HEW's Witchhunt

...On arrival, he was interviewed by two HEW security officers, John Gulka and William Sterbinsky...

...He is seeking access to his file as a matter of individual right, because he claims that the existence of such a file retards his professional advancement and that he has a right to know its contents...

...I was able to get across, I trust, that at the time my society was with his kids, he being thirty or more years older than I . " The interview ended ambiguously...

...it was quickly picked up by other publications, including Newsweek, which reported that many scientists thought HEW "more zealous about security clearances than the Department of Defense...

...What impressed me most at the time was the voluminous security file in front of them on one James B. Kahn," he recalls...

...b) I was but seven or so years old when it was made...

...Kahn could not communicate with HEW personally...

...Not sending Kahn, in deference to HEW security, was a form of not-so-subtle pressure on him to volunteer information about his father and, perhaps more important, about his father's friends still alive...

...Yet HEW has its own security system, a relic of the 1950s, which has persisted relatively unchanged to this day...

...Security Chief Frederick Schmidt conducted the second interview...

...Kahn's security status was clouded because he had refused to answer questions at his interrogation...

...I t began with a question from Mr...

...Kahn, are you aware that in a public hearing before the House Committee on Un- American Activities in the year 1949 such and such a person testified that Gordon Kahn was a member of the Communist Party of the United States from 1930- something to 1940-something?' I answered in virtually every instance that (a) I had never heard the allegation before...

...James Kahn was taken by surprise in February 1969 when he received an urgent call from an HEW personnel officer asking him to fly to Washington immediately...

...While still at Harvard Medical School in 1967, he applied to the U.S...

...and (c) I had never heard of the person making the accusation...

...All that was needed was "approval," which Kahn was told he now had...

...His superiors resented it when he sought the help of Atlanta civil liberties lawyer Charles Morgan...

...This might be relevant if Kahn ever gets to the point of trying to expunge his security file of information about his father...

...He wanted some information about my father in return for which he seemed to suggest I might get security clearance...

...Kahn is hardly unique for having been hurt by it...

...he wanted to know what was in it so that he could clear himself...

...when this was routinely denied, he appealed...

...As the months went by, he saw other doctors, often less qualified, given these assignments while he was passed over...

...He was promised overseas assignments and advanced training in tropical medicine...

...Morgan reminded him that there were merely some specific questions I had chosen not to answer, to wit, those re Gordon...

...The interrogators asked Kahn if he had ever been arrested...

...DuBois...

...Schmidt said that it was not a tribunal and therefore no lawyer could be present...

...But with a new Washington lawyer, Hal Witt, who volunteers only some of his time to the American Civil Liberties Union, and with the inevitable bureaucratic delays, Kahn has been frustrated...

...Howard Hiatt, Chief of Medicine at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, where Kahn was then a resident, called Gulka, offering himself and others in the Harvard medical community as character references for Kahn...

...When Gordon Kahn was threatened with another HUAC subpoena in 1950, he joined the expatriate community in Cuernavaca rather than face the likelihood of a jail sentence for contempt of the Committee...

...The appeal was lost in the HEW labyrinth for several months before it was denied...

...By this time, Kahn was as much concerned with his future in public medicine as with his shoddy treatment at the CDC...

...Schmidt said he would be glad to resume the interview, as they had wanted to see the last time if I would take advantage of any opportunity to testify, in effect, that Gordon was a Communist...

...Kahn was frightened and upset by the interview...

...A few days after his interview, Kahn called HEW to inquire about his status...

...Trips to Peru and Brazil—for which Kahn was ideally qualified—went to other doctors while phone calls went back and forth between Atlanta and Washington in an attempt to get Schmidt to clear up the confusion...

...James Kahn is unusual among recent blacklist victims because the entire source of his trouble was his father's activity, a fact which indicates that instead of rejecting the witchhunt's old guilt-by-association doctrine, HEW has extended it to Biblical proportions...

...Kahn's cousin Henry was blacklisted from the PHS because he had committed the dual sins of appearing at an antiwar rally and signing a petition for a memorial to W.E.B...

...He insisted on bringing his lawyer, although HEW forbade it...

...Yet no offers were forthcoming...

...He was both intrigued and shaken by the existence of a large security file in his name...

...He was invited to Washington for another interview...

...Kahn interjected that he thought a CDC officer had gotten the opinion of HEW General Counsel Manny Hiller that a lawyer could be there...

...During the period of intense U.S...

...Many of the pins are in the tropics, a region for which Kahn has a special fondness, perhaps because of the five years he lived in Cuernavaca, Mexico, as a child...

...I regarded this as not-too-cleverly disguised blackmail...

...Finally Schmidt consulted Hiller and relented...

...Probably because of some unconscious fear that I would be victimized like my father, I didn't participate in any political groups and certainly didn't sign any petit i o n s . " Such caution did not impress the HEW security officers, Gulka and Sterbinsky, whose purpose in interviewing Dr...

...The doctor who got the assignment had to go to Berlitz first to learn Spanish...

...He had not been active politically...

...In July 1969, Kahn set off for the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta...

...Kahn recalls, "Schmidt explained that the matter was simple enough—I had allegedly walked out on the interview...

...Schmidt wanted to know if I had ever carried messages to Albert Maltz or gone to meetings with him...

...Tour father is dead now, isn't he?' " I answered, 'Yes, he has been dead for six years.' " 'We have information that your father was a member of the Communist Party.' " Kahn's father Gordon was, in fact, a prominent blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter and a vocal opponent of the House Un-American Activities Committee during its vintage years...

...James Kahn has a large world map over the desk in his study with pins stuck in all the places he has traveled...

...Since there was no rule that everyone went overseas, Kahn could not conclusively prove he was being punished, although he later did conduct a survey which showed that almost every other doctor had been asked to go abroad at least once, including many who had definitely said at the outset they were not interested in overseas assignments...

...according to President Eisenhower's original security order (an expansion of the Truman loyalty program for Federal employes), as well as a later executive order and the 1966 Freedom of Information Act, material in individual security files need not be revealed, presumably because such revelation would destroy the "confidentiality" of sources...

...He put it this way: 'Give Dr...

...He said he didn't know if his father had been a Communist and asked what relevance this had to himself...

...From there he has continued to try to get access to his security file...

...When one officer suggested Kahn's name for a Biafra relief assignment, the CDC security chief rejected it because, he said, Kahn had not ye\ received "clearance...

...He participated in the campaign to defend the Ten, and wrote a book, Hollywood on Trial, which chronicled this opening battle between heretics and inquisitors—a battle which was decisively won by the inquisitors and which resulted in blacklisting throughout the entertainment industry...

...James Kahn responded to the family dislocations and to the harassment they suffered in the late McCarthy era in New Hampshire by becoming cautious about politics...

...Inquiries from the CDC to HEW Security Chief Schmidt were handled by a bureaucrat...

...Witt plans a class action suit in which Kahn would be one of several plaintiffs asking to examine and expunge their security records...

...First Witt had to apply for access to the file...

...William Stewart, who arranged for Kahn's admission to the PHS, but warned him that he had better get used to the idea of security interviews and be prepared to answer questions in the future...

...Attorney Morgan explained that this would almost certainly be forbidden...

...Kahn is now medical director of a unit for the treatment of alcoholism in Cambridge and a fellow in infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital...

...He wrote at the time, "If I should retain my commission but be denied the privileges that normally accrue to officers in the Center for Disease Control, I will regard this as I would regard my having been refused a commission in the first place...

...When someone was needed to teach epidemiology in El Salvador, Kahn's name was submitted, but withdrawn before the list was sent to Washington...

...In February 1970, HEW finally confirmed that Dr...

...children often are...

...when Dr...

...The tenacity with which the security apparatus continues to refine its ancient files is both remarkable and perverse...

...both Hiller and Morgan observed the second interview...

...In 1947 he had been subpoenaed by HUAC along with the men who eventually became known as the Hollywood Ten, and he had been scheduled to testify next when the uproarious hearings were called off...

...McCarthyism marches on in HEW's massive security system HEW's Witchhunt MARJORIE HEINS Dr...

...Kahn proved no help...

...The files would in many cases cease to be threats to the careers of their subjects, or enticements to extract testimony, to name names...

...I n the first part of the interview/' Kahn recalls, "the questions were formal statements of alleged facts by Schmidt, to wit, 'Dr...

...Hiatt then called the Surgeon General, Dr...

...Having exhausted this route, the security officers turned to the major business of the interview...

...Perhaps, in this post-Watergate era, the time is ripe for litigation, backed by vocal protest, to open the whole security program to public scrutiny, or even to dismantle it...

...It is a stigma which stays with a human being like my father all his life...

...Gulka told Hiatt no further information was being solicited, but effectively repeated his offer of security clearance in exchange for information about Gordon Kahn...

...Gulka would not tell him.Kahn said Gulka did ask "if I had any more information for his office and further suggested that if I did he might be able to get me an answer on when he would be in communication with the Public Health Service...

...In 1955, the Kahns returned home and settled in New Hampshire, where Gordon successfully defied the state attorney general's loyalty investigations and wrote under a pseudonym until his death in 1962...

...Being a physician, it means loss of potential advancement in academic medicine and virtually no funding from the Government for research...

...Kahn refused to answer questions about the Communist Party...

...Back in Atlanta, the CDC wouldn't request an overseas assignment until Kahn had clearance...

...The fact that a massive security system still exists is not surprising, and Dr...

...He saw Gulka write, "Interview terminated at approximately 10:30 a.m...

...Morgan could wait outside while the questioning went oh...

...Kahn was apparently to augment their records of left-wing activities years ago...

...When he was overheard discussing the problem with friends, his superiors took him to task for indiscretion...

...Public Health Service for admission to the Center for Disease Control, which sends doctors overseas to battle with tropical illness...

...When he asked questions, he was told not to make waves...

...At this point Kahn said he did not want to continue the interview without the aid of legal counsel...

...Gulka replied that Kahn might have been influenced by his father...

...He strained his memory and came up with a few passport and visa hassles during his travels, and participation in a Harvard band prank which led to a few minutes frivolously spent in a New Haven jail...

...Eventually, a sympathetic officer told Kahn that his security clearance had been held up...

...Kahn found himself in a limbo in which there were no formal charges against him, yet he knew he was being discriminated against...

...The security agents, in their zeal, probably violated the constitutional provision that "no attainder of treason shall work corruption of the blood or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted...

...I assiduously avoided political engagem e n t s , " he says of his high school years...

...HEW Security Director Frederick Schmidt responded by denying the existence of a blacklist, but an attorney who had studied the situation wrote, "Officially, blacklists are condemned but the operation of the system itself encourages bureaucrats in the bowels of the appointing agencies to make them up and use them anyway...

...He was given charge of the parasitic disease drug service and awaited the overseas assignments which had been promised...

...This contention strikes at the violation of civil liberties which is central to the whole security system: If information in the files were made available to their subjects, the testimony of informers could be refuted, as it usually is in the courts...

...Further correspondence created more confusion: Kahn now learned that few of his colleagues had security clearance, nor was it required for trips less than ninety days long...

...The things that hurt most," he says, "were the digging into my father's grave and the aura of intimidation about the entire proceeding...

...In 1969, Science magazine published an article about blacklisting within HEW...

...But James Kahn's Federal employment is over...

...Gulka," Kahn remembers...

...Kahn a chance to comment on some information we have concerning certain subjects.' What was more, Mr...

...Impressed with Kahn's travel and language experience (he is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese), the Public Health Service accepted him with a commission as major, to begin in July 1969, after completion of his residency...

...My reason is that we are living in a country where failure to pass this security clearance is tantamount to some kind of leprosy...

...The Public Health Service is part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, a government agency not ostensibly concerned with high-security matters...

...His family—James was eight at the time—joined him after nine months...

...involvement in the Vietnam war, radical or liberal doctors applying to the Public Health Service were sometimes harassed because the security chiefs wanted to punish them for their antiwar views by forcing them into the military...

...The second part of the questioning centered on Albert Maltz [one of the Hollywood Ten] and his family, none of whom I have seen for umpteen years...

...The career officers at the CDC apparently sensed that assigning Kahn overseas would antagonize their superiors in Washington, even after he had technically obtained "approval...

...Morgan said he was going to remain present...

...Schmidt implied that Kahn was in the clear but added that no security clearance could be granted until the CDC requested that Kahn be given an overseas assignment...

...The PHS was an alternative to the draft...

...So James Kahn completed his two years of service without an overseas assignment and returned to Cambridge in July 1971...