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 regurgit
ated. 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 t
o 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….”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 46
