Matusow: Boomerang Boy

Unless man is to drop to all fours, backbones roundabout need a bit of stiffening. In some measure, perhaps, this generally seedy book (FALSE WITNESS, by Harvey Matusow. New York: Cameron & Kahn. 255 pp. Cloth $3. Paper $1.25) written by a rather seedy, no longer quite-so-young, young man may supply it. Not, let us hope, with all the results that the publishers, sponsors, and perhaps even author of the book anticipate, but we will come to that later. At the outset it is only fair to give the book its due. I know of nothing else in print which illustrates so graphically the kind of menagerie that is turned loose when society starts persecuting people for what it supposes they think rather than prosecuting them for what they do.

No argument previously advanced for repeal of the Sniith Act (or the equally nefarious Humphrey “Communist Control” Act) is quite so eloquent, it seems to me, as that which emerges from Matusow’s story of how the problem of linki...