“I can assure you that we did not try to conceal anything,” Cook continued. “They just called to our attention certain minor entries that ... didn’t appear to be appropriate.”
“So they suggested no other names that you leave out except Wenzell and Miller?” Senator Kefauver asked.
“No; not that I recall,” Cook answered.]
The President knew little about the Dixon-Yates contract even at this late date, more than a year after it had first been criticized by Democrats. His answer reflected his lack of knowledge, as well as his desire to shut off further questions.
“I don’t intend to comment on it any more at all,” he said. “Now, I think I have given to this conference time and again, the basic elements of this whole development, and everything I could possibly be expected to know about it.
“I said Mr. Dodge, who initiated this whole thing, is going down before the committee to again begin the process of taking this thing from its inception and following it through until he turned [it] over to Mr. Hughes, and I believe that Mr. Hughes is to be there if they want him again.
“Now, they [Dodge and Hughes] can tell the entire story, and I don’t know exactly such details as that. How could I be expected to know? I never heard of it.”
It would have been difficult to imagine a case that dramatized more clearly the bad government that could fester under arbitrary executive secrecy. President Eisenhower had issued an order for a full chronology of events leading up to the Dixon-Yates contract, but, instead, his subordinates had put out a record edited to eliminate the names of persons involved in a “conflict of interest.”
The secrecy deceived the public, deceived the committee of Congress, and even deceived President Eisenhower. His comments over the period of months showed that his subordinates had misled or deliberately deceived him on the key point in the controversy—the role of Adolphe Wenzell. In this respect the secrecy possible under “executive privilege” worked against the best interests of President Eisenhower. Apparently his subordinates thought they could distort the record, and keep it hidden from the public and the President. Only the persistent work of Senator Kefauver’s investigators pulled loose sufficient facts to document the deception.
President Eisenhower might have been able to sell the Dixon-Yates contract to the public if it had been handled as a simple debate of private power versus public power. But he could no longer see it through once he had been forced to take note of a “conflict of interest” that he had previously denied existed.