The files contain the results of interviews apparently conducted by FBI agents with numerous sources at Harvard and elsewhere. Stamped confidential and full of blacked-out names, the files set out in stark detail the government's version of events that took place at Harvard in 1954.

According to the files:

On June 14, 1954 Business School officials received an anonymous tip that Ann and Ray Ginger might be called before the Massachusetts Commission to Investigate Communism.

The next day Harvard officials, whose names are deleted from the files, called Ginger into an office at 4:30 p.m. Ginger was then asked if he was in fact under suspicion by the commission.

According to the document, Ginger said he would be called before the commission, but "hedged" as to whether he would cooperate with its investigation. Ginger was told he was to appear at a 9 a.m. meeting the next morning with more answers.

The morning meeting came, but Ginger would not answer the critical question posed to him: was he a Communist?

"When the conference with him resumed this morning, Ginger refused to give a definite answer about whether he would cooperate," an FBI document states. "He thereafter refused to answer questions put to him whether he is now or ever had been a member of the Communist Party."

Harvard officials also asked Ginger whether his wife Ann--a lawyer involved in the defense of alleged subversives--was a member of the Communist Party.