ustxtxb_obs_1958_02_28_50_00003-00000_000.pdf

” ..***48okrowarawao.sgasioomooftmaivissim COMMITTEE ON OVERLOOKING ‘They’re Federal munications’ MARSHALL The times have brought us delightful interludes in the race to see who can get the most dead people on the moon first. Outstanding is that produced by the doings of the well named Democratic Committee on Legislative Oversight and by the appreciation dinton. The committee takes first place. A nice genteel prod at executive interference with the functions of regulatory boards was desired by the committee’s creators. The stage seemed properly set for this, even to the extent of clearing the proposed chief investigator with Gerald Morgan of the White House to make certain he was “safe.” Dr. Bernard Schwartz seemed to fit the bill for the position, being a good Republican, and Oren Harris, daddy of the gas decontrol bill, smiled benignly as he stood in position, as chairman of the parent committee, to horse trade for votes in the greatest Johnson-Rayburn tradition. The Cornmittee on Oversights was now in position to Overlook. Its first oversight was that Dr. Schwartz was one of them wild-eyed perfesser fellers, with no understanding of the niceties of the American system of government. He didn’t seem able to pull his punches, and when he failed in his duty, as Counsel of Oversight, to overlook bribes made WASHINGTON The reason why forthright Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine quietly resigned from the GOP Sen,ate campaign committee over the $100,000 from that Texas Joe Martin dinner was very simple. She remembered how Texas money had reached all the way up to Maine and bankrolled an opponent to run against her in the Republican primary in 1954. He was Robert L. Jones, who received contributions from Texas oilionaires including Douglas Marshal, ERRAND BOY HOUSTON Charles Murphy, lobbyist for the Texas Manufacturers’ Assn. who is now running for the Houston seat in the Texas Senate from which Searcy Bracewell is retiring, has written a letter calling attention to his lobbying for TMA and soliciting support. The letter, dated Feb. 6, and written on Murphy’s stationery as an attorney, was ‘received by a TMA member in conjunction with an invitation to a Houston TMA dinner for Asst. Secy. of the Air Force Dudley Sharp March 4. The invitation was signed by Inge. Grant, chairman of the Houston TMA chapter. Murphy noted in his letter he was running for the Senate and had been a representative eight years from Houston. Then he wrote : “Following this eight years’ service, I served as Special Counsel for the Texas Manufacturers’ Assn. for two with the Officials of Labor and their attorneys in planning amendments to our Workmen’s Compensation Laws to be presented to the Texas Legislature. I might add that the result of this work in the form of H.B. 433 passed with the overwhelming support of all concerned. “I feel that my lona . experience with State government and my knowledge and understanding of the problems facing the citizens of Texas in all phases of our social and economic preciate your support.” THE TEXAS OBSERVER Page 3 February 28, 1958 by the right people, brother Oren began to foresee trouble for some who were close to him. He first tried to restrain the doctor by refusing to give him subpoena powers and blocking his every move behind the scenes. Dr. Schwartz was too astute to be stayed. Next the overlookers began to look over Dr. Schwartz. A pale shade of McCarthyism must have whispered in Oren’s ear, and he sallied forth with an investigation of the investigator. By now we bewildered onlookers could not tell the hounds from the hares, or who was looking over whose shoulder for what. At this point the prcifessor was supposed to have meekly resigned, leaving the field to the Overseers in order for them to correct their first oversight in not selecting a “blind” counsel. But the audacious little egghead dared the committee to fire him, and the charge that Oren had offered the investigator’s scalp in exchange for votes in support of his gas bill had to be looked over by the committee on oversight in return. While Oren was proclaiming his innocence, left hand over heart, right upraised, Jack Porter put on his production of Pal Joey down Texas way. Now there was nothing original about a candidate promising to vote for a proposed legislative measure, if he were given campaign funds, in son-in-law of Roy Cullen. Another Cullen son-in-law, Corbin Robertson, was a sponsor of the dinner for Joe Martin, also a sponsor for a similar dinner given to Democrat Lyndon Johnson. Mrs. Smith also knew that Vic Johnson, who really runs the GOP Senate campaign committee for the reelection of senators, is hand-inglove with Texas oilionaires and was suspected of financing opposition to her. That’s why Mrs. Smith not only resigned from the committee but remarked privately to friends: “Those rich Texans not only want’ to keep their money through oil depletion allowances and make the rest of us pay extra taxes, but they also send their money all over the country to defeat senators who don’t agree with them. They want to make the Senate of the United States a rubberstamp for Texas.” Pro-Republican Bureau Fists almost flew at a recent hearing of the House agriculture committee, when Rep. W. R. Poage of Texas challenged Frank Wooley, counsel of the American Farm Bureau Federation, to meet him “in the alley” after Wooley charged that communists were behind a Southern-backed production payment plan for cotton. Wooley didn’t accept the challenge. However, what the committee didn’t know was that he would have been found in the same “communist” category if the calendar were turned back a few years. For Wooley is a disgruntled former New Dealer who was eased out of a top job at the agriculture department. At that time he advocated price-supporting crop payments, which he now wildly attributes to communists. In fact, for a time Wooley was known among colleagues as “Mr. Price Support,” so avidly did he plump for production payments to farmers. Wooley came to the Agriculture Department in the ’30’s under Henry Wallace, stayed on to serve as deputy boss of the production and marketing administration under Secretaries Clinton Anderson and Charles Brannan. Early in 1949 he had a major hand in drafting the Brannan Plan of direct crop payments. In 1950 he and his boss, PMA administrator Ralph Trigg, were’ eased out of their jobs and de Texas. Why the boys up north went into such a dither over Joe Martin’s $100 a plate dinner rightly puzzled Jack and friends. Yet here was some’thing Oren couldn’t overlook : his pet bill was dead, and all his back stage checkmating of Dr. Schwartz could not now receive full recompense. The handsome Arkansan had already boasted that he had in his day as a prosecutor sent five men to the electric chair, and after the curtain fell on the last act of Pal Joey, he really lowered the boom on Dr. Schwartz. “Put up or shut up” was the tenor of his cry ; but he reckoned without his investigator’s shrewdness. That ingrate had actually preserved the evidence supporting his charges, and Oren’s boom became a boomerang. After Eisenhower Democrat \(Floridirectly accused, and Secretary Sinclair Weeks pointed out as waiting in the wings with Thomas E. Dewey, the chairman decided the committee had better look over a four-leaf clover it had overlooked before. The inquiry continued : no one on the moon, the FCC chairman rather plaintively complaining that if he had gotten as much as ten thousand dollars up Spokane way there would be something to talk about, and the only casualtyEthos. FRANKLIN JONES moted to “special consultants” by B rannan. Those who know him say Wooley has never forgotten this blow to his pride. He later went to work for the pro-Republican American Farm Bureau Federation, where he has been busy ever since lambasting farm policies he formerly fought for as a New and Fair Dealer. The payoff came when Wooley tried to attach a “communist” tag on production payments to cotton farmers. This, like the wool payment plan, is inherited from the original Brannan proposal which Wooley helped to draft. An Unnamed Senator \(Pearson’s column for Feb. 24 reveals the contents of Dr. Bernard Schwartz’s secretly-recorded interview with FCC Commissioner Richard A. Mack, who accepted money, part of which he ‘described as “gifts, advances, or what-have-you,” from Thurman Whiteside, the Miami attorney who asked him to grant a multimillion-dollar television license to The commissioner hinted that, if called on the witness stand, he might implicate an unnamed . senator. “I can show you a letter from a senator …” he said. “I was rather amused to get , it because he wants a definite commitment out of me.” The investigators ignored this crack and pressed the commissioner for more details about his financial arrangements with attorney Whiteside. Truman-Go-Round Harry Truman speeded up his recent speech so much to get within his allotted TV time that most people didn’t notice an indirect but deliberate crack he took at Sen. Lyndon Johnson and Speaker Sam Rayburn’s boycott of the Democratic Advisory Committee. Truman went out of his way to quote from the committee’s policies in which Johnson and Rayburn have refused to. participate. Elmo Roper, the pollster, has completed a secret survey for the AFLCIO regarding labor attitudes in the South. The survey reveals that the South is so anti-union that the AFLCIO has abandoned plans to unionize new industries moving south of the Mason-Dixon line. DREW PEARSON LATE DECISION AUSTIN The hell with taxes and nine-day allowables and alll that fiscal jazz. As far as I’m concerned the burning question of our time is, what happened last Saturday between 6 and 6 :30 p.m. to make KTBC-TV, Sen. Lyndon Johnson’s monopoly of the cyclops eye business in Austin, ,change its mind about Harry Truman? Something happened. Because, as a Mohawk Indian I know used to say when he’d had one over his firewater limit, brothers, attend: At 6 p.m. the girls who answer KTB C-TV’s telephones were still telling callers, as they told them all last week, no, I’m sorreee, but we do not have that program scheduled. That is, KTBC-TV would not, repeat not, carry the Columbia Broadcasting System’s public service telecast of former President Harry Truman ripping the hide from the GOP elephant at the Saturday night $100-a-plate dinner of the national Democratic committee in Washington. But at 6 :30 p.m., as I sat transfixed in my living room by a commercial implying that the roadto :-successful’ snobbery leads through the dining room of the Driskill Hotel, I heard a disembodied voice saying: “Be sure to stay tuned to KTBCTV at 9 :30 tonight for a speech by former President Harry Truman.” Or words to that effect. The admonition was repeated at 7, 7:30, 8, 8 :30 and 9 p.m. How many Central Texans missed hearing Harry because there were only six spot announcements advertising his speech, and those at the .next-to-the-last moment ? Hundreds? Thousands ? And how many more would have heard him if KTBC-TV had made up its mind earlier, and said so? KTBC-TV’s wasn’t the only mush, mouthed performance in re the Truman , speech. On Jan..29 Paul Butler, chairman of the national Democratic committee, wrote a letter to Jim Lindsey, chairman of the state . Democratic executive committee. The letter noted that CBS was to carry the Truman speech on public service time and asked that Lindsey lead a campaign to get all CBS affiliates in Texas, radio and television, to carry the speech. Provided a copy of the letter, this writer called the SDEC, asked for Jake Pickle, was told that Pickle was in Laredo with Gov. Price Daniel. I asked the girl who answered the telephone if she knew of any effort to get the Truman speech on the air. She did not. I called Jake Jacobsen, assistant to the Governor and the SDEC’s secretary. Jacobsen said he had no knowledge of the letter and that he didn’t believe Butler had sent a copy to Daniel. I called Lindsey. He said he couldn’t recall having received the Butler letter. “I don’t remember that particular one,” he said. Is anyone on the SDEC doing what Butler asked ? Lindsey was asked. He replied : “Well, I imagine they are … I just couldn’t say … I’ve been kinda out of touch … I’ve had the flu.” LYMAN JONES Senator Smith Remembers