It's a Crime
Secretary of the Interior for a. personal profit of half a million dollars. It took ten years of legislation and detective work to get the crimi- nals sent to prison; the lease cancelled; the re- serves restored; and some of the nation's money back. Even before that. 'politician' was a grubby word in the American vocabulary; some of the reasons why it is so still are to be found in Corruption in Washington, by Blair Bolles (Gollancz, 21s.), which argues that corruption has grown with the power 'of the Federal Government and of the White House as its executive arm and of the number of officials on its payroll, and flourishes because the Assistant to the President is not accountable to Congress just a slob,' was Alice Longworth's verdict on Arai the twenty-eighth President of the United States —a kinder judgment than that of William Allen White. whose considered opinion was that 'if ever there was a man who was a he-harlot, it was this same Warren G. Harding.' This re- ferred not to the President's bedroom behaviour, but to his money-morality, and that of such ,k dubious associates as those to whom he gave cabinet office and access to the nation's till. This .A is the detailed story of the biggest till-rifling operation of them all—the fraudulent leasing to a pal's oil company of Teapot Dome, the 4f Government oil reserve in Wyoming, by the 'al y t bet),
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