Meet the Author

"Tell Mr. Worth to come in here," said Georgia's crusty old Carl Vinson. At last the House Armed Services Committee was going to get to the bottom of the anonymous charges that the Air Force's B-36 bomber had been bought in fraud and double-dealing and that the bomber itself was not much good. The hot newsreel floodlights, which went into use only at dramatic moments, were turned on.

Witness Cedric R. Worth turned out to be a big, balding, 49-year-old bureaucrat in pince-nez glasses, a onetime Hollywood scripter, wartime Navy commander, and now a $10,305-a-year special assistant to the Under Secretary of the Navy. Chairman Vinson plunged right in.

Had Worth ever passed around copies of a mysterious nine-page document, which summed up the rumor-ridden case against the B-36? Yes, Worth admitted frankly, he had "Where did you get this document from?" Vinson demanded. Replied Worth in a crisp, calm voice: "I wrote it." Three wire-service reporters dashed for the door.

Without Pay. Worth insisted that he had done the whole job himself, without pay and without the knowledge of the Navy's top brass. But he had gotten some help from Planemaker Glenn Martin and "a great deal of information" from Commander Thomas D. Davies, who piloted the Navy's Truculent Turtle in its record-breaking flight from Australia to Ohio.

For the next three committee sessions Worth squirmed unhappily on the committee griddle. In an abject recantation Witness V. Torth agreed that there was no evidence of corruption in the B-36 procurement program,* that neither Defense Secretary Louis Johnson nor Air Secretary Stuart Symington nor top Air Force officers had been guilty of impropriety in buying the Consolidated bomber, that it was "ridiculous" to say (as the anonymous statement had suggested) that Board Chairman Floyd Odium and the Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corp. had contributed $6,500,000 to the Democratic campaign.

Would Worth also admit to the committee that the whole scheme had done the Navy no good? Worth would go further than that: "I will state to anybody that I've done the Navy no good."

Not One Scintilla. When he had stated his repentance for every item of the statement, Carl Vinson thought it was about time for the committee to take a formal stand on the evidence to date. By unanimous agreement (including the vote of Pennsylvania's discomfited James Van Zandt, who had reported the anonymous charges on the House floor), the committee agreed that there was not "one iota, not one scintilla, of evidence . . . that would support charges or insinuations [of] collusion, fraud, corruption, influence or favoritism."

Then the committeemen adjourned for a few weeks. But that wasn't the end of it. The Navy promptly suspended Worth, and ordered a court of inquiry to find out just how many other Navymen had helped him to put his statement together. The Navy board would have company. Carl Vinson and Committee Counsel Joseph B. Keenan also promised that they would get to the bottom of Cedric Worth's undercover campaign against the Air Force and the Administration. Most committee members believed that Bureaucrat Worth could not have done it without a lot of help from Navy officers.

Another congressional outcry died in an embarrassed whisper. After three months of investigation the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy was still unable to find any evidence of the "incredible mismanagement" Senator Bourke Hickenlooper had charged up to the Atomic Energy Commission and its chairman, David Lilienthal (TIME, June 6). In fact, the committee members had gotten so apathetic that Chairman Brien McMahon was unable to round up a quorum even to declare the hearings officially ended.

*The total cost of the first 95 B-365 ordered, said the Air Force, was more than $6,000,000 apiece, including the addition of jet pods and a new bombing system; the next 75 would be $4,700,000 a copy.

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