National Affairs: Boyle’s Law

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“I’ve certainly striven to conduct myself as my mother would wish me to,” said William Marshall Boyle to a Senate investigating committee. Many citizens mistakenly assumed that this statement by the chairman of the Democratic National Committee was a piece of pious patter. But Bill Boyle was in sober earnest. His mother is still honored in Kansas City as one of Boss Tom Pendergast’s best precinct workers of the 1920s. Friends of the family, discussing Bill Boyle, say somewhat condescendingly that he is a nice, pleasant fellow; Clara, his mother, now retired, was “the politician of the family.”

The political climate at certain high altitudes of the Truman Administration is the climate of Clara Boyle’s generation of machine politicians. The big-city machines were a lot huskier then than they are today. They recruited thousands of people like Clara Boyle, who considered themselves and were considered by their neighbors as decent, God-fearing men & women. (It would never have occurred to Clara Boyle that her friend Tom Pendergast was a crook; they both attended the Visitation Roman Catholic Church.) The machine politicians of the precincts and the city-hall corridors had ethical standards which were, in all the everyday affairs of life, as high as those of their communities. In politics, however, they had a special code: it was not wrong to take personal advantage of a political position. It was terribly wrong to fail in helping a political friend —even if the help might involve some damage to the public interest.

This code is in force again in Washington. It was absent—or nearly absent—for a long time. After the Harding scandals, the Coolidge and Hoover administrations were as clean as Washington had been for generations. The New Dealers were dedicated men: some were dedicated to ideas, some to their magnetic leader and some to the personal acquisition of power. They were not boodlers, grafters or dealers in personal “influence” in the old machine sense. To most of them, a job applicant recommended by a political boss had two strikes on him. They had a contemptuous name for politicians: pols. From 1933 until late in the war, the New Dealers kept the pols down. About 1944 the pols began to seep back. Harry Truman opened the floodgates.

Green Pastures. The New Deal vastly increased the opportunity to make private hay with public funds and the pols who came after 1944 were not dedicated men. A friend was a friend, a favor was a friendly act, and a gift was a friendly act in return, and why in the hell shouldn’t a man get a little something for all his hard work and loyalty to the party?

The Democratic burro was hungry for party funds, and some of the men who carried the party load of getting out the vote were hungry for personal rewards. In expanded federal agencies there were green pastures for both. The friendship boys from city hall, who made up the Democratic burrocracy, thrived on the new bureaucracy.

The Chicago Daily News recalled last week that Tom Pendergast used to hand out signed cards that said simply: “This man is my friend.” The card, said the News, “promised nothing, but it was immunity from everything.”

To understand the spirit behind Tom Pendergast’s card is to understand the ever-mounting spate of scandals in Washington. Most of the men accused, including Bill Boyle, are sincerely indignant at the charges against them. They have done nothing that they consider wrong, nothing that was not approved or tolerated in the political environment where they learned the game, nothing that was not done in Washington years ago. Public criticism of their actions strikes them as strange and unfair.

The new intensity of the criticism is based partly on two new factors: 1) the welfare state and government-in-business present too many opportunities to be run on the old city-hall basis; 2) Washington is the capital of the free world, which is locked in a fight for its life over moral issues with the Communist world. Boyle’s law, the code that he and his kind live by, is not the worst code around. It just isn’t good enough for 1951.

What is Bill Boyle’s law, and how did he come by way of it to his present eminence and notoriety?

Grass Roots. “Bill has never done anything wrong. He has always been more than glad to do favors in a nice way,” said Mother Clara Boyle last week as she reminisced about the family’s beginnings. He and his twin brother Russell (now an Army colonel) were born in 1902 in Leavenworth, Kans., where their father was a broomcorn merchant. They were a devoutly lighthearted Irish Catholic family of five. The twins went to Cathedral School in Leavenworth, where a stern rule forbade the playing of mumblety peg on the front lawn. “Bill liked to have fun,” said Clara Boyle, “but he always got by.” One day Bill and Russell were tossing a knife into the turf when a priest walked up behind them and coughed. Bill looked up beamingly. “Such a beautiful lawn, Father Kelly,” he said. “We couldn’t bear to see it spoiled by the dandelions.”

The family moved to Kansas City in 1915, and Mother Boyle had Bill and Russ pushing doorbells and passing out handbills in the hilly Fourth Ward before they were out of high school. Theirs was a predominantly Republican district, and the few Democrats were badly split between Tom Pendergast’s “goats” and Joe Shannon’s “rabbits.” Mother Boyle stuck loyally to the “goats,” and ran her Cosmopolitan Democratic club for Tom Pendergast with a firm hand. At the big, rip-snorting Pendergast picnics at Lonejack, Mo., the Boyles got well acquainted with the Trumans, another loyal Pendergast family. Harry Truman was a Jackson County judge (i.e., county commissioner) and making a name for himself for administration. “The President loved those picnics, never missed one,” Bill Boyle recalled much later. The kids always hoped Judge Truman would be moved to make one of his “Lonejack orations,” the belligerent, off-the-cuff speeches that still serve him best at election time.

Onie’s Diplomatic Doorman. Bill Boyle got through the Kansas City School of Law, and, in 1926, was admitted to the bar. He stuffed his diploma in a desk, went to work selling gas appliances, and married a stenographer named Genevieve Hayde. If Bill had failings, greed was not among them. A friend recalls: “He’d make $100 in the morning and take it easy around home the rest of the day.”

When the depression caught Bill with two babies and no job, Mother Boyle hustled to the rescue. She knew just where to turn, and the Pendergast organization did not fail her. She got Bill on as a $100-a-month booking clerk at the old Fourth District police station, in the heart of Kansas City’s Irish district. Two years later he was secretary to the director of police, an old Pendergast hack named Otto P. (Onie) Higgins. The ward bosses, the flatfeet and the job hunters who came to deal with Higgins called Bill Boyle “Onie’s Diplomatic Doorman.”

One day in 1939 the machine found itself in need of a shining, bright-eyed new face. The reform forces of Governor Lloyd Stark were bearing down on Kansas City and threatening to put the corrupt police department under state control. Pendergast & Co. kicked out Onie Higgins (he later went to prison) and put Onie’s diplomatic doorman behind Higgins’ desk. Boyle was told to “clean up the town and keep it clean.” Police Director Boyle followed his orders enthusiastically. In person, he raided gambling houses, broke up slot machines, closed up the red-light district, shut down saloons, and even tossed some of his old acquaintances into jail.

Two Moves & a Jump. But it was later than Tom Pendergast thought. In three months the State moved in, and Bill Boyle was no longer police director. He moved over to the Pendergast redoubt at City Hall, became commissioner of street cleaning. A reform mayor fired him in 1940, and he moved again: this time to the job of assistant prosecuting attorney in the county courthouse, the last Pendergast citadel. It was dull work; his main assignment was to take confessed criminals before the court to enter guilty pleas. “To my knowledge,” said Bill’s good friend, Lawyer Shannon Douglas, later, “Bill never tried a single case in Kansas City. What that boy needed was a job.”

He found a good one. As Bill Boyle likes to remember it, Senator Harry Truman called him from the Capitol and asked him to be an investigator for Truman’s war contracts investigating committee. As others recall it, Boyle was desperate, and Harry Truman put him on as a sort of personal aide, at $350 a month. In 1942, Truman’s old Missouri crony and secretary, Harry Vaughan, went off to the Army, and the Senator gave Vaughan’s job to Boyle. Bill became a specialist on the boss’s political problems, and in 1944 moved over to the Democratic National Committee to try to help Truman get the vice-presidential nomination. He got it. Bill Boyle took and passed the District of Columbia bar examination. By the time Harry Truman inherited the presidency, Bill was all set and ready to do business.

Right Place, Right Time. Fourth Ward arithmetic was hardly adequate to measure the opportunities for influence in postwar Washington. In Kansas City or Boston, a pol could do a friend a favor by fixing a traffic ticket, knocking down a tax assessment or awarding a municipal contract. But all these things were clear-cut acts, and relatively easy to rule legal or illegal. The complications of the federal operation opened up new frontiers for the pol.

A big department store, for example, has to deal with some 20 federal agencies (not to mention a score of state and municipal ones). The Bureau of Internal Revenue checks its taxes, the alcohol tax unit approves its whisky labels, the Bureau of Customs stamps its imports, the Department of Labor’s wages & hours division inspects its working conditions, the National Labor Relations Board hears its labor disputes, the Social Security Administration collects unemployment insurance, the Federal Reserve Board System administers credit regulations, the National Production Authority doles out scarce goods, the Securities & Exchange Commission patrols stock issues, the Federal Trade Commission scouts for mislabeling or deceptive advertising, the Post Office rules on parcel deliveries, the Selective Service Board makes passes at store executives and employees, the Interstate Commerce Commission rules on freight shipments, and—if the store is hard up for capital—the Reconstruction Finance Corporation has money to lend.

In most of these areas, Government agents have to make yes or no decisions on their own. The decisions often mean hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Government or to a corporation or an industry. If a pol has a few friends in the right places, who could ever draw the line between a legal and an illegal favor? It was symbolic of changing times that the Post Office, traditional haven for faithful politicos, was running along quietly under a career civil-service postmaster. Bill Boyle, for one, preferred to maintain his freedom outside of a Government job. It was significant, too, that a complex organization like the SEC still functioned without any apparent machine tooling. (Explained a Washington observer: “SEC is probably so complicated that they haven’t found a way to milk it.”) But by early 1949, it was clear that the pols were buzzing in & out of two principal areas of heavy sugar: the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the RFC.

War Horse & Friends. In far-off St. Louis, the buzzing was audible to an ambitious, fast-talking manufacturer of printing forms named Robert John Blauner. His business, the American Lithofold Corp., was in a bad postwar slump. Blauner decided he needed some professional advice and hired Jim Finnegan, U.S. Collector of Internal Revenue in St. Louis, an old Democratic war horse. (Over the next two years he paid Finnegan some $44,000 in commissions and expenses, while Finnegan held down his collector’s job.) Finnegan’s first advice was for Blauner to hire a Washington representative. He recommended Cecil Green.

For years Cecil Green had had a Pendergast garbage-collecting contract in Kansas City. In 1936 he bought a Kansas City saloon called the Irish Tavern from Bill Boyle’s brother-in-law. When Bill opened his Washington law office, he hired Cecil Green as his investigator at $5,000 a year. On the side Cecil branched out into an export and beer sales agency and began to pick up out-of-town clients who wanted to meet people in government. Blauner hired him for Lithofold at $10,000 a year.

Cece Green hustled his new client over to meet Bill Boyle. Boyle, too, was added to Lithofold’s payroll, at the stiff retainer of $500 a month. Four weeks later, Blauner was back in Boyle’s office in a high state of excitement because the RFC, for the second time, had turned down Lithofold’s loan application. Boyle picked up his telephone and called Chairman Harley Hise of RFC. Blauner got an appointment with Hise within the hour. Three days later, in March 1949, Lithofold was granted a loan of $80,000, followed shortly by two others totaling $645,000.

Sharp Point. Bill Boyle had other things on his mind besides Lithofold in the spring of 1949. As vice chairman of the National Committee, he was plainly tagged as a comer because he was Harry’s boy. Boyle was no expert in business law, yet his law office was bursting with business clients who had cases not before the courts, but before administrative agencies. In one ten-week period of 1949, when he was virtually running the committee (without salary), Boyle added eight new major cases to his portfolio, each involving a federal agency. They were worth, by his own estimate, $158,000 in fees. He was grossing about $100,000 a year.

On Capitol Hill there began to be murmurings about Boyle’s double-barreled activity. Shortly thereafter, Bill Boyle accepted a $30,000-a-year salary as full-time executive director of the National Committee. Three months later the White House eased Rhode Island’s Senator Howard McGrath out of the chairmanship (kicking him upstairs to the Attorney General’s office), and promoted Bill Boyle to McGrath’s job, which pays $35,000 a year.

Expansive Flourish. It was all done in grand style. There was a glittering banquet at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, where Harry Truman looked fondly at Bill Boyle and said: “I am as happy as I can be, of course, that my lifetime friend—I have known him ever since he was a kid (I knew his mother before him and she was one of the best Democrats that Missouri ever produced)—is the national chairman of the Democratic Party.” Howard McGrath, in an expansive, oratorical flourish, hailed Boyle as “that eminent lawyer from the state of Missouri, ever devoted to the cause of good government.”

There was a second Bill Boyle banquet in Kansas City. The President, the Vice President, four Cabinet members and most party bigwigs, including Jim Finnegan, were all there too. So was Kansas City Gangster Charlie Binaggio (who was riddled by bullets seven months later in a Kansas City Democratic clubhouse). Another expansive guest was American Lithofold’s ubiquitous Robert J. Blauner. He paid for a whole table. It cost him, he told the Senate committee, “a thousand or twelve hundred dollars—I don’t remember.”

Those happy days were recalled last week under unhappy circumstances.

Code of Ethics. Flanked by two other lawyers, Bill Boyle strode confidently into the small third-floor Capitol committee room of the Senate Investigations subcommittee. For 20 minutes the photographers and newsreel cameramen hovered around him. He smiled a relaxed smile for the lenses, his broad Irish face showing few signs of his 49 years, except for an accordion-like rippling of chins. North Carolina’s pale old Senator Clyde Hoey, Democratic chairman of the subcommittee, arrived promptly at hearing time, smiling and looking more than ever like Arthur Train’s unforgettable Mr. Tutt in his dark frock coat and customary red boutonniere. Arkansas Democrat John McClellan waved a friendly greeting to Boyle before taking his seat, and Boyle gaily waved back. With a glance at the clock, Senator Hoey ordered the photographers back and rapped for order. Then, during a five hour session, Bill Boyle got a chance to explain his code of ethics.

“I never ask the Government agencies to do anything,” he said solemnly. “I ask them to see a man, or a woman or a child. We never ask them to do anything.” Then he added: “I would not want to assume that any Government employee would be influenced by any name. I never believed that people in Government were swayed. They just show courtesy to Senators and Representatives and people from the political committees . . . I feel that it is not only proper for the staff or officials of the Democratic National Committee to make . . . appointments [with officers of Government], but it is their duty to do so.” But as for getting paid for this service, “If there was anyone associated with my committee today that I knew was doing that, I would terminate their employment.”

Did He Work or Not? Did Boyle make a clean break with his law practice when he moved from an unpaid to a paid job with the committee in 1949? Boyle says that he did, but the details have an odd look. His former law associate, Max Siskind, a sharp, self-possessed Brooklynite, last week told the Senate committee that he has paid Boyle $100,000 in installments at irregular periods over the last two years and owes him $50,000 more. The payments, Siskind said, were part of a settlement he made with Boyle when Boyle left the law office. There was no written agreement between them. They both admitted they would never let a client conduct a business agreement that way. And both of them reported the $100,000 on their income taxes as current items—i.e., not as acquisition of capital or outlay of capital.

The main implications of this deal were two. First, it was a highly irregular way for a lawyer to sell his practice, if that was the purpose. Usually when lawyers sell their practices, they do so because the buyer wants to use the old established firm name. Yet here was a situation where Bill Boyle’s name was scraped off the door, and nobody was supposed to use it at all. Secondly, if Boyle really believed it was improper for a Democratic National Committee employee to represent a client for a fee, then he obviously couldn’t have done any work on the cases he sold Siskind for $150,000. If he had not done any work, he was either defrauding Siskind—or getting paid enormous fees just for bringing the cases into the office when he was still the unsalaried boss of the National Committee.

There was one other detail. When Boyle quit his law practice in 1949, Lithofold had gone right on paying its $500-a-month retainer to Boyle’s ex-partner, Max Siskind. The payments to Boyle had totalled only $1,250. The payments to Siskind, to date, had totalled $14,000 and Siskind admitted that he has done only about five minutes’ work for Lithofold in 28 months. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch charged that Bill Boyle got a total of $8,000 from Lithofold, instead of the $1,250 he swears to. Last week the P-D’s Lithofold expert, Reporter Ted Link, followed Boyle to the stand and stood firmly on the $8,000. One of his anonymous sources, said Link, told him: “Mr. Siskind is giving Mr. Boyle half of the Lithofold fee and it will show up in Boyle’s bank account.” Link and his paper were so sure of their facts that they were willing to risk libel by printing them, he added. So far there have been no suits. “Of course,” said Link, “the libel suit would open things up so wide that I doubt if he will ever file it.”

The committee voted to subpoena Boyle’s bank account this week. If the records should show that Siskind passed along any of his fees from Lithofold, then Boyle has lied to the committee under oath, and—a far worse crime under Boyle’s Law—to old friend Harry Truman.

Unshaken Man. The President still seemed supremely confident that there was no political danger to his administration from Bill Boyle. Last week, after Siskind had testified about the $150,000 payoff to Boyle, the rumor ran around Washington that Bill Boyle was through. But Harry Truman faced his press conference, and said his confidence in Bill Boyle was unshaken.

Then Truman launched a counteroffensive that betrayed, for an unshaken man, a certain nervousness. He sent Congress a special message, urging that all important officials of the federal Government and political leaders of both parties be required to make public their annual incomes from all sources. His reason: “Attempts have been made, through implication and innuendo and by exaggeration and distortion of facts, in a few cases, to create the impression that graft and corruption are running rampant in the whole Government.”

Hardly anybody had stated the case in terms that sweeping. Far less than 1% of federal employees have been in any way involved in charges. The civil service has never been cleaner, never enjoyed a better reputation. The trouble is that so many of the scandals have struck so close to the top: Truman himself and the Deep Freezers, Harry Vaughan and his friends among the five-percenters, three district Collectors of Internal Revenue appointed by the President, a mink coat to a White House stenographer, a camera to a presidential secretary, and then the story of Bill Boyle and the RFC.

The exposures were not entirely partisan. Most of the scandals involving Democrats were brought to light by Democratic members of Congress. And it was a Republican Senator who denounced Republican National Chairman Guy Gabrielson for working on the RFC in an effort to get an $18.5 million loan for Carthage Hydrocol Inc., of which Gabrielson is president and counsel. Welcome as the Gabrielson issue was to the Democrats, it scarcely relieved them of the onus of the Administration scandals.

It added up to a heavy load for Truman to carry into the 1952 campaign. It added up to an impossible load for the U.S. to carry, through a time when it was asking the world to look to Washington for moral leadership.