Postscript

When the sensational "Hanley Letter" burst in the midst of New York's gubernatorial campaign last fall (TIME, Oct. 23), Republicans immediately offered the public a soothing interpretation. It was true that ailing, 74-year-old Lieut. Governor Joe Hanley had been promised the G.O.P. nomination for governor, and that he had been asked to step aside at the last minute to let Tom Dewey have it again. But the fact that old Joe had simultaneously been guaranteed a well-paying state job only proved how honest he was.

Old Joe, cried the Republicans--including Tom Dewey--was so honest that he had contracted a vast debt of honor and had kept himself poverty-stricken for years paying it off. The intimation was plain: Dewey had not offered Hanley a political bribe to surrender the nomination; he had simply been rewarding an upstanding public servant for good works. Nevertheless, Senate investigators called on Old Joe just before the election to quiz him about the whole affair.

Paid in Full. Hanley, who was lying in a hospital bed recovering from combat fatigue, talked with impressive sincerity. His debt, according to the investigators' subsequent report, dated back to the death of his father in 1933: the elder Hanley had died the owner of $75,000 worth of stock in a bank which had failed in Muscatine, Iowa. Joe was not legally responsible, but he had shouldered his father's $150,000 double-liability obligation, and he had spent years of scraping and pinching in an attempt to make it good.

In August 1949, the report continued, Publisher Frank Gannett and the Bank of Manhattan had kindly lent Hanley the $28,500 which he needed to pay up the debt in full. But when he knuckled down to Dewey, his patron and another anti-Dewey Republican, Congressman W. Kingsland Macy, were not pleased. It was then that Hanley wrote Macy The Letter, a lugubrious note of apology and explanation.

Joe's lawyer showed the investigators a promissory note for $150,000 made out to one C. C. Hagerman of Muscatine, Iowa. It bore notations of payments on its back; the last, for $28,000, was entered on Sept. 12, 1949. The note was marked "Paid" and bore the initials "C.T.C." The sleutHs obtained a photostatic copy and departed.

Who was C.T.C.? But last week Senator Guy M. Gillette, chairman of the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, announced in rather baffled terms that Old Joe's story just didn't seem to add up. The investigators had gone to Muscatine too, and had discovered that Old Joe's father had never owned any bank stock; instead of debts, in fact, he had left an estate of $20,570.32. There was a C. C. Hagermann living in the town, and he had known Hanley since boyhood. But he told the investigators that he knew nothing about the note or the bank stock, swore that Hanley had never paid him a nickel, and declared himself completely mystified by the initials "C.T.C."

Had Old Joe simply invented the debt and written the promissory note himself? If so, why? What had happened to the $28,500? At week's end nobody seemed to have the least glimmer of an answer. Joe Hanley, just appointed by Governor Dewey to a $16,000 job as special counsel to the state Division of Veterans' Affairs, had dropped out of sight--his daughter said he was on a "vacation." Tom Dewey retired behind a cloud of no comments and declared that he knew nothing of Hanley's "private affairs." Macy (who was defeated for Congress after the letter was made public) howled for an "investigation" of the whole affair. Said Senator Gillette: "It's the strangest case I've ever come across. I just can't make it out."

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