As an outspoken critic of the radical right, California's Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel has been the subject of repeated smears. Last week, after three weeks of hearings, a Los Angeles County grand jury indicted four men on charges of conspiring to commit criminal libel against him.
Last June, when Kuchel was campaigning against Barry Goldwater's candidacy in the California presidential primary, a vicious document was circulated around the state. It purported to be an affidavit signed by a Los Angeles police officer and saying that in 1949 he had arrested Kuchel, then state controller, on a drunkenness charge. But that was only the beginning. The document went on to say that when arrested, Kuchel had been in the midst of an act of sexual perversion. Kuchel's fingerprints, the document said, had been sent to the FBI.
Kuchel did not learn of the accusation until October, when his Los Angeles office came into possession of a copy of the affidavit. The Senator denounced the document as "a monstrous falsehood," demanded an investigation by Los Angeles police. They reported that they had no record of any such arrest. Neither did the FBI, said Director J. Edgar Hoover in a personal letter to Kuchel. Kuchel then demanded criminal proceedings, which resulted in last week's indictments.
The four men indicted were: Norman H. Krause, 44, bar owner and ex-Los Angeles policeman, who in 1950 did arrest two employees of then-Controller Kuchel's office for drunkenness; Jack D. Clemmons, 41, a Los Angeles police sergeant until his resignation two weeks ago; John F. Fergus, 47, until recently a public relations man for Eversharp, Inc., who in 1947 was charged with possession of a concealed weapon and given a suspended sentence, and Francis A. Capell, 57, of Zarephath, N.J., publisher of a rightist newspaper, Herald of Freedom, and author of a pamphlet entitled The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe, which suggests that Marilyn met death at the hands of Communists. In 1943, as an investigator for the War Production Board, Capell was fined $2,000 for "agreeing to take a gratuity from a clothing manufacturer." If convicted, each of the accused could be fined $5,000 and sentenced to three years in prison.