I would hesitate about establishing the right of anybody who was adversely affected or commented on in a derogatory way. If you give him the right, he may want to bring in a lot of witnesses. I think the committee must determine whether or not he is sufficiently injured for them to go through that; otherwise, your committee investigation will be destroyed.

The CHAIRMAN. Are there any further questions?

No further questions.

Do you have any further statement, Senator?

Mr. BREWSTER. No.

The CHAIRMAN. I want to thank you in behalf of this committee for your contribution in coming here and testifying on this very important subject. With your vast experience, I am sure your testimony will be of benefit to the committee in arriving at a proper and just decision.

Mr. BREWSTER. I think the committee has a great task.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, Senator Brewster.

We will stand in recess until Tuesday at 10 o'clock.

(Whereupon, at 12:05 p. m., the hearing was recessed until 10 a. m., Tuesday, July 20, 1954.)

RULES OF PROCEDURE FOR SENATE INVESTIGATING

COMMITTEES

TUESDAY, JULY 20, 1954

UNITED STATES SENATE,

COMMITTEE ON RULES AND ADMINISTRATION,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON RULES,
Washington, D. C.

The subcommittee met at 10: 38 a. m., pursuant to recess, in room 318 of the Senate Office Building, Senator William E. Jenner (chairman) presiding.

Present: Senators Jenner (chairman) and Hayden.

Also present: Senator Theodore Francis Green; Boris S. Berkovitch, counsel to Subcommittee on Rules; W. F. Bookwalter, chief clerk of the Committee on Rules and Administration; Darrell St. Claire, professional staff member, Committee on Rules and Administration; and Judge Robert Morris.

The CHAIRMAN. The committee will come to order.

Senator Nye, would you come forward.

Will you be sworn to testify, sir.

Do you swear that the testimony given in this hearing will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? Mr. NYE. I do.

The CHAIRMAN. You did not submit a statement to this committee prior to your appearance here, sir.

Mr. NYE. I have not.

The CHAIRMAN. All right; then you may proceed in your own fashion.

TESTIMONY OF GERALD P. NYE, A FORMER UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF NORTH DAKOTA

Mr. NYE. I sat down yesterday and last evening at my own typewriter and wrote out a statement that I hope might expedite any contribution that I might hope to make to your committee and its dealing with this issue of the conduct of investigations.

I ought to feel right at home, here, Mr. Chairman, because for many months, even for years, I sat where you are sitting in conduct of an investigation that endured for almost 3 years.

I welcome more than a little your invitation, your want for me to appear before this committee, to discuss experiences which I had encountered in the conduct of investigations while in the Senate; but the more I contemplate and recollect the experiences of those years, the more I am inclined to wonder this morning if I hadn't ought to plead the fifth amendment, which seems to be a popular way of avoiding be

coming enmeshed in any of the controversy now growing out of the experience of the Senate in the conduct of investigations.

Mr. Chairman, I guess I had my share of experiences in Senate investigations. Three of them in particular are going to live with me until I go to the grave.

My first experience arose when I came as a greenhorn to the Senate and was assigned to the only committee vacancy that existed at that time in the Senate organization, namely, the Public Lands Committee. The Public Lands Committee at that time was having a battle, not over who should be chairman of the committee, but who shouldn't be chairman, and the ranking members of the committee were finding it very convenient to win assignment to other committees and, almost before I had my eyes opened as a Senator, I found myself chairman of the Public Lands Committee. It was engaged at that very time in the inquiry which was known as the Teapot Dome investigation. It grew, became an inquiry into the Salt Creek oil reserves and the Continental Trading Co., and was one of those things that the party in control at the time found it embarrassingly difficult to deal with; yet, my experience as chairman of that committee was affording the richest experience I believe I had during all of my 19 years in the Senate.

The prosecuting member of the Public Lands Committee was the well-remembered Tom Walsh of Montana, and the disclosures that were being made were reflecting very seriously upon members of the Republican administration. It was a most difficult assignment, and yet the behavior and conduct of all members of that committee was such as to leave me wondering today why regular standing committees of the Senate should experience any difficulty in their search for facts when they are making inquiries involving affairs in which the Senate is interested in a legislative way.

We had in that age, though, no such organization to conduct inquiries as you are providing nowadays. If I remember rightly, the committee in that investigation of Teapot Dome, Salt Creek, Elk Hills, and the Continental Trading Co. had but one investigator. Every member of the committee was interesting himself in the facts that were brought before the committee. All members were given an oppor tunity to handle separate features of the inquiry, doing the examining of the witnesses as they appeared before the committee. Out of that study, along with the tremendous returns and recoveries into the Treasury of assessments, of unpaid taxes, penalties, in addition to the fact that men were penalized to the extent of spending terms in the Federal penitentiaries out of it grew a knowledge and an acquaintance with the extent to which the submarginal lands, oilfields lying under water around the United States, were affording a value that ought to be jealously guarded, and I think my resolution shortly thereafter, asking for a recovery of those submarginal lands, making their possession the possession of the United States Government, or of the Navy, as a naval oil reserve, was the first approach to that submarginal question, which group

Mr. BERKOVITCH. Senator, excuse me, may I interrupt you at this point; I assume you want to make this informal?

Mr. NYE. I hope to.

Mr. BERKOVITCH. You noted a few moments ago that at the time of the Teapot Dome investigation each of the Senators on the committee

found the time and the interest to keep quite close contact with the conduct and the progress of the investigation.

Now, would you think, from your later experience, that Senators today have the time to devote that they did in those years to the dayto-day proceedings and the details of an investigation?

Mr. NYE. Well, in my own time in the Senate, in the years following that particular experience, I saw a diminishing of opportunity for individual Senators to participate as they did participate in the Teapot Dome inquiry.

I had the responsibility of subsequent investigations, and never again, except in the case of one inquiry, was there the cooperation from members of the committee that was true at the time of that Teapot Dome inquiry.

I shall cover that briefly a little later, and describe what I think is the reason for the difficulty of winning quorums in the conduct of committee hearings.

There is another kind of investigation in which the Senate engages, in which it was never difficult to accomplish the presence of a quorum. Those were the missions that required the Public Lands Committee to go out and study the feasibility and practicability of creating new national parks.

It was always a grand pleasure in the summer recess for members of the committee to go on those excursions, and they were not loafing excursions though they did afford a great deal of pleasure, such as the excursion which was basic to the creation of the Everglades National Park, and the Grand Teton National Park out in Wyoming. Then came another experience in the early thirties, as chairman of a special committee of the Senate investigating the conduct of senatorial campaigns in that year. That was an experience which was rough; to say the least, it was of necessity a partisan committee, made up of 3 Democrats, 4 Republicans. I have to say to your committee that it was never difficult to have a quorum at the hearings that were conducted then, be they in Illinois, in Nebraska, in Tennessee, or in Pennsylvania, where we had extensive work to do, but I would remark that when we were operating in States involving alleged scandalous conduct of a Republican candidate for the Senate I was never able to get Republican members of the committee to accompany me, but we always had fine attendance by the Democrats.

On the other hand, when we went into States that were involving allegedly wrong conduct by Democratic candidates for the Senate, we always had fine Republican attendance, but little or no Democratic attendance.

I think there is no need to excuse the reasoning that entered into that situation; but, on the whole, there was never difficulty, though there were majority and minority reports in some instances, there was never any such strife as denied the committee the chance to know all there was to know through the conduct of those investigations.

But the experience that I think was most outstanding, and the experience which probably can help your committee more than anything else I can offer, was that which grew out of the conduct of investigation of the munitions industry, an investigation that had to do with the study in one degree and another of the causes entering into the making of war and the involvement of nations in war.

It was a study that endured for nearly 3 years. What is accomplished is a thing upon which we might be inclined to differ, yet there can be no denying the fact that the investigation had a most salutary effect upon the relations existing between munitions producers and Government agencies procuring their products.

I think there was a tremendous reformation that came to the Government procurement agencies as a result of that inquiry.

So much time of that inquiry was devoted to that particular weakness, procurement, that when the OPA was organized they went to the formulas that the committee had laid down, rather roughly, and during the Second World War procurement was made under those procedures.

Mr. Paul Henderson-was it Paul Henderson, head of the OPA? The CHAIRMAN. Leon Henderson.

Mr. NYE. Leon Henderson advised Mr. Raushenbush, who was the executive secretary of our committee at that time, and who is present here with me this morning to lend any refreshment of memory that I might need or be ready to respond to your questions, that as a result of applying these formulas to procurement during World War II, the United States Government saved $54 billion, as compared with what would have been the cost had the formulas pursued in the First World War been followed. That was not the only benefit or result flowing from that inquiry, I am sure, but as to its conduct I have to reveal to you a very unusual condition prevailing in the organization of that committee.

Senator Vandenberg and myself had introduced separate, yet related resolutions bearing on the subject, calling for the inquiry, and when the inquiry was authorized-this, mind you, during Democratic control of the Senate-the Vice President, Mr. Garner, asked some of us to get our heads together and reveal who we would like to have serve on that committee, and the committee was appointed. The Vice President failed or refused to designate a chairman of that committee and left it to the committee of 4 Democrats and 3 Republicans to elect their own chairman.

Why I, a Republican in the minority, was elected to that chairmanship I do not know, but I know it came to pass, and I know that there never has been a committee of the Senate that worked more closely, that was more cooperative than was that committee of seven men.

Oh, I do not mean to say there were not differences of opinion, that there were not clashes growing out of the 3 years of study. There were, but there was generally excellent unanimity on the part of the committee in the conclusions that were reached and the recommendations that were made in the reports submitted, and in the legislation that was called for. It was a most unusual experience.

I think it can be traced, the success of that committee's functioning, to the fact that there was no desire on the part of any one member of the committee to carry the whole load. I know that the chairman at the time was wishing very much for a division of the responsibilities, and the responsibilities were divided to an extent where one member of the committee would handle this shipbuilders case, another member of the committee would handle the du Pont study, another member of the committee the Remington study-and, so, we broke it up, and as our investigators working with the committee developed their cases, before hearings were conducted, the investigators and the member of