I wasn't doing civil rights work. You see, I never was a
member of any kind of an organization at all, I didn't like
organizations. I was uncomfortable. Finally, I did, after I got out of
the government, the Lawyer's Guild was the only group of
lawyers that was standing up against this group hysteria and my friend,
I was a very good friend of Tom Emerson, who was the Yale Law School
dean and he was battling the thing and I thought that he had taken his
share of the punishment and they asked me to join and be president at
the same time. I thought that Tom ought to have a year off and I took
that, but that is about the only organization that I belonged to. Well,
I belonged to the American Bar Association briefly, but I quit that. I
belonged to the Presbyterian Church, but I got out of that, too. I was
determined and Virginia severed her connections, it was a question of
making a living and supporting these children. I
gradually eased into a law practice and my first year, it looked like I
was going to do all right. It was dull, but the bread and butter kind of
thing, real estate clauses, wills and automobile accident cases and
things of that sort. Then, the first thing that happened, the Supreme
Court had under consideration, Brown vs. the Board of Education. They
hadn't acted on that. So, I was also representing among my
clients, I had two corporate clients, the Durr Drug Company, which was
the family business and the Southern Farmer, run by
Aubrey Williams. I don't know whether you know of that
character or not. He is one of the great men of this country, he was
sort of the [unclear] of the New Deal. He
was Harry Hopkins right hand man under the WPA and later, Roosevelt made
him head of the National Youth Administration. In fact, he gave Lyndon
Johnson a job that launded him into politics, he was National Youth
Administrator from Texas. Aubrey was an old Alabama character, had a
country place north of Birmingham, a very poor family, but a book has
got to be written about Aubrey. Then, Roosevelt wanted to keep him in
Washington and so the Rural Electrification administrator's
job came open and he appointed Aubrey to that. Well, Aubrey had refused
to allow any discrimination in the National Youth
Administration and also, he had very quietly backed up the FEPC, the
Fair Employment Practices Commission, and put a little pressure on the
manufactures who had war contracts and tried to avoid hiring black
labor. So, a fight was waged against Aubrey on his confirmation and the
confirmation was defeated. So, then Marshal Fields admired him and
brought him south with a paper, I think it was a little weekly to try
and get some liberal ideas across in the South. So, he had quite a plant
there and I represented him.
Well, one day, Aubrey came around, one Saturday morning and he had a
subpoena from the internal security subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary
Committee. Eisenhower was still president and he was to appear in New
Orleans to tell all he knew about subversive activities of the Southern
Conference for Human Welfare. Well, Virginia had been very active in
that when it first started. Part of it sloughed off for tax purposes and
became the Southern Conference Educational Fund and Aubrey became
president of it. It was about the only organization in the South that
was for integration. So, Aubrey had this subpoena for New Orleans and
almost instinctively I got to work on the thing and we began to discuss
strategy and how to handle h himself and Virginia was taking calls,
acting as my secretary then. It's a bad
idea to have a man's wife working for him, but I needed a
secretary and trieda lot of others but she was the only one that could
spell, so I was stuck with her. [Laughter]
Well, this was a rather amusing story. I had been trying to catch up and
had been under terrific strain and I was under treatment for a heart
condition at the time, not a heart attack but a coronary insufficiency,
they called it, angina. So, when we left home Saturday afternoon,
Virginia said, "Cliff, I know how you feel about all this and
Aubrey, but you just can't go down there with your heart
condition." I said, "Nobody else in Montgomery will go
with him and I know the ropes, so let's stick by
Aubrey." Well, by the time I got home, she had gotten in touch
with the doctor and he had me on the phone and said, "You just
can't go down there." So, I argued with him some,
but on Monday morning, the problem was solved because when we went to
work that morning, the marshal was waiting with a subpoena for Virginia.
So, I called the doctor and said, "Listen hear doctor, you may
as well be sensible about this. You know that it is going to be a strain
on me sitting up here in Montgomery with Virginia down there going
through all that business and I want to go down with her."
Well, he could see that and there were a number of other people
subpoenaed, Myles Horton and Jim Dombrowski and
quite a number of others. Virginia got busy on the phone meanwhile and
started playing politics. First she called Lyndon Johnson. The
sub-committee consisted of McClellan of Arkansas, who had some prestige,
then Jenner, the Republican, who was chairman and Jim Eastland. That was
to be the committee. Well, Virginia decided that we could handle Jim
Eastland all right, but McClellan and Jenner might be a little tough, so
she gets busy on the phone and called Lyndon. He was on the floor and
finally Virginia called their home and gets Byrd and she said,
"Well, Lyndon has gone to bed." Virginia says,
"Get him up," and she proceeds to tell Byrd what has
happened, that we have all been subpoened down there, including Aubrey.
Well, Byrd in her sweet way said, "I know you and Aubrey are as
fine Americans as there ever were and I'll just get Lyndon
up." She got him up and Lyndon got on the phone,
"Honey, what you calling me about?" Virginia said,
"I'm calling you because I'm as sore as
hell." She told him about her and Aubrey being subpoened down
there. Well, he said, "I didn't know a thing about
it." "Do you mean that you are the majority leader
there and you don't know what is going on in the United
States Senate." "Well, what in the hell should I
do?" She said, "You just see to it that no other Democrat comes down with Eastland."
"Well, I'll see what I can do." Then, there
was a guy from Ohio, George Bender. He was a colorful character, pretty
much of a and he was later Senator. I think that at thetime, he had been
elected Congressman at large. They had had some reapportionment. But
George had been for this abolition of the poll tax because of the Negro
votes in a few cities of Ohio and it was good politics for him to be for
it. So, one Sunday afternoon, Virginia gets on the phone and locates him
at Chagrin Falls, Ohio. George was a little to the right of Bob Taft
politically, but the poll tax was a different issue for him. So, George
says, "Well, Virginia, you must love me as much as ever,
calling me up long distance to talk to me." Virginia said,
"Well, George, I do love you just as much as I ever did, but I
didn't call you up to tell you how much I loved
you." She proceeded to tell him about this hearing.
"Well," he said, "you've got
nothing to worry about. You haven't done anything wrong. Just
answer the questions and you'll be all right. You
haven't done anything wrong." Virginia said,
"That's just it. You never do know what they might
ask you and if they ask about this poll tax fight, you know that we used
your office and we used your memeograph machine
and you sent out a lot of the stuff over your name. If they ask me this
question, I've got to answer them." "Oh,
isn't there some constitutional amendment that you can
invoke?" [Laughter] Virginia
said, "I'm not going to invoke the Fifth Amendment
and have people think that I have something to hide."
"Well, what can I do for you, honey?" She said,
"You see to it that no Republican comes down with Jim
Eastland." The long and short of it was that we got down there
and Jim Eastland was by himself. [Laughter]
Well, that's a long story. The main witness was a guy
named Paul Crouch and he was an informer and obviously a psychopath and
he admitted that he didn't know Aubrey or Virginia. You see,
I wasn't subpoenaed, I was just down there as the laywer for
them. He had met Aubrey once after he had met a speech and had been
introduced to him as "Comrad Williams." [Laughter] Then Virginia, well, she was in
with the White House and kin to Justice Black, and he was the mastermind
who really started the Southern Conference for Human Welfare
…well, the first day, I told them that they were going to be
held in contempt and wind up in jail and they said that they were not
going to invoke the Fifth Amendment, but they said that they would
answer any questions about themselves, but they weren't going
to give them names. That's what they
wanted, to get names of other people. I told them that the Fifth
Amendment was to protectyou and if you don't answer the other
questions, you can be held in contempt and go to jail. The first day,
the two characters were on who none of us knew before. One of them was a
contractor who had been very successful and had a Polish name. I think
that his parents had come to this country when he was eighteen months
old and the other was born in Brooklyn andwas a laywer. He had practiced
law in New York for awhile and then he had come to Miami. Well, they
went after them. Whether they had ever been Communists, I
don't know, it turned out that what happened, there had been
some Jewish synagogues bombed down in Miami and Jim Dombrowski, who was
secretary of the Southern Conference, had gone down to see if he could
help organize some protest and they had been in this local group. He had
pretty well forgotten about that. Well, anyway, Crouch began to testify.
One of them was all prepared, he was going to meet the Russian navy when
it launched its landing craft on Miami Beach and all this. Well, you
couldn't believe the treatment that these guys got. They were
just reated….they protested and finally the marshals were all
ordered to drag them out of the room. I woke up in the middle of the
night to the banging away of a typewriter and there was Virginia. I
said, "What in the hell are you
doing?" She said, "I'm getting up a
statement." I said, "Everybody agrees what you are
going to do, you're going to end up in jail because you are
going to be held in contempt." She said, "From what I
have seen today, I'm not going to have anything to do with
this outfit at all." Well, she started off in this statement by
saying that she had the highest respect for the investigative role of
Congress and from what she had seen, this was no legitimate exercise of
Congressional powers and this was nothing but a kangaroo court and she
refused to be any part of it. She ended by saying, "I stand in
utter and complete contempt of this committee." [Laughter] When they got her on the stand
the next day, she just refused to answer any questions. She admitted
that she was my wife and wasn't a Communist and never had
been, but the rest of the time, she just stood moot. Well, there is
another aspect of the story, John Cone from Montgomery volunteered to go
down there as a lawyer, he is George Wallace's speech writer.
That's another story. I'll digress and come back
to that. [Laughter] She just refused to
answer any questions at all. She wouldn't reply. It just
drove them frantic.
Then they would put Paul Crouch on the stand and he would go on about
Virginia's activities and then followed
that with Aubrey Williams. Eastland had announced at the very beginning
that the cross examination of witnesses would never be permitted. Crouch
was vouched for, he spent about two hours telling us his qualifications,
how he had been a private in the Army back in the twenties and had been
courtmartialed and sentenced to thirty years for causing subversion in
the ranks or something, but after three years, his sentence had been
commuted and he got busy with his Communist activities. He went to
Russia and having been in the army, he said the General Staff let them
sit in on their war plans against the Panama Canal and all this. They
guy was just completely nuts. But Eastland announced that there would be
no right to cross examination. Well, I had run across this
guy's trail very briefly. When McCarthy made his famous
Wheeling, West Virginia speech, I got pretty disgusted with Dean Acheson
running like a scared rabbit instead of slugging at him. You know, he
started on the State Department. "I have in my hands a hundred
and nine or ninety-two hundred card carrying Communists
…" all this numbers game. Instead of slugging him.
Acheson was rushing around trying to get statements from Bryne and
Marshal, ex-secretaries of State that one of these so named had never
been on the State Department payroll. Well, at the State Department,
this man was oneof the greatest experts in the
world on China. He had written these books at John Hopkins. Outer
Mongolia and all were all his home ground. At one time, Roosevelt sent
him over as advisor to Chaing Kai-shek, but they couldn't get
along and he pulled out. I was just disgusted that the State Department
was doing this, whether Vladimir was pink, yellow brown or blue, that
the State Department hadn't been picking his brains. If they
didn't have him on the payroll, there was something wrong
with their intelligence. I wrote a ltter to the Washington Post saying that this wasn't the way to deal with
this thing. The next day, a Congressman from California named Waddell
was all ready with a speech. He had a dossier on me and the Washington
Post. [Laughter]
They said we were Reds. But anyway, he said in this, "A former
Communist by the name of Paul Crouch had testified that he had seen Durr
frequently in meetings of the top Communist echelon in New
York." Well, Woods was then chairman and I so I wrote Woods and
said that I was issuing a statement to the press and said,
"Look here, this is what Waddell has said and if Crouch or
anybody else has been testifying this about me, I want to come over and
see it." I couldn't get a reply to the letter. So,
several years later, this was '51 when
McCarthymade his speech. No, '50. And as I recall, it must
have been six or eight months later that I was representing Frank
Oppenheimer, who had been subpoenaed before the committee and I saw this
couple while I was waiting around the room, they looked like a couple of
lost dogs. I said to one of the secretaries there, "Who are
they?" "That's Paul Crouch and his wife and
he is an ex-Communist." I wneton my way and didn't
pay any attention to it. So, after the first day's hearings
when they took these two guys from Miami, the first recess. I went up to
Crouch and motioned to some newspaper men to follow and I referred to
this Waddell article and I said, "Man to man, I want to know if
this is Waddell's lie or yours?" Well, about that
point, the counsel moved up to Crouch and whispered in his ear and he
said, "What I have to say, I'll say under
oath." So, we go ahead thenext day and I am representing Aubrey
Williams and Eastland had announced firmly that the right of cross
examination would not be permitted. When Aubrey gets through, he said
that anything they wanted to know about him was o.k., but he
wasn't going to give any names. Eastland smiled beningly and
said, "Mr. Williams, because you have been such a cooperative
witness, I'm going to waive the rules and permit your lawyer
to cross examine Mr. Crouch." Well, I knew nothing about the guy except his own testimony about himself. He
was obviously a psychopath. It was like putting a dime in the juke box
when you asked him a question. he just ran through the record. I decided
the best thing to do, since he was enjoying himself so much, was just to
go ahead and let him tell about his nefarious about his activities while
a member of the Communist party. So, I asked him about his training in
Russia and how he was trained to blow up airplanes and railroads and so
on. I said, "You were trained to lie, too, weren't
you?" "Oh, yes."
[Laughter] Finally, I said, "Why did you get out of
the Communist party?" "I got out to save the lives of
my children and of yours if you have any." "What
happened to change you so quickly?" "Out there in
California, I saw atomic secrets being handed out to members ot hte
Communist spy ring and then I saw all at once the horror of this thing
that I had participated in for so long." I asked him when this
was. "In 1941." "Well, when did you first
report this to the FBI or an agency of government?"
"1948." "You saw all this back in
'41 and you waited seven years." Well, you would
just get more speeches. Finally, I said, "How do you prove that
you are not a Communist? Are you still one?" At that point, the
counsel leaned over and said, "Mr. Crouch, is Mr. Durr a Communist?" "I don't
whether he still is." Eastland begins to get a little uneasy.
Crouch says, "I saw him several times at meetings of the top
Communist echelon in New York." Eastland gets a little more
uneasy and said, "Mr. Durr is not a witness." I said,
"He started this testimony Let's get it all in the
record." So, Crouch goes ahead. For everybody else, he had
learned his speech and he had said that Aubrey Williams had spoken at
such as place and time. It would be years before, but he would give them
dates and everything. But the best he could do on me was "it
was between 1939 and 1941." O tried to pin him down as to the
year or time or month and all he could remember was that.
"Well, who else was present?" He named all the top
Communists. "Where did it take place." "Well,
we changed our meeting places everytime and I can't
remember." "What went on?" "Well,
speeches were made." "Well, what did I do?"
"You just sat there." "Did I ever make a
speech?" "No." "Did you ever meet me
and get my name?" "No, but you are one of those
distinctive looking people like Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and once you see
their faces, you never forget it." I turned to Eastland and
said, "Senator, I want to be put under oath." I said
that ever word that he said about me was a complete lie. I had never
been to A Communist meeting in my life. I said
that I wouldn't think that there was anything wrong with it
if I had and wanted to see what was going on. But I said that I had
neverbeen a member of the Communist party and had no idea of being one.
I said, "Both of us are under oath and it is your job as
chairman of this committee to see that one or the other of us is
indicted for perjury." Of course, nothing ever happened. But
rather interestingly, the last day, Viriginia was out of the room, Myles
Horton had been called up and he was a rough tough quick tempered
Tennesse mountaineer and she was afraid that he would get in trouble and
tried to calm him down. Crouch took the stand again and was summing up.
Now, Mrs. Roosevelt had been very active in this anti-poll tax bill, she
would have Virginia over to the White House quite often to discuss
strategy and so on. Crouch testified that he published a Communist paper
in the South and the word was passed on to him, he had never met Justice
Black, but he heard that Black wanted to subscribe to that paper and it
couldn't be sent to him since he was on the Supreme Court, so
"send it to Cliff Durr and he will see that it is sent to
Justice Black."