Master of the Senate (57 page)

In one, which appeared in the
Star
under the headline “
OIL AND GAS INTERESTS SEEN OUT TO HANG LELAND OLDS IN SENATE HEARING
,” Thomas Stokes told his readers that “it is often the secret maneuvering and manipulations of little groups of men, your elected public servants ostensibly, that decide great issues here that deeply and directly affect your public welfare.” A “proved and outstanding champion of the public interest” is on trial before a subcommittee “which obviously is packed against him,” he said. (The column had been written the previous day, before Johnson had begun questioning Olds, and it revealed the success with which Johnson had concealed his maneuvering; Stokes wrote that Johnson, “hitherto regarded as a progressive,” now “is lined up against Mr. Olds and appearing somewhat uncomfortable in that role.”)

Shying away from repeating the charges against Olds—as if reluctant to clothe them with the authority of print—Stokes identified them only as “the usual baseless sort of insinuations so carelessly made these days against progressive figures,” but the
Washington Daily News’
Frederick C. Othman was less squeamish. “The opposition made much of the fact that pieces by Washington’s leading amateur cellist used to appear in the
Daily Worker
, the Red newspaper,” he wrote. “The implication was that if Olds weren’t a Communist, he came close.” And, Othman said, “If I were a referee, I’d call this hitting below the belt. Olds … used to write in his youth for the Federated Press, a kind of press association for labor newspapers. It sold news to hundreds
[sic]
of dailies and weeklies, most published by labor unions. One of its cash customers was the
Daily Worker.
[Olds] couldn’t help that.”

When the hearings resumed after lunch, there was a dramatic change in Johnson’s tone. In part, this may have been because most—perhaps all; the hearing transcript is unclear—of the subcommittee’s other members were absent, at a vote in the Senate Chamber, so there was no one present who had to be persuaded of Olds’ radical propensities. And the explanation for the change may in part have lain in Johnson’s attempt to keep from completely burning his bridges to the liberal community, the same attempt that had led him to downplay the hearings, keeping journalistic attendance low, so that his tactics would not receive a lot of attention in liberal columns. The Stokes and Othman
columns were a reminder of how dangerous it would be for these tactics to become widely known. And at least one liberal columnist, Elmer Davis, startled by reports of the morning’s hearings, had telephoned Johnson during that luncheon recess to ask if Olds was indeed being called a Communist. Assuring Davis that he was not, Johnson had invited him to attend the afternoon session to see for himself (whether Davis did or not is not known), and Johnson felt that other columnists might attend.

For a while, therefore, the chairman’s afternoon tone of voice was as warm and sympathetic as the chairman’s morning tone had been cold and threatening—particularly on the point that Othman had termed “hitting below the belt.” Making clear that
he
certainly understood that Olds had never been a Communist, Johnson asked Olds, “So far as you know, it was not a prerequisite of the
Daily Worker
for a man to be a member of the party in order that his articles might appear; was it?” (Olds replied, “I judge not. I certainly was never a member of the party….”) Olds was even allowed to read his statement for a time without interruption, and, discussing his Federated Press articles, he said, “Frequently I made statements showing that capitalism should be reformed. In the light of the changes which have taken place in the world and my own experience, some of the statements in retrospect have seemed to carry an unfortunate connotation.” Johnson, in his new tone, and with a question that revealed a dramatically improved understanding of Olds’ point, said: “Reformed, but never destroyed or eliminated; is that right? Just reformed?” Between the chairman on the dais and the witness at the table below a dialogue even ensued. “That [reform] is generally what I had in mind,” Olds replied.

Johnson said, “I think that is a better way to put it than it was put in some of these articles,” and Olds said, “I agree with you, Senator. I did not think then, and do not think now, that private enterprise in the 1920s was providing a decent family wage or assurance of security or even protection for the modest savings which small investors entrusted to it.”

And Johnson allowed him to make the point that while once he might have favored government takeover of utilities, for more than twenty years he had been in favor of government regulation. Johnson even allowed him to say:

And Johnson was shortly to imply what Olds until recently had believed—that in at least one important area of FPC activity, not natural gas but electricity, they were on the same side. “I thought I had some slight experience with electric utilities with which I think you are personally somewhat familiar,” Johnson said. The columnists’ charge that Olds is being opposed by the utilities, he said—“the columnists are probably directing that at some [other] members of the committee because I have not tried to conceal the fact, both in and out of the Senate, that I had some interest in public power projects and exerted myself along that line in many instances, but I guess I just do not know what is happening here, and apparently you do not, either. Somebody has some information we do not know anything about.”

This new tone didn’t last long, however. The vote in the Senate Chamber was over, and the other members of the subcommittee began returning to the hearing. And Olds’ statement, read without interruption, was too convincing on points on which Olds could not be allowed to be convincing.

On one crucial point, for example—the implication that Olds had Communist sympathies—the statement showed that this was demonstrably untrue even for the period, the 1920s, during which his radicalism had been strongest. The concrete proof was those provisions that Olds had during the 1920s personally written into the constitution for a proposed new labor party—the provisions designed to keep Communists out of it—and Olds, reading those provisions into the record, said: “This should make it clear that … I never believed in nor supported the Communist movement.”

The provisions did make that point clear, so without warning Johnson switched the subject to another party. As Olds was saying, “I never believed in nor supported the Communist movement,” Johnson abruptly demanded: “What date did you become a member of the American Labor Party?”

The effectiveness of having kept Olds in ignorance of the subjects to be covered in the questioning was again proven, because he did not at once know the answer. “I think I was a member of it for about a year, around 1938,” he said, and he tried to explain that “At that time it was not the American Labor Party as it is today….” But as Johnson pressed him, he had to admit, “I do not
remember the precise time when I actually [resigned],” and Johnson then asked several questions designed to create the suspicion that Olds had remained in the ALP after it had become infiltrated with Communists, that he was trying to hedge and dodge around that fact—that perhaps he had never resigned from that party at all.

“You did notify them?” he asked.

“I am quite sure I did,” Olds said.

“I wonder if you have a copy of that notification,” Johnson said. “I think it would be important at this point if you have it.”

Olds’ recollection was accurate. That night he went home, dug through old boxes of papers, and found his letter of resignation, dated September 18, 1939. But his inability to remember the date at the moment he had been asked for it—an inability that was a dividend of the secrecy in which Johnson had cloaked his tactics—hardened the suspicions of the senators about his truthfulness, and about his Communist sympathies.

And Johnson’s sympathetic tone of voice vanished completely when Olds, reading his statement, said, “I come now to the period of my life which I believe is really material to the Senate’s consideration of my reappointment for a third term as a member of the Federal Power Commission”: his record, a ten-year record, during his first two terms. Johnson couldn’t let him talk about the record. The chairman again became sarcastic, Van Scoyoc recalls, “a mean, insulting tone … firing questions which made it difficult to answer them, and making it difficult to make sense….”

Hardly had Olds begun talking about FPC policies when Johnson interrupted—to turn the discussion to FPC personalities. He had been quietly telling his fellow senators that Olds had been sowing dissension on the FPC, maligning fellow commissioners who did not agree with him, and now he tried to lead Olds into testimony that would reinforce that impression. At first, Olds replied with an answer that was true to his character. When, abruptly changing the subject, Johnson asked, “I gather you do not share the opinion frequently expressed that maybe some members of the commission are too friendly with utilities?” Olds replied, “I do not think along those lines. I try to assume that every man is good….”

And when Johnson did not let the subject drop, but asked, “You are aware, of course, of the insinuation that has been made about other members of the Commission?” Olds replied: “I did not know there were many insinuations about the members.” (“I did not say many,” Johnson said. “I do not remember,” Olds replied. “You do not remember having seen or read any of them?” “I just do not remember, that is the answer I can give.”)

“All right,” Johnson said, but it was all right only for a few minutes. Then he returned to the point, with questions designed to reinforce the impression, as well as the impression that he had been spreading that Olds considered himself an “indispensable man.” And this time the questions were much sharper, for this was a point that would weigh heavily with senators who hated bureaucrats
who assumed more power than Congress had delegated to them. The questions were asked in the quiet, carefully controlled voice, but though that voice, and the face the spectators saw, was carefully empty of emotion, that was not true of the part of Lyndon Johnson’s body the audience couldn’t see, the part hidden by the dais. As his dialogue with the witness continued, he began to hunch further and further forward, leaning on his arms in his intensity, until his rear end actually rose out of his chair, all his weight on his arms now—leaning further and further forward almost as if the lip of the dais in front of him was a barrier keeping him separated from the witness, a barrier he would very much have liked to cross.

Johnson began trying to get Olds to admit that the Commission’s policies would remain the same even if Olds were no longer a member. Had not even Commissioner Nelson Smith (Kerr’s man) concurred in the policies? he demanded, cutting Olds off when he tried to reply.

Olds finally protested against Johnson’s tactics. “Unless I can answer these questions in such a way as to make the record intelligent, I cannot answer them,” he said.

“I will judge whether it is intelligent or not,” Lyndon Johnson said. “You want to make a speech. I have no objection to your making the speech after you answer the question. Were they on the Commission when you accomplished this? …” Olds tried to explain. “Was Mr. Smith on the Commission?” Johnson demanded. “Did they agree with you? Were they opposed to the policy?”

Finally, Olds got to reply. No, he said, Smith had not agreed with him. “I was going to tell you that Commissioner Smith issued a minority opinion.” In as sharp a statement as Leland Olds made during the hearings, he said to the commanding figure above him on the dais, “That is what I started out to tell you, and I wanted to give you the background. That was the basis of the answer I was going to give you.”

Johnson’s attitude had again unleashed Homer Capehart, who now gave Olds perhaps more credit for the overall growth of international Communism in the twentieth century than he deserved.

Don’t you feel, Capehart asked, that “as a result of the articles … in which you praised Russia … that made some contribution to the fact that the world pretty much is going communistic today and socialistic?” Olds said he didn’t think so, but Capehart would not allow such false modesty to go uncorrected. Olds’ article on the Soviet system being “beneficial to children … You do not think maybe that had some effect on helping to communize that portion of the world which had been communized or socialized?” (“We have a lot of it in this country,” Capehart said. “A lot of what?” Olds asked. “A lot of people who believed in the so-called Soviet system.” “I have not seen many of them, Senator.” “You have not been looking for them, but there are a lot.”)