Part 13: Dupont Dynasty Behind The Nylon Curtain ...A Dynasty in Transition

DuPont Dynasty 

Behind the Nylon Curtain 

Gerard Colby

Sixteen(2 of 3) 

A DYNASTY IN TRANSITION 

5. 

THE THURSDAY NIGHT MASSACRE 

The taming of such media storms as the State News and Behind the Nylon Curtain was still underway in November 1974 when the DuPonts were confronted by yet another rebellion, this time at the heart of their control over northern Delaware’s press: the News-Journal papers. During the previous year, reporters for the papers had confirmed New Castle County Executive Mel Slawik’s charge of property tax under assessments, including homes of DuPont family members, and although editors continued their disparaging coverage of Slawik, the papers also poked fun at such DuPont family affairs as the annual Holly Ball, a Christmas-time party for the debutantes of chateau country, with proceeds going to charity in the true fashion of noblesse oblige. 

The reason for all this was John Craig, a veteran News-Journal reporter and Wilmington native who had worked his way up to replace DuPont Company’s Chick Hackert as Executive Editor after the latter’s death in 1970. Craig was backed for the job by DuPont in-law Richard “Dixie” Sanger, who was Christiana Securities’ uneasy appointment as president of the News-Journal. The board was reluctant to give Craig control of the papers, but Sanger insisted that Craig’s independence would help the papers shed their image as DuPont organs. Seeing the public-relations usefulness of this to win needed SEC approval if the desire of many family members to dissolve Christiana Securities was ever to be realized, Christiana’s chairman, Irénée DuPont, Jr., threw his support behind Sanger and the board’s resistance summarily collapsed, although Robert Carpenter, Jr., continued his criticisms. 

Craig took his job seriously and wanted to put out the best newspapers possible. He brought bright young reporters and editors into the staff from outside Delaware, including three veterans from Pacific Stars and Stripes, John Baker, Curtis Wilkie and Bob Hodierne. Some of the older staff members resented the newcomers, but the NewsJournal, for the first time in its history, had begun to win many national awards. Wilkie was praised for his stories during the 1972 presidential campaign and the paper won the Public Service Award of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association. Although Irénée DuPont, Jr., forced the editors to print an endorsement of Richard Nixon by the owners (Christiana Securities) as a “View from the Top,” Craig’s insistence on independent news coverage reaped a harvest of controversial stories, including stories on the Nemours Foundation and Ed Ball’s use of the Alfred du Pont estate, an analysis of serious problems at the family’s brokerage firm of Laird, Bissell and Meeds, changes in DuPont’s pension plan, real estate dealings by Delaware Chief Justice Daniel Herrmann, and articles by investigative reporter David Walsh suggesting that Irving Shapiro had risen to power because no DuPont family member, including Irénée, was capable of doing the job. 

It seemed a dramatic, refreshing change. 

Delawareans, accustomed to reading Philadelphia papers for news on their own state, were not used to it. 

Nor were the DuPonts. Irénée, Edward, Robert Carpenter, Jr., and others were pursuing their plan to dissolve Christiana Securities into DuPont. This would mean that DuPont Company would inherit the News-Journal papers. At first, DuPont had every intention of retaining ownership, using a board of trustees of trusted academicians, “public” representatives, clergymen, and others to act as an advisory news council. But when the Nader Study Group on Delaware in 1971 criticized the pro-DuPont bias of the papers in their book and recommended the sale of the News-Journal, the family, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, was moved “to accept a fact they had already become painfully aware of—that control of the papers sometimes resulted in more bad publicity than it was worth—and they have had them for sale ever since.” 101 

If so, the family must have been aware of the Nader Team’s criticisms during their stay in Delaware (Irving Shapiro personally accompanied the team during their formal interviews with DuPont employees), because the decision to sell the papers was made in April, 1971, a full seven months before the Nader team had its report ready for publication. At any rate, in the summer of 1971, Irving Shapiro and Irénée DuPont met with in-law Rodney Layton of the family’s top law firm, Richards, Layton & Finger, and News-Journal president Sanger and devised the trustees’ plan. “The idea was to put it into effect as soon as possible,” a DuPont source told the Philadelphia Bulletin, “and definitely prior to the publication of the Nader report.” 102 

The plan never came off because the DuPonts could not decide how the trustees would be appointed or by whom. Whatever inclinations they might have had to pursue the plan, however, were overwhelmed by fears of loss of control during the following year’s presidential campaign, when the editors refused to endorse candidates Congressman Pierre DuPont, Richard Nixon or Senator J. Caleb Boggs and even ran an unflattering cartoon of Richard Nixon. Although Craig was placated for the owners’ “View from the Top” endorsement of Republicans by a board resolution that made him a vice-president with expanded powers, a strike that idled the News-Journal during the campaign did not impress the DuPonts on the papers’ board of directors. One of those was Irénée, who had just joined the board. Irénée took the line that the newspapers’ assets were in danger. In early 1973, Christiana Securities intervened, according to Irénée, “in an effort to preserve the asset. We placed an experienced manager in charge of the board of the papers with the understanding he would use the office to provide financial and business leadership that was obviously lacking at the paper as it existed prior to that time.” 103 

Yet the assets were so large, $24.2 million, that when DuPont Company first learned of its size from appraiser Vincent Manno, the executive committee was shocked. The company agreed to pay the family that amount when the Christiana merger went through. From that moment on, the company’s stake in preserving a financially lucrative operation for future prospective buyers ultimately outweighed all considerations about the paper’s journalistic quality. Irénée, too, had the same stake in “preserving the asset,” so it could be sold to DuPont at the agreed-upon price. Business speculation, then, replaced journalism as the highest priority. The freedom of the press was soon for sale also.

“Maybe it’s time we bit the bullet and sent one of our people over there,” 104 Shapiro told Sanger. The man they sent was David H. Dawson, 66, a senior vice-president and director who was scheduled to retire in September, 1973. In January, Dawson was asked to spend one-third of his time on the News-Journal “problems” as chairman of its board of directors, representing the owner. To help him in his new task, Du Pont Company provided the talents of two new employees, assessor Vincent Manno and Edward W. Barrett, former Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Armed with Manno’s statistics on industry averages for editorial costs and Barrett’s advice on production costs, Dawson quickly used budget cutting as his axe in attacking Craig’s news operation.

The newsroom was particularly vulnerable. Its editorial costs were 46 percent above the national average and its employees had never formed a newspapermen’s guild or union. Some of those costs were for machinery, including a $1.5 million photo composition system designed to reduce the number of employees. Dawson was committed to this expense. That left only salaries and operating budgets. News-Journal photographers were winning a host of awards, but Dawson considered that the outstanding ones were art, rather than news. The number of photographers would have to be cut. The travel budget would also be slashed; Delaware, it was argued, did not have to follow national stories like the 1972 election so closely, awards notwithstanding. Craig resisted the reduction in news coverage. “I think that attitude is patronizing of the community,” he argued. “The people here have as high an income and intelligence level as the people in New York or Washington. They want the same kind of information.” 105

But it was precisely information that was being targeted. Dawson was particularly peeved about the stories on Irving Shapiro’s rise and Irénée du Pont, describing them as “unforgivable.” 106 Dawson put the blame on the editors. “I’d contact Dixie [Sanger], saying here’s another example of poor editing,” he later recalled. “I recognize that it’s good to have reporters who are aggressive, but editors are there to restrain them.” 107 Dawson claimed that “the board and many people in Wilmington” severely criticized Craig for slanted news, bad taste and liberalism.

Craig offered to compromise, but pointed to the board’s DuPont composition as the problem; he suggested a larger board, reflecting the community. It was his undoing. When earnings fell off in early 1974 with the general economy, his news department was set upon by Dawson’s demands for another 10-15 percent cut. Craig had already vacated 16 editorial positions, reduced its portion of revenues from 14.8 to 13.9 percent and cut news coverage in the paper by almost 20 percent. Dawson’s demands meant that more employees would have to be retired early or laid off.

Craig then made blunder number two. He convened a group of his five “best people” at the Red Fox Inn in nearby Pennsylvania on November 3, 1974, and set up a reorganization plan that called for ten job eliminations, including some of the Old Guard and one of Dawson’s neighbors. On November 22, Craig and his team met Dawson at the Wilmington Country Club and presented their plan. Five hours of debate ensued, with Dawson resisting the forced retirements and lay-offs and raising Barrett’s criticism of the time spent in compiling news from wire services, arguing that more time could be spent editing. “With all respect, Mr. Dawson,” replied Hodierne, “that’s bullshit.” Dawson, used to the gentility of life at DuPont’s executive suites, was not used to being talked to like that. He disliked Hodierne, 29, who as the youngest fully accredited journalist in Vietnam and a winner of journalism awards had been called a “traitor” by an Army information officer for his Stars and Stripes articles. “It was John’s first mistake,” Dawson later said of Craig’s choosing the newcomers over the Old Guard, “and led to effectively putting him under the control of the Stars and Stripes people. He was more and more entrapped.”

It was an “outside agitator” line Dawson would use repeatedly in his campaign to reassert control over the papers. Although the News-Journal had run an unfavorable review of Behind the Nylon Curtain by a University of Delaware professor, Carol Hoffecker, which repeated false claims (about the author’s supposedly rare visit to the family’s manuscripts museum) identical to those made by DuPont’s Public Affairs Department in its secret internal critique of the book, the news editors’ loyalty to the family was still questioned when a five-part series appeared during the week of December 9 on financial control of the University of Delaware, a DuPont sacred cow. For Dawson, the series was “the last straw”; he confronted Sanger, reviewed the remaining articles yet to be run, and discussed firing Craig. The situation worsened when Lammot DuPont Copeland, Jr.’s Commuter News Digest ran a story by an ex-News-Journal reporter, Charles Wilson, indicating that Craig’s newcomers were pushing aside older employees. But this was not news to Dawson. He had already learned from Sanger that second week of December that Craig had appointed Baker managing editor, Hodierne metropolitan editor, and Wilkie associate editor. What probably allowed Dawson to vent his furies was the decision handed down by the SEC the same day the Wilson article appeared, Friday the 13th. The DuPont family, the SEC ruled, would be allowed to swap its Christiana holdings for DuPont stock.

Dawson then countermanded Craig’s promotions, even though Craig had been given power to make such appointments since his vice-presidency in 1972. Craig was now in an untenable position and wrote Dawson on Monday informing him that he still believed the promotions should proceed.

Desperate for a compromise, Wilkie and Sanger tried to enlist support from Du Pont Company’s Public Affairs Department. Vice-President Thomas Stephenson, busy at the time in drafting his own secret letter of protest against the New York Times review of Behind the Nylon Curtain, listened politely and the newsmen left thinking Du Pont might come to the aid of freedom of the press. It didn’t. Shapiro had endorsed their plan subject to a later independent study, and may have spoken once to Dawson, but he knew that the real power in the company resided with the family. He could only go so far without jeopardizing his own position, which he had no intention of doing.

Negotiations collapsed again with another Dawson refusal to compromise and on Monday, December 23, Irénée and Carpenter Jr. led the News-Journal board in vetoing Craig’s promotions. The vote was 7 to 1, with only Sanger casting the opposition vote. On Tuesday, Christmas Eve, Wilkie sent another desperate plea in writing to Stephenson through columnist John Gates, an ex-DuPont in-law who had married Stephenson’s daughter. Wilmington Mayor Tom Malooney, hoping to save Craig’s valued independent editorship, also called Irving Shapiro. But Du Pont officials refused to stop the confrontation. “It all hinges on who should run a newspaper,” Wilkie summed up at a staff meeting on December 28, “chemists or journalists.” 108 On December 30th, 64 people, including half the newsroom, registered their protest against interference in a petition to the board. Dawson replied on January 3, disingenuously claiming that “the only issue in dispute was a plan to proliferate the number of supervisory positions.” 109 “Lies, lies, lies,” Wilkie sadly concluded. 110 In fact, Dawson had himself admitted his concern about stories that “reported shortcomings of the DuPont Company or various DuPont family members.” 111 In Dawson’s view, the recent series on University of Delaware finances constituted the type of story that “the board would like to know about.” 112 The board, in effect, wanted to review sensitive news articles before they were published. “Stories about company and family tax assessments, institutions such as the Holly Ball for DuPont debutantes, the University of Delaware, and unionization of DuPont plants,” the editors later said, “were in the future to be handled with kid gloves or not handled at all.” 113

The blocking of their promotions forced Hodierne and Baker to do some hard thinking about their careers. Hodierne had turned down a higher-paying job in Louisville because of the promised promotion; Baker felt his professional reputation had been damaged. They sought legal counsel, who then wrote Dawson of their concerns and suggested that the editors had oral contracts for promotions. Dawson then moved to axe both men from the payroll. As chairman, he convened an emergency meeting of the board on the evening of Thursday, January 2, 1975. DuPont in-law Robert Richards, Jr., who was the only member unable to attend, wired a recommendation the gist of which was that Craig should be fired. Dawson moved that Craig be stripped of the powers conferred on him in 1970 so that any editorial restructuring would have to first be approved by the board. The board passed the resolution and asked Craig to fire Baker and Hodierne. Craig did, allowing both men to be eligible for severance pay after the board refused any severance pay to those who quit. Then Craig himself resigned. The board refused to fire Wilkie, who had asked Craig to inform them he wanted to be fired by a chemist because no journalist would fire him. Wilkie forsook his severance pay and also quit.

The News-Journal staff, informed by Craig, was stunned. Baker, in one of his last official acts, turned to reporter Jack Murray: “Cover this,” he said. Murray did, determined to be as objective as possible, including background material Craig had given him off the record, as well as statements Dawson made on the condition that they not be printed. Murray judged them to be of vital news importance to the community, and the next day Delawareans learned that Dawson said that henceforth the board would be “advised and consulted” before any articles were published that might be “particularly argumentative and disturbing to the community.” 114 Baker, Hodierne and Wilkie were also barred from entering the News-Journal building after they left.[great to know these assholes still control Delaware DC] 

“The sacred cows are grazing more peacefully in Delaware today, 115 Hodierne stated after urging sympathizers to stay on and continue the fight for an independent daily in New Castle. But Assistant Metropolitan Editor Shaun Mullen, asked to write biographical sketches of the award-winning journalists he had just seen fired, could not go on. He resigned the next day. So did Special Projects Editor Jay Harris, whose articles (with staffer Ralph Moyed) exposing heroin traffic in Delaware had won first place awards from the Associated Press Managing Editors and the Greater Philadelphia Chapter of Sigma Delta Chi, the professional journalists society. The Newark bureau’s crack woman reporter, Marti Steward, also quit. “I wouldn’t want to be part of a newspaper where the board controlled a newspaper over the objections of the editors,” 116 said Mullen. Hodierne understood. “For me,” he agreed, “it got to the point where we couldn’t put out an honest newspaper. And I couldn’t put up with that.” 117

Eleven of the Old Guard, led by Public Editor Cy Liberman, leaped to the board’s defense. It was an odd role for a journalist ostensibly representing the interests of the public, not management, to champion owners who sought to control the news, but then Liberman, a veteran of 33 years, was one of those whom Craig had slated for early retirement. “The situation has been misrepresented elsewhere,” Liberman and his ten allies said in a circulated statement, “as part of an attack on the integrity of the News Journal papers being made by former staff members whose ambitions for fast personal advancement have been thwarted.” 118 Liberman followed that up with a similar echoing of Dawson in his “Public Editor” column on January 4. Some reporters who disagreed with Liberman, like Hugh Cutter, nevertheless could not bring themselves to follow the lead of Craig and the other editors. “We are caught between our own idealism and the reality of having a job before resigning,” 119 said the young reporter. But Cutler never did’ resign. He remained, eventually settling into a niche in the newsroom.

The “Thursday Night Massacre” caused an uproar in Delaware. Governor Sherman Tribbitt, whose own top aide had been indicted as a result of News-Journal investigations, stated he was “gravely concerned that these actions could hamper the continued development of a free and independent press in Delaware.” Hailing the “ever burgeoning aggressiveness” of recent reporting, he urged the formation of a citizens group to “preserve the intellectual and journalistic integrity of the News-Journal papers.” 120 The presidents of the Delaware Bar Association and State Labor Council also expressed worries, as did the American Association of University Women, and a Concerned Faculty for a Free Press was formed at, of all places, the University of Delaware, defending the series on the university’s financing as “factual reporting of information which is common to other states.” 121 By January 6, the entire nation was aware of what had happened in Delaware when the New York Times ran a story on the upheaval, headlined “Du Pont Newspapers in Delaware Shaken by News-Control Dispute.” On that night, some 250 Delawareans gathered to discuss the issue and set up a steering committee to offer to act as mediator.

Their offer was not accepted. In fact, some DuPonts actually seemed quite surprised by all the commotion. Dawson denounced the governor’s statement as “just politics” 122 while Irénée’s brother-in-law, board member Henry Silliman, claimed, “This is just a case of sacking a guy who asked for it—Craig. This is not a case of DuPont influence. It’s plain ordinary people making the decision to get rid of Craig.” 123 University of Delaware President E.B. Trabant rejected the governor’s suggestion that he serve on the proposed citizens committee. It was “an internal management problem,” he insisted. “I didn’t read that any reporter has been dismissed for any reporting on any topic.” 124 Then Dawson made matters worse on January 6. He “strongly urged” that the editors print his reply to the governor denying any interest in controlling the news. Wilkie called the statement “a deceitful document,” and ended by reiterating Joseph Welch’s rebuke of Senator Joe McCarthy, “Have you no decency left, sir?” Sanger, ever the tactician, labelled Dawson’s action “a damn fool thing to do.” 125 

Apparently, Irving Shapiro agreed with Sanger. Shapiro quickly fired off a press release denying any Du Pont Company involvement in the intervention. “The company maintains a hands-off policy with respect to the papers’ treatment of news and editorials,” he stated, “And will continue to do so.… Allegations have been made in the current controversy that the Du Pont Company has intervened or wishes to intervene in the editorial processes of the Wilmington newspapers. This is emphatically not true, and there are no solid facts which would support a contrary inference.” 126 He did not reveal his part in sending Dawson, a Du Pont vice-president and director, over to the NewsJournal, or his lending Barrett, a Du Pont consultant, to Dawson to advise him. 

To some degree, it was true that the family, and not the company, were the prime movers. And this was precisely what Craig had in mind when he told Newsweek magazine that “people who suggest that the board is trying to protect the Du Pont Company interests are missing the issue. Many of the board members have no connection to the company. It was never a question of particular stories or sacred cows. They just didn’t like the tone of the paper.” 127 

This rings true in one sense. “Tone” is a matter of perspective, whether in art, music or politics. And families like the Du Ponts, observing from high in the upper realms of American society, are especially sensitive of any hint of corruption of democracy that may point in their direction or to their corporate managers; expressions of outrage are considered totally intolerable. “Tone,” for example, was the identical complaint given by Irénée du Pont, Jr., and Du Pont Company officials in explaining to a federal judge their hostility toward a book contemporary to the News-Journal dispute, Behind the Nylon Curtain. 

Yet Dawson’s claim to the press that the issue at the News-Journal was really “the financial soundness of the papers” 128 and Sanger’s insistence that his dispute with the board was over “essentially a business matter” 129 were not merely a ruse; they were also a paradox. For their very arguments underscored the symbiotic relationship between Christiana Securities and DuPont Company; or, more precisely, between Irénée DuPont, Jr.’s drive to “save the asset” owned by Christiana by cutting costs exactly where most desirable from the DuPont’s own conservative political point of view—the news and editorial department—and Irving Shapiro’s concern that the newspapers he had already agreed to purchase from Christiana as part of the merger would, in turn, be a financially lucrative property capable of easily attracting bidders when Du Pont put the paper up for sale as planned. 

This obvious financial tie was the answer to Wilkie’s puzzlement over DuPont Company’s behavior during the dispute. “I don’t understand how the situation got out of hand,” the young reporter later confessed. “For what happened is not in the best interest of either party. DuPont either chose not to believe or didn’t care. I’m surprised and disappointed they didn’t step in to call off the dogs.” 130 Wilkie, it seems, never understood that it was the family, not the company, which was master. Expecting the opposing general’s hired army, in this case DuPont executives, to be willing to play the role of cavalry coming to the rescue was a basic flaw in judgment resulting from a classic case of poor reconnaissance before the battle. It reflected the degree to which the disarming illusion of books like James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution, with their promise of powerful independent corporate managers, has penetrated American society, including its journalists who normally pride themselves in professional skepticism. Wilkie’s innocence was in his belief in a free press and that neither party gained from what happened. Du Pont Company did gain, despite the bad publicity; it was having its future property beefed up on the balance sheet. And the family gained also: the controversy killed off a move led by Sanger to turn the paper over to its employees, while cooling the interest of more liberal buyers who might well have felt, as Christopher Perry adduced, that “their offers will not be well received by a conservative seller.” 131 With such economic and political stakes, the Du Ponts were not about to back down to Craig and his liberal Stars and Stripes group. 

If there was any confusion about that, it was Wilkie’s, not the company’s. The family and the company understood exactly what their interests were; Wilkie’s comments reveal that the editors were either ignorant of those interests or did not give them enough weight. Not understanding power and the willingness of those who wield power to use it if threatened, the editors were predictably shocked by the vehemence of the counterattack and their ensuing isolation. Wilkie’s claim that the purging of him and his allies did not serve “either party” was at best naïve, for the immediate battle, while clearly provoked by Dawson, was ill-prepared, and that left Delaware’s press vanquished and the DuPonts triumphant. Wilkies battle, therefore, was more valiant than his analysis was accurate. His statements, in fact, were strikingly reminiscent of those in the 1920’s who, not aware of the economic and political stakes involved, bewilderedly ascribed an accidental quality to the First World War even as the system of rivalries for economic and political power which gave it birth prepared to deliver to them yet another terrible offspring, another wasteful and mutually destructive “impossibility” shaped by its origins into necessity. Power, itself, is seldom an accident; only its immediate exercise may be. With the DuPonts and Shapiro behind the scenes, Dawson’s appearance and his immediate attacks on Craig’s method of operations was no accident. 

Craig, contrary to Wilkie, seemed to understand where power really lay in this struggle, perhaps because he had lived so many years in the DuPont fiefdom. But being a native Delawarean also has its handicap of illusions. Craig’s comments to Newsweek about there never being a question of “particular stories or sacred cows,” for example, obviously contradicted most of what he and the other editors had earlier stated, and was probably explainable as not only an effort to distance himself from the fired editors, but also as a manifestation of the naïveté characteristic of many Americans about financial power and those who hold it. “I’m absolutely convinced that what we tried to do here is in the best interest of the DuPont family,” he told Christopher Perry, son of a retired DuPont public relations executive and publisher of Delaware Today magazine. “They’re nice people. I’ve known many of them all my life. They’re not robber barons. For the papers to be independent is in their own best interest, as irritating as it might be occasionally. It’s in the company’s best interest, too.” 132 It was straight native Wilmingtonese, but it was Wilmingtonese of an earlier age, when smiling patronage reaped the rewards of good feelings for both the dispenser and the receiver, when innocence reigned before the challenge. But when the challenge came, an iron fist was revealed beneath the velvet glove. 

The Delaware State News’s Joe Smyth poignantly reminded Craig of his naïveté, publishing a letter Craig had written him four years earlier urging the State News to “give up that crap about the ‘DuPont house organ.’” Smyth, at the time facing his own mounting DuPont pressure, pointed out that the source of Craig’s dangerous naïveté was right under his nose. “The News-Journal newspapers are the prime source of information for thousands of Delawareans. Having those papers edited by the Du Ponts is like allowing the White House to run the Washington Post. 

“But edit they do. Because, by God, this is their state. And in Wilmington, freedom of the press belongs to the family that owns it.” 133 

It was not really surprising that Craig, one of those “thousands of Delawareans” whose consciousness was early shaped by the DuPont-controlled “prime source of information” could develop such a blind spot, particularly when he was so involved in the actual News-Journal operation on a daily basis for so long. Nor was it any shocker that he defended his naïveté. That is true of all whose desire to do a good self respecting job creates a need to believe in what they are doing and in those who entrusted them with the responsibility to do it. Such is especially true of many working journalists who must learn to seek the story while being sensitive not to tread on the toes of their wealthy publishers or the top editors they have hired. In a state like Delaware, Craig could be forgiven his innocence; his only real crime, after all, was taking his job seriously. For that he was cast from the tower of success, hopefully into the light. 

But even if Craig insisted on not opening his eyes, Irving Shapiro, unencumbered by such native reflexes, recognized that others outside Delaware would not be so blind, especially after Dawson conducted a disastrous meeting with the newsroom staff—his first. Dawson began with assurances he was not there to dictate and ended with a reiteration of his demand to review “especially sensitive” stories for his suggestions and a warning that an editor who consistently rejected suggestions and showed poor judgment could face dismissal. 134 Ralph Moyed, who reported the meeting, raised the spectre of Watergate then haunting the nation in order to pinpoint the danger to the citizenry. “I am confident that the loss [of Craig and his top lieutenants] is especially appreciated because of what happened in Washington during the Nixon administration. I don’t think, on balance, that many newspapers distinguished themselves in the early stages of the unraveling of the Watergate outrages. But they recovered. And in the process, they helped uncover the Nixon-Agnew plot to discredit the press so that the two men would be free to accomplish their goals.” 135 He titled the column “Many Are Watching.” 

Many were, indeed, and not just in Delaware, but throughout the nation. There were already speculations that the scandal over Christiana’s control of the newspapers might hinder its planned merger with DuPont. When the Democratic governor made his call for a citizens committee, Shapiro could smell politics in the air. He knew that the proposal was not acceptable to the DuPonts, and probably shared Dawson’s feeling of being “heartened” by a group of DuPonts and their political allies who seized the initiative from the Democratic governor and met at the home of Hallie and Alton Tybout, relatives of the former Emily Tybout, widow of H.B. DuPont, to discuss the issue and plan a public meeting the following night which launched their own “citizens committee.” It would only be a matter of time, however, before this committee would no longer be able to hold at bay such groups as the Concerned Faculty for a Free Press, which had also endorsed Governor Tribbitt’s proposal. Statements of gratitude for their concern would not be enough. An alternative would have to be introduced, and fast. 

Charges such as columnist Norm Lockman’s that Dawson might be insensitive to the professional responsibility of newsmen to report the news and the stain on their careers if they do not and other reporters subsequently do, underlined the need for an immediate change in image if not in substance. 

This became even more urgent when the Philadelphia Bulletin pursued Tribbett’s question of a guiding committee of community leaders that would likely “take the form of a press council.” Clearly, something new was needed on the scene. But while a State News might allow itself to be scrutinized by the Delaware News Council, as in the case of the serialization of Behind the Nylon Curtain, the DuPonts would have none of that for their News-Journal. In fact, they ignored the Delaware News Council altogether, as did their critics, even though the charges against the DuPonts about accuracy and fairness in news reporting were much more serious than in the State News’s case. 

The grand solution came, as it often does in modern DuPont history, from New York, and its name was Norman Isaacs. A colleague of Edward Barrett’s at the Columbia School of Journalism, Isaacs had once been courted by Charles Reese, a member of the News-Journal board, to come to Wilmington as executive editor more than a decade earlier. And for good reason. Isaacs was not only an editor but also travelled in the right circles among experts in what was blatantly called during the Fifties “cold war propaganda” and “psychological warfare.” Isaacs was well acquainted with the Radio Free Europe crowd. In 1959, he had served on the State Department’s “public affairs mission” to Yugoslavia (whose feud with Stalin had long inspired futile solicitation by British and American intelligence agencies) and also served on a task force on “Government and the Press” for the 20th Century Fund, a liberal think-tank directed by, among others, Adolf Berle. A key figure in intelligence circles, Berle had set up the intelligence division in the State Department during the Roosevelt Administration and after the war helped Allen Dulles and others set up Radio Free Europe and a host of other CIA propaganda operations focused on Eastern Europe and Latin America. Isaacs, like Berle, was both a liberal and a cold warrior, a political hybrid that flourished in the hothouse of the McCarthy era (Berle, in fact, was chairman of the Liberal Party), often shamelessly trying to prove its loyalty by out-Righting the Right in domestic politics while criticizing it for over-reliance on repressive dictatorships, military solutions and a lack of sophistication in foreign affairs. Eastern Europe, one of Berle’s great concerns, became also Isaac’s focus, and Radio Free Europe brought many a liberal together with ultra-conservatives they might otherwise have shunned. 

This strange alliance included the DuPonts. At the time Reece was trying to recruit Isaacs for the Wilmington papers, DuPont’s chairman, Crawford Greenewalt, was also chairman of the Free Europe Committee, Allen Dulles’s organization of corporate sponsors for Radio Free Europe. 136 Collaborating with Dulles and Greenewalt was Harlan Wendell of DuPont’s Public Relations Department. Nor was Isaacs a lone editor among these charmed circles; other liberals included Peter Grenquist, the secretary of the Columbia University-sponsored think tank, the American Assembly, who went on to become acting secretary of the President’s Commission on National Goals where, at White House conferences, he “served coffee” to Crawford Greenewalt and Harold G. Brown of DuPont’s Public Relations Department; joining him there was also Dave Amerman of Prentice-Hall, publisher for the Assembly and the Commission. Prentice-Hall was also the secret incorporator in Delaware of the CIA’s Pacific Corporation, parent of Air America. Editors and publishers, the record shows, had a big hand in the intelligence operations of the Fifties and Sixties, and probably still do. 

Isaacs, obviously, was no lightweight when it came to managing the news. The NewsJournal “board has delegated to me complete power,” he announced on his arrival in Wilmington, and he vowed there would be “no more public fights between the news staff and the board of directors.… I’ve been delegated to operate the newspapers and if there are to be quarrels, they will be with me.” 137 This took the heat off the DuPonts and put the spotlight on a hired troubleshooter. Isaacs was accordingly named publisher, president and member of the board of directors of the News-Journal, while Dick Sanger was demoted to the hotseat of executive editor where he would have to put his friendly relations with the staff to a direct daily test. 

The News-Journal, of course, hailed the change. The New York Times carried the announcement of Isaacs’s appointment on the same day and same page that carried also its article revealing DuPont’s interference with Behind the Nylon Curtain, quoting the charge of Prentice-Hall’s lawyer, William Daly, that Book-of-the-Month Club had “knuckled under” to DuPont. 138 For Isaacs, however, there was only praise. He appeared the ideal choice, as associate dean of a school whose own magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, had once run an article by a writer who called the News-Journal “no more than house organs of the DuPonts.” 

The Times also quoted Craig’s statement to the newsroom that Isaacs’s appointment was “as welcome as it was dramatic.” Impressed by Isaacs’s Columbia credentials, Craig said, “I cannot conceive of these papers being edited under his leadership, except in the most professional manner.” 139 

The manner was immediately evident. Isaacs consolidated his position with respect to the staff by naming Shaun Muller assignments editor, encouraging the young reporter to withdraw his resignation. To replace John Baker as metropolitan editor he named a 31-year-old native Wilmington resident, John Taylor, Jr., who had been with the News-Journal for eight years. Isaacs also quickly met with the “Public Committee on the News-Journal Controversy” and assured them he would report to the board only on “significant matters of business.” 140 Any newspaper, he explained, is “a quasi public institution … a public utility in private hands.” He suggested the group create a press council independent of newspapers and politicians to monitor regional news; the committee included former New Castle County Council President C. Douglas Buck, Jr., a DuPont family member; a former special assistant to Governor Russell Peterson; Ernest S. Wilson, Jr., an attorney associated with the DuPonts in the Northern Delaware Industrial Development Corporation; DuPont family attorney L. Coleman Dorsey; the wife of future Republican Congressman Thomas Evans; a DuPont marketing executive; and Rosamond DuPont. The Committee members announced they were satisfied. 

Isaacs, meanwhile, had told the Times he considered himself “a tough editor who will tolerate no outside interference.” 141 

None was needed. According to Mullen, who subsequently left Wilmington and joined the Philadelphia Inquirer, the News-Journal coverage of the Du Pont company and family “tapered off to a trickle” 142 after Isaacs was named publisher. This did not mean “investigative” journalism was cut out entirely; Isaacs seems to have agreed with Dawson’s urging that “the sooner we can get some good investigative stories in the papers the better” in order to restore the paper’s credibility. 143 Under a two-year contract with Christiana Securities, Isaacs’s responsibilities included reviewing controversial articles. Soon it became apparent who was the target of a “restored” investigative journalism in the News-Journal: Melvin Slawik. 

6. THE TRIALS OF MEL SLAWIK 

When the News-Journal controversy first erupted, New Castle County Executive Slawik had been one of the first to express his concern for the integrity of the newspaper, even though it had made him, as Christopher Perry acknowledged, “a frequent target of News-Journal probes and articles.” 144 Perry himself had run a slanted cover article against Slawik in his August, 1974, issue of Delaware Today in which some 106 negative comments overwhelmed 30 positive statements, and most of these were concentrated in the beginning and at the end to lend the article some credence to the unsophisticated reader. Until then, it was the News-Journal which had led the onslaught against Slawik reputation. “I have never hated anyone in my life,” Slawik was quoted by Delaware Today. “But I hate the Journal now. I suppose if you can learn to live in a concentration camp, you can learn to live with the Journal.” 

After the Delaware Today article, however, the News-Journal’s editors began to back off, and concentrated on other, more powerful targets, including the family which would ultimately fire them. Coverage of Slawik’s efforts to pursue his plans to tax industrial and commercial fixtures took on a more balanced tone in the area’s press as an ex-News-Journal reporter, Bob Frump, now working for the Philadelphia Bulletin, quoted Slawik’s concern that “we don’t want to drive anyone out of business with the changes. We don’t want to hurt anyone too badly,” but added his comment that “Taxes would be kept low with the new assessments, though, and that’s a good thought.” 145 

The Frump article was a rarity in that it analyzed Slawik’s planned fixtures tax with thoroughness and fairness, pointing out that “The plan could … dramatically lower property taxes paid by homeowners by shifting a heavier load of the tax burden to business and industry.” 146 It also recorded DuPont’s opposition and its drafting of legislation in conjunction with Irénée DuPont’s State Chamber of Commerce to attempt to set aside the state constitution with a piece of legislation. 

That was on November 17, 1974. Five days later, the News-Journal entered its crisis when Craig’s editorial team met with Christiana Securities’ agent, DuPont retired vice president David Dawson. On December 7, the Evening Journal’s Dover Bureau ran an article that confirmed that Delaware’s tax and workman’s compensation rates for corporations were the lowest of the Eastern industrial states studied by Ernst and Ernst accounting firm for the New Jersey Manufacturer’s Association. 147 If the article was a surprise to Delawareans and a delight to the Slawik Administration for its exposure of facts that supported Slawik’s plans, it was also short lived. Before another week had passed, Craig’s editors were fighting for their jobs and their integrity. Mel Slawik,however, did not know his stakes would be even higher: his freedom. 

When the News-Journal dispute hit the headlines, Slawik had reason to sit it out as a bystander happily wishing plagues on both houses. Instead, he spoke for the integrity of the newspaper. He was also wise enough to realize that no matter how much he disliked the way Craig had treated him, whatever the DuPonts put in Craig’s place would probably be worse. 

It was. Within a little over a year Mel Slawik, surrounded by News-Journal headlines screaming about corruption, would be sentenced to a year in prison for a crime of which he was never convicted. 

Slawik’s downfall was planned in the offices of Senator William Roth’s handpicked U.S. Attorney, Richard Keil. The U.S. Attorney’s office had spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of FBI agents’ time in an exhaustive investigation of Slawik’s life. In the summer of 1974, Keil finally found a weak spot, a loose thread that could unravel the fabric of Slawik’s whole career. What was so surprising was that it took the U.S. Attorney’s office so long, for that same human thread had already tripped Slawik once and was well known as a problem for Slawik: Bayard Austin. In fact, Austin was such a disreputable and obvious weapon that his lack of credibility may account for why Delaware’s federal prosecutors probably hesitated to use him; that they eventually did may also be a measure of their desperation. But it worked. 

That summer, Slawik received a strange phone call. It was from his erstwhile friend, Bayard Austin, calling from his new home in Florida where he had gone to live after making such a mess of his life—and Mel Slawick’s reputation—in Delaware. Austin was frantic. FBI agents had been swooping around, he said, and he had been subpoenaed to present himself before a federal grand jury in Delaware. They were apparently investigating him as part of a general sweep of friends of Slawik and Capano, the contractor for the Taylortowne housing project. Austin didn’t want to go. He was scared by their claims that he was being made a “fall guy” and he might say something foolish, maybe anything to get them off his back. Mel had to come down and give him some advice, he pleaded. 

Slawik was immediately apprehensive. “Bardie” Austin had already betrayed his trust. He had worked for Slawik in previous campaigns and Slawik had given him a job at Geriatric Services. Then came the 1972 race, uphill all the way, and campaign workers were not easy to come by. “Bardie worked hard for me doing odd jobs when I was running for County Executive,” Slawik told Detroit radio host Lou Gordon in 1976, “but after I was elected Bardie evidently got carried away and did nothing but cause trouble for me. He drank too much, talked and lied too much, and was always getting in trouble and getting his name in the paper—and they always mentioned his connection with me. One incident involved his crashing into a County Police car while he was drunk; he proceeded to tell the Police Chief that he was a friend of mine and he’d have him fired. Finally I couldn’t take any more so I had a job in Florida arranged for him by a friend, and Bardie and his family moved to Florida.” 148 

Yet all that only underscored the fact that Austin was irresponsible to his friends and was capable of lying to them or about them. And Slawik was convinced Austin was now genuinely upset. Austin just might say anything he thought some overeager FBI agents might want him to say, especially if they could compromise him through possible legal problems, such as taxes. Slawik was unaware of how far the FBI might go to entrap its prey; that would take the power of a Special Investigating Committee of the U.S. Senate to reveal, and that would not happen until 1976. 

But Slawik did know that FBI agents had already spun some tales to alarm Austin. “He was typical of the kind the government manages to come up with,” Slawik recalled to Lou Gordon, not attempting to hide his bitterness, “completely unstable, heavy drinker, and easily brainwashed. They told him I planned to make him the ‘fall guy’ for all my crimes—whatever they were.” 149 What was being insinuated was corruption of office, involving Slawik’s relation to Capano’s construction of the Taylortowne housing project. 

Slawik decided to fly down to Florida. It was precisely because he didn’t trust Austin’s judgment that he brought along a friend as a witness as well as Capano to answer any questions Austin might have. They met at a hotel and the men carried out a rambling conversation reassuring Austin there was never any intention to set him up, that nothing illegal had been done, that Capano had never received any favors or kickbacks, and advising Austin to tell the Grand Jury the truth and that he had the right to invoke the Fifth Amendment if he was genuinely scared about something. Slawik believed that if Austin did decide to immunize himself Austin might feel freer to then speak the truth. The County Executive also warned Austin not to lie about anyone. 

Slawik was apparently not suspicious that Austin dragged the conversation on for five hours, but he should have been. Austin had allowed the FBI to hide a tape recorder on his body. In fact, his phone call to Slawik had been bugged also and was actually an FBI ruse to draw Slawik into meeting with Austin in Florida in order to later charge him with “interstate racketeering.” 

A judge later threw that charge out of court. The fact that the tape showed that not one word had been uttered by Slawik about any illegal activity or corruption throughout the five hours of conversation must have caused some consternation among the FBI agents, if merely because of the quandary it put the U.S. Attorney’s office in to justify the enormous expenses it was building up (they would ultimately reach an alleged $2 million). Slawik, meanwhile, returned to Delaware convinced that the issue was resolved, although U.S. Attorney Keil’s earlier statement that he was “going to get Slawik” still gave him some cause for concern. 

Slawik resumed his battle to enforce the state constitution’s provision for a tax on industrial and commercial fixtures. Lawyers for DuPont, Getty, Delmarva Power and Light, Diamond State Telephone, and Irénée DuPont’s State Chamber of Commerce had been unable to pressure him to back down and had decided to mount a massive lobbying campaign to push a bill through the legislature in June that not only excluded manufacturing machinery and equipment from property subject to county taxation, but also some items already taxed. 150 

The News-Journal all but ignored the scandal of this attempt to lay aside the constitution by simple statute, and Bill 416, sponsored by Greenville’s John McKay and Elsemere’s Robert Byrd, passed the legislature and was signed into law by Governor Tribbitt on July 8. Bill 416 became 60 Laws of Delaware Chapter 194. 

There was only one problem, which apparently Irénée DuPont and others at the Chamber of Commerce hoped no one would notice: the law violated the state constitution and a decision by Delaware’s Supreme Court affirming the taxability of industrial fixtures. 

Mel Slawik, of course, noticed the contradiction and he quickly had his county prosecutor, Thomas Luce, prepare a legal suit to test the law before the Superior Court. He intended to seek a declaratory judgment against the Chamber of Commerce’s leading promoters of the bill: Du Pont, Getty, Delmarva Power and Light, General Motors, Chrysler, and the Northern Delaware Industrial Corporation. 

Slawik soon found himself fighting a two-front war. News-Journal publisher Norman Isaacs, in the course of reviewing “controversial articles” before they went to press, had been approving stories that alleged corruption in the office of the New Castle County Executive. The headlines were sensationalist enough not only to sell newspapers but also severely damage the reputation of Mel Slawik. As the County Executive would soon learn, it could also prejudice any jury from the community, disclaimers notwithstanding. 

So it happened that in the midst of this News-Journal campaign for honesty, law and order, Slawik was suddenly subpoenaed and hauled before a federal grand jury of solid well-heeled citizens investigating “corruption.” For over five hours, Slawik was subjected to an interrogation by the U.S. Attorney’s prosecutors. The questions were often vague. Did he, for example, advise Austin to tell the truth to these grand jurors? Yes, he had, answered Slawik. The prosecutor did not ask Slawik, however, if he had ever advised Austin on the Fifth Amendment. Nor did he ask Slawik if he had requested Austin to take the Fifth. Nor did he tell Slawik that his conversation with Austin had been taped or even inform the grand jury of the secret recordings. 

Instead, the federal prosecutor simply left this grand jury and went to a second one that had been convened. There, in a scene reminiscent of a medieval Star Chamber, he revealed the existence of the tapes and argued that Slawik, in counselling Austin on the Fifth, had been attempting to obstruct justice and had lied to the first grand jury when he testified that he had told Austin to cooperate and tell the truth. Without ever questioning Slawik or giving him any opportunity to confront his accuser or explain his purpose in counselling Austin on the Fifth Amendment, the second grand jury handed the prosecutor the indictment he sought: 13 counts of obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and perjury. Three years of FBI investigations into charges of corruption headlined by the News-Journal had been unable to prove one instance of corruption involving Slawik. Yet the New Castle County Executive was now faced with the prospect of a ruined reputation and being jailed for years. 

The News-Journal trumpeted its war against corruption. No investigation, however, was ever launched into the activities of Irénée DuPont or other members of the Chamber of Commerce then wantonly conspiring to break the highest law in the state, the constitution. Despite the pressure of an impending trial and lack of media support, Slawik pressed his case against the DuPonts anyway, bringing a civil action against the six aforementioned sterling members of the State Chamber of Commerce. Of the six, three had DuPonts on their boards of directors: Irénée DuPont, Jr., chairman of the Chamber, was a director of two, DuPont and Delmarva Power and Light. The other, Northern Delaware Industrial Development Corporation, was billed as a “non profit” corporation and had among its directors Bernard Isaacson, a director, like Irénée, of Wilmington Trust and Irving Shapiro’s closest friend, and William H. Frederick, son-in-law of Crawford Greenewalt and nephew by marriage of Irénée. Getty, General Motors and Chrysler were all companies in which DuPont family members or their mutual funds owned large blocks of stock. 

From the list of directors, however, one name stood out for its frequency: Irénée DuPont, Jr. Mel Slawik may not have realized it, but he was taking on probably the most powerful DuPont of all. 

November 10, 1975, is a significant date in Delaware’s history, for on that day there appeared some manifestation of the furies descending upon the second most powerful elected official in Delaware. County prosecutor Luce announced the filing of the Slawik Administration’s suit against the State Chamber of Commerce’s leading industries. And Pierre S. DuPont IV, Delaware’s sole Congressman, announced that the Labor Department of Republican Administration of President Gerald Ford and Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller would begin an investigation the following Monday into alleged “problems” at the Delaware labor department’s unemployment office. Democratic Governor Tribbitt, the most powerful elected official in Delaware, suggested that the federal probe was politically motivated, a reference to Congressman DuPont’s gubernatorial ambitions. The two biggest obstacles between Pete du Pont and the governor’s mansion, both Democrats, were now tainted by federal investigations. 

Norman Isaacs ran these stories together in the News-Journal, but continued parading the corruption issue around Slawik’s name. When Slawik raised questions in 1975 about Greenville’s zoning practices effectively restricting public low-income housing, the paper headlined that Slawik was charging Greenville with being unfair to Mario Capano, the Taylortowne developer indicted along with Slawik. The County Executive confronted Isaacs directly, pointing out that he had never mentioned Capano. Isaacs simply replied that the headline conveyed what the News-Journal believed Slawik actually meant. 151 There was no retraction. 

But there was room for Delawareans to enjoy another folksy portrait of Irénée du Pont on November 30 by John Gates. “I was down in the basement trying to fix the oil burner,” Irénée was quoted. “My wife started hollering. I knew the oil burner hadn’t exploded. I was standing right there.” Irénée’s wife, it seems, had been startled by a pair of balloons drifting over the Granogue estate at about treetop height and one had settled in Granogue’s long winding driveway. “We got in the VW,” Irénée chuckled, “and drove down to see what was going on.” Finding the balloon already tethered to a ground support car that had come onto the estates grounds, Irénée was offered a ride. He couldn’t resist. But he was no man’s fool. Instead, he sent his daughter up first, “to test the thing perhaps,” offered Gates, “and when they emerged safe and sound, Irénée ventured up himself.” Delighted by the adventure, Irénée blossomed into rare magnanimity and invited everyone into the mansion for coffee, toast and juice. “We were out of eggs and bacon by then,” the heir remarked. 152 

Slawik, meanwhile, was running out of time. The fixtures tax was still tied up in court by Irénée’s lawyers, and as Christmas approached, New Castle County’s poorest families, deprived of some assistance by DuPont’s decision in 1974 to sever its donations to the Urban Coalition, 153 paid a property tax that was 12.4 times as great a percentage of family income as that paid by the county’s richest families, including the DuPonts. 154 

At the end of February, 1976, Mel Slawik surrendered himself into the hands of the federal court for trial on the perjury charges. For two weeks, the News-Journal ran daily stories on Slawik and the prosecution’s charges of corruption. The judge was James L. Latchum, formerly of the Potter, Anderson, Carroon law firm of William S. Potter, the DuPont in-law whose domination of the New Castle Democratic Party Slawik had dared to challenge. Latchum, himself, had had his conflict with the County Executive, Slawik having been instrumental in defeating Latchum’s bid for the lieutenant governorship. 

Latchum did not step down, as the state’s conflict-of-interest laws might have suggested. Instead, he proceeded to allow anything into testimony that made Slawik look bad, including unrelated allegations of corruption for which Slawik had never been indicted. Keil was not on hand, however, having stepped down from office during allegations about his part in a possible obstruction of justice; he was not indicted like Slawik. His replacement as U.S. Attorney was the former state attorney general under Governor Russell Peterson, W. Laird Stabler, a DuPont in-law. Stabler, in fact, was brother-in-law to Nancy Kitchell, wife of Daniel C. Lickle, the real estate promoter whose proposed shopping center had been rejected by the County Council at the same meeting Capano’s Taylortowne was endorsed. Stabler, therefore, had a potential conflict-of-interest, but he sat in on the trial conducted by his assistant and later participated in Slawik’s ill-fated plea bargaining. 

On March 9, 1976, the jury found Slawik guilty of three counts of perjury. Three days later, Governor Tribbitt removed Slawik from public office. On April 21, Latchum imposed a needlessly harsh sentence: four years in prison, more time as a first offender than most of the Watergate criminals received. Slawik’s only break was that the sentences were to run concurrently. 

The impossible had happened, and Slawik was warned he could expect little different in his coming trial for obstruction of justice under Judge Murray Schwartz. He was broke, with no job and little means to continue to fight for his exoneration. Predictably, his lawyer then suggested the second trial be “negotiated” out of court. Slawik considered the trauma a second trial would place on his wife and three children and thought it over. Laird’s office, sensing what Slawik’s lawyer did not, actually initiated the plea bargaining negotiations, however, and on June 11 Slawik agreed to enter a technical plea of guilty (but with no admission of guilt) to one count of obstruction in exchange for the dismissal of the remaining counts, the dropping of the charges against his friends, and a maximum sentence of one year and a day to run concurrently with the four-year sentence and not to commence until his appeals on that sentence were concluded. 

“I don’t feel that I am guilty of any federal violation,” Slawik said to District Judge Stapleton, “but at the same time I’ve just gone through a long trial for perjury, and I wasn’t guilty of that either, I really wasn’t. But I got convicted anyway. My lawyer advises me that I have a substantial risk of, you know, being convicted on this one. And facing, you know, another trial, the time and so on, the long investigation, frankly, I just surrender, Your Honor. You know, I just want to get it over with.… Again, I feel in my heart and my mind that I’m not guilty of these charges.” 155 

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Slawik on January 3, 1977, and reversed the perjury convictions. The court held that all three perjury counts of the indictments should have been dismissed; the case should never have gone to trial. The court specifically cited the U.S. Attorney’s vague and ambiguous questioning of Slawik before the grand jury “which would trap an unwary, assenting witness ‘in perjury.’” 156 Slawik petitioned to withdraw his plea bargain and requested a trial. But there still would be no justice for Slawik in Delaware. Judge Stapleton held that the technicalities of the law and Slawik’s “voluntary” and sane decision required that the bargained guilty plea on the obstruction count must remain. Mel Slawik was sent to Allenwood Federal Prison. 

By then, the political reform movement in New Castle County that Slawik had led was disheartened and shaken by the power of a single family and all but collapsed. County attorney Joseph Bernstein did continue to press the county’s suit for a declaratory judgment that 60 Delaware Laws Chapter 194 was unconstitutional. In November, 1976, he succeeded in getting a motion for dismissal made in May by Du Pont and the other companies denied by the Superior Court. Getty, significantly, was represented by the law firm which bears the family name of the wife of Senator William Roth, Richards, Layton and Finger. 

The movement’s political momentum, however, had already been stopped by the 1976 elections. Those elections painfully demonstrated how Delaware, under Du Pont domination, had become such a queer political phenomenon. In most other states, the Republicans were hurt by Watergate; but in Delaware, in a bizarre reversal orchestrated by the Du Ponts, it was the Democrats who suffered. What Mel Slawik had lost because of the atmosphere against corruption generated by Watergate, Pete du Pont gained. Running on a campaign that made much of his voluntary ceiling on campaign donations and even more of contributions to Governor Tribbitt’s race by high-level state employees, du Pont was swept into the governor’s mansion under a slogan that seemed a deliberate answer to the Delaware State News’s “no leader” charge during his 1974 congressional campaign: “PETE DuPont, Leadership … for a change.” Even one of Slawik’s last supporters, Ted Keller of the Citizens’ Coalition for Tax Reform, was lured from his previous endorsement of Tribbitt by the governor’s refusal to tax Getty’s fixtures and by Pete’s implied promise that he would. “I’d look for an increase in business income taxes first, if an increase is needed,” DuPont wrote to Keller, specifically citing Getty. “Perhaps surprisingly, Delaware’s business taxes are among the lightest in this region and our personal income tax is the highest.” 157 Keller was so beguiled by Pete’s charm and his anger at Tribbitt that he released Pete’s letter along with his own letter effectively endorsing DuPont to the press shortly before the election. 158 It was a move Keller would later regret. 

A Republican, Mary Jornlin, replaced Mel Slawik’s administration in New Castle County that year. After securing her control over county agencies, the new County Executive soon hoisted her true colors up the flagpole in front of the County building. In January, 1978, Assistant County Attorney Catherine Mulholland raised the unconstitutional nature of 60 Delaware Laws to her superior, County Attorney Joseph Farnan, Jr. “The statute clearly conflicted with the State Constitution; the problem then became how to proceed. Should the County tax fixtures, it would violate the statute; if it did not, it would continue to violate the Constitution.” In reviewing the county’s suit, she noted that “we are getting nowhere. Even if the Supreme Court finds in our favor, we merely go back to the Superior Court and begin at the beginning. We have already missed at least two tax years … due to the passage of time and the defendants’ real interest in prolonging this suit as long as possible. I would suggest the County ‘gear up’ the assessment division, tax fixtures (in violation of the statute) and defend our tax thereafter based on the Constitution.” 159 Her suggestion was rebuffed. Instead, in May, Farnan, acting for the Jornlin administration, withdrew the county’s suit. Mary Jornlin subsequently married Vincent Theisen, an associate of the DuPonts and treasurer of Hotel Rodney, and accepted a seat on the board of the DuPont family holding bank, Wilmington Trust Company, where she now reigns in sublime bliss. 

The DuPonts’ smashing victory over Slawik and the state constitution did not mean, however, that compromises were no longer needed in the post-Slawik era. They would be, at least until the Christiana Securities merger in DuPont was finalized. The bill to cut the state’s capital gains tax by 50 percent, for example, had to wait until the closing minutes of the 12th General Assembly before it was finally pushed through in July, 1976, by Irénée’s State Chamber of Commerce, justified as a means of luring the wealthy to take up residence in Delaware. Although the law ended up costing the state some $10 million a year, it was championed by the Chamber’s lobbyist, Bruce Ralston, as a cost effective attempt to stop a $3 to $5 million a year tax drain caused by “economic exiles who are forced into exile by these confiscatory rates. They won’t stand for it because they don’t have to.” 160 

There was more than a touch of arrogance in that remark, and Democrat Representative John Ferguson resented the bill as a handout to the rich. “It’s about time we did something for the little man,” 161 he said. But Pete’s uncle, former senator Reynolds DuPont, would have none of that. “There are all kinds of reasons for going to Florida,” he warned. The capital gains tax “makes it a little bit expensive to live here.” 162 Reynolds, of course, was a multimillionaire. 

By April, 1977, some legislators, seeing the cut as responsible for 25 percent of the state’s projected deficit of $40 million, began to have second thoughts. At the same time, the Citizens Coalition for Tax Reform, involved in the effort to restore the capital gains tax to its original status, also wrote Governor DuPont asking if he had taken any steps to request an IRS audit of Getty Oil International’s books. The FEA, Coalition chairman Ted Keller noted, had three weeks before included Getty in a group of 20 companies that had been accused of overcharging subsidiaries for crude oil. 163

Asking the IRS in (it had earlier expressed a willingness to assess Getty’s refinery in Delaware) was the last thing that Governor DuPont’s corporate backers wanted. There were big plans for Delaware, and taxing business was not one of them. Financial power on an international level was. So was political power on a national level. There was no point in reviving any populist threats to those plans when so much time had already been lost crushing them. The DuPont homeland was just settling back into its dull routine of acquiescence to powerlessness and apathy. The feisty Delaware State News had been brought to heel. The Wilmington News-Journal revolt had been smashed. An embarrassing exposé biography on the family had “disappeared” because, as Irénée DuPont put it, it simply was “a bad book.” Pete DuPont’s New Castle County Republicans had thrown the downstate Democrats out of the governor’s mansion. And populist Mel Slawik, the troublesome County Executive who had raised the greatest threat to the clan’s power in its 170-year history, was now locked up in a federal prison, smeared with disgrace. 

Humbled and chagrined, the county government could be counted again as one of the fold. The family’s control over the county’s public libraries, its private Wilmington Free Library Institute, for example, was reaffirmed, despite the scandals of the embezzlement of $80,000 in mostly county funds by its director, Dr. Jack Bryant, and a law suit brought by an employee, Patricia Trivits. Trivits claimed she had been fired in 1972 because she “knew too much” and had resisted bookkeeping changes that discontinued keeping certain financial records on book purchases and invoices. When the American Librarians Association Journal charged the Institute with violations of due process, citing its failure to give her prior notice, probation status, or a fair hearing, Institute president Edward DuPont answered with a letter claiming Trivits had been fired for being insubordinate and incompetent. Trivits sued for defamation, only to see her case thrown out of court in 1976 by the ever-reliable Judge James Latchum, presider of the Slawik trial of the same year. 

Edward, meanwhile, reaffirmed his ideological belief in the special qualities that wealthy private citizens and their private corporations bring to public institutions when they and only they decide, for example, how to spend the 90 percent of the Wilmington Free Library’s budget provided by the county’s taxpayers. In the midst of mounting criticism, Edward remained serene. “I still have the fundamental feeling,” he decreed, “that the private sector can run things better than the public sector.” 164 

Nor was this opinion shaken when the Newark and Greater Wilmington Leagues of Women Voters protested that county residents were not given equal access to library service and wrote letters to the Institute urging it to open its meetings. Edward’s response was again regal. He simply ignored them. Until, that is, the Leagues in March 1976 released a report charging his Institute with an “independent, insular attitude” while taking county money, and urged more county government and citizen representation on its board as voting members. Edward then merely opened the Institute’s meetings, leaving the board’s original voting membership intact and the Leagues with a hollow victory. 165 

7. A CAPTAIN’S ODYSSEY 

A similar “containment” strategy had been employed with problems surrounding Du Pont Company, such as charges that toxic chemicals were causing cancer among Delaware, New Jersey and West Virginian workers and that freon gases were destroying the earth’s ozone layer. 166 Those issues would ultimately have to be dealt with on a national level. For the immediate, however, the main line on the 9th floor of DuPont headquarters was one of non-controversy; a quiescent image of a willing listener to social concerns was what was needed to steer DuPont through uncharted legal seas to its safe berth with Christiana Securities. 

The captain, of course, was Irving Shapiro. Never before had DuPont been placed in abler hands when it came to politics. Shapiro had proven his loyalty to the family for over two decades, ever since he had taken the antitrust expertise he had learned at public expense in the Justice Department and defected to the DuPonts to help them battle Justice’s efforts to force them to give up their monopoly over some of General Motors’ purchasing accounts. It was this obsequious deferral to all things DuPont, even more than his growing knowledge of how to manipulate the law in the interest of high finance, that led to Shapiro’s sudden rise in the firm as the family’s consigliere. He guarded their interests when Nader’s investigators came around in 1970, sitting in on all their official interviews with DuPont employees. He was the first to notify the company in June, 1974, of Behind the Nylon Curtain’s imminent publication. 167 He deferred to their demands for the removal of the News-Journal editors and did not intervene. And in the Christiana merger negotiations he gave them the sweetest of sweetheart contracts. 

“The deal is a windfall for the DuPont family,” said DuPont shareholder Lewis Murtaugh, “and bad news for ordinary shareholders in E.I. DuPont de Nemours.” 168 The deal called for an exchange of 1.123 shares of DuPont for every one share of Christiana. This saved the DuPonts enormous capital gains taxes they would have had to pay if Christiana had liquidated and turned its DuPont stock over to its shareholders. It also allowed the family to escape paying double taxes on its Christiana dividends as well as its DuPont stock; now only DuPont dividends would be taxed, while the family could retain its direct 23 percent control. Furthermore, Christiana stock was discounted at a mere 2.5 percent of the price of the DuPont stock it owned, instead of the 10 to 20 percent discount Christiana stock had traditionally sold at. The profit for DuPont was a mere $55 million, far less than the amount Christiana would have been forced to pay if it had sold its shares on the market. 

Shapiro remained unperturbed by the loss. He insisted that the lower profit was “the kind of money I like to see.” 169 It was also the kind of money the DuPonts wanted to pay, although no DuPont would admit it to the press, anxious to protect DuPont Company officials from charges of collusion and conflict of interest. Edward DuPont, for example, who helped Irénée negotiate for Christiana, claimed he had yielded to ultimatum. C.B. McCoy, who represented the company as chairman, said he had driven a hard bargain; he did not mention having any conflict-of-interest as a DuPont in-law. Shapiro projected less bluster than McCoy. If he had tried to drive a harder bargain, he claimed, the deal would have slipped off the hook, as if it was he, not the DuPonts, who had landed the prize catch. He did hook his own reward, however, even if the shareholders he was supposed to be legally representing did not. With unprecedented rapidity in a company normally known for its long executive climbs, he rose in four short years from assistant general counsel to senior vice-president, then chairman. 

Shapiro had to pay a price for this in human companionship. After his appointment as chairman, he noticed that lunch conversations with old friends became more cautious. His weekly poker games, which he had enjoyed for 20 years as an escape from office tensions, were suddenly transformed into an extension of that strain. “I knew I had become a restraint on everyone else,” he later recalled, “so one day I invented a fiction and I dropped out.” 170 He attributed the breakdown in friendships that attend fears for promotion in the corporate hierarchy as “human nature.” “I’ve probably built some walls around myself,” he conceded. “But I simply must be in a position to make a decision based on merits. You don’t want to be trapped and unable to move because the person involved is a friend.” 171 

What exactly “merit” was, however, seemed to be dictated by DuPont’s profit concerns, and his subordinates, accepting this standard in their own lives as well, understood that their old friend was no longer playing the role of DuPont Personified just in the courtroom, but now in daily life. “One of the trade-offs in a job like mine is that you have a lot of acquaintances but not a lot of friends,” he told John Taylor of Delaware Today. “Anybody in a job like this lives in splendid isolation. It’s a little lonely at the top.” 172 

He compensated by immersing himself even deeper in DuPont’s tasks. “He’s a workaholic,” complained his wife, Charlotte, a shy, quiet trim woman who admitted her own conformity to the traditional conservative image of the corporate wife. “My main consideration is him. I feel I’m a part of what he’s doing and I want to make it as easy as I can. I’m not a woman’s libber as you can see.” 173 Charlotte did not really share much of her husband’s doings, however. As a young lawyer he was often gone for weeks at a time. “It was tough on the little children,” she recalled, and Irving himself calls that time “one of the most painful experiences of my life. My family has paid a price for the fact that I’ve been occupied on a full-time basis with these kind of responsibilities.” 174 Even as chairman, when things were supposed to be easier, Irving would come home and spend his evenings in the den, poring over reports, while Charlotte would quietly sit next to him, reading novels. 

Diversions for the couple were rare: an occasional party with friends, a quiet dinner, a baseball game played by the DuPont family-owned Philadelphia Phillies. They hadn’t seen a movie in years. 

It is a portrait of a man who was probably always a workaholic, racing to outpace the ghost of early poverty and fulfill the dream of a father who always wanted his son to be a lawyer rather than heir to a small dry cleaning business. “I dreaded it,” he said of his childhood years at his father’s shop. “You took the dirty clothes and had to mark each garment with a number. I found it very distasteful to handle other people’s dirt. I ducked out as soon as I could.” 175 His father was happy for him. “I think my father always had a sense of frustration that he wasn’t involved in intellectual pursuits,” he said. “My going to law school was a great vicarious experience for him. When I was admitted to the bar, he visualized it as his being admitted to the bar.” 176 It was the first step in Shapiro’s long odyssey in search of recognition and acceptance. 

It was a quest marked by a shrewd adjustment of his arguments to fit the opinions and prejudices of more powerful men in order to lead them to his own conclusion. “One of the things I did,” he spoke of his time at the Supreme Court as a young attorney for the Justice Department, “was analyze how each of those justices functioned, what kind of approach each took, what kind of arguments appealed to him and how that showed up in the opinions he wrote.” 177 

He had his own mind, of course; he realized that otherwise his usefulness and value would be limited. But his method was the classic lawyer’s penchant for compromise and persuasion, rather than confrontation. 

It was not a style the elder DuPonts were used to in the early 1950’s, when an offer of an $11,000 salary brought Shapiro to the company to help the clan fight his former employer’s efforts to end their control over the nation’s largest corporation, General Motors. “When I came to DuPont, lawyers were treated like outsiders,” 178 he once remarked. And they were outsiders. No lawyer had ever occupied the chairman’s seat at Du Pont; rather, they were seen as hired guns, legal mouthpieces, and occasionally, advisors, but never as business or social peers. This was especially true for Jews, the DuPont family’s anti-Semitism being legendary. Shapiro decided to challenge that image by making himself indispensable, not only in the GM litigation, but throughout the vast corporate subculture that is called DuPont Company. He began attending sales and staff meetings to learn how the business operated and to convince the DuPonts that early consultation with him could save them many headaches later. Over a period of time, he became their consigliere against the government and ultimately won their acceptance into the company’s inner sanctum. But he was not invited to the family’s intimate social gatherings or their exclusive clubs. In the real world of power, Irving Shapiro remained a hireling, an outsider still knocking at the mansion door. 

He never showed resentment. Instead, he played the role of a wise Talleyrand before the DuPont throne: he was competent, intelligent, useful, everyone’s friend, a man one could confide in and be sure he would keep a tight lip. And a man who, in turn, seldom confided in anyone, a loner, even to some extent with Charlotte. His social discrimination only reinforced his sense of his Jewishness and he found some outlet for his frustration and fear of future holocausts in a political loyalty to Zionism’s concept of an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine, becoming a leader in B’nai B’rith, the United Jewish Appeal, and a founder of the Jerusalem Institute of Management. 

At DuPont, he emphasized the personal approach, the mark of a man who wanted to be liked, and was. This, combined with his expertise in government negotiations, was exactly the quality the DuPonts were looking for during the turbulent era of the Sixties and early Seventies, when companies like DuPont were being challenged to accept some of the responsibilities and not just the privileges and rights of legally recognized “citizenship.” Appointed assistant general counsel in 1965 during the last stages of the GM divestiture, he was nominated as a director, vice-president and executive committee member in 1970. “Shapiro has as high a level of admiration and acceptance by the departments as any man in the company,” Chairman Charles McCoy told the DuPonts. “It would be a popular choice which would give the organization added confidence in the flexibility of the present management and our merit system.” 179 

Three years later, when he was named chairman, his promotion was billed as the corporate essence of the American dream come true, an image embraced by not only Du Pont’s public relations office but also his own family. “When he told me he was going to be vice-president, I was so nervous, so shocked that I couldn’t believe it,” Charlotte said. “It just had never occurred to me that he might get an administrative post.” Their son, Stu, himself a corporate lawyer, agreed. “A Jew simply does not become chairman of the DuPont Company. In fact, a lawyer doesn’t become chairman of DuPont.” 180 

But it was precisely because he was a lawyer savvy in the ways of government and public relations that he had been selected. “I had been doing these things (more accountability and work in community affairs) in my other capacities within the company, and I had prior experience with government matters of public affairs,” Shapiro acknowledged, “so it wasn’t a great transition for me. I think the people who chose me for chairman had the perception that the world was changing and DuPont had better change if it was going to stay on top.” 181 

The “people” he was referring to were the DuPonts, represented by Irénée and other elders of Christiana Securities. Articles in the business section of the December 15, 1974, issue of the State News reflect just some of the problems confronting the DuPonts. One article titled “Merger Faces Major Obstacle” describes how the SEC approval for the tax-free merger would require additional approval by the IRS; it also recounts the court struggle of DuPont shareholder Lewis Murtaugh to block the merger on the grounds that Shapiro and McCoy’s deal with Irénée and Edward DuPont was a profits “windfall” for Christiana. Another article that same day pointed out how DuPont was one of eight companies convicted of price-fixing in selling dye and that scientists of the Environmental Protection Agency had testified that a DuPont product, freon, was destroying the thin layer of ozone gas in the earth’s atmosphere which keeps out some of the sun’s strongest and cancer-producing rays. 182 

8. A DIRTY WORD CALLED CANCER 

Cancer was a word Irving had been hired as chairman to disassociate from DuPont’s good name. Bad publicity for DuPont might easily mushroom into a major obstacle for the Christiana merger. Irving’s approach was twofold: 1) express concern and the need for more studies and thus show signs of being a responsible corporate citizen while delaying a government ban; 2) threaten the nation with massive unemployment if it insisted on protecting its health at cost to DuPont’s profit margins. 

The two tactics were employed simultaneously. Shapiro ran a series of full-page ads called “discussions by DuPont to offer a perspective,” that were classics of corporate propaganda. “You want the ozone question answered one way or the other,” one ad was headlined, “so does DuPont,” whereupon a list of “Assumptions” were answered by “Fact” and “Research” drafted by the company’s public affairs department. “Independent research,” much of it financed by the company, was cited along with a list of the prestigious names of the universities with which the researchers were affiliated to back up DuPont’s assertion that there was “no conclusive evidence” that fluorocarbons were a world health hazard. “Should the theory be proven correct after all the evidence is in, DuPont, as we have stated, will stop the manufacture and sale of the offending compounds. In the meantime, we believe that to act without the facts—whether it be to alarm consumers, or to enact restrictive legislation—is irresponsible. Final decisions cannot be made with only the information at hand.” 183 

Charges that it was DuPont that was being irresponsible were answered with threats. A DuPont spokesman testified in Washington that a production ban could mean a loss of $8 billion to the U.S. gross national product and a loss of jobs for a bulk of 200,000 workers in various companies throughout the country. 184

Before the public, however, Shapiro presented the image of responsibility. “We in industry can’t do everything we might like to do,” he told young businessmen at Junior Achievement’s National Business Leadership Conference in Chicago in January 1975. “We must make intelligent choices from among our alternatives, and we are going to have to crank in much more than bottom-line effects to those decisions. How such decisions affect people, communities, resources and the environment is a factor that grows bigger by the day—and the sensitivity of industry leadership must rise with it.” 185 Emphasizing people as investments by society and business who have a “replacement cost” of about $45,000 for high school graduates and $65,000 for college graduates, Shapiro championed “greater individuality and better utilization of human potential” before his youthful audience, stating “we have to recognize this increasingly by giving people not just pay but more say.” 186 

Shapiro’s speech was not just a call for sensitivity training for top corporate executives, however; it was also a challenge to them to “develop leaders to meet further government intervention with statesmanship and objectivity. It is time to end the historic confrontation between business and government.” Shapiro wanted corporate leaders to take the initiative of leading America away from “politicians” and government. “Surely business leadership can read public concerns and evaluate them as well as the politicians. We should increasingly seek to take affirmative actions on our own in areas of justified public concern—and not wait until we are forced to action by legislation and bureaucratic decree. If business leadership comes up with more positive proposals for sound reform on its own, we should have a stronger voice in our own future, limiting the possibility some see that our economic system might someday become ‘free’ and ‘enterprise’ in name only.” 187 

Shapiro’s speech proved to be his debut in national politics. It was also to prove to be the debut of a new aggressiveness by top corporate leaders that would ultimately culminate in “the Reagan Revolution” against environmental, safety and health regulations. 

It was a “Shapiro phenomenon” whispered only on the 9th floor of DuPont headquarters but one which went overlooked in the over-confidence of liberals after the fall of Richard Nixon. Dazzled by Nixon’s spectacular descent and the thunderous applause of self-congratulations, most reformers concentrated on the 1976 elections and paid scant attention to the design behind Irving Shapiro’s Chicago speech and the subterranean currents of corporate power that were being stirred by his words. It was not until the middle of the election year, when Shapiro was elected chairman of the powerful Business Roundtable by the country’s biggest industrialists, that labor and liberals began to see the danger. 

Nevertheless, there were harbingers of the future to see in 1975, including Shapiro’s failure to fully inform stockholders or DuPont workers about incidences of bladder cancer at DuPont plants. The issue was first raised in early 1974 by the National Cancer Institute’s report that Salem County, New Jersey, between 1950 and 1969 had the highest rate of bladder cancer for white males in the entire United States. In January, 1975, New York Times reporter Mary Churchill learned from DuPont that 330 employees at the Chambers Works, one of the world’s largest chemical plants and located in Salem County, had contracted bladder cancer since 1919. One of the products DuPont started making at Chambers that year was beta-nephthylamine (BNA), a chemical used in dye bases; within ten years, DuPont workers began getting bladder cancer, and the company started sending a long line of patients to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. In 1931, researchers identified links between cancer and BNA and benzidine, also produced at the Chambers Works. The DuPonts continued to authorize its production. By 1938 Switzerland, a leading chemicals producer, banned BNA. The DuPonts still authorized production. In 1949 the Manufacturing Chemists Association, an industry lobbying group, admitted “there is no known safe, allowable exposure. The only safe method of handling must be on the basis of no exposure whatever.” 188 Still no ban by the DuPonts. In 1952 and 1954, benzidine’s carcinogenic potential was positively identified and confirmed. The DuPonts continued production, and workers continued to die. 

In 1955, the DuPont Company ceased making BNA, but it was not until 1965 that the DuPonts dropped the production of benzidine. By then, scores had died since 1950, 73 in fact, between 1950 and 1969. 

In all those years since 1929, Johns Hopkins Hospital had made no public announcement warning of the dangers of working at DuPont’s Chambers Works. Dr. Hugh J. Jewett, who handled the cases sent in by Du Pont and was identified by Du Pont spokesman James P. Reynolds in 1975 as “the country’s leading urologist when the bladder tumor cases were recognized as employment connected,” 189 refused comment. But in 1973, in a similar situation involving another company, Jewett had been quoted by the Washington Post saying, “It’s none of my damn business to tell them how to run their plants.” 190 

No one, of course, tells the DuPonts how to run their plants. That is one of the main reasons they have been intent on keeping out national labor unions. In 1973, it was revealed that the DuPonts were exposing their Chambers employees also to two other chemicals identified by the U.S. Department of Labor as cancer-causing: alphanephthylamine (alpha) and 4.4’ Methylenebiso 2—chlorobenzenamine, an agent used to cure rubber and known by its trade name, MOCA. A petition was brought to the Labor Department and courts by the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) and the Health Research Group, founded by Ralph Nader. The Labor Department, hit with Shapiro Tactic Number One (insisting there was no evidence yet linking MOCA and alpha to human cancer, and asking for further studies), refused their petition for a ban on exposure. DuPont production of MOCA and alpha was allowed to continue, although on a much lower level of exposure to workers. In December, 1974, the OCAW and HRG’s appeal to federal judges in Philadelphia was thrown out of court. 

The Health Research Group’s and the union’s actions did stir concern among DuPont workers, however. Shapiro’s executives had never informed the Chambers workers that the OCAW and HRG had asked for a zero tolerance, and the workers, while continuing to work under the Labor Department safety standards, warned they would refuse if the chemicals were proven to cause cancer in humans. DuPont officials only admitted alpha and MOCA were “cancer-suspects.” “How many dead workers do you have to have before you take action?” 191 asked HRG researcher Bertrand Cottine. 

Workers at the Repauno plant ten miles north of Chambers were also concerned and asked DuPont if OCA, which they make and sent to Chambers as a component of MOCA, could cause cancer. “We knew what kind of answer we were going to get,” commented Bob McIlvaine, the local union’s safety and health representative. “They assured us it was not.” He persisted, requesting permission for the workers to shower before leaving the plant. “Our people work in it all day long and get it all in our skin and all in our clothes.” Showers were already in effect at Chambers, but DuPont refused. “Their argument,” said McIlvaine, “is, ‘What are you after? A paid shower?’” 192 

As the alarm was raised by information DuPont denied the value of, company researchers began worrying about chloroprene, a chemical similar to vinyl chloride, a known carcinogen that DuPont had been making since 1931. In December, 1974, they found two studies by Soviet health scientists suggesting links between skin and lung cancer and chloroprene. Some 3000 DuPont workers had already been exposed. In March, 1975, a team of DuPont scientists arrived in the Soviet Union to supposedly talk with the Soviet scientists who conducted the studies. They never met them. Instead, the DuPont team talked with chemical industry representatives, complained about alleged vagueness in the studies, and returned to Wilmington. Company officials decided to give the chemical’s profits, rather than workers’ lives, the greater benefit of doubt. Chloroprene production continued at plants in Louisville, Kentucky, Texas, Louisiana and Northern Ireland. “Exposure is kept to the lowest practicable level,” 193 assured DuPont’s Reynolds. But Dr. Joseph Wagoner, director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s Division of Field Studies, was unhappy. “If I want to know about a health problem, I go to the health people.” 194 Meanwhile, the president of the Louisville DuPont union, Dudley Lacy, reported that company officials told him, “The Russian study didn’t prove anything.” 195 He was not told of DuPont’s failure to speak to Soviet health officials. 

Queried at the annual meeting in 1975, Chairman Irving Shapiro repeated the official line. “They discovered nothing in Russia which changes our thinking,” he told the stockholders and the public. “When all the data is in, a judgment will be made.” 196 

Shapiro Tactic Number One. Tactic Number Two was already in effect in the minds of the Louisville workers. “You can smell fumes,” Lacy remarked. “Whether it’s chloroprene or not, I don’t know. It appears to us that there’s a large amount of death due to something. There appears to be a little too much of it.” Then he added his fear that if chloroprene production was stopped, “all the jobs would be gone.” He then retreated to Shapiro’s position. “There’s a big question, yes, but it should be studied more.” 197 

Dr. John Zapp, director of DuPont’s Haskell Experimental Laboratory, admitted that his lab never tested chloroprene for its cancer-causing potential before DuPont authorized its production and marketing. 

Of the 800 chemical reports the Haskell Lab did prepare yearly, very few detailed studies were released. “They keep us uninformed on a lot of things,” one local union official in Philadelphia told reporter Don Glickstein of the Delaware State News. “People don’t know the full hazards of the kind of work they’re involved in.” Hazards were left to supervisors to reveal. “They’re very safety-minded,” commented the president of the Repauno local, H. Van Etten, “except when safety interferes with production. They say, ‘We have the facilities, the experimental laboratory, we are very careful.’ If we say we want independent testing, they block it.” 198 

The director of the new Delaware Tumor Registry was Dr. Reuben Teixido. His computers, however, were not programmed to do an intensive analysis of cancers by geographic area, and Teixido not only held that researching victims by jobs and materials they worked with was far in the future, but that determining work-related conditions for even those cancer deaths already compiled by federal investigators for Delaware between 1950 and 1969 was an “enterprise frought with dangers of misrepresentation.” Teixido worked at the Wilmington Medical Center, a position not to be envied when one considered that among the Center’s trustees were Joseph Dallas, Norman Copeland, Robert L. Richards, Hugh R. Sharp, Jr., Crawford Greenewalt, and Charles B. McCoy, all DuPont Company directors at the time. 

It was these same directors who sanctioned Shapiro’s efforts to undermine the Toxic Substances Control Act. DuPont led the fight to weaken the bill through the Manufacturing Chemists Association (MCA), chaired by DuPont president Edward R. Kane. DuPont sought to strike from the bill a key provision which would have given the EPA the power to require testing before a new chemical is marketed. 

Under federal law, any food or drug suspected of containing a chemical which might be carcinogenic must be removed from the market. For the sake of the health of the public, the chemical is guilty until proven innocent. The Toxic Substances bill, introduced by California’s Senator John Tunney, sought to apply the same protection to workers on the job and to the public exposed to other chemicals. “The American public ends up being the guinea pig for these chemicals,” Tunney’s legislative assistant, Daniel Jaffe, pointed out. “Any kind of chemical can be put on the market with no testing. We’re playing Russian roulette, and one of these days, the chamber might be full. You’re putting the whole population at risk.” 199 

Nevertheless, DuPont insisted that profits derived from the chemical again be given the greater benefit of doubt. “The EPA administration [should] provide justification for any pre-market testing,” argued a company position paper. DuPont also wanted a provision forbidding the EPA from regulating a chemical if its manufacturer is regulated under law by other federal agencies. It insisted that this would prevent duplication and make the law more effective. 

Jaffe saw this reasoning as nonsense and a ploy to escape EPA regulation. In the name of lowering government costs and inflation, DuPont’s provision would actually require an increase in government expense by forcing the law to be administered in a roundabout manner; it would “really be socking it to the American public.” Enter Shapiro Tactic Number Two: The MCA threatened that the bill’s passage might mean an “excessive cost in complying with new regulations”; 200 if so, the consumer could expect higher prices. 

No one on the 9th floor of DuPont headquarters could see any alternative. Certainly executive salaries and dividends could not be reduced. Charles McCoy, for example, only made $487,000 during 1975, his last year as chairman; and in 1974, he made only $701,000. Granted, it might take a typical chemist earning, according to the Labor Department, $34,476 a year, or an average engineer with an annual salary of $31,464, over 20 years to accumulate what McCoy made in that one year, but then these were hard times for everyone. Even the biggest DuPont stockholder, Lammot du Pont Copeland, Sr., made only $1,526,989. Lammot might have been consoled, however, by the $116,000 in compensation he received as a DuPont director and another $1,000,000 paid to his immediate family because of their Christiana and DuPont stockholdings. 201 

9. A QUESTION OF CREDIBILITY 

Holding the line against any further governmental interferences of these hard-working leaders of free enterprise was Irving Shapiro, the recipient in 1974 of a paltry $216,300 salary, another $85,000 in incentive compensation, and a $25,278 bonus on dividend units awarded previously. “Only a small mind would suggest” that he was motivated in the Du Pont-Christiana negotiations by a desire to protect and prolong his position with.....

To be continued666s