The Broken Rule

Around the White House offices somber-faced staffers tiptoed across the squares of linoleum tile, whispered out their business as if some member of the official family were seriously ill. There was no laughter; tension ran higher than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower's heart attack. In the spacious, green-carpeted corner office, only 30 paces from the President's own, worked Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams, 59, briskly shuffling papers, softly snapping monosyllabic orders as he had since the day that he became Dwight Eisenhower's chief of staff in January 1953.

But Sherman Adams, the White House and the U.S. knew that things would never be the same again. Adams was the man who decried the influence peddling of the Truman Administration, the stern moralist who had banished Republicans from the Administration at the first hint of errant behavior, the walking book of ethics dedicated to keeping the Eisenhower Administration spotless, as Candidate Eisenhower put it in 1952, "clean as a hound's tooth." This same Sherman Adams was now being held up in headlines from coast to coast as a man who lent his influence to a friend in trouble with Government agencies. Neither the secondhand reassurances of the President nor the rearguard action of Presidential Press Secretary James Hagerty could do very much to take the sensation out of the story.

Adams was pinpointed by two investigators of the House Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight. They turned up in Boston a month ago, took time out to follow up a tip to look at the books of the stately Sheraton Plaza Hotel. They hit pay dirt: on a dozen occasions between 1955 and May 1958, members of the Adams family stayed at the Sheraton Plaza and racked up total board and food tabs of nearly $2,000. The bills, the investigators found, were paid in full by a millionaire Boston textile manufacturer and real estate man named Bernard Goldfine (see box).

Then, back in Washington, the committee put together the other end of the story, turned up three instances of Goldfine's benefiting from his friendship with Sherman Adams:

P: On Dec. 30, 1953, Adams called Federal Trade Commission Chairman Edward F. Howrey to ask for the source of an FTC complaint against Goldfine for putting a "90% wool, 10% vicuna" label on cloth that actually contained some nylon. P: On April 14, 1955, when Goldfine was investigated again on the same charge, Adams got him an appointment to meet Chairman Howrey. Once there, Goldfine waved the Adams name like a magic sledge hammer. "Please get Sherman Adams on the line for me," he ordered, loud enough for nearby FTC staffers to hear. "Sherm, I'm over at the FTC," he said on the telephone. "I was well received over here." P: The next year, Adams asked White House Special Counsel Gerald Morgan to check with Securities and Exchange

Commission lawyers to see why Goldfine's East Boston Co. was under investigation.

Even after his telephone act at FTC, Goldfine found three of his companies slapped with "cease and desist" orders on their label violations. Nor had the committee proved by week's end that Adams had in fact done his friend any good in any of his Government troubles. Be that as it may, Goldfine understood how the Adams friendship let him wheel and deal. "He told me," testified Goldfine's latter-day enemy John Fox, publisher of the Boston Post, in court in April, "that as long as he had Sherman Adams in his pocket he could do it." An old hand at politics, Adams knew Washington well, and he would have been an unknowing man indeed not to realize that interest on the part of the "Assistant President" could carry potential weight.

Just Friends. Adams had gone off to New Hampshire to deliver a baccalaureate address to Holderness school (for boys) on "the questions the Bible tells us shall be asked on Judgment Day" when the House investigators introduced into evidence photostatic copies of Adams' paid-up hotel bills. He secretly slipped into Boston for a three-hour lunch with Old Friend Bernie Goldfine. Then he flew back to Washington to draw up a 766-word statement to the House subcommittee, sent it to the President, who, Press Secretary Hagerty announced, "thinks that these are the full facts."

"Since your committee," Adams wrote the subcommittee's chairman, Arkansas' Oren Harris, "has chosen to make public the extent of entertaining of myself and my family on the part of an old friend . . . and has insinuated that because of this entertaining or this friendship Mr. Goldfine has received on my intercession favored treatment from federal agencies, I feel that I should set the record straight.

"I categorically deny such insinuations. They are unwarranted and unfair."

He reviewed each case of intervention, said that he had asked and got only information and, since there had been no influence on Government, there had been no peddling of influence. He had believed that the hotel suite was rented permanently by a Goldfine company, would have just been empty if he had not used it.

"Mrs. Adams and I have known Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Goldfine for well over 15 years," he wrote. "We have entertained them in our home, and they have entertained us in theirs. We have had a close personal relationship."*

Hollow Stand. After handing out the Adams statement, Press Secretary Hagerty fought doggedly through two press conferences to defend Adams before a White House press corps in full cry. Hagerty hewed hard to the line laid down by Adams: no influence was exerted, so the hotel hospitality was a matter of personal and private friendship.

"Does this indicate a departure from the Administration's previous attitude toward freeloading by high officials?" Hagerty: "I don't know what you mean by that . . . This is a personal friend, if that's what you're talking about." Reporter: "It's all right for a personal friend?" Hagerty: "I stick with the letter that the Governor issued. The facts as they are."

The Adams-Goldfine friendship got a thorough going-over. Privately Adams remembered how he and his wife Rachel, trying for a little balance in their relationship with the free-spending Goldfine, once gave Goldfine a gold watch and at other times some of Mrs. Adams' oil paintings. But newsmen were more interested in a rumor (it was true) that Goldfine bought the Adamses a $2,400 Oriental rug from Macy's, and had a tailor make Adams a vicuna coat worth at least $500 retail (wholesale cost to Goldfine: about $250).

Congressional Democrats, battered for years by the corruption-in-Government issue, said remarkably little aloud but smiled at each day's news. They would not soon forgive Adams for such few but flinty campaign speeches as his January 1952 "Augean Stables" attack on Truman and the promise that Eisenhower would clean up federal corruption: "Here is the man to do it. The kind of people with whom he has surrounded himself is answer enough to that."

"I am tired of pious preaching from Sherman Adams," said titular Party Leader Adlai Stevenson on the eve of his trip to Moscow. "This is not the only example of hypocrisy in the Administration." Florida's Senator George Smathers and Michigan's presidential hopeful, Governor "Soapy" Williams, solemnly echoed the hypocrisy issue.

Day by Day. The bitterest pill of all was the general Republican disapproval. A sort of "abominable noman" to Eisenhower loyalists in need of favors from the Federal Government, Adams was the tough cop many could admire but few tried to like. Now that he himself was in trouble, many remembered his relentless judgment against Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott, who once or twice solicited business for his efficiency-engineering firm on official Air Force stationery. Talbott and others had gone out complaining that the implacable Adams never gave them a chance to square up things, clear their names.

Delaware's hound's-tooth polisher, Republican John J. Williams, led a parade of five Republican Senators provisionally suggesting an Adams resignation. The other four: Arizona's Barry Goldwater, Michigan's Charles Potter, Maryland's Glenn Beall, Minnesota's Ed Thye. California's Bill Knowland tagged along, intoning that "the facts should be completely disclosed."

Back at the White House at week's end, while the President golfed at Gettysburg, Adams wrestled with his conscience. "It'll be a tough gale to ride out," said one top White House aide. "They are just going to hound him until he has to leave," said Rachel Adams to the Minneapolis Tribune. Adams himself worked away on a day-to-day basis, well knowing that the final decision would have to be his alone. One thing he had already decided: if, after a careful measuring of headlines and political forces, it looked as though his continued presence would seriously damage the Administration he had served, he would put on his hat and walk out.

*Said Major General Harry H. Vaughan, Truman aide, to a congressional investigating committee on Aug. 30, 1949: "The freezers . . . were a gift from two old friends of mine. This gift was an expression of friendship and nothing more. There is absolutely no connection between this gift and any assistance I have given these friends. At no time have I taken action as a member of the White House staff in exchange for a gift or other favor."

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