Questions for Justice Clark

Back to Capitol Hill last week went Philadelphia's smiling Irishman, Lawyer James Patrick McGranery, who was U.S. Attorney General in the last days of the Truman Administration. The House Judiciary Subcommittee, headed by New York's Representative Kenneth B. Keating, wanted to ask McGranery some questions about an earlier day. The committee was trying to find out whether the Justice Department was "improperly induced" to drop a $185,000 million mail-fraud case against Kansas City Bond Dealer Roy E. Crummer in 1946. At tHat time, McGranery was an assistant attorney general under Tom C. Clark, now a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

McGranery's frankness startled the committee. In three important and controversial cases in Justice in 1945-46, he testified, normal procedure was upset and his office was bypassed. The only person who could have arranged the bypassing was Tom Clark. One case was the Kansas City vote-fraud scandal in the 1946 Democratic primary, in which there was no prosecution despite ballot-box stuffing, dynamiting and theft of evidence. Another was the famed case of the left-wing Amerasia magazine, which was caught with a file full of Government documents (some of them top-secret). No one involved went to prison.

The third was the Crummer case, which Clark's Justice Department dropped. McGranery said that the case, like the others, should have been routed through his office, but he didn't even hear of it until he became attorney general six years later. Said McGranery: "You can't have secrets and dispense justice behind closed doors in our system. It must be done in wide-open spaces . . . I say to you gentlemen that you cannot dismiss matters under these circumstances without leaving real suspicion, and cause and reason for that suspicion . . ."

After McGranery's testimony, there certainly seemed to be some questions for Justice Clark to answer. He is expected to be called before the committee soon.

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