INVESTIGATIONS: The Mess (Continued)

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In the eleven months since Harry Truman fired him as head of the Justice Department's tax division, big, molasses-voiced Theron Lamar Caudle has spent a lot of time down home in Wadesboro, N.C. reflecting steadily on the ingratitude of princes. Last week, before the Chelf subcommittee in Washington, he made it plain that he felt himself more to be pitied than censured, that his was the dilemma of the small-town boy who falls in with flint-eyed, big-city strangers and finds himself the fall guy when the cops knock down the door.

Perils Right & Left. Washington, he confided, was "dangerous. I'd say on the whole that you really have to be careful in this town . . . One Martini, a handshake, and sure enough, the fellow would be in your office asking for something." He was not above indicating that he was only human and perhaps foolish. There was that matter of the $5,000 commission he picked up for selling an airplane. There was his wife's famed mink coat. "My wife loved that coat," he drawled. "She loved it and petted it like a firstborn child. Now, the pore thing, she'll never put it on again. I think she sold it."

It had, Lamar confessed, taken him a long time to understand the perils & pitfalls of Washington. He had felt, vaguely, year after year, that his job was in danger. But he had been reassured. Attorney General J. Howard McGrath once warned him that a "White House clique" was after both of them. According to Caudle, McGrath went on to say that he had a "story that he could tell that would blow the White House so high it would become another satellite and the force of gravity would never bring it back to earth."

Reassured, Lamar relaxed and went off to Italy on a vacation in 1951 and, while there, bought a cigarette case for Harry Truman. "I didn't know whether he smoked, dipped or chewed," the witness volunteered (the President does not use tobacco in any form). But the gift won him a presidential thank-you note which began informally, "Dear Lamar," and he admitted that "I thought I was makin' some time." That was less than three weeks before the roof fell in on him.

Butter for the Boss. But if he had been foolish, he protested, he had done no wrong in any official capacity. He was not ashamed to say that he had buttered up Attorney General (now Supreme Court Justice) Tom Clark. On one occasion, Lamar took him hunting on the fabulous Vanderbilt family estate, Biltmore, outside Asheville. "Somethin' like 3,000 acres," mused Caudle. "Wild turkeys everywhere you looked. Just floppin' around every whichaway." Caudle and Clark were right close: one cold night at Clark's house, they sat huddled up together under one blanket for hours while working on a case. But was he to blame for carrying out Clark's orders?