A Woman's Memories

When lean, handsome William Remington, Commerce Department economist, was accused of being a Communist back in 1948, he defended himself with such injured but manly firmness that he won what seemed to be vindication of a sort. The top U.S. loyalty review board sent him back to his $10,330-a-year job. The New Yorker ran a 24-column article about his ordeal. Meanwhile, Remington sued for $100,000 and got an out-of-court settlement from the network and sponsor of a television program on which onetime Communist Courier Elizabeth Bentley had affirmed her accusations--that he was a member of the party, and that he had given her confidential information for transmission to Moscow.

Last spring a federal grand jury in Manhattan decided that William Remington's denials were hollow after all, and indicted him on a charge of perjury. Last week, as he went to trial in the Manhattan federal courtroom where Alger Hiss had faced a similar charge, Defendant Remington found that the prosecution had more than the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley to back its charge. The prosecution's first important witness was Remington's divorced wife.

Conditions of Marriage. Economist Remington, testified quiet, sullen-mouthed Ann Moos Remington--looking directly at her ex-husband as he sat motionless and poker-faced at the counsel table--had been a Communist. So, she admitted, had she. Communism, in fact, had been the cement in their romance, which began in 1937 when he was a student at Dartmouth and she an undergraduate at Bennington. She told the jury that once when they were sitting in a parked automobile on the Dartmouth campus, he confided that he "was a member of the Communist Party and adjured me to secrecy."

Mrs. Remington had never been in love with him, but thought she "might grow to love him," she testified. When he proposed marriage in 1938, she said yes--on condition that "he would continue to be a Communist." She added: "He said I need not worry on that score."

At one point in her testimony, Mrs. Remington paused to say that she was "a reluctant witness" against "the father of my children." She told the jury that Remington had made a determined effort to keep her quiet; last May, before she appeared before the grand jury, she said, he had suggested she get her psychoanalyst to declare her "mentally incompetent." She had refused.

In Her Presence. Her testimony gave the Government its first corroboration of Elizabeth Bentley's most serious charge--that Remington had delivered U.S. secrets to Courier Bentley for transmission to Russia during World War II. The biggest secret, his ex-wife said, was a formula for making explosives out of garbage. She later conceded that it might have been a formula, as Miss Bentley had testified, for making synthetic rubber.

Under sharp questioning by grey, stooped Defense Attorney William Chan-ler--who described his client as a man who had sown his "mental wild oats" in his youth but had long since reformed--she admitted that neither she nor Remington had been "orthodox Communists." They had associated with Trotskyites, had not held party cards, had paid dues only irregularly. But she stuck stoutly to her story that she had frequently been along, as driver of the car, when Elizabeth Bentley and Remington met in Washington. On such occasions, she testified, she parked in various quiet spots, heard her husband and Courier Bentley discuss Government documents, and saw Remington hand them over for dispatch to Moscow.'

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