THE ADMINISTRATION: The Deep Freeze Set

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Hunt's greatest triumph involved the repurchase from the Navy of the Lido Beach Hotel at Long Beach, N.Y. The Navy had paid $1,300,000 for the place. The former owners wanted it back, and agreed to pay Hunt a $50,000 fee plus a big percentage of any amount under $800,000 he was able to get it for. He got it for $635,000, and made $86,000 by a process which, though legal, could hardly have been applauded by U.S. taxpayers.

Friendship. Whatever the final outcome of the investigation, it had already defined the kind of dank atmosphere in which Vaughan's good friend Hunt and his colleagues had operated. If Vaughan himself had done nothing worse, he had used the White House as a means of playing low-grade county-courthouse politics. At week's end, the President was still sticking firmly to the position he had assumed during his weekly press conference —that nothing which had happened had changed his opinion of his old friend Harry Vaughan in the slightest. Mulling Harry Truman's stubborn friendship for his military aide, the Washington Post had a suggestion to make: ". . . it seems to us that the time has come for the general to demonstrate his friendship [in turn] for the President... by resigning and so sparing his patron any further embarrassments."