And so, on September 22, 1958, Sherman Adams resigned. In a nationwide television broadcast, he said he had “done no wrong” but was the victim of “a campaign of vilification.”
Only five days later, a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned the indictment charging Richard Mack, the former FCC commissioner, with conspiracy to defraud the government. The indictment charged that Thurman A. Whiteside, a Miami lawyer, had bought Mack’s vote in connection with the award of Miami television Channel 10.
Some people paid a heavy price for what had once seemed to them to be clever secretive manipulations to influence governmental decisions. Whiteside crumpled under the strain and died by his own hand. Mack cringed before the court with a plea that he was too ill and too alcoholic to stand trial.
Even a million-dollar fortune couldn’t save Bernard Goldfine from the disgrace of a federal prison term. He hired the most expensive lawyers and engaged in every conceivable maneuver to stay out of prison, but in the end lost his freedom and his “friends.” He went to prison on a criminal charge of evading more than $800,000 in federal taxes. Although he had boasted bravely that he would not co-operate with the Justice Department in explaining what he did with the missing $800,000, his health broke while in prison and left him a shattered shell of his former self. Later the Internal Revenue Service filed liens against his property totaling more than $7,000,000. The Goldfine magic had turned to mud.
These cases had dramatized the full evil of secret government. The problems of Adams rose directly from the failure of the White House to recognize the dangers involved. It was not necessary to read evil intent into the origin of the blanket secrecy. It was bad enough that the Administration had so self-satisfiedly assumed that things were being handled efficiently and properly and that the press and the Congress were better off kept in the dark where they couldn’t stir up trouble.
CHAPTER XII
Ike’s Lawyer and the Law
William Pierce Rogers was nominated to be United States Attorney General in the fall of 1957. He had served as Deputy Attorney General under Herbert Brownell from the time the Eisenhower administration came to power in January 1953. When he was nominated for the top post, he was forty-five years old and had been included by President Eisenhower on a select list of bright young Republicans qualified as presidential or vice presidential timber for 1960. He was regarded as the closest friend of Vice President Richard Nixon.
The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Rogers nomination had barely started on January 22, 1958, when Senator Estes Kefauver raised the question of the Eisenhower administration’s broad use of “executive privilege.”
“Mr. Rogers,” the Tennessee Senator said, “many of us in the Senate and in the House have been increasingly alarmed over the expansion of the pleading of privilege on information which congressional committees desire, and feel they have a right to have.”
Senator Kefauver explained the philosophy behind the need for full information in a democracy, and then moved to the specific problem: