Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975)

by William Manchester

  HAROLD V. DUMAS

  Chief of Public Relations

  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios

  P.S. Dont write to me at the office as this is kind of personal. Just sent it to me care of General Delivery L.A. and it will get to me Okay.

  I never replied, but I found the note strangely moving. Whitey had climbed the Parnassus of his calling, and evidently he had now slid back down all the way. He was pathetic on paper, and his assessment of the kind of material that interested Harper’s was unbelievable. (How on earth had he even seen the magazine?) He had entered the shadows; for all I know, he never emerged again. It is of course quite possible that he staged a stunning caper under another name—as G. Gordon Liddy, say—yet somehow I doubt it. His big sting with us had a one-shot air about it, like the flight of an exotic bird that dazzles for a single season and is never seen again. But on the Morton’s fantail, and outside that POW stockade at Koli Point, he had been magnificent. And to this day I feel a tingling at the base of my scalp when I think of that towheaded prisoner in his Portsmouth cell dreaming up what must have been the most imaginative con of the war, saying in that straightforward voice, “Guard, I want to speak to the C.O.,” and then, “Sir, I know I deserve to be here, but my country is threatened and I want to do my share. I can really help in an unusual way, sir. You see, I speak Japanese.”

  Ways and Means

  “Why do you rob banks?” the cops asked Willie Sutton, who replied with engaging candor, “Because that’s where the money is.” Where the money is often is where the power is, which is the reason for my professional interest in it. There is a driving theme in every writer’s work. An author may be convinced that the central fact about man is his essential loneliness, say, or his penchant for violence, or the eternal tournament between the sexes. I see people preoccupied with the search for dominance—in politics, in war, in society, in the family—and in the struggle for money.

  I have known rich families: the Rockefellers, the Kennedys, the Krupps. Scott Fitzgerald was right; they are not like you and me. They have more clout, command greater attention, and have a far greater range of choices open to them, in everything from wardrobes to careers. They are not happier, but they have a clearer concept of the sources of happiness and unhappiness. Unlike the rest of us, they cannot blame whatever disarray there is in their personal lives on a lack of ways and means.

  I have never been one of them. I am a member of the Depression generation. Those of us who reached the age of awareness between the Crash and Pearl Harbor bear what Caroline Bird has called the invisible scar. No matter how fat our bank accounts become, we buy day-old bread, have our shoes half-soled over and over, and show up at fire sales. I have no credit rating because I have never bought anything, not even an automobile, on the installment plan. I simply cannot live with debt. That does not mean that I feel powerless. Language can be a source of influence. Words have brought me a kind of potency currency cannot buy. But for most people the path to puissance runs through the teller’s window. Forcing an entry, we may, if only vicariously, see where it leads. What follows is such a heist.

  The Treasury Department

  Somewhere beneath the vast, colonnaded pile of Washington’s off-white Treasury Building there is a cornerstone. It is a historic curio, for it was laid by Andrew Jackson, the sworn enemy of all banks, and it contains a snippet of blond hair from Jackson’s secretary’s baby daughter, who grew up to work for the Treasury. Unfortunately, no one can find the cornerstone. It was lost during the physical expansion of the building. The structure moved around it and over it, and all we know for sure is that it must still be down in the granite masonry—entombed, inaccessible, but nevertheless there, holding up the whole works.

  In a sense the Treasury itself rests on a single plinth. Each of its “products and services,” as former Secretary Robert B. Anderson called them, has a common denominator. During the Mopsy growth of nearly two centuries, the Department has acquired an extraordinary variety of functions. It has its own navy and its own diplomatic corps; it runs the most elaborate system of private eyes in the world. Its various branches employ chemists, accountants, marksmen, artists and scholars, only a fraction of whom are housed in the main Treasury Building. Yet all are bound by one tie. That tie, like the lock of hair in the lost cornerstone, is golden. It is, in fact, gold itself. It is money.

  Money is the root of every Treasury bureau. Internal Revenue collects income taxes. Customs collects tariffs. The Bureau of Accounts keeps the books for the Federal Government. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing manufactures paper money on high-speed rotary presses, and the Mint strikes coins and guards the nation’s bullion depositories at West Point and Fort Knox. The Treasurer of the United States, who is often confused with the Secretary of the Treasury, authorizes four hundred million checks a year. (Every day he—or, more recently, she—gets back a hundred forged endorsements.) Department economists puzzle over tax schemes, international finance and the national debt; and in the tipsy Martin-and-Coy hills of the South, airborne revenue agents hunt out the camouflaged bases of moonshiners trying to dodge the Federal liquor duty.

  Actually, it may be argued, money is at the bottom of everything in the government. And indeed, at one time or another, the Treasury Department has been home to the postal service and the departments of Commerce, Labor, the Interior and the Public Health Service. One by one these were lopped off. Today most of the remaining Treasury branches have a clear relationship to mammon. One exception is the Treasury’s navy, the Coast Guard. Coast Guardsmen blow up derelict ships, spot icebergs, screen seamen and investigate the weather. They haven’t much to do with cash, though the service was originally established by Alexander Hamilton to foil smugglers. Similarly, the Secret Service, a Treasury branch, is best known for providing the President’s bodyguards. Nabbing counterfeiters was its original assignment, however, and remains one of its greatest problems. The Service began guarding the White House after the assassination of McKinley, because Secret Servicemen were then the only house dicks on the Government payroll; J. Edgar Hoover had just been born.

  T-men do not enjoy being mistaken for G-men; they have been around longer. Since the Revolution the Treasury has been responsible for the country’s financial integrity. Most crime is inspired by greed, and this has always been a greedy country. It was settled by counterfeiters—colonists fleeced Indians with wampum—and it was freed by such notorious smugglers as John Hancock and Samuel Adams. Following independence, Secretary Hamilton pointed out that such goings on hurt the national credit and were therefore unpatriotic. Future scofflaws would be the prey of the Department. Other enforcement jobs arose when Congress, discovering that the power to tax is the power to destroy, created some taxes whose sole purpose was destruction. An important one was a ten percent levy on state bank notes, which paved the way for a national currency. Today gamblers, manufacturers of white phosphorous matches and owners of silencers and sawed-off shotguns must pay a special tax or risk jail. Drugs, too, are controlled by revenue stamps, which explains why the Bureau of Narcotics is under the Treasury Department instead of the Department of Justice.

  Altogether the Treasury has seven different police forces. Coordination is a major job, and it hasn’t always worked. In the early 1930s Secretary Ogden L. Mills called his enforcement agencies “a damned hodgepodge.” Mills was mad because employees of two different agencies, stalking bootleggers in North Carolina, had opened fire on each other. Assured that no one was hurt, he added acidly that they weren’t even good marksmen.

  As superintendent of the nation’s finances, the present Secretary ranks second to the Secretary of State in protocol, pays himself $60,000 a year and wears about twenty hats. Some are tall and silken: chief fiscal adviser to the White House, chief worrier about the debt, United States Governor of the International Monetary Fund. Other hats are scarcely more than caps: trustee of the Smithsonian Institution, honorary treasurer of the Red Cross. Theoretically he is responsible
for each of the Department’s 80,000-odd civilian employees—since McKinley, Congress has held the Secretary personally accountable for the safety of the President—but in practice he doesn’t spend much time measuring shotgun barrels or tracking down alky stills. Such aides as the Commissioners of Narcotics and Internal Revenue are left to wreak vengeance on drug addicts and taxpayers. The Secretary concentrates instead on matters of policy from a third-floor suite which might have been conceived by the late John Marquand. Two hall signs request QUIET PLEASE. Inside is a black marble fireplace which works, a splendid view of the White House, and oil paintings of four former Secretaries.

  Oil paintings hang all over the building—contributing to the Treasury’s Boston-bank air. Old retainers don’t shuffle around in alpaca coats and celluloid cuffs, but one feels that they should; even pinstripes and broad lapels seem impertinent here. High ceilings wear a patina of dust, wooden floors are softly rugged, corridors are lined with money-colored pilasters; office doors are slatted, like first-class staterooms on P&O steamers.

  Treasury veterans savor this musty charm and recoil from change. There was an uneasy stir in 1956, when the General Services Administration decided to letter the Department’s name on the building. (It didn’t have a name. Since 1789 it had been called both The Treasury Department and the Department of the Treasury. Secretary George M. Humphrey, always a partisan of thrift, settled for the more economical The Treasury Department.) Some stand-patters went so far as to defend the starlings which, until recently, made walking beneath the cornices an adventure. Electrical wires now discourage the starlings, but not much has been done about the building’s creaky elevators, one of which dates from 1898. Once, after an important press conference, an elevator stalled between floors, and the Secretary was rudely disturbed by screams from the caged reporters. Decorum pays dividends in the Treasury. The sedate Dow-Jones man, who had used the stairs, beat the Associated Press by thirty minutes that day.

  Under the building are huge old vaults. One of them is used by Secret Service men for target practice, another is linked to the White House next door by an underground passage. During World War II the Treasury basement was President Roosevelt’s air-raid shelter. The Secret Service won’t say whether it serves that need for President Ford, though certainly it’s no longer used to store opium and precious metals. That was the original purpose of the vaults, back in the Treasury’s childhood, when finance was simple, and the Secretary personally designed all Department forms, and gold was something a man could put in his pocket, not a four-letter word to affront him. Hamilton is remembered as an administrative genius, but it was a lot easier to keep the store then. The principal internal tax was on distilled spirits. Thomas Jefferson rejected even that, thus converting mountaineers to the Democratic party, and the government was entirely supported by Customs revenues.

  The Customs Bureau, in fact, is older than the Department itself. It was one of the first agencies to be created under the Constitution, and as late as 1910 it brought in fifty percent of Federal income. Today it accounts for about one percent. That’s still over three billion dollars, however, and because Customs men are strategically placed at ports of entry they enforce the regulations of a score of government agencies. The State Department frowns on gunrunning, but Customs men do the actual searching of baggage. They check seeds for the Department of Agriculture and parrots for Health, Education and Welfare, and at the behest of the Atomic Energy Commission they stop the transport of fissionable materials out of, or atomic bombs into, the country. Presumably they use Geiger counters, although, of course, they don’t talk about it.

  Last year Customs greeted over 200,000,000 people and pawed over fourteen billion dollars’ worth of imports, making sure each item was correctly labeled: “Made in Japan,” “Made in Ceylon,” “Made in Monaco.” Customs’ biggest job is to administer the Tariff Act, which lists 5000 categories of dutiable goods. It takes about five years to become an expert Customs examiner. Nine laboratories help him determine classifications; they also test the purity of ores and detect hidden materials of value which may raise the duty.

  The bureau is increasingly sensitive to the need for courtesy and efficiency. But even with tact, Customs is a touchy service to administer. Now and then a Customs ruling seems whimsical to importers. Some appeal to Customs courts. Some merely gripe, as did the European lingerie manufacturer who muttered that he wouldn’t be surprised to find one American appraiser classifying his bras as “meat-packing devices while another insisted on calling them jewel cases.”

  The smuggler, Customs’ ancient antagonist, is still around. Packages can be X-rayed, but human beings are an eternal problem. Frisking every overseas arrival is impossible. It would take 50,000 inspectors to do an adequate job. Old hands have developed an uncanny knack for spotting the off-beat shipment, though: during a recent five-month period they seized a quarter of a million dollars’ of contraband at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, which handles about forty percent of the country’s imports. They are familiar with all the hoary smugglers’ tricks: the false-bottomed suitcase; the bellyband under the shirt; the hollow statues and hollowed-out shoe heels, books, crutches, canes, pens, shaving-brush handles, billiard cues and golf clubs. Heroin has been found in dolls and fake hunchback humps; gems have been detected in glass eyes, in toothpaste tubes, in false teeth, in medicine-bottle cotton, in chewing gum. Swiss watch movements have been pried one by one from cargoes of gears, and with the increasing popularity among women smugglers of what are officially called the “body cavities,” inspectresses have been detailed to all major ports.

  Diamonds are a special problem. They are so tiny and so tempting to an amateur. An airline pilot can carry $233,000 worth in his pocket—it happened not long ago—and people who wouldn’t touch narcotics see nothing wrong in sneaking a fortune in ice through a Customs shed. It looks easier than it is. The inspector has allies abroad, a network of agents reporting to the Treasury attaches in American embassies. Moreover, Customs gives informers a cut of twenty-five percent of the value of seized goods, up to $50,000. The name of the American woman who buys a glittering bracelet in Rome will be quietly registered at the American Embassy by the clerk who waited on her. It will be sent home through channels, and if she doesn’t declare the bracelet when she returns, she gets the works and the Roman clerk can quit clerking.

  So attractive are these moieties that the professional informer has become the bane of the professional smuggler. Naturally espionage breeds counterespionage. The bureau has never been able to pay a certain major claimant. He told his tale, it was confirmed and then, for reasons which may be ventured, he vanished.

  Another big winner later went to jail. He had neglected to report his bounty on his Form 1040, and somebody had a hunch. Customs isn’t the only Treasury branch that offers rewards. Internal Revenue pays up to ten percent on taxes recovered through tips. The system works admirably, though here money seems to be a secondary motive, second to envy. If a man suddenly turns into a big spender, his whole neighborhood turns green. Speculation naturally focuses on the income tax. Everyone hates to file his return. The thought that someone is welshing is unbearable, and much of the billion and a half dollars picked up each year from flouters of the tax laws may be traced to healthy suspicions.

  Unhappily for the bureau, some unhealthy suspicions are directed toward its own employees. Embittered taxpayers haven’t forgotten the Internal Revenue scandals of the late 1940s, when a former commissioner went to prison. Since then the bureau has been largely removed from politics. Tax returns of most Internal Revenue employees are audited periodically and until 1960 each employee was required to attach a special slip to his form, marking him for special treatment, like Jean Valjean. But distrust dies hard, and Nixon’s “enemies list” rekindled it. Switchboard operators at the bureau, a few blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue from the Treasury Building, blush at the language of anonymous callers. Obscene notes arrive by mail, visitors wear
dark looks. A curious result of this is that Internal Revenue is a merry place. Bureau employees seem to have taken to boisterous good humor as a protective coloration. They delight in stories about odd taxpayers—the man who inquired how he could deduct the blood he had given to a blood bank, the man who tried to pay his tax with a credit card, and the woman, in Fresno, California, who paid twenty dollars in quarters “because it said I had to pay quarterly.” Let a girl appear and report that she needs a new form and Internal Revenue’s day is made, and you have to stop them if you’ve heard the one about the address of the bureau’s district director in Little Rock, Arkansas—(Capitol and Gaines streets).

  Despite abuse from cranks, bureau men think highly of the average American. He is, they believe, the most scrupulous citizen in the world. It’s a good thing. Although the bureau is the Department’s largest—five of every eight Treasury men work there—it would be helpless without public cooperation. Only one individual tax return in twenty can be audited. If most Americans weren’t honest, Washington’s bills couldn’t be paid. The pattern of taxation has changed mightily since 1789. The reason isn’t, as some suppose, creeping socialism. There is wry irony in the location of General Sherman’s bile-green equestrian statue opposite the Treasury Building. War has been hell on the taxpayer. First came luxury taxes, after the War of 1812, then an income tax, during the Civil War. That income tax expired, was revived, was declared unconstitutional and was later sanctioned in the Sixteenth Amendment. By then we had a corporation tax and World War I gave us new excise taxes. Extracting all these is the job of Internal Revenue, which harvests over ninety percent of the Federal income, about half from income-tax returns.

  Internal Revenue agents are called “Mr. Whiskers.” The typical Mr. Whiskers is discreet—it’s a criminal offense to reveal anything from a return, even information about illegal income, without authorization—and exacts about $1,000 additional tax in his average audit. His regard for the rectitude of the American yeomanry doesn’t hamper a continuing search for the unscrupulous. He likes to pore over newspapers, and his eyes shine whenever he reads of a sweepstakes winner or a home which has been looted of cash. Ritzy suburbs fascinate him; he is forever checking returns against addresses. Much of his time is spent sorting out the blizzard of W-2 forms from employers, because he is familiar with that vexing audacity known as the mass-refund racket. Mass-refund gyps file batches of fake returns, claiming overpayment of tax. Two such gangs were unearthed in San Quentin and New Mexico State Penitentiary, a discovery that gave Treasury colleagues in the Secret Service a hearty laugh until, to their own mortification, they traced a counterfeit ring to a state-prison printshop in Alabama.