Yale Man Claims Monmouth Case Handled Unfairly

A Yale instructor, two months in studying the Fort Monmouth cases on alleged espionage, said last night Senator McCarthy had "no foundation at all for the spectacular headlines he gave the case in November."

John Phelps, member of the Yale Committee of the Federation of American Scientists, told a meeting of the Cambridge FAS branch that such a case may seriously hamper "the research that supports our national defense."

No final decisions have been handed down yet on the 21 Monmouth employees who were suspended as security risks. An additional 24 employees lost their security clearance, but were not suspended.

Phelps said the 24 who lost their security clearance form "a so-called leper colony." He objected to "the catch-all aspect" of this treatment, under which men lose clearance because they are suspected as risks. They are never accused, and therefore have difficulty in having their cases tried and their clearance restored.

Phelps said he questioned 38 of the 45 employees affected by the investigations, and discovered that "about 85 percent of the charges made against them depended on their association with other people--relatives, college classmates, and the like."

Frank Newman, visiting professor at the Harvard Law School, questioned the FAS Committee's conclusion that our present trouble comes from the administration of the Eisenhower security order, and not from the order itself.

"We ought to strike at the security order itself," Newman said. He called for a constructive program to revise security regulations.