The Loyal Secretary

For months, like dripping from a leaky faucet, the rumors dribbled out of the Justice Department: at the next go-round between Bernard Goldfine and the Federal Government, sensation would be heaped upon scandal. For accepting Goldfine's vicuna coat, paid-up hotel bills, and other expensive gifts, onetime Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams had long since paid the price of banishment from public life. Now, went the reports, the Justice Department was prepared to lower the boom on other politicians on the gift list of the Massachusetts textile and real estate millionaire.

Last week, in a Boston federal court, the star witness was to be Goldfine's longtime secretary, Miss Mildred Paperman, Goldfine, who suffered a stroke in December, had been transferred to a Staten Island hospital after serving half of a one-year prison sentence for evading nearly $800,000 in taxes, and was deemed mentally unfit to testify.

Russian-born Mildred Paperman had been a disappointing witness in the past. In her first court appearance, in 1958, she had shown a feminine sensitivity about her age (50 next October). "What are you trying to do. bury me?" she had snapped to reporters. "I'm five or six years younger than you people said. It's bad enough to be 40, let alone the age you claim." In 1960, Secretary Paperman refused to turn over certain of Goldfine's tax records to the Internal Revenue Service and served ten days in pokey for her loyalty. But this time, it was whispered, Mildred had sung and sung to the federal investigators, naming names and testifying to the length of 120 pages.

Last week Mildred Paperman disappointed again. Wearing a lampshade cloche on her curls, she appeared in court in answer to her summons, was accused of smuggling unauthorized papers and letters to her hapless boss last summer, when he was in the Danbury, Conn.) Federal Correctional Institute. One of her letters contained eloquent testimony to her loyalty. "My only ambition in life," she wrote, "is to see you get out." Instead, Mildred Paperman went in, wearing an inscrutable smile, to serve 30 more days for her devotion to Bernard Goldfine.

As for the promised revelations, they just failed to materialize. In the absence of any firm documentary evidence (Goldfine was never much of a hand for keeping records about his financial transactions), the Government's main hope for uncovering the full extent of Bernard Goldfine's corruptions was locked in Goldfine's own deteriorated mind and in the heart of his loyal secretary.

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