Mr. Paine. I gathered—I was irked because it seemed to me the difference that he accepted as a sufficient difference, the one in the Soviet Union was impersonal, that he was not, in other words—he admitted in the Soviet Union that the tax rate which was a general term then for the amount of money or reward that is not returned of what a man makes, was higher in the Soviet Union. He agreed that that could be true, and didn't seem to be dismayed at that. So I did not find criticism of the Soviet Union on that score.
And in fact he didn't—I didn't discover in what ways he would like to try to change the Soviet Union except he didn't like the restrictions on his freedom there. Neither did he see there was any connection between the restrictions on freedom there and the freedom we have here without control of how the relationship between men would be governed.
Mr. Dulles. Did he ever go into the question of the relative position of labor in the United States from the point of view of its freedom of bargaining and the control of labor in the Soviet Union? Did that ever come up?
Mr. Paine. No. I think, I can't remember whether it was a conversation I had directly with him or immediately after, I was following this idea that here we feel we have quite a different attitude about exploitation. Somebody—he felt exploited and he thought all the working class was exploited, and he also thought they were brainwashed, and he also thought that churches were all alike, all the religious sects were the same and they were all apparatus of the power structure to maintain itself in power.
When I pointed out that our church was financed by people like myself, when I contribute so many dollars to the church, he just shrugged his shoulders. It didn't—his views still stood and it also permitted him, I think, gave him the moral ground to dismiss my arguments because I was here just a product of my environment and I didn't know better and he had the word from the enlightenment, that he knew the truth and therefore I was just spouting the line that was fed to me by the power structure.
Mr. Liebeler. I think you mentioned before that he had wanted to put you in a category, categorize you. Did he indicate to you during that first conversation that he had concluded what category?
Mr. Paine. No; it was over several conversations, I suppose it was the last conversation we had, he couldn't put me in a category and he named about seven or eight categories.
Mr. Liebeler. What were they?
Mr. Paine. I wasn't a Bircher, I wasn't a liberal, a Communist, a Socialist, probably something to do with religion, something like that, atheist.
Mr. Dulles. He didn't say whether you were a Republican or Democrat?