Stephen J. Spingarn (September 1, 1908 – August 6, 1984) was a mid-20th-century American lawyer and civil servant in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and (briefly) Dwight D. Eisenhower administrations, including Special Counsel (1949) and Administrative Assistant to Truman (1950) and lastly commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission (1950–1953) during transition to Eisenhower.
His father, Joel Elias Spingarn, was a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, co-founder of Harcourt, Brace & Co., Republican Party supporter who ran for Congress in New York with an endorsement from President Theodore Roosevelt, and later chairman of the board of the NAACP.
He started studies at Yale University but, after working summers as a U.S. National Park ranger in the Mesa Verde National Park, decided to stay West and settled on the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he graduated in the mid-1930s and passed the Arizona State Bar.
During World War II, he served as a colonel in the 5th Army Counter Intelligence Corps (1943-1945).
I was in the Salerno invasion, I was at Anzio and at Cassino and at many other places, and while I was not a combat officer I saw a lot of people get killed, close by.
They were mostly Italians, but they were working for the German intelligence services, Abwehr and SD, which I believe is more than any other allied army captured during World War II.
I don't have any figures on the Russians, but as far as I know it was better than any of the Western allies, and we often modestly stated that it was more than the FBI had caught in the whole forty years of its history.
We therefore need to know the real facts, the secret information of the Department of Justice, on how widely infected with subversives, they believed, the Government is.
[5] On August 3, 1948, Chambers would appear under subpoena before HUAC and name White among more than half a dozen former federal officials as part of the Ware Group ring he ran.
Having submitted three articles written for the Saturday Evening Post with journalist Milton Lehman on "How We Caught Spies" during World War II, Spingarn had New York City Mayor Bill O'Dwyer and producer Ray Stark, help him pitch his articles for a movie in Hollywood.
In early September, President Truman's secretary called him to come home and work on the presidential election.
During the McCarthy period he was there all the time, almost daily; he used to hang out in Matt Connelly's rear office.
[8] Spingarn further recalled: There was an operation run, more or less, under the supervision of Max Lowenthal in the basement of the White House which was to prepare answers to the charges that McCarthy was hurling so freely during all that period and get them ready in a hurry, not wait until the lie had gone around the world before the truth has gotten its pants on.
I did an awful lot of work on the McCarthy stuff, but I did it in terms of trying to devise some machinery, or system, or operation.