Melvin Barnet, a former New York Times editor who was fired in the 1950s as a suspected communist and had difficulty finding work afterward, has died. He was 83.
He died Wednesday at Long Island College Hospital. The cause of death was not given.When questioned in 1955 by a congressional committee investigating communist links in the news business, he invoked the Fifth Amendment.
He was among seven Times employees called to testify before Congress: Six provided accounts of their communist backgrounds to the Times' editors and kept their jobs.
Barnet, a Harvard graduate and World War II veteran, had been a copy editor on the newspaper's city desk for two years.
For years he harvested oranges in Florida, worked as a cook on a shrimp boat and edited manuscripts for vanity presses until the 1960s, when he found a job with The Medical Tribune, a journal for doctors. When he retired in 1978, he was associate editor.