Master of the Senate (59 page)

And, Head declared, Olds had already “accomplished much” of his agenda. “The entire history of his administration in the Federal Power Commission can well be characterized as a bite-by-bite process…. How far away is the last juicy bite, the destruction of the ‘myth of private property’?”

During his ten years on the FPC, Head declared, Olds had been “indoctrinating” the FPC “with the tenets of, shall we say, communistic, or, shall we say identical with communistic thoughts, that is evident in his writings of the twenties…. Why should Mr. Olds continue to write for the Federated Press, for the
Daily Worker
(for Industrial Solidarity) when he can write for the Federal Power Commission and accomplish much more? Mr. Olds is boring from within; Mr. Olds is a termite; Mr. Olds is gnawing away the very foundations upon which this Government exists.”

Who knew, Head asked, how far such hidden communistic influence might extend? “The elements in this country which support the philosophy which Mr. Olds represents are stronger than I had realized,” he said. There was, for example, the
Washington Post
, “which, as I understand, is what is called one of your more advanced papers.”

“In the
Post
there appear the writings of a man by the name of Childs,” Head noted. Marquis Childs’ attacks on the Natural Gas Act, he said, “seem strangely reminiscent of the words of Mr. Olds” and are part of “the greatest organized campaign of propaganda … that I have ever witnessed.” Not only Childs but “a man by the name of Mellett, I believe, and another man by the name of Stokes have been in the forefront of the attack.”

And, Head declared, “this morning the apex of misrepresentation occurred.” He was referring to the editorial in the
Washington Post
which called John Lyle’s testimony “despicable” because of its attempt “to smear Mr. Olds as a Red.” The editorial, Head said, was “the culmination of this propaganda campaign, waged by Mr. Olds’ machine…. No greater pack of lies has ever existed than that.”

T
HE
P
OST
EDITORIAL
had evidently struck a nerve not only with Head but with the subcommittee’s chairman. And Mellett’s column was a danger signal. What if other liberal columnists—the columnists who had believed that Lyndon Johnson was a liberal—appeared at the hearings, and saw what Mellett had
seen? To telephone calls from liberal friends Wednesday evening inquiring about the reports they had been hearing, Johnson assured them that the reports were incorrect: Olds had indeed been labeled a Communist, he said, but not by him. On the contrary, he told the callers, he had attempted to stop such smears. He told the callers to come to the hearings and see for themselves.

Lyndon Johnson’s behavior that Thursday morning was, for a time, as studiously impartial as it had been—for a time—after Wednesday’s Stokes and Othman columns had appeared. He repeatedly attempted to document the even-handedness with which he had conducted the hearings by emphasizing that any witness—whether pro- or anti-Olds—would be allowed to appear: “I just want to be sure that the record shows that every man who wanted to say anything had his say,” he declared at one point. He even attempted to distance himself from the most violent aspects of Bonner’s testimony, thereby decrying in public the very words he had approved in private. “Now, Mr. Bonner,” he admonished him at one point during his testimony, “there is no testimony before this committee that Mr. Olds was a member of the Communist Party…. There is no one who testified that he is disloyal to his Government. As a matter of fact, we had witnesses all day yesterday who talked about how loyal he had been.” (Bonner would shortly be writing to “Dear Lyndon” to “compliment you on … the very able manner in which the entire hearing was conducted,” and to gloat over his testimony’s success in producing headlines. “Half the states … quoted my own statement… particularly the expression ‘punk’ which I used”).

During the testimony of anti-Olds witnesses the chairman’s stopwatch remained in his pocket; even though Head’s testimony consumed more time than he had requested, Johnson made no reference to “time consumed.” And during Bonner’s testimony, the chairman departed from his previous practice. The Houston attorney had come equipped with his own photostat: a typed four-page summary—provenance unknown—of information from the files of the House Un-American Activities Committee: “Subject, Leland Olds.” Bonner, holding the photostat out to Johnson, asked that it be made a part of the record. When other witnesses had presented exhibits with a similar request, Johnson had simply said, “Without objection, it will be made a part of the record,” and had indicated that the documents should be handed to a committee clerk. But with this exhibit—perhaps because Senator Bricker, who was particularly susceptible to HUAC information and who had been out of town, had just made his first appearance at the hearing, and could not be relied on to read through the transcript of previous testimony—Johnson, before handing this exhibit to a clerk, said, “For the benefit of the committee, I will read the article
[sic]
into the record”—and did so, every word. Only after ten minutes of his recitation—“In Report 1311 of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, dated March 29, 1944, the Federated Press was cited as a Communist-controlled organization…. In the report of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, dated January 3, 1939, the Trade Union Educational League was cited as a project
put under control of and made amenable to the central executive committee of the Communist Party of America”—did Johnson add a disclaimer. “Now I will say that the testimony yesterday by Mr. Olds covered most of the references…. Mr. Olds testified that he never belonged to the Communist Party….”

He got the reaction from Bricker he wanted—both then (“He did not deny any of this charge, then, on page 4?”) and at the end of the hearings, when Head was winding up his testimony. “In conclusion, I say this,” Head declared. “Leland Olds is a fraud, he is a fraud on his friends who appeared here in his behalf; he is a fraud on the consuming public whom he fills with misleading statements. He is a fraud on the press, whom he fills with misleading statements, and he is a fraud on the people of the United States of America.” “It is a good, strong, positive statement, certainly,” said Senator Bricker.

And Johnson again got the headlines he wanted. Newspapers in states across the country did indeed, as Bonner boasted, carry some version of his statement; a headline in the
Houston Post
, for example, said: “
LELAND OLDS LABELED CRACKPOT AND TRAITOR.
” The attorney’s colorful phrases—along with Head’s—provided rich grist for newspapers predisposed to be hostile to Olds, enlivening the articles under the headlines; the first sentence in the
Philadelphia Inquirer’s
article informed readers that “Leland Olds, President Truman’s choice for a third term on the Federal Power Commission, today was branded a ‘punk,’ a ‘crackpot,’ a ‘jackass’ and a ‘traitor’ by a witness before the Senate Commerce Committee.” “Denounced as a traitor to his country,” reported the
Chicago Tribune.

J
OHNSON HAD ALLOWED
only two full days for the hearings, and his emphasis on dispatch was perhaps explained by a remark he made to other subcommittee members Thursday afternoon: “The rumor has gone around today that maybe the proponents would like to continue the hearing on into next week some time until they get some more articles written, and things like that.” By taking Olds’ supporters by surprise, he had kept them from mobilizing support behind the embattled commissioner. He didn’t want to give them time to mobilize now.

A stumbling block now appeared in the road to speedy conclusion, however. Olds asked for a chance to reply to the charges against him.

He had asked on Wednesday, as he was rising from the witness chair, and Johnson had said, “I think that can be worked out.”

Johnson’s idea of “working it out,” however, involved speed. The rest of the hearings would wind up Thursday afternoon; Olds could reply, Johnson said, on Saturday morning. But when, on Thursday, Olds asked the committee clerk for the transcript of Lyle’s testimony, and the exhibits upon which it was based—the fifty-four Federated Press articles—he was informed they would “not be available” until sometime Friday.

Olds thereupon wrote to Johnson requesting a postponement until the following Wednesday. “The material selected by Representative Lyle purports to be selected from articles which I wrote more than twenty years ago and which … number some 1,800,” he said. “To have such material thrust upon me at a moment’s notice and without an opportunity to relate the selected articles to my work, placed me in a position in which I could make no adequate comment…. I am, therefore, writing you … to renew my request for opportunity to study the record and to make such answers as I believe necessary in a public hearing.”

Reasonable though Olds’ request may have seemed, however, it was not to be granted. Rather than replying to Olds himself, Johnson had a Commerce Committee clerk, Edward Cooper, do it. At seven o’clock Thursday night, Cooper telephoned Olds that the schedule would not be changed: his reply was still scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday. And Cooper made clear that there would also be no change in the schedule for providing him with the transcript on which the reply would be based: that would still not be available until sometime Friday. Olds was being given twenty-four hours—or less—to prepare his defense.

There was what Olds was to call a “big heap” of Federated Press clippings in his house on McKinley Street in northwest Washington, but he hadn’t looked at them in years, and they had just been tied together haphazardly; merely to sort through them and to arrange them in some kind of order would take hours. And he knew he didn’t have many—perhaps most—of the articles Lyle had cited; it had taken teams of investigators weeks of sorting through copies of old newspapers in libraries to compile a complete file for the prosecution. Following Cooper’s call, Olds worked until midnight Thursday sorting through the clippings, and arose to continue at five-thirty Friday morning—still without having seen the transcript to which his defense was supposed to reply. As the impossibility of preparing an adequate defense by Saturday became apparent, Olds telephoned Johnson to plead for more time. “I had asked for Wednesday,” he said; if that was impossible, “I feel that in justice I should have until Monday to get this answer ready. I am appealing to you to let me have until Monday….”

“I talked to the [sub]committee before I called,” Johnson replied. “Some of them will be out of town Monday. They suggested you take Saturday….”

When Olds obstinately balked at this suggestion, Johnson casually unveiled a threat. Of course, he said, if Olds insisted on submitting additional material, Lyle would testify again—and submit additional material himself. “He said he had some pretty recent statements and will come back with some more comparisons,” Johnson said. “Said he had some more of your views he would like to read into the record.” And Johnson insisted firmly on his own point of view. When Olds mentioned the “voluminous record” he had to study, Johnson said the issue was actually quite simple. The subcommittee’s “viewpoint,”
he said, “is that there are some fifty articles and that you either wrote them or you did not. It shouldn’t take any time to decide that.” When Olds said that the White House “want[s] me to deal with this thing as fully as I think I ought to,” Johnson replied: “You either wrote the article or you did not. We put the page and paragraph and you can check them.” “It is not as simple as that,” Olds said.

It was not he who objected to delay, Johnson said, but other members of the subcommittee: “As far as I am concerned I will have no objection. I will recommend it. I want to be as fair as I can…. I will treat you just as I would want you to treat me if the positions were reversed. I will talk to them and if I can get them to be agreeable I will let you know….”

Later, Johnson called back, and said that the subcommittee had agreed to the Monday date. “Well, you are very kind,” Leland Olds said. “And I appreciate what the others did very much, too.” He wouldn’t have the five days he had asked—a meagre enough time to defend a lifetime’s work—but at least he would have a whole weekend.

“A
T THE OUTSET
I want to state simply and categorically that I am not a Communist,” Olds said on Monday morning. “I never was a Communist. I am and always have been loyal to my country. I am and always have been a profound believer in democracy. In my opinion the very theory of Russian communism represents a negation of democracy.

“I did write radically during the period publicized by Mr. Lyle,” Olds said. “I did so because I believed radical writing was needed in the ‘golden twenties’ to shock the American people, and particularly labor, out of social and political lethargy…. I felt that unless the American people were aroused to do something about it, the American way of life would be in real jeopardy.”

Olds’ prepared statement then would have gone on to analyze, one by one, the articles which Lyle claimed showed his “alien” philosophy. But Johnson may have been working that weekend, too, with the man who said, “First ask him this—” “Then ask him if he—” Hardly had Olds begun reading this analysis when Johnson cut him off—cut him off with questions that applied to the articles as a single group, and in the broadest, most simple (or, to be more precise, simplistic) terms. “Mr. Olds,” he demanded, leaning forward across the dais and speaking in a very soft tone in which every word was carefully enunciated, “do you repudiate those writings?” And when Olds said he didn’t, Johnson asked: “Do you reiterate them? Do you reassert them?”