Because former President Truman is a stubborn man, he has held tenaciously to his statement of several years ago that the Communists-in-Government issue is just a “red herring.”

Again yesterday he stuck to his faulty evaluation of the serious threat of Communist infiltration into the American Government by categorically refusing to recognize or give any credence to the parade of witnesses who have established irrefutably that the Communist menace is far from a “red herring.”

Mr. Truman’s latest effort to brush aside the mess he could not see when he was in office came during a street-corner interview with a roving television newscaster at Kansas City.

For the record, Mr. Truman declared:

“Now we have a Communist scare. And if you know anybody that knows a Communist, I wish you’d put him in touch with me, because I’d like to see what one looks like. I don’t think that the country is in any danger from an interior Communist uprising.”

As a starter, we might refer Mr. Truman to George Nelson, the Communist agent in the Tampa area, who was interviewed a couple of years ago by an enterprising Tampa Daily Times reporter.

Or he needs only to refer to his own files where there must be entries referring to Alger Hiss or Harry Dexter White or Lee Pressman or Nathan Gregory Silvermaster or any number of others who were either Communists with cards, Communists without cards, or fuzzy-headed so-called “liberals” who served the Moscow masters.

Or to go a little further, Mr. Truman might contact Elizabeth Bentley who has named hundreds of Communists and Communist sympathizers in the Government Mr. Truman headed.

Or he might get in touch with Whittaker Chambers or Louis Budenz, both former Communists who renounced that ideology when the sham of the aims became apparent to them.

Or he might contact Herbert Philbrick who was an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation within the Communist party for years. And there are dozens of other loyal Americans who have worked with the Communists in order to help disclose the conspiracy to defeat this country, not by a bloody uprising as Mr. Truman tries to picture, but by subverting the Constitution and the laws by which Americans have chosen to govern themselves.

Indeed, the former President does himself injustice by pooh-poohing the dangerous Communist menace.