Last week's star witness before the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight investigating the relationship between Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams and Massachusetts Tycoon Bernard Goldfine: Boston Financier John Fox, 51.
Off the Sidewalks. Born Dec. 9, 1906 on down-at-the-heels Second Street in Irish South Boston, Fox was the son of an employee in the supply department of the New England Telephone & Telegraph Co. who worked himself up toward a middle-class living—and made John take piano lessons. John Fox, by his own admission less interested in knowledge per se than in prestige per se, majored in English literature at Harvard, paid his way through as a ragtime pianist at the Copley Plaza (now the oft-mentioned Sheraton Plaza) and Brae Burn Country Club, graduated in 1929 and landed a job with a Boston broker at $20 a week just before the great crash. After the crash, came the 1933 Federal Securities Act, which was "written by lawyers for lawyers, and I didn't even know what a lot of the words meant." Fox therefore enrolled in Harvard Law School, skipped most classes but made a deal with some "greasy grinds" to rent their notebooks at $10 a weekend, passed his examinations and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar.
In the Money. Within ten years, with time out for a year-and-a-half World War II hitch as a Marine Corps lieutenant, Fox had shuffled credits into a securities-real estate empire estimated at $25 million even while staying "in hock to my eyeballs." Among other interests, he controlled the U.S. Leather Co. (which he liquidated in 1952), held the principal interest in Western Union (which he sold out in 1952). He owned a 47-acre Connecticut estate at Fairfield, a house with a dining room imported from the 18th century London home of David Garrick, 6,500 acres of Maine farm-and woodland, and six Saint Bernards. At this point of conspicuous prestige, on June 17, 1952. Fox signed a contract to buy the 121-year-old Boston Post. From then on, the road led down.
Newspaper Days. Still in hock up to his eyebal's, Fox needed ready cash to run the Post. Up to then, the Post had been a strident critic of Massachusetts' Democratic Governor Paul A. Dever, running for reelection. Dever arranged for his friend Bernard Goldfine to extend Fox about $400,000 in credit—and the Post suddenly became one of Dever's loudest backers. Similarly, Fox had pledged the Post to support Massachusetts' Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., and abruptly switched position. His story now is that after discussions with others, including Neanderthal Republican Publisher Basil Brewer of New Bedford, Mass., he decided that Cabot Lodge was "soft on Communism" and that therefore he decided to move over and back Democratic Candidate John Kennedy. The day the Post's Kennedy-for-Senator editorial appeared, by Fox's account, Fox talked to Joseph Patrick Kennedy, multimillionaire father of the candidate, who agreed to lend Fox a cool $500,000—and later achieved the feat of getting it back. John Kennedy won the Senate by a slim 70,000 votes, and Fox still claims credit for his election.