Six months earlier, Bruce would have presumed that Buttonfield had decided to rehire him, but by now, Bruce realized that the world he lived in at the moment did not function that way, and in this, he was right. Buttonfield handed Bruce a sheet of paper and informed him that it had just come over the AP wire. The AP dispatch said that the House of Representatives had just voted to cite Bruce Nathaniel Bacon for contempt. It went on to say that the House Committee on Un-American Activities had reason to believe that Mr. Bacon was linked to the international communist conspiracy, and that during the war he had cooperated with the Communist Party of Bengal. “We thought,” Buttonfield said, “that before we printed this, we ought to hear your side of the story and give you a chance to state your own case. Is there any truth in it?” “Are you asking me that with a straight face?” “Yes.” “Then the answer is no. No truth in it. I’m not a communist. If there’s an international communist conspiracy, I don’t know one damned thing about it, and during the war, I was a correspondent of this paper.
