Robert J. Morris

Robert John Morris (September 30, 1914 – December 29, 1996) was an American anti-Communist activist who served as chief counsel to the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security from 1951 to 1953 and from 1956 to 1958, was President of the University of Dallas and founded the now-defunct University of Plano.

Morris grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey, where his father actively opposed Frank Hague, the city's longtime mayor and Democratic Party boss of Hudson County. He was a graduate of Saint Peter's College and the Fordham University School of Law. In 1940, he served on a committee of the New York State Assembly investigating allegations of Communist activities in schools and colleges in New York State.

He joined the United States Navy during World War II, though he had initially been rejected due to an inability to see the color red, a story that he would frequently retell throughout his life. Morris was a commander of counterintelligence and psychological warfare, whose duties included writing propaganda items that were dropped over Japanese cities and interrogating captured prisoners.

Morris served as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Internal Security from 1951 to 1953, leaving the following year when he was elected to serve as a municipal court judge in New York City. He returned as chief counsel from 1956 to 1958.

The New York Times described the subcommittee in 1951 as having a mandate that is practically "limitless in the whole field of security" and that its role "far overreaches the House Committee on Un-American Activities, as it far outreaches Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin." The subcommittee questioned businessmen, diplomats, scholars and schoolteachers, and opened investigations into an alleged Communist takeover of Hawaii, Communist control of the military-industrial complex, and Communist involvement on waterfront in New York City.

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