The lean, sad-eyed son of a North Carolina Baptist preacher, Paul Crouch drifted away from the South at 21. He joined the U.S. Army, preached Communism to his buddies at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, was court-martialed and sent to Alcatraz. After serving three years there, he was dressed out in 1928 and turned to full-time work for Communism. In 1942 he broke with the party.
A decade later, Paul Crouch started a new career: in August 1951 the U.S.
Department of Justice hired Crouch as a consultant and expert witness on Communism. Since then he has been a witness in dozens of Smith Act trials, deportation cases, grand-jury investigations and congressional hearings. In two years he has been paid $9,675 in witness fees.
But from time to time, contradictions bulged out in Crouch's sworn testimony. In a deportation hearing against the Chicago Sun-Times's Cartoonist Jacob Burck last year, Crouch testified that he had often seen Burck at Communist Party meetings and offices. When asked to identify Burck, he pointed to Chicago Tribune Photographer Max Arthur, who does not resemble Burck. In a Philadelphia Smith Act trial of several second-string Communists, Crouch testified freely about one David Davis. Then a defense lawyer reminded Crouch that in the perjury trial of West Coast Labor Leader Harry Bridges, Crouch had denied knowledge of a David Davis. Recently the Justice Department has received several affidavits from non-Communists contradicting portions of Crouch's testimony. Attorney General Herbert Brownell finally announced that he was investigating his own witness.
Last week Professional Witness Crouch made the most astonishing accusation of his career. In identical letters to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's Government Operations Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, Crouch turned on his employers. He charged that Brownell and Deputy Attorney General William Rogers had "given considerable aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States." How? By launching an investigation of Paul Crouch. He demanded an investigation of Brownell and Rogers.
Confronted with this request, Indiana's Republican Senator William E. Jenner, chairman of Judiciary's Internal Security subcommittee, dismissed it with a word: "Absurd."