Tales of the Wild Hare

"Fox is a wild hare if I ever heard of one," muttered Arkansas Democrat Oren Harris, chairman of the House Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, one day last month. "If you could believe one-fifth of what he says . . ." Harris' wild hare was erratic, embittered John Fox, 51, former publisher of the now defunct Boston Post. Yet despite his private appraisal of Fox's reliability, Oren Harris and his subcommittee last week put Fox on the witness stand to air public accusations against White House Staff Chief Sherman Adams and Boston Real Estate and Textile Millionaire Bernard Goldfine. In so doing, the subcommittee gave star billing to a discredited financial operator (see next page) whose personal hatred of Old Crony Goldfine had originally put committee investigators onto the Goldfine-Adams relationship.

Dressed raggle-taggle in a blue summer suit with frayed sleeves and missing buttons, pudgy, grey-haired John Fox took the stand over the formal protests of Goldfine lawyers who pointed to a House rule requiring closed-door testimony for any witness who might tend "to defame, degrade, or incriminate any person." Chairman Harris tossed Fox the responsibility for telling the committee beforehand if any of his statements were likely to come under the rule. Said John Fox, deadpan: "There may be one or more borderline cases." Fox's notion of the border line became clear in two days of testimony designed to blow Sherman Adams out of Washington--if, as Harris had warned, anyone could believe one-fifth of what Fox said. Items:

P: Fox told of being present at a May 10, 1955 meeting in Washington's Sheraton-Carlton Hotel between Adams, Goldfine and Goldfine's son Horace. Said Fox: "Mr. Goldfine came out and invited me in and said, 'Let's all have a drink to my friend, Governor Adams. He never lets his friends down, and he is not letting me down this time.' I was, of course, simply as a matter of courtesy, perfectly willing to have a drink with the three gentlemen in the room, and we drank to Mr. Adams. who never let his friends down. I asked Mr. Goldfine, 'What is the occasion of this?', and Mr. Goldfine said, 'Oh, those so and so's of the Federal Trade Commission are giving one of my mills and my son and some of my other people a hard time, and Governor Adams is going to take care of that for me' . . . Governor Adams, or then Mr. Sherman Adams, took Mr. Goldfine by the arm into a far corner of that room, which was a very big room, and they had a whispered but quite active conversation." Said Fox: "I asked Mr. Goldfine just what his trouble . . . was and he told me that they had accused him of mislabeling . . ." "As a matter of idle curiosity." Fox had later asked if Adams had taken care of the FTC matter, and Goldfine "told me that he had."

P: Fox said he had once reproached Goldfine for being "morally wrong" in having "tapped the till" of Goldfine corporations for many years (TIME, June 30) and that Goldfine replied that "as long as Mr. Adams was in the position that he was, he had nothing to worry about as far as the Securities and Exchange Commission was concerned, because Mr. Adams would make sure that nothing happened to him."

P: Fox said Goldfine "told me that over a period of many years, especially when the Adams children were going to school, he had helped Mr. Adams financially and very materially . . . He told me that it was his habit to purchase securities for public officials which was one of the ways that he was able to help them in return for help they gave him." Fox said he knew of two such cases: one was that of Massachusetts' Democratic ex-Governor Paul Dever, who died in April. Said Fox: "I know that he purchased securities for Mr. Dever, because he purchased them from me . . . The other one. I know only what Mr. Goldfine told me. And that was that he bought interests in various ventures for Mr. Adams . . . He [told] me from time to time that Mr. Adams in one way or another had some interest in some of his mill properties or the profits thereof. He did not specify how."

P: Almost casually, on his second day before the subcommittee, Fox dropped in the line that Goldfine had told him that "he had bought a house in Washington for Mr. Adams to live in." Chairman Harris hastily intervened: "That is another matter that will be inquired into further, but not at this time."

All the time Fox was testifying, Sherman Adams, tight-lipped and furious, was pacing the White House, dashing time and again from his office into Press Secretary Jim Hagerty's bathroom, where Hagerty keeps his two press tickers. In late afternoon of the first day came an unprecedented event: Sherman Adams held the first formal press conference of his five and a half years in the White House. Refusing to answer questions, he read a typed statement: "It is difficult to separate the many falsehoods in Mr. Fox's incredible testimony. Virtually everything he said about me--in one way or another--is false." Adams categorically denied every major charge Fox had leveled against him, adding: "It is incredible to me that any committee of the Congress would permit a completely irresponsible witness to use the committee as a forum for making such vicious accusations."

Adams' point may have been well taken: unless Oren Harris and his subcommittee had more evidence to substantiate Fox's shotgun charges, they stood guilty of behavior as reckless as any of Joe McCarthy's. But John Fox's accusations were nonetheless made under oath, and Sherman Adams' denials were not. That left it pretty much up to Bernard Goldfine, whose climactic testimony was scheduled for this week, to join the issue which might finally decide the disturbing case of the Assistant to the President of the U.S.

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