For two months the House Judiciary subcommittee, headed by Kentucky's Democratic Representative Frank L. Chelf, studied the 1946 Kansas City, Mo. vote fraud case. The question that interested the subcommittee: Did the Department of Justice do what it should have done about the charges that fraud contributed to the Democratic primary defeat of Congressman Roger C. Slaughter by Harry Truman's candidate, Enos Axtell?
The subcommittee learned that Tom C. Clark, then the Attorney General and now a Supreme Court Justice, limited the first investigation to questioning of only six witnesses, and then dropped the case entirely. He picked it up again...