Word: fcc
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Under White House and congressional pressure, Federal Communications Commissioner Richard A. Mack resigned last week for his part in the FCC award of Miami's Channel 10 last year to a National Airlines television subsidiary (TIME, March 10). Mack insisted that his conscience was clear about his vote for National and the loans and gifts he accepted from Old Friend Thurman Whiteside. (In two years on the FCC, Government investigators reported, Mack received $35,000 in salary and $41,000 from outside sources.) But Dwight Eisenhower stiffly told him: "You are wise to tender your resignation...
Mack had at least one defender. Tough, outspoken National Airlines President George T. Baker, who in 40 years had personally built a 140-mile airmail run into a lucrative. 3.400-mile passenger route. Baker, a fellow Floridian, appeared before the FCC-probing House Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight to protest that Mack was "being broken, crucified and . . . sent home in disgrace." But "more guilty," insisted Baker, were Florida's Democratic Senators George Smathers and Spessard Holland, together with Tennessee's Estes Kefauver. Their crime, to Baker's mind: pressuring the FCC for a rival Channel 10 applicant...
Against Richie Mack, 48, were these undenied, undeniable facts: ¶Since becoming a member of the seven-member FCC by appointment of President Eisenhower in 1955, he had borrowed at least $2,650 from his longtime friend Miami Lawyer Thurman A. Whiteside, a big man-about-Florida. Whiteside. as a pompous, disputatious witness last week, admitted that he had been on National Airlines' side and had talked to Mack about the bitterly fought case. ¶In 1953 Whiteside gave Mack, then a member of the Florida Railroad and Public Utilities Commission, a one-sixth interest in an insurance agency...
...vote in the Miami Channel 10 case. I at no time, directly or indirectly, pledged my vote to Thurman Whiteside, to Public Service Television, Inc. [the National Airlines subsidiary], or to any of the other three applicants in that proceeding." Even without his vote, he noted, there was an FCC majority for National: "Public Service would have won even had I not voted...
...about Andar, and "didn't ge into the details." What did all this add up to? Had it never even occurred to Richie Mack that it was highly improper for a Federal Communications Commissioner to accept thousands of dollars from a lawyer interested in a case before the FCC? Replied Witness Mack...