The Man Who Pulled a Thread

Monday, Oct. 13, 1952

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(See Cover) I know of nobody who has found a way to prevent some people from being . . . dishonest . . . Last year there were something like 600 defalcations and embezzlements in the banks of this country. One out of every 300 bank officers was found to be crooked. And the record of the Bureau of Internal Revenue is a lot better than that.

—Harry Truman, Sept. 29, 1952

Many Americans are half convinced by the statistical (or Kinsey report) explanation of corruption in Government: out of every thousand people there are bound to be X number of crooks. It's human nature. You can't do much about it. Anybody who gets indignant is a hypocritical old dinosaur.

Other Americans disagree. Their side of the argument is presented by the junior Senator from Delaware, John Williams. This small-town chicken-feed dealer with a mousy look and a whispering voice has almost nothing in common with the great prosecutors and muckrakers of U.S. history, with Lincoln Steffens or Tom Walsh. Both he and they, however, did more than expose individuals; they exposed systems of corruption. As Harry Truman says, rascals are always around. But as John Williams says, the smug tolerance of rascals is not always around—and that smugness shocks Williams more than the presence of some rascals in Government.

For nearly five years Williams has rocked the country again & again with scandals in the Bureau of Internal Revenue. He is no sensation monger. He carefully waits until he thinks his case is airtight, then submits it to the man or the office he is about to attack, promising to print any denial or rebuttal in the Congressional Record along with his charge. Williams says he has never made an accusation of crime that has not been followed by an indictment. He works alone (his only "investigator" is a girl secretary). Many of his leads have been picked up and developed by high-powered legal staffs of congressional committees, by crusading newspapers, by grand juries.

The "Secret." Williams' warmest admirer would not call him either a mental giant or a man of burning ambition. He started his exposures by pure accident, continued them by doggedly applying ordinary business ethics. He is like a man who pulled at a loose thread; he got interested, kept pulling until the whole covering that screened one of the worst U.S. public scandals was unraveled.

Williams' very lack of qualifications, the simplicity of his operation, is a part of the story. If the graft had been very hard to find, Williams wouldn't have found it. All he had that the Administration didn't have was independence of the system of political favoritism under which the graft flourished. The "secret" of his success is that the bulk of his information comes from Government employees. Once he had stumbled on his first exposure he became known as a man to whom honest Government employees could turn to expose their dishonest fellows. Williams protected his sources. The more he exposed, the more information rolled in.