Richard O. Boyer


Richard Owen Boyer was an American freelance journalist who, before appearing at a Senate hearing, had contributed profiles to The New Yorker and written for the Daily Worker. He was implicated in Winston Burdett's June 1955 testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee hearings as a Communist. The Senate subpoenaed Boyer in November 1955 and he testified the next January.
At the hearing, Boyer refused to answer questions about his affiliations with the Communist Party, under the protection of the First and Fifth Amendment. He was one of many witnesses in 1956 called by the Subcommittee in an "inquiry into New York press. To questions of whether he was a Communist or had know others as Communist, the write invoked both his First and Fifth Amendments. Privately, however, Boyer identified himself as an American Communist, saying that he had been a party member from the nineteen-thirties until 1956, when Nikita S. Kruschev, the then Soviet leader, disclosed the secrets of the Stalin regime."