THE CAPITAL: Handy Andy

• Share

For a man of 71 with a bad heart and a queasy stomach, Andrew Jackson May of Kentucky looked remarkably fit when his trial began last April. For a man on trial for conspiracy to defraud the Government, he was amazingly full of bluster. For a onetime chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, he was in the company of unsavory codefendants: the mysterious brothers Garsson,* owners of a shadowy wartime munitions empire. But Andy May was an amazing man.

The story unfolded by Government witnesses picked up where the Senate's war investigating committee left off last summer (TIME, July 15 et seq.), when Andy May rushed home with a heart attack. The Government's case made Andy out an industrious genius at the art of exerting Congressional pressure. Nothing was too much trouble for him.

One minute May was urging an ordnance colonel to "get a nice, big contract" for his good friends Murray and Henry Garsson to manufacture artillery shells. The next, he was demanding draft deferment for an acrobat friend of Murray Garsson. Then he was back to see if the Garssons could not get an Army contract to build wooden watertanks.

"Blitz Calls." In those days Handy Andy was at the top and he always worked at the top. At one time or another he had turned his persuasive efforts on Secretary of War Robert Patterson (to get the Garssons an E award); Under Secretary of War Kenneth Royall (to see about unfreezing Garsson funds, which were held up during profit re-negotiations); General Brehon Somervell, wartime head of the Army Service Forces (to investigate a cutback contract for Garsson-made truck bodies). Lieut. General Levin H. Campbell Jr., former Chief of Ordnance, heard from Andy so often he began to refer to their telephone chats as "blitz calls."

Andy, by the Government's evidence, seemed to be adept at turning a penny occasionally out of his favors to friends. The Government produced records of two $1,000 checks May had pocketed, a $2,500 deposit in his account by Murray Garsson, an old $5,000 note Murray had obligingly paid off at the bank. But the biggest payoff was an enterprise known as the Cumberland Lumber Co., conveniently located in Andy's home town of Prestonsburg, Ky. The owners were Murray and Henry Garsson; their agent was Andy May.

The Garssons had put more than $50,000 into Cumberland for lumber they never received. One former Garsson employee testified that he had been ordered to juggle the books to show orders and receipts for nonexistent lumber. The Government insisted that Cumberland was simply a blind to shield the fat bribes Andy May extracted from the Garssons.

Not a Dime. If any of this evidence ruffled Democrat May, he did not show it —at least not at first. His defense was ingeniously simple. He was just trying to help the war effort along by helping the Garssons—as he had helped many another war contractor. The checks and cash, he said, were just "campaign contributions," proceeds of private business transactions, funds to pay off notes he had signed to help the Garssons get a little ready cash. He had never made a dime out of the Cumberland Lumber Co. He had posed as Cumberland's owner, he said with a smirk, because no Kentuckian would work in the mill "if it were known that this company was owned by outside people who were Jews."