Dawson, in his turn, insisted he had done no wrong. Acknowledging that he had stayed without charge at a Miami hotel on three different occasions, Dawson said he understood this was a common practice, that even some senators were on the hotel’s free list, a point no one on the committee chose to press. A handsome man with a smooth, ingratiating manner, Dawson gave the appearance of someone who definitely knew his way around, yet claimed he never realized that the Miami hotel had a $1.5 million RFC loan. “I did nothing improper, but I would not do it again,” said Dawson. In conclusion, Senator Fulbright assured Dawson that the object of the hearings was not to embarrass him. “You were sort of a necessary background,” Fulbright said. As Senator Douglas later conceded, Dawson made a “good showing,” only “minor peccadilloes” were proved against him.
While the RFC hearings continued, a House committee began investigations of irregularities in the tax administration, looking into charges of bribes, shakedowns, and gross negligence.
To his staff, Truman said it was all politics and all aimed at him. He could not see that either Dawson or Boyle had done anything seriously out of line and refused even to reprimand them. He liked people, he told Bill Hassett privately, and was loath ever to think of anyone as evil or unredeemable.
“Mr. President,” Joe Short warned, “I don’t think this business is going to blow over.”
Meanwhile, Merl Young, who, because of his wife, had a White House pass, would breeze in cheerfully after work to pick her up. Seeing Young one evening, Roger Tubby had a momentary urge to slam into him. “He was dressed in flashy sport clothes and talked almost gaily to Officer Ken Burke at the door,” Tubby wrote later, still angry.
It was the appearance of wrongdoing, the presence of someone like Merl Young at the White House, that Truman seemed unwilling to respond to with appropriate action, and the appearance of wrongdoing, whether representative or not, only grew worse.
In July the St. Louis Post-Dispatch broke a story charging that Bill Boyle had received $8,000 for arranging a half-million-dollar RFC loan for a St. Louis printing firm, the American Lithofold Corporation, and that part of the fee had been paid after Boyle became chairman of the Democratic Party.
“Ah, me,” wrote Roger Tubby, after returning to the White House from a vacation. “I wonder if this is all as bad as it appears—yes—then, is it as bad or worse than the stuff which goes on in every presidency?” Tubby was forty, a bright, idealistic Yale graduate and former Vermont newspaper reporter who had been a press aide at the State Department before coming to the White House and who in the time since had become devoted to Truman. Like his predecessor as assistant press secretary, Eben Ayers, Tubby was keeping a diary. He was also a great worrier, with premonitions of Truman ending up, as some critics were saying, like Warren G. Harding. “Poker, poker, I wonder why he played so much,” Tubby had commented on Truman in his diary at Key West in April, “a feeling of vacuum otherwise, no struggle, excitement?…companionship, banter, escape from the pressing problems of state?” Now Tubby wrote:
T[ruman] has to take strong action to save himself…. There are rumors of new exposés in Internal Revenue—let the W[hite] H[ouse] take the lead in checking and cleaning up, instead of appearing to be forced to action as in RFC business. Check, then fire Boyle. Lay about with a good broom. It probably won’t be done—probably too late anyhow…to do good politically…never too late otherwise.
In Vermont for two weeks—yes, guess that’s right, Truman and Acheson made good decisions. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MINK COAT? WHAT ABOUT THAT LETTER TO THE MUSIC CRITIC?
So he has an Achilles heel, maybe two of ’em. But he fights doggedly on for the right things. But why, why, why doesn’t he make it easier for himself, for all of us, really, in the world?
Another day, Tubby would write of the President, “He does not like to dwell upon the weakness and foibles of his party, or even of the GOP—he is a builder, looking far into the future….”
Once when he had served as budget director, prior to becoming Secretary of the Army, Frank Pace had asked the President why he continued to tolerate the influence of machine politicians on his administration, and Truman, with a chuckle, had replied, “Frank, you make a splendid director of the budget, but a lousy politician.”
For Truman, the attack on Boyle was cutting close to the bone. He had known Boyle since Boyle was a child in Kansas City, growing up in a prosperous Irish Catholic family where politics was a life force. Boyle’s mother, Clara, had been a Pendergast precinct worker, an energetic, God-fearing woman still honored and respected in Kansas City, and someone Truman greatly admired, calling her “one of the best Democrats Missouri ever produced.” By age sixteen Boyle had organized a Young Democrats Club in the city’s affluent Fourth Ward, and until now he had never been accused of misconduct or dishonesty. Truman liked him. He had put Boyle in one job after another over the years, and from the time Truman first brought him to Washington, as an assistant counsel for the Truman Committee, Boyle had remained a staunch, resourceful enthusiast, working hard for the Roosevelt-Truman ticket in 1944 and harder still for the Truman campaign in 1948, while between times prospering as a Washington lawyer. Boyle was commonly credited as one of the “masterminds” of Truman’s upset victory in 1948. Once Truman installed him as chairman of the Democratic National Committee he became truly, as the papers said, a political power-house.
No one seeing Bill Boyle in the lobby of the Mayflower or the Statler would have had trouble guessing his occupation. A well-dressed, six-foot, fleshy “good fellow” with a round Irish face, he was the picture of a professional politician. He had a “nice way” about him, an “index card memory” for names, and though not known for efficiency or a particularly sharp mind, he knew politics from experience in a way that others, like most of Truman’s staff, never would. He talked the language, he had “the feel.”
Boyle’s chief trouble was with alcohol, and this had infuriated Truman more than once in times past. On the night of the 1944 presidential election, Boyle had been one of those in the suite at the Muehlebach who got so drunk that Bess and Margaret left in disgust. “Your views on Mr. Boyle and the other middle-aged soaks are exactly correct,” Truman had written to Margaret afterward, apologetically.
I like people who can control their appetites and their mental balance. When that isn’t done I hope you will scratch them off your list. It is a shame about Boyle. I picked him up off the street in Kansas City, because I thought he’d been mistreated by the people out there for whom he’d worked. He had the chance of a lifetime to become a real leader in politics and to have made a great name for himself. John Barleycorn got the best of him and so far as I’m concerned I can’t trust him again….
But Truman had not scratched him from his own list, he did trust Boyle again, and remained genuinely fond of him. “Bill’s all right! Don’t let anybody tell you differently!” he had told those gathered for a huge black-tie dinner in Boyle’s honor at the Kansas City Municipal Auditorium in September 1949. Truman and Barkley both had flown from Washington for the occasion. “All these are friends to tie to,” Truman had continued, sparkling with warmth for Boyle, McGrath, and Bob Hannegan, his three party chairmen since becoming President. “They are there when you need them, and that’s the kind of friends I like to have around me.” It was the old professional creed—politics as a matter of friends—and his Kansas City audience gave a roar of approval.
But conspicuously present among the more than two thousand at the dinner had been several well-known North Side gamblers, including the ruling Kansas City racketeer of the day, Charles Binnagio, who only months later was shot to death in a gangland killing reminiscent of the city in its worst days. The press had taken careful note of such “friends” present to honor Boyle, just as the press highlighted the fact that Binnagio had been gunned down in a Democratic clubhouse located on Truman Road and that his bullet-riddled body fell beneath a poster-sized portrait of President Harry S. Truman.
> To many on the White House staff Boyle now looked like a very large liability.
“So Boyle is not only stupid and inefficient, but also, it seems, a crook,” wrote Roger Tubby, so angry he could hardly contain himself.
He should of course resign, or offer his resignation. But these chiselers who use, and who do terrible damage to, the President don’t resign. He should be fired as soon as the President is satisfied there has been wrong doing…. The important thing is that the President be saved from his friends.
Bill Hassett urged Truman to rid himself of Boyle without delay. “Your friends will destroy you,” Hassett pleaded.
“It’s all right, Bill,” Truman said, as if trying to calm a child. “It’s all right.”
Truman quietly ordered a confidential investigation by Charlie Murphy, his precise, scrupulously honest counselor whose importance was far greater than generally understood. Murphy’s report was ready by midsummer, and at a subsequent press conference, Truman said he would stand by Boyle. No one connected with the Democratic National Committee ought ever to take fees for favors or services, Truman said, and it was his impression that Boyle had not. “I have the utmost confidence in Mr. Boyle. And I believe the statements that he made to me.”
In his memorandum, Murphy reported that a thorough search of the RFC records had revealed “no effort of any kind whatever” by Boyle to influence the loan made to the American Lithofold Corporation.
Monthly reports filed by the Company with the St. Louis office of the RFC during 1949 and 1950, while the loan was outstanding, indicate that the Company paid Boyle $1500 in the Spring of 1949…. This appears to be entirely consistent with the statement which Boyle has made that he was retained by the Company for general legal services for two and one half months in the Spring of 1948, that he gave up the account voluntarily in April 1949, when he became a full-time, salaried employee of the Democratic National Committee….
The RFC examiner for the Lithofold loan had never met Boyle, never communicated with him directly or indirectly on that particular subject or any other. Murphy had concluded there was nothing “fishy” about the RFC loan. “I believe that the facts I have developed substantiate the statement Mr. Boyle himself has already issued concerning this matter, and that they indicate pretty clearly that he had nothing to do with the granting of the loans in question and that there is no reason why he should be subjected to criticism, express or implied, on that account.”
Murphy’s report could only have pleased Truman greatly, while also reinforcing his own natural inclination to see attacks on any of his people as fundamentally political and directed at him. It might sound egotistical, Truman remarked, but he thought he was as good a judge of people as anyone who had ever sat in his chair. He had made some mistakes, and he had had to fire some people consequently. But, he added, “You can’t punish a man for not seeming to be right if he isn’t wrong.”
In October, a new revelation relieved considerably the sting of the Boyle accusations. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Guy George Gabrielson, testified that he had been paid $25,000 for “looking after” the loans of a Texas corporation, Carthage Hydrocel, Inc., and had intervened many times with the RFC on behalf of the firm. Gabrielson found it amusing that anyone might think his activities improper. “It is inconceivable to me,” he told the committee, “to believe that a chairman of a party that is not in power could have any possible influence.” But as reported, embarrassed Republicans in Congress did not think it would sound so inconceivable to the voters.
When, in time, the Senate committee issued its final report, Boyle would be cleared of any wrongdoing. In the oddly inverted wording of the report, he was guilty only of conduct that was “not such that it would dispel the appearance of wrong-doing.” But by then, “for reasons of health,” Boyle had also resigned as Democratic national chairman and scandals in the tax bureau loomed larger than any thus far.
For more than a year, Treasury Secretary John Snyder had been trying to get to the bottom of persistent rumors of corruption in various tax collectors’ offices around the country. But Snyder had made little progress. Then in April 1951, the collector in St. Louis, James P. Finnegan, resigned only after being cleared by a grand jury. In July, Truman had to fire two more collectors, Denis W. Delaney in Boston and James G. Smyth in San Francisco. Eight of Smyth’s associates were also suspended, and a few months later, the collector in Brooklyn, Joseph P. Marcelle, was fired.
All four men—Finnegan, Delaney, Smyth, and Marcelle—had been appointed by Bob Hannegan, when Hannegan was head of the Bureau of Internal Revenue under Roosevelt, and all had taken their jobs with the understanding that tax collection need only be a part-time responsibility, that they were free to do other things as well. Like Hannegan, all four men were also the products of big-city Democratic machines, and in fact corrupt practices—or at the least flagrant “irregularities”—had been rampant during their terms of office. Finnegan was indicted for bribe taking and misconduct, Delaney, the Boston collector, for taking bribes to “fix” tax delinquencies. In San Francisco, Smyth, too, was indicted—for fixing tax fraud claims—and in Brooklyn, Marcelle was found to have cheated on his own tax returns and amassed, through his law practice, nearly a quarter of a million dollars beyond his $10,750-a-year salary as tax collector.
Meantime, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, George J. Schoeneman, had suddenly resigned “for reasons of health,” and the resignations of the assistant commissioner, Daniel A. Bolich, and the bureau’s chief counsel, Charles Oliphant, followed almost immediately.
In November, Truman had to fire the head of the tax division at the Justice Department, Assistant Attorney General T. Lamar Caudle. A House investigating committee would conclude that Caudle, though undoubtedly an honorable man, had been naive in his dealings with tax fixers.
By December, George Elsey would report in a White House memorandum that signs of corruption were spreading so fast the staff was unable to document them all.
In Truman’s defense, it was stressed that the tax collectors under fire were holdovers from the Roosevelt administration. Also, Truman had moved swiftly and forcefully to clean house in the tax bureau, a point no one could contest. By December, 113 employees of the Internal Revenue Bureau, including six regional collectors, had been fired from their jobs. When Boyle was replaced by a new Democratic national chairman, Frank E. McKinney, Truman also determined that collectors of the Internal Revenue would no longer be patronage jobs but put under civil service.
Nonetheless, corruption in the tax bureau was truly appalling, the housecleaning long overdue, and if Bob Hannegan had made his key appointments under Roosevelt, Hannegan had also been known as a thorough Truman man, another Missouri crony. Hannegan had himself been a first-rate head of the tax bureau, but Hannegan was no longer available to speak in his own defense—he had died of heart failure in October 1949. And whatever the comparative guilt or stupidity of an unfortunate figure like T. Lamar Caudle, it would be remembered that his wife, too, was the recipient of a mink coat, a Christmas present from an attorney who had dealings with the tax division.
Would he be taking drastic action to clean up the government, Truman was asked at a press conference in December. “Let’s say continue drastic action,” he replied.
“Wrongdoers have no house with me,” he said, an expression that left reporters looking puzzled and that Truman later told his staff he had used since boyhood. (Time would report that it was a colloquialism as old at least as Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet’s father, angry with her for refusing to marry Paris, tells her: “Graze where you will, you shall not house with me.”)
Did he ever feel as though he had been “sold down the river” by his friends?
“Well, who wouldn’t feel that way,” he snapped angrily. But beyond that he would say no more.
“Boss, you’re going to have to run in ’52,” Harry Vaughan told him one day, as Truman sat at his desk. “Who else is there?”<
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“We’ll get someone,” Truman answered, a twinkle in his eye.
“You know there isn’t anybody else. You’ll have to run.”
“We’ll see,” said Truman, and Vaughan came out of the office convinced the President would run again.
Vaughan, as he told the others, had no misconceptions about what was ahead for him personally, should Truman not run.
“Once I’m outa the White House,” Vaughan said one noon hour in the staff lunchroom downstairs, “I know perfectly well that these jokers who bow and scrape and call me General would pass me by on the street and if they saw me say, ‘Why there goes that fat god-damned son-of-a-bitch!’ ”
It was one of those moments when several of the staff were reminded why, after all, the President had kept Vaughan around for so long.
The only one not pointedly urging Truman to run again was Bill Hassett, who was due to retire soon himself and who told Truman that for his own sake and the sake of his family, he should do the same.
In Korea, though peace talks had resumed, now at Panmunjom, the war went on. The sticking point in the talks was the fate of 132,000 North Korean soldiers held prisoner by the U.N. Command. Originally, it had been agreed that the end of hostilities would bring an immediate exchange of all prisoners. But now the United States opposed that policy, since nearly half of the North Korean prisoners of war, some 62,000, had no wish to be repatriated. Truman insisted that they be given the choice of whether to go home. At the end of World War II Stalin had executed or sent to Siberia thousands of Soviet soldiers whose only crime was to have been captured by the enemy. “We will not buy an armistice by turning over human beings for slaughter or slavery,” Truman declared, and he would not be budged.
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