As New Mexico's state legislature waded through routine business in the closing hours of its 1957 session last March, a tough-talking, cigar-worrying statehouse reporter for the Santa Fe New Mexican (circ.11,710) scented a far-from-routine story. What awoke the newsman's curiosity in Reporter Neil Addington, during a discussion of a $221,000 appropriation bill for the National Guard of New Mexico (4,000 officers and men), was the evasiveness with which officials who had drawn up the budget answered lawmakers' questions about such standout items as a $14,000-a-year telephone bill. Though the legislature had been setting new...
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