In a Maryland referendum voters approved by a four-to-one margin the state’s controversial new Ober Anti-Subversive Act, whose provisions included periodic investigations of Communist activity. Actor John Barrymore Jr., twenty-two, was arrested in Las Vegas for driving recklessly while whooping it up on his second wedding anniversary. General Fulgencio Batista ousted the government of Carlos Piros in Havana and seized control of Cuba. The California Supreme Court voided the University of California’s loyalty oath but upheld the state loyalty oath. The U.S. Supreme Court approved New York’s released time program in schools but threw out the state’s ban of the motion picture The Miracle, thereby extending to films for the first time constitutional guarantees of free speech and a free press.
Joe Adonis was sentenced to prison for conspiring to violate New Jersey’s gambling laws. The Missouri, Mississippi, and Red rivers rose over their banks, leaving three dead, 100,000 homeless, and damage estimated at $300,000,000. A House committee investigating the Katyn forest massacre of 10,000 Polish army officers in World War II declared that the Soviet NKVD was responsible. The junta which had ruled Bolivia was overthrown during riots in which two hundred were killed, and the Argentine government seized the independent newspaper La Prensa. The South African Supreme Court invalided a law putting colored voters on separate lists, but Prime Minister Daniel F. Malan declared the Supreme Court itself illegal. In Paris Arthur Koestler finished the manuscript of The Age of Longing, got drunk and then, “conditioned by my past experiences with policemen,” as he later said, punched a gendarme. An Indiana parole board paroled David C. Stephenson, onetime Grand Dragon of the state’s Ku Klux Klan and a sadistic murderer of the 1920s. The Dow Jones industrial average moved in the range between 206 and 236. Since Pearl Harbor, the Census Bureau reported, the number of air conditioners in the U.S. had tripled.
Five atomic explosions set off near Las Vegas, Nevada, included a small-scale bomb detonated in mid-air and the first atomic bomb maneuvers, in which five thousand troops took part. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the convictions of eleven Communist leaders tried in 1949 for intent to overthrow the government, and the Massachusetts legislature banned the Communist party from the ballot. President Truman signed legislation extending the draft on June 19, 1951. The U.S. closed the Hungarian consulate in New York and banned American travel in Hungary.
The White House announced on October 3, 1951, that a second atomic explosion had taken place in the Soviet Union. A third was reported on October 22. West Germany swept Chancellor Konrad Adenauer into office and ratified the European Defense Community Pact. In Prague, Rudolf Slansky and nine other purged Communists were hanged for espionage and treason. Tariff concessions by the United States to the Soviet Union and Red China were suspended. Radio Free Europe opened a transmitter in Munich to broadcast anti-Communist propaganda to Czechoslovakia, while the Russians restricted travel by foreign diplomats to within twenty-five miles of Moscow and, in New York, forced U.N. Secretary General Trygve Lie to step aside for Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden.
All these things, and a thousand like them, passed as the falling calendar pages accumulated in the early 1950s. The snows yielded to greenery, summers passed in their heavily handsome way, leaves turned and snow returned as the seasons moved in sequence; the decade settled in; the Cold War deepened; politics grew uglier at the approach of another national election; and among the swing generation, now entering its thirties as the parents of learning children, a nagging feeling grew that the nation was in trouble.
NINETEEN
Right Turn
Something was in a decline, that was certain; if not the country’s well-being, then its morals, its pride, its self-respect. Since the beginning of the Korean War cartoonists in Communist countries had been depicting Uncle Sam as an evil, leering old man, and accumulating headlines suggested that they might have a case. In both public life and private, a dismaying number of Americans in key positions were turning out to be thieves or worse. Their crimes seemed particularly outrageous when the criminals were in the federal government. The miscreants were called “influence peddlers” and “five-percenters” responsible for “the mess in Washington,” and the issue grew into a severe handicap to Democratic hopes of extending the party’s twenty-year hegemony for four more years.
That was precisely what Republicans meant it to be. Every shady implication was pushed to the very threshold of the White House until, by the spring of 1952, it was possible to infer that in one way or another the administration was responsible for most of the corruption in the country. No responsible Republican suggested that Harry Truman’s hand had been in any till, of course, and as it happened, the first eminent crook of the 1950s—and TV’s first superstar—had never been on the public payroll. He had contributed to Democratic war chests, however, and had become a figure in New York politics, and that was enough to attract the attention of an ambitious Tennessee senator investigating nationwide crime.
Frank Costello, alias Francisco Castaglia, alias Frank Severio, was a man of the period, an organization man of organized crime. He had been arrested only once, long ago, for assault and robbery. Thereafter he let others carry the guns. Moving up the rungs of his trade, he had become in turn a small-time henchman, bootlegger, slot machine operator, owner of gambling houses, and ultimately a friend and sponsor of New York politicians. By then he was trying to cover his tracks. He invested in real estate and oil wells and assured reporters that whatever he had been in the past, he was now a legitimate businessman. But he wasn’t. He had been Lucky Luciano’s chief lieutenant, and when Lucky was deported, Costello became his legatee, the biggest racketeer. His underworld connections crisscrossed the country. Carmine De Sapio of Tammany was Costello’s creature. So, some said, was New York’s Mayor William O’Dwyer.
Had Estes Kefauver’s senatorial road show toured the country in the late 1940s or the mid-1950s, it would have attracted minimal attention—in the first period because not enough television stations had been established, and in the second because network programs had come to fill the hours of daytime TV. But the committee opened its hearings in May 1950. Lacking anything better to put on the air, local television directors in outlying cities covered the proceedings as a public service, and when the investigators pitched their tents in New York’s Foley Square Courthouse on March 12, 1951, cameramen for WPIX-TV were prepared to do the same thing. Here the situation was somewhat different. The incidence of set ownership in New York was extremely high; the mass audience was already assembled. And here in the capital of the communications industry the facilities for relaying transmissions elsewhere had already been developed.
Costello’s lawyer tried to circumvent the tube. He asked that the cameras be turned away from his client, explaining that “Mr. Costello doesn’t care to submit himself as a spectacle.” The senators agreed, but one of the technicians craftily suggested that they concentrate on Costello’s hands. The result was superb theater: tense dialogue accompanied by clenched hands, fingers drumming the table top, gestures with papers and water glasses, nervous hands ripping sheets of paper to shreds. Yes, Costello conceded, he kept “a little cash” at home in a “little strongbox.” No, he couldn’t remember how much. Senator Charles Tobey threatened a search of his mansion, and the gangman suddenly recalled that he had $50,000 there. How had he acquired it? He muttered that he had generous friends. One friend, a fellow golfer who administered Roosevelt Raceway, had admitted that he paid Costello $15,000 a year for four years to see to it that the New York State Harness Racing Commission did not revoke the track’s license because of bookie operations there. Rudolph Halley, the committee counsel, asked Costello if that was true. Not at all, said Costello, making fists; there had been some sort of misunderstanding, and he had “spread the propaganda around” that his friend was “a nice fellow” who didn’t deserve mean treatment.
Costello’s hands began to sweat. He had taken about all he could. Was this, he asked aggrievedly, any way to treat a ha
rdworking businessman? His throat was sore. The television lights bothered him. He wanted to go home. Kefauver bluntly told him to continue answering questions, but Costello shook his head. Then:
KEFAUVER: You refuse to testify further?…
COSTELLO: Mr. Senator, I want to think of my health first. When I testify, I want to testify truthfully, and my mind don’t function.
KEFAUVER: Your mind seems to be functioning pretty well.
COSTELLO: With all due respect to the senators… I have a lot of respect for them, I am not going to answer another question…. I am going to walk out.
He then did, thereby winning an eighteen-month stretch in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary for contempt. His departure was witnessed by thirty million televiewers. According to Videodex figures, nearly 70 percent of New York’s sets were tuned to the Kefauver hearings, giving it twice as large an audience as the previous autumn’s World Series.
After eight days in Foley Square, the Kefauver committee returned to Washington. Its chairman was now a candidate for the Presidency, and thirty million households had been left with the distinct impression that something was rotten in U.S. cities. Ed Murrow said that “the television performance has been fascinating, the audience fantastic—perhaps because the midgets in the box have been real,” and the advertising firm of Young & Rubicam, summing up the general impression, placed ads in New York newspapers to deplore sin and ask: “Is there anything we can do about it?”
One thing that could be done was to teach children the difference between right and wrong. Presumably that had already been accomplished, but while the Kefauver committee was still in session newspapers were documenting charges of corruption in the last place to be suspected, among college youth. For several winters the City College of New York had fielded one of the best basketball teams in the country. It now developed that three of its five starters had been taking money—as much as $1,500 each—to throw games in Madison Square Garden. And no sooner had they been indicted than similar confessions were signed by basketball players at New York University, Toledo University, Bradley University, and the University of Kentucky.
The Fagin of the Garden, one Salvatore T. Sollazo, went to prison for eight years; the others received lesser terms. Sollazo was a convenient scapegoat, and given an exciting sports season that fall, the stain on collegiate copybooks would have been quickly forgotten. Unfortunately another scandal emerged that August. West Point announced that ninety cadets had been expelled for cheating on examinations.
Shaving basketball points and cribbing in exams were symptomatic. The country was going through one of its periodic romps with vice—the first since the 1920s—and as always in such scarlet eras people were more tolerant of sin than they would admit. Grasping what was happening required a lot of reading between the lines. A spade was rarely called a spade; newspaper accounts of dissolution were larded with euphemisms. Typically, prostitutes were described as “call girls” or “party girls”; sometimes they were also “fun girls.” In bed with a man they invariably “partied.” (“After partying with this John, what did you do?” “I went into the bathroom for a towel.”) The cumulative effect was to make the oldest profession sound glamorous.
In their furs and jewels, the whores of the 1950s practiced a harlotry far removed from the dime-a-hump “wild girls” who had ridden the rails in the early 1930s or the six-bit “victory girls” of World War II. Call girls never haunted pavements or bus terminals; they lounged around between silk sheets and made appointments by phone, like doctors. Many were beauty contest winners and/or college graduates. Some had majored in economics, and in court they almost seemed to regard themselves as generous contributors to the Gross National Product. In point of fact, the services they provided did play a certain role in business. Firms provided girls for out-of-town buyers as a matter of course, with the burgeoning public relations departments acting as procurers. Accounting stratagems saw to it that the fees were deductible. Only girls known for their discretion were recruited for this sort of work, but the payoffs were big, as much as five hundred dollars a trick. One wry madam marked her dossier for them “VIP”—for “Very Important Pieces.”
In a way it made sense. Amateur entanglements were risky for star entertainers and executive vice presidents. The girl picked up under a street-lamp or at a big cocktail party came without references. She might be diseased, or a spy for a competitor, or the wife of a man with blackmail on his mind. She could show up a month later at the office or even at home, determined to parlay a casual encounter into a permanent liaison. Putting everything on a business basis removed those possibilities. It did the job and left no aftertaste. The bigger a man’s name, the greater was the likelihood that he would be in the market for professional lust; the bit actors who played the star’s ranch hands could prowl for lonesome waitresses, but the star himself needed a pro. And this was true of distinguished men in any occupation requiring a great deal of travel, including politicians of national distinction. The voters didn’t know that then. Not that they had any illusions about men in high office. Far from it. They merely thought public figures were too busy stealing the country blind.
***
Major General Harry H. Vaughan was a big, genial Missourian with a vague resemblance to Hermann Goring and a natural talent for draw poker. He was not conspicuously talented otherwise, or even particularly shrewd. As military aide to Harry S. Truman he might have been expected to know that he would often be on display, yet he continued to be the sloppiest general officer ever in uniform. He simply couldn’t remember to put on a blouse or cinch up his necktie on historic occasions, and was always making deals. Nothing shady, to be sure; just borderline things. In his first speech after Truman’s ascension to the Presidency in 1945, for instance, he had told the Women’s Auxiliary of the Alexandria Westminster Presbyterian Church about the terrible black market prices in occupied Germany, and as an example he revealed that he had sold his own fifty-five-dollar American watch to a Russian officer for five hundred dollars.
In the White House, Vaughan became celebrated for his gregariousness and his affability. His social energy seemed inexhaustible. He was always ready to grace a cocktail party or a dinner party. Making new friends there, he would be ready, in the morning, to grease the machinery of government with a letter or a well-placed phone call. In almost any other line of endeavor this would have been unexceptionable. In his it was dangerous business.
The general’s undoing was a sleazy ex-colonel in the Quartermaster Corps named James V. Hunt. There were others of Hunt’s stripe around, but he was typical of them and, for that matter, representative of the influence peddlers of the time. For a fee—in Truman’s Washington it was 5 percent of profits—the man with influence who “knew the ropes” and had “pull” saw to it that a difficult deal went through. At Hunt’s request, Vaughan put outrageous pressure on regulatory agencies, procurement officers at the Pentagon, the State Department’s passport office, and the Department of Agriculture. In occupied Europe a businessman with a to-whom-it-may-concern letter from the White House bought up essential oils for a perfume manufacturer. Federal trade regulations were bent for one Hunt client, surplus property disposal procedures for a second, public housing schedules for a third. In the readjustment to a peacetime economy scarce structural steel went to a California racetrack, scarce commercial sugar to a soft drink manufacturer. Vaughan let himself be the channel for campaign contributions from the beneficiaries. Worst of all, he accepted from one of them a personal gift which would become famous. It was a $520 Deepfreeze.
Three other Missouri cronies of the President were Donald Dawson, E. Merle Young, and William M. Boyle Jr. Their turf was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The RFC, established by Herbert Hoover to shore up firms facing ruin, had financed defense industries in the early 1940s and eased the pangs of adjustment after the war. Lately there hadn’t been much need for it, but suddenly business over there began humming. A senatorial subcommittee under J. W
illiam Fulbright of Arkansas went to take a look and stumbled into a cesspool. Government appropriations were being used to plunge in all sorts of speculative ventures, including gambling hotels in Las Vegas and Miami. Some records were missing. Others showed out-and-out favoritism. After being turned down three times in its application for $565,000 in RFC funds, the American Lithfold Company had paid an $8,000 retainer to Boyle, who among other things was vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The loan was then approved. Dawson, a special assistant to the President, had repeatedly made inquiries on behalf of politically well-connected persons seeking loans from the RFC. Young was an RFC loan examiner. For ten years he had been supplementing his salary with “retainers” from firms whose loans he put through. After getting one for $150,000, a company showed its gratitude by sending Mrs. Young a present. It was a $9,540 mink coat.
That gift was disastrous. If there was one thing most American housewives wanted more than anything else, and never expected to get, it was a coat of mink. And here was a woman who had been given one because her husband had been defrauding the government. Fueled by Republicans—who overlooked the fact that their own national chairman had intervened to get a big RFC loan for the Carthage Hydrocol Company, of which he was president—rumors grew until there were those who thought everybody in the administration had a Deepfreeze in the basement and a mink on his wife’s back. The wife of Senator Blair Moody wore on her new fur coat a receipt showing that it was mink-dyed muskrat, $381.25 with taxes. Harold W. Reed of the Mink Ranchers’ Association found it necessary to issue a statement saying that all women with mink coats weren’t married to crooks, that many were in fact “highly respectable people of discriminating taste.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 90