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Cece Green hustled his new client over to meet Bill Boyle. Boyle, too, was added to Lithofold's payroll, at the stiff retainer of $500 a month. Four weeks later, Blauner was back in Boyle's office in a high state of excitement because the RFC, for the second time, had turned down Lithofold's loan application. Boyle picked up his telephone and called Chairman Harley Hise of RFC. Blauner got an appointment with Hise within the hour. Three days later, in March 1949, Lithofold was granted a loan of $80,000, followed shortly by two others totaling $645,000.
Sharp Point. Bill Boyle had other things on his mind besides Lithofold in the spring of 1949. As vice chairman of the National Committee, he was plainly tagged as a comer because he was Harry's boy. Boyle was no expert in business law, yet his law office was bursting with business clients who had cases not before the courts, but before administrative agencies. In one ten-week period of 1949, when he was virtually running the committee (without salary), Boyle added eight new major cases to his portfolio, each involving a federal agency. They were worth, by his own estimate, $158,000 in fees. He was grossing about $100,000 a year.
On Capitol Hill there began to be murmurings about Boyle's double-barreled activity. Shortly thereafter, Bill Boyle accepted a $30,000-a-year salary as full-time executive director of the National Committee. Three months later the White House eased Rhode Island's Senator Howard McGrath out of the chairmanship (kicking him upstairs to the Attorney General's office), and promoted Bill Boyle to McGrath's job, which pays $35,000 a year.
Expansive Flourish. It was all done in grand style. There was a glittering banquet at Washington's Mayflower Hotel, where Harry Truman looked fondly at Bill Boyle and said: "I am as happy as I can be, of course, that my lifetime friend—I have known him ever since he was a kid (I knew his mother before him and she was one of the best Democrats that Missouri ever produced)—is the national chairman of the Democratic Party." Howard McGrath, in an expansive, oratorical flourish, hailed Boyle as "that eminent lawyer from the state of Missouri, ever devoted to the cause of good government."
There was a second Bill Boyle banquet in Kansas City. The President, the Vice President, four Cabinet members and most party bigwigs, including Jim Finnegan, were all there too. So was Kansas City Gangster Charlie Binaggio (who was riddled by bullets seven months later in a Kansas City Democratic clubhouse). Another expansive guest was American Lithofold's ubiquitous Robert J. Blauner. He paid for a whole table. It cost him, he told the Senate committee, "a thousand or twelve hundred dollars—I don't remember."
Those happy days were recalled last week under unhappy circumstances.