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This time Coe, his old air of self-righteousness completely muffled, made no indignant, categoric denials of Communist membership or espionage. Instead, 65 times, in a flat singsong, he refused to answer committee questions, on the now familiar ground that he might incriminate himself. He refused, for instance, to say whether he had ever known White or Lauchlin Currie. He even refused to say whether he was then & there engaged in espionage against the U.S. Cried the hearing's exasperated chairman, Senator Herbert O'Conor: "The sorriest spectacle . . . Very disgraceful . . . Coe should be dismissed summarily from his post."
Two days later, the I.M.F.'s Swedish director, Ivar Rooth, tersely announced that Virginius Frank Coe had resigned his job—by request.