Friendship & Nothing More

In weeks of preparing a political barbecue pit for Harry Vaughan, the Senate subcommittee investigating five-percenters made no secret of its intentions--it was going to spit him, spin him over the fires of righteousness until sin dripped out of him like gravy, and lug him back to President Truman looking like a huge shish kebab. While no formal announcement was made, G.O.P. members implied that church bells would be rung, cannon fired, and flags run up on public buildings as soon as he was cooked.

At first glance last week, Major General Vaughan seemed to have resigned himself to a roasting. As he entered the jammed committee room it was possible to conclude that only by oversight had he failed to put parsley over his ears and an apple in his mouth. His 240-lb. torso was encased in lashings of brass, gold braid, ribbons and other ceremonial military finery, and he eyed the investigating committee nervously, as if he expected each man to pull on a chef's hat and test him with a fork.

The Upright Servant. But once he had seated himself, he assumed an air of bluff unconcern. He got out a prepared statement, fitted on a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, shot his cuffs, and, in eight minutes of manly recitation, denied that he had ever been anything but an upright and proper public servant.

He announced that the President had neither known nor approved of any "assistance" he might have given business firms. He denied ever helping Five-Percenter James V. Hunt, or even having business connections with his good friend, Fixer John Maragon, who had made a good thing out of his White House connections (TIME, Sept. 5). He brushed the famed seven deep freezers off as gifts which were "an expression of friendship and nothing more . . ." He swore that he had never taken a dishonest nickel.

He boldly brought up the matter of

Herbert C. Hathorn, a former Agriculture Department administrator, who had testified to the committee that Vaughan had threatened to "get his job" if he didn't' help the Allied Molasses Co. out of a jam. The President's aide protested that he had never tried to influence a public official and even went as far as to wonder in earnest tones "whether someone impersonated me in a telephone conversation with Mr. Hathorn . . ."

After that he leaned back, fired up a big black cigar and invited the committee to do its worst. In two days of questioning him it made almost no real effort to shake his denials or probe his failure to recollect details.

Who Is Costello? During most of the time the hearing was as stylized as a Chinese play. Republican Senators Joe McCarthy and Karl Mundt exhibited a ceremonial horror at the kind of minor logrolling and back-scratching in which every politico, including many a Senator, indulges as unconsciously as he blinks and breathes. Stern old North Carolina Democrat Clyde Hoey, who was running the show, warned them several times not to belabor "chicken feed" points. Vaughan himself maintained an attitude of outraged virtue, and spoke at all times with the heavy-breathing sincerity of a brush salesman talking through a locked front door.

At one point, when Senator McCarthy asked him if Fixer John Maragon had ever given him campaign contributions from Racket King Frankie Costello, Vaughan did a double take, which would have been a credit to Comedian Oliver Hardy. "Am I supposed to. know Frankie Costello?" he asked. "I have heard of people named Costello . . . May I ask, who is 'Frank Costello?"

"Frank Costello is a rather famous . . ."

McCarthy began.

"Oh," cried Vaughan (it was obvious that he had heard of Costello, but just had never imagined his name would crop up in the hearing), "the New York gangster! ... I didn't know how he got in here."

Helpful Harry. As the hearing wore on, Vaughan developed a secondary theme; that he was an enormously busy man who did thousands of helpful little things for thousands of people. He blandly admitted that he had sent officials of California's Tanforan Race Track to see Housing Expediter Tighe Woods, when they needed scarce building materials, that he had helped Chicago Perfume Importer David Bennett get to Europe during the war, that he had asked Major General Alden H. Waitt, suspended chief of the Chemical Corps, to write a "frank expression" on officers who might succeed him.

But he was plainly just as stunned as the Senators at the idea that anything even smacking of larceny might have developed as a result of his own big heartedness and devotion to the common man. He proudly informed the committee that the FBI had investigated him because of a rumor that he had taken a $10,000 bribe and had found nothing. When he was asked if he would turn over his bank accounts (which the committee had already had for several days), he replied sonorously: "My financial records are available to this committee ... at any time."

Toward the end, Vaughan even took the offensive in a jocular sort of way. He was asked if he couldn't have kept his old pal John Maragon out of the White House just by telling the guards not to let him in. "I could do that, yes," he said, "but Maragon is a lovable sort of a chap. You cannot get mad at him. It is awful hard to do, at least." Maragon, he went on, would have to be "pretty well washed up, fumigated," but he thought that "most of Maragon's sins have not been with malice." As for Maragon's perfume smuggling, "I certainly could not condone it in my own brother, even."

When he went back to the White House, Vaughan still seemed slightly in need of a little laundering himself. But the committee had failed dismally in its efforts to roast him up brown; the fires of its wrath had done little more than make him break into an occasional sweat.

The episode pointed up the fact that the five-percent investigation was far from being a Teapot Dome. It was much lower-grade stuff--a record of bumbling, chiseling, and shabby wirepulling. Blundering, clownish Harry Vaughan was no credit to his uniform or his position, but nobody had proved him a crook. And with that, the investigating committee adjourned for at least a month.

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