National Affairs: The First Mink

A federal grand jury sitting in Washington finally got around to the man who added the mink coat couchant to the escutcheon of the Truman Administration. Indicted for perjury last week was owlish E. Merl Young, an old Missouri friend of Harry Truman, and a former RFC examiner who became a $60,000-a-year influence peddler in Washington. Indicted with him: Joseph Hirsch Rosenbaum, the lawyer who gave Mrs. Lauretta Young her famed $9,450 “natural royal pastel” mink, and two others accused of swinging their weight around the scandal-ridden RFC. Young and the others lied, said the jury, when they denied using their influence with the RFC to line their own pockets with natural royal pastel money.

Two days later, the ax fell on one of the RFC men most susceptible to Merl Young’s influential ways. William E. Willett, ousted as an RFC director last February, had slipped back on to the Government payroll as an $11,800-a-year “specialist” for Under Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Whitehair. When news of Willett’s new job leaked out last week (TIME, Dec. 24), Defense Secretary Robert Lovett (who hadn’t been told that Willett was drawing a Government check again) demanded his resignation forthwith.