Senator Kefauver's big eight-day show in New York had only about an hour to run one afternoon last week, but it was really only half over. In one fast slam-bang finish, the scenery collapsed, the players' masks were yanked off, and there, in full view of fascinated millions watching through TV screens, stood the skeleton of corruption, deceit and bribery in the world's greatest city.
Until that last hour, the audience had begun to worry. Would the good fellows from the sticks ever really show up all those tough, wily city slickers in time for a smash ending? Even the Senators themselves—Tennessee's Estes Kefauver, New Hampshire's Charles Tobey, Maryland's Herbert O'Conor, Wyoming's Lester Hunt —had seemed a little unsure.
Coincidences. Gangsters paraded to the witness stand, but they were about as garrulous as Harpo Marx. Politicians gossiped about each other like a roomful of society cats, but gave no sharp picture of corruption.
Ambassador William O'Dwyer, the politics-toughened ex-mayor of New York, even tried to turn the tables on the committee. He implied that he had evidence linking pious Senator Tobey with tainted campaign money (TIME, March 26). "I have it in my pocket and I will show it only to Senator Tobey," he said darkly.
Cagily, Estes Kefauver called O'Dwyer's bluff, made him hand over the "evidence" and then read it into the record. It was just a perfunctory bread & butter note from Tobey to a legitimate campaign contributor. The Senator's inexhaustible supply of indignation and tears boiled over. "I have lived long years and God has been good to me," cried Tobey from behind the green eyeshade he had clamped on his long, gleaming forehead. "I am a poor man and always will be. But there is one thing I am. I am a free man . . ." Tobey wept a bit, the jampack audience at Foley Square burst into applause, O'Dwyer stared moodily at the floor, and the Kefauver investigation returned to the business at hand.
Untiring, acid-tongued Rudolph Halley, the committee's chief counsel and inquisitor, began digging into the ex-mayor's past. There was O'Dwyer's story that his only business with Gangster Frank Costello had been a visit to Costello's apartment in 1942 in the course of an investigation O'Dwyer was conducting as an Army officer. Why did the leader of Tammany Hall and other important New York political figures happen to be there at the same time? O'Dwyer had no idea—it was just coincidence.
Compromises. O'Dwyer conceded that there probably had been large-scale gambling in New York when he was mayor, and that it could not have existed in any large scale "without police protection." Suspended between forced patience and weary exasperation, the ex-mayor explained: "The man in City Hall who is dealing with . . . all the things that go to run a city of 8,000,000 [cannot] follow these details around . . ."