POWER: Checker-Uppers

A Pittsburgh accountant named Michael Charles Conick got a juicy job last week. Pennsylvania’s Republican Senator James John (“Puddler Jim”) Davis persuaded Ohio’s Democratic Senator Vic Donahey, chairman of the Congressional committee which is exploring TVA, that their job is 85% accounting and auditing; that though twelve experts from the U. S. Comptroller General’s office are now digging through TVA’s books, investigation of one Government agency by another would not satisfy the U. S. public unless checked by an independent inspection. Senator Davis had friends, he said, who would help him finance such an inspection. None of them had any private utility connection, he said, nor had Accountant Conick, his choice for the job. Mr. Conick is a checker-upper whose firm (Main & Co.) has often been called in to clean up after Pennsylvania politicians, whose findings drove from office Pittsburgh’s rapacious mayor, the late Charles H. Kline, in 1933.

Senator Donahey, consenting, furnished Accountant Conick with the same powers of access to TVA records and witnesses as the committee’s other experts. As private utilitarians cheered this new guarantee of an ice-cold view of TVA, Senator Davis publicly declared:

“I am not criticizing the committee or its staff but I regret to see that almost all the information it is getting comes from TVA witnesses, who come on the stand and tell us what they want to tell us, except for what additional facts members of the committee can get out of them by questions.

“We are being helped to some extent by letters and telephone calls, many of them anonymous, giving us leads to follow up; but the examination of witnesses cannot be as effective under existing circumstances as if we had had a force of investigators at work in advance, gathering material as a basis for real crossexamination, as is usually done by Congressional committees. As it is, most of the testimony has been pass-the-biscuit-pappy stuff.”

Evidently stirred by Senator Davis’ activity, Chairman Donahey traveled at week’s end to Washington to ask President Roosevelt for more money for the committee, so that it can audit TVA thoroughly itself. Senator Donahey’s own checker-upper will be W. O. Heffernan, now the committee’s secretary, long a topflight aide of such employers as General Motors, National Cash Register, the British Treasury.