Lo, the Investigator

There I was, as recently as a month and a half ago, sitting in isolation in my academic ivory tower in New York, and lo, the call came to me to perform a great public service in Washington.

There he was, New York University Law Professor Bernard Schwartz, 35, explaining to the Federal Bar Association last September how he had come to be chief counsel for the House Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, investigating the Federal Communications Commission and other U.S. regulatory agencies. And lo, last week Bernard Schwartz was tossed out in the midst of the noisiest time Capitol Hill has had since Joe McCarthy and his junketeering gum shoes, Cohn & Schine.

Schwartz's firing had long been inevitable. During his six months in Washington he had bullied both witnesses and Congressmen (TIME, Feb. 17). He had got into a mixup on his own expense accounts at the same time that he was accusing FCC Chairman John Charles Doerfer of chiseling the Government on expanses. He had leaked secret subcommittee papers to newsmen even while denouncing subcommittee members for doing the same thing; under Schwartz's taunting, subcommittee members swore under oath, in one of history's silliest congressional scenes, that they had not leaked a confidential memo to Columnist Drew Pearson. What finally did it was a weekend press conference at which Lawyer Schwartz accused the subcommittee of trying to "whitewash" his investigations.

Flinging his innuendoes high, wide and handsome, Schwartz paraded such names as White House Staff Chief Sherman Adams. Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks and George Gordon Moore (Mamie Eisenhower's brother-in-law). He darkly suggested that they had improperly influenced the regulatory agencies--and in a later statement, even while admitting that he was far from developing any complete case, he cried that he had "planned to bring to light the machinations of the White House clique in controlling decisions of these agencies."

Payment for Help. Next day the subcommittee met in anguished, angry eight-hour session. Schwartz was called in and questioned, emerged to report: "There has never been a meeting like this one. I charged directly to their face that a majority of the subcommittee were interested only in a whitewash, only in squelching the investigation. I said: 'Let's not talk about the past, but about the future. I'll give you a real investigation if you want it. If you don't want it, fire me.' ... I made the mistake of slouching, and they asked me to sit up. I said: 'Let the record show that I am now sitting up.' "

By a 7 (three Democrats, four Republicans) to 4 (three Democrats, one Republican) vote, the subcommittee booted Bernard Schwartz. Throughout it all, Schwartz's chief defender had been the subcommittee chairman, Missouri Democrat Morgan Moulder. Next day Moulder resigned his chairmanship, to be replaced by Arkansas Democrat Oren Harris, chairman of the full House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. Schwartz characteristically repaid Moulder for his backing. Said he: "He turned out to be a weak man."

"I'll Sue You." But Bernard Schwartz was far from ready to return to his academic ivory tower. No sooner was he fired than he consulted with two of his favorite newsmen, the Des Moines Register's Clark Mollenhoff and a Drew Pearson legman named Jack Anderson. Off marched Schwartz and Mollenhoff, with a suitcase and two cardboard boxes full of subcommittee documents, to the Mayflower Hotel suite of Delaware's investigations-minded Republican Senator John Williams. Williams recognized that the papers had, in effect, been pilfered from a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives, turned Schwartz and Mollenhoff back into the night.

From Senator Williams' apartment, Schwartz and Mollenhoff, after picking up Jack Anderson at Drew Pearson's home, took the documents to the home of Oregon's ex-Republican, ex-Independent, now Democratic Senator Wayne Morse, who had none of Williams' qualms about accepting them. Morse grandly offered to return them to the House--and permitted new Subcommittee Chairman Harris to come for them in person.

That night Investigator Schwartz came churning up to the office he had kept in a small stucco building across from the new House Office Building. By that time, the subcommittee had a guard on the door, in the person of Staffer Stephen Angland, to prevent Schwartz from taking any more of its property. Schwartz raised his arms above his head, turned to newsmen and cried: "These newspapermen are witnesses that I am taking only my coat, scarf and hat. May I take my wife's photograph from my desk, or this chocolate bar, which is a present for my five-year-old son?" Said Angland: "Please get out of here." Shrieked Schwartz: "I'll sue you if any of my personal property is missing." Then he stomped away.

Payment for Services? Schwartz's last big splash of the week came when he was subpoenaed by the subcommittee to testify about some of the accusations he had been flinging about. He appeared tired, subdued, and, for the first time, civil. He was also an arresting witness.

Federal Communications Commissioner Richard A. Mack, he said, had taken a $2,650 payoff for casting the deciding vote in favor of granting a lucrative Miami television channel to a subsidiary of National Airlines. The money, Schwartz said, came from well-to-do Miami Lawyer Thurman A. Whiteside, who had a reputation as, "to use the colloquial term, 'a fixer.' " Added Schwartz: "Mr. Whiteside himself has been, and I believe still is, subject to disbarment proceedings." Schwartz's catalogue of evidence included a wire recording secretly made at his direction by his aide, Herbert Wachtell, while questioning Mack. The recording was kept secret from Chairman Moulder but was later turned over to Wayne Morse by Schwartz's lawyer-wife.

With the help of canceled checks and an affidavit, Bernard Schwartz made out something of a plausible case against Richard Mack, 48, an amiable Florida Democrat who had been thought of as a possibility for his party's future nomination for governor or Senator. Indeed, Schwartz was hardly off the stand before Attorney General William Rogers ordered the FBI into the case. Miami's Whiteside and FCC's Mack protested their innocence, and Mack requested a chance to give the subcommittee his side of the story. He was set down for the chance this week. Not before then could anyone tell whether Bernard Schwartz, after lo, these many months, had performed any public service other than proving that a cocky law professor can sling more half-truths and innuendoes in less time than a skilled politician.

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