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WHERE I STAND by

WHERE I STAND

By

Publisher: McKay

Hank Greenspun has led even more lives than Herbert Philbrick, who settled for three. Now an editor-publisher (the Las Vegas Sun), he grew up in a Brooklyn slum, passed his bar exam and started out to be a lawyer. However, he loved the spirit rather than the letter of the law and turned to wheeling and dealing in heavy industry. Inducted as a private in the Army, he rose to captain and went into Normandy with Paton's Third Army, meanwhile marrying an Irish lass. At war's end he moved his family to Las Vegas where he acted as a publicity man for Bugsy Seigel's Flamingo Club. On a chance trip to Hawaii, he fell in with Albert Schwimmer, an agent for Haganah, and found himself running guns (which he stole from a Naval depot in Hawaii) to the States and hence to Israel to aid the beleaguered Jews. Later, having violated the U.S. Neutrality Act, he was twice tried, then stripped of his citizenship--and later granted full pardon by JFK. But by far the most exciting and amusing pages here are his jousts with Senator McCarthy whom, with no shillyshallying, he called a homosexual in a frontpage Sun editorial. The Senator did not reply. A face to face encounter with McCarthy before a Las Vegas rally stingingly recaptures the anger of the moment and presents McCarthy as revealingly as has ever been done in print. And there are other battles, with mobsters and Senator Pat McCarran and libel suits. Few readers will fail to admire him.