 Garfield 's biographers were unwilling to exonerate him in Crédit Mobilier , with Allan Peskin writing " Did Garfield lie ? Not exactly . Did he tell the truth ? Not completely . Was he corrupted ? Not really . Even Garfield 's enemies never claimed that his involvement ... influenced his behavior " . Rutkow wrote that " Garfield 's real offense was that he knowingly denied to the House investigating committee that he had agreed to accept the stock and that he had also received a dividend of $ 329 . " Caldwell suggested that Garfield " while he told the truth [ before the committee ] , certainly failed to tell the whole truth , clearly evading an answer to certain vital questions and thus giving the impression of worse faults than those of which he was guilty " . That Crédit Mobilier was a corrupt organization had been a secret badly kept , even mentioned on the floor of Congress , and editor Sam Bowles wrote at the time that Garfield , in his positions on committees dealing with finance , " had no more right to be ignorant in a matter of such grave importance as this , than the sentinel has to snore on his post " . 
