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Board Member: If you had knowledge of your brother's belonging to any of these organizations that are listed in the Attorney General's list, would you come forward and give that information or would you try to shield him?
Employee: I don't understand what you mean, try to shield him. Try to shield him from what?
Board Member: Suppose you were reinstated and found out later that your brother was involved in any one of these organizations . . . Would you come forth and tell your supervisor in this agency that your brother was connected in any one of these organizations?
Employee: Would that be part of my duties?
Board Member: You don't know; is that your answer? You don't know what you should do?
Employee's Counsel: What she would do, not should do.
Employee: I don't know what I would do. Some things you don't know until they really happen . . .
Board Member: If you knew your brother was going to or was in the process of committing an act of sabotage or espionage, would you warn the authorities?
Employee: If I knew he was going to commit sabotage? Certainly I would tell them, because he would only be hurting himself.
Nearly a year after she was suspended from work, the employee received word that her record was "not clearly consistent with the interest of national security." She was dismissed.
Case No. 107, a substitute postal clerk, was accused, among other things, of having Communist art hung on the wall of his home. At his hearing, the employee said he owned reproductions of Picasso, Matisse, Renoir and Modigliani. He was rated ineligible for permanent Civil Service appointment and barred from competing in Civil Service examinations for three years.
Case No. 190 was a Negro woman, employed by the Agriculture Department as a tabulator machine operator. She was questioned about her relationship with a suspected Communist, whom she said she had met only two or three times. This aimless exchange ensued:
Q. You say he was dark brown?
A. Yes.
Q. And you say you are a light brown?
A. No, but he was darker than I am.
Q. What would you say your color was?
A. I would call myself dark brown.
Q. You call yourself dark brown?
A. Yes.
Q. And—
A. But he was darker than I am.
Q. Considerably darker or just a little darker?
A. I would say two or three shades darker, I guess.
The employee eventually went back to work at her old job.
Time, Money, Agony. Some of the cases cited by Yarmolinsky involved obvious security risks; others just as obviously involved reliable, patriotic citizens. In some instances, the employees got their jobs back; in others, dismissal was the end result. But in virtually none of the cases was anything accomplished by the loyalty boards, with their mass of rules and regulations and their fumbling procedures, that could not have been done by an individual bureaucrat with a modicum of common sense and the simple right to hire and fire in the interests of national security. And a great deal of time and money, not to mention human agony and governmental dignity, could have been saved.