INVESTIGATIONS: Crooked Halos

Under White House and congressional pressure, Federal Communications Commissioner Richard A. Mack resigned last week for his part in the FCC award of Miami's Channel 10 last year to a National Airlines television subsidiary (TIME, March 10). Mack insisted that his conscience was clear about his vote for National and the loans and gifts he accepted from Old Friend Thurman Whiteside. (In two years on the FCC, Government investigators reported, Mack received $35,000 in salary and $41,000 from outside sources.) But Dwight Eisenhower stiffly told him: "You are wise to tender your resignation ..."

Mack had at least one defender. Tough, outspoken National Airlines President George T. Baker, who in 40 years had personally built a 140-mile airmail run into a lucrative. 3.400-mile passenger route. Baker, a fellow Floridian, appeared before the FCC-probing House Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight to protest that Mack was "being broken, crucified and . . . sent home in disgrace." But "more guilty," insisted Baker, were Florida's Democratic Senators George Smathers and Spessard Holland, together with Tennessee's Estes Kefauver. Their crime, to Baker's mind: pressuring the FCC for a rival Channel 10 applicant while the case was under consideration. Snapped Baker: "Holland, Smathers and Kefauver ought to resign, just as Commissioner Mack has, and for the same reason . . . Their halos have slipped."

The subcommittee announced it would hear any Senator who appeared voluntarily, but House Speaker Sam Rayburn stopped that: "If I were a Senator, I would not come voluntarily. If a Senate committee called me, I'd tell them to go dig potatoes, deep."