National Affairs: The Friendliest People

(2 of 2)

Landau arranged to get mouton coats for Caudle's daughter and for Mrs. Turner L. Smith, wife of Caudle's chief assistant. "A little sheepskin coat," said Caudle, for which he paid $125. But Landau's partner, Attorney I. T. Cohen, remembered things in a different way. The coats cost $563 wholesale, he told the subcommittee, and neither Caudle nor Smith paid anything for them. Christmas gifts, said Cohen.

Landau's friendship was warmer than a little sheepskin. He arranged to get Mrs. Caudle a mink coat for $2,400, then covered $900 of the price himself. And besides, after a telephone call to Landau, Mrs. Caudle was able to line up cut-rate mink coats for the wives of Democratic Senator John L. McClellan of Arkansas and Kenneth C. Royall, a native of Goldsboro, N.C., former Secretary of War.

"She didn't hardly have a coat worth anything," Caudle said of his wife. "She said she had some money she wanted to go to New York and buy one with. She went up there, and she shopped around with Mrs. Landau ... I told her to get a coat would be a pretty extravagant thing. I hoped the sweet thing wouldn't do it, but there was not much I could do about it." The $2,400, said Caudle, was the manufacturer's cost.* Asked what the insurance appraisal on the coat was, he said sadly: "I think either $3,500 or $4,000. The mink market has now dropped ... It has just dropped down just like the oil business . . . Everything has dropped out for me, it seems to me."

Some Bigger Names. As the Caudle tongue rolled garrulously on, some bigger names were dropped. Caudle said Attorney General J. Howard McGrath approved his taking the $5,000 commission on the airplane deal. McGrath replied that he had done so after Caudle had assured him that neither the buyer nor the seller was directly involved in any Government case.

In Charlotte, Pilot Walter B. Mallonee said he flew Caudle on trips to Florida. Among the tax-troubled Mr. Whitehead's guests, Mallonee said, was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark, who was then Attorney General. In Washington, Clark said this was true, but that he didn't know Mr. Whitehead was having tax trouble with the U.S. His old friend Caudle arranged the trips, said Clark. It was Clark who brought Caudle out of the North Carolina hills in 1945 to head the Justice Department's criminal division. Later, Clark promoted Caudle to be the U.S. Government's top tax attorney, although he had no tax law experience and was up against the top legal tax specialists in the U.S.

At week's end, Caudle seemed puzzled that Harry Truman had demanded his resignation because of Caudle's "outside activities." Said he: "I still don't know why I was fired ... I haven't heard one word to tell me why."