11

The Hearing

ROOM 312, on the third floor of the Senate Office Building, was a high-ceilinged room of white marble and tall windows and gold brocade draperies and sparkling chandeliers, but it was not one of the building’s larger rooms, so that the wings of the raised horseshoe-shaped dais at one end ran halfway down the adjoining walls, and the room was dominated by the dais’s dark, heavy oaken facade. It loomed over the small table, set between the wings, at which witnesses would testify.

Only a few witnesses, spectators, and reporters—uninterested reporters, since the hearings were not expected to generate much news—were sitting in the three or four rows of folding chairs that had been set up in the other half of the room. Coming in with Maud, Leland Olds saw John Lyle sitting among the waiting witnesses. The Congressman was holding a large briefcase on his lap. Olds didn’t know what was in it, or why Lyle would be testifying, but then Lyndon Johnson, sitting at the center of the dais, rapped a gavel to open the proceedings and said, “We have with us Congressman John Lyle of Texas. Congressman Lyle, do you have a prepared statement?” and Lyle, taking the chair at the witness table, opened the briefcase, took out a thick stack of white-on-black photostats of the Federated Press articles, and said that Olds’ reappointment would be “utterly unthinkable.”

“I am here to oppose Mr. Olds because he has—through a long and prolific career—attacked the church,” Lyle began. “He has attacked our schools; he has ridiculed symbols of patriotism and loyalty such as the Fourth of July; he has advocated public ownership; he has reserved his applause for Lenin and Lenin’s system….”

His stem-winder’s voice ringing through the room, Lyle looked up at the senators on the dais. “Yes, unbelievable as it seems, gentlemen, this man Leland Olds, the man who now asks the consent and approval of the Senate to serve on the Federal Power Commission, has not believed in our Constitution, our Government, our Congress, our representative form of government, our churches, our flag, our schools, our system of free enterprise.”

Olds had never believed in these things, Lyle said. “What manner of man is this Leland Olds?” he asked. He had discovered the answer, he said, in the fifty-four articles stacked before him; “they provide a clear and definite pattern of Leland Olds’ alien economic and political philosophy.” Many of them, Lyle said, had been published in the Daily Worker, “official organ of the Communist Party,” and even those that had been published in other publications, Lyle said, had followed the Communist line. In reading them, he said, “I found he was full in his praise for the Russian system. I found that he advocated radical and alien changes in the things that all of us believe in, live for, and fought for.” In the articles, Lyle said, Olds “commends Lenin”; conforms to the “Marxian doctrine”; “praises the Russian system as the coming world order and as a model for the United States; preaches class war; echoes the Communist doctrines of class struggle, surplus value, exploitation, downfall of capitalism, and international action by workers, as proclaimed by Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.”

And Olds still didn’t believe in the Constitution or the American flag, Lyle said. He has an “established contempt for the fundamentals of American philosophy,” he said. Olds had merely concealed his true feelings in recent years, he said. “One of Mr. Leland Olds’ particular and peculiar talents is the ability—like a chameleon—to be many things to many men.” And he had concealed his feelings from dark motives. “Leland Olds has seen fit—even in very recent years—to resort to the gymnastics of expediency to remain in a position of power where his advocacy can retain the influence of high position.”

But now that he himself had read those articles, Lyle said, Olds’ true feelings were all too clear. “Now I can understand Mr. Olds, can understand his manner of doing things, his easy turn-about without reason, his easy advocacy of either side of a question, using the same artful, deceitful and sly tactics so evident from his writings which I have assembled.” These articles, he said, “provide a clear and definite pattern of Leland Olds’ alien economic and political philosophy. They unmistakably show that his objectives are basically hostile to our American way of life.”

He would prove this, Lyle said, with the photostats he was holding, those photostats of Olds’ own articles—with “words from his own pen,” most of them words published in the Communist Daily Worker.

One by one, Lyle went through the articles that Leland Olds had written during the 1920s—or, to be more precise, through the fifty-four articles that had been selected. With each one, Lyle first summarized the key point: “Mr. Chairman, I have before me here a photostatic copy of the Daily Worker, July 16, 1925, wherein Leland Olds claims that educational institutions are subservient to the ‘money princes who govern industry.’… I just briefly call your attention to a few lines: ‘Give till it hurts means nothing to the money princes. They simply can’t give till it hurts. They have too much….’” Or: “I have before me, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, a photostatic copy of the Federated Press Labor News, July 20, 1929, wherein Leland Olds hails the ‘decay of the church….’”

Early on, there was an interruption. Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire had been considered too sympathetic to Olds to be placed on the subcommittee. Assured by Johnson that the hearings would be routine, he had given him his proxy for the vote in the full committee. But he had stopped by to watch the hearings, sitting in one of the empty chairs on the dais, and as the thrust of Lyle’s testimony became apparent, he could not restrain himself. As Lyle was calling Olds a “chameleon,” Tobey interrupted. “A man has a right to change his mind; does he not?” he asked Lyle. “Did you not ever change your mind on issues and men?” When Lyle replied, “Yes, sir,” Tobey said, “Does that not qualify what you are talking about now?” But before that line of questioning could continue, Lyndon Johnson intervened, asking that Lyle be allowed to read his prepared statement without interruption. “The Congressman … will be very glad to have any questions asked of him when he concludes, and I should not be surprised if some members of the Senate change their mind if they are willing to indulge him a courteous hearing…. If the members will bear with us, at least for a few minutes until the Congressman completes his prepared statement, the Chair will appreciate it.”

The only further interruptions were occasional brief exclamations of approval from subcommittee members for Lyle’s thoroughness, and a ritual began. Picking up a photostat, Lyle would identify it—“Here is a photostatic copy of the Daily Worker, July 5, 1928. There is an article in here entitled ‘Imperialism and the Fourth of July,’ by Leland Olds.” He would read in a voice full of indignation a marked paragraph, sentence, or phrase from the article which he said summed it up. “That, gentlemen, was written by Mr. Leland Olds, who wants your permission to serve in high public office, your consent: ‘The Fourth of July will loom as anything but the birthday of liberty.’” Then, rising, he would extend the incriminating photostat—“with a flourish,” one observer recalls—to a committee clerk. “Without objection, the article appearing on page 5 of the Daily Worker of July 5,1928, entitled ‘Imperialism and the Fourth of July,’ will be incorporated in the record at this point,” Lyndon Johnson would say.

Occasionally, Lyle would deliver himself of an editorial comment. “Here is an interesting one, gentlemen,” or “Perhaps I am naive, gentlemen, but this is one that shook me”—or

Here is one you gentlemen will enjoy, I am sure, because it concerns you. I will summarize it here. According to Mr. Olds, the Government of the United States is nothing more than a servant of business. He views it as a popular delusion that a political system created in a much simpler economic era still affords the people effective control through their votes over the complex industrial state, which has come into being. He says “politicians must perpetuate this idea, for their jobs depend upon it, but the true view,” he says, “would reveal the political government handling administrative details for an immensely powerful ruling class.”

I am quoting him from that statement wherein he relieves you gentlemen of the responsibility of thinking, the responsibility of acting. All you have to do is handle administrative details for the powerful ruling class.

Occasionally, Lyndon Johnson himself made a brief comment. When Lyle handed up the “administrative details” article, the chairman said, “Without objection we will perform one of those details now and insert this in the record.” Usually, however, Johnson simply repeated, over and over, “Without objection it will be made part of the record.” And that thick stack of photostats, of the very words that Leland Olds had written, that Lyle handed up so methodically, lent an air of authenticity to the Congressman’s testimony. So thoroughly had the articles been deconstructed, in fact, that ideas had been found in them that Olds had not even expressed. At one point Lyle cited five articles to show that Olds had been a propagandist for the “surplus value” theory. “Surplus value,” he reminded the subcommittee, is “the fundamental doctrine, you know, of Karl Marx and his Communist followers.” As it happened, not one of the five articles contained the incriminating phrase, but Lyle explained that that point was of no significance. “Expressions” used in the articles showed that Olds “adhered to the surplus value” doctrine, the Congressman said. Recondite points had been noted, and now were called to the committee’s attention. None of the fifty-four articles contained the word “gravediggers,” but that fact was also of no significance. While Olds had not used the word, it had appeared in a headline above one of his articles—in a headline written by some editor in one of the scores of newspapers that printed the article—and Lyle gravely explained the implications to the subcommittee: “The word ‘gravediggers’ is of interest in view of Karl Marx’s statement in the Communist Manifesto, page 42. I am quoting from Karl Marx: ‘Before all, therefore, the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers. Its downfall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’” (“Without objection, it will be made part of the record.”)

Lyle testified for ninety minutes, and those sentences extracted from Olds’ articles—“A new age is being born which will succeed capitalist political democracy”; “Lenin knew what would take the place of political parties when he made his bid for power in Russia with the slogan All power to the Soviets’”; “Child labor, and the employment of mothers” are “features of the economic order developed under private capitalism”—read to the accompaniment of Lyndon Johnson’s ritualistic drone, “Without objection the article referred to will be made part of the record,” painted a convincing picture.

The photostats produced the desired effect, in part because Lyle, by omitting the fact that the articles had been published in the Daily Worker only because the Communist newspaper was a subscriber to a press service for which Olds worked, created the impression that Olds had written them specifically for the Worker and was employed by it. At the conclusion of Lyle’s testimony, Lyndon Johnson asked for questions from the subcommittee. “Mr. Chairman, I have not any questions to ask,” Senator McFarland said. “I am shocked beyond words at these articles…. I am not a reader of the Daily Worker, and frankly I did not know that such articles as these are going out through the United States mail.” He had worked with Olds, McFarland said, and “I have had a rather affectionate attitude toward him,” but “I think that these are most serious charges, the most serious that I have ever heard made in Congress.” Senator Tobey had no questions either. As the recitation of Olds’ articles had unfolded, Tobey, who had said an early word in his defense, had quietly left the hearing room, not to return.

THE FIRST ATTACK on Olds had come from John Lyle. The second came from Lyndon Johnson.

At the completion of Lyle’s testimony, Johnson thanked him and said, “Mr. Olds, will you come forward,” and Olds walked up to the witness table and took his place before the high dais and the senators behind it. Like Lyle, Olds had a prepared statement, a twelve-thousand-word statement he had been writing for several weeks—he had given Johnson a copy the previous day—and he placed it before him on the table. It was, however, to be quite some time before he was allowed to read it.

While Olds’ statement did not address Lyle’s specific charges—Olds, of course, had not even known that Lyle was going to testify—it happened to deal with the substance of those charges. By sheer coincidence, Olds had composed the most effective answer possible to Lyle’s attacks on his philosophy, for his statement was an explanation of his philosophy—an explanation of how it had evolved during his career first as a social worker, minister, teacher, writer, and then as a member of state and federal regulatory commissions; how, for example, it had evolved from a belief that only public ownership could control great corporations into a belief that they could be controlled by government regulation while remaining in private hands. In effect a twelve-thousand-word autobiography, the statement documented, quite thoroughly, the fact that during the twenty years since the last of the Federated Press articles had been written, his thinking had, under the influence of Franklin Roosevelt, changed considerably. It was a closely reasoned, persuasive description of the evolution of his beliefs from the radical liberalism he had espoused during the 1920s to the New Deal liberalism in which he had, during the intervening two decades, come so fervently to believe. And, almost incidentally but quite convincingly, the statement documented the fact that never, not even in the most radical moments of his youth, had Leland Olds believed in Communism. As a young man, the statement said, he had “rejected the approach of Karl Marx” as “unwholesome,” and, the statement said, “I still believe that.” It noted that throughout his life, as in his determination during the 1920s to “keep Communists from infiltrating” a new political party, he had not merely rejected Communism but had fought Communism. It pointed out that he had never—as Lyle had insinuated—written for the Daily Worker but that that newspaper had merely been one of eighty newspapers, almost all of them non-Communist, that subscribed to the press service for which he worked.

Olds’ statement dealt not only with his philosophy, but, quite specifically and in detail, with his record: the record he had compiled during the twenty years since he had written the last of those articles—the twenty years during which he had served as a public official. It documented, in detail, the faithfulness and effectiveness with which he had implemented Roosevelt’s policies (and, later, the similar policies of Lehman and Truman) in both New York and Washington—in Washington as those policies had been modified by Congress. His statement pointed out that Congress must have approved of his record; during his ten years on the Federal Power Commission, the statement noted, his work “has been an open book to Congress”; he had appeared before congressional committees scores of times; “Congress has had an opportunity to know me, my conception of the FPC’s work, and what I was seeking to accomplish”; and, for ten years, again and again, Congress had approved what he was doing. If the statement had been read without interruption, it would have been an effective rebuttal of Lyle’s charges.

So he would not be allowed to read without interruption.

Olds had hardly begun when Senator Capehart began firing questions at him. When Lyle’s testimony had been interrupted—by Tobey—Johnson had quickly intervened, asking the senators to defer their questions until he had finished, and Lyle had thereupon been allowed to read his prepared statement without interruption.

When Olds’ statement was interrupted, the Chairman did not intervene. Intervention finally came from McFarland, who despite his shock at the articles seemed unable to forget completely his onetime “affection” for Olds. Cape-hart’s cross-examination was continuing—with Olds’ statement still lying unread on the table before him—when McFarland said, “Mr. Chairman, may I suggest that the testimony offered here this morning has been of such a serious nature that I personally feel Mr. Olds should be given the opportunity to make his statement in chief without interruptions.”

“Let us put it this way,” Lyndon Johnson replied. “Let us hope Mr. Olds can proceed with his statement with a minimum of interruptions.”

After Olds had been reading again for about six minutes, however, Johnson himself broke in. Olds’ statement focused on his philosophy, on his record. Johnson wanted the focus on Marxism, and Leninism, and the Communist Party. And he knew how to get the focus there—by linking Olds with the name, instantly recognizable in Washington in 1949, of the head of that party.

Had he not, Johnson demanded of Olds, once spoken from the same platform as Earl Browder?

“It may be the case,” Olds replied. “I do not know. I just do not remember. I remember once speaking before the Trade Union and Educational League….”

That gave Johnson an opening. “When you accepted that engagement with the Trade Union and Educational League,” he asked, “you did so with the full knowledge and purposes of that organization?”

A stack of photostats—not Lyle’s photostats but photostats with which he had been provided by Wirtz—was lying before Johnson. Holding up the first one, he brandished it in front of Olds. Didn’t you know, he demanded, that the Trade Union and Educational League was “cited by Attorney General [Francis] Biddle as an affiliate of the Red International Labor Unions?” The document in his hands, he said, was a page from an edition of the Daily Worker of March 29, 1924, reporting on the meeting at which Olds and Browder had both spoken.

“It was my understanding that the purposes of that organization were to develop the organization of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers in industry through the forming of unions on an industrial basis,” Olds replied. But, he said, even if he had known back then that the League was an affiliate of the Red International Labor Unions, and even if he had known that Browder would be among the other speakers, he would have spoken anyway. “I just want to say I made it a principle, and I made it a principle all through my life, to accept speaking invitations no matter who invited me,” even if he did not agree with the organization’s views, even in fact if his speech would be “totally alien to what they thought.” How else, he tried to explain, could people be provided with information that might change their opinions?

With Johnson’s continued questioning, the dam broke. Capehart demanded an answer—“Did you ever speak with Browder?” And McFarland asked, “You surely do not mean that you would speak before any group no matter what their objectives were, do you, Mr. Olds?”

“I would not speak in such a way as to further their objectives,” Olds replied. But, he said, he would speak. “Even though those organizations were communistic or communistically inclined?” McFarland asked. “I think the situation has changed,” Olds said. “I do not think that the point of view of Communist, or communistically inclined, was so prevalent in the days when I spoke before the Trade Union and Educational League, as it has been since the war in this country. I do not think we were thinking in those terms so much as we are today.”

AT LAST, Olds was allowed to resume reading, but he was not to be afforded hat luxury for long. When he reached his experiences with the “brutal suppression” of the Pennsylvania steel strikes, he tried to explain to the subcommittee, “I am telling this so you will know what kind of laissez-faire capitalism I was writing about during my years as industrial editor of the country’s only labor paper during the years 1922 to 1929,” but interruptions became continuous, and when Olds attempted to explain the evolution of his regulatory philosophy, Johnson was ready again.

As he asked his questions, Lyndon Johnson’s demeanor, observed by the few spectators present, was as calmly senatorial as his dark blue suit or the high, massive dais at which he sat. His right hand, holding a pencil, was poised above a stack of papers, to which, putting on his horn-rimmed glasses, he would frequently refer. His face, normally so mobile, was unusually devoid of expression; what remained was grave and judicious. His voice was low and quiet—“very, very controlled,” Busby says—and seemingly all the quieter because of the contrast with the louder voices of his fellow subcommittee members, and with Capehart’s bellowing. But the members of his staff had learned that, terrible as were Lyndon Johnson’s tantrums, it was the things he said in that low, quiet voice that made them flinch, and hurt most deeply. And there was a force in his voice now that made his Texas twang even more penetrating than usual; it seemed to fill the room. Though the tone in which the questions were asked was neutral and judicious, moreover, the questions were not. His line of questioning had been developed for him by the great cross-examiner. Ralph Yarborough, in 1949 a lawyer in Austin, was to recall visiting Wirtz’s office there during the Olds hearings when the phone rang. “Wirtz picked up the receiver and talked for almost a half hour; his talk consisting almost entirely of questions of the type a lawyer might ask in court. ‘First ask him this—,’ he said into the phone. ‘Then ask him if he—’” Hanging up, Wirtz told Yarborough he had been talking to Lyndon Johnson. “He explained that Lyndon called him every day to report on the proceedings and to get more questions to be thrown at Olds….” And they were effective questions. Olds might have been attempting to explain the evolution of his philosophy, but Johnson wanted a somewhat simpler reply.

“Is it correct to state for the record that you have advocated public ownership of railroads and public ownership of utilities and public ownership of coal mines?” he asked.

Johnson wanted, he was to tell Olds a moment later, a “‘yes’ or ‘no’” answer to that question—and either answer, in that simple form, would have served his purpose. If Olds said no, Johnson could simply point to the sentences in the 1920s articles which, read alone, would appear to give the lie to that denial. A yes answer would create the headlines—“olds favored public ownership”—which would further the impression that he was a Communist. And if Olds replied yes, but said that he had changed his mind since he wrote the articles, that reply could be used to support Lyle’s charge that Olds was a “chameleon” who changed positions to remain in power—which, as Lyle had reminded the subcommittee (already, even without the reminder, well aware of the fact), was a typical Communist trick.

Olds felt that the question—“Have you advocated?”—was too broad to be answered accurately, since it seemed to apply to his entire career, and his position on the subject had changed during that career, and had never, even at the beginning, been as simple as the question implied. He didn’t want to answer the question without explaining that while he had at one time advocated public ownership, that advocacy had taken place in a context so different—the context of the 1920s—that what he meant by public ownership could not be understood if it was defined only in the context of 1949. And “public ownership” was in itself a misleadingly simplistic term, he felt; for example, he was later to say, what he had been advocating for utilities was cooperative ownership (such as the Pedernales Electric Co-op that Representative Lyndon Johnson had formed in Texas) and he did not consider that “as representing what we today mean by public ownership.” When Johnson asked, “Is it correct to state for the record that you have advocated public ownership?” Olds replied, “No, sir, I do not think that is a correct generalization.” He said he could “discuss that later at greater length”—evidently meaning in his prepared statement.

But Johnson was having none of that. “Have you advocated public ownership?” he demanded. “The answer then is no; is that right?”

“Not generally speaking,” Olds said. “For the last twenty years—” he started to say.

But Johnson did not allow him to finish the sentence. Leaning forward, he asked in the low, quiet voice: “Will you tell me whether you have advocated it or not? … I would like to know. I am not talking generally. I think you can say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

Well, actually, Olds tried to explain, he couldn’t say yes or no. As “a generalization covering the whole of my active life, it could not be said that I had. I do think that probably during the twenties—”

That sentence was cut off, too. “I do not want to cover any period of time,” Johnson said. “Have you ever advocated to your knowledge the public ownership of railroads, utilities and coal mines?”

Olds replied, “I think I have advocated it to the extent that those articles that were read this morning indicated.” When Johnson read a sentence from one of those articles that he regarded as damaging, Olds said, “I assume that is a correct statement of my position at that time…. According to my writing during the twenties, they were certainly radical writings; there is no question about that.”

Senator Reed chimed in. “Mr. Olds, cannot you make a direct reply to the Chairman’s question?” he asked. Olds said, “No, I cannot, Senator, for this reason. My thinking in this is not so simple as the Chairman’s question would indicate.” Furthermore, he said, it had been twenty years since he had last read the articles that Lyle had put into the record; he didn’t remember them. “I would have to have them before me to analyze it to tell you just exactly what I meant.” He asked for time to read them. “I would be glad to take them and give you the answer.”

But time was not something Olds was going to be given. The other subcommittee members now seemed freed from all restraint. “It was a lynching party,” says Melwood Van Scoyoc, the FPC aide who had accompanied Olds. To Olds’ request for time to read the articles, Reed replied with more attacks, and, dissatisfied with Olds’ replies, shouted, “I am talking about your evasion on these questions…. You have about run the gamut from one extreme certainly from the left-wing extreme, you have been there, according to your own statement.”

Johnson had arranged to have a duplicate stack of Lyle’s photostats, with the incriminating sentences clearly marked, placed before each of the senators. (No photostats had been given to Olds.) They read the sentences to Olds accusatorially, giving him little chance to reply. Capehart, particularly infuriated by Olds’ statement in a 1927 article that Russia was leading the world in attempting to end the exploitation of children in industry, shouted, “You felt that the communistic system in Russia was a great thing.” Olds tried to explain that he didn’t think the system was a great thing—“I have never thought their method of doing it was right”—yet their efforts on behalf of children were right, but before he could finish that thought, Capehart was on to another sentence, which compared the British trade union movement with labor in Russia. “What you were doing was boosting the Russian system, the communistic system in Russia.” “I had no intention of boosting the Russian system in Russia,” Olds said, but Capehart was already lifting the next photostat off the pile. Reed appeared to have difficulty understanding Olds’ points—referring to a sentence in a 1928 article in which Olds used the phrase “accumulators of wealth,” the Kansas senator said: “I want to ask you what you meant… when you own your own house you have accumulated some wealth. Are you going to take protection away from householders …?” And he appeared to have difficulty understanding the job Olds had held; he referred to the time “while you were on the Daily Worker in charge of the federated department.”

OLDS WENT ON SAYING that he wanted to explain his positions, and that his prepared statement would do so. But the statement remained unread on the table before him. For long minutes, the subcommittee’s chairman made no attempt to allow him to read it. Nor did he intervene to allow Olds to finish his answers to the senators’ questions; indeed, when their attack faltered, the chairman urged it on.

“I am surprised,” Lyndon Johnson said, “that Mr. Olds, who is writing this over a period of many years, does not remember what he advocated and does not say, ‘Yes, I advocated it. I do not share that view now, but I did say it.’ … You advocated taking over the electric industry and operating utilities as cooperatives…. I do not want somebody to drum up some charges here and say you advocate nationalization…. I just want to know what your mind was at that time….”

“I want you to know what my mind was at that time,” Olds tried to explain. “The reason I did not answer the question as far as utilities was concerned, perfectly direct, was because I do not consider the statement as it was read in the record, cooperative ownership, as representing what we today mean by public ownership.”

But Johnson did not lose sight of the point. “Have you ever advocated public ownership of utilities?” he demanded again. And he finally did obtain a one-word answer. When Olds, after several further exchanges, said, “Do you want me to tell you what I advocate today?” Johnson said, “I want you to answer that question ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” “No, I do not,” Leland Olds said.

A few minutes later, Johnson said, in a statement somewhat at variance with the fact that he had organized the hearings around those twenty-year-old articles, “The important thing for this committee to determine—and I hope we will this week—is not what is represented in those articles twenty years ago. They are here and speak for themselves. It is the views of the nominee as represented before this committee today, and I regret that you find it necessary to somewhat generalize, hedge on what happened twenty-five years ago…. What those reports contain, what happened back in 1920, 1921, we can accept those. Let us get down to the question of what you think now.”

And Johnson’s efforts left the senators with the impression he wanted them to have. A comment by Senator Reed showed how clever Wirtz’s trap had been—and how Olds did not really have the option of saying he had once advocated public ownership but no longer held that view. “Let me make a little comment there, Mr. Chairman,” Senator Reed said. “Mr. Olds is a very able and very clever man who wrote a lot and talked a lot; probably assumed a lot of different positions throughout his career.” (Later that day, Reed would make another comment. He made this one to a reporter for the United Press. “Here is a man who is a full-fledged, first-class Communist,” he said.)

EVERY TIME OLDS TRIED TO EXPLAIN, the senators sitting above him on the dais would interrupt—almost in alternation: Capehart, then Reed, then Johnson, then Capehart again, two senators known as conservatives, one senator known as a liberal, refusing to let Olds explain. Two senators shouting—Capehart’s round face red in his rage—one senator speaking in a soft, emotionless voice, all three tarring him over and over with the same brush.

And the interruptions had an effect on Olds. A reporter wrote that “as committee members frequently interrupted” him, he “rocked back and forth in the witness chair.” Busby, who had only seen Olds once before and briefly, was to tell the author that Olds had “a nervous tic—his head would jerk.” But Olds did not have a nervous tic, and Van Scoyoc understood. “He kept trying to explain, trying to explain,” Van Scoyoc says. “And they wouldn’t let him. Every time he started, they would interrupt him: Didn’t you appear with Browder? Didn’t you write for the Daily Worker? Didn’t you say Russia had a better system for educating children? It was like they were punching him over and over. He’d keep trying to start, and every time they’d shout him down. And after a while, every time they’d start to shout, his head would jerk back.”

RETURNING TO HIS OFFICE after the luncheon recess, Johnson found on his desk two Washington newspapers that had appeared that morning with columns about the renomination fight, both apparently based in part on what the columnists had heard about the “whispers” being circulated on Capitol Hill.

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 theWashington 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.

While I would not depart from the basic principle that great institutions such as our corporations must recognize their social responsibility as a moderating influence on the quest for private profits, I think it is pretty generally recognized today that the acceptance of such responsibility is not only a corporate duty, but that in the long run it benefits, through increased prosperity, the corporate owners themselves.

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.”

SENATOR JOHNSON.  Do you think it is now?

MR. OLDS.  I think it is coming much closer to it, Mr. Chairman. I think there has been tremendous progress made in the direction of the reform of capitalism.

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:

I want to answer categorically any contention that I was writing for the Daily Worker. I was doing so no more than writers for any press service which that paper takes today may be said to be writing for it. Actually, my articles were appearing in papers as widely separated as the Seattle Union Record and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers’ Journal….

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.

SENATOR JOHNSON.  You do not think the other members … can be actively counted on to pursue a policy of active regulation?

MR. OLDS.  I think there would be a change in the policy of the Commission if the …

SENATOR JOHNSON.  Why don’t you answer my question?

MR. OLDS.  I am trying to answer it.

SENATOR JOHNSON.  You are evading it.

MR. OLDS.  I do not, I frankly do not…

SENATOR JOHNSON.  That is what I want you to say, if that is what you think. I do not want you to hedge and dodge and get away from it and make a speech on another subject.

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.”)

LELAND OLDS 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.”

AFTER OLDS 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.”)

•    •    •

JOHNSON 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.”

The Daily Worker reported his appearance once on the same platform with Earl Browder, the chairman of the Communist Party. That really hit the Senators hard.

“I am shocked,” said Senator McFarland of Arizona. “Shocked beyond words!” Which in the case of a Senator, could be a third-degree shock, possibly fatal. But the sturdy Arizonan rose to his feet and departed for the Senate chamber, apparently not wishing to hear any more.

If Senator McFarland had detoured by way of the Congressional Library and asked for a copy of Elizabeth Dilling’s book, The Roosevelt Red Record and Its Background, he’d have got a shock that would have finished him. On page 59 he would have found a picture of Earl Browder taken with four men with whom he had just shared the platform at a meeting of the American Youth Congress. And who is the smiling gentleman sitting in the middle? None other than the senior senator from Ohio, Mr. Taft.

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.

LATE 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.)

THE 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.”

And, Head declared, Olds had already “accomplished much” of his agenda. “The entire history of his administration in the Federal Power Commission can well be characterized as a bite-by-bite process…. How far away is the last juicy bite, the destruction of the ‘myth of private property’?”

During his ten years on the FPC, Head declared, Olds had been “indoctrinating” the FPC “with the tenets of, shall we say, communistic, or, shall we say identical with communistic thoughts, that is evident in his writings of the twenties…. Why should Mr. Olds continue to write for the Federated Press, for the Daily Worker (for Industrial Solidarity) when he can write for the Federal Power Commission and accomplish much more? Mr. Olds is boring from within; Mr. Olds is a termite; Mr. Olds is gnawing away the very foundations upon which this Government exists.”

Who knew, Head asked, how far such hidden communistic influence might extend? “The elements in this country which support the philosophy which Mr. Olds represents are stronger than I had realized,” he said. There was, for example, the Washington Post, “which, as I understand, is what is called one of your more advanced papers.”

“In the Post there appear the writings of a man by the name of Childs,” Head noted. Marquis Childs’ attacks on the Natural Gas Act, he said, “seem strangely reminiscent of the words of Mr. Olds” and are part of “the greatest organized campaign of propaganda … that I have ever witnessed.” Not only Childs but “a man by the name of Mellett, I believe, and another man by the name of Stokes have been in the forefront of the attack.”

And, Head declared, “this morning the apex of misrepresentation occurred.” He was referring to the editorial in the Washington Post which called John Lyle’s testimony “despicable” because of its attempt “to smear Mr. Olds as a Red.” The editorial, Head said, was “the culmination of this propaganda campaign, waged by Mr. Olds’ machine…. No greater pack of lies has ever existed than that.”

THE POST EDITORIAL had evidently struck a nerve not only with Head but with the subcommittee’s chairman. And Mellett’s column was a danger signal. What if other liberal columnists—the columnists who had believed that Lyndon Johnson was a liberal—appeared at the hearings, and saw what Mellett had seen? To telephone calls from liberal friends Wednesday evening inquiring about the reports they had been hearing, Johnson assured them that the reports were incorrect: Olds had indeed been labeled a Communist, he said, but not by him. On the contrary, he told the callers, he had attempted to stop such smears. He told the callers to come to the hearings and see for themselves.

Lyndon Johnson’s behavior that Thursday morning was, for a time, as studiously impartial as it had been—for a time—after Wednesday’s Stokes and Othman columns had appeared. He repeatedly attempted to document the even-handedness with which he had conducted the hearings by emphasizing that any witness—whether pro- or anti-Olds—would be allowed to appear: “I just want to be sure that the record shows that every man who wanted to say anything had his say,” he declared at one point. He even attempted to distance himself from the most violent aspects of Bonner’s testimony, thereby decrying in public the very words he had approved in private. “Now, Mr. Bonner,” he admonished him at one point during his testimony, “there is no testimony before this committee that Mr. Olds was a member of the Communist Party…. There is no one who testified that he is disloyal to his Government. As a matter of fact, we had witnesses all day yesterday who talked about how loyal he had been.” (Bonner would shortly be writing to “Dear Lyndon” to “compliment you on … the very able manner in which the entire hearing was conducted,” and to gloat over his testimony’s success in producing headlines. “Half the states … quoted my own statement… particularly the expression ‘punk’ which I used”).

During the testimony of anti-Olds witnesses the chairman’s stopwatch remained in his pocket; even though Head’s testimony consumed more time than he had requested, Johnson made no reference to “time consumed.” And during Bonner’s testimony, the chairman departed from his previous practice. The Houston attorney had come equipped with his own photostat: a typed four-page summary—provenance unknown—of information from the files of the House Un-American Activities Committee: “Subject, Leland Olds.” Bonner, holding the photostat out to Johnson, asked that it be made a part of the record. When other witnesses had presented exhibits with a similar request, Johnson had simply said, “Without objection, it will be made a part of the record,” and had indicated that the documents should be handed to a committee clerk. But with this exhibit—perhaps because Senator Bricker, who was particularly susceptible to HUAC information and who had been out of town, had just made his first appearance at the hearing, and could not be relied on to read through the transcript of previous testimony—Johnson, before handing this exhibit to a clerk, said, “For the benefit of the committee, I will read the article [sic] into the record”—and did so, every word. Only after ten minutes of his recitation—“In Report 1311 of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, dated March 29, 1944, the Federated Press was cited as a Communist-controlled organization…. In the report of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, dated January 3, 1939, the Trade Union Educational League was cited as a project put under control of and made amenable to the central executive committee of the Communist Party of America”—did Johnson add a disclaimer. “Now I will say that the testimony yesterday by Mr. Olds covered most of the references…. Mr. Olds testified that he never belonged to the Communist Party….”

He got the reaction from Bricker he wanted—both then (“He did not deny any of this charge, then, on page 4?”) and at the end of the hearings, when Head was winding up his testimony. “In conclusion, I say this,” Head declared. “Leland Olds is a fraud, he is a fraud on his friends who appeared here in his behalf; he is a fraud on the consuming public whom he fills with misleading statements. He is a fraud on the press, whom he fills with misleading statements, and he is a fraud on the people of the United States of America.” “It is a good, strong, positive statement, certainly,” said Senator Bricker.

And Johnson again got the headlines he wanted. Newspapers in states across the country did indeed, as Bonner boasted, carry some version of his statement; a headline in the Houston Post, for example, said: “LELAND OLDS LABELED CRACKPOT AND TRAITOR.” The attorney’s colorful phrases—along with Head’s—provided rich grist for newspapers predisposed to be hostile to Olds, enlivening the articles under the headlines; the first sentence in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s article informed readers that “Leland Olds, President Truman’s choice for a third term on the Federal Power Commission, today was branded a ‘punk,’ a ‘crackpot,’ a ‘jackass’ and a ‘traitor’ by a witness before the Senate Commerce Committee.” “Denounced as a traitor to his country,” reported theChicago Tribune.

JOHNSON HAD ALLOWED only two full days for the hearings, and his emphasis on dispatch was perhaps explained by a remark he made to other subcommittee members Thursday afternoon: “The rumor has gone around today that maybe the proponents would like to continue the hearing on into next week some time until they get some more articles written, and things like that.” By taking Olds’ supporters by surprise, he had kept them from mobilizing support behind the embattled commissioner. He didn’t want to give them time to mobilize now.

A stumbling block now appeared in the road to speedy conclusion, however. Olds asked for a chance to reply to the charges against him.

He had asked on Wednesday, as he was rising from the witness chair, and Johnson had said, “I think that can be worked out.”

Johnson’s idea of “working it out,” however, involved speed. The rest of the hearings would wind up Thursday afternoon; Olds could reply, Johnson said, on Saturday morning. But when, on Thursday, Olds asked the committee clerk for the transcript of Lyle’s testimony, and the exhibits upon which it was based—the fifty-four Federated Press articles—he was informed they would “not be available” until sometime Friday.

Olds thereupon wrote to Johnson requesting a postponement until the following Wednesday. “The material selected by Representative Lyle purports to be selected from articles which I wrote more than twenty years ago and which … number some 1,800,” he said. “To have such material thrust upon me at a moment’s notice and without an opportunity to relate the selected articles to my work, placed me in a position in which I could make no adequate comment…. I am, therefore, writing you … to renew my request for opportunity to study the record and to make such answers as I believe necessary in a public hearing.”

Reasonable though Olds’ request may have seemed, however, it was not to be granted. Rather than replying to Olds himself, Johnson had a Commerce Committee clerk, Edward Cooper, do it. At seven o’clock Thursday night, Cooper telephoned Olds that the schedule would not be changed: his reply was still scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday. And Cooper made clear that there would also be no change in the schedule for providing him with the transcript on which the reply would be based: that would still not be available until sometime Friday. Olds was being given twenty-four hours—or less—to prepare his defense.

There was what Olds was to call a “big heap” of Federated Press clippings in his house on McKinley Street in northwest Washington, but he hadn’t looked at them in years, and they had just been tied together haphazardly; merely to sort through them and to arrange them in some kind of order would take hours. And he knew he didn’t have many—perhaps most—of the articles Lyle had cited; it had taken teams of investigators weeks of sorting through copies of old newspapers in libraries to compile a complete file for the prosecution. Following Cooper’s call, Olds worked until midnight Thursday sorting through the clippings, and arose to continue at five-thirty Friday morning—still without having seen the transcript to which his defense was supposed to reply. As the impossibility of preparing an adequate defense by Saturday became apparent, Olds telephoned Johnson to plead for more time. “I had asked for Wednesday,” he said; if that was impossible, “I feel that in justice I should have until Monday to get this answer ready. I am appealing to you to let me have until Monday….”

“I talked to the [sub]committee before I called,” Johnson replied. “Some of them will be out of town Monday. They suggested you take Saturday….”

When Olds obstinately balked at this suggestion, Johnson casually unveiled a threat. Of course, he said, if Olds insisted on submitting additional material, Lyle would testify again—and submit additional material himself. “He said he had some pretty recent statements and will come back with some more comparisons,” Johnson said. “Said he had some more of your views he would like to read into the record.” And Johnson insisted firmly on his own point of view. When Olds mentioned the “voluminous record” he had to study, Johnson said the issue was actually quite simple. The subcommittee’s “viewpoint,” he said, “is that there are some fifty articles and that you either wrote them or you did not. It shouldn’t take any time to decide that.” When Olds said that the White House “want[s] me to deal with this thing as fully as I think I ought to,” Johnson replied: “You either wrote the article or you did not. We put the page and paragraph and you can check them.” “It is not as simple as that,” Olds said.

It was not he who objected to delay, Johnson said, but other members of the subcommittee: “As far as I am concerned I will have no objection. I will recommend it. I want to be as fair as I can…. I will treat you just as I would want you to treat me if the positions were reversed. I will talk to them and if I can get them to be agreeable I will let you know….”

Later, Johnson called back, and said that the subcommittee had agreed to the Monday date. “Well, you are very kind,” Leland Olds said. “And I appreciate what the others did very much, too.” He wouldn’t have the five days he had asked—a meagre enough time to defend a lifetime’s work—but at least he would have a whole weekend.

“AT THE OUTSET I want to state simply and categorically that I am not a Communist,” Olds said on Monday morning. “I never was a Communist. I am and always have been loyal to my country. I am and always have been a profound believer in democracy. In my opinion the very theory of Russian communism represents a negation of democracy.

“I did write radically during the period publicized by Mr. Lyle,” Olds said. “I did so because I believed radical writing was needed in the ‘golden twenties’ to shock the American people, and particularly labor, out of social and political lethargy…. I felt that unless the American people were aroused to do something about it, the American way of life would be in real jeopardy.”

Olds’ prepared statement then would have gone on to analyze, one by one, the articles which Lyle claimed showed his “alien” philosophy. But Johnson may have been working that weekend, too, with the man who said, “First ask him this—” “Then ask him if he—” Hardly had Olds begun reading this analysis when Johnson cut him off—cut him off with questions that applied to the articles as a single group, and in the broadest, most simple (or, to be more precise, simplistic) terms. “Mr. Olds,” he demanded, leaning forward across the dais and speaking in a very soft tone in which every word was carefully enunciated, “do you repudiate those writings?” And when Olds said he didn’t, Johnson asked: “Do you reiterate them? Do you reassert them?”

MR. OLDS.  I am going to discuss those writings in terms of Mr. Lyle’s presentation and tell you exactly what those writings mean.

SENATOR JOHNSON. We are going to be able to judge what they mean. We will be glad to have your viewpoint upon what they mean, but the question I want to ask you: Do you still feel as you did when you wrote those articles?

MR. OLDS.  No. I have indicated that the change in the circumstances in this country, and the change in my thinking that has gone along with it, would lead me to write some of those articles in a somewhat different way today.

SENATOR JOHNSON.  But there has been a change in your thinking since those articles were written?

MR. OLDS.  There has been a change in my thinking.

SENATOR JOHNSON.  Then you do repudiate certain things you said then?

MR. OLDS.  I do not repudiate them as said at that time in terms of my relationship to that period in which I was writing.

Repeatedly, as Olds attempted to explain the points he had been trying to make during the 1920s, Johnson would cut in, demanding that he either “repudiate” or “reassert” them. Repeatedly, Olds would try to explain to Johnson that the situation was not as simple as the question made it appear. His thinking had changed, he said over and over, but those writings represented what his thinking had been at the time. He still believed that they represented his thinking at the time. For example, “I did not think then, and I do not think now, that private enterprise in the 1920s was providing a decent family wage or assurance of security or even protection.” And, he said, he therefore could not honestly repudiate them.

But simplicity was what Johnson was interested in. Over and over, when Olds attempted to explain what he had meant by an article, how it related to the times in which it had been written, or how its meaning had been altered by changes in political or economic conditions, Johnson would cut in, demanding that he either “repudiate” what he had written or “reiterate” it.

Whoever framed that question—Alvin Wirtz, Horace Busby, Lyndon Johnson himself—could be proud of its effectiveness, for it placed Olds again in a trap. Refusal to repudiate a specific article could be interpreted to mean that the witness still held the beliefs expressed in it. If he said he did repudiate the article, his repudiation could be taken as proof that he was indeed a “chameleon” willing to express any view that would keep him in power—so that he could further his secret communistic aims.

Had Olds been allowed actually to deal with the articles Lyle had quoted, his answers would have been definitive. The articles may have been “carried in the Daily Worker,” he said, but they had not been written for the Daily Worker, but for the Federated Press subscribers in general, and many other, non-Communist, papers had carried them. (In a further demonstration of Johnson’s sophistry—and of Johnson’s sensitivity to criticism—when Olds said this, the chairman turned to the other senators, made a palms-up gesture of injured innocence, and said, “The committee has not charged him, and so far as I know no other witness has charged him, with being an employee of the Daily Worker. And we do not want the country to get the impression that he has been so charged.”)*

But Olds almost never got to make his points in an uninterrupted, coherent way. When, for example, he attempted to explain what he had meant when he wrote during the 1920s of the necessity for labor to obtain increased political power, Johnson said: “I am not asking you what you meant. I am asking you what you said.”

“I made that statement, yes,” Olds replied.

“You repudiate it today?” Johnson demanded.

“I repudiate it in the sense in which it is understood by you gentlemen,” Olds said.

“I am not saying what the understanding is. I am asking, do you repudiate or do you reiterate it?”

“I would repudiate it,” Olds said. “… What I was trying to describe is still going on, but I think I would repudiate today the way I said it then. I would say it in different terms today, if that is what you mean.”

More than an hour after Olds resumed the witness stand, with his written statement barely begun, Johnson was still employing this tactic. (“The question the committee is considering is, What did you say? Did you say it? If so, Do you repeat it today? … If you said them, say so. If you believe them, say so. You have a right to say that and thank God in this country a man can still exercise some free speech.”) At that point, Senator McFarland stepped in, as he had done on the first day of Olds’ testimony, saying, “Mr. Chairman, I was just going to suggest that probably the best way would be for us to, nearly as we can, let Mr. Olds finish his statement in chief and then we would go back and bring up anything that we wanted in the nature that the chairman has suggested…. I believe that he ought to get in the record, in any way that he wants to, his explanation and then come back to the questions.” Only then did the pace of the interruptions slacken—they never stopped completely—sufficiently so that, two hours later, Olds could get to the end of his statement.

The “repudiate” or “reiterate” tactic was effective with conservative journalists. Some of them, like nationally syndicated columnist Gould Lincoln, felt they knew how to interpret Olds’ refusal to “repudiate.”

Mr. Olds himself told the Senate Committee that he would have written the articles differently today—but he did not recant.

This raises again the issue whether the Administration is inclined to be soft with the Reds and fellow-travelers….

Other conservative journalists felt Olds had recanted—and they knew how to interpret that. Calling him “chameleon-minded,” the Dallas Morning News editorialized that he “no longer thinks along radical lines” only because he is in power. But “what guarantee have we of what his thinking will be tomorrow?” the editorial asked.

The tactic was effective also with the subcommittee members. As a Time correspondent explained, some of its members felt that “he is a radical and that he switches position and policy with rapid facility” while others were angered by his refusal to switch—“He had plenty of chances to renounce his inflammatory writings … but he declined to do so—That did weigh heavily against him.”

THE SUBCOMMITTEE had been carefully selected for its susceptibility to testimony about Leland Olds’ radicalism, and the effect of that testimony had been as powerful as even Lyndon Johnson could have wished—as was proven when, the following morning, Tuesday, October 4, its seven members met in Lyndon Johnson’s office to cast their votes on the nomination. For the President had decided to fight for his nominee. After hearing a summary of the previous day’s testimony, he had written a letter to Commerce Committee Chairman Ed Johnson, and the Coloradan read it to the subcommittee.

“I am aware of the efforts that have been made to discredit Mr. Olds before your committee,” Harry Truman wrote. And it was because of those efforts that he was writing—“because of the nature of the opposition that has been expressed to his confirmation.”

“Nothing has been presented in testimony there which raises any doubt in my mind as to his integrity, loyalty or ability,” Truman said. “Much that has been said about him is largely beside the point. The issue before us is not whether we agree with everything Mr. Olds may have ever said or even whether we agree with all of his actions as a member of the Federal Power Commission. The issue is whether his whole record is such as to lead us to believe that he will serve the nation well as a member of the Federal Power Commission.”

On that issue, Truman said, the record is clear. During ten years on the Commission, “he has served ably, and loyally….” He is “a nationally recognized champion of effective utility regulation; his record shows that he is also a champion of fair regulation.” During those years, Truman said, Olds has “made enemies…. Powerful corporations subject to regulation by the commission have not been pleased with Mr. Olds. They now seek to prevent his confirmation for another term. It would be most unfortunate if they should succeed. We cannot allow great corporations to dominate the commissions which have been created to regulate them.”

Ed Johnson had received Truman’s letter the previous evening, had discussed it with Lyndon Johnson, and a reply had been drafted. It might have been (and perhaps was) drafted by the same hand that had drafted Lyle’s testimony, so closely did it follow its theme.

The President might feel, “Mr. Wisdom” wrote him, that Olds’ articles were “beside the point,” but the subcommittee begged to disagree. “The subcommittee,” he said, “was shocked beyond description by the … views expressed by Olds some years ago.” He would, he said, “include herewith a few excerpts”—and he quoted several of the paragraphs Lyle had quoted.

Certainly, Olds had sounded sincere in claiming that his views had evolved, Ed Johnson said—that was another reason for distrusting him. “The committee found Mr. Olds glib of tongue and very convincing. Like many crusaders for foreign ideologies he has an attractive personality and is disarming to a very high degree.” Despite the presence of four Democrats, members of the President’s party, on the subcommittee, its vote on a resolution, introduced by Lyndon Johnson, to report the presidential nomination to the full committee with the recommendation that it be rejected was a unanimous 7–0. The next day, as the New York Times reported, “President Truman’s earnest appeal for the confirmation of Leland Olds for a third term as Federal Power Commissioner fell on deaf ears again” when the full Commerce Committee “voted 10 to 2, against the nominee.”

WHEN A TELEGRAM ANNOUNCING the committee vote was read to a meeting of the International Petroleum Association of America in Fort Worth, the eight hundred oil and natural gas producers in attendance broke into cheers and rebel yells.

The reaction was different in Washington—in those precincts of Washington in which Lyndon Johnson had for so long held himself forth as a liberal, as the protégé of Franklin Roosevelt, as a crusader against the forces of conservatism in Texas.

The first reaction was shock—for so thoroughly had the preparations been concealed that it was only as the subcommittee and committee took their votes that the liberal community woke up fully to what had been done. “What a subcommittee!” The New Republic exclaimed. “It’s been packed. They even brought in Bricker and Capehart. If we were a defendant in Russia and saw such a mackerel-eyed bunch as that looking down at us from the bench we’d start writing confessions quick.”

Then there was outrage over the way in which it had been done: over the method used to reject Olds—the Communist smear. As The New Republic put it: “Olds, shouts the Senate committee shaking the yellowed pages of newspapers 20 years old, is the glib salesman of a foreign ideology. Who, then, are the Americans? Olds is the product of New England’s Protestant conscience, of social work in Boston slums and of Pennsylvania steel strikes, of Frank Walsh and Franklin Roosevelt….” The views Olds had held in the 1920s were views so many liberals had held, liberals pointed out. “I know of few men worth their intellectual salt who didn’t have some of the doubts Olds had at the time,” Max Lerner said. In an editorial in the Washington Post, Alan Barth wrote that “Like many a young man, he [Olds] was in a great hurry to reform the world [and] said some extravagant things in his column 25 years ago. Taken out of context and looked at in the light of today’s relationship between left and right, they may be made to seem extremely radical. But the social conditions of 25 years ago invited radicalism. A man could denounce open-shop capitalism in those days without being called a Communist or being considered disloyal to the United States. The elder La Follette did so.”

And Olds’ views were not the true reason for the campaign against him, which was, The Nation said, actually a “vendetta … a flagrant attempt by vested interests to exclude from office a man who proved too ‘consumer-minded’ to suit their purposes.” The real issue was the immense profits to be made from natural gas, I. F. Stone explained. “This is the reason for the fight on Olds. If he had been willing to knuckle under on the issue, he would have been forgiven the authorship of Das Kapital itself.” But, these liberal writers knew, the campaign had been successful, frighteningly successful. As Lerner put it: “Once the issue of Olds-as-onetime-devil was raised, no one dared line up on his side. The hunting of dangerous thought has overridden every other quest. None of the Senators dared to take a chance that someday an opponent would accuse him of having voted for a man who had once criticized our master-institution of corporate power.” And these writers understood the larger implications of that success. “No one in the government service is safe unless he played an intellectual Caspar Milquetoast from the moment he left his teens,” Lerner declared. The Olds case was teaching Washington that “all a lobbyist has to do is dig up something vaguely pink or crimson in a recalcitrant official’s past to ruin him,” I. F. Stone said. As the Christian Science Monitor reported: “It is hardly surprising that the case of Leland Olds has embittered Washington as few such cases have in recent years.”

And, as awareness grew of Lyndon Johnson’s role in the campaign, increasingly the liberals’ bitterness began to be directed against him—for many of them were now coming to believe that Lyndon Johnson had betrayed them. The awareness had grown slowly. His friends had not previously focused on the fact that he was the chairman of the subcommittee against which they were raging, but now, criticizing the subcommittee for being “so hostile to Olds that it resembles the House Un-American Activities Committee under J. Parnell Thomas,” The New Republic rectified the omission—with a vengeance. In an editorial entitled “The Enemies of Leland Olds,” the magazine said that “Against Olds is a onetime liberal Senator, Lyndon Johnson, born into the family of a poor farmer, brought forward by the New Deal, and carried into office by liberal and labor support. Johnson, who saw his first backer, Aubrey Williams, hounded out of government on charges of Communism, now is hounding Olds out on the same charges—Johnson, who boasted that ‘Roosevelt was a Daddy to me.’ How Roosevelt would have scorned such backsliding!” Increasingly, in newspaper articles and editorials, the subcommittee was identified as “Johnson’s subcommittee.”

Over the weekend during which Olds was sorting frantically through ancient clippings, trying to assemble his defense, anew issue of Fortune magazine appeared on Washington newsstands with an article whose timing was, from Johnson’s point of view, unfortunate. Among the photographs accompanying the article—on the “Big Rich” of the Texas and Louisiana Gold Coasts—was a picture of the two Brown brothers, Herman and George, and the article reminded the capital that “a tremendous item in which they [the Browns] have big holdings is Texas Eastern Transmission Co., owner and operator of the Big Inch and Little Inch pipelines…. Although they are pretty sure that there is no such thing as good publicity, they are well known in select circles. These include potent people in Washington. They once put up $100,000 to back Lyndon Johnson for Congress….” (“This,” Lowell Mellett commented in the Washington Star, “may explain the strange tangent taken by the subcommittee under Senator Johnson’s chairmanship.”)

The sense of betrayal was sharpest among those who had thought they knew Lyndon Johnson best: the small circle of liberal friends who for years, at their dinner tables, had heard him talk so eloquently about cheap electricity (“Public power was a passion with him”) and about the rapaciousness of the private utilities. This circle, in fact, included some of the lawyers who had helped him circumvent the law to keep the Senate seat he had won in such questionable circumstances, because they had believed that by helping him win, they were helping to bring a strong new liberal voice to the Senate.

Decades later, Jim Rowe, who had long been tied psychologically as well as politically to Johnson’s career, and who in many interviews with the author had defended unpleasant episodes in that career, at first tried to do the same with the Olds episode. In his thoughtful, understated manner, he said that he understood the reason for Johnson’s determination to block Olds’ renomination: “Because he wanted to solidify himself with the oil crowd in Texas. You could not be a senator from Texas without making your peace with them. I don’t think he liked [doing] it, but he was a pragmatic fellow….” After talking in this vein for several minutes, however, Rowe paused and stared down at the desk in his paneled law office—and the pause lasted for some time. When he resumed talking, he did so in a different vein. While he could have accepted Johnson’s blocking of Olds, he said, he had always found it difficult to accept Johnson’s tactics. Speaking very slowly, with long halts between words, Rowe said, “He grabbed onto the goddamned Commie thing and just ran with it and ran with it.” There was another pause. “Just ran with it,” Rowe said. “Ran it into the ground for no reason we could see.”

Rowe’s partner, Tommy Corcoran, Johnson’s chief fund-raiser in liberal circles but a man tied psychologically to no cause but his own, was to say: “I told him [Johnson] to his face one day … that I thought it was the rottenest thing he’d ever done, and that he could take it or leave it…. The [Commerce] Committee did as dirty a job of trying to crucify this guy à la McCarthy as I have ever heard.” Corcoran’s sidekick, Ben Cohen, was always less loquacious than Tommy the Cork, but he could, in his quiet way, be equally eloquent. When asked about Johnson’s tactics in the Olds fight, Cohen replied in a single word: “Shameful.”

For some other leading Washington liberals, less under Johnson’s spell than Rowe or Corcoran, the shock was less severe, for his “We of the South” speech in March had forewarned them that all was not as they had believed. Joe Rauh, who in 1948 had worked all night—along with Rowe and Corcoran—on the legal briefs that persuaded Justice Hugo Black to issue the last-minute ruling that saved Johnson’s election, says he had been “disgusted” by the speech, so that when Johnson’s maneuvers against Olds were revealed, “I wasn’t surprised. I already knew. The tide had turned with Lyndon Johnson.”

Rauh was not alone. He recalls that even before the Olds hearing “there were discussions. What’s happened? This is not the shining New Deal fellow…. The lustre of winning the [1948] election went off pretty fast.” Nonetheless, the speed, and thoroughness, of the transformation—as made clear in the Olds case—was startling; the election had, after all, been barely a year before. During the court fight over the contested election, Rauh recalls, “Corcoran called to get me on the defense team and said, ‘This wonderful congressman …’ In [Abe] Fortas’ office these people were talking about what a great man we were defending. I just sort of automatically assumed it…. But it soon became clear that Johnson was not the shining knight that I was led to believe, that he was a totally different political figure … than he had been in the Roosevelt days…. I was quickly disabused of the notion that this was a New Deal guy. But it was the meanness of the use of these things [Olds’ 1920s articles] that so attracted my attention.” Leland Olds “was a great American,” Joe Rauh says. What Johnson did to him was “really vicious … one of the dirtiest pieces of work ever done.” Rauh says that “I sort of felt dirty, and double-crossed by Tommy. I goddamned Tommy for getting [me to] help….” Opinion had turned even among the wives of the New Deal set who had been so charmed by the tall young congressman. “My, I wish I could have my campaign contribution back,” Elizabeth Purcell, wife of SEC Chairman Ganson Purcell, said at one Georgetown party.

LIBERALS ATTEMPTED TO ORGANIZE. The effort had already started in the White House, with Truman’s letter, and now the President ordered Clark Clifford to mobilize support from New Deal “names.” Clifford asked Olds who he thought might help, and on a notepad on his desk, Leland Olds scribbled an address, 29 Washington Square West, New York, N.Y.—the address of the widow who bore the greatest name of all. And Clifford reported Eleanor Roosevelt’s response: “Enthusiastic—will do it at once and discuss it later.”

Olds was evidently not sure that Mrs. Roosevelt even remembered him. Writing her, at Clifford’s direction, to give her details on the renomination battle (“The main line of attack has been an all-out effort to picture me as a communist…. Unfortunately our old friend Lyndon Johnson is supporting [that] point of view”), he added a reminder of battles long past, as if feeling it necessary to identify himself. “You may recall that we presented the evidence which … enabled Governor Roosevelt to start successful regulation in New York State,” he wrote. And the letter’s final sentences are sentences written by a man who, in dark days, is trying to remind himself of a time when days had been bright.

I had the never-to-be-forgotten privilege to play a small part in your husband’s great work. I look back with a sense of happiness to the one or two instances when you invited us to join the family luncheon at the Executive Mansion when Frank P. Walsh and I were seeing the Governor on the St. Lawrence project.

Mrs. Roosevelt’s next “My Day” column showed that she remembered.

“I knew Mr. Olds when my husband was governor of New York State,” she wrote. “He started his battle then for sound utility and power policy…. Mr. Olds’ work must have been well done because it brought about changes in the state…. A program of effective [national] regulation was later … secured by the Federal Power Commission when Mr. Olds, himself, was chairman of the commission.”

She had nothing but scorn, Eleanor Roosevelt said, for those who had raised the Communist issue. “The horrible fact has been brought out that he once spoke on the same platform with Earl Browder. I don’t know what that proves…. Can’t our senators and representatives see thru this opposition and recognize honest public servants? Must they swallow such an obvious Red-herring allegation on Communism?”

Other friends were attempting to mobilize, friends who would have been working for Olds for months had someone contacted them: New York’s Governor Lehman, under whom Olds had served; Morris Cooke of the REA; Angus McDonald of the National Farmer’s Union, Donald Montgomery of the CIO, Walter Munro of the Trainmen—men whose support could have weighed heavily with senators. Many great names from the farmers’ movement and the labor movement and from the New Deal had, as the tenor of the subcommittee hearings became clear, been telephoning the White House, wanting to help. And there were editorials in leading liberal newspapers around the country—some quite eloquent. “Certain senators,” the Louisville Courier-Journal said, “have been able to make patriotism appear to be disloyalty, and to make protest against wrong seem an act of revolution.”

But it was too late. The hearings—and the subcommittee and committee vote—were already faits accomplis. The surprise had been total. Men who would have testified had not done so. Jerry Voorhiis wrote a long statement on behalf of the National Cooperative League, but he wrote it after the hearings were over. Thanks to the thoroughness with which Johnson had selected the subcommittee’s membership, moreover, there was no Senate supporter of Olds familiar with the testimony, and, now, with the hearings over and the vote of the full Senate imminent, there was no senator who was organizing support to make an effective presentation on the Senate floor. During the same conversation in which Clifford told Olds that “many want to do something,” the White House aide also told Olds that his friends had “no place to plug in.” At one point, in a remark that points up vividly the disparity between Lyndon Johnson’s operation and the effort the Olds supporters were attempting to start, Clifford had to remind Olds of the “importance of accurate poll[ing]” of the senators.

And more time might not have helped. Max Lerner had been correct when he wrote in the New York Post about senators not “daring” to support Olds once the “Communist” issue had been raised. Senator Tobey’s abrupt departure—and failure to return—to the hearing room had been a straw in the wind. On the day after the hearings, reporters polled senators—and found only twenty-nine who said they would vote for the President’s nominee, a shockingly small number in a Senate containing fifty-four members of the President’s party.

Truman thereupon ordered Democratic National Chairman William M. Boyle Jr. to send telegrams to all members of the Democratic National Committee and to state Democratic chairmen urging them to contact their senators and ask them to support Olds. Predictably, that maneuver backfired, for the Senate viewed Truman’s effort as an attack on its cherished independence—“a brazen effort,” Andrew Schoeppel of Kansas called it. Terming it “a deliberate effort to threaten and coerce the members of the Senate,” Harry Byrd said, “President Truman appears to believe that the United States Senate should be an adjunct to his own office, whereby he can issue orders as he pleases.” So predictable was the Senate’s reaction that more than one observer speculated that, in the words of Time magazine, Truman must have “deliberately courted trouble.” Reporters’ polls showed that after Truman’s attempt the number of senators willing to vote for Olds dropped to twenty-four. Leland Olds’ nomination was dead—a simple voice or roll-call vote would have killed it.

But Lyndon Johnson didn’t want a simple vote—for while he had won the Olds fight, he had not yet reaped from it the reward he wanted: recognition by the oil and natural gas industry that he was its savior and champion. The necessity to appear impartial in his role as subcommittee chairman had forced him to disguise the fact that he had organized and stage-managed the hearings—and the disguise had been so successful that his role had not been broadly publicized. Newspaper articles on the hearings had quoted Lyle, or Bonner, or Head—or, when they quoted senators, the senators were Reed and Capehart. Johnson himself had not yet given them much to quote. And he needed a better stage—the Senate floor. At his request, a debate on the nomination was scheduled—for an evening, Wednesday, October 12, since the Senate’s evening sessions were particularly dramatic. He himself would deliver a major address during it; he told Leslie Carpenter that it would be the “most important speech of my life.”

*Olds said that he had not even written one article Lyle had cited, charging that in it Olds had “publicized a school for Communists, urging the comrades to attend.” That article was indeed damaging, Olds said. But, he said—in a statement never thereafter challenged by Lyle, the HUAC investigators, Lyndon Johnson, or anyone else—he had not written that article; he had never seen it before.