POLITICAL NOTES: Eruption in Bourbon County

Just before the polls opened on election day last November, a Republican challenger picked up a ballot box in a Bourbon County, Ky. precinct, shook it, and heard a startling sound. Not a vote had been cast, but paper was rustling inside the box. It was opened. The rustle had been made by 17 fraudulent ballots. Investigators looked farther, found that boxes in ten other precincts had been stuffed too. Altogether, 254 phony ballots had been planted in the boxes. All but one were marked for Harry Truman and Democratic Senator Virgil Chapman (who carried the county 2 to 1).

The discovery threw Bourbon County politicos into an uproar. The FBI went to work on the case. A citizens’ committee was organized and elected Bourbon County’s Lawyer Cassius M. Clay* as its chairman. Several county grand juries investigated the case but took no action. As time dragged on it began to look as though the mystery might never be solved.

Lawyer Clay, who retired four years ago to his Kentucky farm, worked hard to keep the case alive. He needled federal officials unmercifully, got newspaper backing, claimed that the investigation was not being pressed. During the turmoil, U.S. Attorney Claude Stephens filed a $50,000 libel suit against him, for charging the U.S. Attorney’s office with “incompetence or worse.”

Last week, the volcano into which Clay had been throwing stones finally erupted. A federal grand jury indicted A. E. Funk Jr., 27-year-old son of Kentucky’s attorney general, and with him his 34-year-old law partner. The partner was none other than brash, hulking Edward F. Prichard Jr., the onetime New Deal wonder boy whose brass, brains & belly (he weighed 300 lbs.) made him a campus phenomenon at both Princeton and Harvard Law School, who hustled off to Washington at the age of 24 to help Franklin Roosevelt run the country. Four years ago Prichard had come back to Kentucky in search of a political career.

Old Washington cronies who knew Ed as Fred Vinson’s righthand man in the Office of Economic Stabilization—and as a social lion, a self-appointed oracle and a Source Close to the White House—raised their eyebrows. Prichard would not talk about the case; he said only that he was innocent and wanted a speedy trial.

*No kin to the Army’s General Lucius Clay (see Foreign Relations).