PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. - Ed Guthman's hilltop home is decorated with memories - framed photos with the Kennedys, mementoes of the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s, original Bill Mauldin cartoons, a University of Southern California plaque engraved "Best Teacher. . . ." 

And somewhere amid the memorabilia is a Pulitzer Prize, awarded a half century ago to Guthman and The Seattle Times during a grim chapter of American history. 

It came at the height of the anti-communist hysteria now known as McCarthyism, when vigilante-like committees quizzed citizens for any glimmer of sympathy with the Communists. Guthman's work helped clear the name of just one target of the inquisition - University of Washington philosophy Professor Mel Rader. The story was laced with drama and tragedy, heroes and villains, plus an element of intrigue that lingers today. 

This weekend, the University of Washington and others will commemorate the events reported in these pages 50 years ago. And next month the UW Drama Department will premiere a new play about the Canwell Committee, this state's version of the "un-American activities" investigations. 

But those events a half century ago "should never have happened," Guthman says as he thumbs through a tattered file jammed with yellowed newspaper clippings. "Innocent people were terrified by their own government." 

Seattle was a very different city then, Guthman recalls. The region's history of labor politics had earned the state a reputation as the "American Soviet." At the same time, wartime passions and fears spilled over into peacetime, and American politics were laced with a dread of communism. 

If basic civil liberties got in the way, too bad. 

That was the climate that led the 1947 state Legislature to create a Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, which soon took on the name of its chairman, a stern Republican from Spokane named Albert Canwell. The committee was granted "all powers necessary and convenient" to accomplish its mission, and Canwell took that authority seriously. 

In July 1948, the committee convened at the huge concrete Seattle Armory (now the Seattle Center House) to investigate communism at the University of Washington. While protesters picketed outside, the committee quizzed college professors and informants about alleged Communist Party connections. Lawyers and witnesses resisted, newspaper flashbulbs popped, and Canwell grew increasingly harsh as hearings progressed. 

Among the witnesses called was Rader, a tall, bespectacled philosophy professor from a pioneer Northwest family who retold the story years later in his book "False Witness." Rader had no idea he was under suspicion until the spring of 1948, when two committee investigators knocked on his office door and told him: "Our information puts you in the center of the Communist conspiracy." 

At the hearing, George Hewitt, a former party member from New York, testified under oath that he had seen Rader and others at a Communist training school in New York 10 years earlier, during the summer of 1938. 

Rader was astounded. He said he had never been to New York, had never been a Communist, never attended party meetings. While his politics were liberal, he believed communism was a deeply flawed ideology. 

Still, Rader's career was suddenly in jeopardy - along with dozens of others. He faced the task of proving his "innocence" of an act alleged to have occurred 10 years earlier, and which was not illegal in the first place. 

Sitting in the press section was a 29-year-old rookie reporter and World War II veteran who once aspired to cover sports. 

A Seattle native, Guthman had worked his way through the University of Washington in part by processing baseball box scores and other statistics for the old Seattle Star. He was drafted into the Army in 1941, wounded in combat and eventually came home to a city profoundly changed by the war. 

Guthman took a reporting job with The Seattle Times, where he was assigned to cover the Legislature and, later, the Canwell Committee. 

Most Americans feared communism, Guthman recalls. 

"If you grew up in Seattle, you could not mistake the presence of the Communist Party. We would go to Newspaper Guild meetings and stay late to prevent the other guys from passing crazy, leftist resolutions." 

But Guthman watched the Canwell Committee's tactics degenerate to those of the evil it was attacking. Provoked by the protests and egged on by media coverage, Canwell became harsh and inflexible. Guthman and Times editors didn't like what they were seeing. 

"Just about everybody my age had been in the service, and most were in combat," Guthman says. "You saw what tyranny had done to those countries and you didn't want to see it happen here." 

Rader became the test case. While his politics were liberal, his lifestyle was conservative - he was married with two small children, did not own a car and took his university job seriously. 

Yet the professor was not allowed to question his accuser; after testifying, Hewitt left town. 

Rader and his wife frantically dug through their records and eventually recalled they had spent the weeks in question at a small resort called Canyon Creek Lodge, near Granite Falls in Snohomish County. Canwell dismissed it as a "phony story." 

The King County prosecutor, however, filed perjury charges against Hewitt - if only to get him back to Washington for cross-examination. Months later, a New York judge refused to extradite the witness, declaring that Washington state was riddled with "any number of trained and iron-disciplined Communists" and that he would not send Hewitt back "to eventual slaughter." 

The following day, Guthman was summoned into the office of Times Managing Editor Russell McGrath. 

"It's obvious the committee isn't going to settle this," Guthman remembers McGrath telling him. "And the courts aren't going to settle it. Only one side of the story has been told. It's time for this newspaper to do its job." 

At McGrath's instructions, Guthman drove up to Canyon Creek Lodge to look for records of Rader's stay. The lodge had burned down, but he found the former proprietor living next door. 

"I asked if I could see the register for the summer of 1938. She said the Canwell Committee already had been there." 

He learned that investigators had found Rader's registration, dated August 1938, and taken the relevant pages. She showed him the receipt they had given her for the pages. 

Canwell and his investigators denied ever seeing those missing pages. Once again, Rader was confronted with the task of proving his innocence. 

Eventually, the professor recalled breaking his glasses and ordering new ones from Seattle. He recalled signing deposit slips at his University District bank, and borrowing books from the university library. 

Guthman tracked down signed receipts and deposit slips - all dated during the time Rader was alleged to be in New York. He spent three weeks in the UW library stacks, tracking down the books that Rader had signed for. 

"Everything Rader told me checked out," Guthman says. 

Finally, he took the assembled evidence to Times Publisher Elmer Todd. Todd was impressed, called Canwell and asked the legislator to come over and review the evidence. Canwell refused. 

On Oct. 21, 1949, more than a year after Hewitt's testimony, The Times published Guthman's story detailing the evidence - library books, receipts, the recollections of the resort operator, everything except the still-missing pages from Canyon Creek Lodge. 

Rader could not have been in New York that summer. His career was rescued. 

Others were not so lucky. Psychology Professor Ralph Gundlach denied being a Communist, but refused to testify to the committee; he was jailed for contempt, fired and later fled to England. English Professor Joseph Butterworth refused to testify, was fired, eventually lived on public assistance and died a broken man in 1970. Philosophy Professor Herbert Phillips never found another university job and eventually worked as a laborer. 

Canwell dismissed The Times stories as "phony." Guthman was "a Communist front" who had "taken The Times for a ride in a little Red wagon." 

Guthman's memory is more generous. Canwell started as "a mild-mannered guy who really believed it was all a Communist plot," he says. "When people started shouting and protesting, he was provoked." 

Seattle historian Lorraine McConaghy points out The Times went to bat for only one target and took a year to deliver the story, and that Times editorial pages continued to promote Canwell's crusade even after Guthman's stories. 

"Still, for all the excesses of the Canwell Committee, the system eventually worked pretty well," she says. "The committee was disbanded. Canwell was discredited and he was not re-elected. He and the witch hunts were forced underground, where there are no checks." 

Nationally, the hunt oozed ahead with congressional hearings and blacklisting of alleged sympathizers until 1954, when U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy was finally brought down. Hundreds more lives and careers were dismantled. 

After winning the Pulitzer in 1950, Guthman stayed a decade at The Times, delivering stories on corruption in the Teamsters union and other investigations. In the early '60s, he went to work as press secretary for then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Later he was national editor of The Los Angeles Times, then editorial editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. For the past decade, he has taught journalism at the University of Southern California. 

The Canwell Committee's poison festered for decades, he says. In 1964, the Rader case bubbled up again during the famous Goldmark libel trial in which a young lawyer named Bill Dwyer represented former state Rep. John Goldmark and his wife, Sally, against Canwell and others who had labeled them as Communists. 

Twenty years later, when U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton nominated Dwyer to be a federal judge, the same crusaders dug up ancient red-baiting rhetoric to block the appointment for months. That flap contributed to Gorton's only political defeat, in 1986, when Democrat Brock Adams won the Senate seat. 

In 1985, the Goldmarks' son, Charles Goldmark, and his family were viciously murdered by a Seattle misfit motivated in part by fear of a Communist plot. 

They are unrelated events, perhaps, linked only by one brief period of hysteria and the legacy of a government committee that existed for less than two years. 

"The Red Scare didn't end there," Guthman says. "The Pulitzer judges told us nobody else was doing this kind of story, but we didn't know that. We were just one little newspaper way out in the far corner of the West Coast. 

"But I often wonder what would have happened if some of those East Coast editors had reacted the way my editors did." Ross Anderson's phone message number is 206-464-2061. His e-mail address is: rand-new@seatimes.com