Rushmore had backed the wrong horse while in McCarthy's camp as "research director": McCarthy had estimated him as "one of the greatest living Americans," but he had fallen out with Cohn, who might now have helped him, and was used up as a witness and even as a Hearst red expert. He moved on to exposing citizens' sexual deviations in the peephole magazine Confidential with the same enthusiasm he had brought to exposing their political ones, but when one of the exposed sued Confidential an old habit returned: he turned informer against his employers. He then began writing for "girly magazines," a task in which he was only disturbed by his wife, who claimed that he beat and threatened to kill her. Cvetic was hospitalized early in the year as an alcoholic. Pittsburgh's Foreign Born Committee thought this justified reopening of deportation cases in which Cvetic had testified, but his first engagement after discharge from hospital was to expose another obstreperous steelworker for SISS. He did poorly, for every word he said was denied by the steelworker: the script called for named heretics to refuse to answer. Drawing the conclusion that his work in Pittsburgh was now finished, Cvetic went to open up new fields in the far west where his lectures had not yet been heard.

Or consider the case of Harvey Matusow, who after seven years in the Party and four years as an informer (against various Communist Youth organizations, folk singers, and the Boy Scouts) repudiated his career as a professional witness in a book, False Witness (1955), in press conferences, and before a grand jury. Between 1951 and 1954, he consulted with and testified for the Justice Department (in the second New York Smith Act trial), the Subversive Activities Control Board, the Permanent Investigations Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Ohio Committee on Un-American Activities, and the New York City Board of Education. By his own count he had testified in 25 trials and deportation proceedings and identified 180 persons as Communists as he worked his way up from the sticks to the informers' palace-the McCarthy Committee. He also lectured for the American Legion, campaigned for candidates who could meet his fee (he once campaigned for McCarthy himself), wrote for the Hearst papers, and at one point had a radio program with fellow informer Howard Rushmore called Out of the Red. "Pretty good for a mama's boy from the Bronx, wouldn't you say?" he says.

It was his account of his dealings with Senator McCarthy's counsel, Roy Cohn, that got Matusow into trouble. When in 1951 Cohn, then an assistant U.S. attorney in New York, let him know that the prosecution wished to get into evidence at the second Smith Act trial a particularly incendiary passage from Andrei Vyshinsky's Law of the Soviet State, Matusow conveniently allowed as how he not only had read the book but had discussed passages from it with defendant Alexander Trachtenberg - the very one Cohn was after. In his book, Matusow claimed that this was perjury and that Cohn had suborned it.