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"This was more than favoritism," charged South Dakota's Republican Senator Karl E. Mundt last week. "This was complete capitulation to a guy out on the make." A lower-rung Agriculture Department official named Battle Hales openly charged a few weeks ago that the department had shown "favoritism" toward Estes. Hales also dropped hints that he had been shunted to another job in the department, and denied access to the Estes files, because he knew too much about the case. Hales's transfer led to one of the unseemliest scenes ever enacted in the somber corridors of the Agriculture Department. Miss Mary Jones, a nervous spinster of 51, who had been Hales's secretary for eleven years, was upset about the prospect of being transferred to a new boss. After being out sick for two days, she came back and went to Hales's old office to get her leave record signed. What happened next is obscured by confusion and controversy. But apparently an official ordered her to leave the office.
When she refused, he called in a departmental doctor, who decided that the distraught Miss Jones should be taken away for observation. Result: Miss Jones was dragged off to a mental hospital and held for 13 days until a judge ordered her released to the custody of her sister and her own doctor. Says Miss Jones: "It was all a horrible nightmare." Irrelevant Defense. Republican leaders charged that Freeman and his department had mishandled everything connected with the Estes case, from the grain-storage bond to Miss Mary Jones. At his press conference last week, President Kennedy came to Freeman's defense but on rather odd grounds—not that Freeman had been doing a good job but that he played football in college, made Phi Beta Kappa, "had most of his jaw shot off in Bougainville," and served three terms as Governor of Minnesota. These points are true enough, but irrelevant. All Kennedy said about Freeman as Secretary was that the job had been "challenging." Having made a weak defense, Kennedy followed up with a weak counterattack.
The substance of his argument: it was his Administration that pounced on Estes by arresting and indicting him, so there was nothing to holler about. But the President was claiming undue credit. Estes was first exposed by the Pecos Independent. Then the finance-company investigators moved in. Only after that did the FBI—which is under Bobby Kennedy's jurisdiction—put Estes under arrest. Moreover, the revelations about Estes' involvements with the Administration came out not through federal channels but through the Wilson investigation in Texas.
The Real Villain. On the evidence so far, the Estes case is not yet a Teapot Dome. But it is certainly far more than what the President and his Agriculture Secretary claimed it to be—merely a teapot tempest. The most important villain in the Estes case is the vast tangle of the farm price-support system, with its accompanying systems of production controls and surplus storage. Price-support programs provide scant help for the neediest farmers; the most bountiful benefits flow to prosperous farmers, who could get along with no Government aid at all.
Laxly administered, too vast and complex to be effectively policed, the price-support programs provide a constant invitation to