Mr. Matusow Meets The Market 

Harvey Matusow was a crucial witness in the McCarran Committee persecution of Owen Lattimore, reinforcing the tattered testimony of Louis Budenz.

Matusow’s dead, but in the long tail/netherworld of the Internet he apparently has value. Somehow his confessional False Witness finds a market, if you pay the author and publisher nothing.

Budenz’s claims of a seamless web between Lattimore’s writings and the Communist line had suffered from actual reading of what Lattimore wrote, and  of what the Budenz edited Daily Worker said about Lattimore.

Matusow providentially appeared to tie Lattimore to the Reds.  After first inventing Communist subversion of the Boy Scouts, Matusow built from his experience running a Communist book store to claim he sold Lattimore’s Solution In Asia, and that it represented the party line.

 Saluting Solution – see the title on the blackboard partly obscured by bow-tie daddy.

Later Matusow admitted he’d invented this story   and many others as he climbed to the heights of the former party-member-tells-all business.

Matusow recanting has done nothing to deter right-wing cranks replicating his old lies.

Somehow this long lost witness lives on in the Internet, with the text of his tell-all “False Witness” available in a vast array of formats. You can buy a musty old copy for $3.97,  and free online reading and downloads are available at the Hathi Trust Digital Library and archive.org.  After that it gets more complicated. Two outfits sell text files of the book to read or download, and one will even print you a copy of the text, allowing you to simulate the Internet experience of no index and weird scanning generated typos:

“ a feeling of guilt— of how or when could this ever stop. However, I soon got down to rock bottom, a 29 point which made it easy for me to justify my reporting on my former friends.”

Goodreads.com is the physical book seller, and also markets ads against online texts and any reader generated commentary, so start  scribbling for the greater glory.

Onread.com is a bit murkier.  They have malware spreading accusations in their past, although Norton and McAfee find them currently clean.

Others aren’t so sure:

“Russian terms of service. Protected by a Chinese domain that is registered from FranceBoth . “Book” downloads that come with an .exe extension that install and direct you to another website. I may be just a tiny bit jaded, but somehow I think this might not be entirely legitimate…“