Stephen J. Spingarn Oral History Interview, March 27, 1967

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

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This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened April, 1972
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

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Tenth Oral History Interview with Stephen J. Spingarn, Washington, D.C., March 27 , 1967. By Jerry N. Hess, Harry S. Truman Library.

HESS: Mr. Spingarn has just indicated that he has a few more remarks that he would like to say about the Clark Clifford matter, so our restrictions that we mentioned Friday will still be in effect for what we put down now, and that is that this is to be totally closed until five years after the death of Clark Clifford..

SPINGARN: Now, I forgot to add this part to the incident which I recounted in which Clark Clifford came to see me when I was Federal Trade Commissioner, I place this as probably 1952, and, among other things, he was urging the Federal Trade Commission to launch an investigation of the Luria Company, which was the largest scrap dealer or company, iron scrap company in the United States, as I understand the situation. He was representing a competitor of theirs and he wanted the Federal Trade Commission, this is a normal procedure, to investigate whether it was a violation of the antitrust laws, within the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission.

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Now I recited how, after having argued the case entirely on the merits, he said, with a smile as he left, that there would be a fee of $25,000 for him, Clark Clifford, if the Federal Trade Commission merely launched an investigation, it was hinged merely on our launching it, not on its successful outcome from his standpoint.

I should have added that that statement delayed the launching of the investigation several months, probably, because Clark didn’t realize it, of course, that we would have made that investigation if he had never come to the Federal Trade Commission. We were already looking into the matter, I was the commissioner in charge of making a recommendation, and I was prepared to make a recommendation that we make such an investigation on its merits, before Clark ever came t me. When he made that statement, I thought, first of all, that I should reconsider the matter and I asked for further investigative material of the case and the long and the short of it was that it was several months of preliminary investigation more to determine whether or not we would make a full-fledged investigation looking to the issue and serve a legal complaint against the Luria Company,

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as a result of that last statement of Clark Clifford’s.

Then subsequently, after the investigation was made, the full investigation, our staff recommended that a complaint be issued against the Luria Company, this is the formal procedures of the Trade Commission, looking to the issuance of a complaint, a hearing on that before a trial examiner, if he finds that the complaint is right, his verdict may be appealed to the full commission, and if the Commission decides so, a cease and desist order may issue against the company or individual against whom that complaint has been issued.

When the staff finally came up with a recommendation for a complaint, following that investigation of Luria Company that Clifford had favored, which we did make, and which we made strictly on the merits, it would have been made anyway if he had never appeared at the Commission, the case was still mine, that is the staff recommendation came to me to make a recommendation to the full commission as to whether or not a complaint should issue. Only the Commission can issue a complaint, of course.

At that time I requested, because of Clark

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Clifford’s intervention in the matter, that the case be reassigned to another commissioner, and it was reassigned, and if my recollection is right, it was reassigned to Lowell Mason, my Republican colleague, I believe that’s the case. In any event, I recall that a complaint was issued, but the Commission did not decide the case before I left, so that was decided sometimes afterward. At one time I knew what had happened but I have forgotten now and anyone who is interested will have to go to the Commission records and look up the history of the Luria case. That completes my statement on that.

HESS: That completes the restricted area.

SPINGARN: That completes the restricted area, now we go back to other subjects.

I would like to talk about ethics in government as I saw them over the span of my Government service -- in different agencies.

Now, first of all, in my Treasury days, I was a relatively minor official, even at the end I was Assistant General Counsel and Treasury Legislative Counsel. I can't say I was bothered much with lobbyists who were trying to wine and dine me, or anything of that sort, the point

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was that the area in which I worked was not the type of thing that the lobbyist would normally be infesting, the Internal Revenue Bureau was the place where you might expect a lot of high-powered lobbyists around, and we know now from the cases and situations that arose in the early fifties, that they were there, Henry "the Dutchman" Grunwald and his peers and others.

My friend, Charles Oliphant was a victim of this sort of thing, I won't say he was an altogether innocent victim, but he was foolish, not corrupt. Charley Oliphant was the son of Herman Oliphant, who was the first general counsel of the Treasury. There never had been a central lawyer running the whole legal staff of all the bureaus until the post was set up under Henry Morganthau in 1934. Herman Oliphant was a very brilliant man. He'd been a law professor at Columbia and Johns Hopkins. He was a man, however, who did not -- he was a brilliant lawyer, had a wonderful mind, and it was extremely valuable to have contact and listen to him, and I had an opportunity to do that at some length and profited by it, but he was an intellectual and he didn't have the gift of dealing with people easily and comfortably, and so he tended

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to surround himself with buffers, with men who could deal with people, although some of them were not of his caliber as lawyers or in intelligence, but they had the gregariousness that he lacked.

In any event, his son, Charley, had been, as I understand it, a great disappointment to his father, because he had not had the brilliant record that his father had, he did rather poorly in law school and so forth, this was quite a blow to a man who had been a top lawyer and a brilliant law professor, and the impression I had was that Charley had always stood in his father's shadow and that his father had not treated him with the understanding, perhaps, and so forth, that Charley needed. In any event, Charley became a young Treasury lawyer, his father died in 1939 and Charley moved up the ladder and showed considerable ability to make his way. Eventually, he became Chief Counsel of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, a very important key post, obviously, with a staff, I don't know, three or four hundred lawyers under him and then, as I see the picture, another unwise gentleman named Lamar Caudle, was Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Tax Division of the Department

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of Justice. These men were sort of opposite numbers, that is to say, Charley was Chief Counsel of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, which handled, essentially, the civil side and Caudle was the Chief of the Justice Tax Division which handled all of the criminal prosecutions. Naturally, they had to work together closely. Now, I didn't really know Caudle, I mean I may have met him casually, but I didn't know him, all I know is what I have read about his situation and case, which is a matter of record. He went to prison eventually.

But he impressed me as a country boy, I mean, he came to the big city and was taken in by the city slickers. They took him up on the mountain peak and they showed him the panoramic view, and to make a long story short, all these big operators were wining and dining Caudle. They would take him down to the Kentucky Derby on lavish weekends and to the World Series, and all this sort of thing, treating him like a visiting Pooh Bah, naturally very pleasant, but they weren't doing it for fun, they were doing it because they hoped to influence his judgment and decisions in tax matters, some of them. It seemed to me that Charley got somewhat caught in this trap, perhaps by Caudle

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at first, who brought him in on lavish trips to the World Series at somebody else's expense, a taxpayer's to be sure, a big taxpayer, to be sure, and Charley became friendly with Henry Grunwald, who must have been a remarkable man, I never knew him but he seems to have been a friend of everybody, Republican and Democrat, in the city of Washington, and I recall that Senator Styles Bridges, one of the top Republican leaders of the Senate, in the late forties and early fifties, used Grunwald as an emissary down to the Bureau of Internal Revenue, on a tax case involving millions in which a big Baltimore liquor dealer named Hyman Harvey Kline (or Klein), was the subject of a tax investigation.

You might justifiably wonder why a Senator from New Hampshire was so interested in the case of a Baltimore liquor dealer. A man named Jules Abels wrote a book about "the Truman Scandals" in which he recounted this case, Abels was a Republican official of the Eisenhower administration, and the book was first released at Republican National Committee headquarters in 1956.

He was so fair-minded about it that he covered this whole case, spent seven or eight pages on it but

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he never mentioned the fact that Styles Bridges had any interest in it, which to me seemed to be a very major feature of the whole case. The Democrats involved were well covered by Mr. Abels but Styles Bridges was not present.

Anyway, Charley Oliphant got involved in all this, let Grunwald befriend him, make loans to him, and things like that, take him to lunch often, the usual entrapment of the lobbyist working on a shall we say a not too sharp-witted, in this particular area, public official. I do not believe that Charley ever did anything corrupt, but when this picture was exposed, it didn't look good, there's no question about that. It didn't look good, and Charley was forced to resign, in 1951 or '52. Well, that's one case.

Now, this is typical, one day a senior official of the Treasury, Bill Parsons, called me, Bill Parsons is a fine chap and a man of integrity and an honorable public servant, he was the Administrative Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and he wanted my advice as a lawyer, friend and fellow official. He had received from one of the big movie companies, by registered mail, return receipt requested, a seasons pass to

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all their theaters for him and his family, to their movie theaters, and he wanted to know if I thought he should accept it.

I said, "Bill, I don't think so. These people have big tax problems with the Government, with the Treasury, with the Bureau of Internal Revenue," I said, "if you used that pass once or twice a week, for your family, it would run into several hundred dollars a year. Why did they send it to you? Another thing, they sent it to you by registered mail, return receipt requested, and all that, you see." I said, "If I were you, I would send it back the same way." I think he did. Well, there are so many ways that lobbyists try to get in to you, you see. They start so subtly, then they wait a long time before they start expecting returns on their investment.

One of the things I objected to throughout my Government career was the fellow who takes you to lunch. Now when you get to the bill paying, you know, normally the point was that he's a friend of yours, he's an ex-Government official whom you've known, but he's now representing some outside interest. Now this is the normal situation, he calls you up and, I mean, you

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would go to lunch with him because you're friends with him, good friends, but he wants to talk business, of course, which is all right, I don't know any reason why you shouldn't talk business at lunch as well as any other time, the only thing is that when the bill comes, you can never pay your share, you can't do it, he won't let you, and you know that you're going to appear on an expense account; that's what annoys me, if you let them pay it, you're going to be on an expense account. He's going to say, "Ten dollars luncheon bill entertaining Stephen Spingarn, Administrative Assistant to the President," or whatever I am, you see, very annoying. So I tried to avoid those, except in cases where a real close friend of yours, I mean, you know, you're not going to make a Federal case out of one lunch with a real friend, even if he is going to put you on his expense account. But I've always tried to pay those bills, but it's impossible with these fellows cause they want you on their expense account. Unless you want to make a scene in the restaurant, you're going to have to let them pay it, he will argue and shout longer than you will, you know. Well, it's a piddling thing, but it's symptomatic. I

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hope that no one will suppose that a Government official can be bought for one lunch, but it creates an atmosphere, you know, of friendliness.

Now, apropos to that Bill Parsons episode, when I was at the White House, I received one day in an envelope, and it was just loose, without a cover note or anything, and without any registered mail, return receipt requested, a seasons pass to all the Washington Senators' ball games at Griffith Stadium, I received it without any note or anything. It was my first inclination to send it back, but I made an inquiry and I discovered that for many years, Clark Griffith had been giving the President, he gave the President, I believe, a gold one, and he gave every senior member of the staff a seasons pass, this had been going on for years, it had become rather a tradition, so since I had now made the senior staff, as Administrative Assistant to the President, I automatically got one. I said to myself, I'm not going to be -- nobody ever thought of returning them, you know, and I wasn't going to be three steps to the right of the Pope, so I kept it. I was so busy that year, I never used that pass once, so I didn't benefit from it, but I thought to myself later,

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"Well, you gave Bill Parsons sanctimonious advice, but when you got a seasons pass to the ball park, you kept it." You don't always do what you tell the other fellow to do, but it seemed to me that there was a different situation here. And Clark Griffith didn't need my help to come into the White House and see the President and, actually, all he ever saw the President about, as far as I know, was to invite him out to the first game, or something like that.

When I got over to the Federal Trade Commission, I found the lobbyists thicker. Well, I won't say that; they were pretty thick around the White House, especially in jugular affairs, like the airplane cases, I have described something about that in the closed tape when I talked about the Pan American, TWA, AOA case.

HESS: Were there any others that you could...

SPINGARN: I can't recall at the time, but I will say, I remember the General Counsel at Eastern Airlines coming in to see me, I've forgotten his name now, he was a nice fellow, Republican I believe, and Eastern Airlines, of course, was presided over by that great American, Eddie Rickenbacker. Eddie had a terrific war record, he was the outstanding ace of World War I, a Congressional

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Medal of Honor man, and he had a terrific war record for which he deserves much credit and he had that remarkable survival feat in the Pacific where he was adrift in a small boat for I don't know how long, weeks, and survived. He was a man of courage and great abilities, but politically he was reactionary, oh, my, he's off to the right of Goldwater.

I was the aviation man at the White House, and all I remember is that the Eastern General Counsel, whose name I can't remember, came in and told me, it was some case that was going to the President, he said he had never before come to the White House to lobby his case, as he put it, or to try to attempt to discuss it with the White House, after it left the CAB, you see, but that he knew that his competition was doing that, and I've forgotten who his competition was in this particular case, if it was Pan Am, he was sure right, and they weren't the only one. The competition was doing it and so he thought he ought to come in here and speak his case, and I told him my door was open to everybody, I was perfectly glad to listen to anybody who had anything to say on the case and I listened to him, I don't remember what the case was and I don't remember how it was decided, I just remember

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that incident.

Oh, I remember that we got frequent calls from members of Congress, I remember Senator Pat McCarran calling me from Nevada on one airline case, that he was most interested in, but that's the normal run of things.

Oh, I remember one little incident, you know these ethics in Government things run into so many ramifications, one day, I think it was Congressman George Miller of California, who is still in Congress, came down to see me with a lawyer on a private relief bill which was before the President after having passed the Congress. I vaguely recall that the bill dealt with an immigration case, and it dealt with a woman, I think, who was a servant of a family in California, a foreigner. And it had something to do with, I recall, permitting her to remain in the United States. I don't remember the details. Apparently, her time had ended and she would have to go back unless she got this bill through, that's all I recall about it.

My recollection is that the Immigration Service of the Department of Justice had recommended a veto, too, but they had this boilerplate rule, if it fell into a category, they automatically recommended for veto,

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regardless of how sympathy-inspiring the individual case was, they didn't seem to look at the individual case, you see, if it fell into category (a), a veto was automatically recommended. Well, I didn't see it that way and neither did the Bureau of the Budget, which meant essentially Roger Jones, who was Assistant Director for Legislative Reference, and we recommended signing bills even though Justice, or some other department made some boilerplate recommendations for veto. I think this bill was in the category, the main department involved, would recommend a veto, but we were considering otherwise.

In any event, Congressman Miller came in with a California lawyer -- and they told me about the case and I assured them that I would give it my closest attention and make whatever recommendation I thought was right to the President, but, of course, it was up to the President in the final analysis and I couldn't tell them what he was going to do. To make a long story short, he signed the bill, in spite of a veto recommendation, that's my recollection.

This was in the middle of summer, and at Christmas I got a box of dried candied fruit from the lawyer, you

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know, a two pound box worth three or four dollars, with a note of gratitude. I wanted to send it back to him because I don't want gifts, I hadn't done anything but my duty and so forth and so on, but it seemed so piddling to go to all the trouble of sending a two pound box of dried candied fruit back, in addition to which, I don't like dried candied fruit and so I gave it to my maid.

So there you are, you see, had I transgressed the law of ethics by accepting this gift? Well, you have to make judgments of what reasonable men will do under these circumstances. All sorts of things like this arise.

Now, when I went over to the Federal Trade Commission, I found that there was a good deal of lobbyist activity over there. This is natural because the Trade Commission issued cease and desist orders, which are hurtful to the firms they're issued against, and are helpful to the competitors of those firms. The Federal Trade Commission is by no means as jugular an agency as the CAB which allocates routes between airlines, boy, there's hundreds of millions of dollars wrapped up in those decisions, or the Federal Power

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Commission, or the Federal Communications Commission, or the Interstate Commerce Commission. These people deal with matters where there are hundreds of millions of dollars involved, and whether to decide it up or down, yea or nay...

HESS: Who gets in and who gets left out in the cold.

SPINGARN: Right. There I know the lobby activity is very intense, naturally, this is the nature of our Government. And when I say lobby activity, I mean, there is a legal and legitimate lobby activity and there's also illegal and illegitimate lobby activity. Now, when I first came to the Treasury, I lived then as now in the Anchorage, where I am right now. I am sitting in the Rayburn Memorial Room, which is part of the suite that Speaker Rayburn lived in for some thirty-five years or more here, and I've lived here since 1946. Anyway, a lawyer representing large corporate interests, who had a big case before the Trade Commission at that moment and who also lived in the Anchorage then called me up, and I had just been appointed to the Commission, and commented on the coincidence that we both lived here and invited me to have lunch, but I didn't accept his invitation since it was perfectly obvious what the

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purpose was. And I remember a couple of years later -- this was a very able lawyer, but he's not one of my favorite citizens, I'm sure he represents his people very effectively, I mean there was nothing seriously wrong in what he did, it was a perfectly normal thing to do, perhaps, it was also perfectly normal for me not to accept -- I was Motions Commissioner for a long time, I passed on procedural motions on behalf of the Commission, the most common thing was a request for continuance, you know, on a hearing, something of that sort, or for the filing of a brief. One day this lawyer called me up and he wanted to come in on what to me sounded obviously a substantive matter, he was trying to use our procedural tent to hide a substantive proposition which I had no authority to pass on alone, and I told him so on the phone. He said, well, he didn't think so, could he come in, and he did come in with his clients and obviously it was substantive, I couldn't hear it without hearing the other side, you see, at the same time, and even on procedural motions, the other side had a right to make their pitch, whether they were for or against it, you see, usually they came in together but they didn't have to. You could

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simply get the request from one side and then ask the other if they objected, and if they did or didn't why then you make up your mind what you should do. But he came in and argued this matter and I said, to me, it seemed clearly a substantive matter, that the Motions Commissioner shouldn't decide, and I said, "Well, I told you so on the phone." I said, "It seems to me that you wasted my time and yours," and that made him so mad that he stamped out of there without another word, just got up and stamped out without a word.

There was an elderly lawyer, a rather distinguished looking citizen, who came into see me, and told me he had been a student of my fathers when my father was professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, he'd known him anyway, maybe he'd even been in the same class, anyway there had been some connection at Columbia between him and my father, and he invited me up to his, I'm told, attractive summer home up in New England for a weekend. He extended other invitations, none of which I ever accepted, but this is, as I say, rather normal.

I also heard accounts about at least one official at the Commission, I can't say with absolute certainty

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that these are true, but I heard them from many quarters, and that is at every Christmas his office was loaded with cases of whiskey and various other fairly significant gifts from warm-hearted lawyers and firms that did business with the FTC. I didn't think this was at all in the order of things. I don't think a Government official should accept gifts from people who do business with his agency. I suppose you always run into a rule of reason if they send you a fifty cent calendar or even a three dollar box of dried fruit. But when it gets into cases of liquor or even a bottle or two of liquor, I think they're getting beyond the rule of reason.

I think Senator Paul Douglas used to say that he would accept anything on which he didn't place a value of over three dollars, or something like that, other people take five dollars, anyway, somewhere in there. You know there is a legal maxim, de minimus non cura lex, the law does not concern itself with trifles, and there is some point at which you shouldn't have to be bothered with sending back calendars or letter openers, or things like that that are sent out for advertising.

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Anyway, I took a keen interest in this area of ethics, and I tried to get the Commission to adopt ethical standards, and we did eventually adopt, as I recall, a code on ethical standards. I think there's value in these things because no one can say later, well, there wasn't any rule about it, and I didn't know, and so on, if you have laid down rules for guidance.

I think every agency in the Government, I think this may have happened since my time in Government, but every agency in the Government should have, there should be a standard rule and then with variations applicable to the agencies special functions and problems, if necessary, and then there should be a committee in each agency which will consider requests from any agency employee as to whether such and such conduct on his part was within or without the rules, because you get these borderline situations where he honestly doesn't know.

Maybe there is all this, I mean since my time in Government, but this is what I would have projected when I was in Government. And then there should be an overall committee which would advise the agency committee on some standard Government policy on the more important issues of controversy or problems.

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Now, my impression is, that something like that now exists in Government but it's since my day.

In any event, we did adopt, as I recall, some kind of FTC ethical code, but one thing we didn't adopt which I thought we ought to and that was a "no practice" rule for commissioners and the very senior staff, I think the proposal as I drafted it and submitted to the Commission was, that no commissioner and no staff man of the grade of GS-15 or above, should practice before the Commission within two years after he left the Commission. This was controversial at the Commission, especially among the senior staff, because practically everybody who leaves the Commission, all the lawyers, expect to practice before it, this is normal, I can understand that. Before that, in connection with our ethical code, as I recall it, we had actually adopted a rule which included a no moonlight law practice rule for our lawyers. Tradition has been that some of our lawyers have sundown offices, that is they have law offices at night and on weekends, did a little legal work.

This is a clear invitation to people so minded, to

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line up that lawyer on their side, by using him as a private lawyer and then they go to see him in his official capacity, and it's pretty hard for him not to be friendly toward them, if he's their lawyer on the outside on some matter. I mean, this doesn't need spelling out, it's a clear invitation to unethical activities. So we passed a rule that this was to end, and I remember an elderly lawyer, a man approaching seventy and about to retire, came in and had an argument with me over that. He was going to retire and he had a sundown office, he had his name up and he wanted to retire to that office and he didn't want to close it up. He was mad and we had quite a sharp argument, but I said I didn't see how we could make an exception in his case. If we did it for him, why shouldn't we do it for anyone else who wanted to do it, and he stamped out in a huff. He was an unusual fellow, another very rightwing guy that detested everything the Truman administration was doing, and he used to write letters to the editor complaining about it. He was a segregationist and everything, you know. He just hated the Truman position on civil rights, and he hated the Truman administration, he was mad at about

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everything. Some people thought that the Commission ought to curb those letters he wrote to the editor while he was a Commission official but I didn't. I didn't like them but I thought he had a right to write them if he wanted to; just an expression of his opinion.

In any event, the two-year rule I speak of, I couldn't get it through the Commission, and some of my fellow commissioners said if there are specific cases where influence is being used by former employees, let's deal with them, but let's not pass this general, blanket rule.

Later, an individual case did come to my attention, and I said, "All right, you wouldn't pass my general rules, you said let's deal with the individual cases, here's one," and this was the case, I mean, I want to say there was nothing corrupt in this, but it indicated to me the desirability of that two-year rule of mine. Former Commissioner Robert Freer, a Republican, now dead and a nice fellow, practiced before the Federal Trade Commission, had a fairly extensive practice before the Commission. He and I were on friendly terms, he'd come in to see me, he'd drop in to see me once in a while, I liked him, and he was well regarded at the Commission.

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He had been a staff man, who had made his way up to commissioner, and he was well thought of at the Commission. Well, I've forgotten all the details of this case, just the general thrust of it, but I kept a file on it and I can't find it so I may have given it to you, Jerry, somewhere along the line I think, I hope so, because I can't find it in my apartment, it dealt with this case.

I think I called it the Rexair File, I believe that was the firm involved, I'm not actually certain of that, but anyway, Bob Freer was the individual involved, plus one of our Commission staff lawyers. As I recall what happened was this, my legal assistant at this time was Earl Kintner, a Republican, who later, by the way, became General Counsel and later Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, and one day, as I recall the situation, Kintner told me that one of the staff lawyers, I won't mention any names, it doesn't really make that much difference, had told him on the street when they'd met, that Bob Freer was very unhappy because he was representing the Rexair Company, that's the name that sticks in my mind. The Commission had made some investigation looking to the possible issuance

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of a complaint. The staff had recommended the case be closed without a complaint. It had come to me and I wasn't satisfied with the staff recommendation. I ordered the case reopened and a further investigation which still might result in a complaint. The further investigation was still being made. I wasn't satisfied that this thing had been exhaustively enough explored before closing. Freer was unhappy because he had notified his client that the case was closed on the basis of the staff recommendation which is almost always the case, and he had collected his fee on the thing, you see, so he was unhappy. According to Earl Kintner, this lawyer, who was a staff lawyer and a friend of Freers, they had served on the staff together, that was the rub of it, you see, dealing with friends. I am not suggesting for a moment there was anything that might have been in the least corrupt about this thing, it was an ex-staff man and an ex-Commissioner talking to a friend on the staff, who feeling friendship for him, goes to bat for him on a sort of personal basis. And as Kintner recited this thing, the Commission lawyer wanted Kintner to lay these facts before me about Freer's embarrassment in

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the hopes that this might dissuade me from keeping the case open.

When Kintner told me that, I was annoyed, this wasn't the way to do business. It was being suggested that on a purely personal and friendship basis, because Freer was embarrassed, I should do something on that basis. This is no way to exercise the functions of Government obviously on that kind of a basis. So I then called in the staff lawyer involved, and he denied, as I recall, having told Kintner that he wanted Kintner to pass this on to me, he just had told Kintner about the situation, but had not made a request that it be passed on to me. As I recall it, what Kintner said, and I am confident that Kintner told me the truth, what possible reason would he have not to; he came to me and told me what he had been told, but then the other fellow realized how that sounded, and watered down the story. The original story was that Freer had asked him to pass on to me, somehow, the word of what had happened and his embarrassment, in the hope that this would influence my judgment, evidently. Well, then this fellow came in and there was a conflict of testimony between him and Kintner as to what he had said to

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Kintner, that was the nub of it.

It made a good deal of difference as to whether he had asked Kintner to tell me or whether he had just mentioned casually, you know, friends talking on the street, I mean, it's a different matter. Well, I called in the lawyer involved, and he now denied having told Kintner what Kintner told me he had. So I presented this to the Commission. Well, nobody likes these cases, these are always prickly. That's the reason you should have a rule, because when you get to the cases, they are always prickly, you're usually dealing with friends, when you're dealing with staff men, and nobody wants to hurt a friend, especially when you don't think there's any major corruption there. It was just a question, is this the way the Commission should do business? So the Commission then authorized an investigation, or at my request it was made. An investigating officer was appointed and he investigated and interviewed everybody and took statements from them including me and Kintner and the staff lawyer that I referred to, Freer and so forth, and it broke down into a conflict of testimony again, one said, "Yes," and the other said, "No," and the Commission decided to wash it out without doing anything. But to me, that only underlined the necessity

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for a rule.

You see, of course, the fact of the matter was that Freer had already been out more than two years when this happened, but the fact is this, though, a commissioner or senior staff man when he leaves, immediately has a good deal of influence, if he's liked particularly, with the men around him, and who are subordinates. They can't help that, they treated them with respect while he was there, they can't help feeling some, and maybe they're under bonds of gratitude to them for promotions and things like that. That cools off rather fast, though. If you can't practice before the Commission for two years, a lot has been forgotten, and the old rule, "What have you done for me lately," applies in all human existence. I still think that two-year rule would be wise. It indicates the difficulty of dealing with ethical situations as they arise in the absence of a general rule covering that category of cases, because here was an ethical situation, and yet when you try to grapple with it, it sort of fades away like smoke.

Well, my main complaint about ethics in Government, though, I think, is embodied in my fight, in the

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last year of my tenure on the Commission in '52 and through September of 1953, first with the fair trade lobby, I've forgotten what it was called, but that's what it amounted to. We had issued a complaint in a case involving the fair trade issue, I think it was against Eastman Kodak, I'm not certain, and this lobby had sent a newsletter out to their people urging them to descend on their Congressmen and Senators and get them to get the Trade Commission to drop the case. I then wrote a letter to this lobby saying, if they wanted to come in and intervene in the case, I would personally vote to permit them to come in as interveners in the case, to present their case before the Commission, but this is a quasi-judicial case, and nobody should bring pressure on the Commission to drop a case this way, and I, for one, was not going to succumb to that pressure, and so forth and so on.

The second situation that arose, I've already described, was the oil report in which a staff report of ours called "The International Petroleum Cartel Report," three hundred and seventy-eight pages, no conclusions, no recommendations, just facts, facts from the subpoenaed files of the oil companies and

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from investigations of them taking place in countries around the world, so infuriated the oil companies, that instead of coming in and attacking the report on its merits and saying it's wrong, factually, which they couldn't, because it wasn't wrong, they tried to vilify the Commission and the report and anybody who had anything to do with it, and not only in the United States but all over the world, all around the world.

I went on television, had press conferences, there was quite a to-do about it. I wrote to national leaders and organizations all over the country including President-elect Eisenhower, went up to New York and tried to see him and did see Gabriel Hauge, and I wrote President Truman, who gave me a long and most appropriate reply endorsing what I was doing, I wrote Paul Butler, the Democratic chairman, and got a good letter from him, I wrote the Republican chairman, because, after all, ethics is non-partisan, and I knew the Republican administration was coming in. I got good answers from the Democratic side, and bland, non-responsive answers from the Republican side, generally speaking, which, I suppose, was to be expected. I had a large luncheon

[887]

at the Willard to which I invited representatives, the chairman and ranking minority members, who were still, usually Republican, of all the regulatory commissions, and representatives of the Eisenhower administration, the Republican National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, Clark Clifford was there and others, and we discussed this back and forth. Of course, this was December, 1952, a month after Eisenhower had been elected but before he was inaugurated. There was general agreement that the regulatory commissions should resist these pressures, that we ought to form a working group, but nothing was ever done to implement that because new men came in, new teams, and with different ideas.

Well, I also wrote national organizations around the country and tried to get them to raise their voices in attacking improper pressures, because the typical situation in Government is that everybody yells about this corrupt scoundrel of a public servant who had betrayed his trust, but usually there is very little outcry against the man who made him betray his trust, and I say there ought to be just as much attention to the corrupter as to the corruptee.

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I also said that the best way to prevent unethical pressures of this sort, is to spotlight and pinpoint them as they start, not wait until they hit you, but as they start. Put the focus of the spotlight on them and attack them, you see. That makes it a little harder for them to get rolling. You should shout, "Oh, oh, look at what that lobby over there is doing, they are writing to their constituents, and asking their constituents to get the Senators and the Congressmen to descend on the Federal Trade Commission and coerce them into doing something -- not on the merits, but just because that's their side of the case."

We had one interesting experience I shouldn't overlook. This is a very famous Congressman and he's still in Congress, I won't mention his name, he's the chairman of an important committee, was then and is now, and it was a case involving a watch company. I forget the details of the case, just the main thrust of what happened, but, as I recall it, our lawyers had worked out some kind of a consent settlement with the watch company on a case against them, it was in the process of being formulated, they wanted a little better terms, apparently, than our lawyers were offering them. So

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this Congressman called me up, and I believe he called every member of the Commission, to urge us to give sympathetic treatment, do this and that, you see, in the settlement of the case. Well, that was all right, you expect that from a Congressman, but then one of our senior staff men came in a few days later and told me something that I found interesting. He said he had called the lawyers representing the watch company, up in the city they were in, and had asked for the lawyer handling the case, and, by gosh, he had been referred to that Congressman, who was also practicing law, and he was the fellow handling the case. He was wearing two hats on this thing -- one as a member of Congress, working for a constituent, which is perfectly all right, and the other as the lawyer handling the case for them, too, which is not exactly all right. It's only fair to say -- this is a good Congressman by the way, he's no scoundrel by a long shot, he's had a long and honorable record, I don't think this was one of his most glorious hours -- but it's only fair to say that we got the settlement we wanted in that case, I mean, the Trade Commission, we did not, as I recall, give in to the Congressman, and he never attempted to bully, rag, or coerce us. Sometimes

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a certain type of individual will say, well, the sons of guns, they wouldn't do what I wanted to, they come up here wanting something, I'll whack them good, but he never tried that.

There was another case that comes back to me. When we were having the trouble with the oil companies in late '52 or early '53, I guess it was early '53, right after the Republican 83rd Congress came in, and a Trade Commission staff man, whom I knew, told me that he rode in a car pool with a fellow who was sitting with the House Appropriations Subcommittee that handled our appropriation, and they were down at the Bureau of the Budget, I believe, holding meetings with the Budget people, and also with an advisory group of outside people that they had, as I recall the situation, and, son-of-a-gun, one of the advisory group was an oil company man. We were having a knock down drag out fight with the oil companies, who were attacking us, it didn't make me feel happy to think that an oil company man was going to have anything to say about what our appropriation was, obviously, he'd like to reduce it to zero, I suppose.

This story was later reprinted in one of the labor

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weeklies about this oil company man sitting in on the secret sessions of the House Appropriations Subcommittee. Well, when we were up before the House Appropriations Subcommittee a little later, I raise this when it came my turn to talk, I recounted this episode and said I realized that the Appropriations Committee could meet with anyone they wanted, but on the other hand, I wanted them to know of this situation, that we were having this serious controversy with the oil companies and that, therefore, it didn't make me, at least, feel very happy to think an oil company man would have any voice whatever in deciding what our appropriation should be, and I hoped that the Appropriations Committee would bear that in mind when they went over our appropriations, if any cuts had resulted from his interventions, or something like that.

I remember that it was rather a hot exchange, not on my part, I've never gotten heated with members of Congress on committees, I have taken a lot of stuff and nonsense, I've been insulted on many occasions but I've made it a rule never to get mad and never to answer back but just reply, always politely, because you can't win in these exchanges -- your best bet is to keep your

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temper and answer politely, even if you're being really insulted, which sometimes happens when some of them, this is unusual, but some of them can be very brutal and rough on a witness if they want to discredit him. They can call him stupid and ignorant and deny that he's telling the truth, all sorts of things. The thing is to hold your temper and reply temperately. Well, I remember one Congressman didn't think much of my source, he obviously was anti-labor and the fact that it was in the labor magazines showed him that it couldn't be true to begin with. I knew it was true from firsthand testimony from the staff man who rode in the pool. I mean, why would the fellow who was present at the meeting tell him a lie about it -- of course, he was telling the truth. I believe that I had some correspondence with a Congressman on that committee on this matter, too, he's now a Senator, a Republican Senator. He took me sharply to task.

Anyway, I will say this, certainly these lobbying activities, these attempts to influence people, exist and they have done it in every administration, I suppose, since the beginning of time, and as the Government today has more powers and greater ability to give or withhold

[893]

or affect matters which involve enormous sums of money, why obviously there will be greater pressures brought to bear, this is the nature of things. I think, in my experience, and I'm talking about the years I served in Government, that the Government on the whole, with some exception, was remarkably free from major corruption, I don't mean to say there weren't individual episodes, there were, of course, but if you take it as a big picture, I think the Government's record would compare favorably with that of business, let us say, during the same period as far as dealing honestly with its "constituents." As I've noted before, it's always seemed to me that the Truman administration had its minor scandals, which have been well publicized, mink coats and deep freezers, is the phrase that usually goes around, well, these are unfortunate but they are still on the order of rather minor events. It seemed to me that the Republicans on the other hand, are no more free of minor corruption than we are, I could recount many episodes in the Eisenhower administration which involved that sort of thing. But they go in more heavily for major corruption, which is usually, not necessarily, but sometimes, quite legally done. I

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mean in the case of the Teapot Dome thing, that was corrupt and illegal arid bribes were passed.

On the other hand, in the case of the Dixon-Yates, it was almost legal; it would have been legal if they hadn't so foolishly had that conflict of interests by placing that First Boston Corporation official in the Bureau of the Budget, too, so he was on both sides of the fence in his dickering with the Government. Aside from that, though it was legal, but it still was greatly contrary to the public interest, and I'm glad this thing was killed, and it was killed largely through the intervention of Estes Kefauver, Joe O'Mahoney and other public interest Senators who didn't let the rascals get away with it. I think that covers what I wanted to say about ethics in government.

Continuing with the Federal Trade Commission, I think I ought to say a word about the staff of the Federal Trade Commission, I have talked about my fellow commissioners. We had some able men on the staff, some, perhaps quite a few, who wouldn't fall into that category, but that's the case in every agency. Naming some of the abler men there, among the lawyers, a man who impressed me greatly was Joe Wright, Joseph S.

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Wright. He was a small town boy from Montana. He had come to Washington to work for Senator Burton Wheeler, as I recall, in the mid-thirties and then come to the Federal Trade Commission. When I first met him, he was Assistant General Counsel of the Federal Trade Commission, and in the spring of 1950 I was in charge of a White House task force to write a basing point bill veto and I brought Joe Wright over, he came over from the Federal Trade Commission to help me on that, among others. I was much impressed with him. The fact of the matter was so much so that unbeknownst to him, I recommended him for the next vacancy on the Federal Trade Commission, and I found him very helpful while I was a commissioner, often consulted him and always found his judgment good. Now I'm glad to say that my judgment on Joe has been vindicated as to his ability by the subsequent course of events, because while I was still on the Commission, the Zenith Radio Corporation, lured Joe away from the Commission to be their General Counsel, solicitor or chief lawyer, and he is now president of that huge firm and has been for some time, and it has had, apparently, great success under his stewardship, and

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this was a man, who when he went away there, he was a bureaucrat, a civil servant, his entire career of some fifteen years or so was working up through the ranks of Government, and you wouldn't have thought that was the ideal preparation to become president of a great business firm, would you, but he did it and, apparently, he's done a bang-up job there, too, anyway he is their president.

Incidentally, amusingly enough, when I first went to the Commission, I needed a legal assistant, every commissioner is entitled to a legal assistant and that's the most important appointment he makes. All the individual commissioners got under the reorganization plan, which provided for most appointments by the chairman, was their own immediate office staff, their secretary, their legal assistant and messenger -- well, the secretary is important, too, but the most important is the legal assistant, of course. These were regarded as very good jobs by the Commission legal staff; they bring you in contact with the commissioners and they often lead to promotions, so there is considerable competition for them. Six or eight commission lawyers applied to be my legal assistant. I interviewed them all, and there

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was some good men, in fact, almost all of them were good men and amusingly enough, two of them became chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, two of the men who applied to be my legal assistant. One is the present chairman, Rand [Paul] Dixon, and the other was Earl Kintner. Strangely enough, in spite of the fact that Earl was, I think, the only Republican in the group that applied, and I was a dedicated Democrat, I picked him. I figured what I needed was professional competence and I believed that he was, probably, the best of a good group, and I think that my judgment on his professional competence was vindicated, but there was an amusing backlash, later, on the political side.

Earl was a loyal and faithful legal assistant until the election of '52 and then I could feel him falling away from me, immediately; he didn't want to be too closely associated with a liberal Democrat when a fairly moderate or conservative Republican administration was coming in, and he had ambition. He was not only a good lawyer, but he was no mean politician. To make a long story short, first of all, he got himself selected as General Counsel of the Trade Commission.

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I do not think he was actually the choice of our new Republican Chairman. I think that Earl lobbied so well on the Hill and elsewhere, that he was sort of rammed down the throat of the new Chairman, because I think that, quite frankly, the new chairman might have looked a little askance at a fellow who had been working for me for the last three years. Earl was well aware of this. In any event, Earl wasn't sure that I would vote for him for general counsel. I reassured him, because after all, I knew that he was very able and I couldn't imagine that the Republican administration could have gotten anyone better than Earl, I mean, he was a good lawyer. Politically, he'd become undependable from my standpoint. I was holding, for example, a series of meetings which I tried to bring together, Republicans and Democrats to work out some sort of collective security fight against Senator Joe McCarthy, who was doing a lot of damage then. I sent the Truman Library accounts of the meetings I held and the people I invited, and those who came, and there was some very illustrious names on my invitation list, although, not all turned up at the meetings. I tried to get people like Allen Dulles and Henry

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Cabot Lodge, I've forgotten who all. I did get some good men, but it was hard to get important Republicans.

I wanted Earl Kintner to come to this thing, but he ducked out. He was my legal assistant, you see, but he didn't come, although I invited him. And there was another thing, Lowell Mason, my Republican colleague, for years had been running up and down the country making speeches before business groups, attacking the Federal Trade Commission, of which he was a member, and he had a sort of boilerplate speech which he made in various forms, I've mentioned it before, but I think it is appropriate to summarize it here. As I recall, the idea was that the Federal Trade Commission was a powerful bureaucracy and it's at his throat, it is later than you think; he talked about some Russian Commissar of Justice named Krylenko, or something like that, who condemned first and then tried the case, that was his form of justice, and it wasn't ever clear to me whether he had learned that from the Federal Trade Commission or we learned that technique from him. In any event, we were soul mates, Krylenko and the Commission, as far as Lowell

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was concerned, in our methods of operation. Nobody had ever answered Lowell. I thought somebody ought to start making a few speeches against Lowell's thesis, and I wanted Earl to collect material on Lowell's speeches as a basis and start helping me to work up some speeches, opposing his thesis, but it was true that Earl was busy, he could never find time for that. He was very unhappy about the assignment to begin with, because he felt that this would put him in trouble with Lowell. I assured him that I would go to Lowell and tell him exactly what I was doing, and that Earl was doing it under my direction and not at his own instigation.

And I did, I told Lowell, well, Earl has got to take orders from me, but this is my idea not his, I assure you. Well, we never got around to doing that, but then the payoff was this, and this really had its elements of humor. When Earl was made General Counsel, there was a luncheon given for him by the Commission, the commissioners and the senior staff feted Earl, and everybody made a little speech. Well, a few days before that, the announcement of Earl's appointment as General Counsel had been made and the press releases

[901]

had been issued, and the press release, as I recall, was two pages, single spaced and it recounted blow by blow, Earl's career from birth, including being valedictorian of his high school class, and such minutiae as that, but all it had to say about the last three years of his life was, that he'd been legal assistant to the Commission, they never mentioned my name, he hadn't been legal assistant to the Commission, he had been legal assistant to Commissioner Spingarn, you see, but the whole last three years of his life were boiled down to an ambiguous statement that hid what he had really done.

I was amused by this. I understood the reason, and when I got up to make my speech, I made some, I hope, humorous remarks on the subject, I said it was hard to tell where Earl had been for the last three years from reading this lengthy history of his. I wanted to assure them that if anyone was interested, I'd be glad to tell them where he had been, he'd been in my office helping me -- I don't know what I said, but it was all kidding Earl. Everybody laughed and that was all right. I wasn't hurt by that.

But then something happened that was different.

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I appointed a fine young chap named Paul LaRue to replace Earl as my legal assistant, and I thought, in ordinary course, a short press release on this was in order, to get everyone around the Commission to know that I had a new legal assistant, and so forth, and give LaRue the proper status. So I wrote a little press release, just a couple of paragraphs, it was half a page, I naturally stated that he was replacing Earl Kintner, who had been my legal assistant for the previous two and a half years and who had now become General Counsel.

I wrote this out myself and I sent the draft down to our press office to type up for final issue. Within twenty or thirty minutes after I sent it down there, Earl appeared in my office with the draft in his hand, and he begged me to remove the reference to him in my own press release.

Now, that really shook me, it made me angry, very angry and I gave him a tongue lashing, and he assured me that this was simply a tactical matter, that if I would watch his career as General Counsel, I would be proud of him, because he was going to be a good anti truster and so forth and so on, but this was

[903]

tactical, you know, there's nothing personal in this. I assured him that I thought it was a very scrummy trick, that you couldn't rewrite history to eliminate the last two and a half years, and even if he could rewrite his own history as he had on his own press release, he couldn't rewrite mine. He had the gall, in fact it was pretty stupid, to think that he could do that.

After I had thought it over, I sat down and I wrote a letter to Earl, in which I recited his infamy and how I had befriended and picked him for my legal assistant, that he served ably for two and a half years, and now he had the temerity to do this, and so forth. It was a very sharp letter and I was going to send it to him and with a notation that a copy was being placed in his personnel file, or something like that.

Well, I wrote the letter in rough draft, and I thought of it overnight and the next day I decided not to do it quite that way. I simply called Earl in and I read the draft letter to him and then I said, "I'm not going to put it in the personnel file," I said, "I just wanted to get it off my chest. I feel better

[904]

now, now that you know what I think of you," that was it. Earl became General Counsel, and after I left, he became Chairman of the Commission, and, by the way, he's a very able guy, let's not underestimate his talent.

He was for a couple of years president of the Federal Bar Association, and he was the sparkplug of their putting up their own building. It's on H Street. He was also the sparkplug of the Federal Lawyers Club, which they sponsored, which is now a very successful enterprise in that building. He's a fellow who gets things done, and I think he had a slightly guilty conscience about me because every year .since I left the Commission he sends me a Christmas card, every year, and I've never sent him one during the whole period. Three or four years ago I ran into him at the Federal Lawyers Club, his Federal Lawyers Club, since he was the president, and I went over and said, "Earl, you know I've been annoyed at you about long enough, after all there is a statute of limitations on this thing," so we shook hands and I sent him Christmas cards ever since.

He is very able. All of us have done things

[905]

that we're not too proud of, and I can't say that I think that was one of his shining hours, that occasion, but that he has great ability, no one could argue. Now that's Earl Kintner.

Then there was other men, Joe [Joseph E] Sheehy who was head of the Bureau of Antimonopoly, a fine chap, a fellow of the finest quality, and Everett MacIntyre, who was his principal assistant, and Everett is a wonderful man and a very dedicated antitrust lawyer. He, subsequently, a couple years after the "new team" came in in 1953, he went up to the Hill as General Counsel of the House Small Business Committee, and eventually, as he was a great friend of Wright Patman, the Chairman of that committee and now the Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, on the urging of Wright Patman, he was appointed to the Commission, and he is now a Commissioner. Then there was other men whom I remember, good lawyers, such as Vic [John A.] Buffington, Bill Tinsley, there was an assistant general counsel from Mississippi whose name I can't remember, he was a nice fellow and a good lawyer, and there were others. It's hard to remember them all, I don't want to slight anyone.

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Among the economists, the two men with whom I worked most closely were John Blair, a very able and dedicated antitrust man, and a fellow full of ideas; he has for many years now been the chief economist of the Antitrust Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, extremely able, and another extremely able economist was Bill Johnson, William Summer Johnson. Bill became Chief Economist of the House Small Business Committee under Wright Patman, and he became staff director of the joint Senate-House Committee on the Economic Report, and he became staff director of the House Banking and Currency Committee, and two or three years ago he left the Hill and became an economic consultant for a while, and a year or so ago he went out to Hawaii to settle, and he is now the State Economist of Hawaii and was very active in the 1966 campaign there. He's a liberal Georgian, and I rate this type of liberal, liberal southerners, as one of the best breeds we have in this country, because it's easy for a man to be a liberal in an environment where everybody he knows is a liberal, a New York liberal, or a Chicago liberal, or a Los Angeles liberal doesn't deserve much credit, probably in the circles

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in which he moves, he would be despised and scorned if he were anything else, but a fellow who is liberal in Georgia or Alabama or Mississippi, he has to be a game fish swimming upstream. His liberalism is against the grain of his own background and environment, that's much harder to do, so I rate them as an unusually fine breed of cat.

Well, Bill Johnson is that kind of fellow and he's a dedicated anti-truster, too, He and I worked very closely on many projects together, and we were flashing air mail, special delivery letters back and forth between Hawaii and Washington during their last campaign, too.

Then there was Corwin Edwards, who was a distinguished economist, who had a long reputation as a professor of economics, I think he was at Northwestern, now he's out in one of the Oregon schools. I've forgotten whether it's Oregon State, or the University of Oregon. He's been a consultant in many capacities for the Government. He was consultant to Esther Peterson on her Consumer Protection White House operation. He's a fine chap and very able.

There was John Wheelock, who was Jim Mead's legal

[908]

assistant, the chairman, a moderate, pleasant, likeable fellow from Tennessee, he's now the executive director of the Commission, he's got the chief staff job. Well, there were others whom I've probably overlooked but I have mentioned the men whom, I suppose, whom I worked with most closely.

Now one thing I want to mention is the tempo of the work at the Federal Trade Commission. I have been used to a much harder tempo, a much more driving tempo, actually. I had come from the White House where we worked night and day and weekends. I talked about my running the task force that wrote the Defense Production Bill and I found that I got the assignment on a Saturday morning, on July 15, 1950, and the bill was completed and taken to the Hill on Wednesday, July 19th. We were working night and day for four days. That was a awful stretch, just a blur, you know -- I mean all day Saturday and all night Saturday and all day Sunday and all night Sunday, my goodness, it was awful. I was there until midnight or two o'clock every night and up in the morning reasonably early, too. This was not atypical, there was always a crisis at the White House on something.

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Now in the Treasury in the '30s, we were working in sort of a crisis atmosphere, there was an awful lot of night work and an awful lot of weekend work at the Treasury, and after the war, that is after I came back to the Treasury, the three years I was there then, the work was heavy but it was not as heavy as it had been in the '30s. It wasn't quite that crisis atmosphere as much then as had been, but when I got over to the Federal Trade Commission, I found a thoroughly different tempo, it was strictly an 8:30 to 5:00 tempo, hardly anyone worked overtime, relatively few, while there were many dedicated and hard working people there, the fact remains that there wasn't the accelerated tempo. It was an old line agency, for one thing. The Federal Trade Commission dated back to 1914, actually set up in 1915 under a '14 statute, but I think that probably the thing was that this was an assembly line of cases, the Commission.

There were six or seven hundred employees when I was there and probably two hundred and fifty of them were lawyers, something on that order, and then there were many economists, statisticians and accountants besides, a heavily professional group. And when you

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have a never ending chain of cases, you see, and it doesn't make any difference how many you dispose of, that just means other cases have moved in on you, as fast as you dispose of some you get more; there isn't the incentive to work seventy or eighty hours a week that there would be if you were working on different matters, one time one thing and one time another.

Here it was case after case after case, and the man worked in either one category, at that time they were divided into two main bureaus – anti-monopoly and anti-deceptive practices -- antimonopoly handled the so-called antitrust cases, the price fixing and Robinson-Patman and so forth and the anti deceptive practices handled the false advertising and deceptive practices, so I think that had something to do with the way the staff worked, most of them, I don't mean to say there weren't exceptions.

But I used to stay, I used to come in late, but I used to stay till six, everybody left at five, I'd be there all alone until six or later every night, and then I'd take my work home and read. An enormous part of the commissioner's job is reading briefs and memorandum,

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you see, and you can do that anywhere, of course. I used to take that home and read them at night, read them weekends. The first few months I was on the Commission, I didn't work too hard, I was still licking my wounds a little, I hadn't wanted to go there, but then I began to become interested in the work and I began to work harder and pretty soon I was working full tilt, or pretty near.

I wasn't working as hard then as I am right now, though, although I don't have any assigned job. I've been getting up, since September at least from four to six almost every morning, I was up at 4:45 this morning, for example, Jerry, I probably had knocked out half a dozen letters and memorandum before you woke up.

There's one factor I want to mention. Although I was a White House staff man, had been assistant to the President, there was never, not once in the whole time I was there, any White House pressure on me on a single case, to decide that case one way or the other, I just want to make that a matter of record -- not once.

I would like to say that when I left the Commission, I issued a press release, my term ran out on September 25th,

[912]

and I issued a press release September 21st, a sort of a final swan song, and I summarized my views based on my three years experience on the Commission, of how an antimonopoly agency such as the Federal Trade Commission, should operate in order to serve the public interest most effectively. I'm going to give you this memorandum which I asked to be Xeroxed and returned to me, and I will note only my list of the headings. (1) to be worth its salt, the Commission must be truly independent, (2) to be effective, the Commission must have a highly competent and uncowed staff, which genuinely believes in the objectives for which the Commission was established, (3) the Commission should not be afraid to deal with controversial matters and should be tough enough to take its lumps for doing so, (4) the Commission is substantially too small for the job it has, and it should actively seek adequate appropriations, (5) the Commission should strongly resist the current efforts to weaken or emasculate the antitrust laws, (6) the Commission should strongly resist efforts to influence its quasi-judicial decisions in extralegal ways, (7) the Commission should select its cases. more advertently, (8) the Commission

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should do more work in the economic reporting field, (9) the Commission should not rely on unenforceable voluntary agreements to discontinue illegal practices in the antimonopoly field, (10) the Commission should make the meaning of its work more understandable to the Congress and to the public, (11) the Commission should not wrap its quasi-judicial robes too tightly around itself.

Those are the points I made. I want to mention a little more on two of them, I think. I said (1) to be worth its salt, the Commission must be truly independent. Now, of course, I was a presidential man who came over there and, of course, what I was really objecting to was too great presidential domination of this so-called independent quasi-judicial commission, which is supposed to be independent and the President had no right to influence its decisions, but the fact is, of course it can't be avoided that he appoints the commissioners. I mean, they would have to be appointed presumably by the President, but its appropriations have to go through the Bureau of the Budget, his agency, which regularly cuts us more than Congress. I pointed this out, the average cut of the Budget over the ten

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years previous to the year I made this check while I was on the Commission, was I think eighteen percent a year on the average, whereas the Congress only cut us another twelve or thirteen percent, if my memory is right, on the average.

Then our legislation had to be cleared with the Bureau of the Budget. I think we should send our budget direct to Congress without going through the Bureau of the Budget, I think we shouldn't fool around with the Bureau of the Budget on clearing legislation. As a matter of comity, we might send them copies of what we're going to send up, but not ask them to let us know if it's O.K. or not.

Then there's the question of the strong Chairman, I've mentioned that, who dominated the Commission, and who serves at the pleasure of the President, as Chairman. He's his man, he makes all the appointments, virtually, and he really runs a large part of the Commission. The other commissioners, of course, have the same voice in quasi-judicial decisions but in the administrative operations, they do not.

Then there is the question of appealing our cases; we have to get the approval of the Solicitor General to

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take our cases up to the Supreme Court, again he's the President's man, and so forth and so on.

So, although, it is said that the Commission is independent, in fact, they are very heavily under the domination of the President. Your point of view shifts, depending where you are, obviously, and when you are in the White House, you're likely to be a White House man, but when you get to be an independent commissioner, you are an independent Commission man. Maybe that sort of typifies how human nature operates.

The other point I wanted to mention is the, I think it's number six, no, I had it number five; "the Commission should strongly resist the efforts to weaken and emasculate the antitrust laws," and six too, I guess; "the Commission should strongly resist efforts to influence its quasi-judicial decisions in extralegal ways." Sometime after or around, I think it was December or January, I've forgotten exactly when, but around the beginning of the takeover of the Eisenhower administration, I held a luncheon at the Willard and I invited the leaders of the antimonopoly conference, which consisted of small business organizations, and some labor organizations, and some farm organizations,

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which had been kind of a loose coalition to work against monopoly. I invited both Republican and Democratic members of Congress. Estes Kefauver was there for one, and I invited Senator William Langer. Senator (Charles William) Tobey came, he's now dead, a Republican from New Hampshire, and others, and the point I tried to make in my keynote speech to them, if that's what it was, was that I felt we had a lot of work ahead of us, those of us who believed, in both parties, in anti-monopoly. I said I didn't think my administration had done too good a job on it, frankly, I couldn't give them a very high rating. I didn't say that it was very bad, but I didn't think it was terribly good, and from what I had seen I didn't think the next administration was going to do any better. There were ominous signs on the horizon already, you see, along those lines. So I just suggested to those in both parties -- heaven knows antimonopoly should be a bi-partisan, non-partisan sort of issue. Those of us in both parties, who believed in antitrust and antimonopoly work should hang together and try to resist the pressures to emasculate this work.

Well, I could elaborate on each of these points,

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but I think the paper here says just about what I would say, and I still stand on what I said in there.