Harvey Job Matusow (October 3, 1926 – January 17, 2002) was an American communist who became an informer for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and subsequently a paid witness for a variety of anti-subversion bodies, including the House Un-American Activities Committee, before eventually recanting the bulk of his testimony.
[2] During a 1950 summer road trip to the West Coast, he made a prolonged stop at the San Cristobal Valley Ranch, a resort near Taos, New Mexico, directed by musician Jenny Vincent and her husband and favored by progressives, and filed detailed reports with the Albuquerque office of the FBI there, which paid him $75 a month; he listed the license plate numbers of cars in the resort's parking lot and noted the comings and goings of people he recognized as party members or he alleged were members.
Notable visitors to the ranch during his stay included Jessica Mitford and Virginia Durr,[3] but he does not appear to have identified them in his reports.
In December, Matusow was abruptly summoned to New York and expelled from the party; soon afterward, the FBI, deciding that he was of no further use, dropped him from the rolls of its paid informants.
Matusow also claimed that he had known Clinton Jencks, an officer of the Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers Union to be a member of the American Communist Party; that resulted in Jencks being sent to prison for perjury for having signed, as a union official, a required affidavit of nonmembership in the Communist Party under the Taft-Hartley Act.
Because of the book, Matusow was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to five years in prison, of which he served 44 months, and was ultimately blacklisted.
However, having alienated people across the political spectrum (some hated him for his McCarthyite activities, some for his subsequent recantation), he found it impossible to move on.
The event's highlights included performances by Charlotte Moorman (in the Roundhouse and in the Richard Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh) and John Cage's HPSCHD, for eight harpsichords and projections of the American space program.
He stated, "The computer has a healthy and conservative function in mathematics and other sciences," but "when the uses involve business or government, and the individual is tyrannized, then we make our stand.
He eventually settled in Tucson, Arizona, where, working with the Magic Mouse Theatre, he developed a clown persona named Cockyboo for stage and television.
This led to the creation of The Babysitter's Magic Mouse Storybook, a self-published book done in collaboration with Hilda Terry, creator of the popular newspaper strip Teena.
He made chimes out of melted ammunition and bomb shells during this time and also became involved in collecting clothes for the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota.