Memorandum for the Hoey Subcommittee Sex Pervert Investigation File from Stephen Spingarn

RESTRICTED July 10, 1950 Memorandum for the Hoey Subcommittee Sex Pervert Investigation File Mr. Francis Flanagan, Chief Counsel of the Hoey Sub- committee, came in to see me Saturday morning, July 8, and spent about an hour and a half discussing the investigation with me. He said that Senator Hoey had asked him to do so. I went over the same ground with him that Mr. Webb, Mr. Murphy and I had gone over with Mr. Hoey. Mr. Flanagan apparently intends to start off with the security officer testimony rather than the medical testimony. He said he had talked to a lot of the doctors and that he did not think they had a practical approach to the matter. He said they talked in terms of a large percentage of the male population having homosexual tendencies, whereas he was thinking only in terms of overt acts. I tried to give him the medical picture as I saw it, but I'm afraid I was not very successful. He told me that from preliminary conversations with the security people they were not able to produce much dope in documented instances in which homosexualism had endangered security, except that CIA had some World War I instances of this although apparently in other countries. Despite the lack of documentation he seemed convinced that homosexualism represents a serious security threat and my suggestion that it should be squared up against other types of security threats by individuals resulting from normal sexual or non-sexual activity did not seem to impress him much. He raised the question of getting names and files from the agencies. I told him what we had told Senator Hoey -- that this would put the matter squarely in the President's lap and we hoped this would not be necessary, that we would have no objection to the agencies furnishing statistics on the matter, which he is in fact already collecting. He said that Senator Mundt or other minority members of the Committee might be insistent on this. He himself did not see how the Subcommittee could determine whether the existing method of handling this problem was ade- quate unless they could look at some files on a sampling basis. In any event, they are getting the police records of the Washington Police on arrests and convictions in this field and will make a check to determine how many of the people in this group are Government employees or have been. If any of these are employed by the Government, this would seem to re- quire that the employing agency report to the Subcommittee how it has handled the particular case.