He got the reaction from Bricker he wanted—both then (“He did not deny any of this charge, then, on page 4?”) and at the end of the hearings, when Head was winding up his testimony. “In conclusion, I say this,” Head declared. “Leland Olds is a fraud, he is a fraud on his friends who appeared here in his behalf; he is a fraud on the consuming public whom he fills with misleading statements. He is a fraud on the press, whom he fills with misleading statements, and he is a fraud on the people of the United States of America.” “It is a good, strong, positive statement, certainly,” said Senator Bricker.
And Johnson again got the headlines he wanted. Newspapers in states across the country did indeed, as Bonner boasted, carry some version of his statement; a headline in the Houston Post, for example, said: “LELAND OLDS LABELED CRACKPOT AND TRAITOR.” The attorney’s colorful phrases—along with Head’s—provided rich grist for newspapers predisposed to be hostile to Olds, enlivening the articles under the headlines; the first sentence in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s article informed readers that “Leland Olds, President Truman’s choice for a third term on the Federal Power Commission, today was branded a ‘punk,’ a ‘crackpot,’ a ‘jackass’ and a ‘traitor’ by a witness before the Senate Commerce Committee.” “Denounced as a traitor to his country,” reported the Chicago Tribune.
JOHNSON HAD ALLOWED only two full days for the hearings, and his emphasis on dispatch was perhaps explained by a remark he made to other subcommittee members Thursday afternoon: “The rumor has gone around today that maybe the proponents would like to continue the hearing on into next week some time until they get some more articles written, and things like that.” By taking Olds’ supporters by surprise, he had kept them from mobilizing support behind the embattled commissioner. He didn’t want to give them time to mobilize now.
A stumbling block now appeared in the road to speedy conclusion, however. Olds asked for a chance to reply to the charges against him.
He had asked on Wednesday, as he was rising from the witness chair, and Johnson had said, “I think that can be worked out.”
Johnson’s idea of “working it out,” however, involved speed. The rest of the hearings would wind up Thursday afternoon; Olds could reply, Johnson said, on Saturday morning. But when, on Thursday, Olds asked the committee clerk for the transcript of Lyle’s testimony, and the exhibits upon which it was based—the fifty-four Federated Press articles—he was informed they would “not be available” until sometime Friday.
Olds thereupon wrote to Johnson requesting a postponement until the following Wednesday. “The material selected by Representative Lyle purports to be selected from articles which I wrote more than twenty years ago and which … number some 1,800,” he said. “To have such material thrust upon me at a moment’s notice and without an opportunity to relate the selected articles to my work, placed me in a position in which I could make no adequate comment…. I am, therefore, writing you … to renew my request for opportunity to study the record and to make such answers as I believe necessary in a public hearing.”
Reasonable though Olds’ request may have seemed, however, it was not to be granted. Rather than replying to Olds himself, Johnson had a Commerce Committee clerk, Edward Cooper, do it. At seven o’clock Thursday night, Cooper telephoned Olds that the schedule would not be changed: his reply was still scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday. And Cooper made clear that there would also be no change in the schedule for providing him with the transcript on which the reply would be based: that would still not be available until sometime Friday. Olds was being given twenty-four hours—or less—to prepare his defense.
There was what Olds was to call a “big heap” of Federated Press clippings in his house on McKinley Street in northwest Washington, but he hadn’t looked at them in years, and they had just been tied together haphazardly; merely to sort through them and to arrange them in some kind of order would take hours. And he knew he didn’t have many—perhaps most—of the articles Lyle had cited; it had taken teams of investigators weeks of sorting through copies of old newspapers in libraries to compile a complete file for the prosecution. Following Cooper’s call, Olds worked until midnight Thursday sorting through the clippings, and arose to continue at five-thirty Friday morning—still without having seen the transcript to which his defense was supposed to reply. As the impossibility of preparing an adequate defense by Saturday became apparent, Olds telephoned Johnson to plead for more time. “I had asked for Wednesday,” he said; if that was impossible, “I feel that in justice I should have until Monday to get this answer ready. I am appealing to you to let me have until Monday….”
“I talked to the [sub]committee before I called,” Johnson replied. “Some of them will be out of town Monday. They suggested you take Saturday….”
When Olds obstinately balked at this suggestion, Johnson casually unveiled a threat. Of course, he said, if Olds insisted on submitting additional material, Lyle would testify again—and submit additional material himself. “He said he had some pretty recent statements and will come back with some more comparisons,” Johnson said. “Said he had some more of your views he would like to read into the record.” And Johnson insisted firmly on his own point of view. When Olds mentioned the “voluminous record” he had to study, Johnson said the issue was actually quite simple. The subcommittee’s “viewpoint,” he said, “is that there are some fifty articles and that you either wrote them or you did not. It shouldn’t take any time to decide that.” When Olds said that the White House “want[s] me to deal with this thing as fully as I think I ought to,” Johnson replied: “You either wrote the article or you did not. We put the page and paragraph and you can check them.” “It is not as simple as that,” Olds said.
It was not he who objected to delay, Johnson said, but other members of the subcommittee: “As far as I am concerned I will have no objection. I will recommend it. I want to be as fair as I can…. I will treat you just as I would want you to treat me if the positions were reversed. I will talk to them and if I can get them to be agreeable I will let you know….”
Later, Johnson called back, and said that the subcommittee had agreed to the Monday date. “Well, you are very kind,” Leland Olds said. “And I appreciate what the others did very much, too.” He wouldn’t have the five days he had asked—a meagre enough time to defend a lifetime’s work—but at least he would have a whole weekend.
“AT THE OUTSET I want to state simply and categorically that I am not a Communist,” Olds said on Monday morning. “I never was a Communist. I am and always have been loyal to my country. I am and always have been a profound believer in democracy. In my opinion the very theory of Russian communism represents a negation of democracy.
“I did write radically during the period publicized by Mr. Lyle,” Olds said. “I did so because I believed radical writing was needed in the ‘golden twenties’ to shock the American people, and particularly labor, out of social and political lethargy…. I felt that unless the American people were aroused to do something about it, the American way of life would be in real jeopardy.”
Olds’ prepared statement then would have gone on to analyze, one by one, the articles which Lyle claimed showed his “alien” philosophy. But Johnson may have been working that weekend, too, with the man who said, “First ask him this—” “Then ask him if he—” Hardly had Olds begun reading this analysis when Johnson cut him off—cut him off with questions that applied to the articles as a single group, and in the broadest, most simple (or, to be more precise, simplistic) terms. “Mr. Olds,” he demanded, leaning forward across the dais and speaking in a very soft tone in which every word was carefully enunciated, “do you repudiate those writings?” And when Olds said he didn’t, Johnson asked: “Do you reiterate them? Do you reassert them?”
MR. OLDS. I am going to discuss those writings in terms of Mr. Lyle’s presentation and tell you exactly what those writings mean.
SENATOR JOHNSON. We are going to be able to judge what they mean. We will
be glad to have your viewpoint upon what they mean, but the question I want to ask you: Do you still feel as you did when you wrote those articles?
MR. OLDS. No. I have indicated that the change in the circumstances in this country, and the change in my thinking that has gone along with it, would lead me to write some of those articles in a somewhat different way today.
SENATOR JOHNSON. But there has been a change in your thinking since those articles were written?
MR. OLDS. There has been a change in my thinking.
SENATOR JOHNSON. Then you do repudiate certain things you said then?
MR. OLDS. I do not repudiate them as said at that time in terms of my relationship to that period in which I was writing.
Repeatedly, as Olds attempted to explain the points he had been trying to make during the 1920s, Johnson would cut in, demanding that he either “repudiate” or “reassert” them. Repeatedly, Olds would try to explain to Johnson that the situation was not as simple as the question made it appear. His thinking had changed, he said over and over, but those writings represented what his thinking had been at the time. He still believed that they represented his thinking at the time. For example, “I did not think then, and I do not think now, that private enterprise in the 1920s was providing a decent family wage or assurance of security or even protection.” And, he said, he therefore could not honestly repudiate them.
But simplicity was what Johnson was interested in. Over and over, when Olds attempted to explain what he had meant by an article, how it related to the times in which it had been written, or how its meaning had been altered by changes in political or economic conditions, Johnson would cut in, demanding that he either “repudiate” what he had written or “reiterate” it.
Whoever framed that question—Alvin Wirtz, Horace Busby, Lyndon Johnson himself—could be proud of its effectiveness, for it placed Olds again in a trap. Refusal to repudiate a specific article could be interpreted to mean that the witness still held the beliefs expressed in it. If he said he did repudiate the article, his repudiation could be taken as proof that he was indeed a “chameleon” willing to express any view that would keep him in power—so that he could further his secret communistic aims.
Had Olds been allowed actually to deal with the articles Lyle had quoted, his answers would have been definitive. The articles may have been “carried in the Daily Worker,” he said, but they had not been written for the Daily Worker, but for the Federated Press subscribers in general, and many other, non-Communist, papers had carried them. (In a further demonstration of Johnson’s sophistry—and of Johnson’s sensitivity to criticism—when Olds said this, the chairman turned to the other senators, made a palms-up gesture of injured innocence, and said, “The committee has not charged him, and so far as I know no other witness has charged him, with being an employee of the Daily Worker. And we do not want the country to get the impression that he has been so charged.”)*
But Olds almost never got to make his points in an uninterrupted, coherent way. When, for example, he attempted to explain what he had meant when he wrote during the 1920s of the necessity for labor to obtain increased political power, Johnson said: “I am not asking you what you meant. I am asking you what you said.”
“I made that statement, yes,” Olds replied.
“You repudiate it today?” Johnson demanded.
“I repudiate it in the sense in which it is understood by you gentlemen,” Olds said.
“I am not saying what the understanding is. I am asking, do you repudiate or do you reiterate it?”
“I would repudiate it,” Olds said. “… What I was trying to describe is still going on, but I think I would repudiate today the way I said it then. I would say it in different terms today, if that is what you mean.”
More than an hour after Olds resumed the witness stand, with his written statement barely begun, Johnson was still employing this tactic. (“The question the committee is considering is, What did you say? Did you say it? If so, Do you repeat it today? … If you said them, say so. If you believe them, say so. You have a right to say that and thank God in this country a man can still exercise some free speech.”) At that point, Senator McFarland stepped in, as he had done on the first day of Olds’ testimony, saying, “Mr. Chairman, I was just going to suggest that probably the best way would be for us to, nearly as we can, let Mr. Olds finish his statement in chief and then we would go back and bring up anything that we wanted in the nature that the chairman has suggested…. I believe that he ought to get in the record, in any way that he wants to, his explanation and then come back to the questions.” Only then did the pace of the interruptions slacken—they never stopped completely—sufficiently so that, two hours later, Olds could get to the end of his statement.
The “repudiate” or “reiterate” tactic was effective with conservative journalists. Some of them, like nationally syndicated columnist Gould Lincoln, felt they knew how to interpret Olds’ refusal to “repudiate.”
Mr. Olds himself told the Senate Committee that he would have written the articles differently today—but he did not recant.
This raises again the issue whether the Administration is inclined to be soft with the Reds and fellow-travelers….
Other conservative journalists felt Olds had recanted—and they knew how to interpret that. Calling him “chameleon-minded,” the Dallas Morning News editorialized that he “no longer thinks along radical lines” only because he is in power. But “what guarantee have we of what his thinking will be tomorrow?” the editorial asked.
The tactic was effective also with the subcommittee members. As a Time correspondent explained, some of its members felt that “he is a radical and that he switches position and policy with rapid facility” while others were angered by his refusal to switch—“He had plenty of chances to renounce his inflammatory writings … but he declined to do so—That did weigh heavily against him.”
THE SUBCOMMITTEE had been carefully selected for its susceptibility to testimony about Leland Olds’ radicalism, and the effect of that testimony had been as powerful as even Lyndon Johnson could have wished—as was proven when, the following morning, Tuesday, October 4, its seven members met in Lyndon Johnson’s office to cast their votes on the nomination. For the President had decided to fight for his nominee. After hearing a summary of the previous day’s testimony, he had written a letter to Commerce Committee Chairman Ed Johnson, and the Coloradan read it to the subcommittee.
“I am aware of the efforts that have been made to discredit Mr. Olds before your committee,” Harry Truman wrote. And it was because of those efforts that he was writing—“because of the nature of the opposition that has been expressed to his confirmation.”
“Nothing has been presented in testimony there which raises any doubt in my mind as to his integrity, loyalty or ability,” Truman said. “Much that has been said about him is largely beside the point. The issue before us is not whether we agree with everything Mr. Olds may have ever said or even whether we agree with all of his actions as a member of the Federal Power Commission. The issue is whether his whole record is such as to lead us to believe that he will serve the nation well as a member of the Federal Power Commission.”
On that issue, Truman said, the record is clear. During ten years on the Commission, “he has served ably, and loyally….” He is “a nationally recognized champion of effective utility regulation; his record shows that he is also a champion of fair regulation.” During those years, Truman said, Olds has “made enemies…. Powerful corporations subject to regulation by the commission have not been pleased with Mr. Olds. They now seek to prevent his confirmation for another term. It would be most unfortunate if they should succeed. We cannot allow great corporations to dominate the commissions which have been created to regulate them.”
Ed Johnson had received Truman’s letter the previous evening, had discussed it with Lyndon Johnson, and a reply had been drafted. It might have been (and perhaps was) drafted by the same hand tha
t had drafted Lyle’s testimony, so closely did it follow its theme.
The President might feel, “Mr. Wisdom” wrote him, that Olds’ articles were “beside the point,” but the subcommittee begged to disagree. “The subcommittee,” he said, “was shocked beyond description by the … views expressed by Olds some years ago.” He would, he said, “include herewith a few excerpts”—and he quoted several of the paragraphs Lyle had quoted.
Certainly, Olds had sounded sincere in claiming that his views had evolved, Ed Johnson said—that was another reason for distrusting him. “The committee found Mr. Olds glib of tongue and very convincing. Like many crusaders for foreign ideologies he has an attractive personality and is disarming to a very high degree.” Despite the presence of four Democrats, members of the President’s party, on the subcommittee, its vote on a resolution, introduced by Lyndon Johnson, to report the presidential nomination to the full committee with the recommendation that it be rejected was a unanimous 7–0. The next day, as the New York Times reported, “President Truman’s earnest appeal for the confirmation of Leland Olds for a third term as Federal Power Commissioner fell on deaf ears again” when the full Commerce Committee “voted 10 to 2, against the nominee.”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 47