The Roosevelt administration also used the secrecy routine to hamper a House investigation of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1943 and 1944. The FCC probe involved the basic charge of political tampering with an independent regulatory agency. There were indications of improper secret contacts with some commission members while cases were being decided.
The Roosevelt administration used every political method available to impede the investigations, including the use of friends in Congress to harass the investigators. Two men who successively held the title of general counsel—Eugene L. Garey and John J. Sirica—resigned in the face of the obstructions and harassment. They charged the investigation was being turned into a “whitewash.”
The final report of the committee gave the FCC a clean bill of health. However, the minority report filed by Representative Richard B. Wigglesworth, Republican of Massachusetts, stated: “It has been impossible for the committee to conduct anything approaching a thoroughgoing investigation.”
Congressman Wigglesworth charged that the committee consistently acted “to suppress indefinitely alleged unsavory facts said to involve high administration officials and advisers.” He made reference to the “methods both brutal and shameful” used to force the original chairman of the investigating committee to resign, and to the general atmosphere that resulted in the resignations of counsels Garey and Sirica.
The unhealthy conditions, which the House committee had started to expose, were left to fester, and fourteen years later the full effects burst on the American public. The investigations of the House Legislative Oversight Subcommittee in 1957, 1958, and 1959, which will be described in a later chapter, disclosed that the successful blocking of the FCC investigation in 1944 not only allowed bad practices to continue but thereby encouraged corruption.
Though President Roosevelt had directed the Secretaries of War and Navy not to deliver some documents which the FCC investigators had requested, his stated reason was simply that it would “not be in the public interest.” No broad claims of a constitutional right to withhold information were ever invoked. There was no need for them because the cover-up was that ruthless and that effective. Had the nation not been at war, such a cover-up would likely have caused a major uproar.
The end of World War II and the election of a Republican Congress in 1946, however, brought the Democrats to heel. From the time the Republican Congress took control of the committees, the Truman administration was in almost constant combat with Congress. The first disputes involved the efforts of Republican committees of Congress to obtain access to FBI records and loyalty files. Later disputes centered on efforts to gain access to records of the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the Justice Department.
In 1947, the Republicans were intent on demonstrating that the Truman administration was “coddling Communists.” Investigators sought access to personnel records and letters dealing with the retention and promotion of persons who were alleged to be security risks or of questionable loyalty.
President Truman issued an executive order barring Congress from access to any of the loyalty or security information in the personnel files of the government. He said it was to protect the government employees from abuse by committees of Congress. The unrestrained activities of some congressional investigators did indeed make the order seem justifiable to many. However, the Republicans viewed it as a cover-up.
Representative Richard M. Nixon, later the Vice President, Representative Charles Halleck, later the Republican leader, and a dozen other prominent Republicans kept a continuous barrage of criticism firing at President Truman.