Clayton Knowles (April 27, 1908 – January 4, 1978) worked as the Washington correspondent for ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' from 1943 to 1971. He became an established and well respected

journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalism ...

during that time.

Testimony in the Senate

Knowles was one of 34 journalists and 26 ''New York Times'' employees subpoenaed by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in November 1955. The subpoenas were a result of journalist Winston Burdett's testimony in June 1955. Knowles was one of the more cooperative witnesses the senators encountered as a number of other journalists invoked the Fifth and

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Amendments to avoid answering questions, many of them losing their jobs as a result. Knowles told the subcommittee that he suffered from "extreme naivete" when he joined the

Communist Party A communist party is a political party that seeks to realize the socio-economic goals of communism. The term ''communist party'' was popularized by the title of ''The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A ...

while working at the ''

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'' in 1937. He testified that he went to the

FBI The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and its principal Federal law enforcement in the United States, federal law enforcement age ...

with his story in 1954 after he found out that his name had been dropped in the subcommittee hearings. He claimed to have left the Communist Party in 1939. Knowles provided the subcommittee with the names of his Communist Party cell-mates during the years at the Long Island newspaper. He told them he knew of no Communists at the ''New York Times''. His testimony prompted Senator Thomas Carey Hennings to admonish the subcommittee counsel J. G. Sourwine for not giving the subcommittee advance notice of the witnesses and questioned whether "any useful purpose" had been served by publicly embarrassing such a long-rehabilitated communist such as Knowles.

Personal

Knowles was a 1931 graduate of

Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is located in Pulitzer Hall on the university's Morningside Heights campus in New York City. Founded in 1912 by Joseph Pulitzer, Columbia Journalism School is one of the oldest journalism s ...

.Past Alumni Awards Winners - Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Accessed 08 October 2007.

Notes

References

January 16, 1956

1908 births 1978 deaths American reporters and correspondents The New York Times journalists 20th-century American non-fiction writers {{US-journalist-1900s-stub