THE ADMINISTRATION: The Deep Freeze Set

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"Later, [one of the friends] informed me that he could obtain some deep freeze units that did not have commercial market value as they were experimental models. At that time I informed him that I would like to have him send one to me, and one to the White House in Washington for the lunchroom used by members of the staff. Also I asked him to send one to the little White House in Independence, Mo., and to send other units to Mr. Fred Vinson, Mr. John Snyder [the Secretary of the Treasury], Mr. James K. Vardaman Jr. [governor of the Federal Reserve Board and onetime presidential naval aide] and Mr. Matthew J. Connelly [White House secretary] . . ."

This air of wide-eyed and injured innocence was based on a premise which was legitimate enough—that there is no law against public officials accepting gifts from grateful admirers and constituents. Presidents accept oil paintings, birthday cakes, prize turkeys, ship models, even Fords (one went to Harry Truman in 1945), but these are open presents, publicly given and publicly received. The freezers had been clandestine gifts; why was the Verley Company so generous? Harry Vaughan's self-portrait in shining armor had to be matched with the picture of him which witnesses had been painting before the committee all week.

Back in 1947, for instance, he had been seized with a burning desire to help the owners of California's Tanforan Race

Track rebuild their grandstands and buildings—a project which was being blocked by Government restrictions on use of badly needed building materials.

He had sent three Tanforan officials to see Housing Expediter Frank Creedon, with his blessing and best wishes. Creedon had brushed them off. A little later, Creedon resigned, and was replaced—through more of the curious coincidence which threaded through everything concerning the Senate's findings—by Tighe E. Woods, an obscure bureaucrat who had been helped to power by Five-Percenter Hunt.

As Housing Expediter, Woods was able to be helpful. In the beginning, Harry Vaughan had only called him to the White House and asked for "fair treatment" for his "friends." But a little later the general had barged into Woods's office with Eugene Mori, president of Tanforan, and had bayed, "Please hurry!" Tanforan's permit, made possible, according to Woods, by "loopholes" in the law, was granted the very next day.

Double Entry. Vaughan's name had also turned up in a lot of other places—among them in evidence the committee had gathered on Major General Alden H. Waitt, recently suspended as chief of the Army Chemical Corps. Waitt, apparently in an attempt to succeed himself for another term, wrote a secret, derogatory memorandum on eight subordinate officers (whom he had praised earlier in Army efficiency reports).

The document was dictated in Five-Percenter Hunt's office and sent to Harry Vaughan. Listening, last week, South Dakota's Senator Karl E. Mundt said: "It looks to me like a sort of ingenious plot by which Hunt, Waitt and Vaughan have connived to cut the throats of all the other officers trying to get that job."