The Reactionary

ARMED FORCES The Reactionary Last week nearly 100 young men in crisp white uniforms stood on the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy grounds at Kings Point, L.I., raised their right hands and fervently swore their allegiance to the U.S. and its Navy. In the ranks was handsome, 21-year-old Eugene Landy--and he kept his hands stiff at his sides.

When the graduation exercises ended, the other men exploded with joy, flinging their caps high into the air with a great cheer. Eugene Landy looked at them sadly, his own cap clamped tightly under his arm, then walked away.

In his four years at the Academy, Landy stood No. 2 in his class, earned letters in football and tennis, and was captain of the debating team. He won a medal in naval architecture, received a $50 prize awarded by the Daughters of the American Revolution for being the best student in naval science. His graduation should have been triumphant. But last week came a blow. The Navy Department advised the Academy that it would not give Eugene Landy the ensign's reserve commission that usually goes with an Academy degree.

The Navy did not give Landy an official reason for the refusal, but it was obvious enough: Landy was suspected of being a security risk because he had associated with a former Communist. The person: his mother, to whom, said a Navy official darkly, Landy had been ";extremely close." Questioned only a few days before his graduation, Landy had concealed nothing, explained that his mother was a former Communist, but that he himself had never had any sympathy with the party.

His mother agreed. "He's a reactionary," she said, "diametrically opposed to me." Mrs. Landy, a widow who works as a seamstress in a Belmar, N.J. garment factory, said she had joined the Communist Party in 1937 because she was lonely and it offered friends. "I never intended to bring about a revolution," she said. "I never found Communism to be a conspiracy. Out here in this rural area it was more of a Kaffeeklatsch." Mrs. Landy said she quit the party about eight years ago, but still misses her comrades. Why. then, did she leave them? Said she: "He [Eugene] gave me an ultimatum--to quit or he would leave home; to choose between him and the party." Then she added: "I chose him." Which was more than the U.S. Navy could say.

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