Said Representative Nixon on April 22, 1948:
“I say that this proposition cannot stand from a constitutional standpoint or on the basis of the merits for this very good reason: They would mean the President could have arbitrarily issued an Executive order in the [Bennett] Meyers case, the Teapot Dome case, or any other case denying the Congress of the United States information it needed to conduct an investigation of the Executive department and the Congress would have no right to question his decision.”
Again, three years later, Representative Halleck was saying on the House floor:
“His [Truman’s] censorship order gives every agency and department of the Government the absolute power to decide what information shall be kept from them. These agency heads are absolute czars unto themselves. When they order the iron curtain down it stays down—a gag on the press and radio of the nation.”
Most of this initial criticism was aimed at the rather limited presidential order which barred Congress from the government personnel files in the investigations of loyalty and security cases.
Although the Truman administration was reluctant to make records available when the Republicans began looking into allegations of improper activities and political favoritism in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), in the Bureau of Internal Revenue, and in the Justice Department, no blanket order was issued refusing testimony or records. The allegations were followed first by denials. Then there was stalling but finally, under the pressure of public opinion, the records were made available.
What happened specifically was this: Senator John J. Williams, the Delaware Republican, produced some fairly well documented cases of favoritism and bungling in the nation’s number one tax agency. President Truman, Secretary of Treasury John Snyder, and Attorney General J. Howard McGrath all denied there was any widespread laxity or corruption in the administration of the federal tax laws. Daniel Bolich, the Assistant Commissioner of Internal Revenue, and T. Lamar Caudle, the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Tax Division, went before the investigating committees and assured the leaders of Congress that all was well.
The self-serving declarations of the Truman administration did not satisfy Senator Williams, however, for they were inconsistent with many documented facts he held in his possession. A subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee was then established to conduct a deeper investigation into the handling of tax cases in the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Later a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee was organized to conduct some further examination of the way the Justice Department handled tax cases as well as other matters.
Because tax cases were handled by the Bureau of Internal Revenue, a branch of the Treasury Department, and prosecuted by the Justice Department, both departments were involved in the investigation. Tax cases, it was learned, could be fixed in their initial stages by Internal Revenue agents, or they could be sidetracked at higher levels in the Bureau of Internal Revenue; they could be rejected for prosecution by the Justice Department in Washington, or kicked aside by the United States District Attorney. There were at least a half-dozen points where a “fix” could take place, and congressional investigations disclosed that some cases were manipulated at almost all stages.
When at first the Justice Department files were not made available, the stalling was recognized for what it was—an effort to hide records that might be embarrassing. Newspapers quickly pointed out the cover-up, and Acting Attorney General Philip B. Perlman was forced to lay down procedural rules for the committees of Congress to use in requesting access to Justice Department files.