Birthday Present

Into the office of Jersey City's Mayor Frank Hague one day last week marched New Jersey's Governor-Elect, A. Harry Moore. "Mayor," said Mr. Moore, "this is your birthday and I always come to extend congratulations. Today I thought that in extending my congratulations I could make no better gift than to offer you the United States Senatorship to succeed me."

"Governor," replied the 62-year-old boss of Jersey City, lapsing into grammatical English, "I don't know how to thank you for this offer. . . . But while I am exceedingly grateful to you I will have to decline. . . ." Acceptance might be interpreted as running away from his fight with C. I. O. and "the Reds."

With this scene enacted, Frank Hague took his affable puppet to Trenton to be inaugurated as the first New Jersey Governor to serve three terms. Before receiving the State's Great Seal from Harold G. Hoffman, the man he gave it to three years before, Mr. Moore wrote himself a letter of resignation as U. S. Senator. His first act in office was to acknowledge and approve his own resignation, Ms next was to appoint John Milton to the U. S. Senate.

Not to be confused with the British poet and civil servant who wrote

High on a throne of royal state which far

Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind . . .

Satan exalted sat

is Senator John Milton, 57, a lawyer and a Hague henchman.

John Milton's appointment was a God-given gift to two rival Manhattan newspapers, David Stern's Post and the Scripps-Howard World-Telegram, which were last week running featured Frank Hague series. Among the facts dug up from old investigations was that John Milton was Frank Hague's personal banker. John Milton's checks, for instance, paid for the $6,250-per-year mayor's $125,000 estate. The mayor always reimbursed his lawyer in cash. When investigators started to probe John Milton's own affairs, he blandly declared that he had just decided to retire and had unfortunately destroyed all his records. Then he laughed.

Before he went to Washington this week to take his oath amid a storm of liberal protest John Milton declared, aping the Hague idiom: "I ain't never been arrested. I ain't never been indicted. I ain't never been convicted."

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