The Unlovable Counsel

Tension and excitement recalling the investigative heyday of the late Joe McCarthy hummed in a packed, green-walled hearing room on Capitol Hill last week. The quaintly named House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight was scheduled to air revelations about the Federal Communications Commission, and massed advance leaks to the press had hinted at sensational stuff, including a "criminal felony." Also reminiscent of the McCarthy period was the doomsday rumble in the voice of Subcommittee Counsel Bernard Schwartz. By week's end intense, brilliant Lawyer Schwartz, 35, New York University Law School professor and author of seven published books on law, had proved to be the most unlovable congressional investigation counsel since Roy Cohn.

Honorariums Pocketed. What the subcommittee originally set out to investigate was whether Washington's "Big Six" regulatory commissions* had been operating autonomously, as Congress intended, without undue pressures from the White House or Capitol Hill. Such an investigation might well have been valuable and would have been welcomed by the commissions themselves. But Professor Schwartz applied for the counsel post, landed it, and bloodhounded an unscheduled investigation into the individual conduct of commission members.

The week's No. 1 witness was John Charles Doerfer, 53, a Wisconsin lawyer named to the FCC by President Eisenhower in 1953, and appointed chairman in mid-1957. Relentlessly, Schwartz piled up testimony and documents showing that Republican Doerfer had collected "honorariums" (not very lavish, usually $100) for speeches to various broadcasting-industry gatherings outside Washington. On these trips Doerfer traveled at Government expense, collecting $12 per diem allowances, although his hosts often paid his hotel bills. Most picked-over trip: a 1954 expedition during which Doerfer 1) took part in the dedication of a station KWTV tower in Oklahoma City, and 2) made a speech to a National Association of Broadcasters convention in Spokane. On this trip, as Schwartz & Co. reckoned it, Doerfer drew $296.91 in travel expenses from the Government, got a total of $1,080.87 in casn and paid tabs from KWTV and the N.A.B.

Brass Knuckles Rapped. Doerfer's defense was that the Federal Communications Act explicitly permits FCCommissioners to present "publications or papers for which a reasonable honorarium or compensation may be accepted." As for hotel bills, bar tabs, etc. paid by the broadcasting industry, "these things are accepted today as American amenities."

But Counsel Schwartz behaved as if accepting $100 honorariums was a crime ranking close to arson. He hectored Doerfer so unmercifully that the American Civil Liberties Union protested and the Washington Post and Times Herald, no friend of the Eisenhower Administration, rapped Schwartz's brass knuckles.

As the week went by, the heralded investigation crumbled into a fiasco. The Chicago Tribune revealed that the subcommittee's chairman, Missouri Democrat Morgan M. Moulder, had put his teen-age daughter Marcia on the congressional payroll as his office helper, enabling her to draw some $12,000 during the four years she attended high school in Camdenton, Mo. Bleated Chairman Moulder: "Smear!" Then the Tulsa (Okla.) Tribune reported that Schwartz had collected from the subcommittee $400 in expense payments for four weekends he spent in Manhattan, where he has his own apartment. Thundered Counsel Schwartz: "Smear!"

*Federal Communications Commission, Federal Power Commission, Federal Trade Commission, Interstate Commerce Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, Civil Aeronautics Board.

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