Master of the Senate (58 page)

L
ELAND
O
LDS WAS EVENTUALLY
allowed to finish reading his statement—every word of it. For over an hour that afternoon, as Capehart and Johnson cross-examined him, the remaining pages lay unread before him. When the cross-examination was completed, Capehart rose and left the hearing room, along with the other senators who had been present. The dais was empty except for Lyndon Johnson. There was no other senator present to hear Olds’ statement. And then Johnson allowed him to read.

After a while, as he was reading, some of the other senators returned. But by this time, Olds was dealing not with Communism but with his record on the FPC. As they sat on the dais, the senators chatted with each other, or leaned back and whispered to their assistants. As
The New Republic
commented: “Olds’ FPC record was of so little interest to committee members that they scarcely listened to his prepared testimony.”

A
FTER
O
LDS FINALLY COMPLETED HIS TESTIMONY
, Johnson began calling other witnesses. Those testifying on Olds’ behalf received treatment no more sympathetic than the Chairman had given the man they were defending. When Olds’ fellow FPC commissioner Thomas C. Buchanan testified that Olds was “a good judge,” who “listens patiently, considers soberly, weighs wisely, and judges impartially,” Johnson asked: “Do you really believe that last statement you made?” And when Buchanan said he did—“very much so”—Johnson’s response was to try to show that Buchanan hadn’t known Olds very long. (Actually, Buchanan said, he had known—and worked with—him for ten years.) When the elderly George S. Reed, a longtime member of the New York State Power Authority, said that he had worked with Olds for fifteen years and praised his “single-minded devotion to the ideals of democracy,” Johnson could scarcely contain himself and tried to make Reed say that he held an opinion equally favorable about other FPC commissioners. (Refusing to be bullied, Reed said, “Well, I was speaking particularly on account of Mr. Olds.”)

•    •    •

J
OHNSON GOT
the newspaper coverage he wanted. Only a handful of reporters had attended the hearings, and most newspapers relied on the article from the United Press. Reprinted the next morning—Thursday, September 29—in newspapers across the country, it led with Senator Reed’s statement that Olds was “a full-fledged, first-class Communist,” and used the word “admits,” with its implication of guilt, in describing Olds’ testimony, referring to “articles which Mr. Olds admitted writing…. Commissioner Olds, confronted with the documents, admitted they were ‘radical.’…”

And over the article were the headlines Johnson wanted—headlines which contained the key word, “senator reed hits olds as communist,” reported the country’s most influential newspaper, the
New York Times
, above a subhead: “FPC Member, Up for a New Term, Admits ‘Radical’ Writing of 1929.” In the
Washington Post
headline the key word was shortened: “
SENATOR SAYS WRITINGS POINT TO OLDS AS RED.
”

Olds’ friends had anticipated that the “Communist” charges brought up in 1944 would be raised again. “The money [natural gas profits] involved, was so big that you couldn’t believe that these people were going to let it go,” John Gunther (the ADA lobbyist, not the writer) recalls. Even so, largely unaware of Johnson’s pre-hearing maneuvering, they felt the attack would again fail, and hadn’t taken the hearings seriously. But on that Wednesday afternoon, Gunther received a telephone call from a fellow liberal, who asked, “Were you at the hearings this morning?” Gunther said he had not been. “My God!” the friend said. “They’re taking Olds’ hide off. They’re really out to get him.”

Late that afternoon, a group of Olds’ admirers met and discussed plans for his defense. The next morning’s newspapers had not yet appeared, and for a few hours they were optimistic. “We still hadn’t had McCarthy,” Gunther says. (Joe McCarthy’s speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, which brought his Red-hunting career to national attention, would not be given until February, 1950.) “So I thought, This [Johnson’s attack] isn’t going to work. The guy [Olds] is too well-respected for this. They [the other senators] are not going to take this seriously.” The optimism was briefly reinforced the next morning by the
Washington Post’s
editorial, which attacked “Representative Lyle’s despicable and preposterous attempt to smear Mr. Olds as a Red,” and by Lowell Mellett, perhaps the only columnist besides Othman to attend the Wednesday hearings, who ridiculed the point introduced by Johnson. After reporting that “I found the hearing had been launched as a trial of Mr. Olds as a former and perhaps unreformed communist,” that “the air was charged with emotion or a reasonable appearance of same,” and that “the subcommittee members were being ‘shocked,’ to their manifest delight, by the Federated Press articles,” Mellett wrote sarcastically that “there was something worse.”

But their optimism (which of course vanished as telephone reports about the newspaper coverage across the country came in) was not shared by Leland Olds. In front of the subcommittee, Olds had maintained an air of confidence. When, late that afternoon, he got back to the FPC Building, however, he went into his office with his wife and his assistant, and shut the door. “And then he slumped in his chair,” Melwood Van Scoyoc recalls. “He was always such a buoyant guy, but he just sat there, slumped, as if he was defeated.” He asked Maud not to come to the hearings the next day, but she insisted that she would.

L
ATE THAT AFTERNOON
, Lyndon Johnson shut the door to
his
office, because he had some telephone calls to make. Olds’ inability to remember the date of his resignation from the American Labor Party, which many senators believed was a Communist front, had hardened the suspicions of the senators on the subcommittee—and Johnson wanted the circle with suspicions to be widened. Telephoning other senators, he said he was calling just to keep them informed on the hearings, and included in his information the fact that the man they were being asked to confirm had been a member of the ALP, and that, while Olds contended that he had resigned, he somehow couldn’t say when. Johnson left the impression that Olds was lying, his tone by turns joking and confidential; Busby and Jenkins, opening the door, saw him with his feet up on his desk, big hand around the receiver, laughing as he described how the witness had squirmed when asked for a date. (If, after Olds had provided the date the next day, Johnson telephoned the senators again to correct the impression, none of his staff heard him do so.)

T
HE NEXT DAY’S HEARING
—THE FINAL DAY scheduled—began with the testimony of pro-Olds witnesses. Johnson hurried them along, and at the conclusion
of each witness’s testimony, simply thanked him, asking no questions. As the pro-Olds witnesses testified, Johnson’s bearing was impatient; several times he pulled out a large stopwatch and looked at it ostentatiously.

This technique was successful because of the thoroughness with which the subcommittee had been stacked, so that there was not even one senator present who was sympathetic to Olds. Joseph P. Harris, a University of California political scientist who was later to analyze the Olds hearings in detail, wrote that “witnesses favoring the nomination were treated politely, but were usually asked no questions. Quite a different public impression would have been made had there been a single member of the subcommittee to ask searching questions of both sides….”

One of the witnesses refused to be hurried. She was Anne K. Alpern, who during seven years as Pittsburgh’s city attorney had earned a reputation as a determined opponent of utility monopolies. Noting that the Senate had confirmed Olds twice before, she told the senators: “You have the same set of facts now as then. There is nothing new. Nothing is involved but the same set of facts. They have been brought up here, they have been hashed and rehashed and regurgitated. I think it is unfair….” Aware that a telling point was being made, Johnson tried to cut her off—“If we spend our time considering what happened in 1940 or 1944, we will never get through. Proceed, Miss Alpern.” But she faced him down. “Well,” she said, “I hope that the senators will ask me some questions, because I think the only way by which anyone has an opportunity to present a point of view is through questions.” As she proceeded to praise Olds as “a courageous public servant” (“The courageous ones are the ones who are decapitated…. That is why I think this confirmation is so very important…. If you do not confirm Mr. Olds … men in high positions will be fearful of … taking a stand”), other subcommittee members asked hostile questions. Johnson pulled out his watch and kept it out, staring at it as she talked. Then, breaking into her argument and giving her a “hard stare,” he said, “Miss Alpern, you have consumed the time allotted to you.”

Staring back at Johnson, Miss Alpern said: “Well, Senator, my time has been divided a little unequally between me and the members of the committee.” Johnson then allowed her to finish. “We, the consumers of the country, have a great deal of difficulty in fighting utilities matters—we do not have the money; we do not have the staff; we need men like Mr. Olds,” she said.

Some of the pro-Olds testimony was quite eloquent. After explaining that Olds’ efforts had forced natural gas companies to refund the more than $8 million they had overcharged Kansas City residents in their monthly bills, city attorney David M. Proctor quoted a recent
Kansas City Star
editorial: “Human memory and gratitude are short, but a few persons in this area have reason to remember Leland Olds.” The testimony came from witnesses representing both labor unions (William J. Houston of the American Federation of Government Employees called Olds “a man of humanity”) and farmers (“Any criticism …
reflects more on the critic than on Mr. Olds,” said J. T. Sanders of the National Grange). Recalling the hearing years later, Van Scoyoc was to write of the “numerous expressions by persons in his [Olds’] favor.” But, Van Scoyoc was also to write, these expressions were “overwhelmed” by “expressions of hatred.” For the witnesses who supported Olds were followed by the witnesses who opposed him, the witnesses Lyndon Johnson had selected with such care, the witnesses he had secretly met with and coached. Lyndon Johnson wanted words in headlines equally as devastating as “Communist” or “Red.” And in these witnesses he had men who would provide headline writers with the words he wanted.

Two of them, South Texas attorneys linked to natural gas interests, were as unlike in appearance as they were similar in their violent anti-Communism. William N. Bonner of Houston, burly and braggadocious, had a beaming grin; Hayden Head of Corpus Christi, stony-faced and thin-lipped, kept his hair cropped close to his skull and his posture as rigidly erect as if he were constantly at attention in a military drill. Already known throughout corrupt South Texas as “the man with the black bag” because of his political fund-dispensing activities on behalf of Maston Nixon of Southern Minerals and other ultra-conservative Rio Valley moguls, Head was rabid in his racism (“We never celebrate Lincoln’s birthday,” he boasted) and in his hatred of Reds, which would lead him to found Citizens Alert, an organization to remind America of the threat of world Communism. (Johnson had been particularly impressed with Head; after a long interview with the attorney, he had wired Maston Nixon: “Am sure he will be invaluable.”) Johnson had spent a lot of time coaching Bonner, but now, when he called Bonner to the witness table, he looked around the room as if he had never seen him before. “Mr. William N. Bonner,” Johnson said. “Is Mr. Bonner present?”

As it happened, Mr. Bonner was, and taking his seat at the witness table, he testified that Leland Olds was “a traitor to our country, a crackpot and a jackass wholly unfit to make rules,” that the Federated Press was “a communistic sheet whose articles were published each week by the
Daily Worker
,” and that Olds “does not deny speaking from the same platform with Earl Browder.”

“Every public utterance which this punk has uttered, every final position which he has taken, shows beyond cavil that he would, if permitted, substitute ‘security’ and ‘statism’ for freedom and opportunity,” Bonner said.

Hayden Head had been saved as the last witness—for Head was the climax. He said Olds was a Communist, and also an intellectual (which made him “all the more dangerous…. He is a much greater threat to the American way of life than he would be if his brain were less agile”)—and Head implied, sitting at attention in the witness chair, that Mr. Olds might also be something more: a Communist
agent
who had turned from writing to bureaucratic administration to accomplish his aims from within the government, an agent using the power he had obtained as a high governmental official to advance the Communist
conspiracy—to destroy free enterprise, the capitalistic system and “American freedom.”

“Do you realize, gentlemen of the committee,” Head asked, that “Leland Olds, clothed in the mantle of respectability, of high public office, both State and Federal, has continued without appreciable intermission the pursuit of those objectives which he advocated twenty years ago in the columns of the
Daily Worker?
… He has done it slowly, yes: but insidiously, delicately, step by step, but relentlessly and persistently.”