Digger on Capitol Hill

Indiana's freshman Democratic Representative Randall S. Harmon, 55, shrugged off all the bother as mere pother. Sure, he admitted, he was drawing $100 a month from the Government for renting himself his own front porch back home in Muncie (monthly mortgage payments for the whole house: $54.40), which he had converted into an office. Moreover, his office was being run by his wife, and she was getting a secretarial salary of $4,424.16 a year from the U.S. "So what?" cried Congressman Harmon last week. "It's nobody's business." Added he: "I'm a fantastic guy. I could be your next President.''

But fantastic Congressman Harmon's business was obviously public business, and as such, it was the latest in a series of exposes on congressional nepotism, payroll high jinks and money-hungry Congressmen that have boiled out of Capitol Hill in the past two months. And the man behind the Harmon story was the newsman behind the entire series: Scripps-Howard's lean, bow-tied Vance Henry Trimble, 45, a shirtsleeve reporter who got his beats by dogged digging in a city where newsmen often settle for the mimeographed handout and the formal press conference.

"I Felt Like a Jerk." In a sense, Trimble's series arose from a sense of frustration. Arkansas-born Vance Trimble was just 14 when he started tracking down personals for the Okemah (Okla.) Leader. He never got to college, shuttled instead around the Southwest from city room to city room in the '30s before landing with the Houston Press, rising to managing editor, and in 1955 going to work for Scripps-Howard. In Washington with the title of news editor for the Scripps-Howard bureau, Trimble was tied to a desk from 3 to 11 p.m., one of the capital's hundreds of near-anonymous newsmen. He chafed at his desk and he chafed at being unknown around town. "I'd go up on the Hill and get challenged by the guards at the press gallery every time," he says. "I felt like a jerk."

Trimble finally got permission to work on his own time going over congressional payrolls. His efforts began paying off Jan. 5, when the 19-paper Scripps-Howard chain broke his detailed story charging that "at least one of every five lawmakers has some kinfolk on his staff."

Paternal Solicitude. Trimble followed up his story. Thumbing through a three-inch stack of House pay records for January, he broke the news that Iowa's freshman Democratic Representative Steven V. Carter was paying his 19-year-old son $11,873.26 a year as his public-relations assistant, although the lad was also a part-time pre-law student at George Washington University (TIME, March 2). When House leaders brushed off his stories ("They kept telling me everyone runs his own business"), Trimble spent a weekend in Iowa gathering outraged reactions to Carter's paternal solicitude. Iowa's Carter subsequently trimmed his son's salary to $6,400.

Last week a tipster ("He called himself 'ABC' ") led Trimble to the story that New York's freshman Democratic Representative Ludwig Teller had an aide named Mrs. Sylvia B. McNamee (Government salary: $13,334) who ran a private insurance business out of his district office in New York City.

Payroll Pay Dirt. Then, still plugging away at his list of freshmen Congressmen with relatives on the payroll, Trimble struck pay dirt when he called Mrs. Randall Harmon on a hunch. He hit on precisely the right question: "Incidentally, where is your office?" Mrs. Harmon's answer: "Why, on the front porch." An Indianapolis reporter later wrote that Harmon was so enraged by Trimble's story that he waved a pistol and vowed: "I figure on throwing the fear of God into that Vance Trimble."

"I've been an investigative reporter for a long time," says Reporter Trimble, "and some things just smell. You know there's something boiling away under the surface if you can just take time to dig it out." After his solid series of solid beats, Scripps-Howard has given Trimble plenty of time. Sprung from his desk job.

Trimble is now spending 18 hours a day digging beneath the surface of Capitol Hill, where a House committee last week blandly approved a bill to let each member add a $14,162.04 aide to his staff.

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