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Joan Hinton, now 33, was an attractive blonde prep-school girl, interested in horses and sports. At the University of Chicago she became a physicist. She was a junior scientific assistant at Los Alamos when the first atomic bomb was exploded; she and her mother spent happy weeks together in the rough outdoors of Dr. Robert Oppenheimer's Perro Caliente ranch, although Oppenheimer cabled last week that he did not know them well. By her own account, "something started to stir" in Joan Hinton when the first A-bombs were dropped. "Hiroshima," she scribbled in a frenzied letter, "150,000 lives. One, two, three, four . . . one hundred and fifty thousand . . . Were we to blame?" Most atomic scientists, far closer to the bomb than Joan Hinton, have struggled with this sense of guilt. Joan Hinton's answer was to abandon her profession and her country.
In 1948, she forsook her laboratory and fled to the Chinese Communists. For a while she made four-wheeled carts in an iron factory in the mountains of Shensi; soon she was attending a Communist "peace conference" that charged the U.S. with germ warfare. In a letter published in People's China, she wrote: "The Chinese with their bare hands are building up a new nation; while the Americans . . . are preparing to destroy mankind."
Beggars & Rags. The Senators asked William Hinton if he had met his sister Joan during his years in China. The witness declined to answer, "on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment . . ."
Jenner: "That your answer might tend to incriminate you?"
Hinton: "Yes."
Seventy-nine times Hinton took refuge behind the Fifth Amendment, refusing to say whether or not he is a Communist, or whether he was sent back to the U.S. to spread Communist propaganda. Then he launched into a lengthy prepared statement that made it plain where he stood.
"Beggars and rags were a rare sight when I left China although very common in 1947, when I arrived . . . The stores were crowded with buyers and heavily stocked with goods—almost all China-made. The American embargo though bitterly resented in China, was not effective . . . Imported Swiss watches tempted many a farmer.
"Our intervention in Korea [by 'our' Hinton meant the U.S. intervention] is looked on very much as we would look on Chinese armies driving to the Rio Grande. [But] always I found people, even total strangers, friendly to me, an American. They wanted to know all about Lin Ken, 'who freed the slaves,' and Lo Sze Fu (Roosevelt), 'who wanted one world.' "
"Loyal American?" Hinton concluded: "I feel certain that no government can hope to lead the Chinese into aggressive adventures abroad." The committee which had heard about aggressive adventures in Korea and Indo-China, was dumfounded. Later, Chairman Jenner, struck by Hinton's repeated mention of cooperation, asked: "Why don't you cooperate with this committee? Why don't you want to make us as happy as those people . . . in Communist China?" Hinton was hurt. "Look," he remonstrated, "I have not been accused of any crimes. I'm a perfectly loyal American citizen . . ."