Cartwright Says Worthy Violated Draft Law in '44

A Senate Judiciary subcommittee ordered a check last Thursday to see whether William Worthy, the Nieman fellow who recently defied a State Department ban on travel in Red China, is the same William Worthy who twelve years ago was accused of violating the draft law.

The question of Worthy's draft record was raised last week during testimony by Robert Cartwright, a high State Department official. Cartwright said that a man named William Worthy pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court at Philadelphia in June, 1944 to charges of failing to report to a camp for conscientious objectors. Cartwright also said that this man had served one day in jail and later had gone to the camp.

Worthy denied all of Mr. Cartwright's allegations, while admitting that a Boston draft board had classified him as a conscientious objector in 1943. He charged the State Department with "trying to becloud the issue of freedom of movement and freedom of the press by raising an irrelevant matter."

Meanwhile in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations committee last week, Robert D. Murphy, Deputy Under-secretary of State, explained that the Department had "tentatively declined" to renew Worthy's passport because it felt he had "misused it in the past." An earlier department statement had declared that to renew his passport "would be prejudicial to the interests of the United States."