Reds" (July 23, 1948), and "Commie Chieftains Ordered Budenz to Aid Red Spy Queen" (July 26, 1948). Bentley was subpoenaed to testify at a public hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on July 31, 1948, a few days after the World-Telegram articles were published. According to Olmsted's biography, reporters' accounts and analyses of Bentley's testimony varied with their politics. The strongly anti-communist New York Journal-American described Bentley as a "shapely" "blonde and blue-eyed New Yorker" who "lured" secrets from her sources, but A. J. Liebling of The New Yorker ridiculed her story and called her the "Nutmeg Mata Hari". Bentley portrayed herself as naïve and innocent, corrupted by her liberal professors at Vassar and seduced into espionage by Golos. On August 3, 1948, during additional HUAC hearings, Bentley began to receive some corroboration from Chambers. Under subpoena by HUAC, he testified that he knew at least two of Bentley's contacts (Victor Perlo and Charles Kramer) as communists and members of his earlier Ware Group. Chambers also supported her accusation that Harry Dexter White, a prominent economist who had worked in the Treasury Department, was a communist sympathizer. Comparing their testimony, Chambers wrote in his memoir: "I knew that I was simply back-stopping Miss Bentley, that hers was the current testimony. The things that I had to tell were ten years old and I had only to let the shadows, dust and cobwebs conspicuously drape them to leave the stand unscathed." Some reporters and commentators were skeptical of Bentley's claims. Because some of those she accused were prominent figures in two Democratic administrations, Democrats were especially eager to have her discredited; President Truman, at one point, described her testimony a Republican-inspired red herring. Republicans, in turn, accused Truman of covering up communist espionage. Conflicts of this nature, along with fears of Soviet communist power in Europe and the increasingly-publicized HUAC hearings, formed the background of McCarthyism. The witch hunt for communists initiated by Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) became a central factor in 1950s domestic American politics. Meet the Press Bentley appeared on NBC Radio's Meet the Press at 10 p.m. on August 6, 1948, on WOR. On September 12, she was the first person interviewed on the first television broadcast of NBC's Meet the Press on WNBT. Journalists on the program included Nelson Frank, Inez Robb, Cecil Brown, and Lawrence Spivak. Brown asked Bentley three times if she would