Mr. Stenhouse. You asked me if I had ever been questioned.
Mr. Tavenner. I mean questioned about communism in a Federal agency and regarding the matters under discussion here.
Mr. Stenhouse. I beg your pardon. I thought you meant had I ever been questioned by an agency of the Government in the interim.
Mr. Tavenner. Of course, we are not interested in whether you have been interrogated by someone in a Government department on matters not at all related to the functions of this committee. I understand you to say you have not been.
(The witness confers with his counsel.)
Mr. Stenhouse. The reason I thought you might be interested in it was that he did ask me a question which related to the Institute of Pacific Relations. And since it related to that, I thought that the committee should know about it.
He asked me if I had ever known (name deleted).
And first I couldn’t remember the name. But then he said, “Well, didn’t you ever go to a luncheon in Washington, D. C., sponsored by the Institute of Pacific Relations?”
And then I remembered that I had, along with several hundred or so other people, gone to such a luncheon.
Mr. Tavenner. Mr. Chairman, this being a matter about which we have no knowledge at all, I believe we are getting into a field that should not be explored in public without some investigation on our own part.