INVESTIGATIONS: New Kind of Shock

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Of all the shocked members of the House Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, none was more constantly, quiveringly shocked by the merest thought of outside pressure on the Federal Communications Commission than New Jersey's Republican Representative Charles A. Wolverton, 77, veteran of nearly 32 years of House service. "It will be a sorry day in America," cried he, as evidence piled up that applicants for Miami's disputed TV Channel 10 had enlisted Senators to bring pressure on the FCC, "if the feeling of reverence for courts does not exist, and I think it's a sorry day when the feeling does not exist for a [federal] commission." Indignant Charles Wolverton wanted to haul the offending Senators before the House subcommittee, and he introduced a bill to make it a crime for anybody, including members of Congress, to make an improper request of a federal regulatory agency member. Said he: "I'm sure it shocks anyone else who has an idea of morality."

Last week it developed that a good deal depended on whose morality was involved. Republican Wolverton began expounding his ethical ideas to Witness Paul Porter, chairman of the FCC during the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations, now counsel for a losing applicant for Miami's Channel 10. That was what canny Lawyer Porter had been waiting for. Smiling owlishly, he reached into a briefcase, produced a letter from a Congressman to the FCC requesting special action on a constituent's application for TV Channel 17 in Camden, N.J. Date of letter: March 30, 1953. Sender of letter: Representative Wolverton.

Visibly suffering from a different kind of shock, Representative Wolverton spent the lunch hour searching for another copy of the letter, finally found one in the National Archives, returned to the hearing room that afternoon with an indignant explanation: It was an "inconsequential letter," and if, "after 32 years, only one letter can be produced, I have a lot to be thankful for." Subcommittee Chairman Oren Harris, an Arkansas Democrat who has been less excited all along than Wolverton about congressional pressures on the FCC, cut in quickly. "There is no impropriety," said Harris. "Hearing is adjourned."

Another day last week the subcommittee met President Eisenhower's brother-in-law. Colonel George Gordon Moore Jr., 54, accused last month by ousted Subcommittee Counsel Bernard Schwartz (TIME, Feb. 24) of trying to swing FCC decisions through his membership by marriage in "the White House clique." Colonel Moore, a crisp and courtly Texan, was born in Galveston, educated at St. Mary's Seminary (Roman Catholic) at La Porte, Texas, in 1940 married Mabel Frances