Word: bratten
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Dates: during 1951-1951
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Florence Umberhocker Bratten had served for 25 years as confidential secretary to Alben Barkley. A plump and jolly woman, she liked to boast that she had a first-name friend in every office in the Government. One of her friends was Charles E. ("Chuck") Shaver, counsel for the Senate Small Business Committee. In the 1948 and 1950 campaigns, Shaver was Barkley's personal aide...
...Veep came out looking old and tired and sat down to the most strained press conference in his political history. Two stenographers kept careful record as he explained that Flo Bratten was "an accommodating, good-natured, bighearted woman." Would she keep her job? Said Barkley, woodenly: "I am not going to make a hasty judgment ... I am reserving judgment...
...down to breakfast one day last week, the New York Herald Tribune's Jack Steele was confronted by his six-year-old son waving a Washington Post. "Daddy," he asked, "what's this woman doing with a gun?" The woman on the front page was Flo Bratten, secretary to Veep Alben Barkley, dressed in her outfit as an honorary Kentucky deputy sheriff, and the gun she held was pointed straight at the reader. Steele grinned; Flo Bratten had reason to draw a bead on him. He had just broken the story of how Mrs. Bratten and Charles Shaver...
Jack Steele, a deceptively jolly, roly-poly fellow, got his latest beat by his usual hard digging, plus a nose for news which sniffed something worth digging for. While skimming through the records of office calls of RFC officials, he ran across the names of Mrs. Bratten and Shaver. The references sounded harmless, but why were they mentioned at all? When Steele discovered that at the time of the visits, Shaver was listed as an associate in Chase & Williams, a Washington law firm, he thought he had something...
Evidence Found. He dredged up hints that Shaver and Mrs. Bratten had been interested in a hotel loan, followed the trail to Miami, Detroit and Minneapolis before clinching the fact that Chase & Williams represented the group seeking the loan. When Steele confronted Mrs. Bratten and Shaver with his evidence, they admitted they had tried to influence RFC. As usual, Steele did much of his news hounding by phone, a system he swears by. Says he: "People will tell you more over the telephone, sometimes, than they will when you're face to face with them...