Little Helper

Ever since Harry Truman became President, Washington politicos had been trying to case a brassy little man named John Maragon. He had a trick of materializing at presidential functions like a bat skimming out of the draperies, and some of his fascinated public guessed he spent the time in between hanging upside down in the Capitol dome. But nobody could quite make out who he was or what he was up to.

Trying to assay him from his past was like trying to peep through a Venetian blind. John Maragon had come to Washington by a circuitous route. He was an immigrant boy from the Greek island of Levkas, had begun life in the U.S. as a brush-flipper and rag-flapper in a Kansas City shoeshine parlor operated by one George Giokaris. He left Kansas City in 1916. In the early 19205 he got a job with the FBI--then a serio-comic collection of political apple polishers commanded by that hoary old Private Eye, William J. Burns.

From 1939 till 1945 he was a Washington agent for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and as such planned trips for Congressmen and Senators and performed the lugubrious chore of arranging for official funeral trains.

Innocent Abroad. None of this seemed like proper preparation for life among the great, but when Harry Truman went to the White House, John Maragon hopped right in behind him. He was, it developed, a particular friend of the President's military aide, Major General Harry Vaughan. According to his own appraisal, he was also a great friend of the President, even had a White House pass (since revoked).

In 1946 he went to Athens as a U.S. employee of the Allied Mission which supervised Greek elections. His progress was noisy. In Rome he got into a street argument with a U.S. Air Forces officer, Brig. General William L. Lee, and was slapped in the face for his pains. (The general was shortly reduced in rank.) In Athens Maragon announced himself as Harry Truman's great friend, waved a picture of himself and the President, and was finally ordered home as a nuisance.

Meanwhile, though he continued to live like a little shot in a lower-middle-brow home in McLean, Va., he began to act more & more like a big operator and a man who knows the right people. As a result, the Senate's special investigations subcommittee called him in to ask him if he was causing the republic any harm.

Who, Me? There were several reasons. For one, his name had been found in the records of James V. Hunt, prime subject (TIME, July 25) of the Senate's five-percent investigation. For another, according to the New York Herald Tribune, he had once tried to smuggle a bottle of precious perfume oils into the country from Europe by saying it was only champagne he was taking to Mrs. Truman.

Maragon was closeted with members of the subcommittee three times. What had the Senators asked him? Maragon was evasive--happy but evasive. The whole thing, he implied, was simply a formality, one of those things a man who knows the right people must endure. The committee was then asked for comment. The Senators, ahum, were not talking either. At week's end Mysterious John Maragon seemed to be just as mysterious as ever.

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