Westbrook Pegler
Logansport Press/September 19, 1956
Fair Enough
LOS ANGELES. There have been many wide-eyed references to Arthur J. Goldsmith, of the Tower, in connection with Harold Stassen’s mysterious campaign to dump Richard Nixon off the Republican ticket. The New York Times is too, too naive about this because the Times knows all there is to be known about Goldsmith and his machinations conducted from a hotel suite, which is also his dwelling, in the same pillar on Park Avenue which is the residence of Herbert Hoover and General MacArthur. James Reston, the chief of the Times’ Washington bureau, pretends to know nothing about Goldsmith and this seems to be the editorial policy of the paper.
Another Times story hinted that the chief or “only suspicion” of Goldsmith came from Gerald L.K. Smith, of’ Los Angeles. However, the fact is that Smith did not poke this phony dragon out of his cave and expose him to public view.
I AM THE ONE WHO poked him out. He now says, in the quote published by The Times: “I am mysterious only to would-be wits, dimwits and half-wits.” Well, five years ago I challenged Goldsmith to give an account of himself, and his backing and expenditures for political candidates and causes and he ducked back into his hole. He said he would answer no questions put orally whether by phone or face-to-face, but would answer questions put in writing. I immediately wrote some questions and sent them to him and I have yet to hear a word from him.
Horsepark Herbie Swope, Bernie Baruch’s old press-agent and author of his publicity title of Elder Statesman, then told Goldsmith that such reticence created that very mystery which Goldsmith now denies the existence of. Of course Goldsmith was in on Stassen’s raid and it is silly to believe Ike doesn’t know the facts. He and his mysterious, letter-head political fronts financed a campaign for the radical Democrat, Matt Neeley, of West Virginia, against Chapman Revercomb, a Republican senator, and helped to kick the Republican out of the senate for the sole reason that Revercomb had helped to write and enact an immigration law for the benefit of the United States.
I CAN TELL YOU also that Goldsmith sent money to New Hampshire to support Senator Tobey, a left-wing Republican, and that he imported George Franklin, of Nevada, to his mysterious political plant in the Tower and adopted him for $5,000 worth of political backing against Pat McCarran in 1950. Like Revercomb, McCarran had helped enact an immigration law. McCarran also had put through a “security” law which earned him the hatred of all those who hated Joe McCarthy.
Now we come to the sensitive fact that when Dick Nixon was on the House Committee on un-American Activities, he, too, like McCarran and McCarthy, put himself on Goldsmith’s list for the same reason.
ERE LEAVING GEORGE Franklin, I would report that Franklin recently told me all about his pilgrimage to the Waldorf Tower at Goldsmith’s invitation and expense and admitted ‘that Goldsmith sent $5,000 to Nevada to dump McCarran in that primary. McCarran won. Franklin has now swung away from the Goldsmith cult and has fought them in Las Vegas at great personal expense and pain. He refused to touch a nickel of Goldsmith’s $5,000 himself but says it was sent in from the Waldorf Tower and spent in his behalf.
Altogether, Goldsmith’s activity deepens the mystery of President Eisenhower’s strange “tribute” to him, a sort of diploma contrived by the present Senator Case, of New Jersey, and Congressman Hugh Scott, of Pennsylvania, after Ike’s two brothers, Milton and Arthur, had spent ten days conferring with Goldsmith in the Tower. After all, Ike, Case and Scott are supposed to be Republicans whereas Goldsmith seems to be anything else but.
I doubt that any of this is unknown to the New York Times. It certainly is not known to Nixon.
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