The Dignity of It All

For nearly two years, beginning in 1951, a House Judiciary Subcommittee pried into suspicious tax and fraud cases that had brought scandal to the Justice Department during the Truman Administration. The most spectacular witness was a drawling, small-town lawyer named Theron Lamar Caudle (TIME, Nov. 26, 1951 et seq.). But more often than not the committee's trail led toward the man who had brought Caudle from Wadesboro, N.C. to Washington: onetime Attorney General Thomas Campbell Clark, since 1949 Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. When Justice Clark was asked to testify, he declined with dignity on the ground that "the courts must be kept free from public controversy."

After Clark's refusal more than a year ago, the investigation ground to a halt. The subcommittee could not clear up or pin down its doubt about Clark, wrote a report full of inferences. The full Judiciary Committee, fearful that friends of Clark would attack the report's defects, dallied about releasing it. Last week, without action by the full committee, New York's Republican Representative Kenneth Keating, chairman of the subcommittee, released the report.

Most Worthy of Criticism. It was the first public censure of Mr. Justice Clark from an official source. Said the report: "The subcommittee found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing by Justice Clark . . . [But] a strong inference remains that he was responsible for some of the conditions the subcommittee has found most worthy of criticism."

Some of the conditions the subcommittee found worthy of criticism with regard to Clark arose in a case involving an Orlando, Fla. bond dealer named Roy E. Crummer. In 1944 Crummer was indicted for mail fraud in connection with two municipal bond issues. Crummer's trial lawyer brought into the case Attorney Francis P. Whitehair, a crony of Harry Truman's crony Donald Dawson. In turn,

Whitehair, who later became Under Secretary of the Navy, retained ex-Federal Communications Commission Chairman James Lawrence Fly. Whitehair and Fly called on Attorney General Tom Clark, asked him to drop the charges against Crummer, and gave him more than 60 letters from Crummer's clients. Said the Keating report: "It was improper for these attorneys to offer, and for the Attorney General to accept, argumentative materials ..." Besides, the subcommittee added, "the letters themselves were practically meaningless," since the point of the charges against Crummer was that he concealed his manipulations from his clients.

The lawyers also gave Clark a Senate resolution calling for an investigation of the Post Office and the Securities & Exchange Commission, the two agencies which had investigated Crummer. "No high-minded advocate would have trafficked so crassly in political pressures," said the subcommittee, "and no public official worthy of his office would have tolerated such a thinly veiled threat . . ."

Pressure & Favoritism. After talking to Clark, Whitehair and Fly took the matter up with Assistant Attorney General Caudle. "We sure talked to these people a lot of times," Caudle related.

Asked if he gave a lot of weight to the letters from Crummer's clients, he replied, "They impressed me." What about the SEC's investigation on which the whole case was based? Said T. Lamar Caudle: "I never did read that report . . . No, sir, I never did. I never did."

Meanwhile, Crummer protested his innocence and brought court action to clear his name, but a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the indictments valid. To the chagrin of the SEC, the Post Office Department, and the district attorney who prepared the case, Theron Lamar Caudle recommended dismissal of the Crummer indictments. Tom Clark so ordered. Said the Keating subcommittee: "Win or lose, the Government was entitled to a trial of the issues involved . . . [The Crummer case] is a clear instance of improper action resulting from pressure and favoritism."

Last week, as the Keating report was making headlines, Mr. Justice Clark maintained the dignity of his high station: he said nothing.

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