Murder Is One Thing .. .

Like Reconstruction, Harry Truman is something the Deep South never quite got over. Last week three South Carolina newspapers printed an interview with his old military aide, Harry Vaughan, which said that both Truman and Vaughan endorsed Senatorial Candidate Edgar Brown. Brown squirmed like a husband with the wrong shade of lipstick on his collar; his enemies could hardly suppress their glee.

After the death of Senator Burnet Maybank (TIME, Sept. 13), Brown, a state senator who controls the state Democratic executive committee, talked the committee into nominating him as a replacement. Conservative Democrats and almost all the state's daily newspapers wanted a primary. Infuriated by the coup, they united behind J. Strom Thurmond, a former governor and Dixiecrat presidential candidate in 1948, as a write-in candidate. A write-in campaign has powerful obstacles to overcome, but loquacious Harry Vaughan certainly helped.

Interviewed by a Washington correspondent for several Carolina papers, he unwound with an attack on old Dixiecrat Thurmond, called him in the "same class with Henry Wallace." Truman, said Vaughan, "can forgive small things like rape and murder, but he can't forgive a guy that goes back on his party." Why was Truman for Brown? Said Vaughan: "You'd be absolutely safe in saying the decision . . . was made 100% on party regularity." Even more damaging to Brown's chances was Vaughan's comment that "civil rights and nonsegregation are as inevitable as the tides . . . It's in the cards, it can't be stopped."

Vaughan, apparently awakening to the stir he had caused, denied that he ever gave the interview.* Said worried Edgar Brown: "Misleading, untrue, vicious and a clear attempt to prejudice some South Carolina voters against me." At week's end Governor Jimmy Byrnes called a press conference to endorse Thurmond. Byrnes is the most powerful politician in South Carolina, and his words, coming on top of the lethal Vaughan story, might well swing the election.

* Vaughan earlier had made another denial. He said that Truman had not delivered his famed snub to Thurmond during the 1949 inaugural parade. According to Vaughan, just as Thurmond's car approached the presidential reviewing stand, "Tallulah Bankhead came out with a terrific 'Boo!'" Said Vaughan: "She was behind the dignified Supreme Court with their silk hats, and she just about blew their hats off ... That was why [Truman] turned his head when Strom was coming past." Asked for comment last week, Miss Bankhead drawled: "Who's Harry Vaughan?"

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