ARMY & NAVY: The Art of Crookery

Congressional investigation of the conduct of the Veterans’ Bureau (TIME, Nov. 5) continued with more hearings before a sub-committee of the Senate. The evidence presented, while almost entirely that of the investigators, pointed to a network of graft and political ” pull.” Some of the charges were:

¶That a hospital site at Excelsior Springs, Mo., had been purchased by the Government for $173,000 although it was worth only about half that sum.

¶That in passing on the transaction, Ewing Laporte, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, had torn out a sheet from the lease on which the sum of $77,000 was mentioned for one parcel of land and substituted a sheet on which the sum was $90,000. (This was emphatically denied by Laporte.)

¶That Laporte had rushed the transaction through on March 3,1921, the last day of the Wilson Administration.

¶That Matthew O’Brien, a San Francisco architect who had been paid $64,000 for hospital plans never used, had been paid an additional $33,000 by order of an official in the Controller General’s office, al-though the present officers of the Veterans’ Bureau protested that O’Brien had already been overpaid by $5,000.

It was reported that the evidence of graft submitted in the inquiry has convinced President Coolidge that the Veterans’ Bureau, which spends one-sixth of the Federal revenue, should be deprived of its independent status and placed under the control of a Cabinet officer.