What Woufd Harry Say?

Paunchy, beribboned Presidential Military Aide Harry Vaughan was still ducking the first barrage of dead cats when another came his way. The Senate's investigation of five-percenters (TIME, Aug. 22) last week took up the story of the Allied Molasses Co. of New Jersey. Clumsy Harry Vaughan seemed to be the villain of that tale too.

Because of a flagrant violation of war food orders--a little matter of exceeding their quota of rationed molasses by 771,000 gallons in a delivery to the Pepsi-Cola Co.--the Allied company had been denied further supplies. According to testimony heard last week before a Senate subcommittee, General Vaughan had hit on a helpful solution. He called up a young Department of Agriculture administrator named Herbert C. Hathorn and suggested that the whole thing could be fixed nicely by simply giving the company a new allocation of from 500,000 to 1,000,000 gallons.

Getting Rough. Last week Hathorn told all, and seemed to enjoy doing it. "We Democrats," Hathorn quoted Vaughan as saying, "have to stick together." When this did not win over Hathorn, Vaughan went further, confidentially confessed an amusing little indiscretion of his own. He had told Allied's president that molasses rationing was soon to end. The president, one Harold M. Ross, forthwith bought 500,000 gallons. But the general had been wrong: rationing didn't end at all and Ross was badly stuck. This, Vaughan said significantly, "could prove very embarrassing to me here at the White House."

Hathorn testified that he refused to go along, even though Vaughan finally got "a little rough" and announced that "he could get my job." The subcommittee congratulated him heartily when he left the stand.

Suspended Judgment. Next day it became evident that Hathorn's testimony--and that of other witnesses--had made a different impression at the White House. The President stepped forward at his weekly press conference, with Harry Vaughan in the background drawn up to a militiaman's position of attention, and angrily denounced the investigation as unfair.

He asked newsmen and their editors to suspend judgment until Vaughan had himself testified. Most of the hearings, he went on, had been held behind closed doors, "particularly if they were friendly to General Vaughan."

This was too much for members of the investigating subcommittee. Its members, thanks largely to the stern and judicial guidance of North Carolina's frock-coated old Clyde Hoey, had conducted themselves with rare restraint. They immediately released all secret testimony concerning Vaughan.

The general had asserted that the deep freezers he wangled for himself and friends were unsalable "factory rejects." Testimony taken in closed sessions established that this simply wasn't so. The closed sessions also turned up a few more details about Albert Verley & Co., the Chicago perfume makers that gave Vaughan the seven deep freezers.

It developed that Vaughan's crony, John Maragon, and two other representatives of the Verley Co. had managed to go to Europe on a business trip, during the period in which the freezers were being delivered, in an Army transport plane. The subcommittee's releases pointedly noted that on the return trip Maragon had attempted to smuggle expensive perfume oils into the country under his false declaration that it was champagne for the White House, and had never been prosecuted.

This final cascade of testimony made it more difficult than ever to imagine just what Harry Vaughan would have to say when he himself testified. But Washington politicos and thousands of plain citizens could hardly wait to find out.

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