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Mr. Mitchell, I remember, came in one day and said, “I've done the best I can do. This is pretty illiberal, and I'm frightened of it and I'm horrified of it, but on the whole, as I read the document that they had brought forth, it didn't seem too horrible to me--granted that you had this view and you took this view that persons who had been Communists had no business in the Federal Government. You had two classes of people to be careful of: those that were already in the Government, and those that ware applying for jobs in the Government, you see. Now, with those that were applying for jobs, it seemed to me that if we took the position that anybody who had ever had any connections with the Communist party or the Communist movement was unwelcome, that was a fairly simple matter, to make a regulation that could be enforced. They apply for a job, and they ask certain questions, and their vouchers are looked up, and they don't get the job if they've been Communists, except when somebody lied or somebody didn't know, and it was covered up and not disclosed. But that would be a small number. But where you had people who had been in the Government some times for a number of years, the assumption at least was possible that those people, whatever their earlier attitude had been, that they'd worked in the Government for five years adequately, competently, faithfully, and that the presumption was in that case that they had give up their Communist connections.
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