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There was one other detail. When Boyle quit his law practice in 1949, Lithofold had gone right on paying its $500-a-month retainer to Boyle's ex-partner, Max Siskind. The payments to Boyle had totalled only $1,250. The payments to Siskind, to date, had totalled $14,000 and Siskind admitted that he has done only about five minutes' work for Lithofold in 28 months. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch charged that Bill Boyle got a total of $8,000 from Lithofold, instead of the $1,250 he swears to. Last week the P-D's Lithofold expert, Reporter Ted Link, followed Boyle to the stand and stood firmly on the $8,000. One of his anonymous sources, said Link, told him: "Mr. Siskind is giving Mr. Boyle half of the Lithofold fee and it will show up in Boyle's bank account." Link and his paper were so sure of their facts that they were willing to risk libel by printing them, he added. So far there have been no suits. "Of course," said Link, "the libel suit would open things up so wide that I doubt if he will ever file it."
The committee voted to subpoena Boyle's bank account this week. If the records should show that Siskind passed along any of his fees from Lithofold, then Boyle has lied to the committee under oath, and—a far worse crime under Boyle's Law—to old friend Harry Truman.
Unshaken Man. The President still seemed supremely confident that there was no political danger to his administration from Bill Boyle. Last week, after Siskind had testified about the $150,000 payoff to Boyle, the rumor ran around Washington that Bill Boyle was through. But Harry Truman faced his press conference, and said his confidence in Bill Boyle was unshaken.
Then Truman launched a counteroffensive that betrayed, for an unshaken man, a certain nervousness. He sent Congress a special message, urging that all important officials of the federal Government and political leaders of both parties be required to make public their annual incomes from all sources. His reason: "Attempts have been made, through implication and innuendo and by exaggeration and distortion of facts, in a few cases, to create the impression that graft and corruption are running rampant in the whole Government."
Hardly anybody had stated the case in terms that sweeping. Far less than 1% of federal employees have been in any way involved in charges. The civil service has never been cleaner, never enjoyed a better reputation. The trouble is that so many of the scandals have struck so close to the top: Truman himself and the Deep Freezers, Harry Vaughan and his friends among the five-percenters, three district Collectors of Internal Revenue appointed by the President, a mink coat to a White House stenographer, a camera to a presidential secretary, and then the story of Bill Boyle and the RFC.
The exposures were not entirely partisan. Most of the scandals involving Democrats were brought to light by Democratic members of Congress. And it was a Republican Senator who denounced Republican National Chairman Guy Gabrielson for working on the RFC in an effort to get an $18.5 million loan for Carthage Hydrocol Inc., of which Gabrielson is president and counsel. Welcome as the Gabrielson issue was to the Democrats, it scarcely relieved them of the onus of the Administration scandals.