Nevertheless, the Senate investigating committee persisted. Both Secretary of Interior Fall and Secretary of Navy Denby were called to testify. It was essential to question these two high-level government officials to lay the groundwork for the investigation. It was essential to explore the conversations between them, as well as the personal financial transactions between Fall and the Doheny and Sinclair interests. It was also necessary to explore the opinions and recommendations of subordinate officials.
Without all of this information, Congress could not have proved the dishonest use of a government position by Albert Fall. It would have been naïve to expect that the Justice Department under Harry Daugherty would have conducted an investigation that was fair and objective, for Daugherty was already mired in his own corruption.
The Harding scandals should have demonstrated for all time that the public cannot rely on any administration to police itself. Nor can it rely on the self-serving declarations of a President, however well-meaning he may be.
President Harding died on August 2, 1923, a broken and disillusioned man, still unaware, however, of the full extent of the scandals. Coolidge’s administration and most of Hoover’s had passed before the investigations were finally completed, the convictions recorded, the appeals completed, and Fall imprisoned in 1931.
President Coolidge was faced with a request for a list of the companies in which his Secretary of Treasury, Andrew Mellon, had an interest. A special Senate investigating committee was studying the Bureau of Internal Revenue and wanted to investigate the tax returns of firms with which Mellon was associated.
President Coolidge said it would be “detrimental to the public service” to reveal the list of Mellon’s business interests and the tax returns of those firms. With that, the investigation ended.
Another request for information was similarly nipped by Hoover. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee had requested that Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson produce the contents of telegrams and letters leading up to the London Conference and the London Treaty. The committee contended it had a special right to such papers because of the constitutional prerogative of the Senate in the treaty-making process. Stimson disagreed and President Hoover backed him, arguing that in order to maintain friendly relations with other nations, it would be unwise to give the Senate all of the information on statements leading up to the treaty.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was favored with a Congress that was largely on his side in his first two terms, so that there were no conflicts over information sought by Congress. Indeed, President Roosevelt preferred having committees of Congress investigate and dramatize problems in order to facilitate the passage of various New Deal measures.
Congress did run into opposition to requests for information in Roosevelt’s third term, however. In 1941 Roosevelt rejected requests for FBI records and reports, and in 1944 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover refused to testify or to give Congress a copy of a presidential directive requiring him, in the interests of national security, to refrain from testifying.
The President was backed by a ruling from his Attorney General, Francis Biddle. In a letter dated January 22, 1944, Biddle claimed that communications between the President and the heads of departments were confidential and privileged and not subject to inquiry by Congress. Another opinion by the Attorney General had previously supported President Roosevelt in refusing to make records of the Bureau of the Budget available to Congress.