In a twelfth-floor room of the Federal Building in Boston, stands a large map of the U.S., and above it runs the inscription : "Justice is the guarantee of liberty." At the bottom are the names of distinguished Massachusetts jurists—Cushing, Story, Curtis, Gray, Holmes, Moody, Brandeis, Frankfurter.In front of the map one day last week sat a onetime Wisconsin circuit judge, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, busy in active refutation of rumors that he was going to quit the Communist chase and devote himself to less flamboyant pursuits. McCarthy was in full cry after an old quarry: Associate Physics Professor Wendell H. Furry of Harvard —and, through him, Harvard's new President Nathan M. Pusey, who has refused to fire Furry, and who once sponsored a booklet that denounced McCarthy.
Three times before. Furry had gone before congressional investigating committees, and each time he had used the Fifth Amendment to refuse to answer questions about his Communism. At previous interrogations, Furry said that he had not been a Communist after March 1951, but would not say that he had been one before. Last week, to the evident surprise of the hunter, Furry doubled back on the trail. He had made the discovery, he said, that continued reliance on the Fifth Amendment would "bring undue harm to me and to the great institution with which I am connected."
Prosecution v. Persecution. He had, he now testified, joined the Communist Party in 1938, while teaching at Harvard, and had known five other Communists associated with him in secret radar work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1943 to 1945. But he obdurately refused to name his Red friends of the time. He would divulge the names to a grand jury, but only if convinced that the persons involved were guilty of "substantive crime." Sole judge of such guilt would, of course, be Wendell H. Furry.