The Deep Freeze Set

Over the White House last week rose a nasty little scandal that had already hurt the Truman Administration, and might hurt it more. It swirled around the hulking, hapless figure of Major General Harry Vaughan, onetime militiaman, military aide to the President and the President's poker-playing pal.

A Senate subcommittee started it with its investigation of "five-percenters," the influential men-about-Washington who get Government contracts for businessmen for a fee. Almost every time the subcommittee lowered its dredge last week, it scooped up Amateur General Harry Vaughan. Each time he was hauled, dripping and protesting, into public view, it became more obvious that he had been using his general's stars, his White House telephone and his place in Harry Truman's affections for a dubious purpose: to help his cronies get Government favors and big profits.

There seemed to be a good chance that the President's military aide had done so only for the most pathetic of rewards--for flattery, good fellowship and a fool's false sense of power.

Disgruntled Client. The most embarrassing revelation of the investigation stemmed from the testimony of a chunky, grey-haired Milwaukee manufacturer named Albert Joseph Gross. The witness was a disgruntled former client of Five-Percenter James V. Hunt, who had boasted of his friendship with Vaughan. Back in 1945, Witness Gross was making deep freezers. He was asked if he had ever shipped any to Washington. He had. Wisconsin's G.O.P. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy asked him who had gotten them.

"Should I answer that?" Gross asked incredulously. McCarthy said yes. The answer: "Well, Mr. Harry Vaughan." Had Vaughan paid for it? Gross testified that the freezer--and more sent to other Government officials--had been paid for (price: seven for $2,625) by Albert Verley & Co. of Chicago, a perfume firm.

By curious coincidence, the Verley Co. was the same firm which employed John Maragon, sometime Kansas City bootblack and long one of Vaughan's sharp-eyed friends, who reportedly once tried to smuggle some precious perfume oil into the country as "champagne for Mrs. Truman" (TIME, Aug. 15).

Before Gross could name the other officials to whom the freezers had been shipped, the committee cut him off--it wanted to be certain before taking more public testimony. But that did not stop newspapers from printing some names: among them those of Mrs. Harry Truman and Chief Justice Fred Vinson.

"Nothing Improper." After 28 hours of vibrant silence, Harry Vaughan issued a statement. Its gist: it was all his fault, but he was innocent. ". . . There was nothing improper in any manner regarding the gifts of these units . . ." it read. "I had a talk with two old friends of mine . . . The subject of deep freeze units came up and I said that I would like to have one . . .

"Later, [one of the friends] informed me that he could obtain some deep freeze units that did not have commercial market value as they were experimental models. At that time I informed him that I would like to have him send one to me, and one to the White House in Washington for the lunchroom used by members of the staff. Also I asked him to send one to the little White House in Independence, Mo., and to send other units to Mr. Fred Vinson, Mr. John Snyder [the Secretary of the Treasury], Mr. James K. Vardaman Jr. [governor of the Federal Reserve Board and onetime presidential naval aide] and Mr. Matthew J. Connelly [White House secretary] . . ."

This air of wide-eyed and injured innocence was based on a premise which was legitimate enough--that there is no law against public officials accepting gifts from grateful admirers and constituents. Presidents accept oil paintings, birthday cakes, prize turkeys, ship models, even Fords (one went to Harry Truman in 1945), but these are open presents, publicly given and publicly received. The freezers had been clandestine gifts; why was the Verley Company so generous? Harry Vaughan's self-portrait in shining armor had to be matched with the picture of him which witnesses had been painting before the committee all week.

Back in 1947, for instance, he had been seized with a burning desire to help the owners of California's Tanforan Race

Track rebuild their grandstands and buildings--a project which was being blocked by Government restrictions on use of badly needed building materials.

He had sent three Tanforan officials to see Housing Expediter Frank Creedon, with his blessing and best wishes. Creedon had brushed them off. A little later, Creedon resigned, and was replaced--through more of the curious coincidence which threaded through everything concerning the Senate's findings--by Tighe E. Woods, an obscure bureaucrat who had been helped to power by Five-Percenter Hunt.

As Housing Expediter, Woods was able to be helpful. In the beginning, Harry Vaughan had only called him to the White House and asked for "fair treatment" for his "friends." But a little later the general had barged into Woods's office with Eugene Mori, president of Tanforan, and had bayed, "Please hurry!" Tanforan's permit, made possible, according to Woods, by "loopholes" in the law, was granted the very next day.

Double Entry. Vaughan's name had also turned up in a lot of other places--among them in evidence the committee had gathered on Major General Alden H. Waitt, recently suspended as chief of the Army Chemical Corps. Waitt, apparently in an attempt to succeed himself for another term, wrote a secret, derogatory memorandum on eight subordinate officers (whom he had praised earlier in Army efficiency reports).

The document was dictated in Five-Percenter Hunt's office and sent to Harry Vaughan. Listening, last week, South Dakota's Senator Karl E. Mundt said: "It looks to me like a sort of ingenious plot by which Hunt, Waitt and Vaughan have connived to cut the throats of all the other officers trying to get that job."

Hunt's greatest triumph involved the repurchase from the Navy of the Lido Beach Hotel at Long Beach, N.Y. The Navy had paid $1,300,000 for the place. The former owners wanted it back, and agreed to pay Hunt a $50,000 fee plus a big percentage of any amount under $800,000 he was able to get it for. He got it for $635,000, and made $86,000 by a process which, though legal, could hardly have been applauded by U.S. taxpayers.

Friendship. Whatever the final outcome of the investigation, it had already defined the kind of dank atmosphere in which Vaughan's good friend Hunt and his colleagues had operated. If Vaughan himself had done nothing worse, he had used the White House as a means of playing low-grade county-courthouse politics. At week's end, the President was still sticking firmly to the position he had assumed during his weekly press conference --that nothing which had happened had changed his opinion of his old friend Harry Vaughan in the slightest. Mulling Harry Truman's stubborn friendship for his military aide, the Washington Post had a suggestion to make: ". . . it seems to us that the time has come for the general to demonstrate his friendship [in turn] for the President... by resigning and so sparing his patron any further embarrassments."

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