In its article on Johannes Steel's run for Congress, Time claimed that humorist Marion Hargrove had "agreed to head a veterans' committee already heavily loaded with other left-wingers." This prompted a letter from protest from Hargrove, whose columns for the Charlotte News on his personal experience of Army life became the best seller See Here, Private Hargrove, adapted into a popular movie that starred Robert Walker as the inept draftee.
In his letter, Hargrove asserted that while he had supported Steel as the candidate of the ALP, with which Hargrove was affiliated, he had not headed a committee or been an active participant in the campaign. Time did acknowledge after running the letter that Hargrove had declined the offer to head the veterans' committee. Hargrove also disputed the magazine's characterization of him as a "left winger," which he wrote not only had made his Republican neighbors look at him with distrust but also had filled his mailbox with invitations and offers from "all sorts of political organizations which I wish would leave me the hell alone." He said that in the four months since his release from the Army the only political stands he had taken were on racial tolerance, open-mindedness in labor-management disputes and a "correction of the Army caste system."
Hargrove was among the featured participants at an ICCASP-sponsored rally on veterans' rights scheduled for May at Madison Square Garden. Gene Kelly, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr, Florida Senator Claude Pepper, Frank Sinatra and Olivia de Havilland were also scheduled to participate. Pepper was defeated for reelection in 1950 mostly because of his defense of Stalin and praise for the Soviet political system. He later served in Congress as a representative from Miami.