Foreign Correspondence: the Great Reporters and Their Times 9780231882392

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Foreign Correspondence: The Great Reporters and Their Times

Foreign Correspondence: The Great Reporters and Their Times

John Hohenberg

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London

Copyright © 1964 by John Hohenberg Third printing and Columbia Paperback edition 1967 Printed in the United States of America

FOR DOROTHY

An Acknowledgment This book was begun more than four years ago as a result of an apparently random conversation with Grayson Kirk at Columbia University. I had been thinking for some time of doing a study of foreign correspondence, but the magnitude of the task appalled me. Consequently, when I was able to confide my hopes and doubts to an experienced historian, I did so with alacrity, thinking that the rite of academic confessional would lead to utter discouragement and an end to the matter. It didn't turn out quite that way. A few days after our talk, I received the following note from Dr. Kirk which I quote in salient part, not to shift my responsibility to sturdier shoulders but to trace the inception of this inquiry: " I feel strongly that a history of foreign correspondence would be well worth the time and study that would go into it. . . . I would encourage you by all means to go ahead with it." I still have that note, dated January 28, 1960, on Columbia blue memo paper, and occasionally I take it out and brood over it because my researches into foreign correspondence scarcely followed the even path that was outlined above. At one point, in fact, I had even changed my plan to a contemporary survey of foreign correspondence that allowed room for perhaps three or four chapters on the origin of that exceedingly strange, yet ever important, pursuit. Talking it over one day on the pleasant Long Island Sound beach at Iron Pier with my friend and neighbor, Bishop Charles W . MacLean of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, I was pulled up rather quickly by his reaction. ""How," asked the bishop severely, "can you justify a few snappy chapters on the background of foreign correspondence, and some rambling observations on what is going on now, when you should be digging into its origin and evolution?" One does not win many

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An

Acknowledgment

arguments from a bishop. I could not justify the few snappy chapters. Then followed one of many long and thoughtful conferences with my editors, associates, and friends at the Columbia University Press at which my course was finally set. Robert Tilley and Joan McQuary between them convinced me that the research into origins and evolution was eminently worthy if it could be expertly done. And so, early in 1962, this work began with the assistance of a grant, which was as gratifying as it was unexpected, from the Columbia University Press. After several hundred conversations with editors, correspondents, and others, plus the reading of several score volumes of reminiscences and personal observations at the main centers of foreign correspondence outside the Iron Curtain, it is now complete. It is offered, not as a formal history, but as a painstaking exploration of the effect of the foreign correspondent on his times and the influence he has exerted on the jagged course of international relations. My indebtedness is great. In addition to those who encouraged me at the beginning, I am thankful to many correspondents, among them John Hightower, Robert S. Bird, Sanche de Gramont, Max Frankel, Harrison Salisbury, A. M. Rosenthal, and numerous others, and to such editors as Wes Gallagher, general manager of the Associated Press; Earl J. Johnson, editor of United Press International; Gerald Long, general manager of Reuters, and Emanuel R. Freedman, foreign editor of the New York Times. I pay due respect also to the formidable critical faculties of J. Montgomery Curtis, director of the American Press Institute, who read a section of this work, which has since been re-done. There was only one other, Dorothy Hohenberg, whose criticism caused me more anxiety and soul-searching; mercifully, she usually managed to be cheerful about it. They all helped in different ways. I cannot conclude this note of acknowledgment without a special word of thanks to the Columbia University Libraries, where much of the research was done. In particular, Wade Doares, the chief of our Journalism Library, and his capable assistant, Jonathan Bryan May, gave me much more help than I had any right to expect. While I make no claim to the discovery of original materials, a lot of forgotten newsprint in the old Talcott Williams clipping collection at Columbia was new and thoroughly delightful to me. The responsibility for this work is, of course, my own. What I have tried to do is to awaken greater interest in those who have made foreign

An Acknowledgment

ix

correspondence an increasingly important factor in the shaping of public opinion. To do this, I had to delve into their sources, their methods, and, at times, even their morals. If much of this study deals with American and British correspondence, it is precisely because these nations have been the leaders in developing an independent foreign correspondence and tolerating its excesses for the sake of the undoubted benefit that it bestows on a democratic society. In the conflict with the controlled press of the world, the independent correspondents are still the leaders in their effect on both their governments and their peoples. JOHN HOHENBERG

Columbia University in the City of New York June 9, 1964.

Contents Introduction

xv

I: The First Foreign Correspondents 1. The Struggle for Control 2. The Reversible Rider

1 7

3. The Tall Towers of France

10

4. 5. 6. 7.

15 21 27 33

"Who Is Mr. Reuter?" The Satanic Scot The Pigeon Fancier of Nova Scotia The Emerging Pattern

II: The Professionals x. The Old Breed—and the New 2. The Exile 3. From the Halls of Montezuma 4. The Man Who Saved an Army 5. 6. 7. 8.

Dateline: Everywhere Dateline: America The Lesson of Antietam The Lesson of Sadowa

III: The World News Revolution 1. The Tribune's "Foreign Commissioner" 2. "The Incomparable Archibald" 3. "Find Livingstone!" 4. The Times's "Foreign Minister" 5. The Crusaders

35 36 38 44 56 62 69 72 74 80 86 92 101

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Contents

IV: For Glory and Empire 1. The Correspondents' Golden Age

113

2. The "Cossack Correspondent"

114

3. "Fuzzy Wuzzy"

120

4. "Our War"

130

5. Young Lion of Britain

138

6. "Chinese" Morrison

144

V : The Shaky Alliance 1. Stone of the AP

151

2. The Uneasy Allies

155

3. The Alliance Gets a Shock

160

4. The Printer from Knoxville

165

5. The End of a Tradition

170

VI: This Shrinking World 1. Words Take Wing

174

2. New Times in the Far East

175

3. The Mingling of East and West 4. Reporter in Russia: 1905

183 185

5. The Age of Flight 6. The North Pole Adventure 7. The Titanic Goes Down

189 193 199

VII: The Challenge of World War I 1. How War Came 2. Front-Line Reporting

202 213

3. The Birth of the Soviet Union 4. The United States as a World Power

225 234

VIII: Not So Brave . . . Not So New 1. "Open Covenants . . ." 2. The Passing of the Old Guard 3. The End of the Grand Cartel

244 251 259

4. The Growth of the New York Times

265

5. The Young Falcons

274

Contents IX: The Darkening

xiii

Horizon

1. Storm Clouds Over China

286

2. Fire in Berlin

291

3. The Weakness of France

294

4. "Avanti!"

298

5. T h e Lady from Baltimore

305

6. The Spanish Tragedy

309

7. T h e View from Moscow

316

8. T h e Coming of World W a r II

321

X : The Ordeal of World War II 1. Blitzkrieg

332

2. T h e Conqueror Falters

336

3. T h e Turning Point

343

4. Victory in Europe

357

5. Pacific Finale

369

6. The Bomb

372

XI: Through Time and Space 1. The Peace Correspondents

385

2. T h e UN's W a r

390

3. The Iron Curtain

398

4. The Western Alliance

412

5. The Conquest of Space

425

XII: Tomorrow's Foreign

Correspondents

1. The State of the Art

431

2. The Multitude

434

3. The Missing Factor

439

4. Press vs. Policy

446

5. Summation

449

Notes

453

Bibliography

475

Index

481

Introduction Jared Ingersoll, co-agent for Connecticut, sat in the House of Commons on a wintry day in 1765, listening to a droning discussion of a stamp tax for the American colonies. The honorable Members, for the most part, were unimpressed and bored. After all, the stamp tax had a long history in England, and most of them felt, as Prime Minister George Grenville did, that the colonies "ought to pay something" for the privilege of belonging to the British empire. Ingersoll, a New Haven lawyer and an inveterate correspondent, took a few notes as Charles Townshend, speaking for the government, admonished the Americans that they were "children planted by our care, nourished by our indulgence . . . protected by our arms" and should therefore "contribute their mite." Then up stepped Colonel Isaac Barré, a Whig of the Pitt school who had fought under Wolfe at Quebec, with a roar of protest that made Ingersoll's fingers fairly fly over the notepaper. "They planted by your care?" Barré cried. "No! Your Oppressions planted 'em in America. . . . They nourished by your indulgence? They grew by neglect of 'em. As soon as you began to care about 'em, that care was exercised by sending persons to rule over 'em . . . whose behavior on many occasions has caused the blood of these Sons of Liberty to recoil within them." It didn't matter to Ingersoll now whether the House was bored or not. He had a story for Governor Thomas Fitch and for the New London Gazette in Connecticut that everybody would read. His account, written in London on the day of the debate, February 6, 1765, appeared in the Gazette on May 10 and was reprinted in the Newport (R.I.) Mercury on May 27.1 From New England, couriers carried copies of the papers to all other colonies, resulting in general publication. Barré's phrase, "Sons of Liberty," became a watchword, a rallying

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cry, and the proud name of a radical organization of patriots whose agitation was the forerunner of American independence. It would be pleasant to report that this early example of the work and influence of an amateur foreign correspondent brought him honor and fame. But like many a professional who was to follow him in the next two centuries, his story backfired. He was among the first to fall afoul of those Sons of Liberty whose organization he had helped so mightily to create. Having accepted the post of British stamp distributor for Connecticut on the advice of none other than his sagacious friend and fellow-joumalist, Benjamin Franklin, he was forced to resign by an indignant crowd of his fellow-citizens. "It is a time," wrote the sorrowful foreign correspondent, "when mankind seem to think they have a right not only to shoot at me with the arrow that flyeth by day, but to assassinate me in the dark." Ingersoll suffered the worst indignity that can befall any journalist. The Sons of Liberty were not satisfied merely because he gave up his office. From then on, he had to give his word that he would write nothing more back to England unless he showed it first to their leaders.2 Having demonstrated his influence once, he could not again be trusted to write unless he submitted to censorship. The sad tale of Jared Ingersoll is a familiar one in the annals of foreign correspondence, although not all his fellows were so unfortunate. When William Howard Russell nearly a century later disclosed in the Times of London that Britain's Crimean army was dying of neglect, disease, and hunger, he loosed the same vengeful spirit against him but, of course, for a vastly different reason. And when Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times penetrated Cuba's Siena Maestra in 1957, drawing world attention to a guerrilla leader named Fidel Castro, he was ungenerously blamed for most of the unexpected consequences that flowed from the eventual success of Castro's revolution. It was as if the correspondent, deliberately and with malicious intent, had let a bearded genie out of a bottle and was somehow expected to catch him and stuff him back inside. If Russell and Matthews were able to survive the attacks of their critics, and Ingersoll was not, it was because a few great independent newspapers in the West had been able in the interim to establish a reputation for truthful reporting in foreign affairs that went beyond the ability of the most powerful forces, inside and outside government,

Introduction

xvii

to control. That is the basis for the respect with which such foreign correspondence is regarded today and the primary reason for an inquiry into its origin and evolution. No one seriously believes that the hundreds—even thousands—of persons who receive journalistic accreditation at international conferences or tours of world leaders are all qualified and competent to make the independent findings of fact and observations that are expected of superior foreign correspondents. Whether we in an open society like it or not, there are relatively few such professionals, career men and women, who file at regular intervals for a serious publication, wire service, or electronic medium around the world. Many of the so-called foreign correspondents of our day, unhappily, either work directly for their governments or are indirectly controlled by them. There are other difficulties. Costs are rising, obliging most newspapers in the world to depend on the global wire services. Censorship in one form or another is spreading and sometimes decisively affecting even the uncontrolled press. The tendency toward the manipulation of the news to meet the propaganda needs of governments, great and small, is growing everywhere. It is ironic that these things should make the task of getting at the real news, not merely its surface manifestations, so onerous at a time when the electronic advances of the age have so greatly broadened man's ability to communicate with man. The stakes for the control of the distribution of world news are very high. But they were almost as great in Bismarck's time. The Iron Chancellor, with a black record in the manipulation of the "reptile press" at home, bitterly attacked the dominance of Reuters in world news in the latter part of the nineteenth century, thereby hoping to substitute German influence for it. Nor did Honoré de Balzac exercise mere poetic license when he denounced Charles Havas for his influence over the French press through his control of much of its advertising as well as news content. It was to the credit of Kent Cooper of the Associated Press and Roy W . Howard, his United Press competitor, that the global news cartel of their day was smashed. They could scarcely foresee the rise of an even more powerful group of agencies, Tass and New China News Agency, which together control the news that is presented to more than half the world's peoples. For the independent foreign correspondent, although he is not very numerous, that has become at once a challenge and an opportunity.

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Introduction

For better or worse, he has become in effect the West's first line of defense against this monopoly. He may not like the position in which he finds himself, for he hates being called a crusader, but there is very little he can do about it. It is an enormous change from his situation of sixty years ago when he and his fellows in the United States were used like so many chattels because a powerful section of the American press campaigned for war against Spain. Such conduct would be unthinkable today for any decent newspaper with a reputation for independence. As far as methods of work are concerned, it is manifestly clear that we have not reached the ultimate despite the existence of a respectable body of good-to-excellent foreign correspondence. It is unlikely that the current system of presenting news in bits and pieces on deadline, whether or not the segments are related, can endure much longer. It may have been adequate a century ago, when news traveled slowly and could not readily be placed before the public. It is inadequate today. T h e mere fact of publication never has and never will make news out of an unassimilated mass of facts prepared by an untrained correspondent, passed by an unschooled foreign editor, and relentlessly chopped on deadline by an illiterate makeup editor to fit a particular hole on page 11. Nor can the electronic media, on their part, justify using a fast thirty-second summary in an account of some complicated subject like atomic negotiations. T h e journalist cannot be turned into an electronic stenographer who parrots what is told to him and is useful only because he can place it before his home public on the same day. A computer can be built to do such a job better, cheaper, and without an argument over when the next raise is due. It is, finally, a weary truism that the times demand a better-prepared foreign correspondent and a more knowledgeable editor. Nor would it be amiss if more publishers had expert acquaintance with the important foreign activities which they so generously finance. These all are, of course, emerging here and there, but ever so slowly, and not many correspondents are staying with their vexing and exacting art as a lifetime's work. Some tum to editing, some teach, some go into a different business altogether, and a few try timidly to follow the illustrious examples of Winston Churchill and Georges Clemenceau by seeking entrance to the hallowed halls of statesmanship. The rewards of foreign correspondence are still not commensurate with its daily demands, ag-

Introduction

xix

gravations, and risks. Those who stay on will gruffly deny it, but the good ones, primarily, are motivated by an ideal—the ideal that sent Ernie Pyle to his death by a sniper's bullet on the tiny Pacific battleground of Ie Shima. In the nearly five centuries since Columbus, when the earliest journalists first began using the printing press to spread the news, such devotion to the cause of public service has been rare. And yet, far more than the men and nations that have grappled in such a deadly struggle for control and influence over the global news network, these dedicated ones, by their example, have advanced the means through which the peoples of the world communicate with each other and understand each other. That is their cause; in serving it, they seek to perpetuate truth. It is their proudest contribution to their profession and their time. This, then, is an accounting of how they came to be and how they have used their influence. It is presented as a case for the foreign correspondent, that sometime myth and sometime statesman at large, in a manner appropriate to the subject—honestly, not too reverently, but with respect.

Foreign Correspondence: The Great Reporters and Their Times

I: The First Foreign Correspondents 1. THE STRUGGLE FOR CONTROL On August 27, 1792, the Times of London published the following advertisement: "Wanted immediately, A Gentleman who is capable of translating the French language. In order to prevent trouble, he must be a perfect Master of the English Language, have some knowledge of the Political State of Europe and be thoroughly capable of the Situation he undertakes. His Employment will be permanent and take up a considerable share of his Attention; for which a handsome Salary will be allowed. Apply at the Office of this Paper between the Hours of Five and Six This Evening or Tomorrow Morning between Eleven and Twelve O'clock." In this manner, the Times began recruiting personnel for its foreign department as the French Revolution began to strain the resources of every paper in London. John Walter I, the practical-minded coal dealer who had founded the Times in 1785, already was complaining about the "immense" cost of foreign correspondence, for he was not merely depending on the French papers. He had agents at ports on both sides of the English Channel to watch for both papers and the special correspondence for which he had arranged in Paris and Brussels.1 In addition to advertising for help, Walter began complaining at about the same time that the Times's dispatches were being interrupted by "Post Offices abroad." He hinted at unfair competitive practices and, a little later, denounced a successful rival, John Bell, editor of the Oracle, as a "vagabond Jacobin." The Times hewed to the "government line" and was vigorously anti-Jacobin, but, in all fairness, Bell's work

2

The First Foreign

Correspondents

was more that of an enterprising correspondent than any sinister French agent in disguise. He was a worthy competitor in the development of the robust and troublesome art of foreign correspondence. But even worse than Bell's competition, the Times found that its shipments of foreign journals were being sent to the office of the Sun, a particular government favorite. The government had in fact been giving both the Sun and the True Briton exclusive information as well as funds because it feared some other dailies in London were in the pay of the French revolutionaries. As early as 1792, charges had been sent to the Treasury that "the editors of the Morning Chronicle and of the Argus have received considerable sums of money and . . . they have each of them a large monthly allowance." 2 William Walter, older son of the Times' s founder, wrote with guarded indignation to Henry Dundas, the Home Office Secretary, on September 5, 1793: "It is notorious, & I could prove the fact, that scarce a Dispatch comes from the Armies, or is there a Paris Journal forwarded to any of the Public Offices, but what is immediately transmitted to the Sun office. This system is now become so general that I foresee my property in particular must suffer, if it continues." 3 No greater evidence was needed of the coming breakdown of the old system of disseminating foreign news by government handout or by copying foreign papers. It had sufficed during most of the eighteenth century, including the critical period of the American Revolution, for several reasons. The largely docile London press had been satisfied to wait for government dispatches from abroad to be printed in the official London Gazette, then reprint them a day late. Because it generally took two months for American papers to cross the ocean, their flamboyantly independent reporting could not have been duplicated in good time. Independent British reportage, in that day, was confined to a few soldier correspondents who occasionally wrote letters home. Both distance and controlled journalism thus had combined to make the London papers mark time for their news with few exceptions. Pitt, Burke, and Fox, through their speeches in Parliament, were better sources for those who sought the truth. The way to reform had come through the victory of the press in 1772 in its long struggle to publish the proceedings of Parliament and the subsequent liberalization of the libel act. It only remained now for the publishers to take advantage of their freedom, and they were, somewhat cautiously, doing so.

The First Foreign Correspondents

3

With the coming of the French Revolution and new military ventures so close to home and so incalculable in their effect, British readers demanded more news and less propaganda and flocked to the papers that tried to provide it. Since the Morning Post and the Oracle both were experimenting with a foreign correspondence system, and since the government was channeling all the usual foreign sources to the Sun first, the Times was caught in the middle of a savage competition. It was just as well, therefore, that John Walter had begun to form his own corps of agents in foreign news centers, messengers, and translators at home. There was no doubt that any successful newspaper would have to provide London readers with a reliable budget of dependable foreign news. That was easier said than done. Arthur Young, the English agriculturalist and occasional correspondent for the Morning Post, had been traveling in France on and off between 1787 and 1791 but, through a lamentable exercise in bad judgment, had missed the storming of the Bastille and the opening of the French Revolution. He had gone home on June 27, 1789, remarking, "The whole business is over." 4 Yet, despite his deficient news sense, Young left an unforgettable record of France in turmoil on which Carlyle was to draw more than four decades later for his history of the French Revolution.5 The rise of Napoleon, and the excitement generated by his military triumphs, intensified the alarm of the British public and the demand for news. Only the papers could give it to them. The rivalry was stepped up. While there was much talk about the staffs of foreign correspondents available to each, the Times at last had begun to build a network of agents that eventually would be larger than any of its rivals, if not always as effective. But government operatives were watching the arrivals of foreign journals and foreign letters for newspapers in London, and evidence of tampering with both was widespread. At this juncture, John Walter II, the younger son of the founder who had now taken over the Times from his father and his brother William in 1803, forthrightly challenged the government and laid the groundwork for the rise of the Times as a newspaper of financial and political independence. He charged that the government was discriminating against the Times, not because it was suspected of subversion, but because it had made clear its intention of being independent. He accused the Home

4

The First Foreign

Correspondents

Office of trying to intercept his correspondence from the "north of Europe," meaning Hamburg, the seat of the best available intelligence at the time on Napoleon's wars.8 Young Walter refused to make further annual payments of sixty guineas a year to the Post Office, a "fee" required of all newspapers, for the preparation of translated summaries by government clerks of the foreign journals that arrived twice a week. At one time, when the competition for copies of the foreign press had been heavier, bribery of clerks by various newspapers had made the system suspect. In withdrawing from it, Walter served notice that he could get along by himself. When the government warned it would permit no newspaper to receive foreign journals except through the Post Office, the Times had to resume the obnoxious payments. But Walter specified as a condition that he would make his own arrangements for receiving news, with the consent of the government. The deal failed. On November 13, 1806, Walter complained that papers intended for him had been seized and "the next day their contents appeared in the Oracle." He simply instructed his correspondents to address their letters to various friendly merchants and bankers, who permitted the Times to use their offices as mail drops. Next, he turned to a 32-year-old lawyer, Henry Crabb Robinson, who had been on his staff for two years, and sent him to Altona, just outside Hamburg. That was in January, 1807. Because he is the first clearly identifiable staff member of a great newspaper who was sent abroad to write dispatches, Robinson is often called the first foreign correspondent. He wasn't, for two excellent reasons. First, there is no doubt whatever that correspondents of a number of foreign newspapers had been in Hamburg and Altona for some time before Robinson's arrival. Moreover, he did not pretend to be a reporter, the first requisite of a foreign correspondent, but rather despised that aspect of his work. He was a leisurely columnist who sent letters on foreign affairs to his paper. Since Nelson's victory over the French at Trafalgar in 1805* and * The news of Trafalgar provides some idea of the manner and speed of news communication in 1805. The battle was fought on Oct. 21. The official dispatch of Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood is dated Oct. 22, and the news was published the next day at Gibraltar. On Nov. 6, Collingwood's dispatch was published in an extraordinary issue of the London Gazette. On Nov. 7, seventeen days after the battle, the London papers picked

The First Foreign

Correspondents

5

the imposition of Napoleon's Continental System, news of Europe had become increasingly scarce in London. Not even the foreign papers were getting through regularly. The Times therefore counted on Robinson's work. Accordingly, he made arrangements with the Hamburgischen Correspondent to look over news that came through Hamburg, read the papers, gossiped with literary lights, and generally seemed to have enjoyed himself. He fitted in, having gone to school in Jena and acquired a solid German background. But he made no secret of his liking for literary rather than political news. The era cried out for active, energetic reporters. Napoleon, victor at Jena, was leading his armies eastward in 1807 when Robinson became correspondent in residence at Altona. Although the Corsican had been checked at Eylau on February 8, he rallied his armies and swept the field at Friedland on June 14. It was six days before Robinson heard about it and forwarded the news to London. He also did a story about the Peace of Tilsit on June 25, when Napoleon and Alexander I of Russia met at the Niemen. Otherwise, the columns from Altona reflected the gossip and rumor of the times. In August, Robinson ended his assignment, being called home to serve first as foreign editor and later as editor for a relatively brief period. The reason for his elevation was his shrewd assessment of the Times foreign service in a memorandum he sent from Altona at Walter's request. He saw that wartime enthusiasm for foreign correspondence was temporary, at best, and that a reorganized foreign service would be necessary when peace came. He asked Walter to match his effort "in securing priority of intelligence . . . by a like zeal in providing for superiority in the mode of stating, as well as in the selection of information from abroad." What he had in mind was a single, coordinated, well-written piece summarizing foreign affairs daily. He did not favor mere "matters of fact men" who transmitted the news, but a "man of letters." Such a correspondent, the memorandum continued, "would write every week on the topick of the week, and though he may not tell you anything new [he] would give you the tone and spirit of his time and place; he having a style of his own would document the authenticity it up, printing Collingwood's rambling description of how Nelson "in the late conflict with the enemy fell in the hour of victory." The news of Trafalgar was not published in France, however, until after Napoleon lost power.

6

The First Foreign Correspondents

of his letters. A correspondent of this description at Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg would be inestimable." As for the rating of the news centers of the day, Robinson felt Paris and St. Petersburg were "of the very first importance, Vienna and Berlin of second-rate value" and Altona "an important channel of information but no source in itself." 7 These comments decided Walter on making something more of his Altona correspondent. By January 25, 1808, Robinson was writing to his brother that, upon Walter's direction, he was to be "known expressly as the Editor." However, Robinson was sent on another important foreign assignment the following year to cover Sir John Moore's forces and whatever news could be obtained of the Spanish uprising. He arrived at Corunna on July 31, 1808, picked up the Madrid papers from a local editor, had them translated, and began writing. He put his dispatches aboard whatever British ships left Corunna harbor and meanwhile amused himself by associating with the "grand ladies and noblemen" in the city. On an ominously quiet afternoon in mid-January, 1809, he sauntered into his hotel dining room and found it deserted. "Have you not heard, sir?" a deferential waiter asked. "The French are come. They are fighting." Robinson decided he'd better find out what was going on and walked out of town, remaining until dark. There was cannonading, he reported, which appeared to "come from the hills about three miles from Corunna." He noted that British wounded and French prisoners were being brought in, but there is no indication that he knew either of the defeat of the British forces or the death of Sir John Moore that night of January 16, 1809. He went aboard a transport in the harbor and, toward the end of the month, returned to London. Not long afterward, he and Walter amiably parted company in an exchange of letters, and he resumed his career at the Bar. The complications of management rather than any failings in his work as a correspondent, Walter assured him, had made the change necessary. For the rest of his life, Robinson remained securely in the confidence of the Times, its publisher, and its editors, but he never resumed his role as a pioneering foreign correspondent. The law was much more comfortable. It was in 1809 also that Peter Finnerty, a rather irresponsible Irishman, made history of a kind as a would-be war correspondent. As the

The First Foreign

Correspondents

7

correspondent of the Morning Chronicle, he managed to get aboard a British expedition under Lord Chatham which sailed for the Scheldt River with the intention of taking on the enemy. With some foresight, he had obtained a berth as secretary to one of the ship's captains, a device that was to be used by foreign correspondents throughout the rest of the century. Finnerty's trouble arose, not because he took the job, but because he was caught. As soon as the Admiralty learned that a miserable pressman was aboard one of its warships, presumably ready to give away all its secrets to the enemy (and the public at home), he was ordered brought back to England at once. In a blaze of undesirable publicity, the unlucky Finnerty was tried and sentenced to prison for eighteen months.8 This new effort to collect foreign news at the source was in every respect a risky business. Yet, the first failures only served to whet the appetites of the adventurous young men who were to follow. There would be no need in years to come for newspapers to advertise for foreign correspondents. Many would seek what they conceived to be fame and glory. Few would achieve it.

2. THE REVERSIBLE RIDER In the ancient and hospitable Swiss city of Zurich, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe picked up a new newspaper dated January 12, 1780. It was called simply the Ziircher Zeitung, the Zurich newspaper, a slender half-sheet, which was to be published Wednesdays and Saturdays. The cost was one gulden, 30 kreuzer annually (roughly $5). Across the top of the paper, Goethe read the announcement of the publishers, Orell, Gessner, Fiissli & Co., who wrote with admirable candor: "It will not be possible for us, any more than for other writers of newspapers, to announce world events before their occurrence, or even before foreign newspapers have reported them. But we have made arrangements with the best French, English, Italian, Dutch, and German newspapers, and with reliable private correspondents, in order always to receive and publish news as early as any other of our neighbors are able to do so. Finally, readers are reminded that all beginnings are difficult, but that progress will be made from week to week."

8

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There followed the news of the French fleet's successes in the American Revolutionary War, datelined Nantes, and other foreign items. Of domestic and local news there was none because of strict Swiss censorship, which obliged any aspiring journalist to gather foreign news if he wanted to put out any kind of a newspaper. All this Goethe fully understood. As a celebrated writer, he had been asked to recommend an editor for the publication. It is not quite clear whether this was on the basis of his most recent work, The Sorrows of Young Werther, or the cruder and perhaps more journalistic Götz von Berlichingen. Whatever the reason, Goethe was a journalistic consultant, and he had the eminent Swiss theologist, Johann Kaspar Lavater, as an associate. Goethe noticed that on the nameplate of the paper, a postboy with horn to his lips was riding a galloping horse from left to right. After he and Lavater had recommended Kaspar Riesbeck, a German writer, who speedily met with the approval of the publishers and was installed as editor, the postboy and his horse obligingly reversed direction on the nameplate in the following issue and galloped from right to left. Thereafter, the custom which Goethe helped to inaugurate was resumed whenever the paper changed editors. By the direction in which the postboy headed, Zurchers knew when there had been an upheaval at their Zeitung. There weren't many. Under the management of Johann Heinrich Fiissli, son of an art historian, the paper from the first was remarkably stable, although its circulation was necessarily small. Its tone was guardedly liberal, since it was written mainly by liberal-minded German exiles. One of them, Gottfried Ebel, was credited with much of the lively and exciting correspondence at the outbreak of the French Revolution. Of the storming of the Bastille, the correspondent wrote on July 17, 1789: "One saw with amazement how on this day [July 14] an almost naked and unarmed people, inflamed by boldness alone, attacked entrenched positions, armed itself with what it found and in ten minutes conquered the first fortress of the Kingdom." Despite the sympathy of the Swiss for the French Revolution, the massacre of the Swiss Guard of Louis X V I by the Parisian mob caused the correspondent to report from Paris on August 25, 1792: "It is still

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quite impossible to come upon an objective account of the events of August 10. The spirit of the retailers' faction appears in every version and one may be certain that those who declare that the corpses of the murdered were boiled and roasted, and that cockades were made out of their entrails, exaggerate as much as those who would report that nothing took place for which humanity should blush." The paper followed events just as closely and objectively during the Napoleonic period, often from special correspondents. Those who wrote from Bayonne and Cadiz, for instance, reported a terrific battle had been fought at sea during November, 1805. On November 29, finally, came the official dispatch from London of the victory at Trafalgar and the death of Nelson. The paper found out about Waterloo from the British minister to Austria, Lord Stewart, who was at a field headquarters, but the news wasn't published until June 27, 1815, more than a week after the victory. Despite the importance of such news, the Ziircher Zeitung sold no more than 1,100 copies per issue up to 1815 and thereafter dropped off to a mere 419 in 1820. The publication was overhauled. The obliging postboy was taken off Page One and permanently stabled, the last remaining touch of the Goethe influence. A slightly larger twice-a-week paper emerged, called the Neue Ziircher Zeitung, under the direction of Paulus Usteri, a liberal member of the city's governing council, a correspondent for the Allgemeine Zeitung of Augsburg, and a fighter for freedom of the press. With the help of Fiissli, now in his seventies, Usteri began to publish Swiss news, but it followed the foreign news as it still does. Before long, the N.Z.Z. was read eagerly all over Europe for the excellence and responsibility of its foreign correspondence and the liberality of its political views. It could be trusted to take an objective and dispassionate line in its news columns, except for those special articles it commissioned eminent writers to do, but it fought its battles vigorously in its editorials. The great powers, having agreed to Swiss neutrality, didn't at all like the idea of criticism from a neutral journalistic source, but Usteri would not be gagged. The paper became a daily on January 1, 1843—a landmark in independent journalism.9 The reversible editor, like the reversible rider, was thus banished from Zurich.

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3. T H E T A L L T O W E R S O F F R A N C E At the end of the eighteenth century, a network of tall towers spread across the lovely countryside of France. On hills six to ten miles apart, in every section of the warring nation, men with telescopes sat on platforms atop each tower ready to receive and transmit messages on clear days. As signaling devices, they had three movable wooden sections, painted black, that could be manipulated to form different letters in a code prescribed by the government. Within six hours, therefore, news could be transmitted from Strasbourg to Paris. At night it was possible, but not too practical, to send by a code of lantern flashes. On August a 5, 1794, the semaphore telegraph carried its first bulletin to Paris—the official report of the French triumph over the Austrians at Condé. Less than two decades later, in 1812, the semaphore system covered more than 1,000 miles by transmissions from about 220 stations. Paris could "talk" to Marseilles, Brest, Turin, and Mainz. By 1830, on a more limited basis, similar semaphores were operating in Germany, Italy, the Low Countries, Russia, Sweden, Egypt, and England. But as in France, these were primarily government-operated and usually they carried military messages. It didn't take very much ingenuity, however, to break the government code and intercept the messages for newspaper use. Charles Havas, an enterprising young man in France, did it during the first half of the nineteenth century by setting up his own transmitting apparatus in a horse-drawn carriage, spotting the government message with his own telescope, and forwarding the news to Paris by his own means. Havas also used carrier pigeons with even greater efficiency to get out stock exchange quotations, probably as early as 1835. Havas was the founder of the news agency system, the primary source of foreign news for the world's peoples today. 10 Out of his pioneering efforts grew an organization that controlled most of the advertising of the French press as well as much of its news for more than a century 11 and played a key part in the building of a world-wide agency cartel for almost as long. 12 Within five years after l'Agence Havas had begun its operations, Honoré de Balzac was denouncing its proprietor as "le maître-jacques" of the press and charging wrathfully, "There is but one newspaper made by him." 1 3 Before its first century had ended, another

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critic wrote that Havas was "the great, the indispensable middleman through whom French business and industry control the press."14 Havas, of course, did not invent the news bureau for multiple subscribers. It had functioned in the Fugger era in Augsburg and elsewhere in Germany, in the Paris of Les Nouvellistes, and even in conservative London early in the eighteenth century where a Monsieur Tansky had a number of newspaper clients for his foreign news letter, Le Petit Papier.16 Changing times and a somewhat ephemeral release of the press from the rigors of government supervision in France gave Havas his opportunity. In the Napoleonic era, the leading newspapers of London had been almost alone in their struggle to maintain independent foreign services. Even if the hand of their own anxious government had not often been turned against them, their position would have been difficult. As a victorious dictator, Napoleon dominated all the news sources on the European continent. His messages, battle communiques, and war bulletins, inevitably shaped to his notions of favorable propaganda, were printed not only in the broad areas where he ruled but also in the lands of his enemies, notably England. As long as he was winning, his story was the one everybody wanted to read. The most that could be done to his news in the London press was to criticize it, analyze it, and, on occasion, make fun of his extravagance of thought and language. But none could deny his successes. Then, too, primarily because of the attention it had to pay to Napoleon's victories, the rising independent press was suspect by his military opponents, notably the Duke of Wellington. Like many another hardpressed and suspicious commander, the Duke didn't like correspondents. He wouldn't tolerate them in his camp. He didn't believe a free press was worth the risk of trusting them. It seemed impossible for him to weigh the advantages most of them would bring him against the disadvantages of a few irresponsibles. In 1809 he accused some English newspapers of having "accurately stated not only the regiments occupying a position, but the number of men fit for duty of which each regiment was composed; and this intelligence must have reached the enemy at the same time as it did me, at a moment at which it was most important that he should not receive it." 1 9 Added to the burden of such hostile news sources abroad, editors had to calculate the cost of providing their own correspondents, the

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uncertainty and expense of communications, and the inadequacy of their available personnel. It was, by and large, a risky business all around, for the editors as well as for Wellington. If anything, the uncertainty of receiving dispatches was the most annoying of all the hazards. Like the Fuggers, the Rothschilds, from the early nineteenth century, had maintained their private news bureau. T o them, news meant money, and they spared no effort to be first with it. Unlike the Fuggers, they shared their knowledge with nobody, either before or afterward. They moved fast and cared nothing for expense. News was a precious and perishable commodity, and they bought it wherever they could get it. Yet, they had no advantage rit Waterloo. The Rothschilds' exploit in beating everybody into London with the news, including the press and the government, was made possible less by their own private intelligence than by the miserable public communications. There may have been no correspondents at Waterloo, but at least one Dutch newspaper had no trouble publishing the news on June 19, 1815, the day after the battle. A Rothschild agent picked up a copy of the Dutch publication and quickly took off for England from Ostend, where a ship was waiting for him. At dawn next day, Nathan Rothschild met his man at Folkestone, scanned the paper, and raced to London for a historic coup in Consols just before the news of Napoleon's defeat broke. The Rothschilds made a fortune that day. They also exposed the weakness of the British press, which first published the Waterloo story four days after the battle. Although the French press after Waterloo was newly independent of Napoleon, it should not be supposed that these were days of hope for free journalism. On the contrary, there is abundant evidence that both the British and French were extremely busy on both sides of the Channel, buying up as many papers and writers as they could. That was also the way the system worked, unhappily. 17 While honest newspapers did exist, no paper and few writers, whatever their eminence, were safe from charges that they were being paid for their advocacy of a cause. In some ways, the estate of the journalist, particularly the few in the foreign service, was at its lowest point. An innovator in the collection of news during that period required steady nerves and a stout heart. Such a one was Charles Havas, who let neither

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the Rothschilds nor the tall towers of France overawe him. These were the conditions of the times. He would have to live with them. Havas' origins and early life are obscure. He was evidently of Hungarian extraction, had lived in Oporto, Portugal, and apparently came to France as a young man to seek his fortune.18 There is little doubt that he was in France toward the end of the Revolution and has been described as a translator employed by the Paris press and as a functionary who delivered news from Napoleon's headquarters to the Paris papers.19 Whatever his activity, he prospered. As early as 1825, he was touring Europe to set up a network of correspondents to serve his news bureau in Paris and hiring translators, couriers, and clerks. His first subscribers were financiers, businessmen, diplomats, and the like. He specialized in circulating stock exchange quotations and other news of interest to the financial world. There is every reason to believe that the Rothschilds and their rivals both took a lively interest in his work. But when he tried for his first newspaper clients in 1826, he was turned down. Four years later, when the Paris press was unable to report the July revolution which it had brought about, French journalism was paralyzed but Havas wasn't. The correspondents for the London papers gave prompt and accurate accounts of the second overturn of the French monarchy. The French journalists, too busy to do any writing, were at the barricades, and Alexandre Dumas pere was leading them. The shrewd Havas, however, conducted business as usual with the regime that was in power. Despite Louis Philippe's policy of repression, Havas did so well for him that the agency won a subsidy.20 While the Paris press again was muzzled, the London papers built up their foreign services. Each had its correspondents in the main capitals of Europe. All gained in independence, prestige, circulation, and advertising. The Times, the acknowledged leader, had men in Paris, Brussels, Hamburg, The Hague, Madrid, Lisbon, Constantinople, New York, and Washington. The Washington correspondent, active from the 1830s, was Matthew J. Davis, correspondent for the New York Courier and Enquirer, and biographer and friend of Aaron Burr. In New York, he wrote as "The Spy in Washington"; in London, he was "A Genovese Traveler." 2 1 Two examples may be cited here of the manifold workings of this developing foreign service in the British press.

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James Murray, who was to become the foreign director of the Times, startled the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1817 by publishing exclusively a secret memoir of the chief of the Russian delegation, Alexander Stourza, which scarcely did the cause of the Holy Alliance much good. It was a feat for which Murray was widely praised in Britain.22 Another correspondent, Charles Lewis Gruneisen of the London Morning Post, was captured in 1837 by the Christinos during the Carlist wars in Spain and dramatically saved from execution as a Carlist spy. Havas correspondents could not match this kind of work because they had neither the scope nor the necessary support. But the fledgling news service was developing slowly. By buying out another Parisian news bureau, the Correspondance Gamier, Havas was able to reorganize his own office. In 1835, he formally made his bow to the world as the Havas News Agency. He offered cheap service, quick translations, messages by semaphore telegraph, and service by carrier pigeon.23 It was too great an opportunity for the revitalized press of Paris to ignore. With the founding of the first cheap, mass circulation newspaper in the French capital, La Presse, which Emile de Girardin put out in 1836, Havas began its spectacular rise to power as a world-wide news agency. The second of the cheap dailies, Le Siecle, also bought his service. Their competitors could not hold out for very long, for they saw that Havas could provide them with the kind of intelligence abroad that was causing the London papers to flourish; moreover, they would have to pay only a fraction of the cost, since each bore a share of the total burden. True, the news might tend to become standardized. Obviously, there was more than a mere hint of government control over Havas' reporting of the news. But on the whole, the news agency scheme recommended itself. Within five years, Havas had a virtual monopoly on the distribution of foreign news in France, for few papers there were in a position to engage permanent, professional correspondents abroad. Moreover, by 1850, Havas had offices in London, Brussels, Vienna, the principal cities of Germany, and he was reaching out for coverage from the United States.24 The invention of the electric telegraph in 1844 by Samuel F. B. Morse, and its general introduction in Europe in 1848, made it much easier to put together a daily news report. But two other developments were almost as important to Havas as the scientific breakthrough in electronic communications. In 1849, Dr.

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Bemhard Wolff, an early employee of the Havas Agency, formed a German news service. The Berlin National-Zeitung, of which he was the director, became the nucleus of this new effort to reduce the cost of gathering foreign news and the basis of Havas' first continental alliance, insuring his expansion abroad. At home, in 1856, Havas purchased an advertising agency, Société Générale des Annonces, and promptly obtained agreement from nearly 200 provincial newspapers to give him a certain amount of advertising space on a preferred number of pages in return for his daily review of foreign and domestic news. He then sold the advertising space to clients, collecting his fees from them.25 He could not lose, whatever happened. Thus, Charles Havas met the challenge of the tall towers of France. Long after they had vanished, the organization he created to rival them would dominate the press of his country.

4. "WHO IS MR. REUTER?" A small, energetic young German and his pretty, fair-haired wife operated a pathetic little news bureau in their Paris living room in 1849. They translated pieces from the French papers, copied them into German, and offered them to a slender list of provincial papers in Germany. It was a hand-to-mouth business. As an eyewitness recalled the dilapidated "office," its curtains were "damp and mouldering, the fireplace filled with remnants of hastily eaten meals, ashes, half-burnt pieces of wood and pieces of paper; a cracked mirror over the damaged, marblecovered fireplace; cobwebs on the plaster mouldings on the ceiling, a rocky table under which a scarred dog used to sit with one leg perpetually out of action; and a dark background of heaps of paper and a press." 26 Such were the beginnings of Paul Julius Reuter, a political refugee from his homeland, who was to see the news agency bearing his name develop into a symbol of British prestige exceeded only by the Crown and the Union Jack.27 He was then 31 years old, and for four years had been married to the daughter of a Berlin banker. However, his promising career as the co-proprietor of a Berlin book shop had been undermined by his rashness in distributing radical political pamphlets. After the revolutionary upsurge of 1848, he had left Germany, abandoning his bookstore business to his partner, and joined the growing group

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of political émigrés in Paris. Like his fellow-countryman, Dr. Bemhard Wolff, who had preceded him, he had served briefly as a translator for Charles Havas. Like Wolff also, he had soon broken away to try to form his own news agency. Reuter's Paris effort failed after a few months. In the summer of 1849, he was a wanderer again, but, ever hopeful, he watched for a chance to set up his news service. He found it when the Prussian State Telegraph was opened between Berlin and Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) on October 1, 1849. The Wolff Bureau snapped up the Berlin end of the line, blocking off Reuter, but he opened up in Aachen with a small list of merchants and bankers as clients for his financial service. He used the mail trains to help him exchange his wire information at Aachen for news of the markets at Paris, Brussels, and Cologne. In the spring of 1850, when the French opened a government telegraph line between Paris and Brussels, he bridged the remaining hundred miles between Brussels and Aachen by using carrier pigeons. They could beat the mail train by as much as seven hours, a thumping advantage for even a fledgling wire service. For a few months, Reuter couldn't be beaten. But before the year was out, the telegraphic gap was closed, Berlin and Paris were linked by wire, and Reuter was out of business again. The ebullient Julius and his wife, thriftily safeguarding their slender means, set out for London and reopened their financial service in two rooms near the Stock Exchange with an office boy as their sole employee. Thus, Reuter's Telegram Company began business, but not a single newspaper would have anything to do with it. They had their own correspondents abroad and couldn't understand how Reuter could possibly help them. In their conservatism, they had neither the wit nor the vision at first to see that the laying of the first successful cable between Dover and Calais on November 13, 1851, would revolutionize communications between England and Europe. Reuter capitalized on the obtuseness of the press. If Fleet Street did not appreciate the value of time in getting the news, the gentlemen of finance made up for it. They vividly remembered the Rothschild coup with the news of Waterloo. No wonder the Stock Exchange in London entered into one of the first agreements with Julius Reuter for news of the Continental markets. Bankers and brokers followed. Within a year, virtually every leading commercial center in Europe looked to Reuter as

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their London agent. And he lined up agents to serve him as far away as the Black Sea, with a colorful Viennese émigré, Sigismund Englaender, as his chief agent in Europe. All this didn't impress the Times. Mowbray Morris, the Tlmes's manager, thought the Channel cable "a great bore." It was with considerable relish that the Reuters historian, Graham Storey, reported that the initial reaction of The Thunderer to its cable competition was to move its special Channel dispatch steamer from its terminus at Boulogne to Calais. However, James Grant, editor of the Morning Advertiser, wasn't so stuffy. In 1858, he was the first to accept a proposal by Reuter for a two-week free trial of the service and, if it proved satisfactory, he agreed to buy it for £30 a month. Other newspapers in London then agreed to the same proposal, except for the Times. It saved some of them up to £100 a year over their previous arrangements. Without further ado, the first newspaper telegram for general use was put out on October 8, 1858, from "Mr. Reuter's Office" slugged "Electric News." It read as follows: Berlin, October 8th, 4.7 PM. The official Prussian Correspondence announces that the King recognizing the necessity has charged the Prince of Prussia to act as regent with full powers, according to his own views, until the reestablishment of his [the King's] health. The necessary publications of this resolution is expected. The Chambers will probably be convoked on the 20th inst. More of these brief dispatches came pouring in to the London newspapers, frequently ahead of the specials on the Continent, and after six weeks even the Times signed up. On February 7, 1859, Reuter scored his first great beat. He asked for an advance on a speech which Napoleon III had planned to deliver that day before the French legislative chamber—a declaration that Europe awaited with apprehension because of the rumors that France would help Cavour expel the Austrians from Italy. The publicity-conscious French Emperor agreed, but bound the Reuters agent in Paris not to begin filing over the land lines and Channel cable until he had begun speaking—the first known instance of a familiar journalistic procedure. Accordingly, as soon as Napoleon uttered his first words, the sealed envelope was opened in the Reuters Paris office. Since an hour's time had been purchased exclusively in

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advance, tying up the Channel cable, Reuters was able to begin filing at once. Within an hour, Reuters translators in London produced an English text. Within two hours, special editions of the London papers were on the streets carrying Napoleon's warning to Austria. The Times and its great professional foreign correspondent, William Howard Russell, had astonished the world with their coverage of the Crimean War. With the war clouds gathering over Italy, Reuters* knew it was in for a stern test of its efficiency. Instead of trying to rival the glamorous specials from London, Paris, and even New York, the British news agency stuck to its system of brief bulletins. But since it had correspondents at the French, Sardinian, and Austrian headquarters, it was able to provide an impartial blanket coverage that was beyond the power of the specials. Julius Reuter met the test, giving luster to his name and causing the man-in-the-street in London to wonder what manner of man was signing so many dispatches in the newspapers. On all sides, the question arose, "Who is Mr. Reuter?" As Kent Cooper phrased a knowing reply nearly a century later: "One idea that Reuter conceived made his name famous. That was that all newspapers which printed his telegrams had to agree to carry his name at the end of each published message. This accomplished two things: It made the name famous and it let the public know who was responsible for the information in the message. In other words, Reuter was the first individual to let the public know 'who said so' as respects the origin of news dispatches. Englishmen saw the name in their newspapers, wondered, 'Who is Mr. Reuter?'; also, they wondered how to pronounce the name." 2 8 The measure of the fame that had come to the humble German bookseller in a decade was the jingle, published anonymously in the St. James

Gazette at the time:89

In Praise of Reuter

I sing of one no Pow'r has trounced, Whose place in every strife is neuter, Whose name is sometimes mispronounced As Reuter. * The agency dropped the possessive, calling itself simply Reuters. The style is followed here. When a possessive is used, it is Julius Reuter's.

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How oft, as through the news we go, When breakfast leaves an hour to loiter, We quite forget the thanks we owe To Reuter. His web around the globe is spun, He is, indeed, the world's exploiter: 'Neath ocean, e'en, the whispers run Of Reuter. Who half so well resolves a doubt? When tact is needed, who adroiter? I trow Earth could not spin without Its Reuter. Let praise arise in every land To Thee, the student's guide and tutor: I bless thee here as Reuter and As "Rooter." But for all his new-found prestige, Julius Reuter—like the first John Walter—was finding his foreign service extremely expensive. Cable tolls were considerably more costly than pigeon feed, for one thing; for another, with his necessarily rising fees his clients expected greatly expanded coverage. He was no longer charging £30 a month. In ten years, his fee for his London morning paper clients had gone to £1,000 a year and he still wasn't growing rich on it.30 Across the Channel, Havas was expanding steadily and doing much better, financially, as a kind of semi-official organ of the State. From its successful venture into advertising and its loose alliance with Wolff in Germany, it reached an agreement with Count Cavour's man, the Trieste journalist, Guglielmo Stefani, to supply the new Stefani Agency with foreign news. From its beginning in 1853, Stefani had also been servicing Havas with Italian news, just as Wolff had been doing in Germany. This seemed eminently sensible to Reuter. By 1856, he had entered into an agreement to exchange financial news with Havas and Wolff, which of course included their affiliates as well. 31 It was another move toward an eventual world cartel, which was growing on these entrepreneurs out of necessity and self-interest. Obviously, the British and French governments also were keenly interested in the dominating

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force which their respective national agencies were exerting on the global news patterns. The rapid extension of the cable meanwhile was broadening the horizon of the news agencies, particularly Reuters. Within seven years after the opening of the link across the English Channel in 1851, the cable companies had gone as far as Africa and the Middle East and were pushing on toward India. Dramatically, on the night of August 17, 1858, a message was delivered to President James Buchanan at the White House in Washington that had come over Cyrus W . Field's Atlantic Cable that day direct from Queen Victoria. Unhappily, the cable went dead the next day and it was eight years before the cable ship, the Great Eastern, was able to reestablish the Atlantic connection on a permanent basis. However, to the entrepreneurs in the news agency business, it was evident that they were on the threshold of the age of global electronic communications. Reuter moved ahead aggressively. In his favor was Parliament's gradual removal between 1836 and 1861 of the so-called "taxes on knowledge." With the end of the stamp levies on copies of newspapers, paper for printing, and on advertisements, the circulation of the British press had increased. As a further stimulant to the demand for news, penny papers had been founded in London at mid-century and the halfpenny papers were to follow in less than a generation, thus matching the cheap press that was flourishing in France. But now, quite unexpectedly, Reuter found that the demand for foreign news was producing rivalry from a strange source—the telegraph and cable companies which were shortsightedly trying to compete with their own clients. What Reuter did about it provided one of the most ingenious and colorful modes of news communication of the pre-cable era. He had sent James MacLean, an able and experienced professional, to the United States on the eve of the Civil War to serve as his special correspondent and forward dispatches regularly. MacLean worked the mail boats out of New York harbor, putting his dispatches aboard in a wooden canister. Spurred by the eagerness of the British public for war news, both Reuters and the Times of London hired small ships to intercept the mail vessels off Southampton, take off the canisters in nets at the end of long wooden poles, and race to shore. From Southampton, the messages were put on the land telegraph wires to London. However, Reuter found that he was being beaten regularly by several

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hours. He learned that the Telegraphic Despatch Company was intercepting American mail steamers at Roche's Point off Queenstown (Cobh), Ireland, and telegraphing to London via Cork and the Irish cable. Secretly, he built a telegraph line with government permission from Cork to Crookhaven sixty miles away, on the extreme southwestern tip of Ireland. Then, in his own tender, he had his men take MacLean's canisters off the American mail ships, beating everybody into London with the latest American news by at least eight hours.32 Through this system and MacLean's enterprise in hiring a tug to catch an outgoing mail ship as it was steaming down the bay from New York, Reuters led by two days in putting out for London and the Continent the news of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on April 14,1865. 33 No one had to ask now, "Who is Mr. Reuter?" He was the head of the greatest news agency in the world.

5. THE SATANIC SCOT A comfortable Yankee, turned newspaper publisher in Charleston, S.C., idly asked in a New York grog shop during the winter of 1822-23 for someone to help him with his errands. A spindly, squint-eyed Scotsman, newly arrived in New York from Boston, happened to be in the tavern and volunteered. In this manner Aaron Smith Wellington, of the Charleston Courier, picked up a 28-year-old apprentice at $5 a week. His name was James Gordon Bennett. Willington liked the way Bennett hustled around, New York, gathering estimates for printing supplies and the like. He also appreciated that his new man had a decent education, having studied for the priesthood in Scotland and mastered both Latin and French in the process. He had left the seminary and the priestly life, however, to emigrate to America because of what he had read in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. But after a succession of jobs—teaching, clerking, and finally proofreading in Boston—he'd landed in New York well-nigh penniless. Willington's chance offer was his first break. He was determined to make the most of it. Early in 1823, he became a translator, occasional contributor, and odd-job man in the editorial room of the Charleston Courier, the beginning of his career as a journalist.34

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The Courier was one of the best papers in the United States at the time and Willington was one of the most enterprising publishers. He had made it a practice to row out to meet incoming ships, since packets from Cadiz, Spain, via Havana frequently brought in French, Spanish, and Italian newspapers with intelligence far ahead of the English journals that reached Boston and New York. As Willington's translator, Bennett was in a good position to see the fruits of the newsboat enterprise. Through his hastily acquired Spanish, based on his grounding in Latin, he apparently was able to provide the Courier with English translations of the reports of Latin American revolutions. The Courier pioneered in the publication of Latin American news in the United States, something which also made a deep impression on the fledgling journalist. In his later years, Bennett was to exceed his mentor both in his development of the newsboat idea and his interest in news from Latin America.* Although Bennett remained with Willington only ten months, his apprenticeship did much to mold him as a journalist. He first learned here the importance of foreign news to the cosmopolitan population of a seaport, something he never forgot. He also absorbed some of the driving force of the successful journalist and the mass appeal of simple but colorful writing. All this he took back with him to New York, no longer the apprentice, but a journeyman worthy of his hire. For twelve years he worked at various jobs on the intensely partisan journals of the day in New York, but only began emerging from obscurity when he turned to writing gossip as the Washington correspondent of the New York Courier and Enquirer. Three times during the period of the emerging penny paper he tried to found his own and * Willington, of course, had not been the first to meet incoming ships to get the jump on the news. That had been done in the United States as early as 1784 by Major Benjamin Russell, founder of the Massachusetts Centinel (as the title Sentinel was then spelled), and later by Harry Blake of the New England Palladium. Moreover, in pursuing a service first begun by Edward Lloyd in London for his coffee house trade in the seventeenth century, Samuel Topliff in Boston had started in 1811 to keep a newsbook in the Exchange Coffee House for his customers. Willington, having come from Massachusetts, doubtless knew how Topliff had prospered by rowing out to meet the mail ships in order to keep his patrons abreast of the news and how his work had been used by the press in New England. Willington applied the same idea to his newspaper.

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three times he failed. But with $500 and the trust of a printing firm, he finally began the New York Morning Herald on May 6, 1835. His editorial office was a basement room, his desk a plank resting on two barrels. He wrote everything in the paper himself and also took in advertisements to help pay for his four-page, four-column publication.88 It was a day of pony expresses that rushed the news in relays from Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington to New York, of clipper ships that raced out to sea as newsboats to intercept the incoming mails, and of carrier pigeons to insure quick transmission of bulletins. At the beginning, Bennett and his Herald had all they could do to stay alive and left these luxuries to their competitors.* But after his successful introduction of sensational murder-case coverage in the Ellen Jewett story, the slaying of a beautiful prostitute for which a wealthy admirer was tried and acquitted, the editor of the Herald felt that he was established. He raised his price to two cents a copy and put out "the most sensational, salacious, and sardonic newspaper in the whole world." 36 He piled on circulation, reaching 20,000 copies a day, and his income soared. He acquired his own newsboat, independent of the other papers; then, with the same diligence he had shown in exploiting domestic news, he went after news of foreign affairs. He had to be first in everything. On April 23, 1838, the British steamships Sirius and Great Western, the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean, reached New York harbor within a few hours of each other. Bennett was the first to exploit the steamship as a source of faster trans-Atlantic communication of foreign news. He sailed on the return trip of the Sirius on May 1, 1838, and reached Falmouth in eighteen days. It was an important trip for Bennett. With other leading foreign journalists, he witnessed the coronation of Queen Victoria and reported it in the Herald, conferred with the leading political and literary figures of the day, visited his home in Scotland, and crossed the Channel to inspect Paris. He wrote at length of his experiences, drawing a lively picture of the Old World for his readers. Foreign letters had been few and far between in the American press at that time. Nathaniel Parker Willis, the essayist, had corresponded for the New York Mirror and the initials O.P.Q. had been signed to * The Sun had a pigeon cote on its roof. As late as the 1930s, the New York Journal-American also had one for ship news and sports pictures.

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foreign letters in the New York Daily Advertiser. There had been such material, as well, in the National Gazette, the Statesman, and a scattering of other papers, but none in the United States had organized the kind of systematic foreign correspondence that appeared in the Times, the Morning Post, and the other great papers of London. Bennett, having pioneered in publicizing both scandal and financial news, now set up the first foreign staff to serve a single American newspaper. He engaged six correspondents in the main centers of Europe with Dr. Dionysius Lardner, a learned Irishman and the editor of the Cabinet Encyclopaedia, as his Paris correspondent.37 Others were in London, Glasgow, Berlin, Brussels, and Rome. Upon his return to the United States, Bennett expanded his chain of specials to Mexico and the Republic of Texas, never doubting that they would soon have exciting stories to tell, and also to Canada, where an abortive rebellion had just been snuffed out. He also saw to it that his foreign material was syndicated free to smaller American papers outside his main circulation area, thereby gaining wide reprints with credit to the Herald and stimulating a flow of news from these papers to New York. It was, in effect, a news agency in itself, and it helped to make the Herald the best-known paper in the United States as well as a leader overseas.38 Nor did Bennett neglect Washington in his broadening of the news reports of the day. With the pride of a veteran Washington correspondent, and perhaps the first of a long line of Washington columnists, he created his own bureau there in 1841 with Robert Sutton, a shorthand man, in charge. In all these moves, Bennett was inner directed and utterly independent. To him, the Herald was a highly personal possession, to do with as he wished. While he could write in grandiloquent terms about the duty of an editor to serve the people, and no other interest, there is little evidence to show that he seriously considered his public responsibilities. Quite truthfully, when the other major papers in New York formed a combine against him in a "moral war," he called attention to his charities which cost him $2,500 of "well earned . . . current money" in two years. He thought that a sufficient answer to assaults on his moral fiber. To those who accused him of having been a peddler in his youth, he replied, "I am, and have been, a peddler. . . . This, I admit. From my youth up I have been a peddler, not of tapes and laces, but of thoughts, feelings, lofty principles, and intellectual truths."

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Whatever Bennett did, said, and wrote reflected these personal preoccupations. When he decided in 1840 that the time had come for him to marry and selected a young Irish music teacher as his bride, he characteristically announced his decision in his newspaper under a headline, "Caught at Last." He saluted the advent of his great rival, Horace Greeley, who began editing the New York Tribune in 1841, by writing that Greeley was "oppressed with a moral nightmare." Nor was Bennett alone in these personal extravagances. In lofty disregard of the amenities, he and his rivals printed the most violent abuse of each other in almost every issue of their papers.39 It was a vigorous exercise of the freedom of the press, but one totally without responsibility. Henry J. Raymond of the New York Times, paying back Bennett for abuse over circulation figures of their respective papers, printed a cartoon in 1861 showing the Scot in kilts, two horns on his head, blowing up a bagpipe labeled the Herald. The caption: "Brother Bennett [Profanely Styled 'The Satanic'] Inflating His Weil-Known FirstClass, A No. 1 Wind-bag, Herald." 40 Bennett did not let abuse or opposition deter him from building up the Herald, however. He profited by every invention, seizing on it with glad cries that it would be the salvation of mankind. He was always a magnificent promoter. Soon after telegraph lines were strung aloft, he used them to beat the New York press with Henry Clay's speech on the Mexican War, delivered at Lexington, Ky., in 1846. The text was rushed by pony express to Cincinnati and put on the wire there to New York. As for the battlefront coverage of the Mexican War, the first conflict to be given extensive reporting by American newspapers, Bennett missed the outstanding correspondence of George Wilkins Kendall, co-publisher of the New Orleans Picayune.* The New York Sun and the Charleston Courier were the leaders of a syndicate that used Kendall's coverage, a landmark in professional foreign correspondence. Instead, Bennett went into a rival combination formed by the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and the New Orleans Crescent. To get the war dispatches north, most of them were sent by ship from Vera Cruz to New Orleans, across Mississippi and Alabama by horse express, and from there northward by train to the nearest point in the telegraph system, usually Richmond, Va. 4 1 One reason why the Herald may not have published war dispatches * Named after a small coin worth about six cents, the price of the paper.

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of the highest available quality, even if it was frequently ahead on the news, was the absence of Bennett, who with his wife visited Europe during part of the conflict. Both sent European letters to the Herald, touching on everything from politics to fashions, from manners to the state of the press. Bennett's foreign letters also described the lively Lola Montez and her affair with the infatuated King of Bavaria, the unrest of Europe on the eve of the risings of 1848, financial conditions in London, the state of Scotland, and many another topic that interested him. But most important of all, the penniless Scot, who had been a $5-a-week translator in Charleston a quarter-century before, was honored by being presented at the court of Louis Philippe as the most powerful publisher in America. Thriftily, he hired a court dress outfit and sword for thirty francs to salute that splendid occasion. On his return to the United States, Bennett was at the height of his authority as a journalist. His foreign service was able to forecast accurately the removal of Louis Philippe, which was published in the Herald a week before receipt of the news that he had been deposed in the February Revolution of 1848. The Herald?s California correspondent, Thomas D. Larkin, forwarded a few samples of ore to New York that same year. When assayed, it proved to be gold of the finest quality then available. Upon publication of the news, the gold rush to California began in earnest. Not long afterward, Bennett suggested that an American mission should be sent to open up Japan, resulting in the expedition led by Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry. It must have been galling to the Satanic Scot when he read the exclusive dispatches of Bayard Taylor, the correspondent who joined Perry in Hong Kong, in Greeley's New York Tribune. But even a James Gordon Bennett couldn't think of everything.42 While Bennett's Herald could not approach the Times of London in suavity and style, nor hope to match the authority of its pronouncements, it could and did exceed that great newspaper in asserting its complete independence of any commercial or governmental interest. When Robert J. Walker of Mississippi, Secretary of the Treasury in the Polk administration, sent some advertising to the Herald in the form of patronage, Bennett fired back the following editorial: "Mr. Walker, Secretary of the Treasury, has published a long advertisement from his department in the Washington Union, giving

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directions to a number of newspapers to copy it, and send their bills for payment to Washington. Among the papers to whom these directions are addressed is the New York Herald. We thank Mr. Walker for his kind intentions in offering us a little Treasury pap, but we beg leave to decline the dose. It is not worth our while to do any of the advertising of the Treasury Department, or any other department of the government, and we now, once and for all, declare publicly that we will have nothing to do with any printing or advertising from the departments." Personal journalism had paid off. For all the faults of its publisher, and for all its drawbacks, the New York Herald was the most independent newspaper in the world in those days. George Washington Bungay, an artist and writer, gave this estimate of Bennett's status five years later: "Whether he be more notorious than popular, I will not assume the province of determining, but I will hazard the remark that the people of the United States would go farther and give more to see him than they would to see the President or any member of the United States Senate." 43 6. T H E P I G E O N F A N C I E R O F N O V A S C O T I A In the days just before the telegraph and cable began carrying the news, a westbound Cunard steamer put in at Halifax, N.S., with orders to prevent a pesky New Englander from flying his pigeons with dispatches for the American papers. As soon as the young pigeon fancier came aboard, therefore, his birds were taken away from him. But, with Yankee shrewdness, he had stowed one away in his overcoat pocket as insurance against just such a contingency. After making a digest of the important items in the incoming European correspondence, and fastening the message to the bird's leg, the bold young man let the pigeon loose close to the skipper's head. The startled skipper ran for his rifle, the ship at the time being more than a hundred miles from Boston, but before he could take a shot the bird was a mile away. The message got through in good order. That was the way Daniel H. Craig, a one-time printer's devil in his native New Hampshire, kept his clients supplied. From about 1837 on, he served a steadily growing list of newspapers in Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. He would fly the bulletins

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out of Halifax or Boston or from the deck of a steamer, as circumstances dictated. Sometimes, he would intercept mail ships at sea by going out in a small boat. But always, he followed up his bulletins by dispatching the details overland on a pony express to the nearest railhead. It was a deluxe foreign news service, the fastest thing of its day in the United States. And while Craig had many distinguished clients, among them the Baltimore Sun and the Philadelphia Public Ledger, it was James Gordon Bennett and the New York Herald who really paid the freight. Bennett would pay Craig $500 for each hour he received major foreign news ahead of his local rivals. No wonder the disgruntled rival papers, particularly in New York and Boston, tried to block Craig at every turn and enlisted the assistance of the steamship line to do it. At one time, they tried shooting down the birds. At another, they hired their own express steamer to bring the news from Halifax, but Craig managed to get aboard somehow with two birds and released them well before the ship arrived in Boston. He was tough and capable, and he was seldom beaten at this exhilarating game. Craig was the lineal successor to Major Russell, Samuel Topliff, and Harry Blake, who had intercepted the mail ships off Boston by rowboat earlier in the century, and Aaron Smith Willington, who had done the same thing off Charleston, S.C. The black-browed, square-jawed New Hampshireman had circumvented the visual telegraph on Long Island, which had signaled crude messages by dropping large black balls from a 92-foot tower at the approach of a ship.44 He had also rendered useless the semaphore telegraph, patterned after the French device invented by Claude Chappe, which ran from Sandy Hook to New York and alerted news boats to an approaching mail ship.45 His only real rivals were the ship-and-rail combinations put together by various newspapers to bring news over long distances. During the Mexican War, the competition for news and the rivalry between the papers along the eastern seaboard, particularly New York, reached such a peak that the more thoughtful publishers decided something had to be done to keep expenses and risk-taking within reasonable bounds. It was at this period that David Hale, the gaunt and gentle publisher of the New York Journal of Commerce, came to the Herald office and knocked at James Gordon Bennett's door. He represented

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Wall Street journalism, the blanket sheets that affected to despise the cheap press of which Bennett then was the leader. "I have called to talk about news with you," Hale said. "Have you any objection?" "None," Bennett said. "Am always pleased to talk on that subject." "We propose to join the Herald in getting news," Hale went on. "Have you any objection to that?" They began talking then about a greater utilization of the newly established telegraph system, of newspaper enterprise generally, the rails, pony expresses, and the news boats. It was the first genuine approach that had been made to Bennett for cooperative newsgathering.46 Up to that time, with the exception of some early and temporary accommodations in the harbor news boat combine, the others had thought they could work by themselves and beat Bennett. He had shown them that it couldn't be done. Not long afterward—and the precise date of the meeting has not been fixed but it was certainly in the general period toward the end of the Mexican War—there was, in the words of Frederic Hudson, a "great Congress of the Republic of News." The representatives of the Herald, Sun, Express, Journal of Commerce, Courier and Enquirer and the Tribune met at the office of the Sun and formed two cooperative newsgathering agencies in New York. The first was the Harbor News Association, in which pool reporters would gather news from incoming ships for the benefit of all. The second, a loose mutual alliance which wasn't even incorporated, was called the New York Associated Press. It was the first of a series of regional AP organizations from which the great cooperative global agency of today evolved and dated its effectiveness from 184s.47 Far to the north, in Halifax, the independent Craig also saw that the telegraph would revolutionize his business. By 1848, the rapidly lengthening wire running north from Boston had reached St. John, N.B. Just as Julius Reuter's pigeon express had been put out of business by the completion of the Paris-Berlin telegraph, Craig now realized that he would be able to use his pigeons only if he ventured far out to sea to meet incoming mail steamers off Halifax and fly his birds to the terminus of the telegraph. He sharply revised his methods, running a horse express 150 miles from Halifax to Digby, N.S., and racing in

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a steamer for 50 miles across the Bay of Fundy to St. John and the telegraph wire. When the New York AP set up its organization in 1848 and 1849, therefore, the indomitable Dan Craig became its first foreign agent at Halifax, working under the first general agent in New York, Dr. Alexander Jones. With them, as a pioneer in cooperative newsgathering in America, came "Father" Gobright, who sent news to the New York papers from Washington, D.C. There was no dramatic change in news collection in America, however, any more than there had been in London or in the great European capitals. The Washington specials came through to the New York papers in volume despite "Father" Gobright's telegraphic bulletins. In fact, the independent telegraph reporters of the day also remained in business for some time to come. Dr. Jones, therefore, had no alternative. He had to skeletonize the news for the New York AP and he even invented a "news code" to save money on tolls. As for foreign news, it was clear to both Jones and Craig that they would have to keep it short —like the pigeon service bulletins. Their sources remained what they had been for seventy-odd years—the foreign papers, a few fragmentary dispatches now and then from poorly paid foreign stringers, and that most familiar and least reliable of all, the returning traveler. When Craig began working for the New York AP in Canada, there is no evidence to indicate that his sources were any better. What he did was to wait in Halifax for a signal gun or a signal flag announcing that a trans-Atlantic mail steamer was approaching. Then he would take off in a fast pilot boat. The mail ship would toss his material overboard in a watertight tin canister with a flag affixed so it could be seen for some distance. He would pick it up, scan the report that had been prepared for him in Liverpool or Galway, hurry to St. John, N.B., the news terminus, and get it on the wire. If he had advance knowledge that big news was expected, he would grab the wire in the more modem tradition, hold it open by having the long-suffering operator file from the Bible, and cut in with his report when it was ready.48 Within a short time after the founding of the New York AP, it was serving papers in Philadelphia and Baltimore. By 1850, because of Craig's operations which by that time had extended to St. John's, Newfoundland, Dr. Jones was offering his foreign news to any paper that

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wanted it on equitable terms. From a mere local organization, the New York AP was rapidly going national.49 Dr. Jones, coming to the organization from the New York Journal of Commerce, did a modest job. His salary was $20 a week but he also continued his medical practice, prescribing for colds and broken bones when he wasn't handling Craig's bulletins. Office expense in New York was less than $50 a week exclusive of rent, which was about $500 a year. Dr. Jones's greatest expense was for telegraph tolls, most of it to bring in foreign news, which amounted to $25,000 to $30,000 a year at the outset.50 However, the whole business made him unhappy. He quit on May 19, 1851, to go to the Herald and the hard-bitten Craig succeeded him. Another tested competitor, William Hunter, took over Craig's post in Halifax. Once Dan Craig took over in New York, it was evident that a new and vital force was at work. He spent money for news, insisted on hardboiled reporting methods, and sought to enforce a rule that no member paper could break a major story ahead of his wire service. However, the powerful papers found ways of getting around that and used the New York AP as a backup service. The smaller and weaker papers did as they were told, for awhile, anyway. Craig won reduced rate agreements with the Western Union Telegraph Company, forced his opposition to the wall, and spread his service all over the nation. For all practical purposes, he soon had a virtual American monopoly on foreign news distribution which was as effective as Reuters in Britain, Havas in France, and Wolff in Germany. Except for the few great papers that had their own foreign services, the American press found it didn't pay to buck Dan Craig. Although he was a salaried employee, subject to the will of the seven publishers who ran the New York AP, Craig tolerated neither dissent nor opposition. By 1855 the annual expenditures of his office reached $40,000 to $50,000 a year.51 His annual pay was $3,000 and his key men received up to $35 a week (but had to pay their own expenses).62 Craig made progress in developing his domestic report, particularly from Washington. But foreign news remained the great problem. For all his efforts, it was generally neither timely nor adequate because the trans-Atlantic steamers were slow. He wasn't satisfied to do what everybody else was doing. Restlessly he sought better ways. In 1859, he made

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the New York AP a kind of junior partner in the global news pact of Reuters, Havas, and Wolff. 53 It did him little good, for in 1862, his Midwestern members revolted and formed the Western Associated Press under the leadership of Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune. Four years later, Craig was fired when it was learned that he was planning to set up his own service. The Western AP promptly hired him, but only for a year. When the warring publishers patched up an agreement in 1867, Craig was fired again—this time for good. He had attempted to force all publishers into an American monopoly.64 James W. Simonton, a former Washington correspondent for the New York Times, had succeeded Craig as the New York AP director and now moved quickly to regain lost ground. He hired another former Times man, Alexander Wilson, as the first staff member to be stationed abroad permanently and sent him to London to preside over an AP office there. Wilson's first big story was the victory of James Gordon Bennett Jr. in the $60,000 stake race of his yacht, Henrietta, against two rivals across the Atlantic. Even more important, he was the ambassador to the great foreign agencies on which the New York AP had to depend for the bulk of its foreign report. The upshot of the maneuvering was the creation of the "Four Power" news cartel of 1870 in which Reuters, Havas, Wolff, and the New York AP divided up the world into zones. Within their respective zones, each had the right to gather and distribute news exclusively. Reuters was given the British Empire, Turkey, India, and the Far East; Havas got France, Switzerland, Italy, the Iberian peninsula, Central and South America and, in association with Reuters, Egypt; Wolff gained Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, Russia, the Balkans, and the Netherlands. The New York AP was restricted to the United States, as were all its affiliated regional organizations.58 That compact, which was to last half a century, was to have a profound effect on the shaping of world opinion and a decisive influence on the journalism of the twentieth century. As Kent Cooper wrote later: "In precluding the AP from disseminating news abroad, Reuters and Havas served three purposes: 1) They kept out AP competition; 2) They were free to present American news disparagingly to the United States if they presented it at all; 3) they could present news of their own countries most favorably and without it being contradicted. Their own countries were always glorified. This was done by reporting great

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advances at home in English and French civilizations, the benefit of which would, of course, be bestowed on the world. Figuratively speaking, in the United States, according to Reuters and Havas, it wasn't safe to travel on account of the Indians." 86 Craig, the irascible pigeon fancier of Nova Scotia, made two mistakes in building the first cooperatively owned news service in the world. He overestimated his own power, which was fatal to his career; even worse, he underestimated the power of his foreign competitors, which well-nigh strangled the cooperative news movement. It was many years before the balance was righted. Meanwhile, every emerging small national news agency was drawn inevitably into the orbit of one of the giants that controlled the movement of world news. 7. T H E E M E R G I N G P A T T E R N Before the end of the nineteenth century, therefore, three major forces were contending for control of the world's flow of news. Of these, the greatest was governmental authority with its legal and economic power over communications, news sources, and the press. It was not seriously challenged anywhere for a sustained period, and with any degree of success, except in Britain and the United States. During the period of British world dominance, the British press manifestly was by far the most important. However, only a few great independent British and American papers, nourished by the mercantile class which found it profitable to advertise, were able to create their own foreign services and lay the basis for a corps of professional foreign correspondents. Of these the leaders were the Times in London, a model for the British press in its authority and its methods, and the New York Herald in the United States, which conducted a frantic scramble for the news almost entirely out of self-interest. Elsewhere, the independent papers were, like the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, small and well-nigh powerless. The development of the news agency system, with all its imperfections, covered the less fortunate and by far the largest area of the world press. Ruled by power-conscious entrepreneurs in Britain and Europe, who invariably kept one eye on the interests of their governments, and by anarchic rival groups of publishers in the United States, the agencies were severely limited to terse factual announcements. The pattern was far from ideal; but then, it was far from an ideal

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world and the makers and movers of world news reflected its weaknesses far more than its strength. News was handled as if it were a commodity instead of a public trust. Unhappily, there was often little to choose between the bureaucrats of governments, the barons who made personal fiefs out of news agencies, and the often whimsical autocrats of the independent newspapers. It was natural for them, whether they were rulers or proprietors or both, to act in the tradition of power politics, to treat their employees like chattels, to bicker and bargain over news as if it were so much cheese to be sold at the highest price. It was an era when both public morality and private virtue were in short supply, particularly in journalism. But where they were able to exist, for however short a time, their influence was profound.

II: The Professionals 1. THE OLD BREED—AND THE NEW Almost unnoticed beneath the disorderly turmoil of world events, a few hardy professional foreign correspondents began molding a new journalistic tradition in the middle of the nineteenth century. A mere handful of public-spirited editors and publishers supported them, even though they were troublesome. By their very nature, they had to be. In the main, they worked for independent newspapers outside their own countries on roving assignments, exercised a large amount of freedom, seemingly spent more money than was necessary, and tried diligently to cover the news rather than comment on what they thought had happened. Moreover, not all of them were on glamour assignments —war, revolutions, and milder civic disturbances. Some conceived it to be their duty, as well, to cover the news that contributed to peace and progress. This new breed was a considerable departure from the old—the tipsters, letter-writers, travelers, visiting dignitaries, and other odd types who incidentally fancied themselves as foreign correspondents. They also seemed, within the limits of their capabilities, to be trying to get away from some of the less attractive journalistic practices of their day although nobody talked of morals or highfalutin codes. Certainly, there was room for improvement. Some who worked as foreign correspondents had no scruples about serving their papers and their trustful publics while collecting "subsidies" from either governments or private individuals. The more famous scriveners of their time went beyond that, making it their primary business to originate propaganda for their causes; the great Italian patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini, for one; the New York Tribune's London special, Karl Marx, for another. Like the genteel Henry Crabb Robinson of the Times of London, the average foreign special was more inclined to let the news come

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to him instead of energetically seeking it out. And like Alexandre Dumas pere in 1830, they conceived it to be almost a necessity for a journalist to use his art for purposes of personal exploitation. While these grievous failings could not be eliminated overnight or even in the following century, human nature being what it is, the new professionals, however young and inexperienced, began to develop certain advantages over the older and more famous figures whose main interests lay in other fields. Out of the intermingling of the two, perplexing though it often was, a tradition of conscience began to emerge for future generations to ponder, to admire, to emulate.

2. THE EXILE In the lively and invigorating Paris of 1831, the Allgemetne Zeitung of Augsburg engaged one of the strangest and most talented of all the special correspondents who have traversed the boulevards. A sympathetic observer left this memoir of him: "Opposite the Pavilion Marsan, I saw a little blond man leaning on the rampart of the quay and holding his dripping hat in his hand while he watched the passersby in the storm. The clouds parted; a ray of sunlight fell on his flowing hair, and illumined his highly distinctive face. . . . He kept on raptly observing the people." The Byronic figure was Heinrich Heine, Germany's greatest lyric poet. Although he was an eternal rebel, cloaking himself in the deep purple of romance, he worked nevertheless at his journalistic chores in the most significant years of his life in exile.1 His was no mere potboiling experience, although it was need that made him a journalist, not pride of profession; whenever he wrote, he usually had something to say. Ferdinand Hiller, a musician who once saw him at work over an article, seemed surprised by the intensity of his labor. "There was scarcely a line that had not been crossed out and another substituted," Hiller wrote. "He saw my astonishment and said ironically, 'And then they talk of inspiration, exaltation and the like! I work like a goldsmith when he finishes a chain, link by link, one after another, one within another.' " Heine wrote at a time when the German censors were alert to suppress any hint of criticism, which created difficulties for him as a journalist. But even more dangerous for someone as unprofessional as he

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was the practice of the French government of handing out "retainers" or "pensions" to various writers as a thinly disguised subsidy. Only a stalwart correspondent, aware of the pitfalls that confront every journalist and fully supported by a responsible paper, could hope to preserve his independence under such circumstances. And Heinrich Heine was a poet, brushed by the golden touch of genius, whose name was more treasured by the Allgemeine Zeitung than his work. It has always been the fashion for promotion-minded newspapers to obtain the services of prominent persons, regardless of their special talents for journalism. Thus, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the New York Tribune engaged Karl Marx among other writers as one of its London specials. Marx had no illusions about Heine as a nonconformist. He was "that queer fowl, a poet," as Marx once said. The fashionable literary world of Paris and his friend, Baron James de Rothschild, who ran a literary salon, meant more to Heine, as his articles in the AUgemeine Zeitung made clear. Heine was 35 when he left the censors of Germany behind him in a somewhat naive search for greater freedom in the France of Louis Philippe. In his early correspondence for the AUgemeine Zeitung, he wrote mildly of new movements in French painting and music. But after a year or so he turned to political reporting. He was wary of German censors at first and asked his publisher, Baron Johann Cotta, to "see that very little is changed in my articles, for they are already censored when they come out of my head." It was a familiar situation for a foreign correspondent. Heine stayed in Paris during the cholera epidemic of 1832 and faithfully covered it, reporting that 2,000 persons a day were dying and 120,000 Frenchmen were seeking exit passes from Paris. Once the plague receded, the poet seemingly gathered courage and began including criticism of the Prussian government in his articles. The censors pounced on them and ripped them apart, and on June 9, 1832, Baron Cotta had to drop Heine as a correspondent. Not at all dismayed, the poet had his pieces printed in their original form with a preface that accused the King of Prussia of endangering peace. He also was published in French journals—Europe Litteraire and the Revue des Deux Mondes. When eventually he became famous in France, he was able to resume his relationship with the A llgemeine Zeitung. Had that been all there was to Heine's journalism, it would be a

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mere incident in the crowded annals of foreign correspondence. But in 1848, the Allgemeine Zeitung accused him, through publication of an anonymous letter, of having received a subsidy for years from the French government. In vain, Heine argued that it was a "pension," which in no way compromised his independence as a journalist, but it was the end of his usefulness as a foreign correspondent for the German press. He never recovered from the blow. Ill, disillusioned, forced to depend for his support on the relatives and kind-hearted friends who did not forget him, he wasted away in a small Paris apartment and died in 1856. He had been temperamentally ill-equipped to cope with the powerful engines of publicity, which he could not dominate and to which he would not submit. The end, inevitably, had been tragedy. For all his weakness and extravagance of emotion, however, there is something wistfully appealing about Heinrich Heine, the little blond man with the bright brown eyes who watched the passersby in Paris with eager interest and disregarded the storm. After all, it matters little that he has been forgotten as a journalist. As a poet, the author of Die Lorelei is immortal.

3. FROM THE HALLS OF MONTEZUMA A 23-year-old Yankee printer hustled along Broadway one day in 1832, just after an outbreak of cholera in New York City. He stopped briefly to greet a fellow printer who asked, "What's your huny, George?" "I'm off for New Orleans," was the reply. "You will die of cholera if you remain here." In this inconspicuous manner, George Wilkins Kendall began a glamorous career. He became the co-founder of the New Orleans Picayune, the most celebrated correspondent of the Mexican War, and an eyewitness of the revolutionary wave that swept over Europe in 1848.2 When Kendall headed south from New York City, he followed in the roving tradition of his trade in the early nineteenth century. He had been born in Mount Vernon, N.H., in 1809, and learned something of the printing art in nearby Burlington, Vt. But it wasn't enough to get him a job in New York City when he arrived at seventeen, full of ambition and light of pocket. Turned away from every newspaper shop on lower Broadway, he headed for Albany, raised $50 from a kindly uncle

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and embarked on a career of adventure. He worked on the National Intelligencer in Washington as a printer, then briefly in New York, before heading south. At 25, after a number of detours, he arrived in New Orleans where he met Francis Lumsden, a friend, and joined him in 1837 in founding the Picayune as a daily newspaper. From the outset, it was a breezy and audacious little sheet, reflecting the personality of its Yankee editor, and it soon prospered even though there were a number of other papers in the city. But Kendall was neither a Bennett nor a Greeley. He couldn't stay in one place for very long, even the charming Crescent City with its many distractions. When he learned that President Mirabeau Lamar of the Republic of Texas was sponsoring an expedition to try to win the allegiance of New Mexico, he set out for Santa Fe with the wagon train that left Austin in June, 1841. The adventure ended in disaster. The Mexican government quickly rounded up the 320 members of the party, as soon as it entered New Mexico, and took them to Santa Fe. Despite great hardships, the venturesome editor managed to survive the rigors of a death march from Santa Fe to Mexico City that took the lives of some of his comrades. Vividly, he described his trials—how he contracted smallpox, was thrust in a lepers' prison, and later was chained with a number of other captives in Santiago. In June, 1842, he was freed with the rest by the Mexican dictator, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, as an act of clemency. Hero-worshiping New Orleans eagerly read his story when he returned and made the Picayune the most popular and influential paper in the city.3 Now, Kendall called for war on Mexico. Throughout the early 1840s, up to the time that American troops finally marched across the border, he and the Picayune led in the agitation and disregarded their opposition. The editor became, in effect, a symbol of the supercharged, nationalistic atmosphere of the times. In New York City, in 1839, another editor, John L. O'Sullivan, had first put this new faith into words that burned themselves into the broad expanse of America. On December 27, 1845, in the New York Morning News he had established with Samuel J. Tilden, he called for American possession of Oregon Territory "by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the . . . great experiment of liberty." 4 There it was, "Manifest Destiny," the key to American expansion. It

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expressed the philosophy of Kendall and those like him, from New Orleans to the White House, where President James K. Polk called for war on Mexico and Congress obliged him on May 13, 1846. At once, Kendall hurried to General Zachary Taylor's camp on the Rio Grande and attached himself to Captain Ben McCulloch's Rangers.* Nothing about Kendall's work was rudimentary. He and his fellow correspondents fortunately did not have to face the hostility of European commanders, which had prevented journalist eyewitnesses from describing the Battle of Waterloo. During the Jackson administration, journalists had been brought into office and two of them, Amos Kendall and Francis P. Blair, had been leading members of the Jacksonian Kitchen Cabinet. The Jacksonian tradition was still strong in the land and permeated the armed forces. No wonder, then, that Kendall could gallop about in Mexican territory with Captain McCulloch's Rangers, far more the soldier than the war correspondent! During one early skirmish, he emerged unscathed with a Mexican cavalry flag which he presented later to the Picayune with a flourish. It was the fashion then for correspondents to prove their daring by fighting rather than to sit on the sidelines as noncombatants, bound by international conventions. One of Kendall's rivals, James L. Freaner of the New Orleans Delta, who wrote under the by-line, "Mustang," killed a Mexican officer at the Battle of Monterey and appropriated his horse. Moreover, both Freaner and Kendall more than once acted as official dispatch bearers. The great Eastern newspapers, particularly those in New York, depended heavily on the war correspondents of the New Orleans press to get the news through to them. The New York Herald alone had a "special" in the field for a time, but apparently did better by rushing dispatches north from New Orleans in cooperation with the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the Baltimore Sun. Kendall's dispatches were published in the New York Sun, which boasted at one point that it was * It could scarcely be said that he was the first war correspondent because there were at least a score of others from New Orleans' nine newspapers who covered the war either with General Taylor or with General Winfield Scott's forces. Moreover, James M. Bradford, editor of the St. Francisville (La.) Timepiece, had fought under General Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 and sent dispatches to his newspaper—a prior example of rudimentary war correspondence.

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able to bring in the news eighteen days after a battle was fought in Mexico through a combination of ship, train, pony express, and telegraph. In one of these stories, describing the storming of Monterey, the correspondent made Braxton Bragg famous by reporting the familiar phrase associated with General Taylor, "A little more grape, Captain Bragg!" The hazards of the dispatch riders who carried the news north from Mexico were just as great as those of the war correspondents. While he covered General Taylor and later, when he was with General Scott's command, Kendall had to pay heavily for dispatch riders whether they went north to cross the Rio Grande or east from General Scott's army to Vera Cruz. Another port that served the messengers was Tampico. Several were killed by Mexican guerrillas and others were captured. Once Kendall shifted his operations to General Scott's army, which marched toward Mexico City after taking Vera Cruz, his partner, Lumsden, helped him considerably. Together, they worked out a system of dispatch riders who brought messages to Vera Cruz. Next, they had fast ships waiting to take the news across the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans, and on one occasion reputedly paid $5,000 for such a vessel for a single voyage. On board, it was the practice of the New Orleans papers to have the dispatches set in type, ready for publication as soon as the ship docked. At the same time, the messages were hastened overland across the South to the nearest telegraph point for nation-wide distribution. No war in history had ever been covered as thoroughly, and nationwide interest was at a high pitch. On February 23, 1847, General Taylor defeated Santa Anna's superior forces at Buena Vista but the news was more than a month getting through at that stage in the war. In some mysterious fashion, word spread in Washington that Taylor had been crushed. But at the end of March, the first reports came to the Picayune of the great victory and on April 1 the official dispatches followed. However, mainly for political reasons, the principal action was entrusted to General Scott, President Polk having suspected early in the campaign that General Taylor would be a formidable rival for the Presidency. Once again, the irrepressible Kendall made certain he was in a key position by volunteering to serve as aid to General William

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Worth. Day by day, he sent back exciting dispatches while under fire— from Cerro Gordo on April 15, the fortress of Perote on April 22, and Jalapa on May 1. With Scott's troops, he sighted Mexico City on August 10 from the summit of its protective mountain range. The final assault began shortly afterward against the complicated network of defenses that ringed the Mexican capital. Captain Robert Anderson, who fourteen years later was to be the defender of Fort Sumter, used the "Kendall Express," as he called it, to send military dispatches to the United States. Kendall's own stories were studded with the names of other young soldiers— Robert E. Lee, a captain; Phil Kearney, a colonel; and Franklin Pierce, a general. General Worth must have thought highly of the services of his volunteer aid, since he mentioned him twice in dispatches. On September 10, after the fighting at Molino del Rey, Worth wrote: "I have to acknowledge my obligations to the gentlemen of the staff, who performed their duties with accustomed intelligence and bravery—G. W . Kendall Esq. of Louisiana, Captain Wyse and Mr. Hargous, army agent; who came upon the field, volunteered their acceptable services, and conducted themselves in the transmission of orders with conspicuous gallantry." That came very near the end, when Scott's army was poised for its final attack on what Mexicans had thought was the impregnable citadel of Chapultepec. In those final, frenzied days, Kendall repeatedly exposed himself to fire and was wounded in the knee by a bullet but carried on. At Chapultepec, he expressed admiration for a young officer named Thomas J. Jackson: "I never saw a man work as hard as young Jackson, tearing off harness and dragging out dead and kicking horses." It was the immortal Stonewall. Had the correspondent noticed a young lieutenant manning a howitzer at a strategic point in the final assault, he would have seen Ulysses Simpson Grant in action. On September 13, the troops carried the stony heights of Chapultepec by storm. On the following day, General Scott triumphantly entered the capital of Mexico and George Wilkins Kendall wrote as follows from the Halls of Montezuma: CITY OF MEXICO, SEPT. 14—Another victory, glorious in its results and which has thrown additional luster upon the American arms, has been achieved today by the army under General Scott—the proud capital of Mexico has fallen into the power of a mere handful of men compared with

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the immense odds arrayed against them and Santa Anna, instead of shedding his blood as he had promised, is wandering with the remnant of his army no one knows where. The apparently impregnable works on Chapultepec, after a desperate struggle, were triumphantly carried; Generals Bravo and Mouterde, besides a host of officers of different grades, taken prisoners; over 1,000 non-commissioned officers and privates, all their cannon and ammunition, are in our hands; the fugitives were soon in full flight towards the different works which command the entrances to the city, and our men at once were in hot pursuit.6 This long account, published in the Picayune on October 14, 1847 and relayed all over the nation, signalized final victory. Kendall was the most quoted of all the correspondents, and his dispatches were the most often reproduced. The final one made history. But very possibly, the second of General Worth's dispatches, in which he was mentioned on September 26, pleased him even more: "Major Borland and G. W . Kendall, volunteer aides-de-camp, the latter wounded, each exhibited habitual gallantry, intelligence and devotion." After Kendall's return to New Orleans, the Picayune distinguished itself once more. It brought the Treaty of Peace to New Orleans from Vera Cruz in February, 1848, by chartered steamer, beating the War Department's dispatches and making possible another extra with exclusive news. That was the final touch in Kendall's greatest feat as one of the pioneers in foreign correspondence. The editor, however, was neither in need of rest nor content to stay meekly at his desk. Very soon, he was off again for Paris, ostensibly to arrange for illustrations, for his history, "The War Between the United States and Mexico." But as matters developed, it proved once again that he had the most valuable faculty a journalist can possess—either the instinct or the knowledge to be at the right place at the right time. As Paris swarmed once more to the barricades in the rising of 1848, Kendall again became a war correspondent. In sympathetic detail, he described the scene day by day to the readers of the Picayune. Despite the lengthy time lapse caused by trans-Atlantic and overland travel, these dispatches, too, deeply interested New Orleans with its great French heritage and served to increase both the prestige of the Picayune and its roving editor. When Kendall came back a few years later, he brought with him a French bride—Mile. Adeline de Valcourt, daughter of one of Emperor

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Napoleon's officers. The journalist at last was home from the wars, his roving days over. While he still wrote for the paper when the occasion suited him, and watched over it with affection, he was more interested in life on a ranch he had purchased in Texas. In 1876 he died, leaving the name of Kendall County, his home, as a reminder to future generations of the role he had played in the manifest destiny of Texas—and the rest of the United States. 4. T H E M A N W H O S A V E D AN A R M Y William Howard Russell, a black-haired, moon-faced Irishman, raced into London in 1843 with the exclusive story of the verdict in the sedition trial of Daniel O'Connell, the "Liberator," in Dublin. He had covered the proceedings for twenty-three days as the correspondent of the Times of London. Now, through good luck, good management, a special steamer across the Irish Sea, and a special train to London, he was well ahead of the other reporters in a typical breakneck journalistic steeplechase of the pre-telegraph era. He set out in a cab for the office of John Delane, editor of the Times, determined to clinch his victory by bringing the news directly to the man who counted most. As he clambered from the cab in front of the office, a friendly passerby spoke in his ear, "We're glad they've found O'Connell guilty at last!" "Oh, yes!" Russell replied obligingly. "All guilty, but on different counts!" He fell asleep, exhausted, after turning in his story, confident that he had scored a major beat. Next morning, in pleasant anticipation, he opened a note from Mowbray Morris, the Times's manager: "You managed very badly. The Morning Herald has got the verdict." To which Russell himself added ruefully, "It turned out that my pleasant interlocutor at the entrance to the office was an emissary of the enemy." As if this hadn't been enough to make the Times discouraged over his prospects, he soon left the staff because he was engaged to be married and the Morning Chronicle was willing to pay him more than the Times's five guineas a week (about $26). But work for the Chronicle wasn't pleasant. First it interfered with his honeymoon. Next, he had to describe the Irish famine, which shocked him. He quit journalism in 1847, consequently, and resumed his reading for the Bar. If Delane him-

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self had not intervened by inviting the difficult Irishman to rejoin his staff, contrary to usual newspaper personnel practices, William Howard Russell might have become a plodding lawyer instead of the leading foreign correspondent of his time.6 It was the beginning of a unique partnership in journalism that was to have a profound effect on the fortunes of the British empire. Delane, born in London on October 1 1 , 1817, had become the editor of the Times when he was only 23 following the death of the great Thomas Barnes.7 He was but two years out of Oxford then, and had been on the Times only a year. But the proprietor, John Walter II, was sure of his man. As the second son of William Frederick Augustus Delane, a leading barrister and the financial manager of the Times, John Delane was trained for his work. He assumed the post without a qualm; as he remarked long afterward, when someone asked him if he had felt uncertain, "Not a bit. What I dislike about you young men of the present day is that you all shrink from responsibility." 8 Until Delane decided to make something of him, Russell was just a young law student, born March 28, 1820, near Dublin, who since 1842 had worked as a seasonal reporter on the Times's parliamentary staff of nineteen men. It was a responsible job. Charles Dickens had been an expert shorthand reporter in Parliament for the London Morning Chronicle and had "worn my knees by writing on them in the old back row of the old Gallery of the old House of Commons." 9 Russell didn't mind wearing out his knees at 22, but he simply wasn't able to earn enough money as a seasonal reporter. He asked Delane for work to sustain him during the parliamentary recesses, one result of which was his assignment at the O'Connell trial. When he returned to the Times after the hiatus at the Chronicle, it was as a recognized member of the staff, a parliamentary reporter, and occasional special correspondent. In that mid-Victorian era, the Times was approaching the height of its influence. It was the most powerful newspaper in the world, an engine of publicity without parallel in the short history of independent journalism. At a considerable cost in railway advertising, the Times in 1845 exposed stock-selling schemes involving 1,200 projected railways that sought £500,000,000 from the public. In the same year, when the French government for its own reasons obstructed the Times's special courier service from India, the newspaper set up a dromedary express from Suez to Alexandria and a special steamer from Alexandria to

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Trieste, bypassing French territory and beating the regular mails by fourteen days.10 But the greatest feat of the era was engineered by Delane himself with the following announcement, published December 4,1845: "The decision of the Cabinet is no longer a secret. Parliament, it is confidently reported, is to be summoned for the first week in January; and the Royal Speech will, it is added, recommend an immediate consideration of the Corn Laws, preparatory to their total repeal. Sir Robert Peel in one House, and the Duke of Wellington in the other will, we are told, be prepared to give immediate effect to the recommendation thus conveyed." The Corn Laws, which restricted the import and export of grain through high duties and thus kept the price inordinately high in England, had been the subject of popular agitation for a decade or more. The flat announcement that Sir Robert Peel's government had determined to repeal them therefore had a shattering effect. The Prime Minister angrily dispatched a special messenger to Queen Victoria after he saw Delane's story. The Lord President of the Council said it wasn't so. But Delane calmly stood his ground. Rumors flew that the beautiful Mrs. Caroline Norton had wheedled the secret out of a Cabinet minister, presumably Lord Aberdeen, and taken it post-haste to Delane. George Meredith, in his Diana of the Crossways nearly two generations afterward, was to embroider that version of the tale, causing his needy Diana (Mrs. Norton) to betray the secret to Tonans (Delane) who worked "in the very furnace-hissing of Events." Unhappily for romance, the truth was that Lord Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary in the Peel ministry, had arranged with Delane for the publication of the story in order to prepare public opinion for the change. After some backing and filling in the government, it all came to pass as Delane had forecast and in 1846 the Corn Laws were repealed. 11 Which caused the admiring Emerson to say, "Who would care for the Times if it 'surmised' or 'dared to confess' or 'ventured to predict,' etc.? No; it is so, and so it shall be." 1 2 This was the newspaper to which William Howard Russell had tied his fortune. From the time he rejoined its staff, he did well. Putting aside his career as a lawyer, he plunged into the raw stuff of journalism, covering a public hanging one day, the tour of Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot, the next. He was slightly wounded at the Battle of Id-

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stedt in 1850 while covering the Danish war over Schleswig-Holstein, his first experience under fire as a war correspondent. In a more peaceful military assignment, he reported a French naval show off Cherbourg. He covered the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, which was attended by many foreign editors and journalists who wrote letters home about it. And, testifying to his eminence as a journalist, he was brought back from a Swiss holiday in 1852 to write the story of the funeral of the Duke of Wellington. After more than a decade of newspaper work, he was at the top of his profession. Nevertheless, he was surprised on a cold February night in 1854 when Delane sent for him and told him he was to accompany a British expeditionary force to Malta. It was the first hint that Britain was about to intervene in what developed into the Crimean War, with Britain, France, Turkey, and Sardinia arrayed against Russia. Ostensibly, the dispute was over the guardianship of the holy places of Palestine. In reality, it was against Russia's effort to smash the tottering Turkish empire. Lord Hardinge, the commander-in-chief, Russell wrote, "had given an order for my passage with the Guards from Southampton, and everything would be done to make my task agreeable; the authorities would look after me—my wife and family could join me—handsome pay and allowances would be given—in fact, everything was painted couleur de rose." As for the instructions Delane gave to guide his war correspondent, they were both simple and direct, the best instructions any reporter could receive: " T h e truth in all things." 1 3 Russell was the chief correspondent of a large and capable Times staff. But the Times was not alone in its determination to bring the news out of the Crimea. One of Russell's rivals was Edwin Lawrence Godkin, a 22-year-old correspondent for the London Daily News. There were others, such as George Alfred Henty, who was to be a correspondent in three wars and the author of boys' tales that thrilled the youngsters of his generation. While the official History of the Times described Russell at 35 as a "big, bluff, genial Irishman, a bon vivant, an energetic but unsystematic worker with an infinite capacity for winning easy friendships," the evidence also indicates that he was a tough and highly critical competitor in the field. Russell reached Malta, but not without difficulty. There were no arrangements for handling war correspondents. He was regarded with

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amusement by a few, with suspicion by most others. While Dickens and Thackeray were at his farewell dinner before his departure with the Guards on February 22, 1854, he had to go aboard the transport Golden Fleece without baggage, horse, or servant. He managed to get aboard another transport under similar circumstances for the voyage from Malta to Gallipoli, which resulted in a question in Parliament as to "what right a newspaper reporter has to go anywhere as early as anybody else." At Gallipoli, Russell wrote, "I was nobody's child on shore. The Rifles marched off far away to Bulair. I was forced to stay behind. I had no quarters, no rations at Gallipoli." When the army moved to Scutari, Russell wangled a tent somewhere and had it pitched inside the lines. But when the brigadier-in-command saw it during inspection and learned it belonged to a correspondent of the Times, it was pulled down and tossed outside the lines. The only cause Russell had for thankfulness was that nobody had thought quite yet of inventing that troublesome military official, the censor.14 Despite his own difficulties, he deluged London with his accurate reports on the lamentable condition of the British forces. From Gallipoli he wrote on April 13: "The worst thing I have to report is the continued want of comforts for the sick. Many of the men labouring under diseases contracted at Malta are obliged to stay in camp in the cold, with only one blanket under them, as there is no provision for them at the temporary hospital." And from Scutari on May 28: "Who was the wise man who warned us in time of peace that we should pay dearly for shutting our eyes to the possibility of war, and who preached in vain to us about our want of baggage and pontoon trains and our locomotive deficiencies? No outlay, however prodigal, can atone for the effects of a griping penuriousness." Small wonder that he was laughed at when he applied for transport and rations to an aide of Lord Raglan, who was sharing the command of the allied forces with the French leader, Marshal Saint-Arnaud. He wrote of his treatment to Delane, at the same time enlarging on the sorry state of the army, and had the satisfaction of knowing that his private letters were making the rounds of the Cabinet. "Your last is now with the Duke of Newcastle," Delane replied, "and he tells me that he has written again by this post to Lord Raglan on your behalf." 1 5 Russell followed the armies to Varna in Bulgaria and, from there, by

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transport to the Crimea where the troops landed on September 14 about twenty-five miles north of Sebastopol. He disembarked with them without any idea of what he was to do, having no baggage, no housing, and no assurance of rations. He was entirely on his own, but immediately he went to work getting out his story of the unopposed landing. Like everybody else, he was dependent on the Army Post Office or an occasional diplomatic or staff courier, and he spread himself in his letters, knowing they might be on the way two to three weeks before publication. He could send short notes by ship to the Times correspondent at Constantinople to telegraph home, and in the following year a combined cable-telegraph system brought bulletins sent from Varna to London in twelve hours. But to the end of his days, Russell mistrusted the telegraph and used it only for the briefest and most necessary messages. He was a pen-and-ink man who disliked to be hurried and who obtained his greatest successes through his determination to write a complete, well-rounded, and utterly truthful story. Everything pointed to an early battle with the Russians. Russell tried to attach himself to Lord Raglan's party, but was given the cold shoulder. Shortly afterward, he wrote that an officer rode up to him and said, "General Pennyfeather wants to know who you are, sir, and what you are doing here." Eventually, he had to explain to the General himself, who exploded, "I'd as soon see the devil! What do you know about this kind of work and what will you do when we get into action?" To which Russell answered, "Well, it is quite true I have little acquaintance with the business but I suspect there are a great many here with no more knowledge than myself." The General laughed. "You're an Irishman, I'll be bound." 1 8 In this manner, the Times correspondent managed to make a place for himself so that he was able to witness the battle at the Alma River, sixteen miles north of Sebastopol, in which the Allies defeated the Russians. The battle was fought on September 20. Russell had to write his account that night, after more than ten hours in the saddle, "worn out with excitement, fatigue, and want of food." He was denied all information about casualties, received no help in reconstructing the confused movements of battle, and was almost entirely dependent on what he heard and saw. He made the morning mail, but it was the London Gazette, the official newspaper, which was out first with the story of the battle in London ten days later.17

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It was not of the glory of victory that Russell wrote with the most telling effect. Day after day, he hammered at the disgraceful conditions in the army which aroused official London against the Times and its daring correspondent. Delane himself came out to see what was going on, satisfied himself that Russell was "telling the exact truth," and told him to continue. After a tour of the Allied base at Balaclava, southwest of Sebastopol, the correspondent wrote one of his most telling accounts: "As to the town itself, words cannot describe its filth, its horrors, its hospitals, its burials, its dead and dying Turks, its crowded lanes, its noisome sheds, its beastly purlieus or its decay. . . . The dead, laid out as they died, are lying side by side with the living, and the latter present a spectacle beyond all imagination. The commonest accessories of a hospital are wanting; there is not the least attention paid to decency or cleanliness—the stench is appalling—the foetid air can barely struggle out to taint the atmosphere, save through the chinks in the walls and roofs and, for all I can observe, these men die without the least effort being made to save them. . . . The sick appear to be tended by the sick and the dying by the dying." 1 8 In mid-October, he reported officers cursing over a total lack of hospital transport, litters, and carts; soldiers dying within sight of 500 transports off the beach for lack of medical aid. He pleaded for doctors and surgeons. But even more, he called for nurses: "Are there no devoted women among us able and willing to go forth and minister to the sick and suffering soldiers?" Florence Nightingale read these words in London and, without official encouragement, organized a corps of 38 nurses who joined the British forces before the year was out on a mission of mercy. Supporting the "Lady with the Lamp," the Times raised £25,000 to buy warm clothes, medicine, and other essentials for the suffering troops and sent a staff man to Constantinople to administer the fund. It wasn't enough.19 On the eve of the battle of Balaclava, Russell wrote not of the glitter of war but of the shocking state of the army: "The diminution of our numbers every day is enough to cause serious anxiety. Out of 35,600 men borne on the strength of the army, there are not more now than 16,500 rank and file fit for service. Since the 10th of this month upwards of 700 men have been sent as invalids to Balaclava."

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This was the army which the Russians attacked next morning, October 25, before Balaclava. At first, Russell was able to report that Turkish outposts bravely faced the Russian infantry and that the 93d Highlanders repulsed a Russian charge, which shattered itself against "that thin red streak topped with a line of steel." It was after the battle that the correspondent changed the phrase to "the thin red line tipped with steel," which became Rudyard Kipling's "thin red line of heroes." 20 The Heavy Brigade charged with success. But then, "somebody blundered," and the order was given for the charge of the Light Brigade. In his long and wonderfully vivid account, Russell wrote: "And now occurred the melancholy catastrophe which fills us all with sorrow. . . . Lord Lucan, with reluctance, gave the order to Lord Cardigan to advance upon the guns, conceiving that his orders compelled him to do so. The noble Earl, although he did not shrink, also saw the fearful odds against him. Don Quixote in his tilt against the windmill was not near so rash and reckless as the gallant fellows who prepared without a thought to rush on almost certain death. . . . There was a plain to charge over, before the enemy's guns were reached, of a mile and a half in length. "At ten minutes past eleven our Light Cavalry Brigade advanced. They numbered . . . 607 sabers. The whole brigade scarcely made one effective regiment, according to the numbers of continental armies; and yet, it was more than we could spare. As they rushed towards the front, the Russians opened on them from guns in the redoubt on the right, with volleys of musketry and rifles. "They swept proudly past, glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendour of war. W e could scarcely believe the evidence of our senses! Surely that handful of men are not going to charge an enemy in position? Alas! It was but too true—their desperate valor knew no bounds, and far indeed was it removed from its so-called better part, discretion. They advanced in two lines, quickening their pace as they closed toward the enemy. A more fearful spectacle was never witnessed than by those who, without power to aid, beheld their heroic countrymen rushing to the arms of death. At the distance of 1200 yards the whole line of the enemy belched forth, from thirty iron mouths, a flood of smoke and flame, through which hissed the deadly balls. Their flight was marked by instant gaps in our ranks, by dead men and horses, by steeds flying wounded or riderless across the plain.

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" T h e first line is broken, it is joined by the second, they never halt or check their speed for an instant; with diminished ranks, thinned by those thirty guns, which the Russians had lain with the most deadly accuracy, with the halo of flashing steel above their heads, and with a cheer which was many a noble fellow's death-cry, they flew into the smoke of the batteries, but ere they were lost from view the plain was strewed with their bodies and with the carcasses of horses. They were exposed to an oblique fire from the batteries on hills on both sides, as well as to a direct fire of musketry. "Through the clouds of smoke we could see their sabers flashing as they rode to the guns and dashed between them, cutting down the gunners as they stood. W e saw them riding through the guns; to our delight, we saw them returning, after breaking through a column of Russian infantry, and scattering them like chaff, when the flank fire of the battery on the hill swept down on them, scattered and broken as they were. Wounded men and dismounted troopers flying towards us told the sad tale—demigods could not have done what we had failed to do. At the very moment when they were about to retreat an enormous mass of Lancers was hurled at their flank. "Colonel Sherwell of the Eighth Hussars saw the danger and rode his few men straight at them, cutting his way through with fearful loss. W i t h courage too great for credence they were breaking their way through the columns which enveloped them, when there took place an act of atrocity without parallel in the modern warfare of civilized nations. T h e Russian gunners, when the storm of cavalry had passed, returned to their guns. They saw their own cavalry mingled with the troopers who had just ridden over them, and, to the eternal disgrace of the Russian name, the miscreants poured a volley of grape and canister on the mass of struggling men and horses, mingling friend and foe in one common ruin. It was as much as our Heavy Brigade could do to cover the retreat of the miserable remnants of that band of heroes as they returned to the place they had so lately quitted in all the pride of life. " A t 1 1 : 3 5 n o t a British soldier, except the dead and dying, was left in front of those bloody Muscovite guns. . . . Our loss, as far as it could be ascertained in killed, wounded and missing at two o'clock today, was as follows: 607 went into action, 198 returned from action; loss, 4 0 9 . " 2 1

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The bare details, in a bulletin forwarded from Russell, were published in the Times on November 1 1 , and the complete story followed two days later, plunging the nation into sorrow. It was Tennyson who had the last word in his tribute to the "noble six hundred" and without doubt he was inspired by Russell's dispatch. The Russian attack was beaten off, but at great cost; and at the Battle of Inkermann on November 5, Russell warned that the victory was no cause for rejoicing because the Allies had "not advanced one step nearer Sebastopol." 22 The tattered, hungry, half-naked British army was facing General Winter, a worse foe than the Russians. On November 25, Russell wrote from camp before Sebastopol: "It is now pouring rain—the skies are black as ink—the wind is howling over the staggering tents—the trenches are turned into dykes—in the tents the water is sometimes a foot deep—our men have not either warm or waterproof clothing—they are out for twelve hours at a time in the trenches—they are plunged into the inevitable miseries of a winter campaign—and not a soul seems to care for their comfort, or even for their lives. These are hard truths, but the people of England must hear them. They must know that the wretched beggar who wanders about the streets of London in the rain leads the life of a prince compared with the British soldiers who are fighting out here for their country, and who, we are complacently assured by the home authorities, are the best appointed army in Europe." Florence Nightingale at that time had just arrived and was with her nurses at the base hospital at Scutari. At the front in the Crimea, there was no sign of relief. The Times's relief funds, though large, could not take care of everybody and it took time for the delivery of supplies and medicines. Russell raged on December 1: "The army is suffering greatly; worn out by night work, by vigil in rain and storm, by hard labour in the trenches, they find themselves reduced to short allowance." 23 With Russell sounding the theme, Delane fiercely attacked the government in his editorials. The authoritative voice of the Times dinned into all Britain the warning that a British army was dying on a foreign battlefield where scarcely a shot was being fired. Lord Aberdeen, Delane's great friend at the time of the Corn Law repeal, was the Prime Minister, but neither respect and affection for him nor temerity of the power of Lord Raglan as commander-in-chief stemmed the Times's campaign to save the British troops. On January 23, 1855, the House of Commons approved a resolution for a Select Committee "to enquire

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into the condition of our Army before Sebastopol and into the conduct of those Departments of the Government whose duty it has been to minister to the wants of that Army." Lord Aberdeen's government resigned. Lord Palmerston took up the responsibility of Prime Minister, with Lord Panmure succeeding the ineffective Duke of Newcastle as Secretary of War. Although Delane had been an old foe of Palmerston's, he now gave the most vigorous support to the new regime on its pledge to carry through the most sweeping reforms in the conduct of the war and to permit a full inquiry into conditions in the Crimea.24 At the front, although Russell wrote that he was "getting bald as a round shot and grey as a badger," he pressed home his attacks on Lord Raglan: "The condition of the army is indeed miserable, pitiable and heartrending, no boots, no greatcoats; no medicine, no shelter; toiling in the mud and snow week after week, exposed in open trenches and torn tents to the pitiless storms of a Crimean winter . . . and watched by sleepless Cossacks night and day from every ridge and hilltop." 25 Lord Raglan's reply was a blistering charge that Russell and the Times were giving aid and comfort to the enemy, the ancient device by which commanders in every age have tried to justify their suppression of the truth. Russell fired back that nothing he wrote was not already known to the Russians and that, in effect, only the British people were being kept in ignorance of the condition of their army. After the war was over, he received support for his views from the Russian commander, Prince Mikhail Dmitreyevich Gorchakov, who wrote him in response to an inquiry: "Your admirable letters were as agreeable as they were well written. . . . I read them regularly, but I am bound to admit that I never received any information from them, or learned anything that I had not known beforehand." 26 The Times announced in triumph that on June 23, 1855, the Select Committee's report appeared, "substantially justifying the criticisms of the Times upon the conduct of the war." By that time, through the most energetic measures, relief had come to the British troops and reinforcements swelled their ranks. New commanders took over from the much-criticized Lord Raglan, who died in June, 1855, after a brief illness.27 On September 14 of that year, Russell was able to write after the storming of the Russian citadel, "Above

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all, in the fiery glow of victory* the British standard floats over Sebastopol." 28 Russell came home, the Times proudly reported, in a "blaze oi glory, to be lionized as no journalist had ever been before." 29 He was received at breakfast by the Prime Minister and given the honorary degree of LL.D. in his native Dublin by his old college, Trinity, and hailed by a distinguished military authority, Sir Evelyn Wood, who said: "He incurred much enmity, but few unprejudiced men who were in the Crimea will not attempt to call into question the fact that by awakening the conscience of the British nation to the sufferings of its troops, he saved the remnant of those grand battalions we landed in September." 30 Russell had only a few days' rest, however. And even that brief respite was troubled. One night he awoke from a deep sleep, frightening his wife by shouting, "Tumble out, tumble out, there's a sortie!" The Crimea had left a deep mark on him. Ten days after his return home, he was off to Russia to see Tsar Alexander II crowned and to visit once more the old battlegrounds of the Crimea. From there, in 1857, he was sent to India to cover the Sepoy Mutiny at a salary of £600 a year, "all expenses if out of pocket reimbursed," as the careful Mowbray Morris phrased it. 31 Russell was not the most methodical correspondent with his expense accounts. Nor was he at ease with the new-fangled methods of running for the wire. "The electric telegraph," he wrote, "quite annihilates one's speculative and inductive faculties. What's the use of trying to find out where an expedition is going to, when, long before the result of one's investigation can reach England, not only the destination but the results of that expedition will be known from John o' Groat's to Land's End?" 32 Russell saw little fighting in India. But his reception by the commander-in-chief, Sir Colin Campbell, whom he had known in the Crimea, was vastly different. Sir Colin gave him access to all his reports and dispatches and trusted to his discretion not to mention matters of military value except in his letters to the paper. The leaders of the mutiny had no telegraphic communication with England at the time. And so, campaigning in virtual luxury, he was able to describe the capture of Lucknow from the mutineers. But what he saw there caused him once more to lash out at officialdom in bitter criticism. He reported

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inhuman acts of vengeance against the Sepoys. "The time for indiscriminate bloodshedding must cease, let all the angry civilians of British India can say be said," he wrote, "with the punishment of the mutinous Sepoys and those actually taken in arms against us. Justice and even vengeance must after a period rest satisfied." Thus, Russell, again supported by Delane, proceeded to educate the British people and their government in the responsibilities of world leadership. He counseled an enlightened imperialism: "Let us be just, and fear not—popularize our rule—reform our laws—adapt our saddle to the back that bears it." But he had no illusions about the effect of his campaign, for he wrote to a friend: "I go home to a sick wife, carrying from India no very pleasant memories, a damaged reputation, great popular enmity—the only Englishman, I believe, who ever left India poorer than when he came into it—with nothing to cheer me save the conviction that I did my duty according to the light that was vouchsafed to me, and the damnation of faint applause awaiting my efforts." 3 3 5. D A T E L I N E :

EVERYWHERE

"Rouse yourself, Monsieur! There is a coup d'etat! The troops are all moving and all the walls are placarded with the announcement!" Algernon Borthwick, the 21-year-old Paris correspondent of the London Morning Post, needed no more urging from his servant that morning of December 2, 1851. Within a few minutes he was on the streets of Paris, noting the placards announcing Louis Napoleon's seizure of the government, watching the troop movements, testing the temper of the always volatile people of the City of Light. He reached the central telegraph bureau without being stopped and got his first story off to London. Then, he paused to catch his breath and think things over. It was obvious that foreign correspondents would not be popular in Paris that day. His movements were certain to be impeded. There was even a chance that he might be seized by the military if he seemed too inquisitive. What to do? Almost instinctively, Borthwick made for the hotel opposite the British embassy where the beautiful and nervy Mrs. Caroline Norton was living. He had met her only the night before at Louis Napoleon's monthly reception and promised to bring her a

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political pamphlet she wanted, asking laughingly in return for the privilege of having breakfast with her. She had agreed good-naturedly and in a bantering spirit had remarked that she wanted to see a coup d'etat. Now he pounded at her door and heard her cry, "What is it—who is there?" "Algernon Borthwick, come for his breakfast." "But are you mad? It's too early for breakfast. What do you want?" "You!" the young man called boldly. "I want to show you the coup d'etat. It has happened, and if you want to put on your things you can't come out too soon, or the streets will be blocked." "I'll come out at once!" So it happened that the most beautiful woman in Paris helped Algernon Borthwick find out at first hand how Louis Napoleon was making himself emperor of France that day. Mrs. Norton was 43 years old then, but still lovely enough to turn men's heads. She had been one of the "Three Graces" of London society, as the three granddaughters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan were known. In 1836, during a sensational trial, her husband, the Hon. George Norton, had accused Lord Melbourne of seducing her, but the jury had decided against him. She was both poet and novelist and had been called the "female Byron" of her time. Altogether, a most persuasive lady, particularly to a dazzled young correspondent in Paris. Young Borthwick's strategy worked. "I explained to the soldiers wherever there was the slightest objection," he wrote, "that I was escorting an English lady who lived on the other side of the Seine. . . . After a glance at the beautiful lady, they most politely made way. W e soon arrived at the Tuileries, and through the great approach to it we could see the plumes of staff officers and all the splendid appurtenances of a military assemblage. "At this point I asked the sentry to allow us to pass and received a gruff, 'Impossible, Monsieur!' I then turned to my companion and said, 'Now it is your turn to tell the same story and to ask the favour.' She at once turned her magnificent eyes on the sentry, who I suppose had never before seen anything so lovely." Mrs. Norton conquered the sentries, their sergeants, and the officers who were the courts of final appeal. Borthwick gathered his eyewitness story. And on December 5 his father, Peter Borthwick, the editor of the

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Morning Post, wrote proudly to him: "Well done, dearest Algy. . . . You have beaten the Times all hollow." Young Borthwick perhaps took an equal amount of satisfaction in the admiration he received from Mrs. Norton. Once he had returned to her hotel, she gave him breakfast.34 As one of the first professionals to face the problem of developing a significant and interesting daily report, Borthwick's experiences were seldom as exciting as his tour with Mrs. Norton. Generally, for his 4 guineas weekly salary (about $21), he was bogged down in petty detail, fretting his heart out over stories he had missed or stories his paper had mishandled. Once, he was beaten because a cunning Times man had obtained proofs of a government-inspired article in a Paris newspaper, La Patrie, instead of waiting like a gentleman for the miserable sheet to hit the street. Another time, he obtained a special government report, wanted to put it on a morning train for the Channel but was frustrated by a "French ass" who insisted that all "expresses" must go on the evening train. Such small triumphs and tragedies were typical of the operations of the new professionals at mid-century. The more prominent correspondents of the day, whose main business was quite different, wouldn't have bothered with such details. One such was Margaret Fuller, of whom Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "She poured a stream of amber over the endless store of private anecdotes, of bosom histories, which her wonderful persuasion drew forth, and transfigured them into fine fables." The description bore little resemblance to the work of the ordinary journalist, nor did Margaret Fuller consider herself one. She had been born in 1810 at Cambridgeport, Mass., daughter of a lawyer, and her first published work had been a translation of Johann Peter Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe. She had taken part in the great transcendentalist experiment of her day and visited dutifully at Brook Farm, the communal colony, for which she hadn't particularly cared. More to the point was the friendship she formed there for Charles Anderson Dana, who was to become Horace Greeley's managing editor on the New York Tribune, and her own editorship of the Dial. When Miss Fuller was persuaded to begin writing for the Tribune, she did literary criticism at the outset. Later, she wrote three pieces a week on various subjects, one being a sympathetic article on the lot of the prostitute, strong stuff for a puritanical America. But she didn't like

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discipline and she hated writing in a newspaper office, preferring to do her work at home. She went abroad in the summer of 1845, the beginning of five years of distinguished foreign correspondence in the manner of her contemporary, Harriet Martineau of the London Daily News, who had visited the United States. Miss Fuller did a notable article on Goethe, interviews with other famous persons, and a constant flow of travel sketches. After her marriage to one of Mazzini's associates, Giovanni, Marchese d'Ossoli, who was seven years younger than she, her correspondence took on a different note. She immersed herself in the revolution of 1848 and in 1849 wrote a lively and detailed description of the capture of Rome. She was nurse as well as correspondent in the battle, in which her husband fought on the side of the Italians. Once the siege was over, she and Giovanni and their baby, Angelo, sailed from Leghorn for the United States. Off Fire Island, in July, 1850, their vessel, the Elizabeth, went down in a storm and all aboard were lost.35 Another correspondent in this older tradition, who also did his best work for the New York Tribune, was the poet, Bayard Taylor, who as a young man sought to emulate the gossipy European travel letters of Nathaniel Parker Willis in the New York Mirror. His admiration was articulated by Senator Daniel Webster who, upon being asked if he knew of Goethe, replied, "No, sir, I haven't heard of Goethe but I suppose he is the N. P. Willis of Germany." 38 Taylor was the product of a sentimental age, bom in 1825 in the Quaker community of Kennett Square, Pa., educated at nearby Unionville Academy, drawn into the miseries of local journalism and, at 19, to the doorstep of the celebrated Horace Greeley himself at the New York Tribune. Greeley took a liking to the tall, pale, romantic youth and agreed to look at any articles he sent from Europe. But, he added tartly, "No descriptive nonsense! Of that I'm damned sick!" It was the start of Taylor's career which took him to every part of the world for the Tribune—a journalist who longed to be recognized as a poet. In March, 1853, under orders from the imperious Greeley to join the black ships of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry on their pioneering voyage to Japan, he reached Hong Kong. The Tai-p'ing Rebellion was raging against the Manchus. The ascetic rebel leader Hung Hsiu-chuan, a convert to Christianity, was fighting to overthrow the Ch'ing dynasty, curtail foreign privileges in China, limit the opium

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trade, equalize land ownership, and assert full Chinese sovereignty. It was a struggle that would cost 40,000,000 to 60,000,000 lives and set in motion profound social reforms. But Taylor, like many a correspondent who would follow him, couldn't fathom the importance of the story. All he did was to pick up some old newspaper clips at Shanghai, when he landed there, which reported the slaughter of 20,000 defenders of Nanking by the rebels and the public quartering of the Chinese viceroy. He was displeased by the "human vermin" in Shanghai. 37 Upon Commodore Perry's arrival in May, the relieved Taylor turned his back on the Tai-p'ing Rebellion and headed north. He was duly sworn in as a Master's Mate in the Navy 3 8 and in this role witnessed the first test of strength between Japan and the United States. It came when the Perry squadron anchored in Tokyo Bay on July 8, 1853. W i t h obvious satisfaction over the Commodore's methods, the correspondent wrote of the ultimatum that was delivered to a Japanese official, "a fiery little fellow, much exasperated at being kept waiting," who had demanded that the vessels call at Nagasaki: " H e was told that we came as friends, upon a peaceable mission; that we should not go to Naugas-Aki, as he proposed, and that it was insulting to our President [Millard Fillmore] and his Special Minister [Perry] to propose it. He was told, moreover, that the Japanese must not communicate with any other vessel than our flagship, and that no boats must approach us during the night. An attempt to surround us with a cordon of boats . . . would lead to very serious consequences." 39 The Japanese gave in. One of the chief counselors of the empire, Taylor reported, humbly received President Fillmore's message of peace and good-will from Perry. " W e had obtained in four days," the correspondent announced, "without subjecting ourselves to a single observance of Japanese law, what the Russian embassy failed to accomplish in six months." As a footnote to his description of this American success, Taylor reported the surprise of a native official who asked permission to examine a pistol, never having seen one before, and of his astonishment at a steam whistle. In his indulgent and patronizing view of these strange little yellow men, Taylor seemed not to have weighed the consequences of the opening of a powerful nation to the world. He did not even wait for the conclusion of the trade negotiations but set out quickly for

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home. He had become the "great American traveler," the lineal successor to N. P. Willis, and all the way back to New York he furiously scribbled poetry. A generation of American maidens swooned over his "Bedouin Song," ("From the desert I come to Thee . . . on a stallion shod with fire.")40 but of his correspondence no memorable passage remains. A more professional approach to the necessities of foreign correspondence, in the manner of Kendall if not of Russell, came at the Battle of Solferino on June 24, 1859. Henry J. Raymond, the young and daring publisher of the New York Times, was one of the foreign press corps on the plains of Lombardy that day, watching the slaughter that accompanied the Sardinian-French effort to expel the Austrians from Italy. As an experienced newspaperman, he was sobered by the 30,000 casualties. He realized, too, that despite the Austrian withdrawal to their fortress chain, Napoleon III would be forced to patch up a peace with his foes. If Raymond was moved by the humanitarian considerations that would have welled up in a Russell, animated by the spirit of the Crimea, there is no record of it. The main thought of the Times's publisher was to get the story out. Through the good offices of "Malakoff," the by-line used by Dr. W . E. Johnston, the Times's Paris correspondent, Raymond was permitted to send his story to Paris with the same French military messenger who carried Napoleon's own dispatches. In Paris, Mrs. Raymond was waiting for the dispatch, hurried to Liverpool with it, and placed it aboard an American mail steamer just before it departed. Raymond's story was published in the New York Times on July 12, 1859, ten days ahead of everybody else.41 Three years later, a modest journalistic contribution to the literature of the war appeared, entitled, "Un Souvenir de Solferino." It was written by no practicing journalist but a thoughtful citizen of Geneva, Jean Henri Dunant, who had been appalled by the suffering and neglect of the wounded that day and appealed to the world to do something about it. The result was an international conference in 1864 that adopted the Geneva Convention and founded the Red Cross. Thus, the foreign correspondents, both the old breed and the new, carried on their work under all kinds of conditions and in every part of the world. Truly, as Dr, Samuel Johnson had said in one of his Idler

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essays, "To write news in its perfection requires such a combination of qualities, that a man completely fitted for the task is not always to be found." 42 6. D A T E L I N E :

AMERICA

"Mr. Russell," said President Abraham Lincoln solemnly, "I am very glad to make your acquaintance and to see you in this country. The London Times is one of the greatest powers in the world—in fact, I don't know anything which has much more power—except the Mississippi. I am glad to know you as its Minister." 43 In this manner, William Howard Russell was welcomed to the United States early in 1861. His arrival meant a great deal more to influential American opinion than the advent of just another "special." The Times of London had built up an awesome reputation, and more than 60,000 circulation, on the basis of Russell's work during the Crimean War. It was common knowledge that under John Delane's editorship, the greatest organ of opinion in the world was favoring the South in the struggle over secession.44 Britain's mercantile classes, for whom the Times spoke, cared more for their commercial interests in the South than the Tightness of the North's moral position against slavery. For once, therefore, Russell's independence as a correspondent was open to doubt; it was a rarity, then as now, for a journalist to be able to oppose successfully the fixed editorial policy of his newspaper. Hence, the President of the United States himself went out of his way to try to disarm a potential opponent. Russell was well aware of the reason for the North's anxiety about him and stubbornly insisted that he was a "free agent" who did not have to follow the Times's official line. He had even made a complimentary speech about the North at a St. Patrick's Day dinner in New York.45 But the Times's manager, Mowbray Morris, had written him a sour rebuke, "I am very sorry you attended that St. Patrick dinner and made that speech." It was scarcely the kind of note calculated to encourage a correspondent to tell the whole truth as he saw it.46 The great special paid no heed to Morris. He headed South that spring as the war clouds gathered over Charleston, S.C. He still followed his leisurely pen-and-ink methods of writing his dispatches. Since the

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trans-Atlantic cable wasn't functioning, he could afford to do so; he could scarcely be beaten on much of the important news and, with luck, he could be ahead of his British and European colleagues in getting his stuff across the ocean. With that well-nigh magical sense of direction so characteristic of first-rate correspondents, Russell was close enough to Charleston to go there on that historic April 12, 1861, when Confederate batteries began whanging away at Fort Sumter in the harbor. He reported sardonically, "Sumter has set them distraught; never was such a victory; never such brave lads; never such a fight." He assured his readers that "the South would never go back to the Union." But he prudently returned to Washington as quickly as he could; as a good reporter, regardless of what he may have thought at the moment of his paper's anti-Northern policy, he knew quite well that the Northem blockade would prevent him from getting many of his dispatches out of the South.47 In Washington, Russell found Northern indignation mounting against both his newspaper and himself with the opening of the war. No President was likely to compliment him now. It was one thing, moreover, to criticize the British government from the Crimea as a British citizen, and quite another to attack the government of a foreign land while enjoying its hospitality in time of war. Soon, Russell began warning British opinion not to expect an early end to the conflict. The tone of his dispatches, warmly pro-South while he was below the Mason-Dixon Line, began to take on a neutral tinge which he later insisted showed secret pro-Northern sympathies. But he pleased nobody despite that. As he wrote, "There was no entente cordiale towards me by members of the American Press, nor did they, any more than the generals, evince any disposition to help the alien correspondent of the Times." 48 The domestic competition was overwhelming. The New York Herald put thirty to forty correspondents in the field and would spend more than half a million dollars to cover the war. The New York Tribune and the New York Times each had at least twenty specials. The New York World, Chicago Tribune, Cincinnati Gazette and Commercial, Philadelphia Press and Inquirer, Boston Journal and a scattering of papers of similar capabilities also made extraordinary efforts to bring the war news to their readers. As Albert Deane Richardson of the New

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York Tribune was to write later, their war correspondents "styled themselves the Bohemian Brigade, and exhibited that touch of the vagabond which Irving charitably attributes to poetic temperaments." 49 Russell, out of sympathy with the Bohemians, applied to the War Department for permission to draw rations and live with the Union Army, but received no encouragement. However, Major General Irvin MacDowell did invite the distinguished visitor to join him on the Federal troop movement south into Virginia that coincided with the New York Tribune's "On to Richmond!" campaign. At 9:30 a.m., Sunday, July 21, 1861, Russell moved out of Washington across the Long Bridge in a two-horse carriage, followed by a groom and saddle horse, and carrying with him ham, bologna sandwiches, Havana cigars, a flask of Bordeaux, a bottle of tea, and a bottle of water.50 The Crimea had never been like that! The Times's war correspondent headed for Manassas, Va., but never got there. The Battle of Bull Run had begun and, while he did not know it, some of the inexperienced and overly enthusiastic American reporters already were rushing back to Washington with tales of what they thought was a smashing victory. The very dilatory tactics of the foreign visitor spared him from even the chance that he might have committed such an error, which is doubtful in view of his experience on the battlefield. The first Russell really knew of the battle was when he was caught up late that day in a swirling panic of retreating Union soldiers. He wrote: "Infantry soldiers on mules and draught horses, with the harness clinging to their heels, as much frightened as their riders; Negro servants on their masters' chargers; ambulances crowded with unwounded soldiers; wagons swarming with men who threw out the contents on the road to make more room, grinding through a screaming, shouting mass of men on foot, who were literally yelling with rage at every halt. . . . There was nothing to do but go with the current one could not stem." 6 1 Russell returned to Washington shortly before 1 1 p.m. At just about that hour, "Father" Gobright of the Associated Press was hustling to the office of the American Telegraph Company there, having written a victory dispatch on the basis of information brought in by one of his correspondents, John Hasson. But the alert Gobright saw the vanguard of the survivors trickling into the capital and heard someone in front of the Metropolitan Hotel telling a crowd about the defeat. "At this

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point," Gobright wrote, in a quick add to his dispatch, "there was a sudden change in affairs," and he strung out as many of the details as he could pick up. Unfortunately for him and for the Bohemians who had come in with the real story, a blind and stupid wire censorship kept all reports of the defeat at Bull Run bottled up in Washington that night. The Washington papers came out with admissions of the rout, since nobody had remembered to shut them down. But elsewhere in the major cities of the North, the hapless press proclaimed a great victory, the New York Herald being typical: HEROISM OF THE UNION FORCES. . . . THEY KNOW NO SUCH WORD AS FAIL. 8 2

When censorship was lifted next day, and the truth finally came through, its unexpected impact made the defeat take on the proportions of a disaster. Henry Villard, in the New York Herald, was first on the street, and his story shocked the city even though the cautious Frederic Hudson, Bennett's managing editor, watered it down considerably: "Our troops, after taking three batteries and gaining a great victory at Bull's Run, were eventually repulsed and commenced a retreat on Washington. After the latest information was received from Centerville . . . a series of unfortunate events took place which have proved disastrous to our army. . . . W e were retreating in good order when a panic among our troops suddenly occurred and a regular stampede took place." 53 Henry J. Raymond of the New York Times was just as frank, as were most of the score or so of other correspondents who finally were able to wire their pieces. But it remained for the drama critic of the New York Tribune, Edward H. House, to sound the most agonizing appraisal from his temporary eminence as a tenderfoot war correspondent: "All was lost to that American army, even its honor. The agony of this overwhelming disgrace can never be expressed in words." 54 All this made the to-do over Russell's report of the battle somewhat puzzling to his British public. In his usual manner, he had taken his time to do his story and sent it on by the mail steamer that sailed from Boston on July 23. When the Times of London that carried his dispatch was received in the United States, a storm again broke about him. He had written some unpleasant, unpalatable, and entirely accurate truths: "The repulse of the Federalists, decided as it was, might have had no serious effects whatever beyond the mere failure—which politically was of greater consequence than it was in a military sense—but for the

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disgraceful conduct of the troops. The retreat on their lines at Centerville seems to have ended in a cowardly rout—a miserable, causeless panic. Such scandalous behavior on the part of soldiers I should have considered impossible, as with some experience of camps and armies I have never even in alarms among camp followers seen the like of it." 5 5 The infuriated Northern press denounced "this bilious LL.D., the snob correspondent of the London Times," "that Cassandra in breeches, Dr. Bull Run Russell," and "Bombast Russell." He wrote that he was the "best abused man in America," caricatured, insulted, threatened, shot at in the streets. A foreigner in a resentful land, he was no longer the admired "Balaclava" Russell but a villainous journalist from perfidious Albion. And in London, George Otto Trevelyan wrote slyly, Stain not a spotless name with useless crimes, O, save the correspondent of the Times.69 In vain did the New York Times write, "He gives a clear, fair and perfectly just and accurate, as it is spirited and graphic, account. . . . Discreditable as those scenes were to our Army, we have nothing in connexion with them whereof to accuse the reporter." 67 The storm did not subside. The Times of London denounced the Americans in the North and their press for "childish irritability," and Mowbray Morris, the Times's manager, wrote privately to his star correspondent, "What a press! Is it the result of cheapness or of an utterly brutal state of morals?" 68 This incident set the tone for the hostility between most of the British press and the leaders of the Northern press, headed by the New York Herald, in the United States for the duration of the Civil War. And this, in turn, exacerbated relations between the Union and the British government, which would have been touchy in any case. On the American side, few newspapers in addition to the New York Times made any effort to understand the British point of view. In Britain, only the liberal London Daily News gave genuine support to the cause of the Union, with Edwin Lawrence Godkin writing much of its war correspondence from the United States, and the talented and proAbolitionist Harriet Martineau writing its leaders in London.* There was no doubt among journalists who have left a record of their im* Miss Martineau visited the United States in 1834-1836, touring the South and becoming convinced that slavery was thoroughly evil.

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pressions that the kindly voice of the London Daily News was almost lost amid the thunders of the Times and the contemptuous squeals of the London Daily Telegraph, which were answered in kind by almost every major paper in the North. Delane, the editor of the Times, most honestly expressed the basic reason for his hostility at the time of the seizure of two Confederate commissioners, James M. Mason and John Slidell, from the British Royal Mail packet Trent by the U.S.S. San Jacinto. Shortly after the Confederates were taken into Union custody on November 8, 1861, Delane wrote to Russell: "The country took to the Crimean War because it was so long since we had enjoyed that luxury. . . . But it is another affair here. It is real, downright, honest desire to avenge old scores; not the paltry disasters of Baltimore and New Orleans, but the foul and incessant abuse of the Americans, statesmen, orators and press, and if we are foiled by a surrender of the prisoners, there will be an universal feeling of disappointment. We expect, however, that they will show fight—and hope for it, for we trust that we will give them such a dusting this time that even Everett, Bancroft and Co. won't be able to coin victories out of their defeats."69 However, the bellicose Britishers were disappointed. President Lincoln's wise and careful diplomatic maneuvering soon led to the release of the Trent prisoners. There was still another aspect to the Trent affair that affected Russell personally. When he learned of President Lincoln's decision, he wired a friend with stock market interests, "Enjoy your dinner." In some way, the New York Herald learned of the indiscreet wire and accused Russell forthwith of involvement in speculation at the expense of the United States. The Times worried about the matter but didn't pull the correspondent home, although he had been hinting for some time that he wanted to be recalled. In fact, Mowbray Morris at one point wrote to him peevishly: "Go to the front or come home. It is your business to report the military proceedings of the Federal army. . . . Up to the beginning of the year [1862] you did well; but since then you seem to have lost heart and thrown us overboard; This cannot last, so I repeat, go to the front or go home." 60 Russell's woes multiplied. He made a number of efforts to persuade the War Department to let him go to the front, but failed. It was this rather than his paper's attitude, he insisted, that led him at last to

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return to London: "I went to America to witness and describe the operations of a great Army . . . and when I was forbidden by proper authorities to do so my mission terminated at once." 61 He sailed for home in mid-April, 1862, being awarded a £300 annual pension for life by his paper, and proceeded to watch the Civil War ruefully from afar as the proprietor of the Army and Navy Gazette. His friend John Bigelow wrote to him long afterward that he had been "thrown overboard" to appease the War Department in Washington, not because of what he had written "but for what appeared in the columns of the print you represented." 62 Russell, seizing on this suggestion, eagerly replied, "As from the first I maintained the North must win, I was tabooed from dealing with American affairs in the Times even after my return to England. If ever I did State service it was in my letters from America." 63 Despite the equivocation in many of Russell dispatches, there was substance to his defense of his position as the Times itself belatedly conceded, saying, "Russell's letters showed a remarkable political acumen. His judgments, had Delane and Morris taken heed of them, might have saved the paper from serious errors, but both were blinded by an understandable though none the less regrettable prejudice." 64 That, too, was hindsight. During the war, Morris was thoroughly impatient with the pro-Northern dispatches of J. C. Bancroft Davis, the young New York lawyer, who represented the Times there and resigned at about the same time that Russell returned home. The Times's manager was much more enthusiastic about Davis's replacement, Charles Mackay, a British journalist with violently pro-Southern sympathies. But he was fired unceremoniously at the end of the war for "blind and unreasonable condemnation of all public men and measures on the Federal side." Perhaps the only man on the Times staff who emerged with an unscathed reputation was Francis Lawley, who covered the South throughout the war, but even this paragon, in 1865, received a slap on the wrist from the anxious Morris who, by that time, was trying to get the paper back on course: "I observe that you never notice the Opposition and always represent the Southern people as being unanimous. Are you sure that you are right in this?" However, Lawley also received Morris's congratulations for presenting "the only authentic record of the Southern side of the Civil War." 65 The evidence, therefore, is fairly conclusive that even if Russell did

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attempt to use the news columns to influence British opinion to expect a Northern victory eventually, the editorial policy of the paper itself was decisive in favoring the South until the closing months of the war. It is debatable whether in this instance the Times led influential British thought, as it had in the Crimean War and the Sepoy rebellion, or merely followed the course of least resistance. In any case, the close association of Delane, the great editor, and Russell, the great correspondent, was broken. It never was quite the same afterward. There were a few other scattered foreign correspondents in the United States, but none of particular influence or importance during the Civil War. The only one who left a remarkable imprint on the history of his times was a fiery little French physician turned journalist who boasted long afterward that he had entered Richmond five minutes before Grant and had covered Lincoln in the fallen rebel capital. He was Georges Clemenceau, correspondent of Le Temps of Paris. Having left France after a political scrape, he continued his spasmodic correspondence for Le Temps from New York after the end of the Civil War but had to teach French in a girls' school in Stamford, Conn., to make ends meet.68 When he went home in 1869, it was to begin a career that would lead him from a musty editor's office to the heights —savior of his country's honor in the Dreyfus case, twice premier of France, the indomitable Tiger whose spirit led the Allies to victory in World War I. 7. T H E L E S S O N O F A N T I E T A M From Russell to Clemenceau, the foreign correspondents who wrote under American datelines during the Civil War included some of the adventurers of journalism. But their actual battlefront experience was, for the most part, sketchy. It remained for the harum-scarum Bohemians of the Northern press to handle the most difficult and dangerous work. In doing so, they set an entirely new concept of journalism before the world by dint of a remarkable outburst of energy, talent, devotion, persistence, and, very often, fantastic good luck. Of all the Bohemians who followed the war, the strangest was a proper Bostonian, George Washburn Smalley. He was the son of a Congregational minister of Worcester, Mass., graduate of Yale and Harvard Law schools, stroke of the first Yale crew to race against Har-

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vard (a race Harvard won in 1852), practicing lawyer in Boston from 1856. He was big and smart, strong and tough, amply fulfilling Lord Salisbury's classic definition of a war correspondent as "a man who combines the skill of a first-class steeple-chaser with the skill of a firstclass writer." But unlike most of his fellow-Bohemians, he affected a cultivated Boston accent and the airs of a country squire, which, in a way, he was. Wendell Phillips, the Boston reformer whose adopted daughter Smalley married, turned him toward newspaper work by sending him to Charles A. Dana on the New York Tribune. The newcomer did well on his first assignment, a series on Negro life in the South before the Civil War. After the second Battle of Bull Run, he joined the Federal forces under Major General George B. McClellan.67 And in the haze of a late summer morning on September 17, 1862, at Antietam, he prepared for action. The pleasant, rolling Maryland countryside was alive with troops in blue and gray that morning. Behind Antietam Creek, winding through green groves and soft meadows, lay 50,000 Confederates under the command of General Robert E. Lee. The great Southern leader had withdrawn them there after McClellan had defeated his rear guard three days before at South Mountain, twelve miles west of Frederick, Md. "Little Mac" and his 70,000 men of the Army of the Potomac alone were counted on by President Lincoln and the prayerful North to turn back Lee's first invasion. The battle began at dawn. Smalley, who had slept on the ground with his horse's bridle around his arm, was with Major General Joseph E. Hooker's corps on the Federal right, having heard that "Fighting Joe" would attempt a flanking movement. General Hooker already was in the saddle, an imperious figure, flinging his troops forward toward a cornfield where "Stonewall" Jackson and his veterans waited. Smalley rode along with Hooker's staff, although nobody knew who he was. Once identified as a New York Tribune correspondent, he was pressed into service as a dispatch rider in the thick of the battle. At about 9 a.m., Hooker was shot in the foot by a Rebel sharpshooter and borne to the rear. Smalley carried on, riding over the battlefield. After a day of carnage, in which each side suffered 13,000 casualties, Lee was halted by the force of Union arms. Smalley found Hooker in a small red-brick schoolhouse and told him that the battle

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was over, that McClellan was resting on his arms and holding back his reserves, that Lee would escape across the Potomac. Hooker flew into a rage, then shook his head. "You need not go on. You must see I cannot move." Smalley had his story. Two bullets had torn his clothes and another had hit his horse. He changed mounts, exchanged notes with three other Tribune correspondents and galloped off to Frederick, thirty miles away. When he arrived at three next morning, the telegraph office was closed and the clerk didn't turn up until 7 a.m. Then Smalley wrote his story, but it went into the War Department in Washington and to President Lincoln. It was their first word of what had happened at Antietam. All that day, the War Department sat on Smalley's first story, which he had held to a column to get the main details through, but finally let it go on to New York in time for the next day's paper. The correspondent now begged to be sent to Baltimore by train, but none was scheduled. By a stroke of luck, an engine puffed into Frederick with a few cars, just as he had given up hope, and later dumped him off at Baltimore, disheveled, tired, and dirty. Ten minutes later, the Washington express came roaring through for New York and he swung aboard during the brief stopover. Knowing that further stories by wire were uncertain of arrival, he gambled on being able to write a complete account on the train by the dim light of a single oil lamp before he reached New York. "I ended as the train rolled into Jersey City by daylight," he recalled. He had begun writing at nine the night before. And so, at 6 a.m. on September 19, "the worst piece of manuscript the oldest [Tribune printer] had ever seen" was triumphantly delivered, and a Tribune extra hit the streets at breakfast time with six columns, Smalley's cleanup story, on the Federal victory at Antietam. It was a thundering beat, both for the early wire story and the complete account, both of which came through well ahead of everybody else. After reporting "the greatest fight since Waterloo," as his lead put it, Smalley headed back for the battlefields of Virginia by train that night. "However," he concluded, "I might as well have stayed in New York, for I was soon invalided back again with camp fever, and then remained in the office to write war editorials." 68 From Vicksburg and Gettsyburg, and from Chancellorsville to Appomattox, other Bohemians carried on in this new and sensational man-

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ner. But in the opinion of Henry Villard, Smalley's was the greatest individual reporting feat of the war. It was to have a profound effect on the conduct of foreign correspondence all over the world.

8. THE LESSON OF SADOWA It is not without significance that the two principal actors in this changing era of journalism, William Howard Russell and George Washburn Smalley, were assigned to cover the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 by their respective newspapers, the Times of London and the New York Tribune. Each worked in his characteristic manner. Although they had never met, each was well aware of the other and each contributed once more to the lore of foreign correspondence. Russell, lumbering out of retirement, wrote a leisurely pen-and-ink story of the Prussian victory at Sadowa (Koeniggraetz) that climaxed the six-weeks war, crediting a Prussian secret weapon for the astounding outcome. He called it a "needle gun"—a breech-loading rifle with a "needle" mechanism that fired cartridges three times as fast as other weapons then in existence. With a flourish, he wrote, "The needle gun has pricked the Austrians to the heart." Consequently, he recommended immediate changes in British weaponry that once again created a stir in Parliament, influenced his government, and benefited his country.69 While Smalley missed Sadowa, arriving from the United States after the battle had been fought, he dazzled his foreign rivals by paying $500 for what he believed to be the first news message over the trans-Atlantic cable—a loo-word story to the Tribune reporting a temporary breakdown in the peace talks.70 The New York Herald soon topped that. It paid $7,000 in gold to transmit the complete text by cable of the speech of the King of Prussia in celebration of the Sadowa victory.71 When it came to running for the wire, nobody could top the Americans. They had learned the lesson early. The work of the Bohemians is memorialized on South Mountain in Maryland in an elaborate arched monument, conceived by the New York World's correspondent, George Alfred Townsend. It bears the names of 157 correspondents and artists, among them Smalley and the other illustrious ones who, by their wit and talent and daring, laid the basis for the globe-girdling foreign correspondence of today. Much as the world owes them for their self-sacrifice in the pioneer-

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ing work with electronic communications, it is even more indebted to William Howard Russell and to his chief, Delane, who died on November 22, 1879, after thirty-six years as editor of the Times. Russell wrote of him, "He was ever my champion, my guide sometimes, my friend always." These two, between them, wove a tough moral fiber into the journalism of their day that resisted the corrosive and baneful influences that were directed against it. They showed that the mere collection and transmission of news, no matter how efficient, was not enough to satisfy the obligation of an independent newspaper to act in the public interest. In his declining years, Russell was weighed down with the honor and fullness of age and the sweet tributes of the mighty all over the earth. He traveled to every part of the world, even revisiting the United States despite his first doleful experience. He was knighted in 1895 and when, a few years later, he received the emblem of Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, King Edward V I I murmured to him, "You must not trouble to kneel, Billy. Stoop!" He died at 85 years of age on February 10, 1907, and was memorialized in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral in London as "The First and Greatest of War Correspondents." 72

III: The World News Revolution 1. THE TRIBUNE'S "FOREIGN COMMISSIONER" "Mr. Smalley sails for Europe today to act as Foreign Commissioner for the Tribune, resident in London." This item, published inconspicuously in the New York Tribune on May 1 1 , 1867, ushered in a momentous change in the gathering and dissemination of world news. George Washburn Smalley, the lawyerjournalist who had covered Antietam so courageously and brilliantly for the Tribune, was about to introduce American journalistic methods into the British empire and Europe. Smalley was quite conscious of a historic break with the slow majesty of the past, when correspondents had composed their dispatches in solemn deliberation over pen and ink and entrusted them to the post, special couriers or, as a rare privilege, the diplomatic or military figures who bore official news. But at the same time he realized that his American colleagues were altogether as skeptical as the journalists of Britain and Europe that he could work the wires overseas as skillfully as he had the domestic telegraph during the Civil War in the United States.1 Smalley's scheme was imperfectly understood even by John Russell Young, his managing editor, who had taken over in 1866. After Smalley's return from his tardy effort to cover the Austro-Prussian War, he had discussed with Young the notion of setting up a bureau in London under a European manager who would direct the work of all the Tribune's representatives in foreign capitals. Young, who was accustomed to the time-honored system under which each foreign correspondent reported individually to the managing editor, objected at first that his authority would be undermined. But Smalley argued that since the

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trans-Atlantic cable and land lines had brought even remote European points within a few hours of New York, centralized authority close to the scene of operations was mandatory. The home office could always give directions when there was time for it. Young finally agreed. Then, after some backing and filling, Smalley accepted appointment as the Tribune's first "foreign commissioner," a grandiose title for a bureau chief. How was this new system to work? Smalley had decided ideas about that, too. "When it had once been decided to establish a Tribune office in London," he went on, "a revolution had taken place. There was to be a responsible agent in charge. He was to organize a new administration. He was to appoint and dismiss other agents from all over the Continent. He was—subject, of course, to orders from New York—to transmit news to New York. "He was to be the telephone between Europe and the managing editor in New York. But he was to relieve the New York office of its supervision over the European staff. What St. Petersburg and Vienna, Berlin and Paris had to say to New York was to be said through London. There would be an economy of time. Orders could be sent from London and results received much more quickly than from New York. In an emergency, as was presently to be shown, the difference was enormous. The notion of the centrality of London, of its unity as a news bureau, was perfectly simple. . . . These methods have since become so familiar that there is little need to explain them, but at that time they were not merely novel but were derided by journalists of great experience." 2 Among the unbelievers were the two reigning powers in the dissemination of foreign news aside from the agencies, the Times of London and the New York Herald. But it was not long before the James Gordon Bennetts, father and son, had to follow the Tribune. Smalley, shrewd man, had devised the administrative and technical machinery that was still in general use well-nigh a century later by the world's major newsgathering organizations in the West. He had little money to spend at first so he concentrated on plugging up holes in his service with stringers. They included Joseph Hance, the secretary of the legation at Berlin; Signora Jessie Meriton White Mario, who was considered the first woman war correspondent and had reported most of Garibaldi's campaigns for the London Daily News; Clarence Cook, the acidulous

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art critic who was paid $1,000 a year for a Paris letter; a more lyrical literary critic and letter-writer, William H. Huntington, also in Paris; and such occasional wandering special correspondents as Mark Twain, who had a fine time with the "Innocents Abroad." 3 Smalley's new method of operation might have attracted little attention if Prince Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian Chancellor, had not succeeded in provoking France to declare war. The conflict burst upon Europe without warning in midsummer, 1870. The Tribune's "foreign commissioner" learned in a rather bored way on July 4 that Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen had been offered the Spanish throne and a few days later had declined, after first accepting, because Napoleon III had been outraged. The French Emperor then sent his ambassador, Comte Vincent Benedetti, to confront Kaiser Wilhelm I at Ems with a demand for a guarantee that no Hohenzollem again would seek the Spanish throne. The Kaiser courteously refused and remarked that the incident was closed, certainly not a cause for war. But in issuing the particulars to the press in a document that became notorious as the Ems telegram, the wily Bismarck so altered the interview as to make Napoleon feel that French grandeur and French honor had been mortally wounded. The Iron Chancellor's trick worked. In mid-July, France declared war. Smalley wasn't too concerned about the diplomatic niceties once war was declared. Among the first things that happened was that New York at once forgot about his carefully planned arrangements and ordered him forthwith to Berlin. He disregarded the order and began placing his men in strategic posts: Holt White, a Britisher who also represented the Pall Mall Gazette, was assigned to Prussian field headquarters, and a Frenchman, M. Mejanel, was sent to accompany the French army. But the energetic Smalley wasn't through. He evidently could round up no more war correspondents in whom he had confidence. He did the next best thing. For the first time, he put together a newspaper combination, a syndicate, and shared expenses with the London Daily News, an innovation that paid off handsomely and helped him carry out his assignment. No international newspaper alliance had ever been attempted, however, and this one was viewed with suspicion by John R. Robinson, the manager of the Daily News, as well as James Gordon Bennett and others like them. But the harddriving Smalley convinced Frank Hill, editor of the paper Charles

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Dickens had started, which formed the basis for the New York TribuneLondon Daily News entente.4 By this time, editors on both sides of the Atlantic had learned that nothing sold newspapers of that era like war news so it was a poor sheet, indeed, that couldn't advertise it had someone in the field with the contending armies. The demand for international news took precedence over all else, as has always happened in time of war. The New York Herald put twenty-four correspondents in France and Germany; Le Gaulois of Paris, twenty-six. The Times of London routed William Howard Russell out of retirement but, despite that and the assistance it gave him, worried, "We shall be outstripped." The London Daily Telegraph put the elegant George Augustus Sala in a field uniform, but made sure to send some working newsmen along with him. As for the London Daily News, Smalley's reluctant partner, it began with very little but was destined to take the lead over everybody eventually with the inspired work of Archibald Forbes. Hance, Smalley's diplomatic stringer from Berlin, scored the first great beat of the war by being far ahead of everybody into London with the story of the battle of Gravelotte, fought on August 18, 1870. Archibald Forbes was full of admiration for "this quiet little man," whom he knew only as a "Mr. Hands," crediting him with having been the first to describe a battle in Europe completely by wire. This was an old story, of course, to Americans who were familiar with Civil War reporting techniques. But except for Hance, Forbes wrote, none of the correspondents at Gravelotte had the wit or inspiration to take a sixhour ride to the nearest telegraph station at Saarbruecken and file their stories direct to London. Hance did. He wrote only a half-column, but it was in the London Daily News of August 19, which claimed a worldwide beat, and it was then cabled by Smalley to the New York Tribune at a cost of $5,000 and printed August 21. 5 After the one brilliant feat, Hance sank back into the bottomless seas of diplomacy and never again came to the surface of world attention. Years afterward, Richard Harding Davis came across him maundering away the years in a small Cuban consulate. The complete story of Gravelotte was told by a correspondent for the New York World, Moncure D. Conway, a Unitarian minister, who witnessed the fighting with another American special, Murat Halstead, editor of the Cincinnati Commercial. Conway reached Saarbruecken

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after walking much of the way, was refused passage on a troop train carrying wounded, but climbed atop one of the swaying cars and rode there for ten hours, sometimes flat on his back to avoid low bridges. Eventually, he reached Trier. With difficulty, because railway bridges were burned, he made his way to Luxembourg, then proceeded by train to Brussels and Ostend and by Channel boat to London where he cabled his piece to the World. It created such a sensation that the Daily News bought it for publication in London and sold it all over the Continent to its clients. Smalley had to pay "a high price" for the right of republishing, in the Tribune, a story that already had appeared in the rival World, so he took a rather dim view of the clergymancorrespondent's exploit. It cost Smalley more than $125,00x3 in cable tolls alone to report the war.6 No wonder that he was not enthusiastic about paying for someone else's beat! But, as Smalley wrote, "greater days were at hand." Von Moltke's hammer blows at Sedan, struck with the incredible force of a superbly trained Prussian army, shattered French resistance, resulted in the capture of 100,000 soldiers and of Napoleon the Little himself. Holt White saw all this. As soon as White had made certain of the French surrender he walked "with dauntless courage . . . right across the battlefield through the still glowing embers of the bitter strife," to quote Forbes, and faced the lines of three armies. The Prussians refused him a permit, the French maintained their security at outposts north of Sedan, and the Belgians threw up a guard at their neutral frontiers, yet White got past all of them. After he had reached Brussels next morning, the Belgians thought him mad when he tried to report the overwhelming French disaster and refused to let him use the wire. He went on to London, covering part of his journey by horseback until he had reached the Channel coast. On the morning of September 3, two days after the battle, the only news London had of Sedan was a brief Reuters bulletin which gave no inkling of the extent of the French defeat. At five that afternoon, White walked into Smalley's office, ragged, dirty, bone-weary, a "mere wreck of a correspondent." But the ruthless Smalley made him write six columns about Sedan. It was a major exclusive—the rise of Germany as a first-ranking world power, the collapse of France, the surrender of the French Emperor after his capture on the field. Smalley followed up with Mejanel's four-column exclusive on the

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French side of the tragedy. Being ahead on the story, the Tribune's "foreign commissioner" stayed ahead. In four days, he cabled $16,000 worth of dispatches—16,000 words. Seldom has thorough journalistic preparation for a major event ever paid off as well.7 New men, using the thoroughly tested methods of the American Civil War correspondents, thus demonstrated their superiority over the best that British and European journalism had to offer. Among the hopelessly beaten at Sedan were William Howard Russell and Hilary Skinner, the latter a correspondent of the London Daily News, whose beautifully written dispatches came in so late that they were very old news. Nor was the struggling Archibald Forbes of the London Daily News any better off at first, although he learned quickly and the older men didn't. Smalley wasn't through. Gustav Mueller, a young American of German ancestry whom he'd hired as a stringer to work on the German side, was first inside the Fortress of Metz after its surrender. Mueller reached the Luxembourg frontier and on October 28, 1870, filed from a telegraph station near Esch. Since the piece was unsigned, and since it appeared in both the Tribune and the London Daily News, the credit was widely given to Forbes. It was a "stern lesson" for him. "In modern war correspondence," he wrote, "the race is emphatically to the swift, the battle to the strong. The best organizer of the means for expediting his intelligence, he it is who is the most successful man —not your deliberate manufacturer of telling phrases, your piler-up of coruscating adjectives." To this, the Times added its own graceful tribute in an editorial that accompanied the reprinting of Mueller's dispatch: "We take from the Daily News the following admirable account of the evacuation of Metz, and congratulate our contemporary upon the promptitude and ability of his Correspondent. We might envy him, if such a feeling were possible, with so honourable a competitor." And Mowbray Morris added in a letter to a friend, "No paper has been so badly served as the Times during this great war by all its correspondents, old and new." The revolutionary methods which Smalley had learned during the Civil War and first applied at Antietam now had been demonstrated with brilliant success to the amazement of the journalistic leaders of the Old World. His victory was complete. The world news revolution

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was finally under way. The race, as Smalley had said, was truly to the swift, the battle to the strong. There is a strange footnote to this episode in journalism. Mueller, who had so dramatically delivered the final proof of the efficacy of American methods, inexplicably vanished after calling on Smalley in London and being sent back to France with a further assignment. Smalley wrote the story for a magazine some years later, posing the mystery of Mueller's disappearance, whereupon the journalistic hero of Metz came to the surface in New York to prove he was still alive. He explained, as if it had been the simplest decision in the world, that he had suddenly decided a war corresponent's life was not for him; accordingly, he had gone home without bothering to notify Smalley or

the Tribune.

'The year 1870," Smalley concluded, looking back on the result of his enterprise, "is a year of transition if not of revolution. I think we are entitled to remember with satisfaction that in telegraphic news enterprise, even in Europe, it was an American journal which led the way and that the Tribune was that journal." 8 2. " T H E I N C O M P A R A B L E

ARCHIBALD"

A morose Scotsman, shabby and hungry-looking, made the rounds of London newspaper offices in 1870 seeking appointment as a war correspondent. He had no luck. In the first place, he seemed more like a tramp then a journalist. In the second, his experience was relatively slight. Meditatively, he stood on the street, tossed one of his few remaining coins, and decided on the way it fell that he would try the London Daily News next. That was the beginning of a brilliant career for Archibald Forbes, an ambitious 32-year-old ex-soldier and clergyman's son, "the incomparable Archibald," as William Howard Russell called him at the height of his fame.® Forbes had gone to the Franco-Prussian War as an unsalaried correspondent for the London Morning Advertiser. He had been with Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm I at the series of battles of St. PrivatGravelotte and had watched Sedan from the hilltop of Frenois with that keenest of military observers, General Phil Sheridan. He had been the only neutral correspondent to witness the confrontation of a shattered Napoleon and Bismarck outside a weaver's cottage near Donchery

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after Sedan. But for all that, his reward was a dismissal from the Advertiser. Its Paris correspondent, he was told, would do the rest.10 After being hired by the delighted John R. Robinson, manager of the Daily News, who offered £20 a week plus expenses, Forbes hustled back to the front, 11 was beaten at Metz, and resolved from then on to use the wire unsparingly. It was his salvation. From Prussian field headquarters outside besieged Paris, he managed to pull off a series of dazzling beats that had both his fellow-correspondents and the suspicious Prussian general staff thoroughly puzzled. One correspondent, in fact, lodged a formal complaint that the Daily News's man had been unduly favored by the Prussians. Forbes didn't let it bother him. But when an officer on the staff of Prince George of Saxony accused him of post-dating his dispatches to make them appear fresher than they were, the correspondent promptly offered to bet him that it wasn't so. They agreed to this test: A newsworthy, but not vital, item of military information would be given to Forbes, and he would have to get it into the Daily News within thirty-six hours. Accordingly, Forbes was presented with his story. He had a little fun with the Prussians by stopping off at the military telegraph office on his way to his quarters and offering his message. "No, no, Herr Forbes," the operator said smilingly, "I have orders to accept no message from you." Despite that, the Daily News on the following morning carried the story, and Forbes collected his bet from the mystified officer. For months, Forbes was able to preserve his secret although, as he wrote long afterward, it was "so simple that I am ashamed to explain it." While he had been on assignment at Metz, he had deposited a sizable fund with the manager of the telegraph office at Saarbruecken, who agreed to accept messages charged against this deposit for prompt transmission to London. In order to get messages from the German lines before Paris to Saarbruecken, he used the military field post which connected with a train at Lagny that daily reached the frontier within fifteen hours. Forbes merely addressed his dispatches to his friend, the telegraph manager at Saarbruecken, in a plain envelope which he mailed routinely from places picked at random along the military field post route.12 In the face of the Daily News's many successes, which boosted its circulation enormously and made it a profitable newspaper almost overnight, the Times had to stagger along as best it could under the weight

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of old methods and even older correspondents. William Howard Russell in desperation used one of his best men, Sutherland Edwardes, as a courier to get dispatches through to London. When his paper protested against his misuse of a good man for a menial job, Russell argued that a correspondent wearing a "Red Cross" brassard could beat the post by three days. He didn't know how else to compete with Forbes because he couldn't understand how to get to a telegraph office under the circumstances. Until that time, Forbes had been about thirty-six hours behind the news—a fabulous showing for those days. But presently, he was to be on the streets of London with a major story at exactly the time it happened. It was the bombardment of St. Denis, a suburb of Paris, by the siege guns of the Crown Prince of Saxony. What happened here was that Forbes inaugurated the journalistic practice of getting up an advance story and past-tensing it; that is, he obtained all the facts about the bombardment from the obliging Saxon prince, emplacement of guns, targets, reasons for the attack, and so on, then wrote as if the event already had occurred. He sent this along to London well in advance with orders to set it in type and hold for a release from him. When the Prince raised his hand, ordering the beginning of the bombardment, Forbes yelled to the military telegraph operator, "Go ahead." That was the code for the release for London and in a few minutes the Daily News's presses were churning out the papers for another Forbes exclusive.13 Russell managed to save something of his reputation against this kind of competition by being first with the story that Paris was ready to surrender. He had attended the ceremonial proclamation of the German Empire on January 18, 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and learned thereafter that Jules Favre was at enemy headquarters at Versailles. Favre, a member of the National Defense Committee in Paris, could be in negotiations with the Prussians only for a surrender, Russell reasoned, and he set about tracking him down. Once the correspondent had seen Favre and confirmed the story, the rest was almost automatic.14 It had taken months, but "Billy" Russell and the Times finally had a beat of their own. It was just as well, for Archibald Forbes was on the verge of one of his most famous exploits. With Favre's agreement with Bismarck on the night of January 28 to surrender Paris, it became clear to the fifty

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waiting correspondents that the next big story would fall to the first one of them who managed to get inside Paris and out with an account of what had happened to the City of Light during its long agony. With typical bravado, Forbes mounted his horse and rode to the St. Ouen Gate, the next one north of La Chapelle, on the morning of January 31. He was the only horseman among a crowd at the gate and a gendarme, who was examining passes in a listless way, let him by without even a question. All he had was his British passport, but he wore a Prussian cap which immediately aroused the indignant Parisians. Somehow, he managed to avoid being pulled off his horse and trampled on and proceeded to make a close examination of the center of Paris, including the American legation and the British embassy. He had some slices of ham with him, which helped. After eighteen hours inside Paris, the only correspondent from outside to make such an inspection, he got out with the same lucky celerity that had marked his entry. Once he had passed the last German sentry, fortunately finding an officer he knew who vouched for him, he spurred his horse to catch the train which he knew left Lagny daily for the frontier. He just made it. But instead of going to Saarbruecken, he headed for Karlsruhe because he knew that the telegraph office in the capital of Baden was open all night. He wrote his dispatch as the train jounced over the French countryside. But when he reached Karlsruhe, there were further difficulties. A suspicious German girl, who was alone in the telegraph office, wouldn't send the message unless her manager approved, and it took some time to locate and arouse him. But finally, after Forbes had emptied his money belt and used all the persuasion of which he was capable, the story began to move. By 7 a.m., it was completed.18 In the Daily News of February 4, Forbes's dispatch gave the world its first outside eyewitness account of the tragedy of Paris: " 'Paris is utterly cowed; fairly beaten.' So said the first Englishman I met and his opinion was mine. Yet, Paris was orderly and decent, and with a certain solemn, morose self-restraint was mastering the tendency to demonstrate. . . . "The whole city is haunted with the chaste odors which horseflesh gives out in cooking. . . . They permeate the deserted British Embassy where . . . I stabled my horse. They linger in the corridors of the Grand Hotel and fight with the taint from wounds in evil cases.

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"The Grand Hotel is one huge hospital. Half Paris seems converted into hospitals, if one may judge by the flags. . . . "The last cow that changed hands 'for an ambulance' fetched 80 Pounds. Those left cannot now be bought for money. The bread is not bad. The difficulty is to get it. Only people say there is nothing else to do but wait outside the bakers' and the butchers'. I saw huge throngs at both as I rode through Paris, and chiefly women, waiting silently in the cold. What must it have come to when the Parisians are so utterly crushed!" 16 Russell, however, remained a dangerous and determined rival. When the Prussian army formally entered Paris on March 1, 1871, and was reviewed by Kaiser Wilhelm at Longchamps, the Times arranged for a special train to speed Russell and a colleague, A. B. Kelly, from the Gare du Nord to Calais. At Calais, Kelly took the account Russell had dictated to him aboard a special Channel steamer and reached London in time to have it published in the Times of March 2. Forbes caught the regular boat train and Channel steamer and got to London in time for a Daily News extra that was published at 8 a.m. the same day, which means that he wasn't beaten by much. For his pains, his detractors spread rumors that he had disguised himself as a fireman and wangled a place aboard the Times's special conveyances.17 Such was the competitive spirit among foreign correspondents of that day. In the bitter fighting that followed the dramatic rise of the Paris Commune, Forbes once more ventured into the shattered city and risked his life to cover the street-to-street duel between the Versaillists and the communards. The climax came for him on May 22 when he reached the Church of Notre Dame de Lorette and found himself in a virtual No Man's Land with the communards and their foes shooting at each other from behind barricades. "I took up a protected position on the church porch," he wrote. "But the [communard] officer in command, happening to notice me, approached and ordered me to pick up the musket of a man who had just been bowled over, and to take a hand in the defence of the position. I refused, urging that I was a foreigner and a neutral. . . . Thereupon he shouted for four of his men to come and place me up against the wall of the church, and then act as a firing party. "They had duly posted me and were proceeding to carry out the pro-

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gramme to its inconvenient ending, when suddenly a rush of Versaillist troops came upon and over the Rue St. Lazare barricade. Thereupon the defenders precipitately evacuated the triangle, the firing party accompanying their comrades. I remained, not caring for the society I should have to accompany if I fled; but presently I came to regard my fastidiousness as folly, for several shots came too near to be pleasant. "One bullet went through my hat; and in a twinkling I was in Versaillist grips and instantly charged with being a communard. The people in the red breeches set about sticking me up against the church wall again, when fortunately I saw a superior officer and appealed to him. "I was bidden to hold up my hands. They were not particularly clean, but there were no gunpowder stains on the thumbs and forefingers. Those stains were, it seemed, the brand marking the militant communard, and my freedom from them just pulled me through. It was a close call; but then a miss is as good as a mile." 18 The problem now was to get out of the city with the story, not an easy task since any correspondent risked being shot as a spy by one side or the other. Forbes solved the problem with a typical bit of resourcefulness. He cajoled a British embassy official into giving him something to carry to Versailles, which, of course, made him a messenger of the Queen with impressive credentials. It was enough to get him through the lines. Once he had done his duty for Her Majesty, he headed for London at top speed, and got into the Daily News first with his story: "Paris the beautiful was now Paris the ghastly, Paris the battered, Paris the blood-drenched. And this in the present century—Europe professing civilization, France boasting of culture and refinement, Frenchmen braining one another with the butt-ends of their rifles, and Paris blazing to the skies! There needed but a Nero to fiddle." Forbes stayed only twenty-four hours in London. On May 16, at a time when the thoroughly shocked British public was reading his dispatches, he already was back in Paris recording the dying hours of the Commune. On May 28, at the end of the bloody week of desperate fighting, Marshal Marie Edme Patrice de MacMahon grandly announced, "I am absolute master of Paris." And in Pere-Lachaise, the dead lay tier on tier in hapless disarray, each layer coated with powdered chloride of lime, in the dank pits where they had been executed by piti-

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less firing squads. All the glory of France could not conceal them from Forbes's eyes. As always, he wrote what he saw and what he heard. An honest correspondent could do no more.19 It was only the beginning for Forbes. Before the decade was out, he was to transform, almost single-handedly, the established practices of war reporting and create a new and uncertain relationship between the military and the free press.

3. "FIND LIVINGSTONE1" James Gordon Bennett Jr., the arrogant young scapegrace who had succeeded his ascetic father as the ruler of the New York Herald, had just gone to bed at his customarily late hour in Paris. There was a resolute knocking at his door in the then elegant Grand Hotel. "Come in!" Bennett roared, not bothering to get out of bed. A small, dark-haired stranger strode into the room, looking every bit as truculent as the publisher. Bennett stared at him, finding him vaguely familiar but at the same time being unable to place him. "Who are you?" "My name is Stanley." Then Bennett remembered. This was the daring young Welshman he'd hired as a roving correspondent on the strength of his reporting of the Indian wars in the American West. Three days before, Bennett had wired the fellow to leave Spain at once and see him. The publisher waved his nocturnal guest to a chair. "Ah, yes. Sit down. I have important business on hand for you." He hoisted himself out of bed and threw a robe about his shoulders. "Where do you think Livingstone is?" As both men were well aware, the world had been wondering for some time about the fate of David Livingstone, a Scottish missionary who since 1866 had been on a pioneering expedition in Africa for the Royal Geographic Society. Henry Morton Stanley gave his employer a quick, frank answer. "I don't know, sir." "Do you think he is alive?" "He may be, and he may not be." "Well," Bennett said, with sudden resolution, "I think he is alive and that he can been found and I am going to send you to find him."

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Stanley asked wonderingly, "Have you considered seriously the great expense you are likely to incur on account of this little journey?" Bennett was always impatient about money, which he flung with improvident abandon at pretty women, choice liquors, and foreign correspondents as the mood seized him. "Well, I will tell you what you will do. Draw a thousand pounds now. And when you have gone through that, draw another thousand, and when that is spent, draw another thousand, and when you have finished that, draw another thousand, and so on. But find Livingstone!" The publisher then outlined a preliminary trip to lower Egypt, Jerusalem, Constantinople, the Crimea, Khiva in the remote Uzbek country, Persia, and India. "Then," he concluded, "when you come to India, you can go after Livingstone. Probably you will hear by that time that Livingstone is on his way to Zanzibar. But if not, go into the interior and find him, if alive. Get what news of his discoveries you can. And if you find him dead, bring all possible proofs of his being dead. That is all. Good night, and God be with you." 20 In this manner, Stanley was sent on his African journey on the night of October 17, 1869. He was 28 at the time, fierce-eyed and resolute, a bundle of steel nerves and raw courage packed into a strong and wiry five-footfive-inchframe. No stranger character ever came out of nowhere to land atop Page One of the world press. He was like an urchin out of Charles Dickens, after whom he tried to pattern his style. The circumstances of his birth were pitiable, for his mother hastened to a London hospital from her native Denbigh, Wales, to bring him into the world in 1841. His father was accounted to have died soon afterward, and the infant bore his name—John Rowlands.21 At the death of his maternal grandfather, with whom he had been left by his mother, the child was placed in St. Asaph's Union Workhouse in Wales at the age of four. Whatever education he had he received at this orphan asylum, where he remained until he beat up a teacher at 15 (a brutal teacher, of course) and ran away. He shipped out of Liverpool as a cabin boy for New Orleans. There he found work because Henry Morton Stanley, the benefactor whose name he eventually adopted, took a liking to him when he applied at the Stanley commission house for something to do. Had it not been for the Civil War, the young immigrant might have become a successful

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merchant in time. But, with reluctance, he enlisted in the Confederate army because it wouldn't have been healthy for any able-bodied young man in the Crescent City to stay at home when there was a war on. His military adventures ended disastrously. He was captured at Shiloh and released from a Union prison camp when he agreed to change sides. But before the year was out he was discharged for ill health and returned to Liverpool. Again, he had no luck. He wound up by reenlisting with the Union armed forces in 1864 as a member of the crew of the U.S.S. Moses H. Stuyvesant. Now, ever so slightly, the wobbly wheel of fortune began tilting Stanley's way. Even at that time, the U.S. Navy was publicity-conscious and liked to insure favorable notices for itself in the public prints. This was easiest done by assigning personnel with a literary flair to be "Ship's Writers" and letting them do chores, on appropriate occasions, for newspapers that didn't mind giving the Navy a little space to tell its story. By that immutable process in the military through which dolts sometimes wind up at headquarters and scientists on K. P., Stanley was assigned to be a "Ship's Writer." When his ship participated in a combined operation that cracked open Fort Fisher in North Carolina, he wrote such forceful and glamorous pieces that many a newspaper gave him a good play. If the Navy was delighted, so was Stanley. He had no doubt whatever that he had found his life's work. Upon his discharge at the end of the Civil War, he and a companion, W . H. Cook, free-lanced their way through the West and back and then journeyed from Boston to the Near East. Evidently, there was a ready sale for Stanley's stuff for he and his partner had $1,200 when they reached Turkey. A gang of Turkish bandits robbed them, but luckily the robbers were caught and the money was recovered. Stanley went back to the United States, looking for a better break. In St. Louis, he found it and became a reporter for a St. Louis newspaper, the Missouri Democrat, at $15 a week. His work attracted favorable attention in the East. Consequently he began stringing for a half-dozen papers in addition to his own, bringing his earnings to $90 a week covering the Indian wars. It is interesting to speculate on what might have happened to Stanley if he had remained in St. Louis. But he loved the life of a wanderer. Learning that the British were about to dispatch an expedition to Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia) to punish its emperor, Theodore, for

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daring to defend his territory against an influx of Europeans, Stanley hastened to New York and tried to find someone interested in that kind of correspondence. Most New York editors, however, were bored with both the British and Ethiopia. At the Herald, James Gordon Bennett Jr. became interested in the young adventurer despite that. " I wish I could offer you something permanent, for we want active men like you," Bennett said. But he was cold on the Ethiopian expedition. Finally, he agreed to consider printing Stanley's stuff if the correspondent would pay his own expenses. It was a calculated risk, but one that Stanley eagerly accepted. Soon he was in London, making his arrangements with the Herald's agent, Colonel Finlay Anderson. And in the spring of 1868, by beating all competitors to the Suez telegraph office with the story of the British victory at Magdala and the suicide of Theodore, the young correspondent established himself. He was put on the Herald's payroll at $2,000 a year and for a year roved over Europe. It was from the Carlist wars in Spain that Bennett finally summoned him, probably at Colonel Anderson's suggestion, to send him back to Africa to find Livingstone. The possibility that Livingstone might be perfectly well, going about his business in pursuit of his agreement with the Royal Geographic Society, evidently never entered Bennett's mind. He was the kind of editor who never let anything interfere with his own notions in the quest for news. Born May 10, 1841, he had taken over the Herald after the Civil War. For all his personal vagaries, he was a first-rate journalist. But working for him was both an experience and a trial, as Stanley was to discover. Once Bennett began drinking, he was a wild man. He could be silly enough to drink champagne from a blonde showgirl's slipper or try to direct firemen fighting the flames while he was in evening clothes. He was so arrogant that he once sent his music critic to St. Petersburg because the unfortunate journalist refused to get a haircut. On another occasion he asked for a list of the indispensable men on the Herald and, when he received it, discharged them all. In Paris, he would walk the length of a restaurant, pulling cloths (plus dishes, wine, and food) off tables if the mood seized him. He would drive a coach and four completely naked. Once, while amusing himself in this strange manner, he forgot to duck under a low bridge and nearly killed himself. Like William Randolph Hearst in a later era, he would send to New York for editors, then keep them waiting in Paris, and sometimes ship them back

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without seeing them. Such was the strange despot who so lightly ordered Stanley off on a mission that might not have been necessary. For fifteen months after receiving his orders from Bennett, Stanley fulfilled his initial assignments and dutifully sent pieces from all the places he visited. Not a word from Bennett. The instructions still stood: "Find Livingstone!" Finally, after a long voyage from Bombay, he reached Zanzibar on December 31, 1870. There was no news of Livingstone, but rumors filtering from the jungle variously had him lost, dead, and comfortably attached to an African princess. Stanley had only $80 in gold, but he persuaded the American consul to help him raise additional funds. Then, on March 21, 1871, he left the coastal town of Bagamoyo with a little army of three whites, 31 armed freemen from Zanzibar, 153 porters, 27 pack animals, and two riding horses. By May 8 he began the difficult ascent of the Usagara range, reached Ugogo, and toiled on into a picturesque country called the Land of the Moon. Everywhere he asked for Livingstone, and nowhere could he find anything definite about the missionary. He knew only that the Royal Geographic Society had asked Livingstone to try to locate the headwaters of the Nile and this, obviously, would have to be the goal also of the rescue expedition. Stanley was caught in a tribal war that held him up for three months and disorganized his party. But he pushed on for Lake Tanganyika. Along the trail he heard a rumor, passed on by a native caravan, that a gray-bearded white man had been seen in a settlement called Ujiji, established by Arabs in the lake country. His hopes rose. On November 10, 1871, he and his party reached Lake Tanganyika. While they rested from their exertions, a tall black man in a long white shirt hurried before them. He bowed to Stanley. "Good morning, sir." Stanley was brusque with him. "Hello. Who in the mischief are you?" "I am Susi, sir. Servant of Dr. Livingstone." "What! Is Dr. Livingstone here in this town?" "Yes, sir." Before Stanley could ask any more questions, the black man took off for Ujiji, running at top speed, to tell his master of the arrival of the new party. Then followed the famous scene which is best told in Stanley's own words as he first wrote them for the New York Herald at the end of his long account of the climax of his search:

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"We have at last entered the town. There are hundreds of people around me—I might say thousands without exaggeration, it seems to me. It is a grand triumphal procession. As we move, they move. All eyes are drawn towards us. The expedition at last comes to a halt; the journey is ended for a time; but I alone have a few more steps to make. "There is a group of the most respectable Arabs, and as I come nearer I see the white face of an old man among them. He has a cap with a gold band around it, his dress is a short jacket of red blanket cloth and his pants--well, I didn't observe. I am shaking hands with him. We raise our hats and I say: " 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume?' "And he says,'Yes.' " 2 3 It was many months before the outside world heard the story of that celebrated meeting, and then it came out only in fragments. The first report to the New York Herald came from Colonel Anderson in London, who on July 2, 1872, published the news that Livingstone was safe and Stanley had found him. Stanley's own account, forwarded by the London agent, was published on August 10, 1872, with tremendous fanfare. But the New York Herald's great exclusive served at first only to raise doubts in England. One expert gibed, "Maybe it is Livingstone who has found Stanley." Perhaps it was for this reason, perhaps for the sheer artistry of embroidering a romance, that Stanley eventually added many more details to the scene in which he came upon Livingstone for the first time. He supplied the missing observation about the trousers—the missionary's were gray tweed. He also filled out the romantic confrontation scene with numerous colorful details. On March 14, 1872, after promising supplies which the Herald was delighted to send, Stanley left the missionary. He arrived fifty-four days later at Zanzibar. On May 20, he sent fifty-seven men, completely outfitted and supplied, from that base to accompany Livingstone for two years. On August 11, 1872, they reached the missionary at Unyanembe. Having been "found" by Stanley, he wasted no time plunging back into the bush country with his new party.24 Stanley, nevertheless, emerged from the exploit as a hero. If any doubters remained, Bennett silenced them by splashing a letter from Livingstone across Page One of the Herald. It was dated Ujiji, November, 1871, and it was fervently thankful for the assistance of both Stan-

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ley and the Herald. Since it was addressed to Bennett himself, the publisher was quite happy, particularly when Livingstone related how he had been "found" by a caravan bearing the American flag.26 Stanley went on to cover one of Britain's numerous little imperialistic adventures in Africa. When he arrived at the Island of St. Vincent on February 25, 1874, he learned that Livingstone had died at Ilala near Lake Bangweolo on April 30, 1873.26 It didn't take Stanley long to seize the main chance. As Livingstone's successor, he took up the role of African explorer with relish, this time as the representative of both the Herald and the London Daily Telegraph. In three years, between 1874 and 1877, he opened up sub-Sahara Africa, traced the Congo River from source to mouth, and crossed the dark continent from east to west. When Britain declined to support him in developing the Congo, he turned to the brutal Leopold, King of the Belgians, named Leopoldville for him, and founded the Congo Free State. He was elected to Parliament, knighted, married late in life, and settled down on a Surrey estate. On May 10, 1904, he died in London at the age of 63 and was buried in Surrey after services at Westminster Abbey.27 Just as George Washburn Smalley and Archibald Forbes changed the methods of foreign correspondence, Stanley broadened the substance with which it dealt. He showed both the world and his profession that there were more important things for a journalist to do than report on wars and rumors of wars. He was the founder of a hard-riding troop of glory—men who sought adventure for its own sake in the jungles, deserts, and mountain fastnesses, in the bleak white midnight of the polar ice and the restless blue of the seven seas, at the very bottom of the ocean itself, and finally in the ghastly and weightless emptiness of space itself.

4. T H E T I M E S ' S " F O R E I G N

MINISTER"

One snowy New Year's Eve in Paris, a quiver of excitement raced through the diplomatic corps. Rumors of a revolutionary coup in Madrid had brought a huge crowd to a magnificent old hotel on the Avenue Kleber. It was the Palais de Castille, inside which the gay and youthful Prince of Asturias and his retinue were celebrating the advent

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of the year 1875. A few of the chosen ones would know tonight if he had already been proclaimed Alfonso XII, King of Spain, as rumor had it. But the outside world would have to wait, perhaps until morning, to know if his country had used him well or ill. The crowd shifted restlessly in the pelting snow. Police moved about, stamping their feet, before the great gates that guarded the courtyard. Many had tried to get through, but nearly all had been turned away. The royal guest of the government of France could not be disturbed. All at once, a black carriage, drawn by two horses, came dashing down the Avenue Kleber and halted at the fringe of the crowd. A Spanish nobleman, the Count de Banuelos, pleaded with a Commissary of Police that he had urgent business with the Prince of Asturias and succeeded in having his card sent in to the Palais de Castille. Within a few minutes, the crowd was forced aside. A double line of police made an avenue along which the carriage passed through the gates. Too late, a waiting journalist saw a second shadowy figure inside the carriage beside the Count de Banuelos and set up a wail, "It is Blowitz* carriage!" But by that time, Henri Stefan Opper de Blowitz, acting Paris correspondent of the Times of London, already was safely inside the Palais de Castille, and his noble guide was arranging for an exclusive interview for him with the Prince of Asturias. Blowitz boldly addressed the young man as "Your Majesty" and saw him smile. "Although I believe I may consider myself King of Spain," Alfonso X I I said, "you are the first stranger who has yet greeted me with this title. I have been utterly surprised at the event. . . . I was afraid it might be too long delayed but my friend Martinez Campos wished to make me a present on this appropriate day of the year and," here he laughed, "he could not have chosen a finer one." That was all Blowitz needed. He chatted nervously for a few minutes longer, then excused himself from the royal presence, warmly thanked the Count de Banuelos, and raced for the wire. Three days later, John Delane congratulated him and on February 1, 1875, he was formally appointed the Times's Paris correspondent.28 In this manner, Blowitz, a pompous little Bohemian with the pose of a small-time ambassador, the manners of a burglar, and the gall of a first-class confidence man, began his incredible reign as the virtual dictator of foreign policy for the greatest newspaper in England. It was with good reason that the Times itself, in its official history, called him the "most quoted

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and most hated" of its correspondents during his more than two decades of service.29 The manner in which Blowitz insinuated himself into journalism and gained a foothold at the Times was a foretaste of what could be expected from him. At an early age he left the Pilsen region of Bohemia, where he had been born in 1825, and became a teacher in Marseilles. With the fall of the Second Empire, he began dabbling in politics, turned tipster for a local paper, and somehow managed to gain the confidence of Adolphe Thiers, president of the new republic. When the veteran Frederick Hardman temporarily left Paris, putting the burden of the Times's correspondence entirely on the less-experienced Laurence Oliphant, Blowitz saw his chance and took it. His first story was an exclusive interview with M. Thiers, who was greatly pleased, as was the Times?0 When Hardman died in 1874, it was only a question of time before Blowitz would obtain the cherished Paris post. 31 Almost at once, the new Paris correspondent pulled off a sensation that had the British public buzzing and the chancelleries of Europe wondering what kind of a journalistic chameleon had been turned loose in their midst. The French, having made a rapid recovery after the debacle of 1870, had begun rebuilding their army, and German newspapers soon took notice. On April 8, 1875, the Berlin Post ran an article headed, "Is War In Sight?" A little of this kind of journalistic needling went a long way in Paris, where the Foreign Minister, the Due Decazes, took fright. He called in Blowitz in secrecy one night and showed him some "confidential" dispatches from the French ambassador at Berlin, the Count de Gontaut Biron, which warned in effect that Germany was ready to march westward again. Decazes urged Blowitz to run a story which would cause Emperor Alexander II of Russia to protest to Germany during the course of a visit to Berlin that had already been scheduled. This kind of intrigue suited the vain and pompous little correspondent perfectly. He managed to persuade Delane that his story was genuine, as a result of which the Times on May 6, 1875, published the whole business under the headline: " A French Scare." Subsequently, Blowitz reported that the Russian Emperor did protest, Bismarck called off his supposed war plans, and the peace of Europe was saved.32 However, after the passage of many years, the Times had this to say about the strange affair:

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"Blowitz' claim is not bome out by the facts, His letter did not cause the Czar to speak nor did Russian intervention save the situation. The facts are that his letter was written at the earnest request of Decazes, the French Foreign Minister, who deliberately conveyed to him the more sensational facts of the reports of the French ambassador in Berlin. The German campaign was dying down, though Paris was very uneasy and the British government still apprehensive. Decazes and Blowitz, with their own reasons for wishing to give a startling turn to the situation, made Delane an unwilling accomplice. . . . The publication of the war scare letter created a sensation in Paris and had such an effect upon the Bourse that Decazes was accused of stockjobbing. The effect of the letter on the public was as designed: it revived the fears which were waning. To this extent it affected the calculations of statesmen. Beyond that, it had little significance; the leading article of May 6 aptly entitled it, 'A French Scare.' " 3 3 The French troubles with Germany, and Blowitz' interpretation of them, were speedily forgotten with the beginning of three years of tension in the Balkans, punctuated by the uprising in Bosnia and Herzegovina against Turkish rule. The futile Serbian war against Turkey, the Daily News's exposé of the Bulgarian atrocities, and the Russian war against Turkey all served to heat up the European atmosphere. Needless to say, the relatively poor showing made by the Times in its war coverage against such masters as Forbes and MacGahan led to the paper's dependence on Blowitz. For all his faults, he could still deliver exclusive stories from Paris and, more often than not, he could make them stand up. Such men were in rare supply, whether they were sensation-mongers or not. Consequently, when the Congress of Berlin was called in 1878 to revise the Treaty of San Stefano, Blowitz was sent from Paris to cover. With Bismarck playing a leading role as the so-called "honest broker" and with Russia, Austria, Britain, Italy, and France redrawing the map of southeastern Europe, the most rigorous security was imposed on all diplomats. Blowitz and the Times in particular were objects of surveillance. The deals that were being made behind closed doors were not likely to please any of the have-not nations. Moreover, in carving up Turkey, the western European nations and Britain wanted to be certain that Russia did not receive too much. At the Congress of Berlin, Blowitz was using General Ferdinand

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Eber, the formidable Hungarian, and Carl Abel, the regular Berlin correspondent of the Times, as blinds in a cleverly masked scheme to get the full text of the treaty as soon as it was completed and publish it exclusively.84 He was the kind of imaginative and energetic reporter who leaves as little as possible to chance. Long before he ever left for Berlin, he laid his lines in such a way that he could make any number of moves calculated to achieve his goal. He hired a young man with a fancy for intrigue and the high life of diplomacy and managed to plant him as an office assistant with one of the main participants in the Berlin Congress. Then, he entered into an understanding with a high diplomatic source whom he never named, but whom the Times itself always believed to be the French Foreign Minister, William Henry Waddington, to keep him posted. Finally, he boldly made a bid for the help of Bismarck himself, arguing that it would be in the best interests of Anglo-German relations and hands across the North Sea if the Iron Chancellor delivered the compact to him. At first, Blowitz amused himself by working with his young plant. He pretended to be greatly concerned over the faithfulness of all the diplomats to their agreement with Bismarck to say nothing to the press. But as is usual with all such unnatural arrangements, they are kept only by those perfect human beings who have no ax to grind. All the rest leak secrets furiously to their favorite correspondents in an effort to gain some advantage, real or fancied, over their opponents. AH Blowitz needed was a tip from his spy, delivered in the form of tissue-paper notes tucked in the hatbands of hats that were exchanged at lunch each day at the Kaiserhof. With these key phrases or sentences, he easily persuaded his diplomatic friends that he knew exactly what was going on and, in order to mollify him, they might as well open up. They did, of course. After he had printed an accurate summary of a speech by the Russian Chancellor, Prince Gorchakov, Prince Bismarck lifted up the tablecloth beside a diplomat he suspected of helping the correspondent and remarked: "I am looking to see if Blowitz is not underneath." Blowitz kept up his little game while he quietly made arrangements with Prince von Hohenlohe-Schillingsfuerst, the German ambassador to France, for an interview with Prince Bismarck. On the evening of July 2, 1878, accompanied by the discreet Hohenlohe, he proudly

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walked up the white-and-pink flagged staircase in the Wilhelmstrasse building that led to Bismarck's private apartment. The interview was interesting diplomatic chit-chat, but of no particular importance. Since Blowitz was interested in creating an effect, it didn't matter that he came away with little but colorful talk. And what an effect! Next day, everybody in Berlin knew that Bismarck had spoken in confidence with Blowitz. From then on, no source was closed to him. His young spy quit in a huff, since it was now clear that Blowitz no longer needed him. The correspondent was unworried. He made two more moves. The first was to obtain from Baron Nothomb, the Belgian minister at Berlin, a letter to M. Vinchent, the director general of telegraphic services at Brussels, approving an immediate test transmission of a new nightly service for the Times between Brussels and London. Mext, he approached his high diplomatic source and coolly remarked that he wanted the text of the treaty and didn't care where he got it. The source asked, "And how are you going to get it?" "I have just had an assurance that Prince Bismarck is highly satisfied with what I wrote on our conversation and he thinks I have rendered a service to peace," Blowitz replied. "I am going to ask him to reward me by communicating the treaty to me." "No," his friend said, "do not ask him till you have seen me again. Walk out tomorrow between one and two in the Wilhelmstrasse and I will see you." On the following day, the source met Blowitz as he had promised and said, "Come for the treaty the day before the end of the Congress and I promise that you shall have it." The Times's suspicions that the source was the French Foreign Minister evidently were based on the premise that only someone so highly placed could have been blackmailed by Blowitz into yielding the treaty under threat that otherwise Bismarck might do it. Whatever the source, the scheming Bohemian's arrangements worked. He now made his bid to Hohenlohe for Bismarck's help in getting the treaty and, after a suitable delay, was turned down. He pretended to be furious and made arrangements forthwith to leave Berlin at once. Mackenzie Wallace, St. Petersburg correspondent of the Times, and a secretary went with him to the station. Before leaving, however, Blowitz called on the Count de St. Vallier, French ambassador at Berlin, and persuaded him to give up the pre-

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amble of the treaty, the last part that was drafted. When the ambassador objected, Blowitz dramatically showed him the text of all the rest of the treaty, except the two final articles which remained to be adopted. T o satisfy St. Vallier's squeamishness, the correspondent memorized the preamble and took off, joining Wallace and the secretary on the train. Some of Blowitz' ever-suspicious colleagues were at the station to see him off. "And," he glumly explained, "to see if I really start." That was shortly after noon on Friday, July 12. T h e Congress was to end the following day, which meant that Blowitz would have to publish in the editions of July 13 or lose his beat. There was no Sunday paper and Monday, July 15, would be too late. By then, Bismarck surely would have given the whole thing to the expectant German press. There was still another difficulty. No German or French telegraph office could be expected to transmit so dangerous a document to London. Blowitz had taken all these things into account. Now, as the Paris express rolled out of Berlin, he arranged for a picturesque climax quite in character with the rest of his career. He dictated the preamble he had memorized to his secretary. Next, he demanded Wallace's coat and ripped open the lining. W i t h suitable gestures, he produced the treaty before the dazzled eyes of his colleagues like a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a hat. He had brought along needle and thread, which he proceeded to use to sew his documents into the lining of Wallace's coat. Then, as a final guarantee against transmission trouble, he produced the letter to the Belgian telegraph director which he gave to his colleague. T h e rest was easy. Wallace moved to another compartment. At Cologne, he changed to the Brussels express while Blowitz and his secretary went on to Paris, knowing they must be under surveillance. Wallace used his letter in Brussels to persuade the Belgians to transmit the treaty text. And on July 13, as Blowitz had planned, the Times exclusively published it at just about the hour that it was being finally ratified in Berlin. 35 T h e exclusive was a sensation in London, and it shook the rest of Europe as well. For the Congress had dealt out territory with the reckless abandon of a gambler disposing of a deck of cards. Turkey was left with only a sliver of territory in Europe. Austria-Hungary took over

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Bosnia and Herzegovina. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro all became independent states, although all three lost land that had been granted to them at San Stefano. Rumania yielded south Bessarabia to Russia and was given the Dobrudja area of Bulgaria in return. The remainder of Bulgaria was divided, North Bulgaria alone being an autonomous principality, and the rest being retained by Turkey, undoing the work of San Stefano. The British, who had not fired a shot during the war, took over Cyprus. The French eventually occupied Tunis. The GrecoTurkish border was rectified, and the Italians were put off with promises. In addition to south Bessarabia, all the bitterly disappointed Russians received was Batum, Kars, and Ardahan in Asiatic Turkey. Understandably, Bismarck was agitated when he learned that all his secrets had been stolen from him by a clever correspondent. He had a telegram from London announcing the Times's publication of the preamble and sixty-four articles, with attached English translation. "How could the Times have obtained the preamble yesterday morning seeing that it was not drawn up?" Bismarck demanded of Count de St. Vallier. "Was it not you, Count, who gave it?" The French ambassador told the German Chancellor that Blowitz had displayed the whole treaty, except the two final articles, on the previous morning so the addition of the preamble had been, in effect, meaningless. In Paris afterward, the self-satisfied Blowitz asked St. Vallier, "And what did Bismarck say when you told him?" The ambassador smiled. "Excuse me, but he did not tell me to repeat it to you." 36 From that time on until his powers flagged with the advance of age, Blowitz ruled the foreign policy of the Times with the will of a dictator. His disclosure of the witch's brew prepared by the august statesmen of the Berlin Congress made him famous, not because he had the wit to see that they were preparing Europe for disaster, but because he had made public an official secret ahead of schedule. John Cameron MacDonald, who had succeeded to the managership of the Times, continued to lay great stress on Blowitz' ability to publish new information, and it didn't seem to matter a great deal whether he was able to interpret it correctly. With Paris as his watchtower, Blowitz now ranged over the whole of Europe and wrote whatever he wished. Then he also insisted on

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editorial support for his views from the Times and, more often than not, he had his way. It was only after MacDonald's death in 1889 that he began slowly to lose influence. He completely misread the significance of the role of the French military leaders in the Dreyfus affair, which embarrassed his paper, and committed other indiscretions that raised doubts about the advantage of maintaining him in Paris in his great status. Eventually, that same Mackenzie Wallace who had helped him break the Berlin treaty story became his superior at the Times and submitted him to a galling supervision. "Your great journalistic talent is universally known and no one is more ready to recognize and admire it than I am," Wallace wrote him, "but it is, unfortunately for us, of a peculiar kind which does not easily accommodate itself to the requirements of that anonymous journalism of which the Times is the great representative, and in which each worker strives to sink his own personality in the collective personality of the Paper." Wallace did even more. He began keeping some of Blowitz' most sensational beats out of the paper. When the slippery Bohemian interviewed Lord Lytton's widow immediately after his death, Wallace spiked the story because he thought the British public would be shocked. And when Blowitz obtained exclusively the text of Queen Victoria's telegram to the Paris embassy expressing her horror at the Dreyfus verdict of 1899, Wallace coolly replied that the Times would not "give publicity to a private communication from the Queen." It was all up with Blowitz. The Times no longer wanted sensational personal journalism, but impersonal, informed analyses of political and economic affairs by specialists. After an operation for a cataract, Blowitz was retired at the end of 1902, being replaced by William Lavino, a much safer and more dependable correspondent who had served his time at Vienna. On January 18, 1903, Blowitz died in Paris. To his British contemporaries, who dismissed him as a mere sensation-monger, he may have seemed without influence on his era. But to the canny Bismarck, who spent much of his life attempting to manipulate the foreign press into a more favorable opinion of Germany, Blowitz was a key factor in arousing suspicion in Britain against Germany. The Iron Chancellor accounted Blowitz not as an English writer, "but rather as a Frenchman . . . voicing the French eagerness to sow suspicion . . . against the policy of Germany." He went a step

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beyond that in 1885 by associating Blowitz by implication with a policy that sought to align Britain, France, and Russia against Germany. 87 T h e Times, of course, firmly denied that it had ever had any such intention. There was a final irony in Bismarck's enmity for Blowitz. Kaiser Wilhelm II, in the first display of his youthful power, dropped his pilot on March 20, 1890. Less than a year after Bismarck's abrupt dismissal, the Times brought in Wallace to check Blowitz, which in effect amounted to exactly the same thing.

5. THE CRUSADERS On the confused and shadowed stage of the nineteenth century, the journalist played many roles both inside and outside his native land and spoke in many voices. He was at once a chronicler and mentor, preceptor and guide, diplomat and adventurer, and even, on occasion, a warrior in his own right. At his worst, he was a mere echo of all the vices that beset mankind; at his best, he was its conscience. There is little doubt that the nineteenth-century journalist played his most colorful role as a seeker after fame and glory, a standard bearer in the cause of empire. But despite his many failures and the toofrequent instances in which he proved himself unworthy, it was as a crusader for a better world that he made a more lasting impression on the history of his times. T h e role was not at all new. It had, in fact, originated with the very beginnings of journalism itself—with Jared Ingersoll and the unwitting impetus he gave to the formation of the Sons of Liberty in the American colonies, Arthur Young and his reports on the meaning of the French Revolution, Heinrich Heine and his attacks on German autocracy, Georges Clemenceau and his writings as a political exile in the United States. Had it not been for the conscience of William Howard Russell, a British army would almost certainly have perished in the Crimea. Had it not been for the conscience of Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, the barbarities of Turkish rule in Bulgaria might never have been exposed. Nor were they alone in making effective use of the newspaper as an organ of social protest. T h e very climate of the nineteenth century gave the journalist courage.

In London at the offices of the Daily News while Garibaldi was

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mobilizing his Redshirts for the deliverance of Italy, Editor William Wier had to write to his gifted special correspondent who had just been accredited to the rebel camp: "Don't get into prison again. It is very inconvenient for our paper." The Daily News's special needed the warning, being a beautiful and highly emotional English girl, born Jessie Meriton White, who had lately become the bride of one of Garibaldi's officers, Alberto Mario. She was just 27 at the outset of Garibaldi's campaigns in 1859, a magnetic personality with a mass of shining, reddish hair and an eager sensitive face. She had begun writing for a ladies' magazine at 21 but that had been too tame. Going to Italy, she had met the dashing Giuseppe Garibaldi, just back from his adventures in South America, and the spiritual leader of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Mazzini. Out of these experiences came her first series for the London Daily News, "Italy for the Italians," in 1856. As a result, she was offered the post of Genoa correspondent for the paper and accepted. Shortly afterward, she met Alberto Mario and fell in love. Unhappily, because they lcnew too much of a blundering attempt by the rebels to embark on an expedition to free the south of Italy, both were thrown into jail and didn't get out for five months.38 Jessie covered Garibaldi in Sicily and during the march to Naples in i860. On October 1 that year, at the Volturno battle, she was more nurse than correspondent, working for thirty-six hours in a first-aid hospital. Harry Wreford, correspondent of the Times of London, saw her make no less than fourteen trips under fire from the hospital to the battlefield, helping to bring back the wounded. It was only afterward that she put together a story of what happened, since the Daily News's regular correspondent meanwhile had been captured by the enemy.39 When Garibaldi called his volunteers together and began his march on Rome in 1862, only to be forced into battle at Aspromonte by the troops of a vacillating king who feared him, it was Jessie who got out first word of his defeat. After a surgeon had managed to operate successfully on him that tragic August 29, when he had been wounded, she wrote: "Never did I pen such a joyful telegram as the one announcing to England that the ball had been at last extracted and that the General was doing well." 40 Jessie and her Alberto lingered on by Garibaldi's side and Mazzini's

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and she chronicled both their deaths. During the 1860s, she worked often for the London Daily News, and sometimes for the New York Times and the New York Evening Post. She also served the New York Tribune in the Franco-Prussian War. The benediction over a life which she devoted very largely to Italian freedom was pronounced by her friend, Giosue Carducci, Italy's poet-patriot and Nobel laureate: "She was a great woman to whom Italians owe a great debt." 4 1 Frederick Greenwood, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, was quite a different crusader, but no less effective. From his own sources, he received confidential information on November 14, 1875, that Ismail Pasha was on the verge of selling out his 44 percent interest in the Suez Canal to the French. The French, indeed! The very notion was repulsive to an editor like Greenwood, to whom the British cause was something holy. The very thought of French control of the Canal appalled him. At his first opportunity that day, he hastened to the Foreign Office but was told his information couldn't be true. Fortunately, the canny Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, was somewhat more willing to listen. Lionel de Rothschild, the Prime Minister's friend, confirmed the whole thing. Whereupon the Khedive, after secret consultations, was paid £4,000,000 ($20,000,000) for his 176,602 shares in the Suez Canal management, and the British took over control of the canal. That was on November 25, 1875, eleven days after Greenwood learned it was up for sale. He had, until that time, published not a word of the story, fearing to alert the French. Even after the deal was consummated, the Times ran the first story on it, and the grumpy Disraeli commented: "The Times has got only half the news—and very inaccurate." When Greenwood broke his silence, the full story of the Suez drama appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette. For his sagacity and his reticence, he won the plaudits of his contemporaries and the gratitude of his government.42 The Canal was Britain's for eighty-one years, returning its cost many times over, until both time and fortune ran out on the empire. Not all such adventures turned out as well for the cause of empire and not all crusaders, however lofty their motives, were able to be proud of what they had wrought through the use of their influence. The Times of London never was able to live down completely its mistaken effort to ruin Charles Stewart Pamell, the uncrowned king of Ireland. The story began in 1885 when an elderly Irish journalist with a great

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beard and a soft, wheedling voice hinted to an impressionable stringer for the Times that he knew how to accomplish Parnell's downfall. The journalist was Richard Pigott of Kingstown, who was well and unfavorably known in Dublin. The stringer was 22-year-old Edward Caulfield Houston, who in 1883 had helped the Times's regular Dublin correspondent cover the sensational Phoenix Park murder trial and now was secretary of the Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union. As its name implied, the Union opposed Parnell and Irish home rule. Pigott was a strange character. He was one of those seedy, down-atthe-heels operators who are to be found on the fringe of almost any group of reputable correspondents and who seek, in various ways, to pick up a little money here and there as tipsters. Such men generally pose as correspondents and even manage, at times, to get credentials from some small paper, but knowledgeable people, including their fellow-journalists, give them wide berth. That was Pigott's situation. Had young Houston been more experienced, very possibly he would not have been impressed with the old man from Kingstown. But Pigott was able to sell Houston some letters, which were purportedly signed by Parnell and which alleged that he was responsible for the work of the Irish terrorists in the Phoenix Park murders. The Times admitted paying Houston £1,780 for the letters; then, banking on their authenticity, put together a sensational series, entitled "Parnellism and Crime." Some of the letters were printed to support the charges, but a commission of inquiry appointed by the House of Commons established without doubt that they were forgeries. The Times unconditionally withdrew the letters and paid Parnell £5,000 in settlement of a libel action. Pigott fled, was traced to a hotel in Madrid on March 1, 1889, and committed suicide by shooting himself as he was about to be arrested. The case cost the Times more than £200,000, and constituted a major blow to its prestige. Just when Pamell was at the height of his power, and believed victory for Irish home rule was in sight, disaster struck from an unexpected quarter. Captain William O'Shea, who for eight years had put up with his pretty wife's affair with the Irish leader, sued for divorce. The antiParnell press in England and the north of Ireland made Captain O'Shea a martyr and played havoc with Catholic sentiment, even in Parnell's own domain. The Irish members of Parliament split. On the showdown, a majority voted to demote Parnell as their leader and only

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twenty-six remained faithful to him. Of them all, there wasn't a one who didn't believe, even though proof was not forthcoming, that the Times had not been at least in part responsible. Adultery was proved in the O'Shea divorce suit. The Captain won his decree in 1890. And Parnell, shattered in health because of the repudiation of his party, married his Kitty O'Shea the following year. That summer, the gay sunbathers on the Parade at Brighton sometimes saw a faded little woman sitting in a wheel chair with a bent and dulleyed man, crippled by rheumatism, slowly pushing her beside the sea. It was Pamell, faithful to his Kitty to the last. That fall, although only 45 years old, when he should have been at the very height of his powers, he died.43 In the year after the tragic end of the Parnell story, another journalist came to Paris and there, during the enactment of a trial that shamed the honor of France, found the inspiration that enabled him to breathe life into a nation dispersed 2,000 years before his time. It was scarcely a role for which Theodore Herzl had prepared himself. When he became the Paris correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna in 1891, he had no thought either of joining the Zionist cause or crusading for the rebirth of Israel. He wrote to his parents, delighted with his good fortune as a journalist, "The position of Paris correspondent is a jumping board from which I shall swing myself high to your joy, my dear parents." Herzl was then 31, the image of a dedicated man. Wherever he went, his black-bearded, austere figure commanded attention. Those who knew him well realized that his restless, piercing eyes were constantly, fiercely probing beneath the surface of Parisian life, that his keen intellect was ever alert for a challenge more sweeping than the mere recording of the news. Such a man needed a cause worth fighting for, worth dying for. Unlike Heinrich Heine, a journalistic dilettante, Herzl went at his work with professional zeal. He bacame expert in the nuances of French politics. He had first-rate sources in the government. Moreover, he knew how to cover the Chamber, no small achievement for a foreigner. Yet, as time went on, his dissatisfaction increased. He groped for that greater challenge. And one afternoon in 1894, while he sat in his room at the Hotel Bastille in the Rue Cambon, working on a play, he was deeply disturbed.

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An infuriated mob surged along the street shouting, "Death to the Jews!" If this had been Russia or Poland or even his native Hungary, perhaps Theodore Herzl might have accepted what he heard with a bitter equanimity. But this was Paris, home of the rights of man; France, a nation founded on the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity. It seemed incredible to him at first that such things could happen here, almost as incredible as if he had heard this fateful outcry in Germany. Then, he began to understand. Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been arrested as a traitor; therefore, whether he was guilty or innocent, all Jews must suffer with him. Here in the cultured, freedom-loving west, the savage anti-Semitism of the east had taken root, and it would not easily be exorcised. Herzl covered the Dreyfus trial for the Neue Freie Presse. But even more important than anything he wrote for his newspaper was a book for which he began making notes. It was, he wrote to his friend, Arthur Schnitzler, "a mountain of granite. Perhaps it is because I am still so shaken that this apparition glows in me, frightening me." The book was Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), which appeared in 1896. Chaim Weizmann, then a student in Berlin, called it a "bolt from the blue" because it revealed to him a "historic personality," not any particularly new concept of Zionism. Herzl founded world Zionism through the Zionist Congress, which he headed. He gave up his cherished post in Paris as a journalist and spent the rest of his life rallying support for a Jewish national home in Palestine. Worn out with his efforts, he suffered a heart attack at his Vienna home and died on July 3, 1904, at the age of 44. Forty-four years later, the State of Israel was born.44 Captain Dreyfus, whose plight had inspired Herzl's epic work, survived him. In his case, too, world opinion played a major role because the energies of French liberalism were strengthened thereby. From the day that Emile Zola published his celebrated "J'accuse" in Georges Clemenceau's newspaper, L'Aurore, on January 13, 1898, journalists all over the world took up the challenge and republished it. Thirty thousand letters poured into France as an answer. From an insignificant circulation, L'Aurore began selling 300,000 copies of every issue that dealt with the Dreyfus case. Zola was promptly prosecuted for criminal libel, convicted in thirty-

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five minutes by a jury vote of 8 to 4 and, seeing his appeal would be hopeless, went into self-imposed exile in London. Queen Victoria sent a confidential inquiry to her grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, asking if Dreyfus had been trafficking with the German espionage service, the charge on which he was convicted. The answer was no. The Dreyfusards surged to the attack, with Clemenceau directing their strategy. Captain Dreyfus, who had been convicted of high treason by a military court on October 15, 1894, and sent to Devil's Island the following February 21, was still there, helpless to do anything for himself. On August 30, 1898, one of Dreyfus' accusers, Major Hubert Henry, was arrested for forging evidence and killed himself by slitting his throat with a razor. Henry's friend, Major Count Ferdinand WalsinEsterhazy, who had been tried and acquitted of the crime for which Dreyfus was convicted, then fled without luggage to London. Marquis Merrier du Paty de Clam, who had sworn that Dreyfus had written a confidential document recovered by French intelligence from the Germans, retired. Premier Henri Brisson's cabinet fell. The High Court of Appeals decided to hear arguments on the revision of the verdict against Dreyfus. At this juncture, the Times of London on June 3, 1899, published a signed confession by Esterhazy that he had written the confidential document that was the chief evidence against Dreyfus, the so-called bordereau. On the same day the High Court ordered a new trial for Dreyfus. When it opened at Rennes on August 11, 1899, with the longsuffering captain still proclaiming his innocence, hundreds of foreign correspondents awaited the verdict. The French general staff, still determined to ride roughshod over world opinion, closed the doors on the foreign press. They reaped the whirlwind when they voted 5 to 2 to find Dreyfus guilty but softened his penalty to ten years in prison due to "extenuating circumstances." It was inevitable that world opinion would prevail, that free society would be able to reach the conscience of France. On September 19, 1899, Dreyfus was pardoned and left prison through what President Emile Loubet, rather ironically, called an "act of mercy." On July 12, 1906, the High Court formally set aside the guilty verdict of the Rennes court. The Chamber of Deputies decorated Dreyfus and his valiant military defender, Georges Picquart, who became a brigadier general. As a lieutenant colonel, Dreyfus fought in two great actions of World

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War I—at the Chemin des Dames and Verdun. On June 1, 1930, he received a letter signed by Louise von Schwarzkoppen, wife of General of the Infantry Max von Schwarzkoppen, who had been the German military attache in Paris at the time the case broke. Frau von Schwarzkoppen enclosed her late husband's diary, saying that "his wish always had been to testify in the monstrous trial of which you were the central figure and victim. For reasons which his memoirs clearly indicate, this was impossible for him to do." Thus came final vindication. When Dreyfus died on July 1 1 , 1935, he was a mere historic curiosity, a man who had outlived his time. But, as Jean Jaures wrote, "What matter the errors of fate and false directions in life? A few luminous and fervent moments are enough to give meaning to a lifetime." To the weak-hearted and the faltering, to the compromisers who abandoned principle, to the turncoats and the cowards who ran away, the Dreyfus case was a mark of shame. To Georges Clemenceau, the Tiger of France, the fight for the life of an innocent man became the symbol of the rebirth of his country. As for the foreign correspondents who had witnessed the long struggle, they were content. They had done their duty. They had seen right prevail. As Julian Ralph of the New York Sun wrote: "In the course of the trial of Captain Dreyfus, we had before us the proof of our power. You may say it was the unfinishable vitality of the truth which reopened his case, but the French knew very well that they had exiled truth and it found its opening in our foreign press." 45 The manner in which America treated her own meddlers already had been spread before the world. In 1908, Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, had been accused by President Theodore Roosevelt of criminal libel and indicted under as strange a proceeding as can be found in the annals of journalism. It was the opening of the Panama Canal scandal. Pulitzer first realized the extent of his personal involvement on December 7, 1908, when Don C. Seitz, the World's business manager, and Joseph Pulitzer II, his youngest and most talented son, boarded his yacht, Liberty, at Charleston, S.C., with a copy of the Charleston News and Courier. On Page One was a story reporting President Roosevelt's angry rebuke to Delavan Smith, editor of the Indianapolis News,

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for an editorial raising this question about the Panama Canal project: "It has been charged that the United States bought from American citizens for $40,000,000 property that cost those citizens only $12,000,000. There is no doubt that the government paid $40,000,000 for the property. But who got the money?" The Indianapolis News explained that its comment was based on statements made by a prominent New York newspaper. When that was read to the elder Pulitzer, who was then almost blind, he demanded: "What newspaper does he mean?" "The World," Seitzsaid. "I knew damned well it must be," Pulitzer snapped. "If there is any trouble, you fellows are sure to be in on it." 46 That had been the basis for Pulitzer's success—to be "in on" trouble. The first words he had written for the World after acquiring it on May 10, 1883, had been: "There is room in this great and growing city for a journal . . . that will expose all fraud and sham, fight all public evils and abuses, that will serve and battle for the people with earnest sincerity." By carrying out his credo, he had become one of the dominant powers in American journalism. Pulitzer's rise had been in the American tradition—an immigrant, born April 10, 1847, in Mako, Hungary; a Civil War soldier, mustered out of the service well-nigh penniless in 1865; a reporter, legislator, civic leader in St. Louis, and eventually the proprietor of a small, struggling paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; a successful publisher, invading New York and buying the World; a crusader, raising the money from his subscribers to bring the Statue of Liberty to the United States from France and place her on her pedestal in New York harbor; finally, a great and wealthy and powerful man, dedicating his own golden-domed skyscraper on Park Row, New York.47 All that had cost him his health. Nearly blind, ill, wracked by sensitive nerves, the gaunt and bearded giant had become a wanderer on the high seas, keeping in touch with his properties by remote control. Theodore Roosevelt had not been the first President he had opposed. In 1895, at the height of the Venezuelan border crisis in which President Cleveland had pushed the United States to the brink of war with the British, Pulitzer had dictated and published an editorial in the World on December 22 saying:

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"President Cleveland's message to Congress on the Venezuelan matter is a grave blunder. It is a blunder because it is based on a wrong conception, because it is not sustained by international law or usage and because it places the United States in a false position. The President . . . assumes that the policy of Great Britain in Venezuela involves a menace to this country. . . . The assumption is absurd. And with it falls the structure of ponderously patriotic rhetoric reared upon it by the President." The Bureau of the American Republics, later known as the Pan American Union, was in existence then, having been founded April 14, 1890, with a roly-poly little correspondent for the Chicago RecordHerald, William Eleroy Curtis, as its first director.48 But the notion of calling on international peace-keeping machinery was so novel at the time that Pulitzer didn't even think of it. He had the World embark on a full-scale peace campaign which helped, in its own way, to reduce the tension. While the British backed down because of their growing troubles in South Africa and the threat of German aid to the Boers, there is little doubt that Pulitzer's stand had its effect on Cleveland. The Venezuelan matter was arbitrated.49 Had Pulitzer taken a similar position in the Spanish-American War, he would have been happier. As it was, he let the World go galloping off into a headline rivalry with William Randolph Hearst's boisterous New York Evening Journal and forever regretted it. In the Panama Canal case, however, he found himself drawn into a fight he hadn't begun. Characteristically, he accepted the responsibility thrust on him by his associates even though the World had no evidence to prove its charges. However, before he could make any investigation of his own, the World next day ran a scorching editorial attack on President Roosevelt. He was accused of making "deliberate misstatements of fact in his scandalous personal attack on Delavan Smith." The newspaper demanded a congressional inquiry into "who got the $40,000,000." The hot-tempered Roosevelt flared back, informing Congress on December 15, 1908, that the World and the Indianapolis News had committed a "string of infamous libels." The President demanded the remarkable action of a federal grand jury indictment for criminal libel, which went against both law and custom, since libel suits are reserved to the states. He used as a subterfuge an 1825 statute in New York "to protect harbor defense from

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malicious injury, and for other purposes." He authorized the Attorney General's office to contend that the federal government had jurisdiction because the World was sold on government property at West Point and elsewhere. The New York indictment against the World was obtained March 4, 1909. Other indictments were voted in both Indianapolis and the District of Columbia. Pulitzer fought the case with all the power of publicity, disclosing that federal agents were searching the World's mails. Within a year, the courts threw the case out for lack of jurisdiction. Nothing came of the uproar, except that the U.S. attorney in Indianapolis resigned rather than open prosecution. Moreover, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Henry L. Stimson, did not relish his role. The key question, "Who got the $40,000,000?" went unanswered. Pulitzer wrote later: "If this is to be a government of the people, it is a crime to put into the hands of a President such powers. . . . Congress is responsible. . . . W e must have an independent Congress, just as we must have an independent President."60 It was Pulitzer's final cause celebre. The last bit of energy was drained from him in fighting Theodore Roosevelt, directing the investigations that were carried on by his foreign staff in Latin America and in France, and in disputing the handling of the news with his associates. He developed whooping cough that weakened his heart. His eyesight now was almost gone. He could see nothing in bright light, and could barely make out surroundings against gray skies with one eye. He could not stand the slightest noise about him. Even a loud voice sometimes irritated him unduly. Toward the end, his main interest was in the perpetuation of high standards of journalism and the elevation of those in letters, drama, and music. It was for this that he endowed the Pulitzer Prizes in Columbia University and established the School of Journalism, now the Graduate School, at the same institution, with a $2,000,000 bequest. After his stormy life, the end came quietly on his yacht, on October 29, 1911. One of his secretaries had been reading to him from the life of Louis XI. Pulitzer murmured, "Leise, ganz leise, ganz leise . . ." ("Softly, quite softly . . .") In a few minutes he was dead.51 The World papers survived until February 27, 1931, when they were sold to Scripps-Howard and merged with the New York Telegram. The golden-domed Pulitzer building on Park Row subsequently was

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torn down to make way for a broader approach to the Brooklyn Bridge, being replaced by a small bronze marker. But on Morningside Heights, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and through the annual award of the Pulitzer Prizes, the spirit of Joseph Pulitzer remains a dominant force in American journalism. His creed was stated best in a message on his retirement on April 10, 1907, which has been published daily ever since on the editorial page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as its platform: " I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles; that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare; never be satisfied with merely printing the news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." To the end, Pulitzer maintained his drastic independence in the public interest. It was his heritage to those who followed him. He showed that peace, too, had its victories; and of these, the victories of conscience were the greatest.

IV: For Glory and Empire 1. T H E C O R R E S P O N D E N T S ' G O L D E N

AGE

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, foreign correspondents and their editors exercised greater power over public opinion in the Western world than ever before. Their deeds, their sweeping narratives, their bold assumption of policy-making authority and, above all, the swiftness of their communications gave them a status that none had attained before and few have achieved since. T h e very atmosphere of the Victorian era favored them, for it was a time when men strove for glory and empire. A correspondent who went out to tell that story could do just about what he pleased, exercising the utmost freedom and license. Statesmen accordingly stood somewhat in awe of such freebooters. Mere politicians threw in their lot with them and abjectly courted their favor. The public, dazzled by the sheer romance of their adventurous lives, eagerly snapped up their newspapers and bought their books. It was a novelty for a newspaper to use its superior informationgathering facilities to bring diplomacy out of the silken chancelleries of Europe and sit it on the curbstone for the humblest citizen to see. While the novelty lasted, and while journalists used their unique power with skill and responsibility, they were the pampered darlings of public opinion. But inevitably, a reaction set in. Governments slowly learned how to regulate and manipulate the flow of the news by direct and indirect means, thereby producing certain effects both in their own countries and elsewhere. The press, in an effort to maintain its historic freedom of action in the Western world, became a counterweight to government rather than a prime, self-directing force. And toward the end of the century, a very young correspondent in the Boer War, Winston Spencer Churchill, exclaimed in despair: "Alas! The days of

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newspaper enterprise in war are over. W h a t can one do with a censor, a forty-eight hours' delay and a fifty-word limit on a wire?" 1 Greater days for foreign correspondence were in store, despite young Churchill's bleak mood, but the exalted freedom of movement and action of the latter part of the nineteenth century were never again so fully realized. T o those like Churchill who survived it and went on into the gathering darkness of the twentieth century, it was always remembered as the golden age of correspondence, whether it dealt with war or peace. 2. T H E " C O S S A C K

CORRESPONDENT"

"Dark rumours have been whispered about Constantinople during the last month, of horrible atrocities committed in Bulgaria." Such was the beginning of an exposé, couched in the extravagant phrasing of Victorian journalism, which the London Daily News published on June 23, 1876. The author was Sir Edwin Pears, its correspondent in Constantinople, a lawyer who previously had served as the Times's representative in the Turkish capital. The story bore a respectable amount of documentation, including the names of thirty-four villages that had been destroyed by rampaging Turkish irregulars known as Bashi-Bazouks. Faced with revolt in Bulgaria, so the tale went, the Turks had moved ruthlessly to put it down. However, there was also a suspiciously large amount of material that might have been well-worn atrocity propaganda—a hundred Bulgarian girls slain in a village school, still other Bulgarian girls raped and burned alive. It was obvious that Pears had not been able to check his facts at the scene, but had forwarded whatever he could pick up in Constantinople. It was not, certainly, the most approved way of breaking a story as important as this one at a time when Britain was trying to maintain the balance of power in Europe and keep Russia from exercising a dominant role. It was to be expected that the Turkish government would denounce the whole business as a monstrous fabrication. Soon after that happened, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli took a sharp thrust at the Liberal Daily News, which was supporting his rival, William Ewart Gladstone, the Liberal leader. The Conservative Prime Minister was scornful. The Daily News's dispatches from Constantinople, he told

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the House of Commons, were mere coffee-house babble, unworthy of belief. Gladstone fired back with the result that the government ordered its minister at Constantinople to investigate. Lord Derby, the Foreign Minister, soon announced that neither the minister to Turkey nor any British consul could substantiate the charges, whereupon Disraeli dismissed the Daily News's exposé as little more than a trick, perpetrated by the Russians, to throw the Turks out of Europe by military action. Clearly, both Gladstone and the Daily News now were in an embarrassing position. Disraeli had dared to defend the "unspeakable Turk," and he seemed to be getting away with it. The Daily News would have to produce verification of its allegations from a responsible independent source, or it would have to concede that, as the gentlemen of the Foreign Office put it so delicately, the editor had been led up a garden path. The editor was not about to concede anything. "To us, at all events, our duty was clear," Sir John R. Robinson wrote. "We must have a special inquiry into the conditions and the facts—an inquiry to be conducted on the very spot—by a man who would explore the whole scene of the struggle and the controversy— a man of courage and daring, who would make his way under whatever difficulties to each spot—a man of cool head and steady eye, who would see and judge for himself and tell the impartial truth. We found the man in Mr. J. A. MacGahan." The name was Januarius Aloysius MacGahan. From a country boy of Irish heritage, born near New Lexington in Perry County, Ohio, on June 12, 1844, he had been transformed from an Indiana bookkeeper into a dashing adventurer who delighted the bizarre tastes of the maharajah of journalistic sensation, James Gordon Bennett Jr., publisher of the New York Herald. Now 32 years old, MacGahan was a hustling American giant, six-feet three inches tall, who affected a full black beard and moustache and an Astrakhan cap. His recent feats in Russia had made him famous as a journalist and caused him to be known to his delighted colleagues as the "Cossack correspondent." For all his posturing and swaggering, there was no nonsense about Januarius Aloysius MacGahan. He had been stringing for a few papers; when he went to Europe, therefore, it wasn't a particular surprise when he turned up as a stringer for the New York Herald. He soon established himself by interviewing some of the celebrated men of Europe,

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including Victor Hugo and Leon Gambetta. During the Paris Commune, he won nearly as much admiration as Archibald Forbes by staying in the city at the risk of his life, covering the fighting, and being saved from execution by the American minister. MacGahan had a way about him. Wherever he went, he made friends easily. In the course of his travels, he turned up at Yalta in the Crimea and proceeded to talk his way into the Summer Palace of the Tsar. Through a fortuitous accident, a foot injury while on a hike with an aide to the Russian ruler, he was immobilized in the palace for three weeks and made still more friends. The obliging Russians bore him back to St. Petersburg with them when the Court returned north, certainly one of the few American correspondents ever to be shown such friendly solicitude in Muscovy. From then on, MacGahan had acceptance in the highest places of the ever-suspicious Russian government. As the New York Herald's St. Petersburg correspondent, he picked up a tip that the Tsar was sending a military expedition into Turkestan to seize the remote khanate of Khiva, last remaining stronghold of Moslem power along the Oxus. With a Kirghiz interpreter, guide, and servant plus baggage and six horses, MacGahan took off through the desert country on a wild and dangerous ride of more than 600 miles on April 30, 1873. Now and then he was lost. Often, he was in danger of attack by nomads. He suffered thirst, hunger, and incredible hardships. During the latter part of his trek, he was trailed by hard-riding Cossacks who strove to catch up with him and put him under arrest. But on June 1, at last, he made it to the Oxus (Amu-Darya) in the heart of the Uzbek country and heard the booming of Russian cannon. Soon afterward, he had his story in conquered Khiva.2 This, then, was the man to whom the London Daily News turned for verification of its "Bulgarian atrocity" charges. He happened at that stage in his career to have been in Constantinople, for he and the Herald had finally parted company after his coverage of the Carlist wars in Spain and a brief venture north with an Arctic expedition. When the Daily News asked him to make the inquiry, he readily agreed. He moved into Bulgaria and on July 23, 1876, rode into Philippopolis, center of the area which the Bashi-Bazouks had raided. Between July 28 and August 6, his pieces in the Daily News aroused an indignant

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British public, upheld Gladstone and the Daily News, and made political mincemeat out of Disraeli. From Philippopolis, he wrote: "The atrocities admitted on all hands by those friendly to the Turks, and by the Turks themselves, are enough and more than enough. I do not care to go on heaping up the mournful count. When you are met in the outset of your investigation with the admission that sixty or seventy villages have been burned; that some 15,000 people have been slaughtered, of whom a large part were women and children, you begin to feel that it is useless to go any further. "When in addition to this, you have the horrid details of the violent outrages committed upon women, the hacking to pieces of helpless children, and spitting them upon bayonets; and when you have these details reported to you by the hundreds, not by Bulgarians, but by the different consuls at Philippopolis and the German officials on the railway, as well as Greeks, Armenians, priests, missionaries and even Turks themselves, you begin to feel that any further investigation is superfluous." MacGahan, careful reporter that he was, produced eyewitness accounts, located burned villages, turned up skulls and skeletons of old men, women, children, and even babies. "And yet," MacGahan wrote, "Sir Henry Elliot [British Minister to Turkey] and Mr. Disraeli will keep prating to us about exaggeration. . . . The crimes that were committed here are beyond the reach of exaggeration. There were stories related to us that are maddening in their atrocity; that cause the heart to swell in a burst of impotent rage that can only find vent in pitying, useless tears. . . . "If I tell what I have seen and heard, it is because I want the people of England to understand what these Turks are, and if we are to go on bolstering up this tottering despotism; if we are to go on carrying this loathsome, vice-stricken leper about on our shoulders, let us do it with open eyes and a knowledge of the facts; let us see the hideous things we are carrying." 3 Eugene Schuyler, the American consul-general in Turkey, reported to the American minister on the atrocities, confirming the entire inquiry in effect. The German minister reported to his government in much the same vein. Robert Bourke, Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs in

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the Disraeli cabinet, belatedly told the House of Commons that "he felt bound to admit that the Government really had no idea of the events which had been going on in Bulgaria until attention was called to them in the House, and he gladly took that opportunity of saying that the Government and the country were very much indebted to the newspaper correspondents through whom these events had become known." The grateful Gladstone, who was to come to power again in part because of the dramatic outcome of the inquiry, praised the Daily News's foreign correspondence as "most splendid," adding with a flourish, "It is even possible that but for the courage, determination and ability of this single organ, we might even at this moment have remained in darkness, and Bulgarian wretchedness might have been without its best and brightest hope." 4 All this would have given MacGahan sufficient cause to take pride in the outcome of his efforts. But even greater consequences were to follow. Bosnia and Herzegovina had been in revolt against the Turks for some time, beginning in 1875. The Serbs, covertly encouraged by Russia, had followed. When the Bashi-Bazouks crushed the attempted Bulgarian uprising in the brutal manner disclosed by the Daily News, Russia at once moved to insure Austrian neutrality in any armed conflict that might ensue. Accordingly, on April 24, 1877, Prince Aleksandr Mikhailovich Gorchakov, acting for the Tsar, sent the following polite note to Tavfek Bey, Turkish charge d'affaires at St. Petersburg: "The earnest negotiations between the Imperial Government and the Porte for a durable pacification of the East not having led to the desired accord, His Majesty, my august master, sees himself compelled, to his regret, to have recourse to force of arms. Be therefore so kind as to inform your Government that from today Russia considers herself in a state of war with the Porte." 5 Writing years afterward about the significance of MacGahan's role in the hostilities between Russia and Turkey, which changed the face of the Balkans and set that troubled stage for the opening events of World War I, Archibald Forbes had this to say: "It is, indeed, no exaggeration to aver that, for better or worse, MacGahan was the virtual author of the Russo-Turkish War. His pen pictures of the atrocities so excited the fury of the Slav population of

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Russia that their passionate demand for retribution on the 'unspeakable Turk' virtually compelled Alexander II to undertake the war." 6 Whether or not passionate demands from a usually pliant Russian public had anything to do with the Tsar's action, the short war that followed was anything but a walkover for Grand Duke Nicholas' forces. Because of the wildness of the country and the remoteness of wire facilities, all correspondents had a difficult time keeping in touch with their offices. Moreover, the stiffness of Russian censorship and the arrogance of Grand Duke Nicholas resulted in the cancellation of credentials to several war correspondents. Thus, the modem pattern for handling correspondents in the field began to emerge slowly in the Balkan wilderness. MacGahan, who worked with Archibald Forbes in the service of the Daily News, played a key role in the war coverage despite an injury that lamed him and caused him a great deal of pain. He had broken a bone in his ankle while trying to ride a wild horse just before the war began. When he reported to Forbes for duty, his ankle was in a plaster cast. On his first battle assignment, he and his horse tumbled over the side of a precipice, which caused the bone to be broken again. A less determined correspondent would have accepted with alacrity an offer to be sent back to London for treatment, as Forbes promptly suggested. But MacGahan loved this kind of work. He lived for it. And he stuck through one of the most extraordinary and taxing journalistic efforts of the era. Taking Smalley's New York Tribune-London Daily News syndicate as a model, Forbes put together a New York HeraM-London Daily News combined staff in the field and pooled all dispatches for the two newspapers—an arrangement approved by both managements. Forbes, always at his best in a situation like this, deployed his forces at the outset to get maximum value out of their sources, for despite Napoleon's flamboyant battle bulletins the world's military leaders had not yet learned how to conduct one war at the front and another at rear headquarters for the correspondents. Nor had correspondents even considered the notion that they should be disarmed, barred from the front lines, spoon-fed with material, and treated like auxiliary forces. At first, Forbes was uncertain whether the Russian censor at Bucharest would interfere with the Herald-Daily News pooled dispatches and set

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up an alternative pony express courier route of eighty miles across the Carpathian mountains to Kronstadt, in the Austrian province of Transylvania. But after using it once to report the first Russian setback before Plevna, he decided the effort was too strenuous and gambled on the Russian censor's good nature. Accordingly, from his Bucharest base, he arranged for a system of couriers every thirty miles to the front. But, as matters turned out, both he and MacGahan called on their energies and their luck throughout the war to take long rides through the war zone to Bucharest with major accounts of the fighting at Shipka Pass, a Russian victory, in late August, 1877. To use Forbes's phrase, they "rode on the cannon thunder." 7 When Plevna finally collapsed after a three-month siege on December 10, 1877, and the Turks sued for an armistice two days later, MacGahan was there to cover. He also hurried to San Stefano, the little town near Constantinople where the preliminary peace terms were ratified on March 23, 1878, bringing Bulgaria an all-too-brief deliverance from her centuries of oppression. Once he had sent his story, he nursed his friend and fellow-countryman, Lieutenant Francis Vinton Greene, who had fallen ill of typhoid fever in Constantinople. Two days later, MacGahan came down with malignant typhus. He died June 9, 1878, three days before his thirty-fourth birthday. In the presence of Russian officers and Americans from the U.S.S. Dispatch, then in the harbor, he was buried June 11 in a small Greek cemetery on a hill behind Pera. Five years later, by act of the Ohio Legislature, which underwrote the expenses, the body of Januarius Aloysius MacGahan was brought home aboard the U.S.S. Powhatan. It lay in state at New York's lovely Georgian City Hall for a day, then was interred at New Lexington, Ohio, on September 1 1 , 1884. For many years, in the churches of Bulgaria, mass was said for the repose of his soul and his statue graced a public square in Sofia. When the Iron Curtain came crashing down, crushing freedom in Bulgaria once again, MacGahan, the liberator, was forgotten.8

3. "FUZZY WUZZY" Toward the end of 1883, with the rising tide of the Mahdi's revolt swirling dangerously about him, Frank le Poer Power, a 25-year-old Irishman, wrote from Khartoum to his mother in England:

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"You would be surprised how much influence being British consul and Times correspondent gives me here. The people here have a very high opinion of the power of the Times. They say that 'it was not Europe, but the Times deposed Ismail Pasha' (and in this they are au fond right) and say, 'If this paper can change one Khedive, why not another?'" As the British consul and correspondent of the Times Power knew perfectly well, it wasn't so simple. However reassuring he may have been to his mother, his letters to his newspaper showed that he wasn't at all certain of the Anglo-Egyptian position in the Sudan. However, the British press was outraged because British power was being challenged by a bearded nobody with a lot of ignorant, half-naked followers. And in the Sudan, which was little more than a British province under nominal Egyptian rule! A chorus of patriotic editorial writers was insisting that Britain must stand firm, that British prestige was at stake, that the Sudan must be held against the Mahdi and his 50,000 or more well-armed dervishes. It was a bull-headed attitude for which Britain was to pay with arms and treasure and the lives of some of her most devoted soldiers and civil servants. But in the process of fighting for "such an emptiness," in George Warrington Steevens' phrase, some of the most distinguished war correspondence of the century was to be written and its authors were to take part in gallant and heroic feats that live on in the annals of their profession.® This was the position as it had evolved with the slow inevitability of tragedy—a romantic tragedy, perhaps, but no less difficult for a proud and powerful nation to bear. During the reign of Khedive Ismail, which was both cruel and wasteful, generations of misgovernment in Egypt and the Sudan had reached a disgraceful low. When he was replaced by his son, Tewfik, and the persecuted nation sensed that the process of transferring power was faltering, it was the signal for revolt against foreign oppressors and their indolent Egyptian servants. The Mahdi began preaching a Jehad, a holy war, against all foreigners and mobilized an army of 40,000 to drive Egyptian troops out of the Sudan. The Khedive, propped up by British authority, was persuaded to send Egyptian troops to face the Mahdi's forces. General William Hicks, a retired British officer in the service of the Khedive, led a

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frightened army of 11,000. Edmond O'Donovan, a 38-year-old correspondent for the London Daily News, and Frank Vizetelly, an artistcorrespondent for the Graphic of London, were with Hides Pasha. Both were veterans. O'Donovan was the hero of a colorful ride to Merv, on the Afghanistan border, and an exploration of the area that kept him away nearly three years in the 1880s.10 Vizetelly had covered the South during the American Civil War. Neither could have had many illusions about the outcome of a battle between the Mahdi's dervishes and Hicks's pathetic column.11 At El Obeid, on November 3-4, 1883, Hicks's column was trapped. A massacre resulted. When the dervishes retired, they left an army of corpses behind them and took Hicks's head with them. Both correspondents were lost. The first direct story of the tragedy came from Power, the Times's correspondent in Khartoum. He had come out to the Sudan with O'Donovan, intending to collaborate with him on a book, and narrowly had escaped being with him at El Obeid. An attack of dysentery had forced him to return to Khartoum, where he had learned of the disaster a few days later. The story of the tragedy was pieced together by Rudolf Carl von Slatin, known as Slatin Pasha, who had governed Darfur for the Khedive and who was taken into captivity by the Mahdi shortly after Hicks's fate was sealed. Slatin, a former Austrian army officer who had asked for service under the British in the Sudan, was given the grisly tokens of the Mahdi's victory—a few diaries, documents, and other mementoes taken from the bodies of the slain. Among them were dispatches from O'Donovan and sketches by Vizetelly, but neither body was ever found although they must have died on the battlefield. There was a brief record in the diary of an officer who had known O'Donovan and asked him, before the battle, where he thought the expedition would be eight days hence. "In Kingdom Come," was his reply. In O'Donovan's own diary, which Slatin Pasha recovered, this entry appeared just before the battle: "I make my notes and write my reports, but who is going to take them home?" 1 2 The Mahdi now became an obsession to British statesmen and journalists alike.13 A furious outcry arose over Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone's policy of disengagement in Egypt and the Sudan. In vain, the government argued that Britain was not really involved in the tragedy at El Obeid. The press trumpeted back sternly that Egyptian

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troops had been led by a retired British officer, Hicks Pasha, and the effect in Egypt therefore had been the same as if British authority had been directly involved. To still the clamor of the press, Gladstone halted the withdrawal of British troops from Cairo. Thus, he embarked on the first of a series of steps that led to a fatal British commitment. It didn't help. Within a short time, Power was cabling from Khartoum that one of the Mahdi's most ferocious lieutenants, Osman Digna, a retired slave trader, had invested the towns of Sinkat and Tokar in the Sudan in a lively campaign against the Red Sea ports through which the British would have to send their reinforcements. Soon he was cabling even more ominous news that Khartoum was endangered, low on food, and had only 2,000 men to defend nearly four miles of lines. The Times, as the leader of the British press, now thundered that Khartoum must be defended. It had had enough of Gladstone's procrastination. Once again, a newspaper was setting itself up as an authority on military policy without even taking into consideration the hard facts that had been presented by its own correspondents. Who was to take over in Khartoum and in some magical manner resolve a difficult situation? The first suggestion came from W . T. Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, who, according to Winston Churchill, proposed General Charles George Gordon. He was a natural —"Chinese" Gordon, veteran of the Crimean War, victor at Peking over the Chinese rebels in the 1860s, governor general of the Sudan until 1880, and merciless foe of the slave traders there. The Times was for him, too. It printed a letter from Sir Samuel Baker, an authority on the Sudan, proposing Gordon's appointment. That was enough to get a campaign for Gordon under way. The rest of the British press, for the most part, fell into line. It was an unhappy instance of the sometimes tragic fascination of otherwise sensible editors with the "great man" theory of history. Had the British press read young Power's dispatches from Khartoum with even a degree of thoughtfulness, and several degrees less emotion, it would have become clear that no man, not even the magical "Chinese" Gordon, could change the deteriorating situation in the Sudan merely by riding into Khartoum on horseback. The War Office, at a signal from Gladstone, gave in to the clamor of the press. On January 19, 1884, it authorized an announcement that

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General Gordon and his military secretary, Lieutenant Colonel }. D . Stewart, of the 1 1 t h Hussars, were on their way to the Sudan. 14 Theoretically, he was to lead an evacuation. T h e British were in for another blow. On February 5, while Gordon was hastening toward the Sudan, Power cabled from Khartoum that another British-led Egyptian force had met disaster. This one was an army of 3,500 Egyptians under General Valentine Baker, late of the 10th Hussars and now the Inspector General of the Khedive's forces. He had landed at the Red Sea port of Suakin to try to push through to the relief of beleaguered garrisons at Tokar and Sinkat. But Osman Digna, at the head of no more than 1,000 members of the Hadendoa tribe, fell on the Egyptians near El Teb. General Baker was wounded. He wrote that the Egyptians "threw down their arms and ran, carrying away the black troops with them, and allowing themselves to be killed without the slightest resistance." He lost 96 officers and 2,250 men killed plus a large supply of guns and ammunition that was lost to the Arabs. He led the tattered remainder of his force back to Suakin. Osman Digna, without opposition, now proceeded to mop up by taking Tokar and Sinkat and disposing of their garrisons. 15 General Gordon entered Khartoum on February 18. With great emotion, Power reported his thunderous reception and the purplish prose with which the gallant soldier rose to the occasion: " I come without soldiers, but with God on my side, to redress the evils of the Sudan. I will not fight with any weapons, but with justice." He tried to pacify the Mahdi and his followers but that failed. After that, the General settled down with Colonel Stewart and Power, the only other Britishers in Khartoum, for a long and difficult effort. Without a British force that would press through to relieve them, they were doomed—and they knew it. The Arab slave traders, who among others were supporting the Mahdi, would never show mercy to their old enemy now that they had him cooped up and helpless in Khartoum. 16 T h e last act in General Gordon's personal tragedy was at hand. W i t h his British friends, he moved into the Governor's palace. They ate together, took counsel with each other, and hoped for the best. Their best chance, as they realized, was a small army of 4,400 British troops who had landed at Suakin on February 29 under the command of Major General Sir Gerald Graham. Graham seemed to be a match for Osman Digna—and perhaps for the Mahdi as well.

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Power now had welcome competition for the first time. Among the correspondents who had arrived with Graham were two of the ablest journalists of their day—Bennet Burleigh of the London Daily Telegraph and Frederic Villiers of the Weekly Graphic. Graham's campaign began brightly. On March 4, he defeated Osman Digna's dervishes at El Teb, the scene of General Valentine Baker's unhappy rout. At nightfall, when the Arabs withdrew, the British were hopeful that they could push on to Khartoum. But they soon saw that an Arab withdrawal was not necessarily an Arab surrender. On March 13, at Tamai, Osman Digna turned and fought again. That battle, like the one at El Teb, would scarcely be worth describing to a world fearful of atomic disaster except for a jingling bit of verse dashed off by Kipling and called "Fuzzy Wuzzy." For it was here at Tamai that Fuzzy Wuzzy broke the British square, and Burleigh and Villiers were the correspondents who reported the scene over which many a shiny-faced schoolboy has since declaimed. Villiers heard Burleigh yelling at the height of the confusion in the square: "Give it to the beggars! Let 'em have it, boys!" Soon the officers rallied the British, and the square was closed. The foe was beaten off. The Arabs lost more than 2,000 killed, the British 109. Burleigh galloped off to file at Suakin, getting into London first with the story of the victory.17 Power, in Khartoum, indicated in his dispatches that General Gordon was under the impression that Graham intended to cut his way through to the Nile at Berber and thereby relieve Khartoum. He was disappointed. It couldn't be done. The Mahdi himself and the main body of his well-armed fanatical force still lay between Graham and the Nile. The small British army, having routed Osman Digna on two battlefields, turned back to Suakin. The investment of Khartoum by the Arabs tightened. General Gordon rallied his 7,000 native troops and the 30,000 people of Khartoum for a siege. He and his two British associates could easily have escaped on one of the British river steamers at that juncture. It would, however, have been unthinkable for them to do so. The thirteen small paddle-steamers could not have evacuated the troops, and the Arabs had blocked the roads. Power sent this message to the Times on April 1, 1884: " W e are daily expecting British troops. W e cannot bring ourselves to believe that we

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are to be abandoned by the government. Our existence depends on England." Gladstone procrastinated. The Times opened a battle for the formation of an expedition to relieve Gordon at Khartoum. But it was slow work, and the government didn't seem disposed to speed it up. On May 26, Berber, the gateway to Khartoum, fell to the Arabs. The summer passed. Sir Garnet Wolseley, who was to command the relief expedition, arrived at Cairo in September and began to make his arrangements. But Gordon, not knowing of this, was growing desperate. On the night of September 9, he sent Colonel Stewart, Power, and the French consul, M. Herbin, by paddle steamer on a hazardous voyage along the Nile to Dongola to let the world know of his plight. On the morning of September 18, the ship, the Abbas, struck a rock. The three men, all unarmed, trustfully followed a local sheik who promised to give them camels so that they could continue their journey. Instead, he had them killed. Ironically, Power's last dispatch, dated July 30-31, reached the Times later and was published September 29, saying, "General Gordon is quite well, and Colonel Stewart has quite recovered from his wound. I am quite well and happy." The Times paid its tribute to "our brave and ill-fated correspondent," blamed the government for his death, and demanded action. But it was December 30 before the Desert Column of 1,100 officers and men started from Korti, commanded by Sir Herbert Stewart. After marching a hundred miles to Gakdul Wells, they were reinforced and totaled 1,800, but the Mahdi outnumbered them twenty to one. Nevertheless, at Abu Klea and Abu Kru, the British beat off a force of 10,000 Arabs, but their commander fell, fatally wounded.18 Four correspondents were killed during the two battles, including John Cameron of the London Standard and St. Leger Herbert of the London Morning Post. Burleigh was hit twice, once in the neck and once in the foot, but kept on going.19 The Mahdi realized on the night of January 25, 1885, that the British were only 120 miles from the Nile and surged ahead. In the early morning hours next day, he sent his besieging force into Khartoum in overwhelming numbers to pillage the town and massacre its inhabitants. Gordon himself came out of the palace to meet a mob of shouting dervishes, flourishing their swords. "Where is your Master, the Mahdi?" he demanded. In a few moments, they ran him through, cut

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off his head, and left his body lying on the palace steps in the eerie light of the rising sun. At the headquarters of the Mahdi, Slatin Pasha was aroused by one of the followers of the prophet, named Shatta, who held up Gordon's head and demanded: "Is not this the head of your uncle, the unbeliever?" "What of it?" Slatin replied. "A brave soldier, who fell at his post. Happy is he to have fallen; his sufferings are over." 20 The Gordon relief expedition reached the Nile on the following day and camped beside its banks that night. An alert sentry halted a rowboat with one of the survivors from Khartoum. "When the sun rose on our camp, so hushed was the little fort that the reveille brought no wonted stir," Villiers wrote. "From mouth to mouth was whispered, 'Khartoum has fallen.' All our fighting, all our maddening thirst, all our waste of precious blood and weeks of misery, had availed naught. Our advent on the Nile had been the signal for the sack of Khartoum and for Gordon's doom." 2 1 The British retreated. The Mahdi within a few weeks came down with smallpox and died. But his successor, the Khalifa Abdullahi, triumphantly built a cruel dervish empire in the Sudan that lasted for fourteen years. "Yet in this dark hour," wrote Winston Churchill, "there dawned a brighter day. While the whole country cowered, a new and vigorous spirit was growing in the great towns of England and Scotland; and in the freshening breeze of Tory Democracy pride in the past and hope for the future came back to the British people." 22 How that hope was realized was best told by Churchill himself in his account of the expedition led by Major General Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener to crush Mahdism and restore Khartoum and the Sudan to the rule of the British empire. The future Prime Minister was only 24 years old then but already accounted a first-rate journalist when he wasn't busy fighting.23 As might be expected of the son of Lord Randolph Churchill, a graduate of Harrow and Sandhurst and a lineal descendant of the Duke of Marlborough, he followed the course of battle and left the philosophy and the hand-wringing to the "sentimentalists," as he called them. "I can never doubt which is the right end to be at," he wrote. "It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor, rather than a critic." 24

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From the first, Churchill was determined to be an actor on the world stage, as was evidenced by his daring conduct on the Spanish side in Cuba in 1895 when he was only 21 years old. Like his father, who had been paid £2,250 by the London Daily Graphic for special articles, the young soldier-correspondent chose to write for that newspaper. He was not, of course, as well rewarded but the adventure, the public attention, and the pay all recommended the life of a journalist to him at the outset of his career. He turned up next as a subaltern with the 4th Queens Own Hussars in India, where he learned that a border war was being conducted in 1897 to subdue a native leader known as the Mad Mullah and his 12,000 tribesmen. Instead of sitting the war out in barracks, he obtained a leave of absence, joined the Malakand Field Force north of Peshawar, and became a soldier-correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph.25 After recording the end of the Mad Mullah, he returned to Peshawar the following year as a member of the staff of the Malakand commander, Sir William Lockhart, and correspondent for the London Morning Post. It was from here that he was able to shift to the Sudan in the dual capacity of correspondent for the Post and lieutenant of the 21st Lancers, a combination that suited him perfectly.26 Churchill had formidable competition. Bennet Burleigh was in the field for the Telegraph, Frederic Villiers for the Globe and Illustrated London News, George Warrington Steevens for the London Daily Mail, Lionel James for Reuters, Charles Williams for the London Daily Chronicle, and Frank Scudamore of the London Daily News. The Times sent two men, Colonel Frank Rhodes, brother of Cecil Rhodes, and Hubert Howard, whom Churchill had known in Cuba. Any war, even a small war such as this one, brought out correspondents in large numbers now. In the spring of 1898, with a force of 26,000 men, Kitchener ventured into the Sudan to oppose the Khalifa's 55,000 dervishes. By the last of August, he was fighting probing actions. He tested his newly built desert railway of 384 miles and found it to be a first-rate mobile supply line. He was within sight of Khartoum. On September 1, 1898, the Khalifa's army formed before Omdurman, across the river from Khartoum. The next morning "the bugles all over the camp by the river began to sound at half-past four," Churchill wrote. As the sun rose over the Nile, the two armies lay partly revealed

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in the folds of the dark and rocky plain beside the river. The Khalifa boldly flung 15,000 screaming dervishes at Kitchener's center, but they wavered, broke, and fled. Instead of following up their advantage, the British threw the 21st Lancers into one of those brilliant but futile cavalry charges so beloved of the correspondents. The declared intent was to keep the dervishes out of Omdurman, but there were only 320 Lancers and they had a long distance to go. On they came under fire against the waiting dervishes—"a long, galloping line." Churchill, one of the few officers to use a pistol rather than an old-fashioned saber, was in the center of the melee as the two forces crashed together. He shot one dervish dead at a yard. Burleigh also saw him rescue a non-com during the murderous close-quarters combat. The young lieutenant emerged without a scratch to write a lyrical account of the brave but futile charge.27 The unsung 1st Brigade of Egyptians, commanded by Colonel H. A. MacDonald, saved the day. The Khalifa made a final, despairing effort to break them, but under MacDonald's cool leadership they stood their ground. The Khalifa fled, leaving behind him 9,700 killed, 5,000 prisoners, and 10,000 wounded. The British lost less than 500. It was the end of the dervish empire, the beginning of the glamorous military legend of the invincible Kitchener of Khartoum, propagated by the admiring correspondents.28 The Khalifa survived less than a year, being caught and killed. Churchill wrote the classic history of the war and his pieces in the Post were closely read. But Burleigh in the Telegraph got the beat on Omdurman. Because the Times lost both its correspondents, Howard being killed in action and Rhodes wounded, Burleigh's account was also published in the Times.29 He made light of it, but during the battle he, too, had a narrow escape. A dervish with a heavy spear turned on him as he was riding by a furious group locked in hand-to-hand combat. "I fired and believe hit him," Burleigh wrote, "and as my horse was jibbing about fired a second shot from my revolver with less success, then easily got out of the dervish's reach." A British officer also fired at about the same time. The Arab's body was found on the battlefield later with four bullets in him.30 Steevens, the most disenchanted correspondent of all, pointed out that the Arabs, as always, fired too high and made the British and Egyptian losses incredibly low—less than 500 killed and wounded, with the

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21st Lancers alone losing 24 killed and 74 wounded.31 He summed it all up after the reconquest in these bitter terms: "The poor Sudan! The wretched, dry Sudan! Count up all the gains you will, yet what a hideous irony it remains, this fight of half a generation for such an emptiness." 32 It was, perhaps, an unconscious reflection on an imperial adventure which had begun, not because Gladstone had wanted it, but because the press and public had clamored for it. Yet, in little more than half a century, the British again had lost not only the "poor Sudan, the wretched, dry Sudan," but they also had given up Egypt and the Suez Canal as well. As Steevens wrote on the day of victory at Omdurman so long ago, "Surely enough, 'When Allah made the Sudan,' say the Arabs, 'he laughed.' You can almost hear the fiendish echo of it crackling over the fiery sand." 33

4. "OUR WAR" On the night of February 15, 1898, F. J. Hilgert, Associated Press correspondent in Havana, sent two bulletins within a few minutes: THERE HAS BEEN A BIG EXPLOSION SOMEWHERE IN THE HARBOR MAINE HAS BEEN BLOWN U P AND HUNDREDS OF SAILORS HAVE BEEN KILLED

William Randolph Hearst, upon arriving home that night, was summoned to the telephone by a call from his office and was told the news. "Good heavens! What have you done with the story. . . . Have you put anything else on the front page?" "Only the other big news." "There is not any other big news. Please spread the story all over the page. This means war." 34 Long afterward, when James Creelman was associate editor of Pearson's magazine and under no requirement to cheer whenever Hearst raised his hand, he wrote quite realistically of that moment: "The outbreak of the Spanish-American War found Mr. Hearst in a state of proud ecstasy. He had won his campaign and the McKinley administration had been forced into war." 35 The equally critical Willis J. Abbot, once a Hearst editor and later the editor of the Christian Science Monitor, remarked wryly, "Hearst was accustomed to refer to the war, in company with his staff, as 'our war.' " 36

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The California-born Hearst, then 35 years old, had made his contribution through his New York Journal, in which he was challenging the leadership of Pulitzer's World. He had depicted a 17-year-old Cuban girl, Evangelina Cisneros, as a Cuban " J o a n of Arc" who had been cast into a dungeon for defending her chastity against a rapacious Spaniard. He had even directed her rescue from prison by an enterprising reporter, Karl Decker, who thoughtfully bribed the guards and produced her at a Madison Square Garden mass meeting.87 When the unfortunate Spanish minister in Washington, Dupuy de Lome, had sent a letter critical of President McKinley to a friend in Havana, it had turned up on Page One of the Journal under a banner: "The worst insult to the United States in its history." 38 Dupuy de Lome resigned. Hearst, in short, had done everything he could think of to exacerbate relations between the United States and Spain—and had no apologies to make. In fact, when the Journal came out on February 17 its most sensational headline was: " T H E WARSHIP MAINE WAS SPLIT IN TWO BY AN E N E M Y ' S SECRET INFERNAL MACHINE." 3 9 The justification for this charge was based on a Journal artist's concept of a battleship floating over mines, which in turn were wired to Spanish forts on shore. To be fair to Hearst, he was not the only one who agitated for war with Spain. The World did its part. And Theodore Roosevelt, no yellow journalist, he, demanded after visiting the White House and learning that President McKinley was undecided: "Do you know what that white-livered cur up there has done? He has prepared two messages, one for war and one for peace and doesn't know which one to send in!" When the President finally asked Congress to decide, the Senate vote for war on April 19, 1898 was 42-35, while the House whooped it up, 310-6.40 After all Hearst's efforts, he had to play second fiddle to his opposition on the first big story—the reporting of the victory at Manila Bay. The first word came from Madrid by way of London on Monday, May 2. It was just a bulletin that Commodore George Dewey's Asiatic Squadron had fought and defeated the Spanish at Manila Bay, but had incurred heavy losses in doing so. All the papers jumped on the story, but the nation was torn between pride and the deepest concern over American losses. Dewey himself was silent. All the Navy Department had was a message from a New York Herald correspondent, which it did not consider official.

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Everything depended on the first word from Dewey. That was the big story. The McCulloch, a revenue cutter, was his dispatch boat, and it was known to be heading for Hong Kong. The messages would have to be cabled by way of Europe, since the United States had no Pacific cable then. When the Navy Department remained silent on May 6, rumors spread that fearful losses were being covered up. 41 At 1 a.m. on May 7, six days after the battle, the World at last received this cable dated Hong Kong and sent at the urgent rate of $9.90 a word, a message that beat the Navy's official report: J U S T ARRIVED FROM MANILA. MCCULLOCH. ENTIRE SPANISH F L E E T DESTROYED. E L E V E N SHIPS. SPANISH LOSS THREE HUNDRED KILLED, FOUR HUNDRED WOUNDED. OUR LOSS NONE KILLED, SIX SLIGHTLY WOUNDED. SHIPS UNINJURED. BULLETIN,

[signed]

HARDEN. 4 2

The correspondent was Edward Walker Harden, financial writer of the Chicago Tribune, who also represented the World. He had been with the fleet because he was the brother-in-law of Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Frank Vanderlip. With John T. McCutcheon, then a young cartoonist working for the Chicago Record, Harden had traveled to the Far East on the McCulloch and stumbled into the Battle of Manila Bay. But, although he technically scored a tremendous beat by getting the first complete story into the World office, it came too late for the paper's regular editions and had to be run off as an extra. The 8oo-word account, sent at a cost of $1.80 a word, was in time for the Chicago Tribune and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, however. They cleaned up. What had happened was this: Joseph L. Stickney of the New York Herald, a former Navy officer and the only bona fide war correspondent with the fleet, had been pressed into service by Dewey as his aide on the flagship Olympia and had seen the entire battle from that vantage point. It was Stickney who noted for history Dewey's famous command that May Day: "You may fire when ready, Gridley." Stickney, too, had by far the best story, but he and the two amateur war correspondents aboard all gave Commodore Dewey their word that they would let the official dispatches go first at Hong Kong. According to McCutcheon, the three tossed a coin to determine who should file first at the cablehead and Stickney won,

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but Harden's piece got in first because he sent his first thirty words at the urgent rate.43 In floppy Panama and baggy flannels, Hearst took charge of a fleet of ten dispatch boats and a band of twenty-five foreign correspondents in Cuba including Creelman, his star, whom he had captured from the World, Edward Marshall, and Frederic Remington, the artist.44 Remington was the hero of the famous prewar cable from Cuba to Hearst: "Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return." To which Hearst replied: "Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war." 45 Creelman, too, was celebrated, having exposed the Japanese massacre at Port Arthur for the World,49 and then helped stir things up in Cuba. Hearst was annoyed, to put it mildly, over being without the services of the brightest star in American war correspondence, Richard Harding Davis, the 34-year-old Philadelphian who had caught the imagination of America. The publisher had paid Davis $500 to report a Yale-Harvard football game and $3,000 for a single month's work in Cuba in 1896. Davis had pleased him, weeping just as convincingly as Creelman over the Cubans. But the Journal had not pleased Davis. One of his dispatches, telling how Spanish officers had searched three Cuban girls on an American vessel, had been played under a screeching headline: DOES OUR FLAG PROTECT WOMEN? Underneath was a handsome Remington drawing of three leering Spaniards inspecting a naked Cuban girl. The outraged Davis, who had neglected to specify in his original dispatch that the search was conducted by a woman, wired a public disavowal to the World. He was in Cuba now for the New York Herald, the Times of London, and Scribner's,47 Davis took the first honors. Colonel Theodore Roosevelt saw great merit in the correspondent and made certain that he was with the Rough Riders, whose laureate he became. During the first action at Las Guasimas on June 24, 1898, Davis was carried away by the lust of combat. " I told the lieutenant (next to me in the line) to let us charge across an open place and take a tin shack which was held by the Spaniards' rear guard," he wrote later to his brother. "Roosevelt ordered his men to do the same thing and we ran forward cheering. . . . I guess I fired about twenty rounds and then formed into a strategy board and went down the trail to scout." 43 In this skirmish, which didn't amount to much, Hearst lost his first

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correspondent, Marshall, who fell with a bullet near his spine, shattering a vertebra. When Dr. William C. Gorgas saw the correspondent after the battle, he was dictating his story to his friends, Davis and Stephen Crane of the World, who got it through for him. Dr. Gorgas, later of Panama Canal fame, operated on Marshall, scarcely believing it possible that he would survive. But he did.49 Hearst now swung into action himself with a 3,ooo-word piece for the Journal of June 29 on the situation before Santiago. Just two days later, the icy-calm, six-foot two-inch publisher and Creelman were together under fire at the battle of El Caney while Davis was following the fortunes of war with Roosevelt's Rough Riders up San Juan Hill. These were the climactic battles before Santiago. The small and black-bearded Creelman, a revolver in his holster, dashed inside a Spanish fort, saw a Spanish flag lying in the dust, and watched the American soldiers pick it up, cheering. Most of the garrison was dead, but a young Spanish officer was ready to surrender the rest. Just then, however, a Mauser bullet hit Creelman's left arm and he went down. Faint from heat and loss of blood, he lay helpless. He recorded what happened next a considerable time afterward: "Some one knelt in the grass beside me and put his hand on my fevered head. Opening my eyes, I saw Mr. Hearst, the proprietor of the New York Journal, a straw hat with a bright ribbon on his head, a revolver at his belt, and a pencil and notebook in his hand. The man who had provoked the war had come to see the result with his own eyes and, finding one of his correspondents prostrate, was doing the work himself. Slowly he took down my story of the fight. Again and again the tinging of Mauser bullets interrupted. But he seemed unmoved. The battle had to be reported somehow. " 'I'm sorry you're hurt, but,'—and his face was radiant with enthusiasm—'wasn't it a splendid fight? W e must beat every paper in the world.'" 80 Creelman wasn't the only headline hero that day. Davis made Theodore Roosevelt famous for leading the charge up San Juan Hill and did some more fighting on his own. He wrote: "I speak of Roosevelt first because . . . Roosevelt, mounted high on horseback, and charging the rifle pits at a gallop and quite alone made you feel that you would like to cheer. He wore on his sombrero a blue polkadot handkerchief . . .

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which, as he advanced, floated straight behind his head, like a guidon." 61 Davis also made a confession about the battle of San Juan Hill in a letter home: "I got excited and took a carbine and charged the sugar house [on San Juan Hill]. If the men had been regulars, I would have sat in the rear as [Stephen] Crane did but I knew every one of them, had played football and all that sort of thing, so I thought as an American I ought to help." It was, all in all, rather difficult to decide which correspondent had carried off top honors in the field that day—Davis or Creelman or Hearst or some of their equally active associates and rivals. But there was no doubt whatever about who had captured the fancy of the nation as a soldier. The name was Theodore Roosevelt. Before the public at home even had a chance to catch up with the news of all that had happened on July 1, there being no radio and the dispatch boats being obliged to make a long run to various cable heads, an even greater sensation broke. On Sunday, July 3, Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete tried to run his fleet of six ships out of the blockaded Santiago harbor. Rear Admiral William T. Sampson was caught on land, napping. But the alert Commodore Winfield S. Schley, who was chatting on the bridge of the U.S.S. Brooklyn with an AP correspondent, George E. Graham, heard the lookout bawl: "The enemy ships are coming out!" Schley seized his binoculars and saw the Spanish fleet in column, led by the flagship Maria Theresa, racing from Santiago harbor. "Come on, my boy!" he cried to Graham. "We'll give it to them now!" It was just 9:35 a.m. on a hot and cloudless Sunday. In response to Schley's signals, the American fleet pounced on the Spaniards with murderous fire while Graham recorded the battle scene beside the commander. Two of the five AP dispatch boats darted into the thick of the battle. On one of them, the Wanda, was a veteran correspondent, John P. Dunning. With great coolness under fire, Dunning now managed to rescue a Spanish officer and eight sailors from a sinking enemy destroyer and was enthusiastically kissed on both cheeks by the officer. Dunning also boarded the U.S.S. Gloucester and interviewed the defeated

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Cervera after he had been picked from the water near his disabled flagship. On the U.S.S. New York, flagship of the absent Admiral Sampson, another AP correspondent, William A. M. Goode, recorded the action. There were still other AP correspondents on the dispatch boat Dauntless. Dunning collected all these stories, got them into shape for transmission while the Wanda set out for the cablehead, and decided to make a run for the British cable station at Jamaica, 140 miles away. There was a French cable station at Mole St. Nicholas, Haiti, but the operators were undependable. As for the section of the Cuba-Haiti cable that had been commandeered by the U.S. Navy at Guantanamo, it was of course closest, but it was also choked with traffic, and military messages always moved first. The battle off Santiago was over at 1:30 p.m., July 3. By the time Dunning reached the cable station at Kingston, Jamaica, it was 1 a.m. July 4. He learned there, to his disgust, that one of the rival dispatch boats had come in an hour before with news of the beginning of the battle, but not its triumphant end. Dunning took a chance. He put the complete AP file on the wire at the urgent rate of $1.67 a word (from Jamaica or Haiti the normal rate at the time was 50 to 88 cents a word). The total came to $8,000, exceeding a file to the New York Herald on the land combat which cost more than $5,ooo.52 While the Wanda and the other press dispatch boats were racing for Kingston, blind chance threw the biggest part of the story into the lap of a completely unsuspecting correspondent, Matthew Tighe, who was covering the White House all by himself that drowsy Sunday in Washington. He was working for the Hearst newspapers and, as one of the Washington regulars, was well acquainted with the Secretary of the Navy, John D. Long. When Long emerged from the executive offices late that day, Tighe caught up with him as a matter of course and began a casual conversation. Long drew a piece of paper from his pocket. "By the way, Tighe. I've just received this message from Admiral Sampson, saying the fleet under his command has engaged and destroyed the Spanish squadron. I have just shown it to the President. Perhaps it will be of some interest." Tighe allowed that it might. He didn't stop to ask questions but quickly copied the message and ran for the wire, scoring a two-hour beat on Sampson's official message. The Admiral, who had been conferring

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with General Shatter ashore during the action, evidently seized the opportunity to get the victory message through Guantanamo before acknowledging that the triumph had been gained without his assistance. It was a Washington legend for many years later that Hearst was so grateful that he guaranteed Tighe his job for life, warning all editors that only he could discharge the correspondent. In any case, Tighe died in the Hearst service.53 There were many others who distinguished themselves during the war. The usual contingent of novelists, explorers, and various other quasi-joumalists were there, a corps of specialists known to the profession as "trained seals." The expense was, of course, enormous. Arthur Brisbane estimated that every first-class newspaper in New York City would have been bankrupt had the war continued for two years. As it was, he remarked that all first-class newspapers in the city ran "far behind"—the Journal having spent $3,000 a day extra for gathering war news alone. That amounted to $500,000 for the duration of the conflict. The World may not have spent quite that much, but its costs were high. The AP, Herald, and Sun were believed to have spent about $250,000 each. The AP, with five ships and nineteen correspondents, was second only to the Journal in the manpower it placed in the field. Except for that first great beat, the World had its troubles. Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage, did some beautiful vignettes after he had been hired away from Hearst as a special. But at a crucial point in the short war, he embarrassed the World by telling the truth about the 71st New York Regiment at San Juan Hill. They had been in the way of the Rough Riders, it is true, but it didn't make good reading in a New York paper. With a howl of triumph, the Journal jumped on the luckless Crane: SLURS ON THE BRAVERY OF THE BOYS OF THE 71ST. Then it listed the 7ist's casualties: 14 killed, 59 wounded. The World hastily disowned Crane's story and began a fund for a field memorial for the 71st. When it was all over, both Richard Harding Davis and Arthur Brisbane praised Crane's work as a writer of appealing human incidents. He had something of the common touch made famous in World War II by Ernie Pyle, but the disappointed World wanted headlines, not art, at that juncture. Throughout the war, Crane showed great personal bravery but wrote nothing about himself.54 The most painful incident of all, as far as the World was concerned,

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was the conduct of its impulsive correspondent, Sylvester Scovel. He was on the roof of the governor's palace at Santiago, watching General Shafter accept the surrender of 8,000 Spanish prisoners of war, when he was hauled from his perch. According to the opposition press, Scovel angrily slapped or tried to slap General Shafter in the face. Davis alleged in his defense that he only "returned a blow." In any case, he was barred from further contact with the American forces for insolent conduct. President McKinley later cleared him, but his usefulness to the World was, to put it mildly, impaired.55 Despite all the damage to his staff, the expense and the headaches of keen competition, Hearst was content. The last thing he did during the war was to pick up twenty-nine Spanish prisoners in his yacht, Sylvia, after the sinking of the Spanish fleet. He then took the wounded Creelman aboard at Siboney and started for home after seventeen days at the Cuban front. Although it took a war to do it, the Journal was established. On its greatest day, it printed 1,068,000 copies, and it could have sold at least 200,000 more.56 That brought it abreast of the World and perhaps even surpassed it. Hearst was now one of the most formidable forces in American journalism. Only one man who had wanted this war achieved more in the few months it lasted—Theodore Roosevelt. 5. Y O U N G L I O N O F B R I T A I N The Boer War in South Africa began on October 12, 1899, when President Paul Kruger of the Transvaal hurled 6,000 armed farmers against 25,000 British regulars. Two days later, in the dual role of lieutenant in the South African Light Horse and correspondent for the London Morning Post at £250 ($1,250) a month, Winston Churchill was on the Royal Mail steamer Dunottar Castle bound for the front. When he landed at Cape Town on November 1, he learned indignantly that the British were everywhere on the defensive. Sir George White had been smashed at Laing's Nek. Colonel Robert Baden-Powell and his men were besieged in Mafeking. Kimberly was under attack. Ladysmith was about to be invested. "A democratic government," Churchill roared reproachfully, "cannot go to war unless the country is behind it, and until it has general support must not place itself in a position whence, without fighting, there is no retreat. The difficulty of rallying public opinion . . . has caused

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a most dangerous delay in the despatch of reinforcements." Churchill spoke with the voice of empire, scornful of subterfuge, disdainful of opposition. But the professional correspondents, more accustomed to telling the story as they found it, not as they wished it to be, weren't so sure. The much-admired London Daily Mail special, George Warrington Steevens, then only 29 and a bare six years out of Oxford, came to South Africa directly from the Dreyfus trial and was troubled by what he found. He didn't like what the British had done to the Boers in South Africa, the madness of Leander Jameson's raid, the overweening ambition of Cecil Rhodes, the failure to deal with the needs of the Boers. He would be shut up in besieged Ladysmith from November 2 on, and he would die there of enteric fever on January 15,1900. There was another veteran of the Dreyfus trial who would be shut up in Ladysmith with him, Henry W. Nevinson, who was, as the correspondents put it, for the London Chronicle. As a lifelong champion of liberal causes, he was no less doubtful of the rightness of the British cause than Steevens. He understood the "natural suspicion and apprehension" of the Boers over the "exaggerated grievances" of the British, "emphasized by the insatiable greed of the mine owners." 58 It was scarcely Churchill's view. Yet, whether they were liberal or conservative, professionals or brilliant amateurs, the correspondents went to war together and suffered together. Of the hundred or more who reported that small but significant conflict, some were besieged and more were captured, some were shot, and at least thirteen died. The old war horses were all there and some of the younger ones— the formidable Edward Frederick Knight for the London Morning Post and New York World, who was shot in battle at Belmont and lost an arm; William Maxwell of the London Standard, who was among the besieged at Ladysmith, but smuggled messages out; Julian Ralph of Collier's, who railed at some of the British officers with their "absurd airs, brusque speech, and a contempt for the press"; the veteran combat artists, Frederic Villiers and Melton Prior; Bennet Burleigh of the London Daily Telegraph and Lionel James and Leopold S. Amery of the Times of London; and Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. Heading the American delegation was Richard Harding Davis, who came with his bride to represent the New York Herald and the London

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Daily Mail. Then, too, there was Reuters, with correspondents on both sides, which was being put to the most difficult test of all for a news agency—the test of war. The conflict was only five weeks old, and Churchill had been at work for only two weeks, when he was slightly wounded and captured. That day, November 14, he went on an armored train, which everybody in camp had called the "death trap," to reconnoiter toward Chieveley in Natal. A patrol of about 100 Boers derailed some of the cars, using field guns, then settled down to pound away at the scouting party with both shells and rifle fire. Churchill, with the permission of the commanding officer, called for volunteers to clear the track and get the engine free for a run from danger. For more than an hour, he and the husky soldiers tugged and heaved at the jammed rolling stock, under fire all the while. The engine, meanwhile, pushed ahead and backed up fruitlessly. At last, when the job was finished, Churchill jumped aboard with as many others as the engine could take, including wounded, but it was too late. Three Boers opened fire, and one bullet slightly nicked his hand. He gave up. An AP correspondent in Pretoria, Richard Smith, interviewed Churchill there and found him well. The New York World, which was running his copy, twinned the story with the report of the shooting of Knight under the headline: WORLD CORRESPONDENTS SUFFER FATE OF SOLDIERS.6®

Churchill was not one to suffer such a fate for very long, however. On the night of December 12, when the sentries' backs were turned, he scrambled over a wall and into an adjoining garden, waited there for about an hour and, when he found he hadn't been missed, calmly strolled along the crowded streets of Pretoria into the suburbs. At a bridge at the edge of town, he sat down and took stock: £75, four slabs of chocolate, and it was 300 miles to Lourenco Marques and Portuguese territory to the north. What to do? Find the Delagoa Bay Railway. How to judge direction? Follow the stars. It worked. Within a short time, the future Prime Minister was in a freight car buried under empty sacks covered with coal dust. He promptly fell asleep, exhausted after his adventure. When he awoke, it was nearly dawn and he jumped from the moving train, fearing discovery with the coming of daylight. He landed in a ditch, shaken but unhurt. Nearby, he found a pool of clear water and drank his fill.

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For the next five days, he took refuge in the wooded countryside during the oppressive heat of the day and walked steadily north by night. He became aware that he was a much-wanted prisoner. The Boers circulated a poster: "Englishman, twenty-five years old, about five feet eight inches high, indifferent build, walks a little with a bend forward, pale appearance, redbrownish hair, small moustache hardly perceptible, talks through his nose, cannot pronounce the letter S properly and does not know any Dutch." On the sixth day, desperate after subsisting on nothing but his chocolate bars, he spotted a freight train at the Middleburg station and buried himself under sacks stuffed with soft merchandise. "The hard floor was littered with gritty coal dust, and made a most uncomfortable bed," he wrote. " T h e heat was almost stifling. I was resolved, however, that nothing should lure or compel me from my hiding place until I reached Portuguese territory." The Boers searched the train at the border, but they didn't probe deeply enough. After sixty hours of misery, Churchill arrived at Lourenco Marques, a free man, and a hero the whole length and breadth of Britain. 60 As he wrote triumphantly to the London Morning Post that December 2 1 : " I am very weak, but I am free. " I have lost many pounds, but I am lighter in heart. " I shall also avail myself of every opportunity from this moment to urge with earnestness an unflinching and uncompromising prosecution of the war." Some of the more enthusiastic Churchillians have always contended that his exploit, and his subsequent campaign for heavy troop reinforcements, resulted in the strengthening of British forces to 350,000 men under the command of Lord Roberts, with General Kitchener as chief of staff. Very possibly, in view of the heavy British reverses, the reinforcements would have come anyway. But there is little doubt that Churchill's gallant adventure, which finally gave the British something to cheer about, speeded up the government's determination. Churchill remained with Sir Redvers Buller's column, which moved slowly to the relief of Ladysmith. He reported the battle of Spion Kop and three heartbreaking attempts to cross the Tugela River to save the beleaguered city. "The general," the correspondent observed gravely,

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"must not be afraid to brave disaster. But how tolerant the arm-chair critics should be of men who try daring coups and fail. You must put your head into the lion's mouth if the performance is to be a success." 6 1 On February 28, at last, Ladysmith was relieved and Buller's army entered the city. The losses in the campaign had been more than 300 officers and 5,000 men killed and wounded out of a total engaged force of about 23,000 men—twenty-five days of action spread over ten weeks. Like so many others, Churchill mourned the death of Steevens, the Daily Mail's star who was fatally stricken with enteric fever. Henry Nevinson and Willie Maud of the Graphic, who was to die in the next war from the effect suffered in this, took the dying man to the river bank and hid him from the sun in a shaded hollow for the few days before he died. "And I who was older," Nevinson wrote sadly, "was to go out to succeeding wars alone." 62 The siege lasted 1 1 8 days. Davis, hurrying to Ladysmith without his bride, was deeply moved when he entered with the conquering army and saw the pitiable condition of the besieged. "I wanted to say that I had lost my way and had ridden into town by mistake, and that I begged to be allowed to withdraw with apologies." 63 Thus, Davis, the white knight, posturing in the mud and filth of war. The British offensive ground on. When Mafeking was relieved on May 17, the Reuters man from Pretoria, W . H. Mackay, got the news from the Boers ahead of anybody else, put his bulletin inside a sandwich, gave a locomotive engineer £5 to get it across the Portuguese frontier, and hoped it would reach London. It did. It was given to the Queen and Prime Minister and cabled back to Cape Town where Lord Roberts, too, was given the news. The government had no confirmation but Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, solemnly announced he did not doubt "the accuracy of Reuters information." 64 Reuters did well in the war. H. A. Gwynne, the chief correspondent, marched with Lord Roberts to Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria. Henry Collins, who had helped Julius Reuter open up India to news agency service, took charge in Cape Town. He broke in a new man, Roderick Jones, who at 18 had been the first to interview the captured Leander Jameson after his border raid. Jones eventually became the head of Reuters. There was one other junior correspondent

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for Reuters who was to achieve fame in a different way—Edgar Wallace, the mystery writer.65 There were mishaps. There was tragedy. And there was glory, too, for the correspondents who survived. Richard Harding Davis, determined to leave the British and go over to the Boer side, which was more popular in the United States, made it with his long-suffering bride in a cart. He was taken to Pretoria and shown every courtesy by General Christian DeWet, which mollified Mrs. Davis. But once on the Boer side, Davis showed a different aspect of his character—a touch of steel under the candy cotton. "As I see it," he wrote of the Boers, "it has been a Holy War, this war of the burgher crusader, and his motives are as fine as any that ever called a Minute Man from his farm, or sent a knight of the Cross to die for it in Palestine. Still, in spite of his cause, the Boer is losing and in time his end may come and he may fall. But when he falls he will not fall alone; with him will end a great principle—the principle for which our forefathers fought—the right of self-government, the principle of independence." That wasn't all. He attacked Kipling for writing about a "good killing," assailed Churchill for reporting, " W e had a good bag today, ten killed, seventeen wounded." Worst of all, he made the British furious by questioning their sportsmanship. For this he was cast into outer darkness by being expelled from the Garrick Club in London. He replied by founding the Order of Pretoria for all Americans who had fought on the Boer side or reported the war for the Boers. He, too, was a worthy opponent.66 Churchill triumphantly finished the war by marching with Lieutenant General Ian Hamilton's column for 400 miles on the flank of Lord Roberts' army from Bloemfontein to Pretoria where Churchill rose to the occasion with a rhetorical outburst: "The British flag was hoisted over the Parliament amid some cheers. The victorious army then began to parade past it. . . . For three hours the broad river of steel and khaki flowed unceasingly, and the townsfolk gazed in awe and wonder at those majestic soldiers whose discipline neither perils nor hardships had disturbed, whose relentless march no obstacles could prevent. With such pomp and the rolling of drums, the new order of things was ushered in." 67

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Nevinson, who was also there, didn't see it quite that way. He cabled home an entirely different kind of message, which illustrates the difference between correspondents, as well: "Kruger (if he has not already departed for Holland) has at least 15,000 men with him, they say; he has twenty guns, nearly three millions in gold, and a religious conviction that God must of necessity be on his side. With forces such as those, it seems possible that the extraordinary old man may give us a lot of trouble for some time yet." Nevinson was right. T h e war went on. The British embarked on a brutal "scorched earth" policy to crush Boer resistance. But with the burning of farms and villages on the veldt and the herding of survivors into concentration camps, the outcry against the conquerors was deafening. There was an epilogue. Winston Spencer Churchill, Conservative M P , arrived in the United States toward the end of 1900 to lecture in defense of the British conduct of the war. Davis publicly refused to serve on the official reception committee. But, because of his friendship and admiration for the new hope of the Conservatives, he went around to Churchill's hotel to give him a warm private welcome. "That same evening," Davis proudly wrote, "three hours after midnight, he came in, in a blizzard, pounding at our door for food and drink. W h a t is a little thing like a war between friends?" 68 Regardless of whether or not this was the proper role for a foreign correspondent to play, it was the only role which Churchill believed to be proper. He was committed, dedicated, too roughly unobjective in his approach. It was a role he lived gloriously, whether he was soldier, journalist, parliamentarian, or statesman. Many of the British journalists of his time, and some of the Americans as well, believed in it as implicitly as he did. That belief powerfully influenced the main stream of Anglo-American journalism in the middle and late Victorian era. It lingers on, here and there, among the elderly who love the past and the young who are so desperately afraid of the future.

6. "CHINESE" MORRISON T h e foreign legations in Peking were under siege. Outside the makeshift fortifications, a force of 20,000 enraged Boxers shouted, "Kill! Kill! Kill!" Inside, a grim little international company of soldiers only

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480 strong stood at battle stations to protect the diplomatic corps and their families. They counted on General Jung Lu and his imperial army to help them, but the general was an uncertain quantity at best. For many days now, kindly but bumbling Edwin H. Conger, former congressman from Iowa and friend of President McKinley, had been sending alarming messages home. The Boxers (I Ho Ch'uan, meaning Righteous Harmonious Fists) had been rioting against the foreign devils. They had burned villages, beheaded missionaries, torn down a main railway station, invaded Peking itself. Yet, the State Department did nothing. Let the European powers go on bleeding weak, corrupt, impotent China by extorting concessions. The United States didn't want to create complications as long as it, too, had an open door to trade with China. What could poor, misguided native mobs do to change the course of history? Seeing Conger was getting nowhere, a group of American missionaries on June 8, 1900, sent the President a cable for help. Sir Claude Macdonald, the British minister at Peking, at the same time called for heavy British reinforcements. Finally, Conger himself cabled a despairing cry for assistance. After that, silence. At the June 15 cabinet meeting in Washington, Secretary of State John Hay was quite vexed with Conger. He hadn't been keeping in touch with the department, which was strictly contrary to orders. Besides, the fussy Hay was worrying because he feared Conger might be tempted to cooperate with other diplomats, and he had been cabling him not to do so. The rest of the cabinet, and the President himself, were uneasy about the whole business. They finally settled on a cable to Conger to communicate at once with Rear Admiral Louis Kaempff aboard the U.S.S. Newark at Tientsin. Hay evidently was satisfied. Now, just let Conger ignore that! Poor Conger! At that moment he was cut off from the world. He didn't know Hay was displeased. He wouldn't have cared much if he had. Besieged with the other diplomats and their families in the Inner City from June 20 on, he knew he either cooperated with his colleagues or he was lost. For now, the foreign colony had another foe in addition to the Boxers. Some of the imperial troops had gone over to the enemy, slaying the chancellor of the Japanese legation as a manifest of their intentions.69 Soon afterward, a tattered Chinese beggar, pitifully guarding a few

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handsful of rice in his begging bowl, made his way along the Boxer lines. He asked alms as he went, but no one paid any attention to him. Unheeded, he wandered through Peking and on through the aroused countryside until he reached a friendly haven. Then, carefully he drew from his rice bowl two messages from correspondents inside the siege lines. Within a short time, they were on the cables. In this manner, the world learned for the first time of the enormity of the plight of the foreign legations in Peking. One of the messages, sent by a gallant but little-known correspondent, Robert Coltman, gave a major exclusive in the United States to Victor Fremont Lawson's morning paper, the Chicago Record. The other was from one of the most experienced and illustrious of the old China hands, Dr. George Ernest Morrison, the correspondent of the Times of London, known then and also to posterity as "Chinese" Morrison.70 The cable from Coltman was news. The cable from Morrison was a trumpet call. No demarche, painstakingly worked out in one of the chancelleries of Europe, could have had the force of this stark announcement that British lives as well as British interests were at stake in a far corner of the earth. Morrison was one of a small but distinguished group of career foreign correspondents who were making history for the Times, and often for the empire as well, at the turn of the century. Theirs was no runand-write assignment. They were not asked to cut corners. Nor was there any nonsense about "team coverage," the use of four uninformed correspondents on a difficult assignment instead of one. They would not have understood that there was anything special about coverage in depth. That was all they did—and they did it well. Much better, in fact, than the embassies from which they were supposed to get information. It usually worked just the other way. Such men were carefully tested by old-fashioned but highly effective methods before they were engaged. Sometimes they were told that they could not, at the beginning, presume to claim that they were Times people. More often than not, they went out to their assigned stations as specials. Only after years did they achieve the cherished status of O.O.C.—Our Own Correspondent—which with their dateline served as their only identification in the paper. But in the Establishment at home, and in places where such knowledge counted abroad, they were very well known, indeed.

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One of Morrison's colleagues was James David Bourchier, a deaf Irishman from Cambridge who left a teaching post at Eton to bury himself in the Balkans for almost a generation. He became the father of the Balkan League and, like MacGahan, a Bulgarian national hero. A Bulgarian postage stamp bearing his portrait was issued in his memory in 1921. 71 Another was Walter Burton Harris, the correspondent of the Times in Morocco for an even longer period. He was referred to quietly as "one of the real rulers of Morocco" and acted the part. It was he, primarily, who was courted by Wilhelm II at the time the Kaiser dramatically opposed French aspirations in Morocco at Tangier. Not that it did the Kaiser much good. Such Times men were British to the core.72 Perhaps more than any other, the career of George Saunders, the Times man in Berlin, typified this highly influential group of correspondents. The German Chancellor, Count Bernhard von Biilow, argued that Saunders was "dangerous to us" and did everything possible to force his recall. But Sir Valentine Chirol, the head of the Times foreign service, stood by his man. Together they raised warning after warning to Britain and to the world of Germany's warlike intentions. That was how Times men operated. It was Morrison's assignment to represent the Times in the Far East as these men did in Germany, in the Balkans, and in North Africa. He came to the Times's attention because he published a book in 1895, when he was 33 years old, entitled An Australian in China. It was a record of a 3,000-mile trip he had taken through China at a cost of £18 ($90). Whether it was the record of the trip, the evidence of economy, or both, that recommended him, the record does not show. In any event, Moberly Bell, the Times's manager, asked him to call. Morrison was an Australian physician, born in Geelong in 1862, and up to that time had given little thought to journalism as a career. As his first assignment, he was told to visit Siam, Burma, and the interior of China, posing as a private citizen and not as a Times correspondent. Sir Thomas Sanderson was so impressed with the information Morrison developed that he wrote a personal note of thanks from the Foreign Office. But when Morrison took up residence in Peking as an acknowledged Times correspondent and began exposing the intrigues in China, there were mixed emotions at the Foreign Office. Lord Curzon com-

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plained in the House of Commons that Morrison's work was based on the "intelligent anticipation of facts even before they occur." 73 Both the Russians and the Japanese soon recognized Morrison's unique influence. Count Hayashi, who was in Peking for his government, seriously discussed a British-Japanese alliance with Morrison as early as 1900. But even then, the Boxer uprising was gathering force. Morrison saw correctly that it would be a long and dangerous affair, which would involve all the great powers in one way or another. That was what he concentrated on, and it was just as well. He was a key man, as it turned out, in the defense of the besieged foreign legations. Once the correspondents' messages reached the outside world, the little band of foreigners behind their makeshift fortifications hoped that military assistance would be rushed to them. It didn't turn out that way. The first relief expedition was stopped far short of its destination. Weeks went by. From behind the siege lines, news seeped out that the German minister, Baron Wilhelm von Ketteler, had been assassinated. Next came word, unofficial but it was believed reliable, that "Chinese" Morrison had been killed while fighting off the Boxers. The Times on July 17, 1900, did the handsome thing. After announcing in its leading article that the British residents in Peking must be considered lost, a gloomy conclusion based on insufficient information, as it turned out, the paper commented editorially: "There is one other amongst the victims of the Palace who claims a special tribute at our hands—Dr. George Ernest Morrison, our Peking correspondent. Dr. Morrison has had so many hairbreadth escapes in the course of his most adventurous life of thirty-eight years, and possessed such infinite resource in moments of emergency, that we cannot quite relinquish the hope that he may possibly have escaped in the confusion of the final slaughter. . . . "No newspaper anxious to serve the best interests of the country has ever had a more devoted, a more fearless and a more able servant than Dr. Morrison." It is given to few men to read their own obituary notices, and to still fewer to peruse as flowery and laudatory a tribute as this one. Morrison survived to enjoy every word of it, much to the satisfaction of the Times. It appeared that he had twice distinguished himself. At the outset of the siege, when Minister Conger protested there was no room for some 2,000 Christian Chinese from the missions who would

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almost certainly be murdered when caught, Morrison commented: "I should be ashamed to call myself a white man if I could not make a place for these Chinese Christians." He thereupon took over an abandoned Chinese palace next door to the British legation, the palace in which he was supposed to have perished, and the Chinese Christians came trooping in. When a Boxer volley mowed him down on July 16, 1900, it was while he was in attendance at the palace as a medical officer. The volley fatally wounded a Britisher, Captain Strouts, and seriously injured a Japanese, Colonel Sheba. Despite Morrison's own painful thigh wounds, he did what he could for his comrades before submitting to treatment himself.74 More messages began dribbling out of the besieged camp. Daring messengers made the trip, most of them safely. In one case, Secretary Hay managed to get through to Conger, asking for news. On July 20, a message came back expressing fear of a massacre and begging for immediate military assistance. When the authenticity of the message was questioned, Hay disclosed he had asked Conger to identify himself by including the name of his sister in his reply. The message gave her name correctly, "Alta," a warm, folksy detail that appealed to sentimental America.75 Undoubtedly, Conger's dramatic appeal helped speed up the relief expedition. The Russians and Japanese poured troops into China. The British and Germans were well represented. The French had a token force. The Americans, assigned a quota of 10,000, managed to produce 5,000 and actually had 2,100 in the relief column. The siege of Tientsin was raised first. Then, on August 14, the 20,000-man international army finally got through to the gates of Peking. The siege lasted fifty-five days. Of the 480 defense troops, 234 were killed or wounded. As soon as Morrison recovered, he proceeded to outrage nearly everybody except the Times with his coverage of the Boxer war negotiations in Peking. He exposed Russian maneuvers so successfully that he aroused ill-favor at St. Petersburg. His exclusive report of a Russian-Chinese agreement giving Russia military rights over the Manchurian railway aroused British opinion. Next, his disclosures of British maneuvering brought down the wrath of Lord Curzon, his old foe, in the House of Commons. The correspondent then made the Chinese government unhappy with his attacks on its ability to govern its own country. Finally, he wrote so disapprovingly of German actions in China (he

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was not alone) that Field Marshal Count Alfred von Waldersee, the German commander, called him an "arch-liar." "I am no more impressed by press attacks than by the barking of a dog," wrote the field marshal. "But I am surprised that a newspaper like the Times allows itself to be served so badly all the time. The Englishmen here are ashamed of their countryman but do not possess the courage to send him away." 79 It was not the British, finally, who "sent him away." It was, ironically, the Chinese, for whom Morrison had the greatest respect as a people. When the Boer War ended, and the Anglo-Japanese alliance was promptly concluded, Morrison evidently took it as a signal for war. In any event, he wrote in such a way that even Chirol, his superior, interpreted his articles as encouragement to the Japanese to make war on Russia.77 When such things were published in ordinary newspapers, they could be dismissed as figments of the reporters' imagination. When they were published in the Times, one could never be sure whether or not they represented the policy of the government. That was at once the strength and weakness of the Times as a newspaper; it was, also, scarcely the strength but most assuredly a weakness in the press policy of the British foreign office. Well aware that the Times was suspected of trying to goad Japan into a war with Russia, Valentine Chirol, the Times's foreign manager, wrote to Morrison to say his "bellicose" article was being toned down. Chirol noted that Morrison had reported Japan "ready and eager" for war. He argued rather weakly against that, then added: "But even accepting your statement without reserve, I should be very sorry to give any encouragement to the idea that Japan was eager for war." Morrison never received the letter at Peking. He was expelled on May 30, 1903.78 The nervous Chinese, knowing he was anti-Russian, concluded that he was pro-Japanese, and they had no illusions whatever about Japan. While the correspondent continued to represent the Times in the Far East, he never again attained the peak of influence which had distinguished his work up to and including the Boxer rebellion. It was one of the inevitable risks of permitting correspondents to shape policy, or even help to shape it. In the long run, the publisher, and not the government, had to be responsible and the newspaper couldn't fight a war all by itself, no matter how ardently the correspondent desired it.

V: The Shaky Alliance 1. S T O N E O F T H E AP A slender, thin-lipped stranger from Chicago called on Baron Herbert de Reuter in London on St. Patrick's Day, 1893. He was Melville Elijah Stone, the first general manager of the newly organized Associated Press of Illinois. No hard-pressed prime minister ever approached a foreign potentate with greater need for an immediate alliance. The scholarly de Reuter knew it. And Stone, despite the challenge in his cold, hard eyes behind their rimless pince-nez glasses, knew it, too. The blunt truth was that the Illinois AP, which aimed to be a national newsgathering cooperative replacing numerous regional organizations of the same name, had to have Reuters foreign service. It was a matter of survival. Stone had rushed to London, leaving Chicago twenty-four hours after his appointment, in an effort to beat out a rival American service. Terms? Under the circumstances, they were just about whatever the Baron wanted to demand. Certainly, the new AP would have to become a part of the old agency cartel—Reuters, Havas, Wolff, and their satellites—just as the old New York AP had been. That would mean continued American subservience to the dominant news powers of the Old World—and meek dependence on the influence of London. Stone couldn't help himself. As he was to report to his board years later on another occasion when the value of the grand alliance was questioned, " I think it would be a disaster, an absolute disaster, for this organization to break with this combination." 1 He didn't like the idea of a news monopoly. He was deeply devoted to the principle that newsgathering and news distribution should be conducted by the participating newspapers, not by the government or a profit-making corporation; that it should be a cooperative, nonprofit venture, giving equal service to all its members.

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He had put it this way to his board: "A national cooperative newsgathering organization, owned by the newspapers and by them alone, selling no news, making no profits, paying no dividends, simply the agent and servant of the newspapers, was the thing. Those participating should be journalists of every conceivable partisan, religious, economic, and social affiliation, but all equally zealous that in the business of newsgathering for their supply there should be strict accuracy, impartiality and integrity. This was the dream we dreamed." 2 Reuters didn't have to dream. Reuters was a reality. Except for the specials, and only the most powerful papers could afford them, the great British agency was the central viaduct for world news in the United States. It was, in addition, the channel through which Havas and Wolff reports from Europe moved to American newspapers in general. It was also the source of news from India and the Far East and whatever scattered intelligence was sent from Africa. As Reuters itself boasted, with good reason, "British trade, the early enterprise of British cable companies, and the resourcefulness and reputation of Reuters had combined to make London the center of the world's news." 3 Reuters was not about to give up its advantage merely to favor an upstart American agency. The contrast between the plainly dressed, plain-spoken Stone and the elegant Baron de Reuter was even greater than that between their organizations. The Baron, son of the founder, was shy, a recluse and a reader when he wasn't in the thick of business; a cultured, welleducated man, a patriarch of British journalism. Stone, a son of a Methodist minister, was a self-educated man, a hard-bitten journalist of the old school, founder of the Chicago Daily News, president of a Chicago bank. He had been bom August 22, 1848, in Hudson, 111., left high school to become a Chicago Tribune reporter at sixteen, worked in Washington as a correspondent, started the Chicago Daily News on a shoestring, sold out to his friend and partner, Victor Fremont Lawson, and come back into the news business for a fresh start at the age of 45-4 Baron de Reuter, despite his scholarly appearance, was an eminently practical man and knew perfectly well that Stone had to have Reuters' cooperation. The old New York AP had just collapsed, most of its members going into a rival organization known as the United Press

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(no connection with the organization which later took that name). The remainder rallied around the banner of Victor Fremont Lawson, who with other Midwestemers incorporated the old Western AP as a new organization, the Illinois AP, on December 13, 1892, with Stone as general manager.5 The Baron proposed a ten-year alliance between the new AP and Reuters, Havas, and Wolff, with a self-renewing ten-year extension.6 It would be "a close alliance for the exclusive interchange with each other, outside their respective territories, of all telegraphic news received by them." 7 The annual fee to be paid to Reuters, $17,500, was nominal, but the service commitments were enormous.8 Stone had no choice. He signed. The new AP thereupon cleaned up, persuaded the most powerful newspapers in the country to join with only a few exceptions, and elected Lawson its first president.9 The hard-working Chicagoan, born September 9, 1850, of Norwegian immigrant parents, had proved himself a super-salesman. As a result, the rival UP went into receivership in 1897.10 However, three years later, the Supreme Court of Illinois denied the right of the AP to withhold its service from a rebellious member, the Chicago Inter Ocean, or to any other newspaper that applied for it. At one stroke, Lawson and Stone found themselves out of business. But the resourceful Stone quickly organized a new committee and obtained permission in New York to form the Associated Press of New York on May 22, 190c. 11 Certain rules were liberalized. Various provisions that had proved to be a fatal defect in the Illinois charter were reworded. But in effect, the founding of the AP in New York did preserve the rights of each member in his franchise and protected him against rivals in his territory who also wanted AP membership. The results were proof of Stone's sagacity. Thus, the AP at last had achieved the status of a legal, national, newsgathering cooperative organization which was ruled by its own membership. While Frank B. Noyes of the Washington Evening Star was named its first president, it was Melville Elijah Stone as general manager who was the real power in the organization. As for Lawson, he was formally declared after his death to have been "The Founder oftheAP." 1 2 Stone wasted no time on self-congratulation. As soon as the agency's

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business was on a firm base in New York, he took the first significant steps to insure the A P of a minimal foreign service of its own. It was delicate work. He could not do anything to offend Reuters, Havas, or Wolff. Yet, he knew quite well that his members would not long be content to take merely what the British and their European allies were willing to send. The tradition of American independence in journalism was too strong. "From the beginning," Stone wrote at the outset of his campaign for a foreign service, "the Associated Press had only one foreign agency and that was located in the British metropolis. It was from a British news agency or through the English dispatches that we derived all our European news. True, there were interesting letters from the continental capitals, but long before their arrival or publication the story of any important event had been told from London and had made its impress on the American mind—an impress that was not easy to correct. . . . Thus British opinion, in large measure, became our opinion." 1 3 Stone decided he would have to expand the A P foreign service. Directly after the Spanish-American War, he made three trips abroad, opened a Paris office with the blessings of the French Foreign Minister, Theophile Delcasse, an old political journalist, and was given a warm welcome to Berlin by Kaiser Wilhelm II himself. King Victor Emmanuel III in Italy and the 93-year-old Pope Leo X I I I both saw the energetic AP executive and agreed to receive an A P Rome correspondent, the distinguished Italian journalist, Salvatore Cortesi, known far and wide as the "Commendatore." * Finally, on February 1, 1904, at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Stone negotiated directly with Tsar Nicholas II. Stone boldly told the Tsar that "a wall has been built up around [Russia] and the fact that no correspondent for a foreign paper can live and work here has resulted in a traffic in false Russian news that is most hurtful." The Tsar agreed to let an A P correspondent into his capital, placing him on the same footing with other foreign representatives. The AP thus was able to bring world news to the American press through the services of its own correspondents. The coverage was thin. The agency still had to depend on the grand cartel for most of its * Cortesi's wife, Isabelle Lauder Cochrane of Boston, was the first New York Times correspondent in Rome. His son, Arnaldo, was the Times's correspondent there, off and on, until he retired in 1963.

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foreign coverage. But after more than a half century, the American point of view was at least recognized abroad. That was Stone's major contribution in the field of foreign correspondence. His monument is the A P . " 2. T H E U N E A S Y A L L I E S Baron Herbert de Reuter was not the kind of man you slapped on the back. He was aloof, reserved, retiring. While he capably discharged his duties as managing director of Reuters from the day his father yielded power to him in 1878, it was not with great enthusiasm. To him, the powerful news agency at 24 Old Jewry, London, was both a family business and a family responsibility. As a traditionalist, he was bound to it. While everything went well, nobody could question the Baron's methods. Yet, it was perfectly clear that Reuters was far behind the times. The merest inspection of its headquarters was proof. The firm of E. Remington in the United States had put out a typewriter as early as 1872. The various regional AP units had put it to quick use. But a decade later, Reuters was still doing everything by hand. It didn't really give up what amounted to quill pen journalism until the Boer War. Similarly, Reuters was highly suspicious of the telephone. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell had taken out the first patent for one in the United States. A year later, the Boston Globe had received the first news from a reporter eighteen miles away. But to Reuters, it was a sensation when in 1882 the agency for the first time used a telephone to notify London subscribers of the bombardment of Alexandria. For Reuters, the stylus and the manifold carbon copies it was used to produce were considered the only reliable way of duplicating messages until close to the turn of the century. Yet, in 1872, the Exchange Telegraph Company, a rival concern, had begun using the first primitive form of teletype machine to distribute its news. The Baron in 1883 decided that the stylus wasn't here to stay, but it was many years before Reuters gave up its gray-uniformed messengers who delivered confirming copies of everything sent by electronic devices. When blinding speed was required, bulletins went oif by messenger in hansom cabs.15 This kind of organization, conservative to the point of being archaic,

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invited ambitious competition. The most logical rivalry would have been an AP-type of cooperative, sponsored by the British newspapers themselves. Here, Reuters had good luck. Such a group, the Press Association (PA), had been organized in 1868 primarily as a domestic news agency which would serve its membership. Since 1870, the PA had had an agreement with Reuters to supply it with domestic news in exchange for the global agency's foreign news. Each tacitly agreed to a monopoly by the other. That still held good. The PA wasn't interested in wrecking a good thing merely for the sake of competition.16 The Exchange Telegraph Agency was something else again. It took over much of the financial reporting, reducing Reuters role in this profitable field, but its ventures in foreign correspondence at the beginning were minimal and never attained full-scale rivalry. The Central News was a more serious competitor. It had begun in 1871 as an outgrowth of Central Press, founded in 1863 by William Saunders, a journalist and a member of Parliament. Central News did try to compete, although frequently it was outmanned, and it never had the kind of financial backing that was available to Reuters. A freak agency, known as Dalziel, gave Reuters a few anxious years in the 1890s, primarily because it was sponsored by the Times of London among others. The newspaper had tried to get along without Reuters in order to weaken the agency and reduce its coverage. That policy failed. Through Dalziel, it tried to provide Reuters with competition to accomplish the same result. The effect was just the opposite. One of the oldest friends, business associates, and advisers of Julius Reuter, Sigismund Englaender, broke through the wall of seclusion behind which Baron de Reuter operated. The old veteran, who had more life in him than anybody else in the agency, asked the Baron to wake up. He proposed a special Reuters service, in which Reuters correspondents not only would tell the news but also comment on it. As a part of the service, he also advocated a more thorough coverage and interpretation of political news, special coverage of wrecks, fires, explosions, startling crimes, assassinations or the peaceful deaths of famous persons. In the 1890s, this was strong stuff. 17 (To 1890 editors, who are alive in spirit seven decades later, interpretation still is a fighting word.) Baron de Reuter agreed to try it. With the beginning of 1891, Reuters and the PA inaugurated a joint special service. It was paid for by

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the word by any paper desiring it and was available in addition to Reuters general telegrams. Within five years, Dalziel had to give up. A more modern Reuters, better able to face the world of the twentieth century, emerged from the brief but spirited competition for the favor of the British press.18 In this battle, Reuters had the services of some of the finest agency correspondents in its history. Primarily, the staff was built up under the 22-year tenure of George Douglas Williams as editor following his coverage of the Franco-Prussian War. Englaender, the agency's De Blowitz, was all over Europe. H. A. Gwynne, later the editor of the Standard and the Morning Post, was a stand-by in the Sudan and Boer Wars. At the Battle of Omdurman, Reuters was lucky enough to have Lionel James, later a distinguished correspondent for the Times. In India, there were two remarkable men, Edward Buck, the first permanent Reuters correspondent, and K. C. Roy, an Indian journalist, who together started the organization that is now the Press Trust of India.19 The grand cartel, despite its division of the world into zones that guaranteed a Reuters monopoly, proved to be a major problem. Realistically, it became impossible to separate Havas, Wolff, Stefani, and the Austrian Korrespondenz-Bureau from the activities of their respective governments. Wolff, for instance, was bound hand and foot by Bismarck, who was jealous of the power and influence of Havas and also suspected Reuters of opposing German interests. Stefani, as an agency sponsored by the Italian government, took its news from Havas but its orders from Rome. The same was true of the Austrian agency. Accordingly, the stresses and strains within Europe were registered automatically in the relations of the news agencies with each other. When Britain and France became rivals in Egyptian affairs, Reuters and Havas found themselves in political competition. When Bismarck wanted to strengthen the Triple Alliance, he did not neglect to turn his attention to the agencies directly involved—Wolff, Stefani, and the Korrespondenz-Bureau. It was a threadbare myth that a news agency could operate with complete independence of its government under all circumstances. If Baron de Reuter had ever believed it, and it is doubtful that he did, he was quickly disabused. The grand alliance between the Big Three—Reuters, Havas, and Wolff—had been signed in 1870 for twenty years. In 1887, three years before its expiration, Italian Premier Francesco Crispi and Chancellor

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Bismarck agreed that they must act against the dominant position which Havas enjoyed as a news agency in Europe. Baron de Reuter thereupon was persuaded to sign in that year what was called an "offensive-defensive alliance" with Wolff in case the old grand alliance was dissolved. Reuters and Wolff opened a joint office in Paris and another in Rome, being assisted in the latter city by Stefani as well. But Havas had no trouble maintaining its European leadership. It lost no clients and gained the prestige that comes with having successfully stood up in a crisis. In 1890, the old grand alliance agreement was renewed for ten years, but this time the government-backed Triple Alliance agencies were reduced to little more than propaganda organizations. Reuters was given East Asia as its exclusive territory, with its former areas left intact, while Havas was recognized as the exclusive distributor of news in South America. There had been exceptions in both areas, but now there were none. Wolff, without any backing from the weak and ineffective German press, lost out all around and had to be content with its European accounts. When the AP of Illinois made its agreement with the European agencies in 1893, it had to subscribe to this state of affairs. Theoretically, it agreed to refrain from selling its news to any newspaper or local agency outside the United States. In practice, it proceeded in 1894 to make its first contract to supply news to Canadian newspapers, a faint indication of what was to come. Reuters guarantee of a monopoly was by no means inviolate, as the Baron realized. It was surprising that the AP did not challenge it until well into World War I. 20 Despite the political stability he managed to preserve both at home and abroad, the Baron was continually plagued by the greatest weakness of the agency business—the enormous expense of gathering the news and the reluctance of subscribers (for cooperative organizations, members) to face the economic facts of foreign correspondence. Reuters twice tried Havas' remedy, the creation of a special branch to solicit and place advertisements, but failed both times. Reuters also had a remittance business and created a bank to handle it. It is ironic that Reuters reserves rose from £30,000 in 1900 to £100,000 in 1910, primarily because the telegraph remittance business was profitable. The upshot was the transformation of Reuters Bank in 1912 into the British Commercial Bank with paid-up capital of £500,000 in

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Reuters ownership and public subscription permitted at £ 1 0 a share. But with World W a r I looming on the dark horizon of Europe, the fate of this venture—and of Reuters itself—was anything but bright. This primarily was the reason for the rumors about Reuters, Havas, and Wolff that came back to the AP. Kent Cooper put the relationship this way: "Actually, the story is that, after the turn of the century, international bankers headed by the Rothschilds became interested in the ownership of all three agencies. Certainly, they were important customers. Whether or not they were owners, they were credited with having influence with the three agencies second only to the influence of their respective governments." 2 1 Under its various directors, Havas had always been far more prosperous than any of its associates in the cartel. When the founder handed power to his son, Auguste, in 1850, it was Auguste who devised the concept of running an advertising as well as a news agency. But it was the Houssayes, Henri and his son, Charles, who proved to be the most resourceful of all the Havas managers and who had the personal respect of their foreign associates in the cartel despite their novel methods. Regardless of politics, and of personalities, every French government that came into power saw that it was a priceless advantage to have the good will and cooperation of Havas. That worked both ways, of course. T h e result was the granting of subsidies in one form or another by the government to the agency which eventually reached 30,000,000 francs annually. 22 Pierre Lazareff, a leading French newspaper publisher and a scathing critic of Havas, believed the agency even worse than Balzac had described it to be in 1840. "Havas," Lazareff said, "handled the publicity for foreign governments, for the big business enterprises, financial publicity, both private and official [the French budget]. In addition, Havas handled propaganda campaigns on behalf of various French products as well as stocks and bonds. Through its grip on the distribution of news and advertising, the Havas Agency was able to exert control over the biggest newspapers in France, and gradually acquired an actual interest, either direct or indirect, in these properties. N o other advertising agency could possibly offer any serious competition. Nor was any other news agency ever able to organize effectively in France." 2 3 One of the deals in which Havas was involved at about the turn of the century came out of the archives of the imperial Russian Ministry

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of Finance. Arthur Raffalovich, a French journalist who also was a tsarist agent, wrote that Havas among others had accepted Russian money from 1904 on in connection with the flotation of a Russian loan. These subsidies continued, in one form or another, until the overthrow of the tsarist government in 1917, according to the report.24 While such things as this were not known at the time to Havas partners, the payment of such subsidies and fees was widely suspected, and the French press did nothing to clear up the suspicion. It was not a good atmosphere for the growth of an independent press on the European continent, to put it mildly. The truth was that, outside the United States and Britain, it was difficult then—and it is probably even more difficult now—to find a group of independent newspapers that were prosperous enough to pay the huge assessments necessary to operate a global news agency. Whether those assessments were in the form of membership fees in a news cooperative or payments to a profit-making corporation, the ultimate cost was about the same. Moreover, it was also true that the relatively few rich newspapers with foreign staffs were the ones that also had to support the cost of global newsgathering by an agency. For all its seeming advantages, therefore, the grand alliance that gave a world news monopoly to a handful of agencies was an uneasy partnership. If there were doubts about the honor and independence collectively represented in the partnership, how could there be universal confidence in its news?

3. THE ALLIANCE GETS A SHOCK Edward Wyllis Scripps sat on a lounge at Miramar, his California ranch, in his old clothes, sweater and skullcap, smoking a cigar. He was an impatient man, full of pure cussedness. Damned old crank, they called him, and he acted the part. He had a right to, of course. He had run $80, a scanty education, and a lot of gall into a multimilliondollar newspaper chain and now in 1908 he was building a wire service to play hell with the AP. Scripps glared at his son, John, who had just ushered out a group of visitors, all small men. He was ready for his next caller and didn't like to be kept waiting. The new man was the New York manager of his

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wire service, the United Press Associations, whom Scripps hadn't met before. "Father," John said, acting the major domo, "this is Roy W . Howard." Scripps shoved his steel-rimmed spectacles up on his forehead, country style, to inspect his boy wonder. "My God! Another little one?" The New York manager of the UP, who had just as much gall as anybody in journalism, answered briskly and without ceremony, "Well, Mr. Scripps, perhaps another little one, but this time a good one." "One thing, you'll never lick anybody's boots," Scripps muttered as he shook hands.25 Roy Wilson Howard was just 25, a dapper little fashion plate out of Indianapolis who violated all the rules and got away with it. He knew that guests to Miramar were supposed to dress roughly in khaki shirts, open at the neck, which was their host's style. He took pains to look the sharp New York journalist, complete to spats and a cane, which was overdoing the part. But then, Howard had a habit of overdoing things. He was an Ohioan, bom in the village of Gano on New Year's Day, 1883. As soon as he finished high school in Indianapolis, he wangled his first newspaper job on the Indianapolis News at $8 a week. Next, he went to Pulitzer's St. Louis Post-Dispatch as assistant telegraph editor, but quit in a huff when he was passed over for telegraph editor in favor of an "old crock" of thirty, as he put it. He wrote his friend, Ray Long, managing editor of the Cincinnati Post, and landed a job there, but didn't stay. The next stop was New York as the $33a-week manager of the New York bureau of the Publishers Press Association. It was his good fortune, and Scripps's, that when the ScrippsMcRae Press Association, the Scripps News Association, and the Publishers Press Association were merged into the United Press Associations in 1907, he became the first New York manager of the UP. Scripps was 54 at the time Howard met him, but already a legend. He had been born on a farm at Rushville, 111., on June 18, 1854, the thirteenth child of an unsuccessful English bookbinder. With an enormous will, his $80 savings sewn inside his vest, and high hopes, he began newspaper work in Detroit for his half brothers, James E. and George H. Scripps, who owned the News. Six years later, with their help, he founded his first paper, the Cleveland Press. Next, he bought the Cincinnati Post and made an associate, Milton A. McRae, its busi-

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ness manager. From then on, Scripps-McRae was in business, founding or buying newspaper after newspaper based on a formula compounded of human interest, short and breezy stories, and big headlines. While his brothers cooperated with Victor Fremont Lawson, Melville Elijah Stone, and the AP, he never did. He decided to found his own wire service and the U P was the result.28 He had intended from the first to build on the ruins of the old UP, which had gone out of business. Why? Howard began to understand as Scripps rumbled, " N o w there are only a couple of things that I ask of you. . . . Always see that the news report is handled objectively as far as it is humanly possible. You must not be biased or take sides in controversies. You won't always succeed in being completely objective, but you must always try to tell both sides of any dispute. "Second, never make a contract to deliver news exclusively to one newspaper in any territory." That, of course, was the basis of the A P operation and Howard had assumed the Scripps empire would run the same way. " N o t even in cities where you have newspapers?" "Never," Scripps said. " I ' m not interested in just making money out of the United Press. I believe there must not be a news monopoly in this country. At one time I would have gone into the Associated Press but it would have limited my own operations and it would have put into the hands of the board of directors of the Associated Press the fate of any young man in America who wanted to start a new newspaper. I believe that any bona fide newspaper in the country should be able to buy the services of the United Press." 27 When the U P was incorporated June 21, 1907, it had contracts to sell news to 369 papers. Its report ran 10,000 to 12,000 words a day. The small, dark-haired Howard, a dynamo of activity, couldn't be held down in New York. After his visit to Scripps, he looked into some of the dozen U P bureaus in the country. He kept telling his bureau chiefs to put "today angles" on stories to freshen the news. "Write about what's going to happen today, not what happened yesterday," he said, complaining that too much of yesterday's news was on the wires. He had little more chance to be a field expert. John Vandercook, the president of UP, died in Chicago on April 1 1 , 1908, and Howard became general manager.

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Howard specialized in fast, hard-hitting reporting, colorful writing, and constant effort to develop news ahead of the AP. While he was interested primarily in his domestic report at first, he made a try at any foreign story he thought important in spite of the scantiness of his budget (a historic UP complaint) and the thinness of his foreign staff. When he learned that J. P. Morgan was reported to be seriously ill in Egypt, he risked $25 on a cable to the banker. Back came a prepaid reply, in which Morgan admitted he had been ill, but said he was better. It made big news in the New York papers—and on the Stock Exchange. Morgan soon died. Using such methods, Howard returned a profit of $1,200 for his first full year of UP operation in 1909. In view of the very real difficulties that faced the great European agencies, it was an excellent showing. But Howard didn't kid himself. He was operating on a shoestring and still had less than 400 clients, while the AP had more than 800 members and a budget of expenses for 1910 of $2,700,000. It was still David against Goliath, and Goliath wasn't worried in the slightest. Howard reached out for better coverage of foreign affairs. He sent an experienced correspondent, William G. Shepherd, to cover the Mexican revolution against Porfirio Diaz in 1910. Without realizing it, he also began picking up dispatches written by a young man just out of Harvard, who was at Torreon during an attack by Pancho Villa, and who wrote for the El Paso Herald. The work of the Herald's man, John Reed, so impressed the UP stringer at El Paso that he based his dispatches on it. The best correspondent in the UP, Ed L. Keen, who had scored a beat on General Emilio Aguinaldo's revolt in the Philippines by filing 600 words "urgent" at $5.40 a word, was transferred from Washington to London. William Philip Simms was made the Paris correspondent, and Henry Wood was sent to Rome. That was it—the UP foreign service.28 Yet, Howard made such an impression that Baron Herbert de Reuter invited him in 1912 to consider entering into an alliance with Reuters, Havas, and Wolff, replacing the AP in the world-wide news cartel. The grand cartel was conducting one of its periodic maneuvers, with each member testing the intentions of the others. Backed by a resolution of the UP's board of directors, Howard made the trip to London. Both he and the Baron took the matter seriously enough to discuss it at some length, although there is no record that the AP was worried

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by the conference. Scripps's "little one" cooled off perceptibly when he realized that he would be signing away his independence, which really was the one thing UP had to offer its clients. Howard broke off negotiations with the Baron. He settled down in new quarters on the third floor of the golden-domed Pulitzer Building on Park Row, from which he directed the growth of his fledging agency into a giant that eventually reached equality with the AP and Reuters. His tactics were hard and aggressive. He carried the battle to the AP and Reuters together, for UP salesmen covered the nation with cries that AP foreign news was "tainted" by reason of its link with foreign "propaganda services." 29 Still another American news agency was launched at the time Howard first began to mount a serious challenge to AP's supremacy— Hearst's International News Service. Its beginning in 1909 was inauspicious. As Hearst himself explained afterward, "I wish I had the [AP] service for the several papers in our organization that do not have it. If they could get it, I would have no reason to operate the International News Service. . . . The trouble is that feeling a loyalty to the AP and having newspapers in its membership, I am in competition with myself by having to operate another press association." 30 Feeling as he did, Hearst treated INS from the beginning as if it had been a stepchild. Its first manager was Richard A. Farrelly, the former city editor of Pulitzer's World who had gone over to the Hearst service and contracted ulcers while trying to make the Boston American pay.31 The erstwhile Boston publisher found nothing in the skeletonized operation of INS to improve his condition. Few Hearst editors had any respect for the service at its beginning.32 But it managed to exist primarily on the costs that were levied against the Hearst newspapers that couldn't get the AP, the prosperous New York Journal among them. Even though Hearst could have bought the UP at that time, he was reluctant to do so because it was the offspring of the competitive Scripps-McRae chain. It was years before sheer necessity forced him to overcome his dislike. Long before that, however, INS was in deep trouble. The British and French governments during World War I barred the Hearst agency from the use of their cables. While charges against Hearst of proGerman sympathy undoubtedly motivated the Allied governments, the immediate cause was what the British called "continued garbling of

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messages and breach of faith." INS denied it, but the prohibition was enforced, effective November 17, 1916. Canada, Portugal, and Japan also embarked on punitive measures against the Hearst agency. When INS continued to operate its service from Britain and France, the AP investigated. On January 4, 1917, the AP formally accused INS of news piracy and asked Federal Judge Augustus N. Hand in the Southern District of New York for an injunction restraining INS from using AP material. Once more, INS made strenuous denials and contested the action, but to no avail. The Supreme Court of the United States thereafter upheld the injunction, ruling in effect that AP dispatches could not be picked up after publication by another agency. This was a long step toward the establishment of a property right in the news, for which Baron de Reuter also was fighting in Britain in contesting news piracy against Reuters. The AP clinched its victory by requiring all members to label every AP dispatch published in their papers, the birth of the famous AP logotype.33 Both these developments were staggering to INS. In addition to its Hearst clients, it had managed to attract two or three hundred others, but the way up was hard. It was losing money heavily. It wasn't considered in the same class with AP, UP, or Reuters, and it couldn't compete successfully with even Havas and Wolff. But Hearst stubbornly kept it going under the editorship of a young South Dakotan, Barry Faris, who took over the unpromising operation in 1916 when he was 27 years old.34 The driving force in the development of the independent world-wide news agency during the beginning of the twentieth century continued to be Scripps's "little one," Roy Howard, who made a precious thing out of his independence. Howard would go far, and he would take the UP with him. 4. T H E P R I N T E R F R O M K N O X V I L L E Charles R. Miller, editor of the New York Times, received an unexpected visitor at his mid-Manhattan home on a spring evening in 1896. He was Adolph Simon Ochs, a 38-year-old printer from Knoxville, Tenn., who had been successfully publishing the Chattanooga Times. Now the ambitious Ochs wanted to buy the New York Times and make something of it.

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Despite everything that Miller could do, the Times had fallen from the pinnacle of its greatest days. In 1871 it had saved the city from financial disaster by exposing the multimillion-dollar grafting of Tammany Boss William Marcy Tweed and his corrupt political ring. Now, the newspaper could not even save itself. Caught between prestige papers like the Herald and the Sun on the one side, and the sensational Journal and World on the other, the Times in quiet and gentlemanly fashion was on the point of bankruptcy. Miller saw little hope in the small, dark-haired man with the courageous blue eyes who had intruded on him, just as he was about to leave for the theater. But then, he didn't know Adolph Simon Ochs. He had been bom March 12, 1858, a son of a German-Jewish immigrant who lived in modest circumstances in Knoxville. At 14, he began as a printer's devil on the Knoxville Chronicle. A year later he left school, becoming a printer. At 20, he made a down payment on the Chattanooga Times with $250 cash, which he had borrowed, and a lot of nerve; in a few years, he made good on his promises and paid off the remaining $5,500 of the purchase price. Still, that was Chattanooga. This was New York. Ochs must have seen how greatly Miller doubted him. Yet, with characteristic enthusiasm, he began talking about the Times and his plans for it. The suave, polished Miller listened to this direct, roughhewn man from the composing room. And the more he listened, the more interested he became. He sent his wife and children to the theater alone. When they returned, his mind was made up. Adolph Simon Ochs, with the support of the editor of the New York Times, promptly appeared before the bankers who were most directly interested in the paper. He knew the Times had only 9,000 circulation, $300,000 in debts, and continuing weekly losses of about $2,500. But he said confidently: "I know that I can manage the Times as a decent, dignified, and independent newspaper and still wipe out the deficit. I'm sure that I can make it pay 5 percent a year interest. I could change your $100,000 a year loss into at least a $40,000 a year surplus." That was the kind of talk the bankers wanted to hear. One of them said, "We're prepared to pay you $50,000 a year to do just that." Ochs wasn't making that kind of money in Chattanooga, but he didn't like the offer. As he explained it: "I simply will not take the

The Shaky Alliance job for merely a fixed salary, not even though you should offer $150,000 a year. I am not looking for employment. Unless you offer me eventual control of the property—based, of course, on my making good, there is no sense in keeping on with these negotiations." While the bankers deliberated, the Times was tipped over into receivership. After a lot of feverish negotiating and many days and nights of argument, Adolph Simon Ochs won his prize. He managed to raise $75,000 of his own money by risking everything that he owned, persuaded others to put up another $125,000 to pay off debts and provide working capital, and on August 13, 1896, announced that he was the new publisher of the New York Times. Miller, who chose to listen to him rather than go to the theater, became his lifelong associate.35 In this inauspicious manner, the groundwork was laid for the creation of one of the world's dominant newspapers and an independent foreign service second to none. The wire services were not to have everything their own way, despite the power of the world-wide news cartel. Nor were the old-line leaders in the gathering of foreign news, the Times of London and the New York Herald, to go on much longer in their traditional ways. Within the generation spanning the turn of the century, Ochs and the New York Times were to make themselves felt as a new force in the shaping of world public opinion through the impartial telling of the news. Moreover, within that same generation, still other important new world services were developing—Victor Fremont Lawson's Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and the newspaper which Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy named and brought into being, the Christian Science Monitor. Ochs had not thought things through as methodically as Lawson, that remarkable man who helped revolutionize American journalism through the introduction of the Mergenthaler Linotype and cooperative newsgathering. For at about this time Lawson was building a foreign service with eighty-five to ninety correspondents in Europe and the Orient and even a few in Latin America and Russia. The Times obviously couldn't afford one-tenth that much manpower in a foreign staff. The most Ochs could promise in his "Business Announcement" published in the New York Times of August 19, 1896, was a "high-standard newspaper, clean, dignified, and trustworthy." He elaborated: "It will be my earnest aim that the New York Times give the news, all the

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news, in concise and attractive form, in language that is parliamentary in good society, and give it as early, if not earlier, than it can be learned through any other reliable medium; to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of any party, sect, or interest involved; to make the columns of the New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion." 36 Ochs carried out his intentions so well that within a year he was in possession of 51 percent of the Times's stock, saw circulation and advertising steadily going up, and found a new spirit in his staff. But as the Spanish-American War developed and the sensational papers blanketed the story with their phalanxes of correspondents, Ochs saw he would have to do something more to attract attention. He did the only thing possible—he dropped his newsstand price to one cent a copy and opened an aggressive war on "yellow journalism." He could compete neither with the Journal nor the World. Nor could he even pretend to match the Herald, which published 2,000 words, at $3.25 a word, paid in gold at Jamaica, on the destruction of the Spanish fleet off Santiago. All the Times could do was to publish AP dispatches and a few mailers, an impossible position for a paper that became the acknowledged leader in the publication of world news a bare half-century later. "It is the price of the paper, not its character, that has changed," the Times explained loftily to its readers in announcing the decision to become a penny paper. Andrew Carnegie, a hard man with a penny, sent word that it was the "best cent's worth in the world." And on Page One, the Times proudly plastered the slogan that has remained there ever since: "All The News That's Fit To Print." By September, 1899, the Times was selling 76,260 copies a day, and advertising was up accordingly. It wasn't even one-tenth the circulation of the giants, but it was stable and loyal. Ochs could afford to think about expansion and he did, first by dreaming of a new Times Building at a place uptown which he wanted to rename Times Square, and second, by entering into an agreement with the Times of London to use its foreign service in the columns of the New York Times. He proceeded with both plans as the new century dawned hopefully for mankind.37 Actually, Ochs's preoccupation with foreign news was one of his most practical concepts of the kind of newspaper the Times would have

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to be, if it was to rise to world-wide fame and affluence. Although his finances were still tight, he had his brother George, the general manager of the Chattanooga Times, spend $50,000 putting out the first international edition of the New York Times at the Paris Exposition of 1900, using six Linotype machines, a Goss press, and a stereotyping plant. It was competition, although temporary, for Bennett's Paris Herald, which had been published since 1887, usually at an annual loss of $100,OOO.38 On October 6, 1900, Moberly Bell, manager of the Times of London, presented Ochs with a plan for a paper to be called the European Times or the International Times, to be published in Paris, as part of an alliance between the Times of London and the New York Times. The Bell plan called for an exchange of news, plus a payment to the Times of London of $10,000 annually, 25 percent of the gross income from syndication of the London paper's foreign service, and free office space. It was too much for Ochs.89 He turned down the more elaborate parts of Bell's brainstorm, settling for the foreign service of the Times of London. That was what he had wanted in the first place. It was a good way to begin a new year and a new century. Four years later, when the 375-foot Times Tower was completed at Broadway and 42d Street, now called Times Square, Adolph Simon Ochs stood with a great crowd outside his own building. He listened with deep emotion as his 11-year-old daughter, Iphigene, stood with silver trowel over the newly laid cornerstone that January 18, 1904: "I dedicate this building to the uses of the New York Times," she said. "May those who labor herein see the right and serve it with courage and intelligence for the welfare of mankind, the best interests of the United States and its people, and for decent and dignified journalism, and may the blessing of God ever rest upon them." 40 The printer from Knoxville, who had become the publisher of the New York Times, would devote the remainder of his life to the kind of service for which his daughter had just prayed. It would not be long before his newspaper would replace the hallowed Times of London as the standard-bearer of independence in the dissemination of foreign news. He, Adolph Simon Ochs, would become a power in the journalism of his country and of the world. In so doing, he would inevitably clash one day with the foreign news cartel—and it would be the loser.

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5. THE END OF A TRADITION Arthur Fraser Walter, the stiff-necked hereditary proprietor of the Times of London, was in serious financial trouble. He had kept up appearances at all costs since the turn of the century. To the arrogant Lord Northcliffe, who fancied himself as a Napoleon of the press and sought to add the Times to his vast holdings, Walter had once flung a contemptuous challenge: "What would you do with the Times?" Northcliffe had replied with silken scom, "I should make it worth threepence, Mr. Walter." 41 Although Walter was one of the true aristocrats of journalism, he no longer could afford to taunt the newspaper peer. He had lost the cherished independence of the first three John Walters, his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father. After a century and a quarter of enormous prestige, the newspaper was failing rapidly. It was an expensive luxury of limited circulation. Its foreign service, maintained at such great cost against the competition of its rivals and the despised news agencies, was draining off its life blood. Such mistakes as the Pamell exposé had been costly in both money and prestige. A decision to run a book club in conjunction with the paper, a fantastic effort to recoup its losses, had gone sour. The hundred or so stockholders, finding that they were receiving little or nothing for their investment, began a rebellion as early as 1898. Now* finally, on July 31, 1907, it was all over. That day, the Chancery Court had ordered dissolution of the Times partnership and the sale of the newspaper. It was scant comfort to Walter that he was named the receiver.42 It was like being the undertaker for his best beloved. Northcliffe was one of two major contenders for the honor—and the expense—of taking over the Times and trying to pump life into it. The other was his foremost rival in the mass circulation newspaper field in London, Sir Cyril Arthur Pearson. And Pearson was already boasting to his associates that he had the inside track. It was dangerous, however, to count Northcliffe out. This was a man who loved wealth and power, having been bom without either into the family of a struggling barrister on July 15, 1865, outside Dublin. He was

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the eldest of fifteen children, of whom seven sons and three daughters survived. Alfred Charles William Harmsworth left no doubt from his early teens that he would be a journalist and a first-rate one. He founded and edited his prep school magazine at Henley House, London, in 1881. He came to London as a freelance at 17 at a time when the socalled "new journalism" was burgeoning. It was typified by a catchpenny sheet called Tit-Bits, put out by a Manchester stationer, George Newnes. For a penny, the mass public that swarmed to buy it got short articles, catchy headlines, cute remarks, an almost painfully basic English, prize contests, and a lot of the sensations that had caught on in the United States. Harmsworth sold stuff to Tit-Bits among others, liked it, saved his money, and in 1888 risked his first £1,000 on a rival publication with the help of his brother, Harold. That was the beginning of Answers. But Tit-Bits, having been established seven years before, was in a strong position. The Harmsworths nearly went down with their first effort until they began a contest, a simple guessing game, with a prize of £1 a week for life. That put over Answers in a big way. Soon Alfred Harmsworth began publishing more such cheap, popular journals, Comic Cuts and Home Chat being the most successful. They weren't newspapers. They weren't magazines. But they appealed somehow to a vast and enthusiastic public. It wasn't until 1894, on the recommendation of a competent newspaper professional, Kennedy Jones, that Harmsworth went into daily newspapering, the riskiest venture in journalism. He bought the faltering Evening News and, with Jones's help, put it over. In 1896 he founded the London Daily Mail, crying out with the first issue, "It's a gold mine!" He was on the way. His dream world had turned into a brilliant reality, and laden down in a few years with circulation, wealth, and honors, he became a knight of the realm. Then, in 1905, Sir Alfred Harmsworth ascended to the dizzy heights of a newspaper peerage, becoming Lord Northcliffe. Two years later, when the court ordered the sale of the Times, he saw a chance at last to achieve one of his greatest ambitions.43 Moberly Bell, the Times's manager, signed an agreement to work under Northcliffe's direction, and on March 16, 1908, won the court's

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approval for purchase of the Times for £320,000. It was an open secret that Bell had acted for Northcliffe and used Northcliffe's money. Northcliffe noted on Easter Sunday of that year with massive restraint, "It is pleasing to me to think that I was able to assist Mr. Bell in keeping the Times in the hands of the English people."44 Perhaps that entry was made in his diary with one eye cocked knowingly at the moving finger of history, for in reality he had no great love for the irascible and difficult Moberly Bell. Theirs had not been an alliance, but an association bom of necessity. Northcliffe had been content to use Bell to help him buy the Times, and Bell had let himself be used. But once the sale had been consummated, the association was speedily transformed into a kind of journalistic cold war. The manager was a man out of the pages of Dickens—a fierce-eyed old hawk with a curved nose who buried himself resolutely in the warm nest of his past glories and snapped at all who sought to disturb him. He was furious at the very notion that he should have a telephone at the Times, and would have nothing to do with either typewriters or secretaries. He scrawled his letters in his own crabbed hand. Arthur Walter died of influenza at 64 on February 22, 1910, being succeeded by his son, John Walter IV, as chairman of the Times Publishing Company. This met with Northcliffe's approval, for he forecast the dawn of a "bright era" in a letter to the new chairman "when we are rid of some of our inevitable initial troubles." 45 The formidable Bell broke under the strain and the work load and died April 5, 1911. It had taken Northcliffe four years to have his way with the Times— and on September 24, 1912, he put his own man, Geoffrey Dawson, in as editor with orders to put an end to "priggish slackness." As it turned out, Northcliffe was his own editor, both on the Times and the Daily Mail, and he dabbled in the Mirror whenever he took a notion. He was possessed that war with Germany was imminent and began receiving reports directly from the Times's foreign correspondents. He brought in Wickham Steed to be head of the foreign department and encouraged both J. E. MacKenzie of the Times and Frederic William Wile of the Daily Mail to send him long, confidential messages from Berlin. Northcliffe left nothing to chance on any of his newspapers as their columns dutifully echoed the sound of the war drums which he had detected from afar as early as 1906. He set up a "German War Emer-

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gency Fund" of £20,000 for the use of his editors to gather news when the conflict broke. All his principal executives were told to train understudies. He ordered publication of more background pieces on foreign events by his own correspondents, aimed at alerting his huge public.46 But these were no longer the stately journalistic minuets which had been devised by the leisurely old Times correspondents. NorthclifFe wanted short, sharp pieces and, after a time, he began getting them from his newer men. Thus, the Times of the Old Guard passed from the vast stage of world affairs in which it had played so dramatic a part, and the principal foe of the grand cartel of news agencies was removed as an independent force in journalism. Instead, Northcliffe's Times became a part of his personal empire. In the war that Northcliffe envisioned, its powerful voice would be raised again, and to many it would sound familiar. True, the voice would be the voice of the Times, but the hand would be the hand of Northcliffe. Like Reuters, the Times would become a mighty British war weapon. After their long conflict as independent forces, they would at last be allies in the hard task of influencing world opinion. It would be a worthy cause, a high-minded cause. But it would also mark the end of a tradition of independence in journalism—that "drastic independence" of which Pulitzer so often spoke as a necessity for a newspaper. In the field of foreign affairs, the New York Times would rise to replace the muted Thunderer. And the grand cartel, after the first of the great wars of the twentieth century, would never recover its authority under the impact of changing conditions.

VI: This Shrinking World 1. WORDS TAKE WING A bundled-up group of Newfoundland fishermen watched and wondered on a frigid December day in 1901 as a 27-year-old Italian flew a kite four hundred feet over Glace Bay. He and his assistants had been paying them good money for some days now to keep a kite aloft at the end of a slender strand of copper wire. They had lost several, but this one was staying up. The Italian was clearly daft. He would run from the kite to a wooden shelter, where he had some new-fangled instruments, and listen tensely and eagerly with a single telephone receiver clamped to his ear. It was a test, he explained to those who asked him. He hoped to receive a kind of telegraphic signal from a station 1,700 miles away in Poldhu, Cornwall, England. What nonsense! The Newfoundland fishermen could see no trace of wires leading to any cable. Just that silly kite, trailing its four hundred feet of copper wire in the Arctic winds that whipped over the frozen white landscape. And everybody knew, of course, that if you wanted to send telegraphic messages, you needed wires. At 12:30 p.m. that December 21, the young Italian jumped up in his shelter, ablaze with excitement. He passed his receiver to his aides, and then to the wondering fishermen. Faintly, but clearly, they could hear three short buzzes in the receiver and, after a pause, three more and three more and three more. "Did you hear it?" The proprietor of the kite was truly mad. He kept asking, over and over, "Did you hear it?" Of course they had heard it. Three short buzzes in a telephone receiver, endlessly repeated. What of it? Any schoolboy knew that in any proper test of a communications system, some sonorous message should be sent, such as, "What hath God wrought?" This was just the symbol

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for the letter "S" in Morse code. It was enough. The crazy Italian, Guglielmo Marconi, announced that day that he had received the first trans-Atlantic message by the use of a radical new method of communication, wireless telegraphy. His kite, his crude instruments, and the wondering Newfoundland fishermen together had made history.1 Marconi had prepared six years for that moment. Capitalizing on the experiments of H. R. Hertz and Edouard Branley, he first worked with his homemade apparatus in 1895 in Italy and succeeded in sending wireless signals for one mile. That was the beginning. In 1896, he patented his system in Britain; the following year, his first wireless telegraphy company was formed. And in July, 1898, wireless was put to its first practical test in the reporting of the Kingstown Regatta for the Dublin Daily Express. The old Commodore, James Gordon Bennett Jr., paid Marconi $5,000 for the use of his apparatus to report the America's Cup Race for the New York Herald in 1899, and the Associated Press gave him five times as much for the same service. Worth it, too, for the fast results it gave! Inevitably, the new medium developed its share of headaches. As soon as Marconi was challenged by another inventor, Lee DeForest, a young American who had perfected his own system, there was chaos. In 1902, the AP used the Marconi method to report the America's Cup Race of that year and the Publishers Press Association, one of the forerunners of Scripps's United Press, hired DeForest. The two signals completely blanketed each other, coming in on the same wavelength, and nobody learned anything by wireless. The faint-hearted began wondering if it was here to stay and looked back fondly to the days of the carrier pigeon, which had been more reliable.2 But the newspapers, particularly the Times of London and the New York Times, had faith in wireless. Presently, with the help of the AP, Marconi was able to report proudly that a daily news budget was being sent to the Cunard liner Lucania at sea by wireless. No longer did news have to await the telegraph or the cable. Words had taken wing. The world was shrinking.3 2. N E W T I M E S IN T H E F A R E A S T Journalists will do almost anything, reasonable or unreasonable, to report a war. That was why a mysterious, black-hulled steamer with a

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lot of strange gear aboard began cruising the China seas at the outset of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. She was the Haimun, a 1,200 tonner out of Hong Kong, refitted in Shanghai and chartered in the service of the Times of London and the New York Times. The responsible correspondent for this illustrious combination was Captain Lionel James, who had reported the Boer War first for Reuters and later the London Times. He was now in the service of the latter organization and seemed to spend his time cruising at sea to no apparent purpose. Press dispatch boats were, of course, an unmitigated nuisance to the contending navies. The AP was running an $80,000 yacht between Port Arthur and the cablehead at the neutral city of Chefoo in China.4 The Chicago Daily News was operating a smaller and less luxurious craft, the Fawan. It had a rebellious crew and a fearful captain with a rubber spine, who on one occasion had to be superseded by a Chicago Daily News stalwart, John Bass, revolver in one hand and tiller in the other.8 Life was like that on the China seas. The Haimun, Captain James's craft, was much more important than her rivals. She was the first newspaper dispatch boat ever to be equipped with wireless and sent into a war zone.6 Once she had been made ready, she put out of the British-controlled port of Wei-hai-wei and regularly cruised the Yellow Sea and the Gulf of Pe-chi-li, flashing back on-the-spot accounts of anything James thought worth reporting to his newspaper by wireless and cable. Unlike the AP's yacht and the Fawan, which had to stay within a reasonable distance of Chefoo, where there was no censor, the Haimun could go pretty well where she wanted—and that was a headache for the unscientific opposition. She was the first electronic spy, for she flashed the first wireless message about Japanese naval movements when she was twenty miles at sea off Wei-hai-wei on her initial test run on March 14, 1904. (It was only after World War I that wireless became known as radio by the public.) The account of Japanese movements was received by the Wei-hai-wei land station, erected under Captain James's supervision, and forwarded by cable to London. That was the opening of still another chapter of foreign correspondence, but James made nothing of it. The Times's correspondent had all the woes of his fellow reporters plus those inherent in his new medium of communication. The British

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navy was forbidden to deal with him, for fear the Japanese would consider it a breach of neutrality. The Japanese put a censor aboard the Haimun in mufti, who obligingly volunteered to commit suicide when a suspicious Russian boarding party searched the craft off Port Arthur on April 6, 1904. The Russians, however, never questioned the censor. They thought he was just another Malay steward. All this cost a lot of money—£1,500 a month for the chartering of the Haimun, £500 for varying charges, and an extra item for transmission costs. The home office estimated at one point that James's messages were costing no less than £1 ($5) a word. That, primarily, was the reason why the assistance of the New York Times in bearing the expenses was welcomed. It was also the reason why James lcept the Haimun moving, looking for the great beat that would justify this pioneering venture. He was off Port Arthur on April 13 when Admiral Togo tried to lure the Russian fleet out to sea with a decoy of small Japanese warships. The effort failed but the Russian flagship, Petropavlovsk, hit a mine and plunged to the bottom, bow first, carrying more than 600 men with her. James got his flash through, but it was not he who was remembered for his dramatic account. The honors were carried off by a Russian painter and writer, M. Kravchenko, a correspondent for the AP, who had had an interview with the Tsar before leaving for the Far East. For three days and three nights, Kravchenko had been sitting on Golden Hill outside Port Arthur, binoculars in hand, waiting for the Russian fleet to move out to battle. After the Petropavlovsk sank, he wrote a story that was cabled to the United States by the AP. It was one of the outstanding pieces of the Russo-Japanese War. The mere fact that James's story moved by wireless on the first stage of its journey to London did not give it the distinction of Kravchenko's.7 Once more, the unhappy James learned that the ideas, words, and images that are communicated inevitably dwarf the means of communication. Worse still, after the battle, Admiral Togo refused to let the Haimun approach his fleet because its wireless interfered with his own transmissions. The Russian high command followed suit, issuing a warning that Captain James and all others aboard the Haimun would be treated as spies if they were captured. It was all up with the first wireless press ship. James sadly dismantled his land station, returned the Haimun

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to her owners at Hong Kong, and settled down to being an ordinary war correspondent once more. He saw little future for wireless as a means of reporting military operations and said as much.8 There was an epilogue to James's adventure. The Army and Navy Journal, the unofficial voice of military opinion in the United States, denounced the Russian attitude toward war correspondents and cited a long list of international decisions giving them privileged status. The first was Dr. Francis Lieber's "Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field," issued as General Order No. 100 on April 24, 1863, which specified that editors or war correspondents "may be made prisoners of war and detained as such," but not as spies. That code was written into the Brussels agreements of 1879 and incorporated in The Hague convention of 1899, the only limitation being the requirement that correspondents must "produce a certificate from the military authorities of the army they were accompanying." Accordingly, correspondents were regarded as noncombatants because, as The Hague convention specified, they were "individuals who follow an army without directly belonging to it." If some of them still carried weapons for self-defense, a custom the military itself was discouraging, that did not change their essential character. Thus, the Army and Navy Journal brushed aside the new factor of wireless and charged Russia's repudiation of The Hague agreement was "little less than an act of bad faith which other nations would probably resent." 9 The Japanese, on their part, did not really believe with Lord Wolseley that war correspondents were "unavoidable evils." They set about using the journalists as they had never been used before, granting permits to only fifty-six to leave Tokyo. These included thirty-three British, eighteen Americans, two French, two Germans, and one Italian. However, it was weeks before the Japanese let them visit the field. If a battle was being fought, no messages could be sent. Once it was over and the Japanese had won, a total of 150 words was allotted to the entire corps of correspondents on the military wire. The reai news followed days later. 10 For instance, Oscar King Davis' fourteen-column story on the Battle of the Yalu, written May 2 in Chuliangchen, Manchuria, was published in the New York Herald on June 2. Willard Straight, who had left the U.S. Customs Service temporarily to be an AP stringer, noted in his diary: "The air of the Imperial Hotel

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[in Tokyo] was a bright blue from early mom to golden sunset. Famous journalists, veterans of countless campaigns, were held up, bound hand and foot by the dapper little Orientals whose attitude throughout has been greatly wondered at and most profoundly admired. . . . The situation was unique in the annals of journalism. A government holding the rabid pressmen at a distance, censoring their simplest stories, yet patting them on the back, dining them, wining them, giving them picnics and luncheons and theatrical performances and trying in every way not only to soften their bonds and to make their stay a pleasant one, but siren-like, to deaden their sense of duty and their desire to get into the field."11 No army in the field had ever taken such strenuous measures before to protect its rear from the prying of journalists. It was a deadly pattern, which was to be emulated in every war that was to follow, leading to countless lamentations over the decline of war correspondence as a fine art. Inevitably, the frustrations produced incidents. The pugnacious Jack London, forgetting his Marxian sympathy for the downtrodden, slugged a Japanese groom and had to be extricated from the clutches of Japanese authorities by the fast-talking Richard Harding Davis, backed up by a cable from President Theodore Roosevelt.12 John Fox Jr., a Harvard man, was trailed on suspicion by a Japanese Yale graduate who unfeelingly tossed him into jail overnight as a spy. He was released next day, forever resolved not to take lightly the counterespionage activities of Yale graduates, Japanese or not.13 All through the spring and early summer of 1904 most of the correspondents waited in Tokyo for the Japanese to move them into Manchuria. A few favored ones preceded them, but they saw nothing the Japanese didn't want them to see and sent nothing the Japanese didn't want them to send. Toward the end of July, Richard Harding Davis and his associates at last were mustered aboard an old bucket, the Heijo Maru, landed on Manchurian soil, and were glibly promised that they would be able to report the fall of Port Arthur. Instead, they were routed north for twelve days in miserable weather by their indifferent Japanese escort officers who, in reality, were their jailers. The battle of Liao-Yang was being fought, but the correspondents knew nothing of it. The correspondents, eighteen strong, signed a round robin to the Japanese high command, demanding to see action. For answer they

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were routed out at 3 a.m. next day and taken on a long, dismal march to nowhere. That night, the Japanese briefing officer (he, too, had been invented on the Manchurian plains) reported the Russians had obligingly moved out of Liao-Yang and were in flight toward Mukden while the Japanese had quietly occupied the town without resistance. That was on August 27, 1904, which, as Davis later learned, marked the opening stage of the battle which lasted from August 25 to September 4. The Japanese briefing officer, however, told the correspondents nothing, and Davis walked out at the head of a delegation. They returned in high dudgeon to the cablehead at Chefoo. There, Davis began to write the story of his frustrations and a Chinese clerk, learning his identity, murmured, " I congratulate you." "Why?" the correspondent asked. The Chinese bowed and smiled. "Because you are the only correspondent to arrive who has seen the battle of Liao-Yang." "There was no battle," Davis protested weakly. "The Japanese told me themselves they had entered Liao-Yang without firing a shot." The Chinese said: "They have been fighting for six days." Davis, who was being paid $1,000 a week for his work, poured out his frustrations on paper. "Six months we had waited, only to miss by three days the greatest battle since Gettysburg and Sedan. And by a lie!" 14 The Japanese, however, took care to reward their own. Their great papers, the Asahi, Mainichi, and the Jiji all had war correspondents in the field and put out extras for every victory. Asahi, emulating American methods, chartered a fast ship to speed reports to a telegraph office. Mainichi broke a first-person story of the battle of Nanshan from one of its correspondents, who had gone under fire as a coolie attached to the 11th Japanese Division. But by inventing the modern military censor and putting all foreign correspondents under strict surveillance, the Japanese had taken an exquisite revenge on the journalists for the indignities they had visited on Lord Raglan in the Crimea, General William Tecumseh Sherman in the American Civil War, and Lord Kitchener in the Sudan, among others. While correspondents would break loose from time to time with rousing accounts of both battles and military shortcomings in the years that were to come, the censors would smother much of their work and blunt their influence on their publics. In sealing off their enemies from knowledge of their military plans, the Japanese had gone

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far toward crushing the most romantic tradition in journalism—the heroic war correspondent. There would never again be another of the breed to rank with William Howard Russell, Archibald Forbes, or Richard Harding Davis. The correspondents of the future, on the whole, would be far more realistic, hard-bitten, and cynical. Still another innovation was introduced into the ranks of the roving journalists during the Russo-Japanese War. That was the use of indigenous Russian correspondents as combat reporters for American agencies. The Russian writer Nemirovich Danchenko daringly rode the last train out of besieged Port Arthur in the service of the AP, skirting Japanese landings, and arrived at Liao-Yang on May 13, 1904. 15 An even more exciting incident involved another Russian correspondent for the AP, Nicholas E. Popov, who wrote under the name of Kirilov, at the Battle of Liao-Yang on August 30, 1904. Since the Russians were not playing the kind of censorship game the Japanese had invented, Kirilov got through to the front lines with a relief detachment under heavy fire. When he reached the last outpost, he told of the jubilant scenes as the fresh Russian troops relieved their comrades. "The Japanese fire was spasmodic," he wrote. "Their bullets sang like birds as they sped overhead and the Russians cracked jokes about it. . . . Out of sixty gunners, forty were killed or wounded. . . . The Russian officers had not eaten anything since the preceding day and the correspondent shared with them what provisions he had. The taste of food caused them to realize the intensity of their hunger. Prudence urged the correspondent to leave the spot, but he was fascinated." It was the end of Kirilov's dispatch. A Russian officer added this explanation to the cable that reached the AP: "M. Kirilov . . . was shot through the right lung while standing by our battery and fell back suffering intense agony, the blood spurting from his mouth. Yet . . . he insisted on being placed on a horse so that he could get to Liao-Yang and file his dispatch." Despite all the precautions taken by the Empire of the Rising Sun, however, there was no way of sitting on the story of the journey of forty-two ancient Russian warships that sailed from the Baltic Sea to meet defeat in Tsushima Straits on May 27, 1905. Vice Admiral Zinovi Petrovitch Rozhestvensky, a proud and able officer, was the commander of that Russian fleet and he sailed aboard his flagship, the Kniaz Suvorov.

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As Rozhestvensky's fleet slowly steamed toward Far Eastern waters, Port Arthur surrendered on January 2, 1905, and the Russian army was annihilated at Mukden in an action that lasted from February 20 to March 9. It was plain that Rozhestvensky was the Tsar's last hope. Wire service and other dispatches reported his fleet's progress around Africa, across the Indian Ocean, past Singapore and north into the Pacific. Everybody knew that Admiral Togo and his fleet lay in wait— and the whole world watched and wondered over the outcome. T h e first news came out of Tokyo, where Martin Egan had forwarded a seemingly harmless dispatch from the field which was passed by the usually vigilant Japanese censor: May 28, 9 p.m. (AP)—Transmittable information concerning today's historic events in the neighborhood of the Tsu Islands is limited to the bare fact that Rozhestvensky's main fleet, steaming in two columns with battleships on the starboard and cruisers and monitors on the port side, appeared in the Straits of Korea. All other information is withheld by the Japanese authorities and cable transmission is refused to any other reference to the movements of the Russian 01 Japanese fleets. TOKYO,

T w o words, "historic events," were the tip-off and New York went to work. While Togo was completing the thirty-one hour destruction of the fleet that had sailed halfway around the world, the news thundered across the astonished West. Howard N . Thompson, the A P correspondent in Moscow, was the first to give the Tsar the hard tidings of the death of Russia's fleet. And when the few Russian ships that escaped Togo reached Vladivostok, the story of the rise of Japan as a world power was complete. 16 At the end of an awesome display of human agony and suffering, Rozhestvensky murmured, " W e weren't strong enough and God gave us no luck." 1 7 Within Russia, the sharpest account of the Russian defeat in a fearful and docile press came from Captain Nicholas Klado, known as the Russian Mahan, in Novoe Vremya. But his analysis of the condition of the defeated fleet came far too late to be of any help. The deeply distressed nation at that moment was barely recovering from the shock of the revolution of 1905. It was no time for even a feeble imitation of a free press to be bom. W i t h Captain Lionel James's pioneering use of the wireless to transmit news and the inauguration of wartime censorship in the Far East, new times in the Far East were ushered in that would be both difficult and dangerous for the entire world.

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3. THE MINGLING OF EAST AND WEST On a hot and smelly pier in Hoboken, N.J., in the summer of 1905, two foreign correspondents from Russia embraced two foreign correspondents from Japan. The Kaiser Wilhelm Der Grosse, of the North German Lloyd Line, had just tied up there, bearing Count Sergei Yuleivich Witte and his Russian delegation to the United States for their peace conference with the Japanese at Portsmouth, N.H. The Japanese, Shiro Fujioka and Jihei Hashiguchi, wanted to interview Count Witte, and their Russian colleagues promptly made the arrangements. Thus, with a symbolic act that steaming August 2, world diplomacy began to acquire a new dimension. In the many-tongued, discordant, and troublesome Greek chorus of journalists that would inevitably surround every international conference from then on, correspondents of the East and West were mingling for the first time. A truly international press corps was taking shape, even though certain governments most assuredly would control the work of a majority of its members. It would be, at times, more difficult to control their thoughts. This, in effect, would be the nucleus of the intrepid band of diplomatic correspondents who would report the search for peace in the darkest hours of the twentieth century. "Congregating in New York," exulted the New York Times that day, "are representatives of most of the great newspapers of Europe. Each European steamer brings more of them, and by the time the peace conference opens there will be an assemblage of correspondents at Portsmouth which could at once resolve itself into the greatest journalistic convention ever held." 1 8 Despite its financial troubles, the Times of London provided the corps of correspondents with its natural and recognized leaders. First of all came the 72-year-old veteran, George Washburn Smalley, the Times's Washington correspondent, on his last great assignment in which he would maintain his independence as stoutly as he had at Antietam. Dr. George Ernest Morrison—"Chinese" Morrison—would be coming in shortly from the Pacific. Donald Mackenzie Wallace arrived from London, fresh from an audience with King Edward VII, bearing messages for both President Theodore Roosevelt and Count

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Witte. He was, accordingly, known as "King Edward's correspondent." 1 9 No less important than these was the first of a long line of British journalists specializing in Russian affairs, Dr. Emile Joseph Dillon, the St. Petersburg correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph. He would have been recognized at a later date as an authentic Kremlinologist, having married a Russian woman, edited a Russian paper, distinguished himself as a Russian scholar, and mastered half a dozen languages. Both he and Wallace had come over with Count Witte on the Kaiser Wilhelm Der Grosse and were therefore ticketed by their colleagues as proRussian. The Count respected Dillon, it is true, but he had no use for Wallace. "He has always misinformed his compatriots about Russia," the diplomatist wrote of the Times's man.20 These were the kind of journalists who thronged to the quiet New England seaside town of Portsmouth that summer. Necessarily, they all paid flattering attention to President Roosevelt, as mediator, which mightily pleased him. But the Japanese, despite their victories and their swift ascension to world power, had a somewhat less than favorable press. Partly, this was caused by the deep distrust they had aroused among important segments of American and British public opinion. Partly, it was attributable to their own suspicion of the international press and their unwillingness to discuss their affairs in public. The world, therefore, soon was able to note a strange spectacle at Portsmouth. Despite the slaughter of the 1905 revolutionaries on Bloody Sunday, the defeats in the Far East, and the iron press control that had gagged so respected a correspondent as Nemirovich Danchenko, the Russians were benefiting from a sympathetic press.21 It was scarcely an accident. Had Russian military power been the equal of Russian diplomacy, the Tsar might have had a triumph at Portsmouth. As it was, he saw his forward policy in the Far East shattered although the Trans-Siberian Railway was preserved. The Russian delegation had to acknowledge Japan's right to Korea and the Laio-Tung Peninsula and ceded the southern half of Sakhalin Island. But Count Witte was able to hold out against Japanese pressure for a huge indemnity, which was the crux of the Portsmouth negotiation. For many days, the indemnity problem and its outcome remained a closely guarded secret, but the AP finally broke the story. The AP

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reported exclusively that Japan would waive all claims to an indemnity, touching off ridicule at Portsmouth and riots in Tokyo. Not even the Russian delegation believed it. T h e climax came on September 5, the last day of the conference. At 11:50 a.m., when many correspondents believed the war might be renewed and so experienced a man as Wallace had cabled London that there would be no treaty, the door to the conference room flew open. Count W i t t e walked out and confronted the correspondents gravely. "Gospoda, mir," he said in Russian. "Gentlemen, peace." 2 2 T h e first great international peace conference on American soil had been successfully concluded. But there was jubilation only in the United States. In Japan, the cabinet soon would fall. And in Russia, new forces already were at work that would change not only that nation but much of the earth as well.

4. R E P O R T E R I N R U S S I A :

1905

Leo Tolstoy was entertaining. His great country house near Tula, Yasnaya Polyana (Bright Plain), was crammed with guests. It was, Henry W . Nevinson reflected, like a house party in an English country estate with Tolstoy, bearded and kindly, as the indulgent squire. Some of the guests were playing at battledore, others at a species of bagatelle. A few were out with guns or walking dogs. T h e ladies were embroidering and shredding reputations, as ladies sometimes will. Nevinson scarcely realized he was in a nation that had been shaken to its foundations by revolution until his host took him aside to a room that was half study, half carpenter shop, a very personal retreat. Since his visitor spoke no Russian, Russia's first man of letters stumbled along in English, but finally compromised on German which both spoke well. "You are a young man," Tolstoy said, calmly overlooking the swiftness with which Nevinson was approaching 50, "and I am old, but as you grow older you will find, as I have found, that day follows day, and there does not seem much change in you, till suddenly you hear people talking of you as an old man. It is the same with an age in history; day follows day, and there does not seem to be much change, till suddenly it is found that the age has become old. It is finished; it is out of date.

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"The present movement in Russia is not a riot; it is not even a revolution; it is the end of an age." It was late in 1905 when the two men exchanged ideas on the significance of what had happened in Russia. Tolstoy thought he saw, almost certainly, the dawn of a new and more liberal era in his homeland and the end of Russian dominance of such smaller states as Finland, Poland, and the lands of the Caucasus. But he scarcely believed Mother Russia would turn to the constitutional systems of Britain or the United States, which he disliked. "We ought to aim at something entirely different from your worn-out methods of government," he said.23 Nevinson didn't know what that "something entirely different" might be, but he wandered all over Russia to try to find out. He had been, as John Masefield wrote, a friend to every generous cause that had stirred men's hearts in his time.24 No journalist with his background could have failed to respond sympathetically to the plight of the Russian people under the knout of tsarist rule. After having undergone the terrors of the siege of Ladysmith, he had implored his countrymen to be merciful to the Boers. He had campaigned for justice for the Irish, votes for women, a more liberal and progressive England. At the cost of tremendous personal hardship, he had plunged into the heart of black Africa and emerged with a shameful and thoroughly documented indictment of slavery in Portuguese Angola. Although he was still suffering bodily torment from infections he had contracted in Africa, he did not hesitate to propose a series on Russia to the London Daily Chronicle in the aftermath of "Bloody Sunday" in St. Petersburg. Nor did the Chronicle hesitate to send him. There were few who were better qualified to try to tell a puzzled and uncertain world what was happening in the domain of the Tsar.25 As Tolstoy pointed out to Nevinson in their long talk that day at Yasnaya Polyana, "Bloody Sunday" and the uprising that followed were not sudden developments. Resistance had been building up for thirty years or more. Until the Russo-Japanese War, the small but active intellectual group inside Russia had been the chief force pressing for a liberalization of government. But with the assassination of the ruthless and tyrannical Plehve, the tsarist Minister of the Interior, a new and

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powerful spirit bolstered the opposition. The zemstvos (district councils) dared to meet in St. Petersburg late in 1904 and propose the convocation of a national assembly. "Bloody Sunday"—January 22, 1905— was the answer. On that day, tsarist troops opened fire on a peaceful procession of laborers seeking to present their grievances at the Winter Palace, killing seventy of them and wounding more than two hundred others. It did not stop the revolutionary workman. It placed him in the forefront of the movement to change Russia—and eventually he made the difference. Nevinson sensed this when he went to Russia by ship in November of that year. In his reports of meetings in St. Petersburg he noted how committees of workmen in their belted blouses dominated all the proceedings of the general strike which was then in progress. He was, as he wrote, watching the origin of the soviet which, twelve years later, was to seize power in Russia.26 He saw, too, the wretched and ragged remnants of the Russian army drifting back from the Far East, a weak and tattered host that gathered about fires built in the middle of city streets, and realized such soldiers could not long enforce the Tsar's will on an aroused populace.27 Often, when he went to Moscow, he would walk in the snowy winter's night on the ramparts of the Kremlin and note that people would avoid him in fear; for this, too, was a part of life in Russia.29 Late in December, when he wanted to go to Baku in the Caucasus to check on reports of heavy fighting there, the general strike stopped all trains. Most public utilities, except water, were shut off. The rioting and the shooting, which had been sporadic for weeks, broke out again in Moscow. Tsarist forces pulled themselves together while the revolutionary leaders debated their position in a house opposite the British consulate and shelled them at fifty yards' range. The revolutionists tossed back a bomb. And so, once more, men fell on both sides, and Moscow lurched perilously on the edge of chaos. It was the beginning of the outbreak of December 22-23,1905. From Christmas until New Year's Day, Nevinson roamed the streets of Moscow, being searched by government troops and held by revolutionists at one time or another. On December 31, in the factory district, he saw wounded workmen hoisting white flags and knew it was

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all over except for the executions. They began next day and, once again, he was there to make the pitiable record. Groups of rebels were taken out of a sugar mill in clusters of three and mowed down by a firing squad until the corpses were heaped like cordwood. "The horror of the deeds was too atrocious to be thought of, if we would retain any belief in the human kind as being on as high a level as the apes," he wrote.29 It was no different in the south. When Nevinson reached Odessa, he found the terrible Black Hundred—the so-called "Order of Russian Men"—raging through a city of 600,000. Since half the population was Jewish, there was the additional incitement of anti-Semitism. "As there was no opposition and no escape," he reported, "heavy slaughter and adequate pillage rewarded Christian devotion." 30 Back he went to St. Petersburg where, briefly, his hope in a decent Russia was revived by Professor Pavel Nicolaievich Miliukov, the guiding spirit of the newly formed Constitutional Democrats, the Cadets. But as he crossed out of Russia through Finland, he saw the Tsar's firing squads at work once more and knew Miliukov could not check the reaction. In London, deeply depressed, he wrote and spoke vehemently against the British government's drift toward a Russian alliance as a counterweight to Germany's growing might. But that, too, was a losing fight. Nevinson's bleak mood was still upon him when he was assigned in June, 1907, to cover the second International Peace Conference at The Hague. "To call that a Peace Conference was an amusing instance of ironic mockery," he wrote, "for nothing was further from the thoughts of all than peace." 3 1 Nevinson never gave up, even though in his journalist's soul he knew that the clouds of a world war were darkening the horizons of Europe. With Bernard Shaw and Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie and Cunninghame Graham, he was out leading a great rally in Trafalgar Square in 1909 against a proposed visit of the Tsar to England. The triumph was a very small one. Instead of treading the streets of London, the Tsar's visit to British soil was confined to the Isle of Wight. 32 It is, however, scarcely a measure of the influence which Nevinson and his liberal associates ultimately exerted on British life and British thought. Out of this ferment, the Labour Party drew its strength and eventually became a major force in the life of the commonwealth.

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World

5. THE AGE OF FLIGHT A strange-looking, double-winged contraption lifted off Kill Devil Hill, near Kitty Hawk, N.C., on the morning of December 17, 1903, and flew exactly 120 feet at a maximum altitude of ten feet, the total elapsed time being twelve seconds. Orville Wright, the bicycle mechanic of Dayton, Ohio, thus became the first man to fly a power-driven, heavier-than-air craft. Shortly afterward his brother, Wilbur, became the second. The Wright brothers made four flights that day against a 27-mile-an-hour wind with their twelve horsepower engine, the longest being fifty-nine seconds. In this manner, the airplane was bom and mankind soared into the age of flight. The only newspaper in the United States to dignify the Wright brothers' triumph was the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, which published a detailed story next day.33 The AP ran a brief account under a Norfolk dateline, but not many papers paid much attention to it. Orville Wright hoped for something better. He sent his father, Bishop M. Wright, a telegram back home in Dayton: SUCCESS

FOUR

FLIGHTS

THURSDAY

MORNING

(DECEMBER

17)

ALL

AGAINST TWENTY ONE MILE WIND STARTING FROM LEVEL WITH ENGINE POWER ALONE AVERAGE SPEED THROUGH AIR THIRTY ONE MILES LONGEST 5 7 SECONDS INFORM PRESS HOME CHRISTMAS OREVILLE WRIGHT

The AP carried that item, too, complete with errors except for Orville's first name.14 But the attitude of the press—local, national, and international—was mainly indifference. A few papers were amused, others were doubtful. But not many took either the Wrights or their airplane seriously. One local correspondent in Dayton is supposed to have remarked contemptuously, "Fifty-seven seconds! If it were fiftyseven minutes, it might be worth talking about!" 35 The longest flight was, of course, fifty-nine seconds. There is also a legend that on the day of the flight a Coast Guard officer in North Carolina queried the New York Times by telegraph if it wanted a piece about an airplane flight he had witnessed. The query was rejected, so the story goes. In any case, the Wright brothers' flight wasn't mentioned in the Times until Christmas Day when there was a brief item that they wanted to sell their contraption to the government. The story noted skeptically that

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the machine might be used in "scouting and signal work and possibly in torpedo warfare." 36 If the American press ignored one of the greatest of all scientific achievements, just the opposite was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. As early as 1902, Northcliffe noted that he had driven to Monte Carlo in his "steam traveling carriage," a Serpollet automobile propelled by steam, to watch a young Brazilian, Alberto Santos Dumont, fly a dirigible balloon.37 Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin had been trying to fly lighter-than-air craft since 1898 in Germany, so the news of such machines was more familiar to editors. When his LZ4 flew for twenty-four hours and covered 300 miles from its hangar on Lake Constance, Joseph Herrings, an AP correspondent, cabled the details to the United States.38 Northcliffe, however, seemed to have been more interested from the beginning in the work of the Wright brothers.39 For two years, the Wrights attracted little attention. A local correspondent would drop around in Dayton, when the brothers would come home from Kitty Hawk, and ask if they'd been flying. "Just about as usual. Couple of flights," Wilbur is reputed to have said once. "How far?" "Halfway down the field." "Not so much, eh? Well, you be sure to let me know if anything special happens."40 By contrast, when Santos Dumont flew a heavier-than-air machine for twelve yards in Europe in the fall of 1906, then followed it by soaring 250 yards, Northcliffe was mightily excited. But all the Daily Mail carried was a mere four lines in the "News In Brief." The Chief (Northcliffe, like Hearst, loved being called "Chief") telephoned his news editor at home in a fine fit of temper because the story had been played down. "Don't you realize, man," he bawled, "that England is no longer an island?" 41 To whet public interest, Northcliffe offered £10,000 on the spur of the moment for the first aviator to fly from London to Manchester. He was royally laughed at. The Star gaily offered £10,000,000 to any airman who could fly five miles. Punch, even more playfully, offered a princely reward for a flight to the moon, never dreaming that in a little more than a half century the United States and Russia would be racing to get a man there first.

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Nor did Northcliffe find complete harmony even within his own ranks. H. W . Wilson, a Daily Mail leader writer, suggested mildly that it might be some time before Britain would have to worry seriously about bombs being dropped from an airplane. The Chief, in another fit of temper, sent him a telegraphic rebuke.42 He seemed to be the only one to believe in the airplane—he and the fools who were risking their necks to fly the machines. Neither derision nor difficulties, however, could make Northcliffe give up his faith in the future of the airplane. Soon he was cabling his New York correspondent, W . F. Bullock, to send him private reports on what the Wrights were doing at Kitty Hawk. One of Bullock's cables in 1908 was prophetic: AIRPLANE PRIMARILY INTENDED WAR MACHINE STOP TRAVELING SPEED FORTY MILES AN HOUR STOP ABLE IF ALL GOES WELL OVERTAKE ANY MODERN WARSHIP AND AS IT CAN BE MANEUVERED UTMOST EASE ANY DIRECTION NAVIGATORS HAVE CLAIMED SHOULD HAVE NO DIFFICULTY DROPPING BOMB GREATEST NICETY ON ANY OBJECT ATTACK. 43

Northcliffe put up another prize, this one for £1,000, for the first man to fly the English Channel. Hubert Latham, a Frenchman with an English name, tried it on July 19, 1909, and ditched his machine in the Channel seven miles off the French coast. A French destroyer rescued him. That attracted world attention, for Latham vowed he would try again soon. And next time, he might succeed. The Daily Mail, prodded by Northcliffe, turned out a veritable army of reporters to blanket its own story and set up wireless stations on both sides of the Channel. Crowds waited and watched from dawn to dusk at Dover and Sangatte, searching the skies for Latham. On the night of July 24, he went to bed with instructions for his mechanic to rouse him at dawn next day if the weather were promising. The mechanic, for one reason or another, let him sleep. But at dawn, a wisp of a man limped down the beach and wheeled a tiny monoplane from a shed. "Ou est Dovre?" he asked somebody in the crowd that gathered around him and his machine. A man pointed north. The little flier twirled the propeller. The engine coughed and spluttered. He climbed aboard his frail craft, gunned it into flight, and in just thirty-seven minutes landed gently in the sloping grass under the frowning gray walls of Dover Castle.

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Louis Bleriot, known to fame previously only as the inventor of a motor lamp, had flown the English Channel.44 The feat surprised even the Daily Mail, whose reporters were sound asleep. Quite by accident, Philip Gibbs was in Dover that morning, having decided that Latham had lost his nerve and wouldn't fly very soon. He was with the first wildly enthusiastic Britishers who thronged about Bleriot, and wrote his story as an eyewitness to history.45 The British budget, the suffragettes, and all the other staples of London newspaper fare dropped out of sight. The headlines screeched the news of Bleriot's epic feat. Within twenty-four hours, Northcliffe arranged a dinner for two hundred guests at the Savoy Hotel in London, at which he handed a gold trophy and a check for £1,000 to Bleriot. The aviator took the trophy but Mme. Bleriot, a practical Frenchwoman, reached out at precisely the right moment and took the check.46 The airplane began setting and breaking records with dizzying frequency, and reporters in the United States, Britain, and Europe enjoyed the thrill of writing about aviation. In 1910, Louis Paulhan captured the £10,000 Northcliffe prize for being the first to fly from London to Manchester, a feat that had been thought impossible.47 In the same year, the New York Times blandly stole a beat on a Pulitzer prize flight, which the New York World had sponsored from Albany to New York. When the World ignored a young flier named Glenn H. Curtiss, the Times decided to follow him and was the first to report that he had succeeded on March 29 in flying 150 miles along the Hudson River at an average speed of 54.18 miles an hour. The flight was rewarded with a $10,000 check paid by Joseph Pulitzer. There was a fresh sensation that fall. Walter Wellman, a former Chicago Record-Herald reporter, set out in the 228-foot dirigible America with a small crew on the first attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean by air. Unhappily, the America was disabled, and Wellman and his crew were picked up by the Royal Mail steamer Trent 400 miles east of Cape Hatteras on October 19.48 Unlike the automobile, which had gained acceptance slowly, the airplane was presented to the world in a wild burst of sensational newspaper promotion. The newspaper-reading public loved it. The more papers the airplane sold, the greater were the prizes that were offered. And quietly, in the war offices of a swiftly arming Europe, the military leaders studied the possibilities of this magnificent new weapon of destruc-

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tion. They did not have to do a great deal to develop the airplane in those early years. The newspapers, in the main, did much of it for them. Ironically, after Northcliffe had followed Colonel Theodore Roosevelt's example and taken his first flight in 1911, he dutifully signed a paper which was firmly presented to him by his mother: "I hereby promise not to go in any aeroplane or flying machine whatever without the written consent of my Mother—Alfred."49 The greatest airplane promoter of them all, in this whimsical manner, decided to play it safe as far as he himself was concerned. 6. T H E N O R T H P O L E A D V E N T U R E Philip Gibbs checked in late at the London Daily Chronicle on September 1, 1909, and casually wandered by the news editor's desk, as reporters will. He had been in the country on another assignment and hadn't the faintest idea of what was going on. He soon found out. E. A. Perris, the news editor, stopped him. "There's a fellow named Dr. Cook who has discovered the North Pole. He may arrive at Copenhagen tomorrow. Lots of other men have the start on you, but see if you can get some kind of a story." The news editor was not angry. He was hurt, as editors always are, when one of their good men is out of reach at a time when a big story is breaking. It makes no difference how hard the reporter is working elsewhere. Nor does it matter that he didn't know of the latest sensation in the world of the flashing headline. He is supposed to have a sixth sense which tells him, in some miraculous way, that he is wanted urgently in Buenos Aires or Bangalore. Gibbs's sixth sense wasn't working at the moment. He groaned, knowing nothing of Dr. Cook and caring less. After drawing a healthy advance from the cashier against expenses, he took off dutifully for Copenhagen.60 Dr. Frederick A. Cook, a Brooklyn surgeon who had accompanied three other polar expeditions, seemed like an authentic hero. That day he had sent word from the Shetland Islands to the New York Herald, which had bought the rights to his story for $25,000, that he had reached the North Pole on April 21, 1908. His first story told of his achievement in glowing terms: "After a prolonged fight with famine and frost, we have at last succeeded in reaching the North Pole. A new highway, with an interesting

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strip of animated nature, has been explored, and big-game haunts located, which will delight sportsmen and extend the Eskimo horizon. Land has been discovered on which rests the earth's northernmost rocks. A triangle of 30,000 square miles has been cut out of the terrestrial unknown." 61 There was much more of this, as Gibbs discovered, but he could do nothing about it. He was in the unenviable position of being the last man on the story, which meant he was outmaneuvered and would have to trust to luck. When he finally arrived at Copenhagen on Saturday, September 3, some forty correspondents were ahead of him. And, of course, the New York Herald was bound to be leading the parade, since it had bought and paid for Dr. Cook's own story. Gibbs could be pardoned for groaning. He had to play a lone hand. Not knowing whether Dr. Cook had even arrived, the tardy correspondent grabbed a cab and asked to be taken somewhere for quick refreshments. He was tired, dirty, headachy, and in a sour mood, all of which may have influenced the driver. In any event, the new arrival was dumped off at a small cafe near the waterfront, choked with people and clogged with smoke. Fortunately, the waiter who served him spoke English. "Has Dr. Cook arrived?" Gibbs asked, guessing from the headlines in the Danish papers that Cook by this time was reasonably well known. "No," the waiter replied. "He ought to have been here at midday. But there's a fog in the Cattegat and his boat will not come in until tomorrow morning. All Denmark is waiting for him." It was Gibbs's first break. He relaxed. If Dr. Cook was due in the morning, there was still hope for some kind of a story. He sat back and smoked a cigarette, hoping to spot a friendly face in the crowd. Presently a lovely girl in a white fur toque and scarf came in with a tall young Dane and another girl. The obliging waiter informed Gibbs that she was Mrs. Knud Rasmussen, the wife of an explorer who had provided Dr. Cook with the dogs that had pulled his sledge to the North Pole. It was another break. Gibbs needed no urging. The girl was beautiful. She was also a firstrate news source. What more could any enterprising reporter ask? He was at her table in a few moments, introducing himself and setting up communications in broken German and fractured French (his) and

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barely elementary English (hers). The girl was even more exotic than he had dreamed, being half Eskimo. Moreover, her escort turned out to be a pretty fair explorer himself, Peter Freuchen. Within a short time, the party agreed that they all must go out together on a launch owned by a director of the Danish Greenland Company to greet their old friend, Dr. Cook, at dawn. They had dinner together. Afterward, Gibbs hired a cab to take them all to Elsinore that night. Freuchen sat next to the driver, helping guide him through the fog. Gibbs sat next to the charming Mrs. Rasmussen and her friend, thoroughly enjoying himself. When they reached Elsinore, the owner of the official launch was there to greet them but he steadfastly refused to take Freuchen, Mrs. Rasmussen, and the other girl. "But," Mrs. Rasmussen said to Gibbs, "he will take you." Evidently she and Freuchen had pleaded so hard for a favor for the British journalist that the owner of the launch had relented. So Gibbs, without an overcoat, and a few Danish correspondents steamed out to a lightship in the Cattegat and at dawn clambered aboard Dr. Cook's ship, the Hans Egede. Luck had intervened once more. As soon as he could stop his teeth from chattering in the cold, Gibbs found that he was the only English-speaking journalist aboard. The few Danes were all confirmed hero-worshipers, ready to play the game any way Dr. Cook wanted it. The explorer, a big and powerful man in furs, stood in the center of a company of his friends and looked at the approaching reporters with restless blue eyes. Gibbs introduced himself, shook hands and settled down to the usual reportorial routine of question-asking. He had no suspicion whatever of Dr. Cook. On first sight, he was rather taken by the man. But very soon he noted that he was getting evasive answers to his questions. In order to save time, he asked if he could look at Dr. Cook's diary. There was no diary. As for the explorer's papers, Cook said he had given them to a friend who would produce them in due course. "But surely," Gibbs said, "you have brought your journal with you? The essential papers?" "I have no papers," Dr. Cook replied. "Perhaps I could see your astronomical observations?"

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"Haven't I told you that I have brought no papers?" the explorer burst out angrily. "You believed Nansen and Amundsen and Sverdrup. They had only their story to tell. Why don't you believe me?" Gibbs was amazed. He then settled down to an hour of aggressive questioning, which produced a number of seeming contradictions. At the end of that interview, the reporter was convinced that Dr. Coolc hadn't been to the North Pole at all, but was lying. When the Hans Egede docked, an enormous crowd roared its acclaim for the explorer. The grand old man of English journalism, W. T. Stead, the editor of the Review of Reviews, embraced him. All the other correspondents clustered about the great man, except Gibbs. He jumped to the pier, took a cab to a hotel, and wrote seven columns of what amounted to libel—a point by point challenge of Dr. Cook's narrative. It was an extraordinary performance. Gibbs, at 32, was an experienced journalist but he had no more knowledge of Arctic exploration than one of the Chronicle's copy boys. "When I handed it [the story] into the telegraph office, I knew that I had bumed my boats, and that my whole journalistic career would be made or marred by this message," he wrote.52 All the other correspondents, meanwhile, were playing it straight. There had been a mass interview for the forty of them, with Stead asking the questions. No one challenged Dr. Cook. No one doubted him. He was everybody's hero. And Gibbs, with a sinking feeling, knew he had no proof to back up his charges except the contradictions he had noted in the explorer's story. The heads of the Danish government, members of the royal family, and officers of the Royal Geographic Society all congratulated Dr. Cook. The University of Copenhagen gave him an honorary degree. Frederic William Wile, who had been a correspondent for Victor Lawson's Chicago Daily News but was now Northcliffe's Daily Mail correspondent, asked the explorer for a statement and triumphantly bore off this signed message to his paper: "When the scientists of England and the rest of the world have had an opportunity of examining my astronomical observations, I cherish the utmost confidence they will unreservedly recognize my claim to the discovery of the North Pole. "I believe our data to be indisputable. They are the result of comprehensive, detailed compilation with the aid of the most modern ap-

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paratus, and I am entirely prepared to accept full responsibility for their accuracy."53 It was a different story than the one he had told Gibbs. But he didn't bother to explain. Instead, he boldly cabled President William Howard Taft at the White House: "I beg leave to report to the Chief Magistrate of my country that I have returned from the North Pole. Cook." Gibbs's story, published in the Chronicle in London and the New York Times, among others, bounced back to Copenhagen with sensational results. The great Danish newspaper Politiken called him "the liar, Gibbs," a term which was later withdrawn with apologies. In cafes, he was the subject of bitter comment and hostile demonstrations. Yet, he kept trying to make his story stand up. He talked with the Norwegian explorer, Otto Neumann Sverdrup, who had been represented by Dr. Cook as a supporter of the North Pole claim. Sverdrup said he had no proof of Dr. Cook's story whatever. Moreover, Gibbs obtained a statement from the University of Copenhagen denying Dr. Cook's contention that he had submitted papers and scientific proofs there. Next, Gibbs had Peter Freuchen and others question some of Dr. Cook's Arctic timetable and distances. Despite all that, the Danish Royal Geographic Society gave Dr. Cook its gold medal and the Politiken made him the guest of honor at an elaborate public dinner in the Tivoli Gardens, at which a horseshoe of roses was draped around his shoulders. During that dinner, a Politiken messenger arrived from the office with a cabled bulletin from the AP: INDIAN HARBOR VIA CAPE ROSE, NEWFOUNDLAND, SEPT. 6 , 1 9 0 9 . STARS AND STRIPES NAILED TO NORTH POLE. PEARY.

Dr. Cook's triumph turned into a debacle. The diners were in an uproar. But the explorer never lost his aplomb. He turned to his hosts and said loudly enough for those at his table to hear: "There's glory enough for both of us." 54 There wasn't. The New York Times owned the rights to the story of Commander (later Admiral) Robert E. Peary, USN, had advanced $4,000 to him for his expedition, and it thoroughly believed in his claim that he had reached the North Pole on April 6, 1909.55 The Times, after waiting patiently, finally got the big break just as Gibbs really began hammering at Dr. Cook's story in Copenhagen. Peary tipped the Times first in a message based on a previously arranged code:

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"GOT OP." The " O P " stood for "Old Pole," which was spelled out in a message to his wife. Then followed the wireless message, flashed to the Times from Indian Harbor: I HAVE THE POLE, APRIL 6TH. EXPECT ARRIVE CHATEAU BAY SEPTEMBER 7TH. SECURE CONTROL WIRE FOR M E THERE AND ARRANGE EXPEDITE TRANSMISSION BIG STORY. PEARY.

In a story beside the account of Peary's victory, there was a relatively subdued piece out of Copenhagen which reported Dr. Cook was "immensely interested" and commented: "That is good news. I hope Peary got the pole. His observations and reports on that region will confirm mine. . . . W e are rivals, of course, but the pole is good enough for two. The fact of two men having reached the pole along different paths should furnish large additions to scientific knowledge." 66 Now it was Cook against Peary. The AP, nervous about the whole business, sent a wireless message to Peary querying him for details. He replied abruptly: REGRET UNABLE DISPATCH DETAILS. M Y DISPATCH STARS AND STRIPES NAILED TO NORTH POLE AUTHORITATIVE AND CORRECT. COOK'S STORY SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN TOO SERIOUSLY. THE TWO ESKIMOS WHO ACCOMPANIED HIM SAY HE WENT NO DISTANCE NORTH AND NOT OUT OF SIGHT OF LAND. OTHER MEMBERS OF THE TRIBE CORROBORATE THEIR STORY. PEARY. 5 7

For four days, from September 8 through 11, the Times played Peary's own story at length and syndicated it all over the world at a profit to the explorer of $i2,ooo. 58 Meanwhile, a number of news organizations including the AP sent correspondents to interview him. Peary's story stood up. Cook's didn't. But no immediate decision between the two was made, and the controversy raged for a long time. Gibbs, in Copenhagen, had his anxious moments. But with the support of Peter Freuchen and his other Danish friends, he was able to shake confidence in Dr. Cook to such an extent that the University of Copenhagen eventually rejected his claims and canceled his honorary degree. W . T . Stead wrote to Gibbs: "I have lost and you have won." To which Gibbs added, "Looking back on it, I marvel at my luck." 6 9 Peary was able to convince the world of his triumph at the North

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Pole through the miracle of the wireless and the work of a first-rate reporter, Philip Gibbs. In the rapid evolution of foreign correspondence as the basis for an enlarged public participation in world affairs, both were important.

7. THE TITANIC GOES DOWN It was a quiet Sunday night in the spring of 1912 in the Boston bureau of the AP. J. D. Kennedy, a night telegrapher, was on his dinner hour in a cluttered supply room where he had rigged up a crude wireless set. He was, in the slightly derisive term applied to radio amateurs, a ham—and an enthusiastic one. As he fiddled with his homemade tuning device, he froze. The White Star liner Titanic, the newest and greatest ship afloat, the unsinkable Titanic, was flashing a distress call: COME AT ONCE WE HAVE STRUCK A BERG IT'S CQD OLD MAN POSITION

41-46 N 50-14

W.

The AP put out a bulletin: CAPE RACE N.F., SUNDAY NIGHT, APRIL

14

(AP)

AT

10:25

O'CLOCK

TONIGHT THE WHITE -STAR LINE STEAMSHIP TITANIC CALLED CQD TO THE MARCONI STATION HERE, AND REPORTED HAVING STRUCK AN ICEBERG. THE STEAMER SAID THAT IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE WAS REQUIRED. 60

It was 1:20 a.m., Monday, April 15, when the bulletin reached the New York Times. Carr Vattel Van Anda, the saturnine Times managing editor, hesitated not a moment. With the next edition deadline only minutes away, he discarded the myth that the 45,000-ton liner was unsinkable and boldly slapped the story on Page One. He had faith in the wireless report and in the operators who were handling the big news. Other papers hedged. The White Star Line offices in New York insisted that the Titanic's safety compartments couldn't be breached. But Van Anda had made up his mind that a disaster was in the making and he would not be swayed.61 The Times had been handling wireless news under Van Anda's direction from the early days of the Russo-Japanese War. On December 10, 1905, in common with the American press, the Times had reported the first wireless distress call from a ship at sea, the storm-battered Nantucket lightship. The Times also had shared with the Chicago

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Tribune the distinction of publishing a wireless message flashed by David P. MacGowan, a Tribune reporter aboard the liner Cymric, telling of the rescue of 37 of 51 crewmen from the freighter St. Cuthbert, afire off Cape Sable, on February 2, 1908. And then, there had been the great story of Jack Binns, the chunky little wireless operator of the White Star liner Republic, who on January 23, 1909, sent the C Q D that resulted in the rescue of all but six of the ship's 1,600 passengers after she was rammed off Nantucket by the Florida.62 V a n Anda's judgment was borne out tragically as the bulletins from the A P came piling in that April night in 1912: SINKING—CANNOT HEAR FOR NOISE OF STEAM ENGINE ROOM GETTING FLOODED.

Then came the new international distress signal: sos . . .

sos.

Shortly after 2 a.m., the Titanic's wireless fell silent.63 All Kennedy could hear was the frantic signaling of other ships racing to the scene, trying to raise the stricken liner's wireless. It was no use. In the Times office in New York, Van Anda concluded despite all the reassurances from the W h i t e Star Line that the Titanic had gone down. The New York Sun alone denied it. How many had died, of the more than 2,000 passengers and crew aboard, nobody would know for perhaps days. The list of the notables on that maiden voyage was therefore run without comment—Colonel and Mrs. John Jacob Astor; Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Straus; Frank D. Millet, the old war correspondent turned artist; W . T . Stead, the British editor; Major Archibald Butt, President Taft's military aid; and many, many more. The spluttering of the wireless at sea next day spelled out the story of the disaster in unmistakable terms. The Cunarder Carpathia reached the last location given by the Titanic at dawn on April 15 and found only crowded lifeboats and wreckage of the unsinkable ship. The W h i t e Star liner Olympic wirelessed Cape Race that the Carpathia was steaming to New York with about 655 survivors. And at last, at 8:20 p.m., P.A.S. Franklin of the International Mercantile Marine conceded that probably only those aboard the Carpathia had survived the Titanic. The rest of the story was told by able New York local reporters who fought their way through a shrieking crowd of 30,000 New Yorkers on

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the night of April 18 to get aboard the Carpathia as she docked. Despite the efforts of Bennett, who had a girl reporter radio stories from the Carpathia, the Times, once again, was ahead. Van Anda had enlisted the assistance of Guglielmo Marconi himself. Since all wireless operators in those days were in the employ of the Marconi company, the inventor insisted on going aboard the Carpathia and he took Times reporters with him. They got the story of Harold Bride, the surviving wireless operator of the Titanic, the sickening account of how the great ship went down with the band playing, some women staying aboard to die with their husbands, all the doomed singing the Episcopal hymn, "Autumn," in their last moments. They learned of the great ones who were gone—Colonel Astor, the Strauses, Millet, Stead, and all the rest. And they determined, at long last, that 1,517 persons had gone down with the Titanic and 706 had been saved.64 The New York Times of April 19, 1912, made history in more ways than one. It established the reliability of the wireless as the world approached the uncertain years of the twentieth century.

VII: The Challenge of World War I 1. H O W W A R

CAME

Robert Atter, chief of the Associated Press bureau in Vienna, prepared for a routine job on a hot and dusty summer Sunday in 1914. Archdulce Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his Duchess were making a ceremonial visit to the capital of Bosnia, a benighted town of 80,000 called Sarajevo, to impress the restless populace. Bosnia, with Herzegovina, had only lately been added to the many and ill-assorted lands gathered under the dual monarchy, much to the displeasure of the neighboring Serbs. T h e visit was intended to quiet matters. While the Archduke and Duchess were driving to the Town Hall for a reception, a bomb was hurled at him, and he warded it off with his arm. The blast injured two of his entourage and six spectators. The Archduke exclaimed angrily at the Town Hall: "Herr Bürgermeister, it is perfectly outrageous! W e have come to Sarajevo on a visit and have had a bomb thrown at us!" 1 Atter began filing. But before he had gone very far, more shocking news broke. This was the A P bulletin: S A R A J E V O , BOSNIA, J U N E 2 8 T H E AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN

ARCHDUKE FRANCIS FERDINAND, HEIR TO

THRONE, AND THE DUCHESS

OF

HOHENBERG,

HIS MORGANATIC W I F E , W E R E SHOT DEAD TODAY B Y A STUDENT I N THE M A I N STREET OF THE BOSNIAN CAPITAL, A SHORT T I M E A F T E R

THEY

HAD ESCAPED DEATH F R O M A B O M B HURLED AT THE R O Y A L AUTOMOBILES.2

T h e details of the crime of the student, Gavrilo Prinzip, and his fellow-conspirators came in swiftly to Vienna where the official Tele-

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graphen Korrespondenz-Bureau made them available. The correspondents who had not left Vienna, as well as those at the scene, kept the cables clogged with messages all that day. But in all the accounts, not a reference was made to war by any responsible correspondent. At Kiel that sunny Sunday, Frederic William Wile, then on the staff of the London Daily Mail, was covering Kaiser Wilhelm II and the annual yachting festival which Germany had designed to try to outdazzle the British Cowes Week. His roommate, Otto von Gottberg, the correspondent of the Kaiser's mouthpiece, the Berlin Lokal-Anzeiger, burst in on him exclaiming: "The Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated today at Sarajevo!" "Good God!" Von Gottberg went on : "It's a good thing." The Kaiser's racing schooner, Meteor V, received the news by wireless and turned. A destroyer approached, taking the Kaiser from the schooner and transferring him to his royal yacht, Hohenzollern. Soon the royal ship broke out a signal flag meaning: "His Majesty is aboard but preoccupied." 3 In Paris it was the day of the Grand Prix at Longchamps, the climax of a brilliant social season. President Raymond Poincaré and the majority of the French cabinet occupied boxes. The crowd was never more gay. But as the news came to the President's box, spectators saw Poincaré's face tum grave. He squinted up at the blue, cloudless sky, abruptly arose, and left Longchamps with his cabinet. The Quai d'Orsay would be busy far into the night.4 Wickham Steed, who had returned from Vienna as the Times's correspondent, spent that day outside London on a holiday and didn't return until seven that night. He found the Times office in turmoil. "Until early on Monday morning, I worked without a break," he wrote.5 In the United States, the New York Times reprinted the translated account of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse, with other details from the London Daily Mail, under a four-column headline in moderate halfinch type: HEIR TO AUSTRIA'S THRONE IS SLAIN W I T H HIS W I F E B Y A BOSNIAN YOUTH TO AVENGE SEIZURE OF HIS COUNTRY

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The New York Times was perturbed, but not unduly excited. Its eight-column headlines were invariably reserved for events it believed to be world-shaking.6 To those who were only casually interested, the Times's policy seemed to be the right one. The excitement over Sarajevo evaporated quickly. In fact, some of the dispatches from Vienna seemed far more concerned over the effect of the double murders on the health of the octogenarian Francis Joseph than on the fate of the world. Yet, in Berlin, there now began an extraordinary three-week game of hide-and-seek, a deadly diversion, in which suspicious foreign correspondents called daily, and sometimes twice daily, at the Wilhelmstrasse to try to divine Germany's course toward Austria and the Balkans. It had been no secret to them that Francis Ferdinand had been the major roadblock in the Kaiser's effort to acquire greater influence over Austrian foreign policy. With the Archduke now removed, the correspondents could only guess at the extent to which the Wilhelmstrasse would dictate policy to the Ballhausplatz. The Kaiser did not attend Francis Ferdinand's funeral. He came down conveniently with a slight case of lumbago, obviously a diplomatic illness, and the Austrian court helped out by announcing that no foreign guests were expected to attend the rites. Next, he sought to lull world opinion still further on Monday, July 6, by taking off in the Hohenzollern for a quiet cruise in the fjords of Norway. The Berlin Lokal Anzeiger and the rest of the German press dutifully pointed out that the Kaiser's cruise signified that there was no reason for concern over the shaky situation in the Balkans. Yet, the day before, the Kaiser and his Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, had given Austria full assurance of German support in punitive measures against Serbia. It was the infamous "Blank Check," the most fateful of all the decisions that were taken in secret that tragic midsummer. For from it, all the others flowed. The German government, no less than the statesmen of both its allies and enemies, were under the impression that the foreign correspondents could not know what was going on. But, even if this was so, the livelier and shrewder correspondents could not be prevented from raising questions based on their suspicions, their guesses, and very likely their prejudices. That is what happened in Berlin. The foreign correspondents kept after Privy Counsellor Hammann, the gloomy chief of the press section of the Foreign OfHce. But whatever their

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questions, his invariable answer was a pious assurance that Germany wanted peace and was not at all concerned by the gravity of the position between Austria and Serbia. The line put out by the German Press Bureau, which the foreign correspondents did not buy at all, was that if difficulties did develop between Austria and Serbia they could be localized. By July 15, stocks were dropping on the Berlin and Vienna bourses. There were rumors that Austria had decided on a partial mobilization and that Serbia was acting accordingly. Actually the Austrian decision to present an ultimatum to Serbia was not taken until July 19 and the note was not drafted until the next day, but the stock markets, the most sensitive of barometers, were reacting to a mood. So were the foreign correspondents. Yet, they could not convince their editors. The Berlin and Vienna correspondents of the British dailies, almost to a man, found most of their dispatches played down and sometimes discarded. Despite a virulent Austrian press campaign that was raging in Vienna, which should have been a signal to sophisticated British opinion that something was up, the Times of London chose to ignore it. Instead, the newspaper editorially advised Serbia to cooperate with an inquiry into the Archduke's murder which "will do much to put herself right with outside opinion." The editorial went on: "Austria-Hungary has acted with self-possession and with restraint hitherto. We earnestly hope she will continue so to the end." 7 The Austro-Hungarian ambassador to Britain, Count Albert Mensdorff, took heart at this favorable development, published on July 16. Certainly not by coincidence, Max Goldschneider, the correspondent of the Neues Wiener Tageblatt, held a dinner the next night for some influential correspondents. Wickham Steed of the Times attended, as did M. Condurier de Chassaigne, president of the Foreign Press Association in London, and others. It was no secret that the Austrians, through their subservient correspondents, were trying to court British public opinion as much as they dared.8 The line which Dr. Hammann had been handing out at the Foreign Office finally appeared in print for the first time in a German newspaper when his most faithful echo, the Norddeutsche Zeitung in Berlin, proposed in a rather vague way the "localization" of war in its issue of July 19, a Sunday. The Austrian press promptly picked up the

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statement, with attribution to its source, which meant a great deal to the nervous and highly suspicious Steed.9 But he was almost alone on Fleet Street in his well-nigh frantic mood, although next day stocks on every exchange in Europe began to drop precipitously. The British press registered no alarm. It was full of the magnificent review of the British fleet off Spithead, which began on July 19, with King George V on his royal yacht cruising among 230 warships manned by 70,000 officers and men. As for the French press, it was crowded with the details of the trial of Mme. Henriette Caillaux, wife of Joseph Caillaux, once Premier of France, for the fatal shooting of Gaston Calmette, the editor of Figaro. Calmette had attacked Caillaux's private life, and Mme. Caillaux had provided a typically French solution for her husband's troubled affairs. What foreign correspondent in Paris could think of war with so juicy a story to cover? They flocked to the courtroom, nearly 150 strong, and some reputedly paid as much as $200 or more to be certain of a seat. To be sure, there was an item in some of the papers that President Poincaré and Premier René Viviani were on the way to St. Petersburg for a ceremonial visit. But what of it? Maybe they wanted the trip! The press campaign in Vienna was intensified. In Berlin, the German Press Bureau was more evasive than ever, and the Kaiser's holiday cruise was over. In St. Petersburg, there was genuine alarm and, as the world was to leam later, renewed assurances were exchanged with the visiting French statesmen of the strength of the Franco-Russian alliance. And in London, Count Mensdorff took the extraordinary step of inviting Wickham Steed to lunch on July 21. The Austrian ambassador for the first time took the gloves off with a hostile correspondent, evidently acting under instructions. "Serbia," Mensdorff said, "must be punished. But if the Times will give the lead, the rest of the press will follow. British opinion will remain friendly to us and the conflict may be localized." Steed, who like Wile had been predicting for years that Germany would go to war, forgot he was a correspondent and began lecturing the ambassador in the most extreme manner. "I am too good a friend of Austria," he replied, "to help her commit suicide. . . . You can certainly crush Serbia if you are left alone to do it. . . . But that is not what will happen. At the first shot you fire across the Save, Russia

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will cry, 'Hands off.' Germany will summon Russia not to intervene, Russia will refuse. . . . Germany will then mobilize and will bolt through Belgium into France; and when England sees German troops in Belgium, she will intervene against Germany and against you." The ambassador flared back, "You will never intervene. . . . I have assurance that you will not intervene." "You do not know the strength of English public feeling." "Then you will not help us?" "On no account whatever." The thoroughly alarmed and shaken Steed now drove to the Foreign Office to try to report at once to Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Minister. But the best he could do was to talk with an under official who listened to his tale and remarked, "You're off your head." 1 0 Steed rushed off to alert Northcliffe with the result that the Times next day carried a leading article, "A Danger To Europe," which was intended to convey a warning to both Germany and Austria. But even Northcliffe feared to exaggerate the danger of war at this stage, causing the editorial to be couched in such vague terms that it could scarcely have disturbed the leaders of the Central Powers, who were convinced that Britain would remain neutral.11 On July 23, Austria handed Serbia a ten-point ultimatum with a forty-eight-hour time limit for reply. Wile sent a bulletin on it to the London Daily Mail at 7 p.m., Berlin time, several hours before the official announcement.12 Still, the German Press Bureau kept saying nobody wanted a war, least of all Germany. At 8:30 on Saturday night, July 25, however, the government mouthpiece, the Berlin Lokal Anzeiger, was the first to put a black bulletin in its windows, "Serbia Rejects Austrian Ultimatum!" 1 3 Of course, the Serbs had done no such thing. They had given in to eight out of the ten Austrian demands. But to the Wilhelmstrasse, as well as to the Ballhausplatz, that was a rejection. Suddenly, frighteningly, the fierce passions of a German street mob let loose and thousands streamed through Berlin yelling, "Krieg! Krieg!" ("War! War!") The sight was not lost on foreign correspondents who transmitted such stories to newspapers all over the world. If nothing else brought home the danger to other peoples, that did.14 In London next day, Sunday, July 26, Sir Edward Grey learned that

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Russia would come to the aid of Serbia, if Serbia were attacked, and that France would fight with Russia. Treaties were being invoked. The cards in the stacked deck of war were falling into place. The London Chronicle received a brief dispatch from its correspondent in Austria-Hungary, Martin H. Donohue, on July 28, reporting that three gunboats in the Danube had fired on Belgrade. The correspondent was arrested, then expelled.16 He had reported the first shots of World War I. And in Paris, Mme. Caillaux was acquitted, but few correspondents in Paris bothered to send much about her. In London, the excitement over the Home Rule Bill and the latest Irish shootings also sank back in the consciousness of press and public. The war correspondents began taking off, many for Paris, and a few doughty ones for Berlin and Vienna. On July 29, news came from St. Petersburg that Germany had warned Russia that Russian mobilization inevitably would be followed by German mobilization. Next day, Russia ordered mobilization. And the Times, almost coincident with German diplomatic efforts to buy British neutrality with a pledge not to take French or Belgian territory, came out with an editorial that could have been written by the Foreign Office, but wasn't: "If France is menaced, or the safety of the Belgian frontier which we have guaranteed with her and with Prussia by treaties that Mr. Gladstone's government in 1870 confirmed, we shall know how to act. W e can no more afford to see France crushed by Germany, or the balance of power upset against France, than Germany can afford to see Austria-Hungary crushed by Russia and that balance upset against Austrian and Hungarian interests." 16 But the British press by no means spoke as one. The Manchester Guardian and the London Daily News wrote against war. And the London Chronicle protested against attempts to "dictate" to Sir Edward Grey. Whereupon, in another extraordinary attempt to influence British public opinion, two members of the House of Rothschild— Lord Rothschild and his brother, Leopold—presented their own ultimatum on July 31 to the financial editor of the Times, Hugh Chisholm. Lord Rothschild bluntly warned Chisholm that the Times must change its tone because it was "hounding the country into war." The banker demanded a policy of British neutrality. Northcliffe himself turned the Rothschilds down when they later carried their proposal to him. 17 The City plunged into near panic as stocks plummeted. That night, Ger-

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many gave the Russians twelve hours to demobilize or face war. That night, too, Germany would send the British no assurance that the neutrality of Belgium would be respected. And next day, August 1, the Times boldly proclaimed, while the British government hesitated: " W e dare not stand aside . . . our strongest interest is the law of selfpreservation." 18 That same day the Daily News accused the Times of having "paved the way to this stupendous catastrophe" and the gentle Henry Nevinson assailed the Times for trying to drag the country into "abominations." Northcliffe called a conference at his office, no less intense and no less dramatic than the many other conferences that were talcing place in the chancelleries all over Europe. "I have trustworthy information," he announced, "that the government are going to 'rat.' W e have taken a strong line in favor of intervention on behalf of France and Russia. W h a t do we do if the government give way?" The well-nigh hysterical Steed demanded that, if the government backed down, the paper would have to go "bald-headed against it." "Would you attack the government at a moment of national crisis?" Northcliffe demanded. "Certainly!" Steed snapped.19 Although it was the August Bank Holiday week-end, a traditional vacation-time, the conferees agreed to put out an extraordinary Sunday paper if it became necessary. And most of them decided in advance that it would be necessary. That night, Germany declared war on Russia and, in the west, invaded Luxembourg. The Germans still had given no answer to the British request for a guarantee against the invasion of Belgium, but the invasion of Luxembourg should have been a sufficient reply. It wasn't. Both the British and French were far more conscious of the care with which they had to clothe their every action than were the reckless Germans and their sword-rattling Kaiser. The Germans seemed to have paid no attention whatever to the sensitivities of neutral opinion. The Times's Sunday edition carried the deadly news of German aggression, as did every newspaper that was published that day around the world. Reuters needed only to use the news exactly as it happened. Havas had to do nothing more than follow suit. The Germans did try one more time to influence British opinion. A t the Times's Sunday editorial conference, a typed letter bearing the name of Albert Ballin

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was forwarded from the London office of the Hamburg-American Line, of which he was president. Later, a telegram came addressed to the Wolff Bureau instructing it to send the Ballin text verbatim to Berlin as soon as the Times published it. This was the gist: "I hear with astonishment that, in France and elsewhere in the world, it is imagined that Germany wants to carry on an aggressive war, and that she has with this aim brought about the present situation. It is said that the Emperor was of the opinion that the moment had come to have a final reckoning with His enemies; but what a terrible error that is. . . . He has not wanted war; it has been forced upon Him by the might of the circumstances. . . . Russia alone forces the war on Europe." 20 The letter wasn't published at that time. Northcliffe was in no mood to present the Kaiser with an apologia in the Times. For on that Sunday the British cabinet voted to guarantee the French coast against attack, but waited to see what the Germans intended to do in the west. Before that day passed, they knew. Germany had demanded permission to cross Belgium without opposition and had promised in return not to retain any Belgian territory after the war was over. The ultimatum had been sent in a sealed envelope to the German ministry in Brussels on July 29 with orders that it was not to be opened until telegraphic instructions arrived. The decisive wire came on the night of August 2 and Belgium's equally decisive answer was given in a matter of hours by its king, Albert I. It was, "No!" 2 1 Now, with the German war machine already in motion, Berlin tried to clothe its aggression with an appearance of righteousness. There were German reports that the French were invading Belgium, that the French had crossed the German border, that French dirigibles had dropped bombs on German territory. All were untrue, and the foreign correspondents quickly learned that the Wilhelmstrasse could not be trusted, if they didn't already know it. The truth was that the French, anxious to avert all blame for this war and to insure complete British support, actually ordered a lo-kilometer withdrawal on July 30 along the German frontier from Luxembourg to Switzerland.22 On the next day, August 3, Germany declared war on France and began the invasion of Belgium, thus executing the plan perfected as early as 1906 by the then chief of staff, Count Alfred von Schlieffen. It was, Schlieffen argued, the only way to envelop and defeat France quickly, a concept

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which was developed by his successor, General Helmuth von Moltke, the nephew of the conqueror of 1870. In Berlin, the crazed crowds were still cheering the coming of war and snapping up the first war extras put out by the controlled press. For the edification of the foreign correspondents, the Wilhelmstrasse issued its official White Paper, which blamed the war on everybody else, almost as soon as German troops crossed the Belgian frontier. London, by contrast, was sober, quiet, apprehensive. At three o'clock on that historic August 3, Sir Edward Grey rose before a packed House of Commons and placed before the honorable members the issue and the choice—support of Belgium and support of France, "these obligations of honor and interest." The House broke into prolonged applause. Back at the Foreign Office, waiting for the decision, Wickham Steed was talking with Sir Arthur Nicolson, the Permanent Under-Secretary, when a secretary ran in with a news dispatch. "They have cheered him, sir!" the secretary exclaimed. Sir Arthur replied, "Thank goodness!" When the speech was over, Lord Onslow joined them, having come directly from the House. "He has had a tremendous success, sir. The whole House is with him." Steed saw Sir Arthur was greatly relieved and heard him say fervently: "Thank God! Now the course is clear, but it will be a terrible business." 23 The British sent off a note to Berlin, demanding an end to the invasion of Belgium within twenty-four hours. It was foredoomed to failure. But out of it came another of those fatal German lapses that flashed around a shocked world, strengthening the Entente, and costing the Kaiser whatever hope he had of swaying neutral sentiment. Sir Edward Goschen, the British ambassador in Berlin, detailed his final interview with Bethmann-Hollweg in this manner: "I found the Chancellor very agitated. His Excellency at once began a harangue, which lasted for about twenty minutes. He said that the step taken by His Majesty's Government was terrible to a degree. Just for a word—'neutrality,' a word which in wartime had so often been disregarded—just for a scrap of paper, Great Britain was going to make war on a kindred nation who desired nothing better than to be friends with her." 24 The world would never forget that to Germany, bent on war, a

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treaty such as Britain's commitment to defend Belgium was "a scrap of paper." It was a story that sank deeply into the consciousness of the neutrals, that inspired the peace-loving Benito Mussolini to proclaim in Avantil his loathing of Germany: "The neutrality of Belgium has been violated. . . . To be in direct or indirect solidarity with Germany means—at this moment—to serve the cause of militarism in its most insane and criminal expression." 25 But Bethmann-Hollweg, in his arrogance, was to say things far worse than that before that day of August 4 was over. The sad-faced, lanky Chancellor wasted no time with his war speech, and swept aside all sentimentality. "Our invasion of Belgium is contrary to international law but the wrong—I speak openly—that we are committing we will make good as soon as our military goal has been reached," he said.26 He spoke of the German soldier "hacking his way through" to victory. He thundered that "necessity knows no law." 27 The Reichstag applauded Bethmann-Hollweg as he concluded with clenched fist: "Our army is in the field! Our fleet is ready for battle! The whole German nation stands behind them! Yea, the whole nation!" Wile turned to Martin Schmidt, of the B. Z. Am Mittag, and muttered, "Supposing the Belgians resist?" "Resist?" Schmidt was pitying. "Why we'll spill them into the ocean." 28 At about that hour in London, Northcliffe and Steed exchanged a few words together. "Well, it's come," Northcliffe said. And Steed replied, "Yes, thank God!" 29 Along the boulevards in Paris, as war came, there was quite as great a wave of patriotic destruction by mobs as there had been in Berlin. German-owned shops were demolished. Suspected German sympathizers were hounded and beaten. There were cheers for Britain, for Belgium, for the United States, and patriotic songs for the youth of France leaving for the front. As Wythe Williams and Walter Duranty went to the office of the New York Times in Paris on the first night of war, they saw a poster beside the Tricolor of France that draped the entrance to the newspaper, Gil Bias: "Every employee of this paper is of military age and therefore is now in the service of France. Gil Bias necessarily suspends publication, perhaps forever." 30 As the foreign correspondents of the belligerents prepared to pull out of enemy capitals, leaving the neutrals to cover for them, many

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were detained temporarily as spies. Eventually, all were permitted to go home. None of them were able to capture in a few words the feeling that was expressed by Sir Edward Grey as he stood at the window of the old Foreign Office on the night of August 4, watching the lamplighters in St. James's Park: "The lamps are going out all over Europe. W e shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." 3 1 Yet, those same foreign correspondents already had cost Germany the war for world public opinion. Nothing that Germany could do in the next four years would wipe out the spiked-helmet image of the Kaiser in his "shining armor," brandishing in his "mailed fist" the "scrap of paper" that guaranteed the freedom of a small nation.

2. FRONT-LINE REPORTING "The entrance of the German army into Brussels has lost the human quality," wrote Richard Harding Davis from the Belgian capital on August 2 1 , 1 9 1 4 . That was the beginning of Davis' most celebrated single piece of war correspondence. In it, he likened the German invaders to "a force of nature like a tidal wave," adding, "When they passed, the human note passed with them." 32 The "hero of our dreams," as a youthful H. L. Mencken called him, was then 50 years old and at the height of his fame. He had just been married for a second time to a vivacious beauty half his age, Bessie McCoy, the "Yama Yama Girl" of the Ziegfeld Follies. He was reporting the war for the newspaper clients of the Wheeler Syndicate at $600 a week, plus $1,000 an article for Scribner's, and he had left Bessie in London to wait for him. 33 If he had planned to send for her, as he had escorted his first bride into Boer territory some fourteen years before, the first sight of the German army changed his mind. Virtually a German prisoner in Brussels, he managed nevertheless to get his story out through a young Britisher, E. A. Dalton, who risked his life to reach Ostend and board a Channel boat to Folkestone. When Davis himself tried to get away, he was picked up by a German officer, who threatened to have him shot as a British spy. The American minister, Brand Whitlock, interceded for him.34 Although the French and British had refused to accept correspondents at the outset, a number of them dashed to the front anyway, de-

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spite lack of credentials, as Davis did. There were other Americans at the front, including Irvin S. Cobb for the Saturday Evening Post; William G. Shepherd for Collier's; Harry Hansen of the Chicago Daily News; John T. McCutcheon, the cartoonist, for the Chicago Tribune, and Amo Dosch-Fleurot of the New York World. Some of them, unexpectedly reunited with Davis as prisoners, were thrust into a troop train loaded with captive French and British soldiers and headed toward the German border. On August 27, as the troop train pulled into Louvain, Davis saw flames consuming the ancient city, its university, and its library which had been founded in 1426. He quickly learned that the Germans had begun burning the city two days before, charging that Belgian snipers had killed fifty Germans. Davis was horrified. Once he was out of German hands and back in London on August 30, he wrote the story of the burning of Louvain: "For two hours on Thursday night, I was in what for six hundred years has been the city of Louvain. The Germans were burning it, and to hide their work they kept us locked in the railroad carriages. But the story was written against the sky, was told to us by German soldiers incoherent with excesses; and we could read it in the faces of women and children being led to concentration camps and of citizens on their way to be shot." 35 Davis' was not the only voice raised against German schrecklichkeit. Newspapers all over the world denounced the crime. And Romain Rolland, a wartime contributor to the Neue Ziircher Zeitung, wrote in an open letter to the German dramatist, Gerhart Hauptmann, "Are you descendants of Goethe or Attila the Hun?" At the time the Germans were putting Louvain to the torch, the British were waiting complacently for the first victories of their tiny expeditionary force, the "Old Contemptibles," who had gone forward to Mons. It was representative of the British state of mind that three elderly gentlemen—Bennet Burleigh, Henry W. Nevinson, and Frederick Villiers—should be out riding in Hyde Park on fine mornings, getting themselves in shape to cover the war. They had always gone out on horseback, and they could not conceive that this war would be any different. Then the terrible news came in from Mons, where the Germans shattered the British forces. Arthur Moore, a war correspondent for the Times of London, and Hamilton Fyfe, a correspondent for

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the London Daily Mail, wrote their stories at Amiens on August 29. Moore's story, the celebrated Amiens Telegram, was published in the Times next day, with Fyfe's following, both having been passed through censorship by a considerate official, F. E. Smith, later to be Lord Birkenhead. "We have to face the fact," wrote Moore, "that the BEF . . . has suffered terrible losses and requires immediate and immense reinforcement. The B E F has won indeed imperishable glory, but it needs men, men, and yet more men." 36 The French were bracing for their first stand on the Mame, and all the world watched and wondered. Wythe Williams of the New York Times saw the old Paris taxicabs, each crowded with French soldiers, puttering off to the northeast where the big guns were thundering on the Mame.37 He understood then what General Joseph-Simon Gallieni, the military governor of Paris, had meant when he had vowed that he would defend the city to the last man. The taxicab army of only 6,000 men was the final resort. Then, miraculously, the French held. The Germans were flung back. The correspondents were permitted at last to go out to the Marne by the censorship officials. But instead of being able to tell the great story, they were, almost to a man, rounded up by suspicious French officers, forcibly detained overnight, and told they were being held as spies. It was futile, trying to be a correspondent under such circumstances. Williams joined the first American ambulance unit, determined to do something useful, and served under fire at Amiens until Christmas, 1914, when he finally was given permission by the French government to go to the front. Nevinson offered his assistance to a Quaker ambulance unit at Dunkirk for a few months. Gibbs was luckier, being one of six correspondents officially recognized for accreditation to the front. The only American with such official accreditation from the British authorities during the early years of the war was Frederick Palmer, a correspondent for Collier's, and a veteran war reporter who served all American wire services and newspapers. As for the rest, they scratched for what they could get, and most of that never passed censorship. Now and then, as the war progressed, a reporter performed some heroic feat and attracted attention. But by and large, the agony and the effort and the risk and the sheer staying power required of all reporters in war zones was very largely unrecognized after the opening weeks. Wilbur Forrest, who went to Europe early in the war for the United

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Press and later achieved a certain amount of fame as a correspondent, wrote a bitter and cynical denunciation of the system: " A heavy defeat in the field was often described as a strategic withdrawal, or even more boldly, the occupation of a new position in accordance with plan. Communiques minimized defeat and exaggerated victory. They did so rightly, because in a struggle of world magnitude it was a vital function of the communique writers to keep the people at home in an optimistic frame of mind. . . . " T h e war correspondent of 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 8 was nevertheless a sort of glorified disseminator of official military propaganda. . . . The critical correspondent was outflanked, decimated, routed." 3 8 T h e even more knowledgeable Frederick Palmer put it this way on the basis of his frustrating experiences from the outset of the war: " M y personal story is a thread, running through the familiar background, knotted with moments of acute consciousness of the double life I led—when I was cast for the part of a public liar to keep up the spirits of the armies and the peoples of our side." 3 9 Palmer and Elmer Roberts, the chief of the Paris bureau of the AP, were able to see the M a m e battlefields only because they were foresighted enough to persuade Senator Paul Doumer, afterward President of France, to escort them. But on his return to London, Palmer found the British raising so many objections to his projected trip to join their armies that he went instead to Berlin. There, he found the victoryflushed Germans only too willing to let the press representatives of the great neutral, the United States, see how easily they were crushing the enemy. The winning side never objects to having its story told by correspondents it deems "objective," meaning either too polite or too lazy to look below the glossy surface of immediate success. Eventually, when Palmer and his few associates were received by the British forces in France, much to the disturbance of French headquarters, it was with several distinct reservations. "There was not the freedom of the old days, but there can never be again for the correspondent," Palmer wrote. " W e lived in a mess with our conducting officers, paying for our quarters, food and automobiles. I do not recall ever having asked to go any place without receiving consent. Day after day we sallied forth from our chateau to different headquarters and billets for our grist, and having written our dispatches, turned them over to the officers for censorship. W e rarely had our

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copy cut. We had learned too well where the line was drawn on military secrecy. "The important items were those we left out; and these made us public liars!" 40 Here was the basis for another new concept of foreign correspondence either during wartime or under conditions similar to war. The correspondent was told the rules, given all assistance, treated as if he were the very prince of good fellows, and trusted to be his own censor because he had "learned too well where the line was drawn." Just in case he forgot, the censor was there to take care of him. And in Britain, there was an added refinement under the Defense of the Realm Act (DORA), when British newspapers cheerfully accepted government suggestions against publishing certain things that might help the enemy. This meant that any rebellion would have to start at the top, not at the level of the correspondents, if it was to be effective, and that is precisely what happened. Provoked by what he considered government laxity in not providing the British army with high explosive shells in sufficient quantity, Northcliffe soon began moving against Lord Kitchener's regime in the War Office. When Colonel Repington managed to cable the Times through censorship on May 15, 1915, that "the want of an unlimited supply of high explosive was a fatal bar" to the success of a British attack in France, Northcliffe threw off all restraint. On May 21, in the Daily Mail, he wrote and published a devastating editorial, "Kitchener's Tragic Blunder," blaming the great soldier for the shell shortage. The Daily Mail lost 238,000 circulation. Both the Mail and Times were burned on the Stock Exchange. Northcliffe, however, was obdurate; in part, he was responsible for the fall of the Liberal Asquith cabinet in May, 1915, and the rise of a coalition which, while retaining Asquith and Kitchener, brought in David Lloyd George as Munitions Minister.41 The same thing happened in France. Despite even more severe press restrictions, the snarling old Tiger, Georges Clemenceau, kept up an unceasing fire against government laxity despite the war. He had only a small paper, L'Homme Libre, but in it he disclosed that wounded French soldiers transported in a dirty freight car (Quarante Hommes, Huit Chevaux) had contracted tetanus. L'Homme Libre was suspended for a week, whereupon Clemenceau immediately put out a supposedly new paper called L'Homme Enchaine. When that, too, was suppressed,

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he printed private copies and sent them out to the Deputies with pitiless attacks on the supreme military commander in France, General Joffre, and others.42 The government didn't have the nerve to arrest him; through his little paper, in fact, he eventually became the government and, with Generalissimo Ferdinand Foch and the heroic poilus, the savior of France. The coverage of the war on the western front settled down to an exhausting, nerve-wracking routine. Reuters had 1 1 5 men on active duty in all theaters, but mostly in the west, and of the total fifteen were killed and several others were accounted as missing. The AP and the UP had smaller but no less expert staffs, headed respectively by Elmer Roberts and William Philip Simms. The correspondents who eventually were permitted at British headquarters included such veterans as Philip Gibbs and Frederick Palmer, Percival Phillips of the London Morning Post; W . Beach Thomas of the London Daily Mail; H. Perry Robinson of the Times of London, and Herbert Russell of Reuters. There were many others who were active, including such major Paris-based correspondents as Wythe Williams of the New York Times, Paul Scott Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News, Sisley Huddleston of the Christian Science Monitor, Arno Dosch-Fleurot of the New York World, Stoddard Dewey of the New York Evening Post, who was dean of the corps, and Frederic Villiers, the war artist.43. Frequently, the newer correspondents were the ones who caught the greatest share of attention. Will Irwin, the author of a famous story about the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, wrote the most devastating account of the German use of poison gas at Ypres on April 22, 1915, published in the New York Tribune. He was much admired, also, for his detailed reconstruction of the battle from the British side.44 Herbert Bayard Swope, the mercurial correspondent of the New York World, interviewed General Paul von Hindenburg after the German victory over the Russians at Tannenberg, toured the Somme on the German side, and wrote a story of the fighting there that helped him win a Pulitzer Prize.45 Edgar Ansel Mowrer, younger brother of Paul Scott Mowrer, broke into journalism as a war correspondent and later toured occupied Belgium with Herbert Hoover's relief commission.48 Not all the work was a battle against censorship. At strategic times, all censorship would be removed to let news of inestimable benefit to the Allies flow freely. Such a day came on May 7, 1915, when the

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Lusitania was sunk off the Irish coast. On the Cunarder's departure from New York, an ad signed by the Imperial German Embassy in some New York papers had warned passengers not to board the ship, but the warning had been disregarded. When Wilbur Forrest heard the first rumor of the sinking in the UP London office, he quickly confirmed it by telephoning the British Admiralty. He was told that the great ship, with 1,924 persons aboard, had gone down off Old Kinsale Head after being hit by two torpedoes from a German submarine. There had been no warning. Survivors were being landed at Queenstown (Cobh). The UP flash went out all over the world, as did the AP flash which originated with James Ryan, its resident correspondent at Queenstown. Within hours, Forrest and other correspondents, British and American, were at Queenstown, talking with survivors, and it was there, finally, that the tragic story unfolded. A total of 1,153 persons, including 114 Americans, had lost their lives, among them Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Elbert Hubbard, Charles Frohman, and Herbert Stone, son of the AP general manager, Melville E. Stone. Forrest alone sent 7,000 words of skeletonized cable copy on the Lusitania story, which was just a fraction of the flood that British censorship permitted to flow over the world's communications systems. "Perhaps [Forrest wrote later] these words contributed something to a growing sentiment in the United States which eventually brought us into the European War." 47 Forrest, of course, was right. The factual reporting of German folly in wartime, in itself, was a powerful factor in swaying American public opinion. First Belgium, then the Lusitania, began hardening American sentiment against Germany despite everything that blundering German agents and fanatical German-Americans could do. It was something more than a mere passing incident when David Lawrence of the AP was able to report exclusively the resignation of William Jennings Bryan as Secretary of State in the Wilson cabinet, soon after the Lusitania sinking.48 That, in itself, was a symbol of the power and the effectiveness of the press despite the suppression of much news under wartime censorship. There was another, even more potent, symbol—Richard Harding Davis, crusading in the last weeks of his eventful life for American participation in the war on the Allied side. Whatever his colleagues

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may have thought of him with his tailor-made correspondents' uniforms, his D'Artagnan posturing, and the wealth that rolled in on him from his plays and his novels, there was no doubt of his hold on the American public. In his lectures, in his war books, in his correspondence, he hammered away at the theme of intervention with the singleness of purpose that William Allen White was to display a quarter-century later during World War II. After returning from a visit to the war fronts in Europe, he was working at his home, Crossroads Farm, in Mount Kisco, N.Y., on the evening of April 1 1 , 1916, on a piece about preparedness. Martin Egan, the old AP correspondent who had covered the Russo-Japanese war, talked with him briefly by telephone that evening and recalled that the conversation ended abruptly. Davis' stout heart had failed, but he had left behind a final appeal to his countrymen which he had written that night: "That France and her Allies succeed should be the hope and prayer of every American. The fight they are waging is for the things the real, unhyphenated American is supposed to hold most high and most dear. Incidentally, they are fighting his fight, for their success will later save him, unprepared as he is to defend himself, from a humiliating and terrible thrashing. And every word and act of his now that helps the Allies is a blow against frightfulness, against despotism, and in behalf of a broader civilization, a nobler freedom, and a much more pleasant world in which to live." 49 Soon afterward, the British naval victory at the battle of Jutland gave added support to the Allied cause. The news was reported first by the regular correspondents, based on the official communiques. But afterward, Rudyard Kipling functioned once again as a journalist and wrote his own account of the events of May 31, 1916, for the London Daily Telegraph.60 Philip Gibbs reported another milestone in the art of making war when he described the birth of the tank on the Somme in 1916: "Our soldiers roared with laughter, as I did, when they saw them lolloping up the roads. On the morning of the great battle of September 15 the presence of the tanks going into action excited all the troops along the front with a sense of comical relief. . . . Men followed them laughing and cheering." H. G. Wells, who had dreamed of this monster, could scarcely add anything to the reality of it in his

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own piece for the London Daily Chronicle. All he could say was: "They were my grandchildren." 5 1 The most moving stories of the war, to neutral America as well as to others, were those written about Verdun by Gibbs, Wythe Williams, Paul Scott Mowrer, and their associates. No writer on the Allied side, standing in the presence of a generation of dead Frenchmen who had purchased a terrible victory with their sacrifices, could fail to be affected and transmit his feeling to his readers. Williams, returning from Verdun, quoted Joffre at the Grand Quartier General, Chantilly, "I do not speak of the wounded. At Verdun, our losses were 460,000 killed, and the Germans 540,000. It is a field of a million dead." 52 The Allies desperately needed the United States now. Italy, the feluctant ally who had come into the war in 1915, was not doing well. The news from the Russian front, never good from the beginning, was growing alarming. And at the Dardanelles, site of the worst British setback of the war outside the western front, there was a burial of dead hopes and brave men. Winston Churchill, who had had such hopes for the Dardanelles campaign, was dropped from the cabinet and went to France as a soldier, but only for a short time. The public learned soon enough of the Dardanelles failure. But one correspondent, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, who tried to circumvent censorship to tell the story in its darkest colors, was caught, sent home, and blacklisted by all commands. Nevinson, who also covered the losing campaign and might have been expected to protest, dismissed the Ashmead-Bartlett case with these quiet words: "It might be argued that a correspondent is justified in breaking his pledged word for what he considers to be the highest interests of the country, but there is no question that the man who is discovered doing it has to go." 53 And yet, censorship was circumvented successfully on another Allied secret which was not, however, of quite such strategic importance. Toward the end of 1916, Wythe Williams sent a message to Carr V. Van Anda, the managing editor of the New York Times, asking him to read a recent piece in Collier's by Alden Brooks. It was about the hero of Verdun, General Petain, who had said within earshot of alert journalists at a critical moment, "They shall not pass!" Van Anda knew, of course, that Williams wanted to use the article as a code and cabled back: "Does Brooks's man want a job with us?"

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"Yes," Williams replied. "We are dickering for him now." Van Anda guessed a change of command was coming. His next message was: "Is Brooks's man to have only the French branch house or the entire firm?" There was a considerable exchange over this, and the censors were none the wiser, until Williams finally came through with two messages within hours of each other. The first was: "Brooks's man wants too much. Think it best to consider his assistant." Then came this one: "Assistant accepts." The New York Times, as a result, ran a story under a Washington dateline, as protection for Williams, announcing that General Robert Georges Nivelle would succeed General Joffre as the French commander. The same code was used a little later to announce General Petain's elevation to succeed General Nivelle. The Times kept its secret despite a lot of official prying.54 Northcliffe, meanwhile, was playing a powerful role in unmaking another cabinet in Britain. When David Lloyd George came into power as Prime Minister at the end of 1916, he asked Northcliffe to call on him at 10 Downing Street, but the press lord curtly refused. The two men had quarreled bitterly and Lloyd George had said at one time: "I would as soon go for a sunny evening stroll around Walton Heath with a grasshopper as try and work with Northcliffe." But they did work together. And eventually, another pet hate of Northcliffe's, Winston Churchill, came back into the cabinet and occupied the War Office post that Kitchener had filled until he went down with the torpedoed H.M.S. Hampshire.56 There was, however, no king-making at the front. Sickened by the horrors of trench warfare, the tank and gas and heavy artillery attacks, the enormous loss of life to gain a few feet of ground, the correspondents turned with a kind of relief to write of the air war, and the censors permitted them great liberty. True, the Zeppelin and the primitive bombing plane had done damage in the cities of Europe, but wholesale death had not yet begun to rain from the skies. Such Allied fliers as Rene Fonck, Georges Guynemer, Albert Ball, W. A. Bishop, and, later, Eddie Rickenbacker, were pictured as knights of the air. Even the Germans, Oswald Boelcke, Max Immelman, and Manfred von Richthofen, were given the qualities of generous foes. They were romanticized

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almost beyond recognition even by the grimmest realists among the war correspondents, creating an image that long persisted in the public mind. Nobody thought of writing about the submarine war in the spirit of "well-played-old-chap." It would have been an incredible affront both to the American and Allied publics. The Germans, suffering under the effects of the British blockade, began unrestricted submarine warfare early in 1917 and thus threw away the last chance they had to keep the United States neutral. A nervy 29-year-old Chicagoan, Floyd Gibbons, dramatized that fatal policy with the support of his newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, in one of the strangest exploits of the war. Fresh from the Mexican border, where he had reported the pursuit of Pancho Villa for the Tribune, Gibbons booked passage for Britain on the Cunarder Laconia when he was assigned by his paper to combat reporting overseas. He could have gone on a neutral ship with a good chance of getting through safely, but he actually looked for a ship likely to be torpedoed. When he went aboard, the Tribune saw to it that he was provisioned with a special life preserver, flasks of brandy and fresh water, and several flashlights. This was one reporter who was prepared to survive a torpedoing if he could. The Laconia left New York February 17, 1917. She was sunk by a German submarine on February 25, but most of the 73 passengers and 216 crew members were saved, only 13 aboard being lost. After six hours in lifeboats, the survivors were picked up by rescue vessels. On February 26, the same day President Wilson told Congress that Germany had not yet committed an overt act in the submarine war, Floyd Gibbons's story was distributed by the Chicago Tribune to newspapers throughout the United States, and realists knew it was just a matter of time before the United States entered the war. Two nights later, on February 28, Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who had succeeded Bryan, invited Edwin M. Hood, the AP correspondent at the State Department, to come to his house. There, Lansing told the astounded Hood about a hitherto secret document that gravely incriminated Germany in hostile action against the United States. The AP was offered the document exclusively but only on condition that the source was kept secret.

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Hood consulted his superiors, who agreed to Lansing's conditions and sent a young reporter, Steve Early, for the document. The result was an international sensation: WASHINGTON, D.C., F E B . 2 8

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS IS ENABLED TO RE-

VEAL THAT G E R M A N Y , IN PLANNING UNRESTRICTED S U B M A R I N E W A R F A R E AND COUNTING ITS CONSEQUENCES, PROPOSED AN A L L I A N C E W I T H MEXICO AND J A P A N TO M A K E W A R ON THE UNITED STATES, I F THIS COUNTRY SHOULD NOT REMAIN N E U T R A L . J A P A N , THROUGH MEXICAN MEDIATION, WAS TO B E URGED TO ABANDON HER ALLIES AND J O I N IN T H E ATTACK ON T H E UNITED STATES. MEXICO, FOR HER REWARD, WAS TO RECEIVE GENERAL FINANCIAL SUPPORT F R O M GERMANY, RECONQUER TEXAS, N E W MEXICO, AND ARIZONA LOST PROVINCES

AND SHARE I N THE VICTORIOUS P E A C E T E R M S GER-

MANY CONTEMPLATED.

This was the celebrated Zimmermann telegram—a coded message dated January 19, 1917—which, it was later learned, had been intercepted by British Intelligence, decoded, and turned over to the American authorities. The note was from Dr. Arthur Zimmermann, the Kaiser's new Foreign Minister, to the German embassy in Washington and it was intended for Heinrich von Eckhardt, the German ambassador to Mexico. Von Eckhardt was supposed to propose the deal to the Mexicans. Coming so soon after the Lacotiia story, the effect of this journalistic disclosure was stunning. As a wave of anger swept over the United States, hardheaded journalists crowded into Lansing's office to find out what they could about the AP's beat. Lansing would not talk. The correspondents began to murmur. But at that critical moment, an AP reporter pinned down the reluctant Secretary. "Mr. Secretary, did you know the Associated Press had this story last night?" "Yes." "Did you deny its authenticity?" "No." "Did you object to the Associated Press carrying the story?" "No." Seymour Beach Conger, the AP correspondent in Berlin, soon cabled Dr. Zimmermann's admission that the note was authentic, together

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with this classic excuse: "The instructions were to be carried out only after the declaration of war by America." 56 When the United States entered the war on April 6, 1917, as a result of Germany's continued submarine warfare, the Allied press leaders clearly displayed their relief. Thus, the Times of London wrote that "America has no sordid interests involved. . . . She has come forward to defend the right and overthrow the wrong." Le Matin proclaimed: "President Wilson's message has changed the face of the war." And Le Petit Parisien published a large American flag on its front page with the headline: "America enters the struggle to defend the rights of humanity." 57 The change in the face of the war, envisioned by Le Matin, was painfully slow in coming. The Allies' vaunted spring offensive came to naught. The Italians bogged down on the Isonzo. And in the east, the Russian front collapsed. As the world watched apprehensively, the Red flag was raised over Russia. 3. T H E B I R T H O F T H E S O V I E T

UNION

It was no secret to any informed statesman or journalist in Petrograd that the Tsar's government was tottering in the autumn of 1916. The only question was when it would fall and what would happen afterward, but the Allied publics were carefully sealed off from events. One of the most knowledgeable correspondents, Robert Wilton of the Times of London, wrote privately to his home office on November 16: "I hear that the Allied ambassadors have made very strong representations in high quarters including the Emperor himself who was told in very plain language by H. E. [Sir George Buchanan] that the dynasty was in peril." Like the rest of the Allied press, the Times chose to ignore these and other warnings, evidently on patriotic grounds. Instead, the Times published an overly optimistic Reuters report from Russia on December 11 and headed it: "Russia Firm and United." It wasn't true, as the public learned.68 The conspiratorial monk, Gregory Rasputin, who dominated the weak and foolish Tsarina, Alexandra, was assassinated on December 29, 1916, by Prince Felix Yousoupov and a group of fellow-aristocrats. At a hint from the Foreign Office, however, the Times published only the barest details. Everything else Wilton passed on to Wickham Steed,

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the foreign editor, was suppressed. In addition the grave shortages of food and labor and the disorganized railroad transport, fully known in the Russian capital, did not become news that was publishable in Allied capitals. But the Germans, of course, were well aware of it. Yet, Wilton faithfully persisted. As a Russian-speaking Britisher of long experience, he had worked under such handicaps for many years. Correspondence from Russia had always been difficult. When Charles Dickens had sent George Augustus Sala to Russia in the 1850s for a weekly called Household Words, Sala had used Mazzini's device of inserting a single human hair in his letters home to show if they had been opened.59 Of course they had been. Later, in 1891, when Harold Frederic had toured Russia for the New York Times and emerged with a shocking series on the persecution of Jewish minorities, he had been barred from the country.80 It was to just such a circumstance as this that Wilton owed his appointment as a Moscow correspondent for the old Thunderer. A predecessor, D. D. Braham, had been expelled in 1903 for writing about the Kishinev pogrom. Wilton, also the correspondent for the Glasgow Herald, served from then on as a stringer. For three years the Times refused to send in another man, insisting on Braham's return. But finally, as a part of a diplomatic formula, the Russian government on December 15, 1906, announced that the "administrative measures" against Braham had been "recalled." Thereupon, the Times named Wilton formally as its correspondent.81 Wilton's first major story after that was the announcement of the British—Russian alliance of August 31, 1907, which ended nearly eighty years of conflict between the two nations. It also eased his own position appreciably. But as the Russian revolution cast its shadow over the desperate land, he delivered the most earnest warnings to his paper. On January 17, 1917, he wrote privately to Steed: "Things have been allowed to drift so long that only a very strong and capable government could possibly hope to deal with it satisfactorily. Under present conditions there is no such hope. It is perhaps time for us to speak out. The young Empress and her clique of women have evidently got the reins entirely into their own hands, and the Emperor is being blindly driven into acts that will sooner or later precipitate grave disorders unless a palace revolution averts a general smother. I do not think I am exaggerating the state of affairs." 62

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Two days later the alert correspondent informed his office that he had heard "from all sides" of a plot to get rid of the Tsar and Tsarina. 83 On March 15, amid strikes and riots and the mutiny of troops in Petrograd, Nicholas II abdicated in favor of a provisional government supported by the Duma. In this manner, the sensational news burst on a world that was largely unprepared for it. In Zurich, where a group of Russian revolutionaries was living in exile, Vladimir Ilyitch Ulianov, better known by his pen name of Lenin, refused to believe the news until he had read it in the Swiss newspapers.* His associate, Leon Trotsky, who then was publishing a radical sheet in New York, wrote of the Bolsheviks: " T h e revolutionary explosion they had so long and so tensely awaited caught them unaware." 64 The provisional government of Prince George Lvov, which included Professor Pavel Miliukov as Foreign Minister and Alexander Kerensky as Minister of Justice, sought to keep Russia fighting against Germany. Curiously, when Joseph Stalin reached Petrograd on March 28 and took control of Pravda, the party newspaper that had been founded in 1912, he published a manifesto: "The mere slogan: 'Down With The War,' is absolutely impractical. As long as the German army obeys the orders of the Kaiser, the Russian soldier must stand firmly at his post." 65 The Germans weren't worried about Stalin at that point. Matthias Erzberger, the Catholic Centrist leader who was the Kaiser's chief propagandist, and General Max Hoffman, the chief of the German general staff on the eastern front, both agreed that Lenin and his party should be sent to Russia through Germany to stir up all possible trouble for the shaky new Russian regime.66 On April 8, 1917, Lenin and his party of Bolsheviks, including the sardonic journalist, Karl Radek, boarded a train at Zurich and were sealed into their compartments. Lenin seemed not to hear the cheers of his supporters, the playing of the "Internationale," or the abuse showered on him by his opponents who howled that he was nothing but a German spy. He kept staring toward the distant Alps as the train rolled toward the German border. Radek remarked in a burst of irreverence, "Vladimir Ilyich is imagining himself as premier of the Revo* He never used "Nikolai" Lenin as a pen name, but did sometimes sign himself as "N. Lenin." "Nikolai," however, immediately suggested itself to many people as a Russian name beginning with N, and he became Nikolai Lenin in many minds.

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lutionary Government." Lenin said nothing, but smiled.67 T h e trip did not attract attention in the world press, at the time, and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung waited an appropriate period before publishing a sarcastic observation on the "loving support of Lenin from German Imperialism." 88 It was April 16 before Lenin and his party arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd, to be hoisted on the shoulders of his supporters and given a bouquet of flowers, to which he replied, with some difficulty: "The Russian Revolution, achieved by you, has opened a new epoch. Long live the world-wide Socialist Revolution." 69 It was April 20 before Reuters reported Lenin had passed through Stockholm on his way to Petrograd and April 30 before the Finland Station demonstration reached the British papers, an indication of the difficulties of communication through censorship.70 Wilton, attacked for his dispatches both at home and in Petrograd, was ill in London at the time. Arthur Ransome of the Manchester Guardian was having trouble getting through. Isaac Don Levine, the foreign news editor of the New York Tribune, was so bemused by the situation he saw in the Russian capital that he believed Lenin's attacks on the provisional government had "alienated the large following" he once had. Yet, despite the confusion, Levine was shrewd enough to see that the situation was "fraught with extreme danger." 7 1 Lenin's hammer blows against the Menshevik war policy kept up all summer in the Petrograd soviet and echoed elsewhere in Russia. One by one, his exiled associates rejoined him for the struggle they all knew was coming with the moderate government. The most important of all, Leon Trotsky, who for years had wavered between the Bolshevik and Menshevik wings, left his newspaper, Novy Mir, in New York and boarded a Swedish-bound ship in Brooklyn. He was taken off at Halifax by British Intelligence officers but told a fellow-passenger, Ulrich Salchow, an A P correspondent bound for Sweden, that he would be in Stockholm soon. Within three weeks, he called on Salchow, as he had promised. Asked how he had done it, he remarked: "Easy. I merely told them how I was going back to Russia to end the revolution and throw the force of Russia back into the war wholeheartedly against Germany." He went to Petrograd to do exactly the opposite.72 As the Lvov government wavered, the Bolsheviks under Lenin's urging launched an attack in mid-July in an effort to seize power. The at-

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tempt was premature. After it failed, Lenin fled to Finland and Trotsky was thrown into prison. The principal result of the first test of strength was to bring Alexander Kerensky to power as premier. Within a short time, he had to dismiss the Russian commander-in-chief, General Lavr Komilov, who then advanced on Petrograd with an army in September to overthrow the government. Trotsky was released from prison. Kerensky had to depend on the Bolsheviks to help him turn back Kornilov and became, in effect, their prisoner. It was at this juncture that the most eloquent non-Russian witness of the revolution, John Reed, arrived in Petrograd with his beautiful but eccentric bride, Louise Bryant. Reed was 30 then, had been a journalist for six years, and was deeply attracted to the Soviet cause. His background was anything but proletarian—a member of a well-to-do family in Portland, Ore.; graduate of Harvard as a classmate of Walter Lippmann and T . S. Eliot; dabbler in the drama as a member of the Provincetown group, which had staged one of his short plays with another by his friend, Eugene O'Neill. Nor was his Louise a born revolutionary. She had been the wife of a Portland dentist until she and Reed had fallen in love, but she was scarcely absorbed in him. Her roving eye had caught and held O'Neill at Provincetown until she had tired of him. Still, Reed hadn't seemed to mind and had brought her to Russia with him. 73 During his wandering in Mexico as a war correspondent covering Pancho Villa and his border forays against the American forces, Reed had had a ready market for his pieces in Metropolitan magazine and other publications. But his expedition to Russia was something else again. American editors, wary of his radical outbursts, steered clear of him and he had to accept the rather impractical sponsorship of the Call, a struggling left-wing paper in New York; the Masses, a radical magazine; and the Seven Arts magazine. From the day he arrived in Russia, he was not a reporter but a partisan and made no secret of it. "Already, I have thousands of comrades here," he wrote home.74 There is no doubt that Reed was on top of the story. Even though he did not know Russian, he and Louise made certain they were always with Americans or others who did. He and Louise received much of their information from Alexander Gumberg, a Russian with close ties to the revolutionaries, who was translator and handyman for Colonel Raymond Robins, nominally a Red Cross representative. They also had

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help from others like Albert Rhys Williams, Bill and Anna Shatoff, and Bill's brother, Zorin, all of whom were sympathizers. All through October, 1917, the Bolsheviks met incessantly and laid their plans with Reed as a trusted observer. He wrote home to Boardman Robinson on the New York Call: "It is possible that the proletariat will finally lose its temper and rise; it is possible that the generals will come with fire and sword. . . . It looks like a showdown soon." And for Kerensky, whom he interviewed, there was this chilling prediction: "Life is hideously swift for compromisers here." 75 Events were now racing toward a climax in Petrograd. At the Smolny Institute, the Petrograd soviet began holding all-night meetings early in November. There was no doubt that the Bolsheviks now had a majority. Reed listened to their debates. Then, he would go up to the top floor of the Smolny where the Military Revolutionary Committee was meeting and see how coolly the Soviets were preparing to make their bid by force of arms. On November 6, with Lenin and Trotsky urging them on, the Bolsheviks made their decision. On November 7, they struck with all the force at their command. Reed and Louise picked up Albert Rhys Williams that morning and walked to the Winter Palace, where Kerensky had his office. He wasn't there. Soldiers and sailors and Red Guards were everywhere on the streets. Barricades were being thrown up. But although tension was high, nothing had happened yet. Reed and his two friends walked to the Smolny Institute where they saw that fourteen out of the twentyfive members of the presidium of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets were Bolsheviks. The moderate Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries attacked the aggressive policy of the Bolsheviks, were voted down, and finally walked out amid hoots and curses. Lenin now was staking everything on his strike for power. Reed's party, now increased to five by the arrival of Gumberg and Bessie Beatty, another visiting journalist, left the Smolny Institute, were given passes and rode to the Winter Palace in time to see the Red Guards, soldiers, and sailors swarm to the attack. The takeover was so swift that Reed and Louise were able to wander around inside the Winter Palace. He even picked up a jeweled sword as a souvenir and smuggled it out with him. On the next evening, Reed was at the Smolny Institute when Lenin, short and stocky in his ragged clothes, stood before the Congress of

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Soviets, accepted their ovation and shouted, "We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order." He read the Bolshevik program: immediate talks to arrange for peace, no indemnities or annexations, publication of secret treaties, and a three-month armistice.78 Reed heard it all.77 But neither he nor any other correspondent was able to get much through Soviet censorship. On November 8, Reuters had sixteen lines from Petrograd saying that naval forces had seized a few points in the city but otherwise things were "normal." On November 9 it was clear that the Bolshevik coup d'etat had been successful. Wilton, who was then in London, put together a column of news out of telegrams to the Times from various sources.78 But on November 12, Wilton's information from Petrograd was so uncertain that he had a story in the paper headed, "Lenin Losing Control." 79 The Times hastily called James David Bourchier from the Balkans as a temporary replacement, but he evidently could learn little during all the disorder and soon left. The mob soon turned on the correspondents, always a ready target in any such situation. Charles Stephenson Smith, the AP bureau chief in Petrograd, was knocked cold by a soldier swinging a rifle butt, and another member of the AP staff was shot in the knee by a sniper.80 Guy Beringer, the Reuters correspondent, escaped with his wife to Finland but didn't know when he was well off. He came back, was thrown into prison for six months, and barely escaped execution.81 Reed was just about the only foreigner who could work effectively at this period. He cabled a short statement from Lenin to the American Socialists on November 15. Six days later, he filed his first complete story of the revolution and had it cleared through censorship. It ran in the New York Call under a seven-column banner.82 The Bolshevik victory was then complete. Kerensky escaped, but most of his associates in the Provisional Government were jailed. Lenin was the commissar who headed the Council of People's Commissars. Trotsky was the commissar for foreign affairs, Stalin the commissar for national minorities. This was the government that concluded an armistice with Germany on December 3, 1917, and took Russia out of the war with the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of March 3,1918. Far from removing the steely grip in which the tsars had held Russia for so many centuries, the new masters of Russia merely replaced the old imperial repressions with their own. Their excuse was the necessity

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for the security of the state; as a result, they instituted a tighter form of state-controlled journalism. One of its manifestations was strict censorship, another the deliberate falsification of the news when that was believed necessary. When local Soviet leaders executed the Tsar, Tsarina, and their children on July 16, 1918, at Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk), fearful that they might be liberated by anti-Bolshevist forces, the official government paper Izvestia announced three days later that the Tsar had been shot, but that "the wife and son of Nicholas Romanov were sent to a safe place." The world did not really know the truth for many months, although rumors of the executions spread widely. Then, a young former UP correspondent in Berlin, Carl W . Ackerman, reached Ekaterinburg with the Czech Legion, formed out of former Austrian war prisoners in Russia, and verified the tragic end of the Romanovs. He published his story in the New York Times.83 At about the time of the Tsar's execution, John Reed was back in the United States, defending Russia with all his strength. He was indicted for sedition as a result of his antiwar activities but nothing came of it. Instead, he returned to Russia with Louise Bryant and worked in the Soviet propaganda bureau, an enthusiastic convert to state-controlled journalism. When he died of typhus in 1920, he was buried with the heroes of the Soviet Union inside the Kremlin wall. American opinion on Russia, so vital a force in world affairs in the years to come, also was significantly affected by the work of a variety of other commentators and correspondents, among the most important being George Kennan, then 72 years old, in the Outlook; Professor Samuel Northrup Harper in the Christian Science Monitor; Harold Williams, correspondent for the New York Times; Louis Edgar Browne, correspondent for the Chicago Daily News; Colonel George Harvey, former ambassador to the Court of St. James's, in the North American Review's War Weekly; Max Eastman in the Liberator; Oswald Garrison Villard in 7 he Nation, and Walter Lippmann in the New Republic. Kennan, one of the leading authorities on Russia in his day, was one of the proponents of intervention, however cautious, in Siberia and thereby anticipated the Wilson administration's eventual action. Professor Harper, who also had a deep firsthand knowledge of Russia, was for economic aid plus moral support of the Russian people, but did not necessarily oppose the use of military force in this connection. Colonel

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Harvey wanted all-out intervention, using Japanese troops, principally, in Siberia, as a counterweight to any possibility that the new Russian regime might give aid and comfort to the German war machine. Villard and Eastman both favored recognition of the new Soviet regime, with the former taking a strong line against intervention. Lippmann, so soon to become one of the strongest journalistic voices of his time, also opposed intervention, basing himself on Wilson's one-time position against intereference in Russia's internal affairs. Yet, despite the importance of the times and the issues, there was a crucial shortage of authentic, firsthand information from Russia in some of the leading news agencies and newspapers in the world.* The most dramatic was the refusal of the Times of London to send in a permanent correspondent from the time that Wilton returned home in 1917 (Bourchier served briefly and temporarily) until relaxation of censorship made it possible to send a staff man to Moscow in 1939 to cover the abortive talks on an Anglo-Soviet Pact. The Times depended mainly on wire services and its own man in Riga, R . O. G . Urch, who had once been imprisoned by the Bolsheviks for two months. During the period between the enforced departure of the A P Petrograd staff in 1918 and the end of the intervention period, the A P also was without a staff man in the capital. Mrs. Marguerite Harrison of Baltimore, who had been a reporter for the Baltimore Sun in 1916 and a war correspondent with the A E F in France, tried to act as an undercover correspondent for the A P in Petrograd during the interim but was caught, jailed for a short time as a suspected spy and thereafter desisted. The A P reported Russia from its perimeter, as did a number of other newsgathering organizations. Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov's refusal to grant visas to correspondents whose views were not "of known sympathy" with Soviet rule made it impossible for a time to get foreign correspondents inside Russia. In this respect, the Soviet regime merely continued the Russian tradition of the tsars. The new masters of Russia were against a press they could not wholly control. When Lenin ordered the merger of the Petrograd Telegraph Agency and the Soviet Press Bureau in 1918 to form * Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, in a supplement to the New Republic of Aug. 4, 1920, showed the ineptitude of American press coverage by pointing to the many false reports of the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime.

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the Russian Telegraph Agency, Rosta, he also saw to it that a special section called Agit-Rosta was organized to get out propaganda for party workers. In 1925, Rosta became the Telegrafnoie Agenstvo Sovietskavo Soyuza, the Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union, or, to use its familiar name, Tass.84 The basic attitudes toward the press in general and foreign correspondence in particular that were so apparent at the birth of the Soviet Union became a pattern for the future. On some occasions foreign correspondents were treated with indulgence and permitted some leeway, on others they were held in the tightest restraint. But at no time for many years were there to be large numbers of them inside the Soviet Union. 4. T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S AS A W O R L D

POWER

General John J. Pershing, then a major general, marched off the Cunarder Baltic at Liverpool with a small group of officers on June 8, 1917. For the thoughtful ones among the knot of correspondents who gathered on the pier, it was a symbolic act—the arrival of the United States as a world power. And yet, there was an air of improbability about the whole business, as if nobody was quite willing to take America's lofty aspirations seriously. The welcoming British military mission did the honors for General Pershing, then one of them asked, indicating the American's modest entourage: "General, is this your personal staff?" The grim-faced Pershing replied, "No, this is my general staff." 8 5 Next, to make everything seem completely homey to the Americans, there was a fine censorship foul-up. The British censors had forbidden mention of Pershing's port of debarkation, which caused the impish Floyd Gibbons to draft the following cable to the Chicago Tribune and see it cleared: PERSHING LANDED AT BRITISH PORT TODAY AND WAS GREETED B Y LORD MAYOR OF LIVERPOOL 8 6

Pershing, with a military man's simple directness, had decided he would be able to control the press by limiting the numbers of correspondents and by getting the best man he could find to handle censorship matters. The limit of a dozen correspondents was soon exceeded. Before the war was over, there were sixty Americans who had been

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officially accredited to the AEF as correspondents and a number of others, including such imposing figures as Herbert Bayard Swope and Westbrook Pegler, who weren't on the rolls of the military in any form. As for the chief censor, he turned out to be the veteran Frederick Palmer, who gave up an estimated $40,000 a year and a new job as the New York Herald correspondent at the front to become a lowly public relations major at $175 a month, with nothing to look forward to except incalculable abuse. Palmer was then 44 years old. He had been newspapering since he had written about a Fourth of July parade for the Jamestown (N.Y.) Morning Post at the age of 15. At 22 he had gone to London and Paris to do pieces for the New York Press. Then, working for Collier's and various newspapers, he had covered a long string of big and little wars —the Greek-Turkish war, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine insurrection, the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese war, and the Mexican border war, among others. Palmer, without doubt, was one of the most experienced of living war correspondents. Yet, it scarcely qualified him for censorship, as both he and General Pershing were to discover ultimately.87 The new chief of the A E F censors should have known better, of course, but no one is more ferociously military than a journalist who is put into uniform and given a command. He decreed that all correspondents, uniformed by General Pershing's orders, would have to be herded together like a party of tourists wherever they went. All copy was to be cleared by his office—and his office was unyielding on protests. There were a lot of other rules, many of them irksome and some unnecessary. The upshot was that long before the first American troops arrived at the front, the unruly and independent-minded American war correspondents decided they didn't like the system and had distinct doubts about their old colleague, Major Palmer. Floyd Gibbons took off from the correspondents' bivouac in France and busied himself with some mysterious assignments in Paris. A large and rumpled New York Tribune correspondent, Heywood Broun, also had a bad habit of deserting the Palmer establishment and eventually had his accreditation suspended—which bothered him not at all. Still others poked around in odd places and found out things they shouldn't. And those who were beaten on stories invariably protested heatedly that they had abided by the rules and lost out to less gentlemanly but

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more competitive comrades. "This," wrote the despondent Palmer, "is worse than war." 88 His trials as a censor had only begun, however. When the first American troops, units of the 1st Division, arrived in convoy at St. Nazaire on June 26, the American correspondents were out in force against their natural enemies, the censors. Major Palmer decreed that nothing could be printed until the last ship bearing the last troops in the convoy made port. There was a lot of grumbling, succeeded by the usual scheming. But to the surprise of Major Palmer, and the discomfiture of the American correspondents, the big news was published first by their Allies. It so happened that a French censor at Ce Soir, Paris, efficiently killed the story of the American landing in page proof but forgot to kill the headline. Accordingly, Ce Soir came out with a blank column under these words in large type on Page One: L E PREMIER CORPS EXPEDITIONNAIRE AMERICAIN EST ARRIVE A SAINT-NAZAIRE.

The British correspondents didn't bother to wait for Major Palmer's stamp of approval but forwarded their copy directly to London by courier. For once, the British censors were less efficient than their American counterparts. It was Reuters, therefore, that carried the first news to the United States of the landing of the modest AEF contingent in France.89 American editors and correspondents, who aspire to a high degree of sophistication except when they are beaten on a story, particularly by the British, reacted with a first-rate display of journalistic rage, but it didn't do them much good. The determined Major Palmer refused to turn any American dispatches loose until July a, when the last ship of the convoy reached port. This was distinctly not the way a great power was expected to handle its affairs. The United States was at war; and yet, despite everything the State Department, the War Department, and the Creel Committee on Public Information could do, the press was conducting business pretty much as usual. Every editor and correspondent swore wholeheartedly that he would be the last to give aid and comfort to the enemy, but few would agree to sit on any piece of war news for very long. This was in the old, independent tradition of American journalism. In consequence, an ever greater strain was placed on the principle of freedom of the press. To add to Major Palmer's woes, there were unintended excesses of reporting that were caused by sheer enthusiasm. One of the most

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famous incidents occurred on July 4, 1917, when the American correspondents, having nothing better to do, traipsed out to Little Picpus Cemetery on the outskirts of Paris to watch General Pershing lay a wreath on the tomb of Lafayette. Major Charles E. Stanton, the AEF paymaster, one of the early speakers, was an old-time country orator. As the general stood by, the major wound himself up to a pitch of oratorical fervor, ending his remarks with a ringing, "Lafayette, we are here!" General Pershing, who followed him, muttered as he laid the wreath on the tomb of Lafayette that the paymaster had spoken for all Americans. In the confusion and hubbub, the correspondents, who were some distance off, gained the impression that Pershing had spoken the historic words. Floyd Gibbons, among others, cabled them home in an effusive July 4 story. Major Palmer wrote sorrowfully of the incident that Pershing was no orator: "He was not a phrase-maker, except the 'Lafayette, we are here!' of Paymaster Stanton, which was credited to him, and led to false expectations."90 It was a talented but unruly crew that Palmer tried to discipline. To have to handle a young Heywood Broun and a young Westbrook Pegler at the same time would have been a sufficient chore for any censor. In addition, he had to keep tabs on, among others, Damon Runyon of the New York American, Irvin S. Cobb of the Saturday Evening Post, a hard-boiled, 28-year-old Virginian, Edwin L. (Jimmy) James, of the New York Times-, Junius Wood, a Chicago Daily News man who operated as if he were back at City Hall; wily Fred F. Ferguson, of the UP, and Raymond Carroll, a loner known as the "Hermit Crab" who wrote for the Philadelphia Public Ledger. There was usually a publisher around, as well. When Floyd Gibbons got into trouble, as he frequently did, he would bring in a doughty major, Robert R. McCormick, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune.91 To transmit sensitive war news to such a crew, to say nothing of the regulars in Paris, would have tried the talents of a Theodore Roosevelt. Major Palmer had grave forebodings when he led his charges toward the front on October 23, 1917. They were bound for the town of Bathelemont, on the Lorraine front, where it was expected the first American gun crew would go into action that day. As they halted some miles from their destination, a battery of American artillery passed them with a familiar figure draped on a caisson. The always alert Runyon yelled, "Hey, there's Gibbons! How the hell did he get there?" Gibbons

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and Raymond Carroll saw the first shot fired from a French 75 by the Americans that day. Gibbons got the shell case and was persuaded with difficulty to give it up so it could be presented to President Wilson. Then he and Carroll, as a penalty for their unwarranted enterprise, were placed under arrest for forty-eight hours, but were permitted to send their stories after the rest.82 The other "firsts," so dear to the hearts of American newspapermen, were soon disposed of—the first wounded American, the first to be killed in action, the first German prisoner (who was bayoneted after he was disarmed, a detail that was quickly censored).93 Palmer, after some months of such trials, was relieved. The military succeeded him, but without improvement in an altogether trying situation for both correspondents and censors.94 Life for the correspondents in the American sector continued to be every bit as frustrating as that under the British and French. The censors had to bear down. It was in the nature of modern war and of the modern state fighting for self-preservation, as even the veteran Wythe Williams discovered. When he evaded censorship by mailing an article to Collier's giving the detailed reasons for the failure of an Allied offensive, his credentials were immediately suspended, and he was nearly expelled from France in disgrace. The man who saved him was Georges Clemenceau, the Tiger, who had come to power that fall and who, even as premier of France, remembered his first profession and his friends.95 In a situation of this kind, there was only one way to stay ahead of the opposition, and that was to use the quickest (and the most expensive) cable services to bring in the official news. Carr V . Van Anda of the New York Times was among those who realized it. As soon as the massive Ludendorff spring offensive began on March 21, 1918, on the western front, Van Anda kept cabling Walter Duranty, a young Britisher in the Times's Paris office, to send everything at the "double urgent" message rate. That was 75 cents a word. It enabled the Times to print news of the current date from the battlefield, when it was officially released. In effect, this was a mere process of expediting official communiques, although Edwin L. James did send some firsthand stories of Americans in action as they began to make themselves felt.96 It was the courageous Gibbons, always disregarding his own safety, who nearly lost his life by going into combat. On June 6, 1918, he en-

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tered Belleau Wood with the U.S. Marines and was hit three times by machine gun bullets, one gouging out an eye. Lieutenant Oscar Hartzel, a former New York Times man, helped him to safety, an exploit for which the correspondent received the Croix de Guerre and the famous patch over his left eye that was his trademark. The soldier was mentioned in the newspaper reports.97 There was less glory still for the newspapermen who stayed in the ambulance corps. One of them, a young man from the Kansas City Star, Ernest Hemingway, was thankful he was able to survive the Italian campaign.98 It was Clemenceau, the old journalist, who dominated the final stages of the war. He had begun his second term as premier on November 16, 1917, and, as the Germans smashed forward in their final offensive he rallied his people: "I shall fight before Paris, I shall fight behind Paris. The Germans may take Paris but that will not stop me from carrying on the war. We shall fight on the Loire, we shall fight on the Garonne, we shall fight even on the Pyrenees. And should we be driven off the Pyrenees, we shall continue the war from the sea. But as for asking for peace, never!" The biggest news now emanated from the headquarters of the generalissimo, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, as the Allies held the Germans at the second battle of the Marne. But once more, the American correspondent reached for competitive advantage. Fred Ferguson of the UP learned of the projected American offensive at St. Mihiel and prepared a series of bulletins, with the time left blank, announcing the achievement of each objective. He turned these over to Captain Gerald Morgan, the field censor at Nancy, and asked him to release them when he could. Morgan agreed. Next, Ferguson hired an auto and kept James Howe of the AP and Hank Wales of International News Service out of headquarters for hours. When they returned, Ferguson had sheafs of congratulatory telegrams; his rivals had rockets, as angry inquiries from the home office are known.99 It was simply in the nature of such correspondents to compete, regardless of censorship, and whatever the ultimate cost might be. For just as Ferguson was able to bring the first news to the United States of the St. Mihiel offensive, Wales gained journalistic fame for an exploit of his own. His was the most eloquent report of the execution of a Dutch dancer, Gertrud Margarete Zelle, and through it he helped

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create the twentieth-century legend of the femme fatale, Mata Hari, as she called herself when she was not selling military secrets to the Germans.100 The pendulum of interest swung briefly from the advancing Allies to New York on September 16, 1918, when the New York Times published an editorial on Austrian peace feelers that had been put out to avert total defeat. The Times's editorial was deliberately done; written by the editor, Charles Miller, on the basis of news dispatches that had been read to both him and Adolph S. Ochs, the publisher, by Van Anda. Miller dictated the piece to the office from his home in Great Neck, but did not clear it with Ochs, who up to that time had trusted his judgment implicitly. "Reason and humanity," said the editorial, "demand that the Austrian invitation be accepted. The case for conference is presented with extraordinary eloquence and force, a convincing argument is made for an exchange of views that may remove old and recent misunderstandings. . . . We cannot imagine that the invitation will be declined. . . . When we consider the deluge of blood that has been poured out in this war, the incalculable waste of treasure, the ruin it has wrought, the grief that wrings millions of hearts because of it, we must conclude that only the madness or the soulless depravity of someone of the belligerent powers could obstruct or defeat the purpose of the conference." The uproar that had greeted Northcliffe's attack on the British government earlier in the war for failing to send enough high explosive shells to the British troops was a mere murmur compared to the devastating protest that now descended on the New York Times. It was almost as if President Wilson's Fourteen Points for a peaceful settlement had been repudiated, which was certainly not the Times's intention. The President himself was upset. So were some members of the Times's own staff, who thought their newspaper was "running up the white flag." Even more criticism flowed from Allied capitals. Northcliffe, who had been a member of a British wartime mission to the United States, was thoroughly out of sympathy with the New York Times. The newspaper lost circulation that took it years to recover and unfairly gained a reputation for being pro-German.101 Nor was the Times alone in facing such criticism. William Randolph Hearst was attacked throughout the war as pro-German. One reason was Hearst's unwise decision to hire William Bayard Hale, the former

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New York Times correspondent whose pro-German sympathies were known, and send him to Germany. Although Hearst did not know it, Hale was being paid by the Germans at the time. Even more damaging was Hearst's visiting with Paul Bolo Pasha, a Levantine merchant who was reputed to be the financial power behind the Paris newspaper, Le Journal. It later developed that Bolo was being heavily paid by the Germans to influence Allied opinion. He was tried and shot as a traitor, as were some of his associates. It did not make Hearst give up his antiBritish line, however; for he was one of the most vigorous champions of the Irish patriot, Sir Roger Casement, who was executed because the British accused him of holding secret talks with the Germans.102 The effort of Hearst's enemies to make him appear to be a traitor never got very far, in any case. In the final days of the war, the tension among journalists became almost unbearable. Each watched the other for a sign that the news for which the whole world hungered, the end of the war, might be close. Censorship was tighter than ever on all fronts, as a result. Nobody wanted to let down. In this strained atmosphere, Roy W. Howard, the jaunty little president of the UP, left Paris on November 7, 1918, to go to Brest and board an Army transport for home. He knew, of course, that the armistice terms had already been agreed on by the inter-Allied conference. Consequently, when he walked into the office of Admiral Henry B. Wilson, commander of U.S. Navy forces in French waters, he was not particularly surprised when the Admiral handed him a telegram reporting the good news. All Brest was celebrating. "The armistice has been signed," Admiral Wilson said. Howard asked, "Is it official?" "Official, hell, I should say it is official. I just received this over my direct wire from the embassy. It's the official announcement." The wire had been cleared by the Admiral for posting in the office of the Brest newspaper, La Depeche. Outside, the crowd in the streets was cheering. "I beg your pardon, Admiral," Howard asked, "but if this is official and you've announced it to the base and have given it to the local paper for publication, do you have any objection if I file it to the United Press?" "Hell, no. This is official. It is signed by Captain Jackson, our naval attache in Paris. Here's a copy. Go to it."

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This was the message Howard filed, countersigning the name and official press card number of his French bureau chief, William Philip Simms, as required by regulations: UNIPRESS NEWYORK—URGENT ARMISTICE ALLIES GERMANY SIGNED ELEVEN SMORNING HOSTILITIES CEASED TWO SAFTERNOON SEDAN TAKEN SMORNING BY AMERICANS. HOWARD SIMMS

In New York, this became a bulletin under a Paris dateline that incorporated other material. Why not? Wasn't it Howard, the boss himself, who had in some miraculous fashion achieved the greatest beat of the entire war? No wonder the UP put out this triumphant lead: PARIS, NOV. 7

( U P ) — T H E WAR IS OVER. GERMANY AND THE ALLIES

SIGNED AN ARMISTICE AT 1 1 A.M. TODAY, HOSTILITIES CEASING THREE HOURS LATER. AS MARSHAL FOCH's TERMS ARE KNOWN TO INCLUDE PROVISIONS WHICH WILL PREVENT RESUMPTION OF HOSTILITIES, THE GREATEST WAR OF ALL TIME HAS COME TO AN END.

The news touched off a roaring, jubilant, unrestrained celebration throughout the United States. It could not be stopped for hours, even though many an editor viewed the beat with skepticism. A number of papers didn't publish it. The AP issued a note to its editors: AT THIS HOUR THE GOVERNMENT AT WASHINGTON HAS RECEIVED NOTHING TO SUPPORT THE REPORT THAT THAT ARMISTICE HAS BEEN SIGNED AND WE HAVE RECEIVED NOTHING FROM OUR CORRESPONDENTS ABROAD TO SUPPORT IT.

Several hours passed. There was still no confirmation from Washington, London, or Paris. Carl D. Groat, the UP correspondent at the State Department, asked about his boss's exclusive, remarked sourly that it was "too damned exclusive." At 2:15 p.m. on that maddening day, the AP finally put out this bulletin: WASHINGTON, NOV 7

(AP)

IT WAS OFFICIALLY ANNOUNCED AT THE

STATE DEPARTMENT AT 2 : 1 5 O'CLOCK THIS AFTERNOON THAT THE GERMANS HAD NOT SIGNED ARMISTICE TERMS.

In Brest at about that hour, a courier located Howard and told him Admiral Wilson had had a second message from the embassy in Paris.

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That message said the original telegram was now "unconfirmable." Howard was thunderstruck. He filed a correction, but with the cables clogged it didn't get through for many hours. The UP rode with his bulletin to a journalistic disaster. Howard next cabled his alibi, a statement issued by Admiral Wilson: "The statement of the United Press relative to the signing of the armistice was made public from my office on the basis of what appeared to be official and authoritative information. I am in a position to know that the United Press and its representatives acted in perfect good faith, and the premature announcement was the result of an error for which the agency was in no wise responsible." The indignation against the UP was great, but the most moral papers were the ones that happened to be among the greatest rivals of the Scripps-Howard organization. Thus, the New York Tribune said editorially: "The statement of Admiral Wilson is an amazing one. It only intensifies the mystery of what must now rank as one of the greatest hoaxes of newspaper history." The mystery of who actually issued the news on which the telegram to Brest was based never was solved. With the signing of the armistice on November 1 1 , 1918, the incident passed into history.103 Thus, the wartime challenge to the independent press to choose between freedom and security was, for all practical purposes, left unresolved. Government regulation and censorship were merely tolerated by the press of the Allied nations, never fully accepted. Once the big guns fell silent, the press of the West reverted to its old anarchic habits and, ever so briefly, the press of Germany experienced the dizzy sensation of freedom. But in Russia, state-controlled journalism set out to provide its peoples only with information of which the government approved. And this, by all odds, was the greatest challenge and the greatest danger to the continued growth of a free and uninterrupted exchange of foreign information for public consumption.

VIII: Not So Brave . . Not So New 1. " O P E N C O V E N A N T S . . When Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris for the peace-making on December 13, 1918, many a correspondent, with a myopia strange to a querulous profession, actually expected that there would be "open covenants . . . openly arrived at." It was the catch phrase the President had used in his Fourteen Points speech of January 8, 1918. Unhappily, it had been a mere expression of his philosophy, a figure of speech. For when the Council of Ten met on behalf of the Allied and Associated Powers, one of its first decisions was to exclude the press. The red-headed and violent Herbert Bayard Swope of the New York World, known as "Wilson's paper," was chairman of the committee of correspondents, which protested vigorously. The Council relented, but only a trifle. A few meek and well-behaved correspondents were admitted to selected plenary sessions, not Swope. The ever-resourceful gentleman from the World attired himself tastefully in top hat, morning coat, and striped trousers, hired the longest and shiniest black limousine he could find, and had himself driven to the conference scene. His welcome befitted that of any potentate. His story next day was great. Whereupon his angry associates drew up a petition demanding his removal as chairman of their committee. In a light moment, he signed the petition—and killed it.1 The exploit was important only as an illustration of the temper of the correspondents. Since they were determined not to be counted out of the peace-making, they had to be dealt with. But the diplomats, dangerously underrating them, did not do a very thorough job, and the consequences were not long in coming,

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In many ways, Versailles set the pattern for acquainting the public with the vast network of international negotiations that was to develop in the years to come. Sir George Riddle for the British, Ray Stannard Baker for the Americans, and Louis Aubert and sometimes Andre Tardieu for the French set up daily briefings for the press. So did the other delegations that sensed there was a press problem. But, too often, the briefing system became a source of misunderstanding, half-truths, propaganda pitches, and occasionally outright untruths. Now and then, a glamorous figure like Lloyd George would hold a press conference, in which he said little or nothing. Finally, rounding out the pattern of daily information, there were the inevitable wire-pullers who inhabited the half-world between diplomacy and journalism—Wickham Steed, Andre Geraud ("Pertinax"), commentator of the Echo de Paris, and Philippe Millet, foreign editor of Le Temps. It was a miserable system. Even Steed had to concede that "a thick mist veiled the peace conference from the British public." 2 As for the United States, things were even worse. Swope worked with his own sources, as good reporters invariably do. He had the best. There was, first of all, Colonel Edward M. House, Wilson's confidant. Moreover, Frank I. Cobb, the Worlds editor, and his young associate, Walter Lippmann of the New Republic, had written the commentary on Wilson's Fourteen Points—a document House read to an impatient Lloyd George and a scornful Clemenceau. These, too, were Swope's friends.3 They all sought support for Wilson's views, but without publicity, how could there be support? Colonel Stephen Bonsai, the old foreign correspondent who had been on Pershing's staff during the war and now was President Wilson's translator, worried about Wilson's aloofness from the press. He wrote: "I have gloomy forebodings. Not a few of the delegates will 'leak' to their favorite newspaper when the leakage promises to be helpful, and of course the burden of newspaper unpopularity under which the President suffers will be increased by what many have already called 'the revival of Star Chamber proceedings' by one who promised 'open covenants . . . openly arrived at.' " 4 Thus Wilson, by sealing himself up, virtually handed the advantage to the opponents of the League who made sure that the most adverse material would be "leaked" at the very worst time. Wire service men, fighting for every scrap of news against the dominance of the specials,

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took everything they could get. Wilson's secrecy, the uninformative and sometimes dishonest briefings, and the wooden communiques only spurred them on to seek news from his opponents. In this manner, the all-important Article X of the Covenant got out prematurely and with damaging effect. Wilson's chief Republican foes, Senators William E. Borah of Idaho and Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, with the support of the Hearst newspapers, were raising questions about the enforcement of the Covenant. There had been reports out of Paris that Article X, if approved at Versailles and ratified by the American Congress, would pledge United States troops to fight for the League at the discretion of foreign powers. Nothing was more calculated to arouse the indignation of the superpatriots, plus the Republicans who needed a campaign issue. "What is Article X?" the League's foes demanded. "Will it destroy American sovereignty?" Fred Ferguson, one of the United Press correspondents in Paris, began looking around for the text of the proposal. He asked Colonel House for it, but the Colonel refused to give it to him. But another member of the American delegation told him to go to a sixth-floor workroom of the Hotel Crillon at 2 a.m. after the guard had left. The door would be unlocked. No officials would be around at that hour. And inside, on a table, would be a draft of the entire Covenant as far as it had been developed. Ferguson did as he was told. To make certain he would not be interrupted at his diplomatic second-story job, he walked up six flights of stairs at about 2 a.m., found the Covenant draft, copied out Article X , and put it on the cables as quickly as he could. He added no comment, no interpretation. There was no need for it. While the UP thus preserved its impartiality, Lodge, Borah, and Hearst supplied the adverse interpretation. The news beat created a sensation in the United States and aroused roars of protest. The American delegation, of course, tried to find out how the UP had obtained the Article X text, but Ferguson kept his secret. He had broken the story and that was all he cared about. What the result would be was not his concern.5 Scant wonder that Herman Kohlsaat, a Chicago publisher whom Colonel House regarded as a seer, wrote to Paris privately: " I think the great majority of our people are still behind the President. But I fear they are very far behind him." 6 House didn't relish the comment. He began sending out memoranda and private advices to Kohlsaat and

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other friends back home to try to turn the tide of public opinion that was running so heavily against Wilson. But such stuff wasn't easy to publish and, once published, it had no effect. All this tied in with Swope's argument that the American delegation would have to make public some major news through sources that were bound to be favorable if the peace treaty and Covenant were to survive in the United States. He waved aside the communiques, briefing sessions, and private advices as useless. What the journalists wanted was news—and if the news put the treaty and Covenant in a favorable light, so much the better. Wilson and House came around to the idea with painful slowness. They simply weren't used to this kind of a battle, in which every trick was employed to make an impression on the public. Thus, the peace conference degenerated into a brawl. The victors, cocksure that the common menace of Germany had been removed, fought each other at the Council tables. Their adherents in the press vigorously took up the cudgels of national self-interest. And a thoroughly bewildered world public looked on without much comprehension. The British press, led by the London Daily Telegraph and the London Daily Express, belabored Wilson. The French press almost uniformly jumped on Lloyd George, with Jean Herbette of he Temps, Pertinax, and Andre Cheradame leading the attack. The American press, with the notable exception of the New York World, the New York Times, and a few scattered Democratic papers elsewhere, fired away indiscriminately at Wilson as well as his opponents. Sisley Huddleston wrote that Wilson was "bewildered at the assault of the press, English, French and American, upon him." 7 Who could blame him? He had tried to impose his ideals on the world, only to find that the world didn't want them. He had ignored the opposition party at home, lecturing them on their duty instead of making them his partners in the peace-making, and now they took their revenge. At this unhappy juncture in world affairs, Swope finally had his way. As the leading correspondent of "Wilson's paper," he began publishing exclusively some of the major decisions of the conference. When the League Covenant was introduced at a plenary session, so intertwined with the peace treaty that the two could not be separated, Swope had a verbatim report of the proceedings. He also gave the first summary of the German reparations clauses of the treaty.8 Finally, in early April, 1919, he obtained an official summary of the amended and revised

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League Covenant in its final version, primarily through the assistance of President Wilson. The President told him to go to Colonel House's office, adding that the Colonel would not be there, but the document would be. It turned out exactly as the President had arranged. On April 9, Swope published the whole thing exclusively in the World.9 The Paris edition of the rival New York Herald, once the great organ of foreign correspondence, humbly republished the World's account with this acknowledgment: "Mr. Herbert Bayard Swope, the special correspondent of the New York World, has scored the great journalistic success of the Conference by obtaining an analytical synopsis of the new document. By courtesy of Mr. Swope, the Herald is enabled today to reproduce the salient passages of the new version of the Covenant." 1 0 After that, nothing stayed secret for very long. Wilson and his foes were joined in battle to sway public opinion and all the unrealistic communique-briefing officer machinery was shattered. Paul Scott Mowrer obtained an unbound, printed copy of the entire peace treaty from "one of Wilson's professors," not otherwise identified, and cabled essential parts of it to the Chicago Daily News.11 Not to be outdone, the Chicago Tribune produced a complete copy of the same document for Senator Borah,12 who had it published in the Congressional Record for everybody's convenience. Whereupon the New York Times, even then eager for a full text, opened twenty-four telephone and telegraph lines from Washington and republished the treaty from Congressional Record proof sheets. The Times of June 10, 1919, was a monumental publishing job—sixty-two columns, nearly eight full pages, of Versailles Treaty text. The whole thing was now out in the open,13 but the manner in which it had happened hurt Wilson rather than helped him. All the haggling over territory, all the fury that was loosed against the Germans, all the idealism that went into the work of building the League of Nations were in vain. Even the defeated Germans plucked up courage when they saw—and read—of all the ill-will among the victors. On May 7, 1919, at the Trianon Palace Hotel, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, the leader of the German delegation, furiously rejected the terms that were read to him by Clemenceau: "We are under no illusion as to the extent of our defeat. . . . We are asked to confess that we alone are guilty. Such a confession would be a lie." 14 It was only a foretaste of what was to come from a nation that had

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been defeated but not crushed. That same day, when the terms of the treaty were first published in Germany, the whole nation stormed with protests. The Versailles Treaty became a Diktat, a weapon which the most dangerous elements in the Reich would soon use with a devastating effectiveness. What was the Diktat? It limited Germany, the aggressor, to 100,000 army troop« without a general staff, planes or tanks, and a navy which could build no submarines or warships exceeding 10,000 tons. A reparations first payment of $5 billion was decreed. Alsace-Lorraine was given back to France. Belgium, Denmark, and Poland all were given back land taken from them by the Germans, and Poland, in addition, was given a corridor for access to the Baltic that split Germany. Finally, the Germans were saddled with responsibility for the war, which stirred them up more than anything else. But for all the rage displayed by a defeated but still powerful and completely united nation, the Germans were then powerless to resist. On June 28, 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, they were forced to sign the peace treaty—a treaty that settled nothing. The scene shifted then to the United States where, on July 10, President Wilson submitted the treaty with its intertwined League Covenant to a suspicious, embittered, and coldly hostile Senate. The President would not plead. He could not persuade. Although many a correspondent suspected even then that he was ill, he set out on September 3 to try to sell the Versailles pact to the people of the United States over the heads of the opposition Senators. It was a gallant but desperate twenty-one day tour that took the ailing President through seventeen states over an 8,000-mile route. On September 25, at Pueblo, Colorado, a sympathetic young UP correspondent, Hugh Baillie, noted Wilson's brave words to an enthusiastic crowd: "There is one thing that the American people always rise to, and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of peace. W e have accepted that truth, and we are going to be led by it; and it is going to lead us—and through us the world—out into the pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before." Baillie wrote of how President and Mrs. Wilson went for a long walk that day, a walk that "testified to his excellent health." But the next day, a mimeographed White House statement was distributed to the correspondents, announcing tersely that the President was ill,

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and the rest of the trip had been canceled. The "pastures of quietness and peace" speech was Wilson's last. The long walk, which had been ordered by his physician, Admiral Cary T. Grayson, was a final despairing effort to stave off the collapse of a President who had worked too hard and promised too much. Wilson returned to the White House on September 28. Four days later, he suffered a stroke that paralyzed his left side, but the press and the nation were kept in ignorance of his condition. Yet, the correspondents sensed something was wrong. "The air of mystery surrounding Wilson's disappearance within the White House was so thick that all sorts of rumors were abroad—he was dead, insane, comatose," Baillie wrote. "Though we didn't know the truth about the President's health, we knew that he was sick—and that his great effort for the Treaty and the League had failed." 1 5 The news struck Europe like a thunderbolt. In Berlin, the Tageblatt published a brief bulletin about Wilson's failure and his breakdown under date of September 27. That same day, the Tageblatt's editor, Theodor Wolff, happened to meet Colonel Bonsai in a Berlin bookshop, and they gloomily discussed the outlook. Wolff said, with sadly prophetic insight: "At the Conference, the victors could have chopped Germany into fragments and remnants. That would have been a solution, although a bad one. Or the Allies, under the guidance of America, could have bound the Germans to them by a treaty of friendship, which might have resulted in peace and security for all. Unfortunately, the conference pursued neither of these courses." 1 6 Germany, Britain, Italy, France, and Japan ratified the treaty in that order. All then watched the United States, where the hostile mood of the Senate was unmistakable. Wilson, desperately ill, was represented by Admiral Grayson and Mrs. Wilson as unalterably opposed to the slightest change in the commitment he had signed at Versailles. The reservations that had been drafted by Henry Cabot Lodge were rejected at the White House without consideration. Through Colonel Bonsai, Colonel House now tried to win some kind of a compromise between Wilson and the Senate. But House's position at the White House had been undermined for many months because of his differences at Versailles with the way in which the President had chosen to operate. Bonsai had to go it alone. Yet, despite his handicaps, the old foreign correspondent-turned-diplomat was able to persuade

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Lodge to soften his reservations, which maintained the historic power of the Senate over foreign commitments. House was jubilant, but not for very long. Word came from the White House that Wilson would accept no compromise.17 He wanted his own supporters to reject a treaty that was not entirely of his own making. And so, Bonsai's effort failed. On November 19, the Senate rejected both treaty and Covenant. On December 1 1 , the World—still "Wilson's paper"—blasted Colonel House as a traitor to Wilsonian ideals, with the result that the Times of London immediately rallied to the Colonel's defense. Thus, the long and dramatic struggle to bring peace to Europe and draw the United States into the shaping of a better world ended in a flurry of petty hostility between two newspapers of major importance.18 It was not an edifying spectacle, either for the United States or its press. The World, under Swope's dominant influence, made one more effort. It fought valiantly against the "return to normalcy" for which Warren Gamaliel Harding and the Republicans called in the presidential campaign of 1920. It tried, with all its resources, to bring about the election of James M. Cox, a kindly and liberal man, as Wilson's successor, hoping in that way to bring about a return to a Wilsonian peace. But Senator Harding, the publisher of the Marion (Ohio) Star, defeated Governor Cox, the publisher of the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News. The Republican tide overwhelmed "Wilson's paper" as well and all who stood with it. The United States chose the pathway of isolation and disaster. The voice of reason, the World's editorial page, drew only hollow echoes for response. Viewing the debacle from afar, many a correspondent who had struggled against frustration at Versailles could not have been blamed for wondering what might have happened if there had been, in truth, "open covenants . . . openly arrived at." The outcome could hardly have been worse. 2. T H E P A S S I N G O F T H E O L D G U A R D Lord Northcliffe, the Napoleon of Fleet Street, embarked on a world tour in the latter part of 1921 and celebrated New Year's Day, 1922, by sending affectionate greetings to his principal associates. Less than two months later, he was in a violent rage. His world tour was

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canceled. He sped home. He had just seen a profit-and-loss statement for the Times of London, his expensive plaything, and it was awful. In his own view, he was "appalled." 1 9 Northcliffe had been in a good mood at the Washington naval conference, where the grandees of European and Japanese diplomacy had persuaded the United States to sink most of its navy, while they retained their own. It was considered a very fine way, by everybody but the American people, to make a beginning on disarmament. Then, too, the Anglo-Irish Treaty had finally been signed in London on December 6, 1921. With the formal recognition of the Irish Free State, not even Eamon de Valera's repudiation of his own negotiators had dimmed the Times's rejoicing. This was something for which Wickham Steed had campaigned from the time of his appointment as editor of the Times. As the paper itself said of its Irish position: "The Times felt it had succeeded so far as its contribution was concerned and that circumstances outside the influence of any newspaper had intervened to perpetuate partition. But at least it may be said that by its leadership between 1919 and 1921, in the cause of dominion status for Ireland, the Times rendered compensation for its misjudgment in the case against Parnell in 1886-1890." 20 Perhaps that had given Northcliffe pleasure at the time. But in the spring of 1922, he began a steady warfare against both Wickham Steed, whom he had appointed editor to succeed Geoffrey Dawson in 1919, and John Walter IV, the chairman of the Times board. At the Chiefs insistence, Steed went to Genoa on April 10 to cover the economic conference there, knowing that it was a move to get him out of the way. If he had sat by idly, perhaps he might have escaped Northcliffe's wrath. But his weakness for playing the diplomat rather than the journalist once more got him into trouble. He cabled a story from Genoa on May 7 that Northcliffe's old foe, Lloyd George, had threatened in an interview with M. Louis Barthou, the French delegate, to end the entente between Britain and France. If the editor hoped to please the Chief with the story, he was quickly disabused; Lloyd George denied he had said anything of the kind, while Barthou issued a qualified denial.21 It was the pretext for which Northcliffe had been waiting to get rid of the editor. Steed was summoned to Northcliffe's apartment on the fifth floor of the Hotel Plaza-Athenee in Paris on June 1 1 . He found the Chief

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in bed, wild-eyed and talking strangely. For several days he had been conducting business in a frenzy, arranging for the purchase of John Walter IV's shares in the Times, firing executives, putting on others, and acting generally like a man bereft of his senses. During a long and trying evening, Steed saw him waving a loaded revolver which he produced from under his pillow. Once he saw the shadow of his dressing gown hanging on the door and threatened to fire at it, mistaking it for an intruder. Steed managed to unload the revolver, called for medical assistance, and tried to persuade Northcliffe from going to Evianles-Bains the following day. But Northcliffe persisted and Steed went with him, although he had been told he was no longer editor but personal adviser to the Chief, who would assume the editorship.22 From then until the end on August 14, 1922, at his home in London, the affairs of the Times were administered in a kind of journalistic Walpurgisnacht. With Northcliffe incapicitated for all practical purposes, Steed hung on grimly as editor in fact if not in name, and Walter maintained his position as board chairman although his status was in doubt. Necessarily, the completion of the sale of Walter's shares to Northcliffe had been delayed by the Chief's condition, but no successful contention was made that he had not been of sound mind at the time of the negotiations. Despite statements made by Steed and others in the official history of the Times, Northcliffe, according to Sir Thomas Horder, was never certified as insane. Sir Thomas, having attended Northcliffe during his last illness, certified that death was caused by malignant endocarditis, a type of blood poisoning that frequently induces delusions and hallucinations.23 There was no doubt whatever that the Napoleon of Fleet Street had suffered from both in his last months of life. The Times was sold to Major the Honorable John Jacob Astor, M.P., in association with John Walter IV, on October 23, 1922. Astor paid £1,580,000 for a paper which was piling up enormous losses and could no longer be said to be the leader in its field. With the coming of a new administration, the Times became somewhat of a journalistic monument.24 Despite its achievements in helping settle the Irish crisis, its influence as a leader in foreign affairs long since had passed into other hands. Steed left the editorship, passing into journalistic limbo, and was succeeded by his predecessor, Geoffrey Dawson, under whom the Times lapsed into an arm of the "Cliveden set," 25 It was signif

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icant that both the office and title of foreign editor, or its equivalent, were abolished. Dawson, forthwith, tried to run both his job and the foreign staff with consequences that could have been pointed out to him by the greenest correspondent.2® The Thunderer became the Murmurer. Like its distinguished British contemporary, the New York Herald also slid into a genteel decline during the early part of the twentieth century, yielding its preeminence in the field of foreign correspondence, and merged its identity in a new ownership. The younger James Gordon Bennett, who was even more flamboyant and eccentric than Northcliffe, turned out in the end to be far less capable. Bennett took close to $40,000,000 out of the Herald's profits during the fifty years of his ownership, but put nothing back. From a high of 511,000 at the time of the Spanish-American War, the Herald dwindled in circulation to a mere 55,000 in 1920. It operated at a loss and was sustained only by its colorful affiliate in Paris.27 The difference between the two papers was that the New York Herald lost its sense of direction while the Paris Herald, for all its zany characteristics, stood for something. It had not been the first English daily in Paris. Giovanni Antonio Galignani had started his Messenger as an English-language weekly in Paris in 1814 and had turned it into a daily in 1884. But the Paris Herald had put Galignani's Messenger out of business in 1904. Competition was too much for it. The Paris Herald was Bennett's own link between France and the United States, which he had been obliged to leave for drunken and grotesque behavior. He published it as an act of faith in the destiny of France, and every English-speaking resident or visitor in Paris loved the Herald for it. In the earliest days of World War I, Bennett argued editorially that the United States would soon be in the conflict. When the Germans surged to the Mame in 1914, the publisher, then in his seventies, worked in the city room in Paris and got out the paper. He never missed an issue, causing an old Herald man to report to his New York colleagues: "Bennett is dead. In his place has come a Scotch miser." 28 But he was no miser when he proclaimed in 1914 to his staff: "Those of you who wish to quit may do so. This place will be under the protection of the Stars and Stripes and I will defy the Prussians to disregard it.

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"If they come and you stay I will do what I can to ensure your safety. In any event, the paper comes out." 29 Bennett had the satisfaction of seeing the Paris Herald on the street with the story of how the taxicab army had repulsed the Germans at the Marne. N o other paper was published in Paris during those critical days. So that all the world would see that he was a changed man, Bennett at the age of 73 finally married on September 10, 1914, his bride being the widow of Baron George de Reuter, the former Maud Potter of Philadelphia. T h e groom worked each night at the Herald office in his shirtsleeves, this one-time millionaire who could fling himself into a monumental rage over a trifle. Now, his main battles were with the censors, and they were furious ones. Yet, he still saw to it that the Herald published each day on its editorial page a letter that had appeared for the first time on December 27, 1899: T O THE EDITOR O F THE

HERALD:

I am anxious to find out the way to figure the temperature from centigrade to Fahrenheit and vice versa. In other words, I want to know, whenever I see the temperature designated on the centigrade thermometer, how to find out what it would be on Fahrenheit's thermometer. OLD PHILADELPHIA

LADY.

Paris, December 24, 1899 30 Through war and peace, affluence and poverty, bachelorhood and marriage, Bennett protected the Old Philadelphia Lady to the last, and nobody ever knew why he caused the letter to be printed in his newspaper 6,718 times. W h e n the United States came into the war and American soldiers thronged into France, the Herald's circulation soared from 12,000 to more than 100,000 despite the rivalry of the Chicago Tribune's Paris edition, established July 4, 1917. T h e profits piled up in the bank because Bennett was now too busy to spend money with his onetime profligacy. However, he did not live long enough to enjoy his new affluence or to celebrate the Allied victory. W i t h the approach of his seventyseventh birthday on May 10, 1918, he began to fret over the fact that his father had died of a stroke at that age. He imagined that he would go the same way and worked himself into a fearful state. On the morning of May 10, he was stricken with a massive brain hemorrhage while he was taking a short vacation at his villa at Beaulieu. On May 14, he died and was buried in a nameless grave in Passy, his headstone marked

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only with two small graven owls, in accordance with his instructions. The Old Philadelphia Lady vanished from the Herald two days later, never to return.31 On January 14, 1920, Frank A. Munsey, a grocery clerk who became a millionaire magazine publisher, bought the New York Herald, the New York Telegram, and the Paris Herald for $4,000,000 from the Bennett estate. To his utter astonishment, the parsimonious Munsey discovered that he had also taken over the Paris Heralds bank account (the Paris paper had been thrown into the sale as an afterthought), in which reposed more than $1,000,000. He picked up an additional $1,000,000 when he resold the Herald in 1924 to Ogden Reid, the son of Whitelaw Reid, for $5,000,000. Reid, whose New York Tribune also had fallen on evil days and a circulation of about 25,000, put the two enfeebled giants together and produced a new and spritely paper, the New York Herald Tribune, with its reinvigorated Paris edition. Munsey then peddled the Telegram to the Scripps-Howard interests, among his other operations, leading William Allen White to publish this obituary of him eventually in the Emporia Gazette: "Frank A. Munsey contributed to the journalism of his day the talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money-changer and the manners of an undertaker. He and his kind have about succeeded in transforming a once-noble profession into an eight per cent security. May he rest in trust." 32 The passing of the Times of London and the New York Herald from their long leadership in foreign correspondence coincided with other changes that vitally affected the field. Victor Fremont Lawson, the developer of the Chicago Daily News foreign service, died in 1925, but his business manager, Walter A. Strong, continued his policies. Edward Wyllis Scripps retired in 1920, elevating the fighting bantam of the UP, Roy W. Howard, to partnership with his son, Robert P. Scripps, in the Scripps-Howard Newspapers. By the time Scripps died in 1926, he saw the UP firmly entrenched in the foreign field as the greatest independent rival of the Grand Cartel. William Randolph Hearst, who lived like a nabob in California, had his wings clipped in the financial crisis of 1929, lost control of his papers and International News Service to a management group in 1937, and lingered on as a journalistic legend until 1951. There was one newspaper collapse above all others that jarred even

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the most callous professionals—the death of the New York World. When Herbert Bayard Swope took over as executive editor soon after his return from Versailles, he saw that something drastic would have to be done to maintain the World's leadership of liberal opinion. It was no longer possible to bring the United States into the mainstream of international affairs; moreover, the World no longer had the resources to maintain a large staff of foreign correspondents, although it did retain a few good ones. Swope therefore led the World in such glamorous and effective crusades as the exposure and crippling of the Ku Klux Klan as it then existed, the elimination of the abuse of prison labor in Florida, and other domestic causes. But as the years of normalcy slipped by, it became clear that the World was no longer the newspaper that Joseph Pulitzer had created. Its summons to action in the greatest international cause of the 1920s, the Sacco-Vanzetti case, was not a trumpet call, but a frightened whimper. Heywood Broun, the large and unkempt foreign correspondent who was also a sports writer, dramatic critic, and literary figure, raised his voice on the World in defense of Nicola Sacco, the shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the fish peddler, on the ground that they had been wrongfully convicted in 1921 of a holdup-murder in South Braintree, Mass. " I am afraid," he wrote as the case reached its climax in 1927, "there is no question that a vast majority of the voters in the Bay State want to see the condemned men die. I don't know why. Clearly it depends upon no careful examination of the evidence. Mostly the feeling rests upon the fact that they are foreigners. Also, the backbone of Massachusetts, such as it is, happens to be up because of criticism beyond the borders of the State. 'This is only our business,' say the citizens of the Commonwealth, and they are very wrong." Like the citizens of France at the time of the Dreyfus trial, the citizens of Massachusetts were outraged by the millions of words that were printed about them in the foreign press, most of them derogatory. But what a howl of rage went up when Broun concluded his column with the angry barb: "From now on, I want to know, will the institution of learning in Cambridge, which we once called Harvard, be known as Hangman's House?" Expressions like these were too much for Ralph Pulitzer, the publisher. He accused Broun, by his excesses, of hurting the World's effort

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to obtain a new trial for Sacco and Vanzetti. Finally, when Broun's continued criticism was omitted from the World, he resigned and found a species of welcome at the Scripps-Howard Telegram. Despite the furor, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on August 27, 1927. 83 And young Eugene Lyons, a Tass employee in New York, sent the flash to Moscow. Whatever Swope may have thought of Ralph Pulitzer's management of the World on this and other occasions, he made no public criticism. But in 1928, when he was independently wealthy through his investments in a booming stock market, the correspondent-turned-editor resigned. Three years later, at its nadir in influence, prestige, and income, JP's once-great newspaper, its younger brother, the Evening World, and their Sunday edition were sold to Scripps-Howard for $5,000,000 and became the New York World-Telegram. At a time when a free society had need of every strong and independent voice it could muster, one that had formerly been the most influential of all was gone beyond recall.34 Thus, the old guard passed on. Death, consolidation, financial stringency, and sheer disinterest combined to reduce the number of independent newspapers that considered it a duty to gather, evaluate, and disseminate foreign intelligence to their publics. Such services as the Times of London, the New York Herald, and the New York World had been able to provide at the height of their power could not easily be replaced. Moreover, few new ones were being developd in France, Britain, or the United States. But in Italy, a newspaper founded during the war, II Popólo d'ltalia, had become the dominant journalistic voice, and it was spreading shivers of fear all over the continent.35 Its editor, Benito Mussolini, the onetime Socialist and pacifist, had marched on Rome in 1922 with his Fascists and now was the new leader, II Duce. The great papers of Italy, the Corriere della Sera, Stampa, and Giornale d'ltalia, no longer were the primary sources of foreign intelligence and the molders of public opinion. None of them took the trouble to tell the world exactly who Mussolini was—and the world did not find out for some time. The great newspapers of Germany did not heed the lesson, any more than did the others. The Berliner Tageblatt and the Frankfurter Zeitung and the rest didn't even bother to take notice of a run-down, debt-

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ridden, anti-Semitic gossip sheet, known as the Voelkischer Beobachter, which had been published twice a week in Munich since 1920 by a peculiar little man, Adolf Hitler, who styled himself the Fuehrer of the National Socialist Party. The Nazis were almost universally regarded as crackpots, but in 1923 the Voelkischer Beobachter became a daily under the editorship of a shoemaker's son, Alfred Rosenberg, with Hitler's former army sergeant, Max Amann, as business manager. The great German papers still slept, although they could have guessed that the Voelkischer Beobachter was attracting substantial conservative business support and, quite probably, some of the Reichswehr's secret funds.36 None of these agencies underestimated the potential of Adolf Hitler or his newspaper to shake the destinies of the world. Its theory was based on the authoritarian press system that now controlled the dissemination of all news, domestic and foreign, in the Soviet Union. In its practical application of the authoritarian doctrine, it would soon rise to challenge the established laissez-faire press systems of the democratic world.

3. T H E E N D O F T H E G R A N D

CARTEL

Baron Herbert de Reuter shot and killed himself at his estate near Reigate in England on April 18, 1915. He left a letter to his wife, who had died three days before, saying: "Life without you is insupportable and the loss of your cherished companionship and tender devotion has shattered my being." 37 The suicide of the 63-year-old Baron intensified a financial crisis for the global news agency which his father had founded. The Reuters Bank, now known as the British Commercial Bank, was in trouble, partly because its assets had been frozen by war, partly by mistakes in management. Reuters' shares, which had been worth more than £12 before the war, now were half that and dropping fast. They reached a low of slightly more than £3 38 It was in this situation that the energetic 37-year-old South African manager for Reuters came to London to advance his claims to the management of the agency. He was the junior reporter of the Boer War, Roderick Jones, born and educated in England, and sent to Pretoria while still in his teens to live with relatives after his father's death.

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After the Boer War, he had won Baron de Reuter's favor during three years of service in the London office and gone back to South Africa as the top man. Jones had the rare good fortune, when he arrived in London after the Baron's suicide, to make an ally out of Mark F. Napier, the chairman of Reuters' board. Together they raised £550,000 to buy the agency, disposed of the bank, formed a private company known as Reuters, Ltd., and entered into a wartime alliance with the British government. The government, by contributing substantially to the financing of Reuters' cable costs, eased the financial crisis of the agency. Reuters, by stressing the government's point of view, bolstered the British war effort. Moreover, by entering into an arrangement with the Press Association, which represented British provincial papers, the costs of supporting war correspondents were shared. The whole operation was so successful that plain Roderick Jones was knighted before he was 40 and became the dominant power in the grand cartel. Sir Roderick made only one slip during his wartime rescue operation. While he was serving as managing director of Reuters, he also was British director of propaganda under Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister of Information. No matter how patriotic, this arrangement was severely criticized and on July 31, 1918, the Select Committee on National Expenditure reported to the House of Commons: "During the last financial year, about £126,000 was paid for cables, mainly to Reuters. . . . The position of Sir Roderick Jones, who is both managing director of Reuters and also a high official of the Ministry of Information, is on principle open to objection." Sir Roderick gracefully withdrew from the government, "acting under urgent medical advice." 39 Whether he was criticized or not, he saved Reuters. During the Versailles conference, he also saved the grand cartel by renewing relations with Reuters' old ally, Havas. Together, they took in more territory and left the defeated Wolff and Austrian Korrespondenz-Bureau with nothing but their own truncated respective national territories. Then Reuters and Havas entered into a succession of formal compacts with a host of national news agencies, completing what was known as the National Agencies' Alliance. 40 T o the victors went the spoils. Melville E. Stone, the Associated Press's old general manager, watched all this in New York and saw that his agency was being pushed into a corner, but feared to protest. " I think it would be a disaster . . .

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for this organization to break with the combination," Stone told his board in 1920. "Their attitude is this: if we want to break with them, we can break. . . . They can get more money anyhow than we would pay them." 41 What bothered Stone, of course, was the possibility that the grand cartel would deal with the fast-developing UP if the AP kicked up too much of a fuss, thereby cutting off much of the AP's foreign service. One of his younger associates, Kent Cooper, didn't believe the grand cartel would dare drop the AP and said so. But even in . the unlikely event that it happened, Cooper told Stone, it would be no calamity. "It would result in freedom of action for the AP abroad," he said. "It would also benefit the AP because, in order to be different, the AP would more than ever intensify establishing its own independent news sources." 42 Stone remained unconvinced. However, as a prudent manager, he developed more foreign offices and hired more foreign correspondents for the AP, thus creating the nucleus of a foreign service that could dispense as well as gather foreign news. Yet, he maintained good relations with the cartel and did not try to infringe on their territory. Cooper bided his time, waiting until he would be able to rally more sympathy for his point of view within the AP management. He had been a working newsman for almost as long as he could remember. Bom in 1880 in Columbus, Ind., he had carried newspapers as a delivery boy at 1 1 , worked as a local reporter later during the summer, and gone to the Indianapolis Press at 19 as a reporter for $12 a week. Being an enterprising sort, he soon joined the Scripps-MacRae Association, one of the forerunners of the UP. There, he drew attention to himself by developing a method of telephoning his news budget to smaller papers at a cheaper rate than it could be telegraphed. Like his fellowHoosier, Roy W . Howard, he became one of the UP's pioneers; unlike Howard, he proceeded to talk himself into the AP's service in 1910 at $65 a week as a traveling inspector reporting directly to General Manager Stone.43 In 1914, Cooper for the first time began to question the worth of the AP's association with the grand cartel. At that time, Don Jorge Mitre, the director of La Nation of Buenos Aires, cabled Stone for AP service because Havas had refused patriotically to transmit the official German war communiques. "We are French," Havas had said.

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"We cannot do it." When Stone ignored Mitre's message, La Nacion signed with the UP. Cooper found out about it and promptly asked Stone for permission to bring the great Buenos Aires opposition paper, La Prensa, into the AP's camp. Stone put him off.44 Curiously, it was an abortive effort by the U.S. government to force the AP into a propaganda role during World War I that finally softened Stone's opposition and gave Cooper his chance. Stone reported to the AP's board in October, 1917, that the government "was very anxious to soften the asperity toward us that was evident in South America." The State Department's proposition was to have the AP employ editors of leading South American newspapers as AP correspondents at "handsome salaries" whether or not they did any work. The government was to repay the AP. The board, shocked at the notion, turned it down.45 A year later, Cooper was permitted to make an exploratory trip to Latin America. Cooper persuaded Charles Houssaye, director of Havas, to give the AP a free hand in South America provided that Havas was reimbursed for any lost income there. Since the UP already had taken away many Havas clients in South America, Cooper wasn't afraid of the bargain. He thought he could fight the UP without further injuring Havas, and so it turned out 46 Three days after the signing of the Armistice in 1918, Cooper embarked on his selling trip. He bagged both La Nacion and Don Ezequiel Paz, the publisher of La Prensa, in Buenos Aires. In addition, he signed up a number of other South American newspapers.47 Emboldened by his success, Cooper extended his operations to Europe and in 1919 called on Sir Roderick Jones at his London office. Cooper was then the chief of the AP's traffic department, scarcely on a level with the tall, austere Briton. When he began describing his Latin American operations, Sir Roderick said coldly, "I am fully informed by our good friends of Havas." Cooper should have heeded the warning, but he was not the kind of man to back away from an opponent. He argued for a better break for the AP, but found himself ignored. After an embarrassing pause, he changed the subject and left.48 That was the beginning of the long AP revolt against the grand cartel for, as Cooper phrased it, Reuters "did sit at the crossroads of the world and control traffic." 49 His policy was simple and direct. He intended to break the foreign stranglehold on the AP and thereby en-

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able it to compete in the world market on equal terms with the UP. Cooper and Sir Roderick were well-matched as opponents. Cooper was 39, Sir Roderick 41. Both had come up the hard way in their respective organizations. Neither had benefited from inherited wealth or family influence, but had made their way in large part through their own efforts. They were thoroughly competent professionals, each with acquired loyalties and supporters. It was in Japan that the break came between the AP and the grand cartel. Reuters had sent Japan its foreign news from 1870 on and, in 1913, had set up the Kokusai agency under the nominal control of Japanese businessmen. In 1916, the rival Nippon Dempo Tsushin Sha (Japanese telegraph news agency) was formed as a UP client and soon began serving 200 Japanese papers.60 The AP began talking with both Yoshio Mitsunaga, president of Nippon Dempo, and Yukichi Iwanaga, director of Kokusai, but didn't get very far at first. The UP and the cartel were too strong.51 Changes in management occurred. Cooper became the AP's general manager in 1925. In the following year, Sir Roderick, now Reuters' majority stockholder, offered half his interest to the Press Association, representing British provincial papers, and the other half to the Newspaper Proprietor's Association, the organization of the London press. The Press Association accepted the proposal and nominally took over the direction of Reuters, but Sir Roderick remained as chairman and managing director.52 The antagonists, Sir Roderick and Cooper, now were in a position to wield both power and authority. The independent trend in Japan became unmistakable when, in 1926, Kokusai was replaced by a new association, Nippon Shimbun Rengo, the Associated Press of Japan, with charter membership allotted to eight newspapers having 75 percent of the total circulation in Japan. Nippon Dempo remained in business, linked to the UP, but Rengo could not buy the AP service because of its affiliation with Reuters. In April, 1927, at length, the AP board of directors voted unanimously to denounce the grand cartel treaty. The purpose was to make a new arrangement between the AP and Reuters, Havas, and twenty-seven other agencies, most of them purely national in character. Cooper was instructed to go to Europe for the negotiations. This time, Sir Roderick received Cooper for lunch at Claridge's with the then British Foreign Minister, Sir Austen Chamberlain, in

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attendance. T h e AP's general manager also attended a news agency conference in Warsaw and a Conference of Press Experts of the League of Nations in Geneva, made some gallant speeches about freedom of information, but nothing happened. All the grand cartel offered was the cancellation of a fee the A P had been paying for thirty-four years as a differential between the news it received from abroad from the others and the news it offered them. Reuters, in addition, demanded to know what the A P was going to do about the inroads the U P was making in Reuters territory in the Far East. Cooper wryly replied that he could do nothing about the UP. In 1929 and 1930, the AP's board sent Cooper to see Sir Roderick twice more on fruitless errands. Reuters would not budge. Meanwhile, Rengo had completed a contractual arrangement with the AP, to be whipped into final shape when the A P obtained its release from the bonds of the grand cartel. It was 1932 before partial relief finally came, with Sir Roderick at least modifying the four-agency agreement to permit the A P to enter Japan and China. However, when Cooper dramatically made public his A P contract with Rengo in 1933, Sir Roderick made no attempt to disguise his wrath. He denounced the arrangement as an unfriendly act and, finally giving the A P exactly what it wanted, served formal notice severing relations with the American agency upon the expiration of their contract. T h e A P lost no time in agreeing. For a short time, there was confusion in the news centers of the world. Reuters tried to tempt the U P into replacing the A P in the cartel, but Roy Howard didn't intend to be caught. He had his own bureaus abroad. He was selling his service to foreign newspapers at profitable terms. He and his associates didn't make any serious reply, therefore, to Sir Roderick's suggestion. W h a t they did do, as a kind of impudent gesture, was to enter into an agreement with the AP—a kind of treaty of mutual defense—guaranteeing that neither would enter into an agreement with a foreign agency to the disadvantage of the other. T h e pact was just a showpiece and soon was allowed to lapse. Sir Roderick gave up gracefully. On February 12, 1934, at the offices of the AP in New York, he signed a contract for an exchange of news between Reuters and the A P which gave both the right to serve newspapers and news agencies wherever they wished. T h e A P gained the right to make a direct contract with the Press Association, and it also insured the same freedom of operation to the Canadian Press. T h e

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policy of separate two-party contracts was carried out with Havas, the Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, (DNB) which had replaced Wolff; Stefani, Tass, and a host of other agencies. The entire character of the global news agency operation changed. Yet, however devotedly he had labored to liberate the AP and put it into a sound competitive position against the UP, Cooper could not insure his ideal of free access to news sources everywhere and free interchange of news between countries. Freedom had been wiped out in Germany and in Italy. It had never existed in Russia. It was tottering in Japan. Much more than the chatter of news agency tickers would be needed to preserve a free society from the challenge of totalitarian dictatorships of the left and the right.53 4. T H E G R O W T H O F T H E N E W Y O R K T I M E S Adolph S. Ochs, the one-time printer's devil from Knoxville, Tenn., traveled to Paris in 1922 to ask a question. How much, he wanted to know, would it cost the New York Times to build up its foreign staff and provide the best foreign service of any newspaper in the world? Edwin L. James, the audacious little European news manager for the Times, shot back an answer that would have made any other publisher wince: $500,000 a year. Ochs evidently expected it. He simply told James to develop a plan for expanded coverage of foreign news which, eventually, was approved.54 While neither he nor James could anticipate it, they soon would be spending much more on foreign news. The Times' s two-man bureau in Moscow alone would be costing upward of $100,000 a year. The decision to try to take over the preeminent position of the Times of London, which still had a fine foreign staff but no longer could undertake new adventures at great cost, was characteristic of Ochs. In the first quarter-century after he had brought the New York Times out of bankruptcy and low estate in 1896, he had made it a journalistic bible. From 9,000, its daily circulation had soared to 323,000; from 2,227,000 lines of advertising annually, the total had gone to 23,447,000 lines. Profits had exceeded $100,000,000 on an original investment of $75,000, a thumping vote of confidence from readers and advertisers alike, and all but 4 percent of it, or less, the rate of dividends, had been reinvested in the paper.55 Ochs truly believed in a newspaper that would

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"give the news impartially, without fear or favor," and he meant to print foreign news as it had never been done before. Fortunately, he had editors with ideas and a staff bubbling with energy and talent to which newcomers were added. Instead of concentrating on the traditional areas of diplomatic coverage, which had caused Northcliffe on occasion to rant that the Times of London was little more than a stuffy court gazette, the New York Times now boldly plunged into the colorful reporting of high adventure and exploration, science and medicine, and, most thrilling of all, aviation. James Gordon Bennett's ideas were exploited at a higher level. True, the slow-paced minuets of diplomacy were still described in sometimes painful detail, but Times correspondents concentrated less on worn and faded figures than on the raucous new leaders who were about to make world history. It was a pattern, all in all, that was generally favored by American papers and wire services in the post-World W a r I era, as well as by the British to a far more limited extent, but the virtue of the New York Times was in its superior execution of the design. As early as 1919, Henry Charles Crouch of the Times's London bureau, who preferred reporting on golf, was writing about Professor Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity (with a distinguished assist from Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington). In 1922, after the AP had reported the discovery of the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen, the New York Times sought out the most authoritative journalist in the field, Sir Harry Perry-Robinson of the Times of London, and contracted for exclusive rights to his work, beginning with a four-column account on December 21 in which he told of entering the 3,ooo-year-old resting place of the Egyptian monarch. 56 Alva Johnson, a New York Times reporter, won a Pulitzer Prize for directing the world's attention to the splitting of the atom. Other staff men told of pioneering experiments in rockets and space and television, of the oceanic explorations of William Beebe, the experiments of Professor Auguste Piccard in the stratosphere, of ventures that took men deep into South American and African jungles, adrift on polar ice and high into white mountain fastnesses. It was a magnificent outburst of journalistic enterprise.57 The outpouring of foreign news was so great, and so much of it was printed to the appreciation and even delight of a growing audience of knowledgeable and sophisticated New Yorkers, that the Times in 1924

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opened its own radio station for the receipt of press messages direct from Europe, and soon afterward from elsewhere in the world. It was the first newspaper to operate in this way. Moreover, it set the pattern for the cooperative operation of Press Wireless, Inc., in which it participated with a number of other newspapers and wire services.68 If the Times had contented itself with mere volume and emphasis on the picturesque, however, it could not have attained its dominant position in the foreign news field. Something extra, a sense of history, a grasp of the meaning of the flow of events, had to be conveyed through its columns; otherwise, its file of dispatches could have become a confusing melange. A small, red-headed woman, Anne O'Hare McCormick, who tried her hand at submitting free-lance articles to the Times after World War I while she was traveling in Europe with her husband, Francis J. McCormick of Dayton, Ohio, had that "something extra" to a superlative degree. Mrs. McCormick seldom wrote news stories. As the Times gained confidence in her work, she talked with and wrote about people and princes, and events and their meaning, wherever she went. On June 21, 1921, Amaldo Cortesi, the son of the Commendatore and like him an AP correspondent at the time, got her into the Italian Chamber of Deputies to hear King Victor Emmanuel III. She wrote in the Times magazine on July 24: "More interesting than the speech of the King was the sudden emergence of the new party of the Extreme Right—the small group of Fascisti. Benito Mussolini, founder and leader of the Fascisti, was among the parliamentary debutants, and in one of the best political speeches I have ever heard, a little swaggering, but caustic, powerful and telling." In Mussolini, said Mrs. McCormick with great conviction, Italy "has heard its master's voice." 59 The future Duce, whose role seemed so foreordained to Mrs. McCormick, did not make such an impression on his other journalistic colleagues. In January, 1922, at the abortive Cannes conference, Mussolini was covering for his paper, the Popolo dltalia. As distinguished a correspondent as Webb Miller of the UP wrote later, "For my part, I would never have known of his presence among the two hundred correspondents . . . but for an incident in the lobby of the Carlton Hotel." Lord Riddell, the British briefing officer, referred at that time to the Fascists as "a gang of hooligans," whereupon another correspondent pointed out Mussolini, saying, "Care-

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ful, that man's the head of it." To which Miller added, "Mussolini trotted around with the rest of us, carrying his notebook and pencil; nobody paid any attention to him at all." 60 They paid attention when he marched on Rome later that year. The rise of Hitler, which was slow and painful in its early stages, was not accompanied by a similar outburst of journalistic prescience, although Cyril Brown, a Times correspondent in Germany, did observe as early as November 20, 1922: "The Hitler movement is not of mere local [Munich] origin or picturesque interest. It is bound to bring Bavaria into a renewed clash with the Berlin government as long as the German Republic goes even through the motion of trying to live up to the Versailles Treaty." 61 Marcel William Fodor, the erudite correspondent of the Manchester Guardian and the New York Evening Post in Vienna, and Edgar Ansel Mowrer, the Chicago Daily News correspondent in Berlin, were more aware than their colleagues of the threat that Hitler represented almost from the beginning. The Times of London, of all the great English language newspapers, was the most complacent. And the great German newspapers, the Vossische Zeitung, the Berliner Tageblatt, the Frankfurter Zeitung, and the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung were blind to the evil force that coiled its strength before them. The virtue of the New York Times correspondence from Germany was that it carefully and consistently reported the tragic course of events in daily detail during the 1920s. While its correspondents could not exercise Mrs. McCormick's intuitive insight, neither were they as bland as the Times of London nor as uncomprehending as the Germans themselves. As for the French and their largely venal press, that was, of course, another story. In Moscow, the Times was fortunate to have Walter Duranty, the young Englishman whom Wythe Williams had hired for the Paris office at the outset of World War I and sent to cover the French front later. It was Duranty's destiny to be the most imposing of all the foreign correspondents who worked in the shadow of the Kremlin between the wars. Yet, he did not spring to journalistic perfection overnight even though, as a young and inexperienced correspondent covering the counterrevolution from Riga, he wrote with a clear vision on January 13, 1920: "An interrogation of Red prisoners, in which the New York Times correspondent took part a couple of days ago, reveals the Bolshevist system in its true light as one of the most damnable tyran-

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nies in history. It is a compound of force, terror, and espionage, utterly ruthless in conception and execution." 82 Duranty was molded by many, but perhaps the most important of all was the brilliant South African who began life as Bill Ryall and ended it as William Bolitho (his full name was William Bolitho Ryall). After fighting at Ypres and the Somme during World War I as a British junior lieutenant, Bolitho became the Manchester Guardian's correspondent in Paris. The grateful Duranty, who worked with him—and against him—in Paris for two years, wrote of him, "I have never met anyone who could see further through a brick wall than he could, or who was better, to use a newspaper phrase, at 'doping out the facts' of any situation." 63 It was Duranty's misfortune, when he reached Moscow in 1921, to be installed as the New York Times correspondent without Bolitho as a colleague and with a tough operator like Floyd Gibbons working against him. The story of the year was the great famine of the Volga, in which nearly a million Russians were said to be dying. The Lenin government was pleading for the assistance of the United States, on the one hand, and refusing permission to American correspondents to enter the stricken area, on the other. While Duranty meekly waited in Moscow for permission to move, Gibbons, the foreign director of the Chicago Tribune, flew into Riga with his associates, George Seldes and Ambrose Lambert. Seldes learned that Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet ambassador, was holding off swarms of correspondents who were clamoring to get into Russia and warned Gibbons to try some other way. Gibbons, never at a loss, marched into Litvinov's office, threatened to precipitate an international incident by flying across the border and dared Litvinov to stop him. It was a bluff, of course; but Litvinov, knowing how his regime was counting on American relief, couldn't take a chance. He rode with Gibbons into the Soviet Union on the next train. Duranty himself described what happened: "The Volga famine was the biggest story of the year, but we sat there in Moscow fighting vermin and Soviet inertia whilst Floyd Gibbons of the Chicago Tribune was cabling thousands of words a day from the Volga cities, beating our heads off and scoring one of the biggest newspaper triumphs in postwar history. Every day we received anguished and peremptory cables from our home offices about the Gibbons exploits,

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and all we could do was to run bleating with them to the [Soviet] press department and be told, 'We are making arrangements; there will doubtless be a train for you tomorrow.' It was an agonizing experience, but there was nothing we could do about it but gnash our teeth and wait." 64 Eventually, Duranty and some other correspondents in Moscow were permitted to reach the Volga area on a selective basis and confirmed every horror of which Gibbons had written. More than 30,000,000 Russians were destitute. The American Relief Administration, the Red Cross, and the Quakers fed daily rations to more than 27,000,000 persons, sufficient to keep them alive. While perhaps fewer than 1,000,000 persons died of actual starvation, more than 5,000,000 were the victims of the epidemics that followed. This was the price of the victory of the Communists in Russia, as Duranty saw it. For its emergency work, the American Relief Administration received no thanks from Soviet historians; moreover, Herbert Hoover's experiences during the ARA campaign were accounted by Duranty to have enforced his determination not to recognize the Soviet Union after he was elected President of the United States.68 Duranty stayed in Russia while most others, both the eminent and the workaday figures of journalism, came and went. He reported the sequence of events as they unfolded in Russia: the death of Lenin on January 21, 1924, the rise of Joseph Stalin, the man of steel, the fall of Trotsky, the first of the treason trials that shocked the West, the procession of five-year plans, the initial Russian failure to introduce a successful Communist regime in China, and the membership of the Soviet hierarchy that was involved in each. Many a first-rate correspondent analyzed the progress and the failures of the Soviet Union—Paul Scott Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News, William Henry Chamberlin of the Christian Science Monitor, Eugene Lyons and Henry Shapiro of the UP, Jim Mills and Eddy Gilmore of the AP, Samuel Spewack and Arno Dosch-Fleurot of the New York World, Louis Fischer and H. R. Knickerbocker of the New York Evening Post, among the Americans, and a host of equally expert British, French, and Germans. Among them there were perhaps better reporters than Duranty in grinding out the daily grist of the news. But none surpassed him in the ability to do what he admired so much in his friend, Bolitho, to "see through the brick wall" of Soviet plans and purposes and correctly in-

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terpret the course of events for the West. It was this, rather than mere length of service, that made him one of the most influential correspondents of his day and helped lift the New York Times foreign service out of the commonplace. Even after he lost a leg in a railway accident in France in 1924 and Bolitho counseled him to quit daily journalism, Duranty returned to his post in Moscow. He loved the "novelty, variety and fantasy of Russian life." 66 If anybody rivaled him in expertness as a Moscow correspondent in his day, it was Paul Scheffer of the Berliner Tageblatt, but Scheffer's work was not generally known in the English-speaking world. It was from Duranty, therefore, that the West learned that Russia could never again be ignored as a world force. Few who knew Duranty ever recalled any great world beat as an index of his stature. It was his incalculable influence on his fellow-correspondents and on the collective public opinion of the West that distinguished him. There was still another Times correspondent who exercised an influence far beyond the bounds of the post to which he was assigned. He was Clarence Streit, a young Montanan who enlisted in the A E F during World War I and later returned to Europe as a Rhodes Scholar. His assignment was the League of Nations at Geneva, once he joined the Times after having served from 1921 on as the Philadelphia Public Ledger's correspondent in Rome and in the Greek-Turkish War. Streit was one of hundreds of correspondents who covered the League at one time or another between the wars. He was by no means the best known, even of the Americans. Nor was his work the most closely read. He did not have the grace of Paul Scott Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News, who could favor American participation in the League even if he recognized that its lack of force would prove fatal both to it and to world peace.67 Nor did he have the ruthlessness of Sisley Huddleston of the Christian Science Monitor, who saw the League collapsing and said so.68 He was no hard-boiled journalist who went to Geneva in search of news, not sentiment, like the UP's Henry Wood, the AP's Joseph Sharkey, and the enterprising Henry Wales of the Chicago Tribune. Nor was he a distinguished analyst like Robert Dell of the Manchester Guardian, Jules Sauerwein of Paris-Soir, "Pertinax" of Echo de Paris, and Georg Bemhard of the Vossiche Zeitung. Streit had the one thing these distinguished journalists did not have—a messianic urge to improve the world, to bring mankind to its senses, to force a

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change in the age-old initiatives of individual nations insistent on working their sovereign will. Such a view was unusual among the Geneva journalists; among New York Times correspondents, it was almost without parallel. Streit was fair. He was reasonably objective, in the Times's sense, as a League correspondent. But nothing could prevent his international outlook from showing through. Eventually, he stepped out of his daily journalistic routine and became more widely known as the author of a book, Union Now, which was published on the eve of World War II in 1939. It called for a union of the North Atlantic democracies in common citizenship, defense, customs, money, communications, and postal services. He lived to see the North Atlantic Treaty Organization come into being under different circumstances and in different form.69 If individual correspondents were undoubtedly important to the New York Times in its foreign expansion, the teamwork of editors with the foreign service was the most crucial factor in the success of the great experiment. In 1925, when Carr Van Anda retired, he was succeeded by a fussy little goateed Britisher, Frederick T. Birchall, who began almost at once to push the paper's superiority in the reporting of exploration ahd aviation. A staff man, William Bird, wrote an exclusive account on May 10, 1926, of the successful flight of Richard Evelyn Byrd's three-engine Fokker aircraft to the North Pole and back. Next day, another staff correspondent, Russell Owen, flashed the takeoff of the dirigible Norge from Kings Bay, Spitzbergen, for a flight over the North Pole to Point Barrow, Alaska. On May 12, Frederick Ramm, a Norwegian, reported the success of the Norge expedition in reaching the pole. Ramm's radioed bulletin reached the newspaper after seven hours of relays.70 It had taken Admiral Peary 153 days to send his own polar story. An even greater exploit was now in the making—the solo flight of Captain Charles Augustus Lindbergh across the Atlantic from New York to Paris. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had turned down the rights to the Lindbergh story, its icy managing editor, Oliver Kirby Bovard, saying that he would not "gamble on a man's life for the sake of a piece of newspaper promotion." 7 1 But when Lindbergh flew into Curtiss Field in his single-engine Ryan monoplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, two Times reporters had no such qualms. They were Lauren D. (Deak)

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Lyman and Russell Owen, and they convinced Birchall that Lindbergh could do it. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Ochs's son-in-law and eventual successor, authorized paying the tall, blond, 25-year-old former airmail pilot $5,000 for his story if he made Paris.72 Lindbergh winged away into the sunrise at 6:52 on Friday, May 20, 1927, flying by a periscope that projected over his blind cockpit, at a hundred miles an hour. He sped past Cape Breton Island at 4:05 that afternoon into the darkness that crept over a stormy sea. No newspaperman will ever forget the growing suspense that day and the next. Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis were swallowed up in silence. The Times alone received 10,000 telephone calls about him. The radio babbled on incessantly, but had nothing new to report. No flier had ever attracted public interest so deeply; few men, whatever their mission, had ever stirred up so many hopes and prayers for a brief time. At 10 p.m., in the darkness at Le Bourget Field outside Paris on Saturday, May 21, a four-man Times staff plunged hopelessly into a mob of 100,000 excited Frenchmen and women as they heard an airplane engine faintly in the distance. They were Jimmy James, the boss, and his henchmen, Carlyle MacDonald, P. J. Philip, and Harold Callender. They had been told by their home office, "Isolate Lindbergh." After one glance at the crowd, they knew they would be lucky to keep him away even from the New York Herald Tribune, which was also out in force along with every other newsgathering organization in Paris. When the landing lights of the field flashed on and Lindbergh landed at 10:24 p.m., the expected happened. The French took over in a madly exciting, noisy, jubilant celebration. The Times had Lindbergh's story, but it lost him in the crowd. When Carlyle MacDonald finally found him, carefully tucked away at the American Embassy, he had to share him that night with Ralph Barnes of the Paris Herald, Freddy Abbott of INS, and C. F. Bertelli of Universal Service. The rest had to fill in as best they could by telephone. But next day, when Lindbergh's own story appeared under his by-line in the Times, those who wanted it had to pay for it. In St. Louis, it was the Globe-Democrat and not the Post-Dispatch which ran his story. It earned Lindbergh more than $6o,ooc.TS As surely as Bleriot's hop across the Channel had signaled the end of British security, Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic showed that

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the United States could no longer live in isolation behind its own ocean barriers. Fourteen years would pass before the United States would pay the penalty at Pearl Harbor for failing to learn the lesson. The Times sponsored many other flights, establishing its leadership in aviation coverage. When Byrd went to the Antarctic, Russell Owen accompanied him in 1928-29 on an assignment without a parallel in journalism. The Admiral's departure on his first flight to the South Pole on November 28, 1929, was Owen's story alone. Nobody else could touch it, and the Times made the most of it. Byrd himself sent the radio bulletin announcing his arrival at the South Pole, and Owen recorded his arrival back at his Little America base on November 29 after a flight of eighteen hours and fifty-nine minutes. It was a triumph of enterprise, both for aviation and journalism.74 At the end of 1929, the Times's circulation soared to 431,931 daily and 728,909 Sunday. In advertising it led the world's newspapers with 32,162,870 lines annually. Adolph Ochs's foreign news policy had paid handsome dividends. There was no doubt about the Times's leadership in the field. But the world in which that leadership had been established was now gone beyond recall, shattered by the stock market collapse of October 29, 1929. The news from New York radiated all over the world with an almost paralyzing effect: "Stock prices virtually collapsed yesterday, swept downward with gigantic losses in the most disastrous trading day in the market's history. Billions of dollars in open market values were wiped out as prices tumbled. . . . Hysteria swept the country and stocks went overboard for just what they would bring at a forced sale." 75 Such was the news the Times printed on October 30, 1929. From that day on, it would no longer be sufficient for American newspapers and news agencies to bring the world's news to the United States. The world—and not merely Britain and France and Germany—now would have to pay greater attention to the news from America, as well. 5. T H E Y O U N G F A L C O N S Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the tough and strong-minded ruler of the "world's greatest newspaper," as he called the Chicago Tribune, told Floyd Gibbons, after World War I, to build up a foreign service.

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The ebullient Floyd needed no urging. Within a few years he collected a spirited group of high-flying young falcons—Frazier Hunt, Larry Rue, David Darrah, Vincent Sheean, Richard Henry Little, George Seldes, and one of the finest of all women correspondents, Sigrid Schultz. Then, by his own irrepressible example, he showed them what he expected of them. It was, in Westbrook Pegler's phrase, the "age of wonderful nonsense" and the Tribune had its share in the work that was done abroad. In 1923, because Rudolph Valentino had created a sensation in a movie, The Sheik, Gibbons organized a camel caravan to cross the Sahara. The objective, on cabled instructions from Chicago, was to "obtain true picture sheiks and their appeal Anglo-Saxon and American women." For three months and five days, Gibbons and his party struggled across the scorching desert for 2,000 miles from Colomb Bechar to Timbuktu. At the end of this odyssey, he reported disappointedly: "I never encountered the type of dashing, handsome, love-making sheik made famous in fiction and movies as a romantic conqueror of the hearts of beautiful Anglo-Saxon girls in the desert. Real sheiks . . . are very unromantic." 76 Such exploits were bound to have an effect on pliant young correspondents, particularly uninhibited romantics like Jimmy Sheean, who had joined the Tribune's staff in 1922. In the fall of 1924, he vanished into the Rif mountains of Morocco and interviewed Abd el Krim, who had been leading a rebellion of 5,000 tribesmen against Spanish rule. Out of this exploit came the Romberg operetta, The Desert Song, and some romantic newspaper pieces. But alas for fame, Sheean was later fired from the Tribune for taking what his indignant superiors thought was too long a time over dinner—a base canard, of course.77 Yet, Sheean's luck held. When he reached New York to look for another job, he ran into Merian Cooper of the New York Times, whom he had known for some years. The aggressive Cooper helped him sell a book about his Rif journey and introduced him to the North American Newspaper Alliance, for which he returned to the Rif and more adventure. Now, instead of working for one newspaper, and an ungrateful one at that, he was to appear in a number of leading American journals, including the New York World, and some of the British press, as well. The second expedition to the lair of the Rif patriot was somewhat

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less than romantic. The French, by this time, had been drawn into the fighting because Abd el Krim had had the bad judgment to send his tribesmen on raids across the border into Algeria. The musical comedy was over. The unsentimental Marshal Henry-Philippe Petain went after Abd el Krim with French bomber aircraft, machine guns, and the latest thing in artillery. Sheean survived air bombardment and other hardships. But when he returned to the outside world this time, nobody was waiting to scatter roses in his path and put book contracts in his eager hands. The Journal des Debats in Paris called him "le press agent attitre d'Abd el Krim." Of course, he had the satisfaction of being beatified in the columns of the New York World, which gave his report a dazzling display. But by 1926, the story was all over. Petain, with scant ceremony, crushed the Rif and sent Abd el Krim into exile. Sheean wrote a disenchanted postscript before he went on to examine the more humdrum aspects of foreign affairs: "That imperialism was murderous and hypocritical was no discovery. . . . You could not be immersed for years in political journalism without getting to know the nature of the beast. But until these journeys to the Rif, I had not realized its awful stupidity—the ghastly wrongheadedness with which it sacrificed the time and the lives of its best men for the enrichment of its worst. . , . So, as all know, the French empire in Morocco was preserved from danger, and the Spaniards returned to that strip of land out of which Abd el Krim had driven them." 78 A more philosophic Chicagoan, William Lawrence Shirer, another new foreign correspondent who was working at that time for the Chicago Tribune in Paris, put it differently: "The Paris that I came to in 1925 at the tender age of twenty-one and loved, as you love a woman, is no longer the Paris that I will find day after tomorrow—I have no illusions about that." 79 But there were few like Shirer, realistic enough to know that new leaders sometimes make deceptive music in their hideaways. It was to be his fate to record the rise and fall of the Third Reich. There were few, too, like Dorothy Thompson, the Methodist minister's daughter from Lancaster, N.Y., who set out for Europe in 1920 at the age of 26 with nothing but her courage and $150 to sustain her. Following her graduation from Syracuse in 1914, she had been a women's suffrage organizer, done advertising, and ground out social service publicity. In London, she patiently applied for work and finally sold a few stories to INS, one about a Zionist convention and others about

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the Irish rebellion. What she earned wasn't enough to sustain her, so she went back to publicity, this time for the Red Cross in Paris. The Philadelphia Public Ledger at about this time was just embarking on a foreign service venture, in which the New York Evening Post later shared, both papers being owned by Cyrus H. K. Curtis, the publisher of the Saturday Evening Post. Miss Thompson resolved to keep trying and wrote a piece about tsarist refugees in Paris who were doing menial labor. With it, she invaded the Ledger's Paris office. There, she encountered the ever-gallant and ever-generous Sam Dashiell, who was bureau chief, and who promptly bought the story. Dashiell did even more. Out of sheer friendliness for the young and the penniless—there were literally hundreds whom he helped in one way or another—lie took the determined young woman with the fair hair and the bright blue eyes to his chief, Wythe Williams, and recommended her. It was another break for Dorothy Thompson. Williams, the old New York Times correspondent who had done an unpleasant hitch with the Northcliffe papers, was now busy developing the Ledger's service with Carl W . Ackerman, back from his exploits in Berlin and Siberia and newly installed in London as its chief European correspondent. It wasn't long before Miss Thompson was the Ledger's correspondent in Vienna. There, fortunately, she came across another sympathetic colleague, M. W . Fodor of the Manchester Guardian, the wisest journalist in central Europe. Fodor's training worked wonders. In 1922, she obtained an exclusive interview with Emperor Karl in Budapest after the failure of his putsch and sent it through censorship by a sleeping-car porter to Fodor in Vienna, with whom she shared the story. Soon afterward, when Fodor tipped her at a party that Marshal Josef Pilsudski was marching on Warsaw intent on a revolutionary seizure of power, she borrowed $500 from Sigmund Freud and took off by train for the Polish border, still in evening gown and satin slippers. About fifty miles outside Warsaw, the train halted because the tracks were mined. Floyd Gibbons, Karl Decker, and other correspondents aboard the train rounded up automobiles to take them to the Polish capital. Out of consideration for Miss Thompson, who seemed quite regal in her party dress, they bowed her to a big, shiny Daimler. But with the frugality of most women correspondents, she refused to pay the $60 rental charge on the Daimler and took an old Ford instead. Virtue was rewarded. The Daimler was riddled with machine gun fire before it

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reached Warsaw. Miss Thompson got through in her jalopy, walking the last few miles in high heels. Through Fodor's training, she knew how to circumvent the Polish censors, just as she had ¿he Hungarians. Once more, her copy came through nicely and the honors were principally hers. It did not take long to make a seasoned correspondent out of Dorothy Thompson. By 1925 she was the chief of the Philadelphia Public Ledger-New York Evening Post bureau in Berlin, a title long on prestige but lamentably short on salary. It paid only $50 a week. Fodor inherited the Ledger-Post bureau in Vienna, which he filled with distinction for many years along with his responsibilities for the Manchester Guardian. He watched with interest the development of the most brilliant of his many protégés, particularly her rivalry with Edgar Ansel Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News, Sigrid Schultz of the Chicago Tribune, and Joseph Shaplen of the New York Times in Berlin.80 With her other friends, he worried over the failure of her four-year marriage to a young Hungarian, Josef Bard. Nobody, as it turned out, had any need to worry about love and Dorothy Thompson. Shortly after she received her divorce from Bard, she attended one of Gustav Stresemann's press conferences in the German foreign ministry on July 8, 1927, and met a lanky, freckled, red-headed friend of H. R. Knickerbocker's. The newcomer was Sinclair Lewis, who wouldn't let her out of his sight. She invited him to a party for her thirty-third birthday next day. When he arrived, he wore a Rotary button in his lapel and carried a Bible in his rucksack. He proposed to her that night, his first wife, Grace Hegger Lewis, already having determined on a divorce. Miss Thompson didn't take him seriously at first. But he was persistent. And she soon saw that he was in earnest. On July 18, 1927, when the Socialist workers' riots broke out in Vienna and the Palace of Justice was burned to the ground in the heart of the city, Miss Thompson flew in to help Fodor with the story. Sinclair Lewis came along. Humbly, he wrote his impressions of the scene, merely because she asked him to do so, and let her cable the story to the Public Ledger syndicate, the first and last time it ever carried a spot news foreign story written by a major American novelist at far less than the going rates. From then on, Lewis went wherever Dorothy Thompson was. He

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even followed her to Moscow on November 29 when she was sent there on a Russian assignment. This was the celebrated occasion on which she and Theodore Dreiser talked separately to Anna Louise Strong, the Communist journalist from Seattle, and later wrote pieces that strangely resembled each other textually. This was the cause of a one-punch fight later between Lewis and Dreiser. Dreiser won. To nobody's surprise, Miss Thompson and Lewis were married in London on May 14, 1928, at St. Martin's Registry Office in London. It was, without doubt, the literary marriage of the year. The new Mrs. Lewis, abruptly interrupting her career, followed her husband and indulgently humored him in his peculiar, alcoholic ways although she saw from the outset that she would have to make all the sacrifices to keep the marriage going. She made the effort, explaining that she loved him: "Why else should I have married him, considering my own position when we met, except because of that pull of his genius and my faith in his almost agonized protestations, at times, that he needed me?" But neither love nor pity, Lewis nor marriage, were to keep her forever from the life she had ordained for herself as a journalist in 1920. 81 Knickerbocker took over from her as the Ledger-Post correspondent in Berlin and in 1931 distinguished himself by doing a Pulitzer Prize-winning series on Russia. The Chicago Daily News, meanwhile, was building up a foreign staff that was the finest of the era for its size. Hal O'Flaherty in London, Paul Scott Mowrer in Paris, Junius Wood in Moscow, Edgar Ansel Mowrer in Berlin, Hi Moderwell in Rome, A. R. Decker in Vienna, and Constantine Brown in Turkey were all authorities in their areas. In some ways, these knowledgeable correspondents eclipsed the kind of men who for generations had been representing the Times of London in key spots of the world. The New York Times was able to compete with individual correspondents of such brilliance only by the sheer force of numbers and greater financial resources. To join this group of experts, younger men flocked to Europe by every device that is known to the local reporter who wants to become a foreign correspondent. Upon his graduation from the University of Michigan in 1925, William H. Stoneman lived with a Swedish family and learned the language while he worked for three years for the Daily News's local staff. Then, quite calmly, he sailed for Stockholm, notified his office that it had a new Swedish-speaking correspondent, and was

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rewarded with the appointment for his daring. Negley Farson, who came from the University of Pennsylvania, recommended himself to the Daily News foreign service by traveling from the Netherlands to Rumania by canal and riverboat and writing pieces as he went. John Gunther, who was no less ingenious, applied for the foreign service almost as soon as he was graduated from the University of Chicago as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. A few years later, as a $55-a-week Daily News reporter, he simply walked off the job, sailed to England, and was hired by the newspaper's London bureau. However, he didn't have Stoneman's luck and was fired as soon as his first by-line appeared in the paper. After doing six months' penance on the UP, he was taken back by the Daily News, gravitated to Vienna where he became another of Fodor's protégés, and eventually developed into the author of a staggering number of "Inside" books on the great nations and continents of the world.82 The Christian Science Monitor, too, was developing a formidable foreign service with the accession of Willis J. Abbot, the old Hearst executive, ?s its editor in 1921. Until Abbot came to the Monitor, its correspondents sometimes were more colorful than expert. Demarest Lloyd, who liked newspapering despite his wealth, was accustomed to cover assignments in London in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. Abbot used a more conventional journalist in London, John Sidney Braithwaite, who headed the European service, and the crotchety veteran, Sisley Huddleston, in Paris. On Russian affairs, in addition to the informed comments of the University of Chicago professor, Samuel N. Harper, the Monitor used William Henry Chamberlin as resident correspondent from 1922 on for fourteen years. At the League of Nations in Geneva, the coverage was more conventional, the correspondent being Hugh Spender, a British journalist of the old school. He made little impression on Erwin Dain Canham, of Auburn, Maine, a graduate of Bates College, who appeared at Geneva in 1926 during a vacation from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, to assist him. It was the first foreign assignment for the Monitor's future editor. The Monitor also brought to American readers the political dispatches of the liberal British editor, H. W. Massingham, and the British critics, V. S. Pritchett and Harold Hobson, among others.83 Another American newcomer to the European field was the Baltimore Sun, which in 1924 decided to open its own London office after

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having used the Manchester Guardian's foreign service for a considerable time. John W . Owens, its first correspondent, was the forerunner of a number of competent experts who gave the Sun papers a broader outlook on foreign affairs.84 The newest, and yet in a sense the oldest, of all the American foreign services was that of the New York Herald Tribune, which contrived to put together a group of seasoned correspondents and youngsters, soon after the merger of the two old newspapers, to compete with the more powerful New York Times. Wilbur Forrest, the old dependable, was in charge of the Paris office, with Leland Stowe, then only a few years out of Wesleyan, to help him. Arthur Draper was in London, John Elliott in Berlin, and John T. Whitaker in Rome. But there was a constant ebb and flow of newcomers on the Paris Herald, as the European edition of the Herald Tribune continued to be known, and some became outstanding correspondents. A typical case was Ralph Barnes, whose first big foreign story was Gertrude Ederle's successful swim across the English Channel in 1926. In the excitement Barnes, who had suffered the excruciating pangs of seasickness during the crossing, plunged overboard from his rowboat and managed to get to a telephone with his story.85 Among others were Bert Andrews, who was to become chief of the newspaper's Washington bureau; Will Barber, who would be a star for the Chicago Tribune; Rex Smith, later to be editor of Newsweek; and Elliot Paul, a picturesque character who would write nostalgic books about Paris. At least one of the Herald Tribune's raw recruits varied the usual pattern by sidestepping the Paris Herald's dubious training and beginning, instead, on a more conventional Paris newspaper, he Matin. She was Sonia Tomara, a slim young Russian refugee who spoke nine languages. She arrived in Paris after World War I by a circuitous route with only 150 francs and a flaring ambition to make something of herself as a journalist. For six years, she served her apprenticeship as secretary to Jules Sauerwein, one of the distinguished editors of Le Matin. Then, the ever-alert Leland Stowe hired her away for the Herald Tribune and launched her on an adventurous career.86 There is, of course, no way of knowing how many young American journalists were nurtured on the thriving English language press in Paris during the 1920s. Only fading memories and tattered books of reminiscences provide the total record and they are, by and large, un-

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certain accountings. Nor can there be any proper estimate of the influence that was exerted on the young, the eager, and the enthusiastic ones by the colorful, careless, and often irresponsible Paris Herald and its rivals, the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, the Paris Times, and the continental edition of the London Daily Mail. All flourished, to the extent that is possible for English-language newspapers in France, during the 1920s. But after the debacle of 1929, when the grand American binge in Paris was over and most of the frolicking young Americans had to go home, the Herald alone survived as an American publication in France. While its appearance began to conform to the handsome dress of its parent newspaper, it did not really change its careless and casual ways between the wars. Moreover, it continued, rather defiantly, to present as one of its trademarks the semi-literate maunderings of its ancient sports columnist, Sparrow Robertson, to a vague audience of good companions whom he called his old pals.87 There were a few other independent American newsgathering organizations that maintained a semblance of a foreign service in the 1920s. The New York World got by with such veterans as Amo Dosch-Fleurot, such newcomers as John L. Balderston, a graduate of the soldiers' newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and such distinguished commentators as William Bolitho. The New York Sun took on an occasional correspondent, too, one being a youngster on the China coast, Edgar Snow, who had an intense curiosity even then about the Chinese Communist movement. Many other newspapers sent correspondents overseas either for limited periods or single assignments, in much the same manner as the infant American radio networks and news magazines at first tried to fill their foreign needs. But basically, except for the foreign services of the New York Times and its principal rivals, American newspapers were able to get what little foreign news they published from their wire services—the AP, the UP, and the Hearst services, INS and Universal Service. An America in isolation basically wanted foreign news that was compounded either out of crisis or curiosity, sometimes both, and that is what was generally in the wire service foreign file in that era. The wire service correspondent was, by and large, a generalist picked on the basis of his ability to get a story and wing it into the cablehead quicker than his rivals. If he had any ability as a linguist, or if he knew something more about the background of his assignment at first than the average college junior, it was purely accidental. And yet, some of

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these correspondents very quickly developed a familiarity with Europe that was the equal of any Reuters correspondent of standing, enabling them to compete successfully with the great British wire service. Such AP correspondents as James A. Mills could pick up a telephone in Paris and summon King Carol of Rumania for an exclusive interview at the other end of the line in Bucharest. Such UP correspondents as Ed L. Keen in London and Webb Miller in Paris were regarded as authorities in their areas. And despite their many weaknesses, the Hearst services could put up a good front on big stories by using their stars, of whom Karl H. von Wiegand was a prime example in Germany, Russia, and eastern Europe. The youngsters came and went in the wire service offices, too, although not quite on the same scale as on the English-language newspapers in Paris; the wire services wanted a little more responsibility for their money, although their pay, also, in those days, was disgraceful.88 There were some, of course, who went into journalism in Europe merely to sustain themselves while they worked hopefully on the great American novel, musical composition, or painting. But it was relatively easy for the professionals to tell at a glance who was seriously interested in the work of foreign correspondence, regardless of talent or lack of it, and who was not. Wilbur Forrest, of the New York Herald Tribune, remarked after brief observation of the husky young man who represented the Toronto Star at the Genoa conference in 1922: "He didn't give a damn about it, except that it provided some much-needed funds and gave him an association with other writers." 8 9 The Toronto Star's correspondent was a 23-year-old native of Oak Park, 111., Emest Hemingway. In fairness to Hemingway, he gave much more thought and effort to his work as a journalist, limited though it was, than did his fellownovelist, Stephen Crane; but, of course, he never wrote as consistently for any newspaper as did Harold Frederic for the New York Times or even Mark Twain for the New York Herald. Hemingway was serious enough about newspaper work when he broke in on the Kansas City Star in 1917, for he labored industriously on a mountain of trivia before he took off for Italy in the summer of 1918 as a Red Cross ambulance driver and canteen assistant with the rank of lieutenant. It was his misfortune to be riddled with fragments of an exploding Austrian trench mortar on July 8, 1918, near the Italian village of

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Fossalta, two weeks before his nineteenth birthday and only a week after he had gone into the trenches. There is a legend that, like Richard Harding Davis, he was firing at the foe although he was a noncombatant, but it has never been proved.90 In any event, when he returned to New York on January 21, 1919, his arrival as a wounded ex-newspaperman was recorded by the New York Sun with a sympathetic 500-word piece, which certainly didn't discourage his interest in journalism. It was perfectly natural for him, therefore, to seek work at the Toronto Star, to which friends directed him, and persuade the Star to let him be its stringer in Paris when he returned there in 1922. For about two years, while he was working on his short stories and his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway supported himself by turning out a melange of features, spot news, and interpretive articles for the Star. If he wasn't serious about continuing in journalism, as Forrest and others said, he was at the very least a serious and conscientious journalist. At Genoa, he wrote of Fascist psychology: "The Fascisti make no distinction between Socialists, Communists, Republicans, or members of cooperative societies. They are all Reds and dangerous." 91 And of Georgi V. Chicherin, the Soviet Commissar for foreign affairs, he observed at the same conference: "Chicherin rose and his hands shaking spoke in French, in his queer, hissing accents, the result of an accident that knocked out half his teeth. The interpreter with the ringing voice translated. There was not a sound in the pauses except the clink of the mass of decorations on an Italian general's chest as he shifted from one foot to the other." 92 He interviewed Mussolini: "Mussolini is a big, brown-faced man with a high forehead, a slowsmiling mouth, and large, expressive hands. . . . His face is intellectual, it is the typical 'Bersagliere' face, with its large, brown, oval shape, dark eyes and big, slow-speaking mouth." 93 There was a lot more of this, equally competent as the work of a young journalist abroad, so that Hemingway had a right to expect reasonably considerate treatment when he came to Toronto to work on the Star in the fall of 1923. He was given short shrift and quit after four months, the final blow being the destruction of some confidential official documents he had shown an arrogant desk man in connection with an interview with a visiting foreign dignitary. It was the end of him as a day-to-day working journalist, although he would be drawn back into the profession for limited periods in years to come.94

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Such was the manner in which American foreign correspondence began to flourish in Europe in the 1920s and such were the young journalists who gave up precious years to work in the field, some temporarily, some for just a lark, but most of them for the rest of their lives. If the Americans achieved a certain preeminence over their British and European rivals in a limited area, it was primarily a triumph of superior drive and energy at first. Elsewhere in the world, American coverage of Asia was sketchy, and the reporting from other areas not commonly covered was based on either crises or stunts. T h e young falcons would have to mature before they could achieve the leadership they sought.

IX: The Darkening Horizon 1. S T O R M C L O U D S O V E R

CHINA

Demaree and Dorothy Bess, who worked for the United Press in Peking, were awakened before dawn on September 18, 1931, by a telephone call. William Henry Donald, the Australian journalist who was public relations adviser to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, announced excitedly: "The Japanese are seizing Mukden and I wanted to tell you that we are appealing to the League of Nations." There was no more sleep for Demaree Bess that night. The 40-yearold Missourian, who had been in the Far East for seven years and now was North China bureau manager for the UP, knew he had a major story. Donald wasn't one to bluff about danger. In Sun Yat-sen's 1 9 1 1 revolution the Australian, then a correspondent for the New York Herdd, had fired the siege guns that blew open the gates of Nanking. He knew more about what was going on in China, perhaps, than anybody except Chiang himself. His information had to be taken at face value. Within a short time, Bess confirmed the Japanese attack. He learned that the Japanese army in Manchuria had begun punitive action against the Chinese for allegedly blowing up a small section of track on the South Manchurian Railway at Mukden. Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, who was allied with Chiang Kai-shek, was withdrawing his Manchurian troops south of the Great Wall. The richest part of China was being left to the marauding Japanese. This was the so-called Mukden incident which, although Bess couldn't foresee it, was the first in a chain of small wars that would lead to World War II. All the correspondent knew at the time was that he had to find some way of covering. By a stroke of luck, Martin Sommers, a first-rate New York newspaperman and graduate of the Paris Herald,

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was in Peking, and Bess quickly arranged to send him north as the UP's man. In a few years Sommers, as the foreign editor of the Saturday Evening Post, would be assigning Bess as a correspondent, but this time it was the other way around. By the time Sommers reached Mukden three days later (the train trip normally took one day, but the Japanese created difficulties), the New York headquarters of the UP was supremely uninterested in the Mukden story.1 Yet, it was clear that the Japanese were not likely to pause after their easy conquest of Manchuria. The League of Nations was powerless to stop them. Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of State, did little more than hurt their feelings by refusing to recognize their rule over Manchuria. Moreover, despite their initial defeat, the Chinese were showing signs of fight. They were clamping an economic boycott on Japan. The Chinese Nineteenth Route Army was bracing itself in Shanghai for a bold stand. To any alert independent newspaper and news agency, the danger signals were almost painfully apparent. And yet, among the old China hands and the youngsters who then were covering for the foreign press either as regulars or stringers, there were few with the experience to handle a crisis like this. China was thinly covered at best and correspondents moved in and out, few staying for very long. Two of the better ones, George Sokolsky, who had edited the Far Eastern Review and corresponded for London and New York dailies, and Relman Morin, a 25-year-old graduate of Pomona College who had worked on the Shanghai Evening Post, had just gone back to the United States. Reinforcements had to be brought in. The Japanese finally moved to the attack on January 28, 1932. They landed 70,000 troops in the Hongkew area of the International Settlement of Shanghai and began lobbing shells into the Chinese army of about 45,000 in the native sector. H. R. Ekins, a tall, fair-haired minister's son who was the UP correspondent in Shanghai, walked past the Japanese lines wearing a fedora and swinging a gold-headed cane as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be out taking the air. Within a few minutes, he walked right into the field of Chinese rifle fire. The walk ended abruptly. Bud Ekins flung himself into a ditch and began crawling to safety. Eventually, Chinese soldiers pulled him out, brushed him off, and took him to their commander. They had tea

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together which was, as Ekins observed later, a strange way to cover a war.2 Ekins was far from alone. Floyd Gibbons, who had been earning a good living as a broadcaster, was in Shanghai as a war correspondent, this time for International News Service. It was his seventh war. His colleagues were saying, with wry humor, that no war was really official until Gibbons appeared. From the twelfth-story roof of the Hotel Cathay in Shanghai, the veteran somberly watched the Japanese warplanes bombing a railway station in which Chinese troops were holding out.3 Most of them were killed, but their companions in the Nineteenth Route Army fought on. And Gibbons filed his stories to the United States, day by day, to a large and relatively unconcerned audience. Americans just didn't believe Shanghai was their concern. Among the younger men who underwent their baptism of fire as war correspondents in Shanghai was Edgar Snow, then a 27-year-old correspondent for Consolidated Press, a syndicate which included the New York Sun and the Chicago Daily News. Daily he walked through the shattered streets with his friend and mentor, John Benjamin Powell, the editor of the China Weekly Review and the correspondent of the Chicago Tribune. Snow had come to Shanghai in 1928 with a letter of introduction to Powell from Walter Williams, dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Now, after four years of training, he could write with sickening precision of the "smell of smoking flesh slapped against the steel sides of a bombed troop train" and the "ragdoll men in their rough cotton-padded blue gowns hanging where the Japanese had left them after using them for bayonet practice." 4 It was, he assured himself, "real" war at last, not the chase and occupation he had witnessed in Manchuria. There was still another newcomer who was being introduced to the ferocity of war—27-year-old Christopher Chancellor, who had taken a "first" in history at Cambridge and come out to the Far East as Reuters chief correspondent. One day, he would head the entire service. Now, he was a particular target of the Japanese despite his youthful years. Their intelligence reports, as it was later learned, credited him with strange extracurricular activities: "It was said in foreign circles that Chancellor's wife had connections close to the British court, while he himself had made a career as a news agency man only because he was

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in close contact with British Secret Service circles and had offered his fortune and his wife's to Britain." 6 Had the Japanese realized it, there was a real spy—the most dangerous of his era in the Far East—operating right under their noses in Shanghai at that time. He was a big, brown-haired correspondent for the German Soziologische Magazin, Dr. Richard Sorge. Nobody thought much of him as a correspondent; he seemed, to both the Japanese and his colleagues, to be a crazy, drunken, woman-chasing Nazi. In reality, he was the organizer of the most efficient Communist spy ring in the Far East and even then was recruiting the members of his apparatus with his chief of staff, Ozaki Hozumi, a special correspondent of the Osaka Asahi.6 But nobody suspected either of them. Few among the correspondents, particularly the latest arrivals, knew very much about the complicated relations between Chiang, the Russians, and the Chinese Communists—and cared less. That was the crucial failure in much of their work. All they saw before them was stricken Shanghai, with Chiang obviously reluctant to rush reinforcements to the embattled Nineteenth Route Army. His hesitation was costing him friends everywhere. Actually, as the better correspondents realized, Chiang was caught between three foes—the Japanese invaders, the Chinese Communists, who had set up a Soviet regime in Kiangsi in 1931, and the remaining independent war lords. If he moved against anyone, he weakened himself in fighting the others. He still was convinced, of course, that the Chinese Communists eventually would be his most dangerous foe. The Chinese Communists had organized in Shanghai in 1921, one of the original members being a round-faced farm boy, Mao Tse-tung. In 1927, after a long period of temporizing, Chiang had broken with them. He had swept them from the Yangtze Valley, captured Nanking in a savage onslaught, and forced his political and military advisers from the Soviet Union, headed by Mikhail Borodin, to flee. He had tried in vain to exterminate the Chinese Communists in Kiangsi; now, seemingly, he had decided to wait, safeguard his own forces, and let the Shanghai tragedy take its course. It was this position that brought him so much criticism from the foreign correspondents who covered the Japanese assault in Shanghai.7 Unwittingly the Chinese Communists, far removed from the scene of

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the battle, were the beneficiaries as far as public sentiment was concerned. The Nineteenth Route Army, after thirty-four days of heroic resistance centered in the Chapei area, had to withdraw from Shanghai, half its strength gone. On May 5, the Chinese ended their boycott and agreed to a demilitarized zone about the International Settlement. Chiang Kai-shek broke up the remainder of the Nineteenth, distributing its troops. At the first opportunity, he resumed his attack against his "first and worst" foes, the Chinese Communists. Japan took advantage of the civil war, creating an "independent" nation, Manchukuo, occupying Jehol, and advancing south of the Great Wall. There was little doubt of what the Japanese meant to do in the minds of such correspondents as Hallett Abend of the New York Times and Victor Keen of the New York Herald Tribune, both Asian veterans. One of the outstanding feats of the entire campaign was the investigation by Edward Hunter of INS of reports that Japanese troops had massacred Chinese peasants. He risked his life to obtain the evidence and documented it so well that it became a part of the League of Nations records. However, when the League on May 27, 1933, finally adopted the Lytton report, incorporating the Stimson formula of nonrecognition of Japanese conquests, Japan withdrew from the League. By that time, the ranks of foreign correspondents in Asia had been thinned again by momentous occurrences elsewhere. In the United States and in Europe, the public gave up worrying about the unsettled Far East. When Edgar Snow of the Saturday Evening Post sought out Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai in distant Yenan three years later and told the story of the fantastic "Long March" of 6,000 miles that saved the Chinese Communist Party from Chiang Kai-shek's annihilation campaign, it was regarded as a sensational journalistic feat. Only a few specialists, however, noted Mao's stinging references to the failure of the Soviet Union to help him in 1927 when the Kuomintang-Communist alliance collapsed and Chiang opened fire on the Reds. They wondered at it, but concluded in the main that it was double talk. Few in the West would have taken any stock then in a Communist split between Russia and China. And even fewer would have prophesied that a chain-smoking, long-haired Chinese with an amiable smile and ruthless revolutionary policy would one day be the master of 600,000,000 Chinese.8

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2. FIRE IN BERLIN Flames burst from the Reichstag in Berlin at 10 p.m. on February 27, 1933. Members of the foreign press corps who gathered outside the building knew without being told that it was the end of the Weimar Republic, that brief and feeble moment of German liberty. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler, the one-time Austrian paper hanger, had been named Chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg with the support of both the German army and the nation's most conservative elements. All Hitler needed was a pretext to make himself dictator. And this was it. At 11:30 p.m., after the fire had been extinguished, the foreign correspondents' suspicions were confirmed in a strange way. They had expected the Nazis would raise the cry of "Red terror," against which Hitler alone could lead the defense. They had learned that the Nazis had arrested a 20-year-old Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, and obtained a confession from him. But what they hadn't expected to find, once they were permitted inside the gutted Reichstag, was about twenty bundles of incendiary materials scattered through the building. Even the cautious Frankfurter Zeitung was to report on March 1: "There is some doubt as to whether the imprisoned man could have done it all himself." The world was not to know until the Nuremberg trials that Nazi storm troopers had scattered gasoline and self-igniting chemicals in the Reichstag that night and used the supposedly demented Dutchman as a dupe. But such correspondents as Edgar Ansel Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News, and others, broadly intimated in their dispatches that the Nazis had set the fire themselves.9 They were not in the least taken in by Hermann Goering's order the night of the Reichstag fire to Rudolf Diels, the new chief of the Gestapo: "This is the beginning of the Communist Revolution! We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very night be strung up." The somber story of Hitler's takeover was quickly told in the foreign press. On February 28, all guarantees of individual and civil liberties were suspended. On March 5, the last democratic election in a dozen years gave the Nazis 288 seats in the Reichstag which, with 52 Na-

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tionalists' seats, provided a slender majority of 16. On March 23, by 441 to 84, the Reichstag voted itself out of power and gave all its authority to the cabinet. Thus, Hitler became the German Fuehrer, while the Nazi deputies shouted the "Horst Wessel" song, and many millions began the tragic journey to death on the battlefield, in the concentration camps, or in the crematories. It scarcely mattered that Ernst Torgler, Georgi Dimitroff, and two other Communists were acquitted after a trial and the Dutchman, van der Lübbe, alone was convicted and decapitated. By that time, it was too late for any German to do anything about Hitler and the Nazis. Germany, as Edgar Ansel Mowrer wrote, had put the clock back. Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, dealt swiftly with the German press—the "lap dog press," he called it contemptuously. When he demanded that his controlled journalists be a little brighter, Ehm Welk of the Ullstein Gruene Post made a mildly sarcastic comment and was packed off to a concentration camp. The Voelkischer Beobachter became the principal party paper, with Dr. Goebbels issuing his program through the Angriff and Marshal Goering taking over the Essen National Zeitung. The Wolff Agency and the old Telegraphen Union merged into the new national propaganda wire service, the Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro (DNB). The Vossiche Zeitung, founded in 1704 and numbering Frederick the Great among its contributors, suspended publication. It had been owned by a Jewish firm, Ullstein Verlag. The Berliner Tageblatt and the Frankfurter Zeitung, both Jewish-owned, were taken away from their proprietors, and continued publication as mere shadows of themselves. The radio and the motion pictures, too, became adjuncts of the State. Journalists became licensed servants of the government. To practice the profession in Germany, one had to be a German citizen, more than 21 years of age, and neither Jewish nor married to a Jew within the meaning of the Civil Service Law (all with Jewish grandmothers were excluded).10 The inevitable reaction was that fewer newspapers were bought and read, greater demand was evident for foreign newspapers, and the work of foreign correspondents, accordingly, was carefully scrutinized. Edgar Ansel Mowrer was told that, because of his outspoken opposition to the Nazi regime, he would have to resign as president of the Foreign Press Association or it would be officially ignored. He tried to quit, but

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the foreign correspondents triumphantly kept him in office for a short while longer. Threats and pressure eventually forced him out of Germany, the first of the foreign correspondents to go. 11 He won a Pulitzer Prize for his German correspondence. For those who remained, conditions became increasingly difficult. Telephones were tapped, mail opened, associates were interrogated, correspondents themselves were trailed. A card file was kept on each in Goebbels' ministry. German associates of the correspondents were pressed into service as informers.12 The whole apparatus of the police state was brought to bear on all those who were obliged to work under the sign of the swastika. Conditions were scarcely worse in Moscow. It was particularly hard on the wire service correspondents, who were responsible for getting news from Germany quickly and accurately, but most of them managed to stick it out. Dorothy Thompson was not so favored. On August 25, 1934, she hastily left the German capital, having been given twenty-four hours to leave. Her book, I Saw Hitler, had made her unpopular.13 Moreover, the Nazis didn't care too much for one of her friends, H. R. Knickerbocker, who had switched to INS in Berlin, and was presently replaced by the more phlegmatic Pierre J. Huss. However, Ward Price, the monocled British correspondent of the London Daily Mail, was popular in Berlin and had a series of interviews with Hitler. A sample of Hitler's pronouncements in the Daily Mail: "War will not come again. . . . Germany's problems cannot be settled by war." 14 Le Matin, in Paris, ran the same stuff, but no realistic foreign correspondent believed it. About a hundred of the foreign press corps jammed the conference room of Dr. Goebbels' propaganda ministry in Berlin on March 16, 1935. The little propaganda chief excitedly read off the text of a new law which, as the correspondents immediately realized, wiped out all the military prohibitions of the Versailles Treaty against Germany. The Third Reich was rearming forthwith. Universal military service was restored. Twelve army corps, thirty-six divisions, would be the beginning. As for the end, any correspondent could guess. The wire service men jumped up—Louis Lochner of the AP, Edward W. Beattie Jr. of the UP, Pierre Huss of INS, and Gordon Young of Reuters. Before Goebbels finished, they were on the telephone to their offices, and the bulletins were going out to an apathetic world. Norman Ebbutt of the Times of London and Pat Murphy of the London Daily

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Express walked up the Wilhelmstrasse later with William L. Shirer, who was the Universal Service correspondent in Berlin at the time and didn't have to file for afternoon papers. Ebbutt kept trying to reassure his colleagues that it was not news—that the Germans had been building up their armies for some time in secret. Shirer knew better. In his diary he wrote: "Hitler, I leam, acted with lightning speed, apparently on the inspiration that now was the time— if ever—to act and get by with it, and it looks as though he will." With a correspondent's dichotomy over the quick dispatch of bad news, he added: "To bed, tired, and sick at this Nazi triumph, but somehow professionally pleased at having had a big story to handle, Dosch [Fleurot] being away, which left the job to me alone." 18 The correspondents sounded the alarm in Germany, clearly and faithfully, just as they had in China. And still, France, Britain, and the United States slept. Paul Scott Mowrer wrote: "Most people just couldn't believe that the things the Nazis were doing were true." 16 They would soon pay heavily for their neglect. The reoccupation of the Rhineland, the annexation of Austria, and the rape of Czechoslovakia would be the consequences of a foreign hope of "peace in our time." 3. T H E W E A K N E S S O F F R A N C E Philippe Barres, Berlin correspondent of he Matin of Paris, waged an aggressive campaign in the 1930s against the rearmament of Germany. He was one of the few on he Matin who did so; the paper, by and large, sided with the conservative elements that had a sneaking admiration for the way Hitler was doing things. But Barres persisted in his disclosures until he found that Le Matin was using his material to dazzle its readers with German might instead of preaching the cause of a stronger France. Then he quit, going over to the opposition Paris Soir Maurice Bunau-Varilla, the proprietor of Le Matin and brother of Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who had helped arrange the Panama Canal land grab, saw virtue in the Germans, as did the French rightist press generally. The Germans, in their own way and for their own purposes, appreciated M. Bunau-Varilla's fine qualities. They even took the trouble to send a German chemist to him to praise a pharmaceutical

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compound known as Synthol, in which he had an interest, and which he presented to visitors on the slightest excuse.18 It was certainly no surprise, therefore, when one or the other of Le Matin's directorate, but not all, made trips to the shrine of Nazidom in Berlin. Nor was Le Matin alone of the major French newspapers in gingerly approaching a policy of appeasement at first, then becoming bolder as the Germans gained strength. The respected Le Temps had much the same leanings. The rightist press was, of course, outspoken. Pierre Guimier's Le Journal, Le Jour, Gringoire, Candide, and L'Action Française all seemed to desire the death of the French Republic more than they did the defeat of Hitler. And then, too, there was a new service called the Prima Press, which distributed news and pictures of obvious Nazi origin to the French press free of charge.19 Otto Abetz, Hitler's chief agent in France, was having a rather easy time, all in all, gently leading his distinguished French friends along the path that one day would drop them off the precipice in Vichy. Paris Soir, among others, was fighting back. Le Petit Parisien, despite a certain fondness for Mussolini, would have nothing to do with Hitler. Henri de Kerillis, in L'Epoque, was denouncing Abetz and his French crowd of appeasers. So was Andre Geraud ("Pertinax") in L'Europe Nouvelle and L'Ordre. But Genevieve Tabouis, one of the wisest and most courageous of all diplomatic correspondents, was obliged to share honors in L'Oeuvre with two French pacifists, Georges de la Fouchardiere and Marcel Deat, who opposed her.20 It went without saying that strange things were going on in the background of French journalism in the years when Hitler was building his war machine. As every seasoned foreign correspondent in Paris knew, it had always been difficult for an honest and competent French journalist to make his way. The miracle was that so many of them survived the system that produced them and labored, despite all difficulties, to try to produce decent newspapers and a responsible press. In 1931, Robert Dell, the Paris correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, wrote: "There has been corruption in the French press as long as I have known France, but it is worse now than it ever has been before." 2 1 An even gloomier observer, A1 Laney of the Paris Herald, estimated that the news columns were for sale in all but one or two of the more than a hundred Paris dailies. It was, he wrote, the "most venal press the world has known." 22 There were, of course, few specific details. Such charges can seldom

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be documented. But Dell and Laney both expressed the belief that much of the French press in the 1930s was subsidized by powerful interests, of which Havas was still the most potent because it controlled the flow of advertising. However, the correspondents also were convinced that foreign money was involved in seeing that there was favorable publicity. German money could scarcely have been excluded from so lamentable a situation, although it was traced to relatively few traitors. Remarking on what he believed to be the general philosophy of much of the French press, Laney wrote: "The owners and directors of daily papers . . . even took the position that any article, pointed in this direction or that, should be paid for. Favorable criticism of the arts was figured at so many francs a line in practically all the papers dealing with these subjects and was cheerfully paid for by the artists. Paid publicity was made to pass . . . as bona fide, impartial statement of fact. The hidden sources of revenue in the leading French dailies were enormous." As for Havas, he continued, "Havas had correspondents in all parts of the world, and the news they supplied it was often, if not always, bent to fit its enormous volume of advertising. It enjoyed a practical monopoly and it could and did control news anywhere in France." 23 Nor did first-rate French journalists themselves fail to protest the insidiousness of the system. Pierre Denoyer, New York correspondent for Le Petit Parisien, told a Princeton audience in 1930: "To alienate Havas may mean for a newspaper the loss of practically all its advertising revenue. This power of one advertising agency is of tremendous importance for the press and for the public, for it is known that in several cases advertising patrons have objected to editorial policies and interfered directly or indirectly with them, stopped campaigns and tabooed topics." 24 Yet, who in France could denounce Havas? Pierre LazarefiF, who edited Paris Soir before World War II, pointed out the consequences of an attack on the system, however much he deplored it, saying: "A mere dispatch from Havas was enough to start a panic on the Bourse, or to set in motion a movement in the Parliament which might lead to the Government's fall, to rioting, or even to war. Who, then, would have dared to attack these evils? Who was in a position to denounce them? Of all the poisons which exerted their influence on French public opinion,

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the Agence Havas was surely one of the most virulent. And this poison often fell on favorable grounds." 26 The weakness of the French system, as it then existed, was that the factual newsgatherer, as distinct from the editor or commentator, had no standing and received the barest subsistence pay. Like the newspapers in Germany, much of the French press consisted of journals of opinion rather than fact. The mere reporter, consequently, was looked down upon; the commentator, having more freedom to bestow his favors, was eagerly sought after and rewarded in a variety of ways.26 Moreover, because a number of French journalists accepted what amounted to bribes to publish certain material, it was assumed in France that the same procedures could be used against foreign correspondents. Obviously, the game couldn't be played that way in very many instances. But the suspicion was raised now and then, which annoyed and sometimes even embarrassed the foreign press corps in Paris. By and large, the condition of the French press was symptomatic of the general malaise that was attacking the nation itself. The Stavisky scandal, which rocked the French Republic to its foundations in 1934, was one aspect of this fatal illness. Serge Alexander Stavisky, a Bayonne swindler, sold millions in worthless bonds, fled to Chamonix when he was threatened with exposure in December, 1933, and there either committed suicide or was killed the following month. Fascists and Communists alike charged the Radical Socialist government of Camille Chautemps with corruption, although Chautemps himself was later cleared. But the reputation of the French press suffered once more when it became known that Stavisky had spread 3,000,000 francs in two years to bribe newspapers and journalists.27 Efforts to suppress the story failed. The foreign correspondents jumped on it with vigor. The new premier, Edouard Daladier, ruthlessly repressed extremist riots in Paris on February 6-7, 1934, and clapped a censorship on cables to halt outgoing news. For some reason, he forgot about the telephones, which were promptly used by both British and Americans to get their news through to London. Daladier fell, being replaced by a national unity cabinet under Gaston Doumergue, who also failed to maintain himself in office for very long. The Stavisky affair, consequently, shook France with unparalleled violence. It coincided with a stepped-up campaign by Otto Abetz to win

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greater sympathy for Hitler's aims in France. A number of French journalists were invited to Berlin, among them Count Femand de Brinon, a political ally of Pierre Laval. When de Brinon returned to Paris, it was with an appeal from Hitler for cooperation between French and German war veterans—a document that was duly published in Le Matin. The French veterans sent a deputation to Berlin, received excellent treatment, and came home in a glow of new understanding for the Third Reich. Not all of Abetz' Nazi promotions came off so well. Once, he arranged for an exclusive interview for Bertrand de Jouvenel, a correspondent of Paris Soir, with Hitler. It was at a time when the Chamber of Deputies was debating the ratification of the Franco-Soviet pact. Hitler, in the Jouvenel interview, offered France a twenty-five year nonaggression treaty provided France scrapped its arrangements with the Soviet Union. The story was not published in Paris Soir, however, to avoid prejudicing the Chamber debate; instead, it appeared in the smaller allied paper, Paris Midi. Abetz complained: "Everything has been ruined. You've made a Franco-German alliance impossible." 28 Through it all, the French people, like those in Britain and the United States, simply could not comprehend their danger. As Eric Sevareid wrote: "They were no more capable of taking preventive action based on a rational analysis of the facts than the American people were of attacking Japan prior to Pearl Harbor or than the British were of getting down to serious business prior to Dunkirk. They were sickened by the chauvinist's use of 'la gloire' as we, as university students, were of 'patriotism,' and they were unable or unwilling to believe that their personal lives and the life of their country were mutually incompatible, until their own patriotism was put to the test. Because of their geographic fate, when the test came for the French, it was too late." 29 4. " A V A N T I ! " During the peaceful and pleasant spring of 1935 in England, Webb Miller reluctantly decided that Italy meant to go to war with Ethiopia. As the European news manager for the UP, he alerted his organization and began shifting his men to cover all eventualities. He was not alone in his foresight. Nobody, not even the procrastinating diplomats at the

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League of Nations, could have had much doubt about the intentions of Benito Mussolini, who had the morals of a jackal and the ambitions of a Caesar. Yet, when he thundered his command, "Avantil" the world would bow before him. All that lazy spring and summer, while Britain and France tried various devices to appease II Duce, the newsgathering organizations, large and small, made their preparations. The veteran war correspondents were called up—Miller, Jim Mills of the AP, Sir Percival Phillips of the London Daily Telegraph, and the most celebrated of all, Floyd Gibbons. As reinforcements, there were far more than the usual number of solemn, wide-eyed youngsters, among them a recent bridegroom who represented the Chicago Tribune, Will Barber; a clear-eyed, fine-looking AP sports writer, Edward F. Neil; and a tall, gangling, ex-secretarystenographer, Herbert Lionel Matthews of the New York Times. Among those who swarmed to Rome and Addis Ababa to file the first war bulletins, there was overwhelming sympathy for Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, the Conquering Lion of Judah, and his people. Nobody made a secret of it. Mussolini, despite the certainty of his coming conquest, had no admirers among the dependable correspondents of an independent press, which disconcerted only a few Fascistminded editors and publishers. As for the Italian and German correspondents, it was perfectly obvious by this time that they were paid propagandists who wrote what they were told to write. Outside their own circle, no one respected them. Webb Miller, perhaps, expressed the feelings of most of the foreign press corps when he wrote: "My emotions were tangled and conflicting when the question of going to witness another war arose. I was disgusted by the hypocrisy, two-faced maneuvering, and double-dealing of the British, French, and Italian statesmen and by the prospect of watching the aggression of a nation with all the modern resources for slaughter upon an ignorant, backward, comparatively defenseless people." 30 Mussolini had been planning this war for years. As far back as 1925, he had placed the Italian colony of Eritrea on a defensive alert against the spear-carrying warriors of neighboring Ethiopia. In 1932 he had sent one of his earliest supporters, the fumbling General Emilio de Bono, to Eritrea to inspect the Ethiopian frontier and told him subsequently to start building roads and creating an African army. De Bono's mission

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wasn't noticed, although it was an important step on the way to empire, Mussolini style.31 When II Duce was almost ready, finally, a small clash between a few Ethiopian and Italian soldiers on December 5, 1934, at Ualual, in disputed frontier territory, gave him a pretext for action. He demanded reparations and an apology. Haile Selassie, thoroughly concerned, appealed to the League of Nations. Two days after the Ethiopian plea was received on January 3, 1935, Pierre Laval, the French Foreign Minister, arrived in Rome and was widely accused thereafter of having given II Duce a free hand in Ethiopia, although both, of course, denied it.32 In any event, Italian troops began arriving at their colonies bordering Ethiopia within a month. By midsummer, nearly 250,000 soldiers and adjunct work forces were in position. Britain and France, finding that Mussolini was deaf to appeals for territorial "arrangements" to accommodate him in Africa, began to talk of invoking sanctions before the League of Nations. Winston Churchill delivered an eloquent warning in London: "To cast an army of nearly a quarter-million men, embodying the flower of Italian manhood, upon a barren shore two thousand miles from home, against the good will of the whole world, and without command of the sea, and then in this position embark upon what may well be a series of campaigns against a people and in regions which no conqueror in four thousand years ever thought it worth while to subdue, is to give hostages of fortune unparalleled in all history." If he heard or read Churchill's warning, Mussolini was completely unimpressed. He told a London Morning Post correspondent that he already had spent two billion lire, about 100,000,000 prewar dollars, and demanded, "Can you believe that we have spent this sum for nothing?" 33 He refused to be dismayed by the power of the British fleet in the Mediterranean or the size of the French army. As for the League of Nations, it hadn't stopped the Japanese. Why should it stop him? Haile Selassie had one more card to play. Francis M. Rickett, a British promoter representing large British and American financial interests, was in Addis Ababa negotiating for exclusive rights to Ethiopian oil and mineral exploitation. Of the correspondents who were swarming about the Ethiopian capital in August, only two seemed interested in Rickett—Mills, the sardonic, gray-haired AP veteran, and Phillips, one of the best in British journalism. Finally, to keep them from following

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him, Rickett agreed to give them his story exclusively if they would leave him alone. On August 30, he made good. The AP and the London Daily Telegraph together scored a world beat which impressed nearly everybody but Mussolini.34 It meant nothing to II Duce that the Negus had handed over half his kingdom to British and American financiers. The preparations for the invasion went ahead relentlessly. Webb Miller had been in Rome since August 27, trying with a number of others to obtain permission to join the Italian army in Eritrea. The Ministry of the Press, through which Mussolini exerted his control, had arranged to permit fourteen foreign correspondents to sail for Eritrea in mid-September aboard the Vulcania, but Miller fully realized that acceptance of such Italian support would be fatal to his own freedom of movement. Moreover, he had learned that Gibbons already was on the way to Eritrea for INS and NBC. Mussolini, an admirer of the Hearst newspapers, had provided the irrepressible Floyd with an Italian army airplane for the trip.35 Miller had no such influence working in his favor, but somehow he managed to get "Press Card No. 1 " out of the Italian Ministry of the Press. Then, he talked his way aboard a ship to Alexandria, an Imperial Airways plane to Khartoum, and an Italian air liner to Asmara. He and Gibbons were the only two American or British correspondents with the Italian army at the outset, and the invasion, as they could see without trouble, was only a short time off.36 Their principal rivals would be cooped up on the Vulcania until it pleased the Italians to put them ashore. Gibbons was then 48 years old, Miller 44. Both had grown up in the rough and tumble of Chicago journalism. Miller, a farm boy from Pokagon, Mich., had begun on the Chicago American at $12 a week at the age of 21. Gibbons, who had been bom in Washington, D.C., was working on the Chicago Tribune at that time at slightly more money, having had five years of experience in Minneapolis. Both covered the miniature U.S. border war against Pancho Villa in 1916, Gibbons for the Chicago Tribune and Miller as a UP stringer. Both were correspondents in World War I. As Miller wrote when he saw Gibbons in the press headquarters shack, the Ufficio Stampa, at Asmara, "Old war correspondents never die. They just fade away." 37 While they were waiting for D-Day, Gibbons and Miller each were favored with a ride in a bombing plane piloted by Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law. It was a three-engine Caproni with an

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n,ooo-foot ceiling, but it was, of course, better than anything the Ethiopians could get. As a further demonstration of Italian good will to the correspondents, both were driven to the Ethiopian frontier in an Italian military car with an Italian escort on a two-day scouting expedition. When they returned, Miller began what amounted to an advance story on the invasion. Much to his surprise, it was passed through Italian censorship: W I T H ITALIAN A R M Y ON MAREB STOP IMPORTANTEST REPEAT

IMPOR-

TANTEST DEVELOPMENTS IMMINENT M Y PERSONAL IMPRESSION RESULT TWOHUNDREDFIFTY M I L E TWODAY MOTORTRIP W I T H COUNT DIBOSDARI THROUGH CONCENTRATION AREA. 8 8

The roar of many columns of motor trucks awakened Miller at dawn on October 2, the signal that the Italian army was moving up. At press headquarters, where the Italian, a few French, and one Polish correspondent clamored for news, Count di Bosdari obligingly announced that the invasion was set for 5 a.m. October 3. Naturally, the news couldn't be sent, although Miller tried to tip Rome and was blocked. Well before dawn, on the brow of a mountain overlooking the broad Asamo plain, Miller and Gibbons were both ready. They sat astride a parapet of sandbags, their typewriters in front of them. Beside them was their telegraph operator, working a military wire that had been strung to their observation post. He was to send five twenty-word bulletins for each correspondent, no more. Nearby, a motorcycle courier waited to take their detailed stories sixty miles to the radio station at Asmara. The Italians were so sure of a great triumph that they took every precaution of which they could think to advise the world. Miller and Gibbons waited for dawn, their first bulletins ready to go. Both were old hands at this kind of thing and had made their own preparations. Miller's first message, addressed urgently to his offices in New York, Paris, Rome, and London, was: ITALIANS COMMENCED INVASION ETHIOPIA FIVE AM

Exactly on the hour, with dawn casting a pale glow over the martial scene, the operator sent the opening bulletins for the Americans and their continental rivals. Then, as the sun mounted, the correspondents watched the troops wading across a river at the border and saw the Caproni bombers roaring off in the direction of Adowa, scene of a dis-

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astrous Italian defeat by the Ethiopians in 1896. From time to time, they filed their twenty-word bulletins. At 9:30 a.m., with the temperature at 118 0 in the shade, an Italian staff officer told Miller and Gibbons abruptly to have their detailed stories ready within fifteen minutes or the motorcycle courier would go without them. Miller had left a lot of descriptive matter behind him in Asmara to be filed when the invasion began, and Gibbons doubtless had done the same. But now, hot and tired as they were, they had to pump out a rounded beginning for the whole effort. Miller wrote about six hundred words of cablese in the time allotted to him. Gibbons did about the same. Both delivered their copy in time, then confessed themselves exhausted. When all the returns were in, Miller had a beat although Gibbons was not far behind. Both, of course, were into New York far ahead of the AP, which had to rely on the official Italian dispatches as they came into Rome. The UP triumphantly claimed a five-hour advantage over its old rival with the first news of the Italian invasion. From the Italian side, as Newsweek summed up the whole business, it was "history's best-advertised war." 39 It was quite different in Addis Ababa that October 3. There, a panicky Haile Selassie received word of the bombing of Adowa and the first skirmishes between his primitive warriors and Mussolini's tanks. He called for a general mobilization, ordering the ceremonial beating of a five-foot lion's-hide drum. The group of correspondents scattered to file what little they had, taking the trouble as they went to fill in Will Barber, the Chicago Tribune's correspondent, who was ill of malaria in the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital. Barber dictated his story from his sickbed, describing the pathetic efforts of the Ethiopians to resist the cruel might of a modern aggressor. It was his last effort. Robinson Maclean, correspondent of the Toronto Telegram, cabled the Chicago Tribune the story of Barber's death on October 6. He was buried on a hilltop overlooking Addis Ababa next day. He was 32 years old and had been married less than a year. His father, Frederick Courtenay Barber, who had also been a war correspondent, wrote his obituary.40 The heat, the enormous exertion, and the sheer exhaustion of trying to keep going at altitudes of 8,000 and 9,000 feet soon told on other correspondents. Gibbons, who had been an iron man until he went on the Ethiopian campaign, teamed up again with Miller to try to reach

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Adowa following its capture by the Italians, but had to drop out. Miller pushed ahead, hiking about thirty miles to the native village and part of the way back, to share the story with his friend and colleague. But Gibbons couldn't stay much longer. He had to give it up and go on to philosophize about the Holy Land, which was easier.41 Miller himself suffered a physical collapse after two months, with John T. Whitaker of the New York Herald Tribune and William W . Chaplin of Universal Service using high-handed methods to commandeer an official Italian car to evacuate him. It was the end of the war for the UP man, also.42 On the Ethiopian side, the durable Jim Mills kept going although most of the youngsters were felled. Mills was caught in an Italian bombing raid on Dessye December 6, in which 84 persons were killed and 363 wounded, but escaped without a scratch. Soon afterward, Haile Selassie ordered all correspondents back into Addis Ababa and kept them there until the end of the war, which cut news from the Ethiopian side to a trickle.43 The League of Nations went through the motions of branding Italy an aggressor on October 7 and four days later imposed sanctions. But nothing happened. Mussolini was more annoyed because the Ethiopians would not stand still and fight than he was by the reluctance of the democracies to do business with him. The news from Geneva, too, dribbled off after that. It just became a matter of time, on the Italian side, until modern weapons could be brought into play against a sufficient number of Ethiopians to end the war. By the time 1936 began, only three American correspondents and one British were left with the Italians—Reynolds Packard of UP, Eddie Neil of AP, Christopher Holme of Reuters, and Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times.*4 Of this quartet, which whiled away the hours playing bridge when there was nothing better to do, Matthews saw little reason to go on with the assignment. On New Year's Day, 1936, he cabled Edwin L. James, who had become the managing editor of the Times, asking to be recalled. James cabled back: "Remain for present."45 It was the only reason why Matthews was on hand to write three columns about his first major battle, Amba Aradam, called Enderta by the Italians, which was fought on February 10-15, 1 936Matthews was then 36 years old, a New Yorker by birth rather than

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adoption, a graduate of Columbia College, and a seasoned member of the New York Times staff. He had begun there as secretary-stenographer in 1922 and worked his way through the ranks as reporter, copy editor, and foreign correspondent to reach his current assignment. He recorded the events of Amba Aradam between bridge games, as did the others, because the Italian commander, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, shelled the Ethiopian positions most of the five days and used tear gas and there was little else to report. But at last, 70,000 Italian troops backed by artillery and aircraft were able to close in on the positions stubbornly defended by 50,000 Ethiopians. At the end, the Ethiopians were routed. The way to Addis Ababa was open. On the afternoon of May 5, 1936, Matthews and his companions rode into the Ethiopian capital with Marshal Badoglio and the Italian army: "The setting was an imperial capital in ruins—buildings still burning, the stinking dead still lying about the streets, gutted houses and stores gaping blackly and emptily at us as we drove by." 48 Such was the manner in which the glories of Italian civilization were brought to Ethiopia, which for all its faults had managed to exist independently in the East African highlands for 4,000 years. "Mussolini, like the sorcerer's apprentice, had set in motion forces which he could not begin to control," Matthews wrote. "Ethiopia finished nothing, but it started a great deal." 47 5. T H E L A D Y F R O M B A L T I M O R E The Times of London published a seemingly routine thirty-line item without comment on October 28, 1936, under a small headline: UNDEFENDED DIVORCE SUIT.

The account dealt with a case at Ipswich Assizes the previous day, in which Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson, of Baltimore, Md., had been granted a decree nisi from Ernest A. Simpson, an insurance agent, on the ground of his adultery. The decree was to become absolute on May 3,1937The rest of the British press was similarly discreet in handling the story, which for the first time introduced the dark-haired lady from Baltimore to its readers. Such unanimity could not, of course, have been accidental. Because of the solicitude of Lord Beaverbrook and Esmond Harmsworth, later the second Viscount Rothermere, the Lon-

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don and Provincial Press had unanimously agreed at a meeting with them in Warwick House, St. James's, on October 16, 1936, to spare the King unpleasant publicity and give Mrs. Simpson's case the barest mention. It wasn't considered necessary to have the Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Morning Post represented at the meeting, since their discretion, to use the Times's own phrasing, was not in question.48 The King himself later referred to this as a "gentlemen's agreement" to report the case without sensation. "The British press kept its word," he said, "and for that I shall always be grateful." 49 The American press was something else again, for Mrs. Simpson already was a sensation in the United States. Gossip columnists had been printing items for weeks, referring to her association with the King. More serious journalists and their newspapers had been paying attention to the royal romance of late. Mrs. Simpson's divorce was considered such big news by the more sensational American papers that it crowded the latest war, Franco's Spanish uprising, off the front pages. Nothing could have illustrated more dramatically the difference between the British and the American press. The Americans were determined to publish anything that was newsworthy, a kind of journalistic anarchy that had often pained their own government. The British were resolute in disapproving of the conduct of the American press and refusing to let it influence them. And yet, many a British editor and publisher had been uncomfortable about the Mrs. Simpson matter for some time, despite their confidence that they were doing the right thing. A few were beginning to express doubts that the royal romance could be kept a secret from the British public much longer. Others sharply criticized such Americans as Hugh Baillie, president of the UP, because his news agency already had carried several stories about the King and Mrs. Simpson.50 The sensitivity of the British press was such that Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times, sent directly to Buckingham Palace a letter from a British subject in East Orange, N.J., who deplored the "poisonous publicity attending the King's friendship with Mrs. Simpson" and hinted that the King should abdicate. Dawson gave another copy of the letter to Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, on the day before Mrs. Simpson's divorce.51 Thus, five weeks before the crisis finally broke, the Times already was delicately raising the possibility of abdication.

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Nor was the Times alone. The Free Churches were becoming restive, Walter Runciman said. Prime Minister Baldwin saw the King on November 16 and learned that he intended to marry Mrs. Simpson and, if necessary, to abdicate. At 10:30 that night, in response to a summons, Dawson met Baldwin at the House of Commons and discussed the problem with him. While Baldwin did not disclose specifically what the King had told him, Dawson nevertheless gained the impression that abdication was likely.52 However, even then, it wasn't quite as certain as it may have seemed to the Prime Minister and the editor of the Times, for on November 26 the King asked Baldwin about the possibility of a morganatic marriage to Mrs. Simpson. The scheme, suggested by the first Viscount Rothermere, would have enabled the King to marry Mrs. Simpson, but she could not have been the queen and their children could not have aspired to legal succession to the throne.53 The cabinet met on this suggestion and the Dominions were consulted, but the answer was negative.54 By this time, literally hundreds of persons were in the closest touch with what was going on in London. As could have been expected, since some of them undoubtedly wanted the matter out in the open, numerous versions of what was going on behind the scenes appeared in the American press. Moreover, any editor of experience could tell that this was no longer gossip but serious business. The very fact that the British press had been sitting on the story for three months was in itself a matter for comment, and not particularly admiring comment, at that. It was neither a statesman nor a journalist, finally, who broke through the traditional British reticence about the members of the royal family. The Bishop of Bradford, at his diocesan conference on December 1, expressed hope that King Edward VIII would be aware of his need for God's grace at his coronation, scheduled for May 12, and a wish that the King would give "more positive signs of this awareness." The Times of December 2 ran the full text of the Bishop's remarks. It also ran a story on the visit of the Duke and Duchess of York to Edinburgh and referred to the Duke, the King's brother, as the heir presumptive to the throne. There was no editorial comment in London, but northern papers began expressing doubt over the strength of the King's character without, of course, giving their reason.55 That night, one of the most respected of American foreign corre-

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spondents, Ferdinand Kuhn, acting chief of the New York Times bureau in London, filed a story to his home office which began: Dec. 2—The reign of King Edward VIII came perilously close to the breaking point tonight after a day of such fantastic happenings as the proud British monarchy has not had to experience for hundreds of years. Upon the utterly astounded country there has burst a constitutional crisis involving the possible abdication of the King tomorrow and succession of the Duke of York to the throne. The crisis is no longer hidden; the conflict between the King and his Ministers has blazed up into an open flame. LONDON,

The New York office was worried. Kuhn received the following: THIS IS PRETTY STRONG STUFF. NONE OF THE AGENCIES CARRY IT. YOU SURE IT'S OKAY?

58

It was, Kuhn insisted, okay. He had, as it was learned years later, checked with Dawson. The story ran for three full columns in the New York Times next day under a four-column headline on Page One. That same day, while the morning papers in London still were discussing "a marriage incompatible with the throne," and not mentioning the lady's name, the evening papers finally identified Mrs. Simpson. The King sent her out of the country to Cannes to await the outcome. On December 4, at last, the Times of London stated its objections which, because of Dawson's closeness to Baldwin, was tantamount to a report on the position of the cabinet. It was irrelevant, the article said, that the lady was a commoner or an American; but the fact that she had two living husbands from whom she had in succession obtained divorces could not be overlooked. To this, Harold Laski pointed out in the Daily Herald, the cabinet would have to address itself, since the King was bound to accept the cabinet's advice in everything, including marriage. If he refused to do so, the only alternative was abdication.57 Now that the whole thing was finally in the open, the British press gave itself over almost entirely to the royal romance and its consequences. Despite the New York Times's prediction that the King would abdicate, there was still so much uncertainty that the UP twice decided against sending similar accounts. One was from Frederick Kuh, a first-rate diplomatic reporter, and the other from the old reliable, Webb Miller. Finally, on December 8, the exiled Queen Victoria of Spain told the same story to still another UP man, Henry Tosti Russell, saying that the King's decision to marry; Mrs. Simpson and abdicate was "ir-

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88

revocable." That was the one the UP carried. Its soul-searchings were no different from those of the other foreign services and foreign correspondents. Nobody could afford to be wrong on this story. On Thursday, December 10, the Act of Abdication was signed and announced in the House of Commons. Prime Minister Baldwin, in an almost conversational manner, gave the essential parts of the story and its inevitable consequences. The New York Times broke out three eight-column headlines over the solemn account that was written by the spritely little Englishman, Frederick T. Birchall, who was now the chief of its foreign service: Dec. 10—Some time Saturday morning, perhaps even as soon as tomorrow night, Edward VIII will cease to be a King and Emperor. He has made his choice between a woman and a throne, and the woman has won.69 LONDON,

The next day, Edward spoke to the world by radio after laying down his responsibilities as King: "At long last I am able to say a few words. . . . You must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility . . . as King . . . without the help and support of the woman I love." 60 George VI succeeded his brother on the throne. The former King, who had been created the Duke of Windsor, was married to Mrs. Simpson on June 3, 1937, at the Chateau de Cande, Monts, France, with only five correspondents in attendance as representatives of a huge press corps.61 From these five, the world learned of the third marriage of the lady from Baltimore, who became a duchess, but not a queen. The role of the press in determining her fate was very great. As the Times of London put it with becoming modesty, "The royal abdication question preoccupied the minds of the government in London throughout the last three months of 1936, and the paper's influence on the December crisis is not undeserving of mention. . . . The abdication was of social importance but, as accomplished by Baldwin's adroitness, of no political significance, though he may have bequeathed a quasi-constitutional question to historians."62

6. T H E SPANISH T R A G E D Y Lester Ziffren, of the UP Madrid bureau, sent a long and seemingly garbled message to London on July 17, 1936, which began:

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MOTHERS EVERLASTINGLY LINGERING ILLNESS LIKELY LARYNGITIS. AUNT FLORA OUGHT RETURN EVEN IF GOES NORTH LATER.

It was a simple code, as London quickly realized, in which the first letter of each world formed a message: MELILLA FOREIGN LEGION REVOLTED MARTIAL LAW DECLARED63

In this manner, Ziffren managed to inform his organization despite a tight military censorship that the Spanish Civil War had begun. That day, the army leaders in Spanish Morocco, Generals Francisco Franco, Emilio Mola, and Jose Sanjurjo, had rebelled against the Popular Front government of the Spanish Republic, which Manuel Azana had formed on February 19. The liberalism and anticlericalism of the government had raised many enemies against the Republic. There would be many more. But worse than any enemy would be the indifference of its professed friends. The revolt, covertly backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy from the outset, spread to the garrisons of Burgos, Saragossa, Seville, Cadiz, and elsewhere. The air force and the large Moorish army contingents were with the rebels. The Republic had little in the beginning except the people of Madrid and Barcelona, who defended it with fierceness and passion. Hopefully, the Republic looked to the democracies for aid. The answer from Britain was a nonintervention pact, a cruel diplomatic device that fooled no one, least of all Generalissimo Franco. Yet, France and the United States adhered to it, and even the Soviet Union joined for a few weeks early in the war. The unrealistic theory was that everybody would play fair and withhold arms from the combatants. The illusion of nonintervention was quickly punctured not by the soft-voiced diplomats, but by a journalist. On August 11, less than a month after the beginning of the revolt, Frank Kluckhohn of the New York Times picked up telling evidence of Nazi-Fascist intervention in Seville and sent it by courier to Gibraltar. The next day, the Times published his account which began: Aug. 11—Twenty heavy German Junker bombing planes and five German pursuit planes manned by German military pilots arrived at rebel headquarters in Seville today. The airplanes had been landed from a ship at the rebel port of Cadiz and were then flown here.

SEVILLE,

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With these and seven Italian Caproni bombers, which arrived during the past few days piloted by Italians, the rebels are in a position to sweep the Madrid Leftist government's planes from the air. . . . The writer saw some of the new German planes. The German consul here privately admits they were flown by German military aviators. . . . The Italian and German aviators are living at the Hotel Cristina here. Neither group is in military uniforms. Kluckhohn had to get out of Spain after his disclosure, but his paper backed him up. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who had become president and publisher of the Times on May 7, 1935, called his work "an excellent example of where the sending of a single story is worth the expulsion that may follow it. It was not until the dispatch was published that the full extent of Fascist aid to rebel Spain was comprehended."64 The bombers were the first installment of the Nazi-Fascist dictators' aid to Franco, who on October 1 became Caudillo and chief of state. Mola by that time was his subordinate rather than his equal, and Sanjurjo was dead, having been killed in a plane crash at the opening of the revolt. Italy had more than 50,000 troops in Spain before the war was over, and Germany had at least 10,000 additional "volunteers," plus the necessary military supplies and hardware. On the side of the Republic, the Soviet Union broke with the noninterventionist nations on October 23, 1936, and began sending in aircraft, pilots, military advisers, and supplies while many sympathizers flocked to the International Brigade. Yet, Sumner Welles called Soviet aid to the Republic "only a token compared to that obtained by Franco," 65 and the Loyalists paid dearly for it, both in gold and in loss of support abroad. This was more than civil war. It was an ideological war, fought with all the ferocity of which human beings are capable. From the outset, foreign correspondents saw that there was no romantic nonsense on either side. In September, 1936, Henry T. Gorrell, a 26-year-old UP correspondent, was picked up by a Loyalist patrol in Madrid because he spoke Italian and clapped into prison as a spy. Had his office not located him in time, he would have been shot. In the following month, on October 25, he was outside Madrid in a small car when he ran into a Rebel ambush and a hail of bullets which he fortunately escaped. When he was brought before the Rebel commander and established his identity, he was told, "We have killed 300 Reds on that road today and you are the first man to come out alive." 88

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Some of the old-timers had no stomach for this kind of business. Floyd Gibbons, arriving for his ninth war, this one for INS again, left after about thirty days and a look at each side, saying: "It is the bloodiest and costliest war, in men and money, that I have ever seen. It is horrifying to see how inhumane . . . men can be to each other." 67 Karl H. von Wiegand, the old Hearst correspondent, proclaimed Spanish censors his worst enemy, particularly those "from pinkish left Republican to Communistic Red" in the Loyalist service in Madrid. He accused them of suppressing news, of the burning of churches and convents, among other things. The Hearst newspapers were, of course, for Franco, as were many others in the United States and Britain; with few exceptions, the best the Loyalists could hope for among the independent press was a judicious neutrality. Yet, the reporting from the Loyalist side was effective and often brilliant. Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times, who had been decorated by Marshal Badoglio with the Italian war cross for valor in the Ethiopian campaign, threw himself into the Spanish war with an almost selfless enthusiasm. On February 1 1 , 1937, when the Rebels announced they had cut the highway to Valencia outside Madrid, he drove through machine gun and mortar fire to disprove it. Moreover, while others were filing Rebel victory claims at the Battle of Guadalajara in the following month, he correctly reported that the Loyalists had stemmed the advance on Madrid at that point and routed an Italian force while they were doing it. Matthews was one of the correspondents in the much-battered Hotel Florida in Madrid during the spring of 1937, when the Germans were shelling the area so that meals had to be cooked in the rooms and just about the only light entertainment was a phonograph playing a scratchy Chopin record. Ernest Hemingway, back as a journalist in the service of North American Newspaper Alliance, memorialized the scene in a play, The Fifth Column. Among other correspondents in the hotel at the time were Martha Gellhorn of Collier's, whom Hemingway later married; Sefton Delmer of the London Daily Express; Henry Buckley of the London Daily Telegraph, and the novelist, John Dos Passos.68 Hemingway wrote that spring, in an NANA piece published in the New York Times and other papers: MADRID, April 24—The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away. There is rifle

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fire all night long. The rifles go "tacrong, carong, craang, tacrong," and then a machine gun opens up. It has a bigger caliber and is much louder—"rong, cararibg, rang, rong." Then there is the incoming boom of a trench-mortar shell and a burst of machine-gun fire. You lie and listen to it, and it is a great thing to be in a bed with your feet stretched out gradually warming the cold foot of the bed and not out there in University City or Carabanchel. A man is singing hard-voiced in the street below and three drunks are arguing when you fall asleep.89 The correspondents came and went on both sides as the war continued, but few stuck it out. They were pulled off by their organizations for other assignments, or they were relieved in rotation from duty that was at times intensely dangerous. Nearly every major correspondent then active was in Spain at one time or another during the fighting— H. R. Knickerbocker for INS; Frank King, Richard G. Massock, and Alexander Uhl for the AP; Reynolds Packard, his wife, Eleanor, and others for the UP; and a host of Europeans and British.70 Matthews, for the New York Times, stayed with the Loyalists until the end. He enjoyed one great moment in the life of a correspondent when, through overeagerness, he and Hemingway and Sefton Delmer entered Teruel just before Christmas, 1937, and found to their surprise and joy that they had "captured" the embattled city. It was the climax of a short-lived Loyalist counteroffensive to take Teruel from the Rebels. "We were almost mobbed, but not by desperate Fascists," Matthews wrote. "These were men and women who wept for joy to see us. They embraced us, shook our hands until they ached, patted and prodded and slapped us and poured out a flood of incoherent but happy talk. It took a long time to make them realize that we were not high staff officers, Russian or otherwise, and had nothing to do with the taking of Teruel, but it did not make any difference. When I told a little girl that I was an American she laughed hysterically and repeated, 'Norteamericano!' many times as if it were the funniest thing she had ever heard." Matthews' story was cut in half when it reached his office and, as he himself put it, "buried inside the paper." There was a lot of other news in the world that day, particularly in the renewed Japanese war on China, as a cable from the managing editor reminded him.71 But that, too, was part of a correspondent's life.

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On the Rebel side outside Teruel, preparations already were being made to recapture the city, and the correspondents were alerted. One of the most capable, who had been covering Franco almost from the beginning, was Edward }. Neil Jr., the AP sports writer who had first distinguished himself in the Ethiopian war. He was 37 at the time, prematurely gray, soft-spoken, and popular with his fellows. He had attended Bowdoin for three years and joined the AP in 1926. Like his father, an AP telegrapher, he had never known another employer and hadn't ever seemed in the mood to look for one. In the Spanish war, he had had several close calls. Like Matthews, at Teruel, Neil had entered Bilbao ahead of Franco's troops and filed an exclusive story. He had been under fire repeatedly since that time; once, during the drive on Santander, he had had a particularly narrow escape. But it hadn't made him shy away.72 When he learned that the campaign to recapture Teruel from the Loyalists was under way after Christmas, 1937, Neil eluded the press officer at the base at Saragossa and made his way to the front. On December 29, he filed an eyewitness story of the fighting in the snow around the city. Two days later, Franco headquarters announced it would permit correspondents to move up. Once again, Neil was ready. He and a close friend, Richard Sheepshanks of Reuters, a graduate of Eton and Cambridge and a fellow-campaigner in the Ethiopian war, decided to drive up together. With them, they took Bradish Johnson of Newsweek, a 23-year-old Harvard graduate, and Harry Philby of the Times of London. When they reached the village of Caudete, three miles behind the front, it was after noon on December 31, and snow had begun falling again. A Franco press officer told them that Rebel troops were in the outskirts of Teruel and expected to be inside the city by nightfall. He refused to let the correspondents go on, despite their pleas. "Too dangerous," he said. The four correspondents decided to wait in their car, which was parked some distance away from several others. Heavy artillery fire nearby didn't seem to disconcert them. They sat in the car, talking and eating chocolate. All at once, shells began dropping all about them. Philby managed to get out of the car and ran to Karl Robson of the London Daily Telegraph, who had taken cover. "They're in there!" Philby yelled.

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Robson found Johnson dead, Sheepshanks unconscious, and Neil riddled with shrapnel wounds. When Sheepshanks died, an effort was made to keep the news from Neil, but he learned about it anyway. William P. Carney of the New York Times, who had covered the war for many months from the Franco side, called on the AP correspondent on New Year's Day with Philby. "They're burying poor Dick here tomorrow and I'm afraid I can't go to the funeral," Neil said. "They keep me here on my back and I'm getting so sick I soon may be unable to write a story or do anything, but old Philby has told everything there is to tell by now, haven't you? Tell my office I'm going to Paris as soon as I can and I will soon be all right again." Gangrene developed in Neil's left leg and he died January 2. He had written to a friend: "One nice thing these wars do teach you— when your number comes up, you grin, shrug, and make the best of it. No one has time to listen to a bleat." 73 Franco took Teruel. Then, Barcelona was singled out for punishing bombing raids such as few cities had ever experienced. The horror of Guemica, which the Germans destroyed in a pitiless air bombardment on April 26, 1937, was small compared to it. On March 17, 1938, Matthews wrote in a dispatch for the next day's Times, "Barcelona has lived through twelve air raids in less than twenty-four hours, and the city is shaken and terror-struck. Human beings have seldom had to suffer as these people are suffering under General Francisco Franco's determined effort to break their spirit and induce their government to yield. . . . The destruction is in one sense haphazard, for the bombs are dropped anywhere at all, without any attempt at specific objectives. However, there is an obvious plan, that every part of the city, from the richest to the poorest, shall get its full measure of tragedy." Yet, for ten months more Barcelona held out. On January 23, 1939, Harold Peters, the UP manager in Barcelona, reported that a town ten miles to the west had fallen to Franco's advancing armies. Next day, while he was on the telephone to London with 700 words of monotonous dictation of government communiques, he dropped in a remark without changing tone or pace of delivery, "Big shots scrammed Franceward." 74 The Spanish censor missed it, but the London office of the UP did not. With word that the Republican government had fled, the fall of Barcelona was at hand. On January 26, Franco's insurgents and

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their Italian allies entered the city. Until February 13, the fighting lcept up on the French border with the government maintaining a semblance of resistance while 200,000 refugees streamed out of Spain into internment. Watching it all at Perpignan, Matthews wrote, "I was sick at heart . . . when I wrote my last dispatch on the Spanish Civil War but at least I, in a humble way, felt vindicated. . . . I, like the Spaniards, had fought my war and lost, but I could not be persuaded that I had set too bad an example."78 He was, however, a far different correspondent than the one who had been inclined, at the end of the Ethiopian war, to believe Mussolini's statement that he wanted twenty-five years of peace to develop his latest conquest. After all, the most important influence on any correspondent has been the essence of the time in which he has lived and the extent to which he has observed it. On March 28, 1939, with the surrender of Madrid and Valencia, the long agony of the Spanish Republic was over. The rest of the civilized world would be the next to be tested on the rack of a black and terrible age. 7. T H E V I E W F R O M M O S C O W Russia lay stunned in her "time of troubles." Lenin was dying. Behind the ornate facade of the Kremlin, his colleagues already were grappling for his power in a deadly rivalry that some of them would not survive. Walter Duranty of the New York Times, carefully considering all the possibilities in Moscow, rejected the determined Leon Trotsky and saw little hope for either Leo Kamenev or Gregory Zinoviev. On January 15,1923, he cabled: "There is the Georgian Stalin, little known abroad but one of the most remarkable men in Russia and perhaps the most influential figure here today. . . . During the year Stalin has shown judgment and analytical power not unworthy of Lenin." 78 Lenin died January 21, 1924, with the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin trio succeeding him. Three years later, Stalin triumphed over the so-called Left opposition and banished Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Communist Party. From the moment of Stalin's election in 1922 as General Secretary of the Party, Duranty had realized that the Georgian was in control. The correspondent had used the trait he had so admired in

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William Bolitho—insight, doping things out, "seeing through a brick wall." Whatever it was called, it was the indispensable ingredient for any foreign journalist in Moscow. In the supercharged atmosphere of the Soviet capital, it was never easy to maintain a balanced, judicious attitude. Fact-gathering was a sparse occupation, since it hinged almost entirely on what was put out by Pravda or Izvestia, circulated by Tass or the Soviet radio. Analyses by correspondents were all-important when they were permitted through censorship. Yet, not every correspondent could do what was expected of him at the outset. William Henry Chamberlin, the distinguished Christian Science Monitor correspondent, wrote: "My first two trips to Russia [in 1922-23] left me, on balance, a Communist sympathizer although with a good many more doubts and reservations than I had felt before leaving America. I still remember a little shamefacedly some of my naive first messages to the Monitor from Moscow, especially one in which I rashly accepted the word of a walrus-moustached Commissar for Justice that there were only two hundred political prisoners in Russia, and that these were lodged pretty comfortably in places where the climate, in the euphemistic words of the Commissar, was 'clear although cold.' But continued residence in the Soviet Union was a good cure for credulity. Some time in 1924 the last traces of partisanship slipped away, and I no longer experienced even an unconscious desire to report developments from the standpoint of an apologist." " The situation of the news agencies in those critical years was even more difficult. Through a friend of Karl Radek of Izvestia, Jacob Doletzky, who was the director of the Rosta agency, the Soviet regime made determined efforts to influence the kind of wire service news that went out of Russia. Doletzky in 1923 bucked the Reuters-Havas-WolffAP news cartel by entering into an exchange agreement with the United Press. But in the following year, when several British papers helped upset the Labour government by printing a forged "Zinoviev letter" calling for a Red uprising in England, the UP's account evidently didn't satisfy Moscow. Doletzky canceled the UP contract and signed up with the AP and the news cartel.78 The UP's man in Moscow at the time was Frederick Kuh and the AP had Jim Mills, both tough competitors, who concentrated on news and left ideology to the specials. The UP sent in a new man early in 1928, Eugene Lyons, who had

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been born in Russia but brought up and educated in New York where he had been one of the first employees of Tass when it changed over from Rosta. At 30, Lyons, like Chamberlin, expected far more from Russia than he was to find, and he was even more disillusioned. But at the outset, he was indignant over criticism of Russia by the veteran British correspondent, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, and wrote: "It was through an emotional haze that I viewed the new Bolshevik world around me. My early dispatches out of Moscow were laudatory, though toned down to conceal my bias." He felt impatient with the calm and often critical dispatches of some of his colleagues—Chamberlin, "exact and scholarly and passionless"; Junius Wood of the Chicago Daily News, whose "indisputable detail . . . added up to ridicule"; Edward Deuss of INS, who ignored "the deeper meanings of the revolution"; and Duranty, who even in comparatively favorable dispatches "left a fuzzy margin of uncertainty." 79 Then, perhaps most expert of all, there was Paul Scheffer of the Berliner Tageblatt, who saw that the Leninist thaw, the New Economic Policy, was over as soon as Stalin attained power. And with Stalin's bloody and remorseless conquest of the kulaks in 1929-30, Lyons' disillusion with the Soviet regime set in. He was soon a bitter opponent of the way of life he was reporting.80 While the handful of embattled regulars stayed on to try to understand what was happening in the Soviet Union and tell what they could of it through censorship, the parade of distinguished visiting journalists passed in and out of Moscow with regularity year after year. It was a status symbol to have gone to the Soviet Union, even briefly, and to have remarked on its progress or lack of it. In the years when Stalin was consolidating his position by methodically wiping out his political opposition—by exile, by stage-managed treason trials, or, as in the case of Trotsky, by murder—all semblance of good will toward the Soviet Union vanished in the responsible world press. Even perfectly objective articles, such as those H. R. Knickerbocker wrote for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and New York Evening Post in 1930 had to have a heading such as "The Red Trade Menace." Edwin L. James of the New York Times wrote a similar series in the same year, shortly before he became managing editor, and sent this explanatory note to his office: "What I saw of Russia was miserable.

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It was dirty and hungry and the people seemed to be strictly out of luck. But then, they always were. I do not believe anyone can say what is going to happen there. . . . I do not believe any people in the world expected the Russians would stand for what is being done, but they have been standing for it for some years and may keep on doing it. Who knows? I don't. I asked [Maxim] Litvinov if they could sit on the Russians for ten years or more. He answered: 'I don't know; do you?'" 8 1 Dorothy Thompson, Vincent Sheean, Sinclair Lewis, Max Eastman, Theodore Dreiser, and many more came and went during the early Stalin period, passing judgment as they did so. Specialists like Louis Fischer soberly studied what evidence they could find on the surface of the success or failure of the regime, but could only suspect the machinations in the background. Isaac F. Marcosson wrote a series of twelve articles for the Saturday Evening Post that so annoyed the Soviet regime that he was barred thereafter.82 Paul Scheffer was expelled, too. But Maurice Hindus stayed on for a time.83 And Anna Louise Strong, who had been transplanted from the radical Seattle Daily Call to Moscow because of the persuasive Lincoln Steffens, began putting out the Moscow News in 1929.84 She would spend much of the rest of her life in the Soviet Union and Communist China.* Of them all, Eugene Lyons was selected for a rare interview with Stalin on November 23, 1930, the only previous one having been given to Japanese correspondents of the Osaka Mainichi in 1926.85 U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933 in itself produced no change in the flow of information between Moscow and the West. As Duranty explained it: "Both sides outsmarted the other, and so outsmarted themselves, because when some months later, after an exchange of ambassadors and the establishment of full diplomatic relations, an attempt was made to create a working business arrangement along the lines laid down in Washington, a serious deadlock occurred, in which each side seemed convinced, I believe with full sincerity, that it was right and honest and that the other was wrong and tricky." 86 After eighteen months, Ambassador William C. Bullitt and Foreign Minister Litvinov reached a far more modest agreement which in es* Miss Strong was ordered out of Russia after World War II but was still acceptable in Red China.

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sence did nothing to improve relationships. The foreign correspondents learned that they were still subject to the same restrictions.* Their "time of troubles," like those of the Russian people, seemed to increase as the years went on. After the struggle and the agony that had marked the collectivization of industry and agriculture. Stalin moved with ruthless and devastating energy against the chiefs of the Red Army and some of his own closest followers in the purge trials of 1937. To the foreign correspondents, it seemed madness for the dictator to tear apart his military high command at a time when Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were demonstrating their might on the Spanish battlefields. But Stalin, in his single-minded devotion to the security of his state, was not to be dissuaded by shock from abroad. Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and seven of his highest associates in the Red Army were executed, just as Zinoviev and Kamenev had been in the previous year. Radek, the faithful, got off with ten years for testifying for the state, but was never heard from again. In such an atmosphere of terror and conspiracy, the American correspondents, in particular, drew closer together. Ambassador Joseph E. Davies often consulted them during the period of the purges and thought of them as his unofficial advisers. The corps, of course, had changed; Lyons, for one, had been expelled after putting out a story through censorship of a Soviet-Japanese clash which he had obtained from Soviet sources.87 Of those who were with him in 1937, Davies wrote: "Every evening after the trial, the American newspapermen would come up to the Embassy for a snack and beer after these late night sessions and we would hash over the day's proceedings. Among these were Walter Duranty and Harold Denny of the New York Times, Joe Barnes and Joe Phillips of the New York Herald Tribune, Charlie Nutter and Dick Massock of the Associated Press, Norman Deuel and Henry Shapiro of the United Press, and Jim Brown of International News. They were an exceptionally brilliant group of men. I came to rely on them. They were of inestimable value to me in the appraisal and estimate of men, situations and Soviet developments."88 * However, Max Eastman managed to publish in the New York Times Lenin's celebrated secret testament warning his associates not to trust Stalin.

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The Americans and the rest of the foreign press corps well understood the meaning of the purge trials. Stalin was now not only the master of the Soviet people but also of their armed forces; in the war which was approaching with such certainty, he had freedom of movement to do as he wished. But as to exactly what he would do and how he would do it, that remained a mystery locked inside the Kremlin. The foreign correspondents could only speculate and that was profitless, under the circumstances. Their sources of information now were tightening up. They dealt with different Soviet officials. Jacob Doletzky, the founding director of Rosta and Tass, was gone, a victim of the Stalinist purges; Nikolai G. Palgunov, who had begun working for Tass in 1929, replaced him.89 The old wire service cartel arrangements, of course, were dead. Tass was now exchanging news, under contract, with the AP, the UP, Reuters, and Havas, although the Tass file meant very little. Nor was there much in Pravda or Izvestia to provide guidance in the critical years when Soviet policy balanced on the edge of Hitler's knife. It was even more difficult now to see Soviet officials. The Soviet censors worked as diligently as ever over wire copy and carefully monitored the telephone transmissions. Correspondents who transgressed, even in a minor sense, faced expulsion; everybody was careful. The visiting journalists still came and went, making their solemn pronouncements on the state of the Soviet Union at a safe distance from its borders. The men inside Moscow who served the Western press had to contain their feelings. In view of all the limitations, it is remarkable that the world knew as much as it did about the condition of the Russian people as they approached the darkest years in their history. As for the outlook from Moscow, it was clouded with doubt and suspicion. The betrayal of Munich, followed by the treachery of the Hitler-Stalin pact, lay just ahead. 8. T H E C O M I N G O F W O R L D W A R II Bud Ekins, who had seen the mutilated face of war in Asia and Ethiopia, flew from New York to reach embattled Shanghai in the early part of August, 1937, as a UP war correspondent. The Asian mainland was aflame once more. On July 7, there had been a night clash at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Peking. Japan, seeing the Western democ-

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racies paralyzed by the aggressive designs of Hitler and Mussolini, had used the incident as an excuse to resume its conquest of China. Before the month was out, Peking and Tientsin had fallen. Now it was Shanghai's turn again. The journalistic veterans of the battles of five years ago were returning to tell the world the same sorry story all over again, Ekins among them. His hair was silvered now, although he was only 36. Like so many of the journalists of his generation, he had seen much of war. In the previous year, as a change of pace, he had won an airplane race around the world from two colleagues, Dorothy Kilgallen of the Hearst service and Leo Kieran of the New York Times. That had been a lark. It was a lot different when he drove to the Palace Hotel on Saturday, August 14, in Shanghai with John R. Morris, the UP Far Eastern manager. Chinese warplanes were swooping over the Japanese fleet in the Whangpoo River in a surprise raid but, by a gross miscalculation, the bombs were dropping in the International Settlement. The car Morris and Ekins had just abandoned was hit by a bomb. Another cracked the Palace Hotel after they had entered it, killing 247 persons, but they escaped unscathed. Ekins hurried across the street to Sassoon House, where the UP's office was located, and found that the building had also been bombed. But, picking his way through jagged broken glass and debris, he reached his office and began doing his eyewitness story. That was his job.90 It was the job, too, of all the rest of the correspondents who had been pulled into Shanghai, some from other posts in China, some from the ends of the earth. This war, the Spanish war, and the tensions aroused in Europe by Germany and Italy had strained the century-old system of gathering foreign news by crisis priority. There were now far too many crises, too much to be told, too little time to do it, too few who really knew how, scant opportunity to try to explain why all this horror was piling on a frightened world. The leading correspondents in Shanghai were seasoned men—Tillman Durdin and Hallett Abend of the New York Times, Arch Steele of the Chicago Daily News, Jim Mills, Morris Harris, and Yates McDaniel of the AP, Jack Belden of UP, Colin McDonald of the Times of London, and Leslie Smith of Reuters among them. But the work they had to do in Shanghai as the fighting progressed taxed the resources of both their organizations and themselves. Visiting newspapermen, even

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youngsters, were impressed into service. Few took precautions and, inevitably, there was tragedy. At one point after the battle had been going for some weeks, Edgar Snow of the Saturday Evening Post and Pembroke Stephens of the London Daily Telegraph accompanied a husky captain in the U.S. Marines, Evans Carlson, to the Nantao section where the Japanese were attacking. The marine and the correspondents were inside the French concession, which was neutral territory, and had taken cover behind a brick wall. But Stephens, with the eagerness of one new to battle, wanted to see what was going on and climbed a ladder. Carlson brought him down; he had been shot to death in a fusillade. That night, depressed over Stephens' death, Carlson remarked to Snow, "That's not only the end of Stephens. It's the end of Shanghai, and maybe the end of the war." "So Japan has won?" "I know what you're thinking and you may be right," Carlson said. "You're going to tell me Mao Tse-tung has the answer. Guerrilla war." There was some more talk, mainly about the Chinese Communists in distant Yenan who were cautiously reentering into relations with Chiang Kai-shek to oppose the Japanese. Snow finally challenged, "Why don't you go see for yourself?" Carlson did. The necessary clearances were obtained all around, and he spent a considerable time with Mao, Chou En-lai, and General Chu Teh. From that visit came confidential personal reports to the White House. It also resulted in the creation of Carlson's guerrillas, the Marine Raiders.91 There were two far more important consequences of the Japanese attack. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, without mentioning Japan specifically, called upon the world to quarantine aggressors on the night of October 5, 1937, in Chicago. "War," he said, "is a contagion, whether it be declared or undeclared. It can engulf states and people remote from the original scene of the hostilities. . . . It seems unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine." Relman Morin of the AP, newly returned to Tokyo, was at a Japanese Foreign Office dinner for correspondents the following night and saw that the regular Foreign Office spokesman, Tetsuo Kawaii, was

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agitated. They talked about the Roosevelt speech and Kawaii said, " W e are wondering what he means by a 'quarantine' and whether this is a way of announcing some change in American foreign policy." "He didn't mention any governments by name," Morin said. "No, but he spoke of wars 'declared or undeclared.' " "So you think he had Japan specifically in mind?" "What other interpretation could there be?" But the President wasn't ready to elucidate. At a press conference in Washington soon afterward, he spoke with reporters and then put the whole thing off the record. What happened was that Ernest K. Lindley of Newsweek brought up the possibility that the U.S. Neutrality Act would have to be revised in order to give aid to countries that were the victims of aggression. "Not necessarily," the President said. "That's the interesting thing." "You say there isn't any conflict between what you outline and the Neutrality Act?" Lindley asked. "They seem to be on opposite poles to me, and your assertion does not enlighten me." "Put your thinking cap on, Ernest," the President said.92 Whether or not the President meant to affront the Japanese, relations deteriorated. On December 13, 1937, Japanese planes bombed and sank the U.S. gunboat Panay in the Yangtze River above Nanking. Sandro Sandri, correspondent for La Stampa of Turin, Italy, was killed. Jim Marshall of Collier's and Luigi Barzini, correspondent of the Corriere Delia Sera of Milan, were wounded. Three other correspondents aboard the Panay, Weldon James, a 25-year-old newcomer to the UP, Norman Soong of the New York Times, and Colin McDonald of the Times of London escaped injury.93 The incident created a furor all over the world. The Japanese apologized and settled the Panay case to the satisfaction of the United States, but the damage was done. When the Japanese captured Nanking on December 1 5 - 1 8 with a senseless display of brutality that took tens of thousands of lives, Arch Steele called it "four days in hell" in his dispatch to the Chicago Daily News. "The Japanese," he wrote, "could have completed the occupation of the remainder of the city almost without firing a shot, by offering mercy to the trapped Chinese soldiers, most of whom had discarded their arms and would surrender. However, they chose the course of systematic extermination. It was like killing sheep." 94

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Much as the American people resented Japanese aggression in China, it did not shake their dominant mood, which was to sympathize with the victims but stay out of war. In Berlin, Hitler was so little impressed with the possibility that the United States might go to war that he left the Americans entirely out of his calculations, which he announced in confidence to his closest associates on November 5, 1937. In planning for the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia that night, he argued that the Third Reich could expect a free hand—Japan would keep both Russia and Britain on the alert, India would be an additional British problem, France would be busy as always with internal troubles, and Italy would be a Nazi ally.95 The Kaiser, of course, had made the same mistake about the United States. Yet, everything that came out of Washington now testified to a renewed American drive for isolation, despite President Roosevelt's efforts. The wire services still carried the bulk of American news abroad, since specials in the American capital had always been few and numbered little more than a score in those crucial years. (There had been five foreign correspondents in Washington in 1910, twenty in 1916, eighteen in 1930, principally British and Canadian, with Sir Willmott Lewis of the Times of London as dean of the corps.) Even if there had been many more foreign specials, they could scarcely have told a different story although some, possibly more familiar with American temperament, might have cautioned against pushing the United States too far. The news supported German calculations and diplomatic soundings in other areas, as well. Mohandas K. Gandhi, the aging Mahatma, had been one of Britain's major difficulties in world affairs for well-nigh two decades with his campaign for Indian freedom. It had been a mark of distinction for foreign correspondents to be received by him, to quote him, to depart with marks of his favor; Americans, in particular, had given him consistent notice in their press and, through it, the press of the world. France, as the Germans knew perfectly well through Otto Abetz and his agents, was so wracked with inner dissension that it could never be a threat in its present enfeebled state. The purge trials in Russia were sufficient evidence that Stalin was preoccupied with domestic considerations. That left Britain as the major problem and here, fortunately in the German view, a campaign of appeasement of the dictators was being waged with great vigor in an important section of the independent press.

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Despite the friendliness of the so-called Cliveden "set" of important British personalities* toward the Third Reich and the attitude of forbearance toward Hitler in much of the press, German diplomacy overreached itself. On August 5, 1937, the British government, for the first time since the end of World War I, ordered the expulsion of three German correspondents—little-known journalists working for the controlled Nazi press—because they had been doing espionage work. The Nazi regime immediately ordered the removal of Norman Ebbutt, who for more than twelve years had been the senior correspondent in Berlin of the Times of London and at one time had written dispatches so pleasing to the Nazis that they had been reproduced in Germany.98 William L. Shirer made this record in his Berlin Diary of August 16: "Norman Ebbutt of the London Times, by far the best correspondent here, left this evening. He was expelled, following British action in kicking out three Nazi correspondents in London, the Nazis seizing the opportunity to get rid of a man they've hated and feared for years because of his exhaustive knowledge of this country, and of what was going on behind the scenes. The Times, which has played along with the pro-Nazi Cliveden set, never gave him much support and published only half of what he wrote. . . . We gave Norman a great sendoff at the Charlottenburger station, about fifty of the foreign correspondents of all nations being on the platform despite a tip from Nazi circles that our presence would be considered an unfriendly act to Germany! Amusing to note the correspondents who were afraid to show up, including two well-known Americans. The platform was full of Gestapo agents noting down our names and photographing us." 97 The Times's reputation for appeasing the dictators was based primarily on its support of the policies of the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and its "complete disinterest" in the Spanish civil war, which made it a target of British Liberals. Said the Times's historians of that period; "All The Times wanted Russia to do was to drop Comintern interference and Germany to 'settle down.' The way to get Germany to settle down was to be reasonably conciliatory. Fortunately, in the opinion of The Times, this was the policy of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary."98 This policy of being "reasonably conciliatory" toward Nazi Germany * Among them, Lord and Lady Astor; Dawson of the Times, Neville Chamberlain, and J. L. Garvin,

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and Fascist Italy was by 110 means confined to the Times and the likeminded conservative British press. In the United States, it was also favored, but for different reasons, by the isolationist press. There was no Cliveden "set" here, but a band of anti-Roosevelt supporters who sounded the call for "America First" at the cost of being accused of pro-Nazi sympathies, whether fairly or not. Among them were the Hearst newspapers, Colonel Robert R. McCormick's Chicago Tribune, and Captain Joseph Medill Patterson's New York Daily News. The New York Times was generally regarded as the leading supporter of Roosevelt's foreign policies and, therefore, the spearhead for intervention. A third factor now entered into this journalistic war for public opinion—a band of talented former newspapermen who were recruited by Paul W. White and others for CBS. As much as anyone else, a lean and talented North Carolinian, Edward R. Murrow, made possible this brief but brilliant chapter in radio journalism. Turning from university student organization work, which he had pursued in the United States and Europe since his graduation from Washington State College in 1930, Murrow joined CBS in 1935 and two years later became its European director. With him, he had Elmer Davis, one of the stars of the New York Times staff from World War I on, whose commentary won a wide following in the crucial days ahead. When the Hearst service dropped Shirer after Universal Service was discontinued, Murrow hired him on the spot. Eric Sevareid was taken on later and other strong and independent voices were added." The whole added up to a potent and widely influential force in the United States, counterbalancing much of the isolationism in the press. NBC, an older service, expanded its news coverage but could not match the Murrow-directed commentary in the prewar period. It was Shirer's change of jobs that made it possible for him to be in Vienna on the night of March 1 1 - 1 2 , 1938, when Austria ceased to exist. As Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg bowed out before Hitler's threats and violence, and ill-prepared Nazi armies poured across the Austrian border to make the Anschluss complete, Shirer fought his way through singing Nazi crowds on the Kaertnerstrasse toward the old redbrick Haupttelegraphenamt, and the Cafe Louvre nearby, the unofficial headquarters for foreign correspondents. There, he learned from Robert H. Best of the UP, a fat and grinning South Carolinian who seemed

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mightily pleased, that the Nazis had taken over the Ballhausplatz—the ancient foreign ministry. M. W. Fodor, the Manchester Guardian correspondent, who long since had become known as the "Duranty of the Danube," was out on the story. While he was away, his wife, Martha, was waiting in the Cafe Louvre for him, trying to keep from crying. Shirer saw Emil Maass, his former assistant, come strutting in. Maass had posed for a long time as an anti-Nazi, but now he exclaimed, "Well, meine Damen und Herren, it was about time." He turned over his lapel and showed a swastika emblem which he now pinned outside. Some women shrieked, "Shame!" Nothing but controlled news would be sent out of Vienna, it was clear. Shirer telephoned Murrow, who was in Warsaw that night, and was told to go to London and prepare for a broadcast the following night. Before he left, he phoned Fodor, who was staying on the job— but only for a short time. Fodor knew he would have to get out before the Nazis came in; for years, he had been a marked man."I'm all right, Bill," Fodor said. But he was sobbing. It was the end of an era for Austria.100 Maintaining his time schedule, Hitler did not wait long to begin his assault on Czechoslovakia. As the uproar of the Sudetenland and the Nazi blackmailing tactics against the Czechs surged toward a climax, the Times of London published an editorial on September 7, 1938, that created a sensation. As revised and approved by Geoffrey Dawson, the editor, the leader pointed out the indisputable fact that the Sudeten Germans "did not find themselves at ease" within the Czechoslovak republic. It continued: "It might be worth while for the Czechoslovak Government to consider whether they should exclude altogether the project, which has found favour in some quarters, of making Czechoslovakia a more homogeneous State by the secession of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation with which they are united by race. In any case the wishes of the population concerned would seem to be a decisively important element in any solution that can hope to be regarded as permanent, and the advantages to Czechoslovakia of becoming a homogeneous State might conceivably outweigh the obvious disadvantages of losing the Sudeten German districts of the borderland." 1 0 1 The Foreign Office was widely believed to have inspired the scarcely veiled suggestion to the Czechs to yield, but the Times denied it. Never-

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theless an angry and determined Jan Masaryk, then Czech minister to London, demanded an explanation of the Foreign Office and was told in silky British tones that the editorial "in no way represented the views of His Majesty's Government." Dawson, the storm center, lunched with Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, and the next day wrote indignantly, "It is really grotesque that so much righteous indignation should be expended on the mere suggestion . . . that a revision of boundaries should not be excluded entirely from the list of possible approaches to a settlement." 1 0 2 Hitler drew his own conclusions. Obviously, Britain was the key to any prospect of successful Czech resistance; just as clearly, the British were not really too enraged over the Times's indiscretion, whether it had been calculated or not. In any event, the Nazi leader pushed ahead, forced Britain and France into the showdown at Munich, and eventually walked off with Czechoslovakia. Eight hours before the agreement in Munich was announced, Louis Lochner, the AP's Berlin correspondent, predicted basically the terms on which a settlement would be reached.103 It was the settlement with which Neville Chamberlain came home to a cheering, relieved London, flourishing his umbrella, and proclaiming he had found "peace in our time." DeWitt Mackenzie, the AP's foreign analyst, was one of many correspondents who did not believe peace would last long. Hitler's appetite was great and Poland, which had shared in the spoils of Czechoslovakia, was well-nigh defenseless before him. Mackenzie talked with Marshal Joseph Pilsudski, the so-called strong man of Poland. "Hitler," Pilsudski said, "is the master of central Europe. Poland doesn't have much choice. It is prepared to play his game economically and in other ways as long as he makes no efforts to intrude on our sovereignty. . . . But if it ever becomes necessary to defend Polish sovereignty, be assured that the Poles will fight to defend themselves." Mackenzie returned to Britain and at once detected a fundamental change in the government's attitude toward the Third Reich. When he asked a leading member of the Chamberlain cabinet what had happened, he was told, " W e have come to the conclusion that the policy of appeasement is a failure. . . . Hitler is not susceptible to any moral influence. . . . W e must smash him." 104 At that late date, Hitler would take a good deal of smashing. On May 3, 1939, the foreign correspondents in Moscow found a story tucked away on the back page of Soviet newspapers: " M . Litvinov

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has been released from the Office of Foreign Commissar at his own request." It was the end of the roly-poly Russian with the British wife who had staked his career on collective security. Vyacheslav M. Molotov, the grim little undertaker with the rasping voice and the ice-cold eyes, came in as Stalin's Foreign Minister. Now, the pressure on Poland mounted and strange rumors began to appear about a rapprochement between Hitler and his sworn enemy, Stalin. Not even the old-line foreign correspondents, hardened to anything, could help but express surprise. Nobody of any consequence in the independent press of the West would believe it possible. But on the night of August 23, 1939, when Shirer went to Tempelhof in Berlin to greet H. V. Kaltenborn, the news was out. Kaltenborn was not permitted inside Germany, since he had made broadcasts critical of Hitler, and was hustled back to London on the next plane. Shirer went on to the Taveme in Berlin where, at 2 a.m., the terms of the Hitler-Stalin Pact became known to him. "It's a virtual alliance," Shirer noted sadly in his diary, "and Stalin, the supposed arch-enemy of Nazism and aggression, by its terms invites Germany to go in and clean up Poland. The friends of the Bolos are consternated."106 The special correspondent of the Times of London in Moscow (the staff man, by this time, had come and gone) thought the whole business was still a poker game and wrote: "If there is one thing the contracting parties can be sure of it is that no Pact that they sign will necessarily be binding." 106 In London, Wallace Carroll of the UP took the crisis far more seriously. He stood outside No. 10 Downing Street and watched the members of the British cabinet file out, one by one, ducking the waiting press and refusing to answer questions. But Carroll noticed so great an air of decision and exuberance about Walter Elliott, the Minister of Health, that he trailed him to his car. "What did the Cabinet decide?" Elliott retorted firmly, "We decided that if Poland is invaded we will fight."107 At 5:11 a.m., on September 1, Hitler announced that his armies had invaded Poland. Jerzy Szapiro, the New York Times correspondent in Warsaw, opened his dispatch with the news of the bombing of Gdynia, Cracow, and Katowice. He closed it with these words: "While this

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dispatch was being telephoned, the air raid sirens sounded again in Warsaw." 108 On the morning of September 3, in the AP headquarters in New York, the bells warned of a major news break over the cables. In a moment it came: FLASH CHAMBERLAIN PROCLAIMED BRITAIN AT WAR WITH GERMANY 109

It was the end of appeasement.

X: The Ordeal of World War II 1. B L I T Z K R I E G A balding, 39-year-old Memel-born correspondent wrote ten days after the Nazis crossed the Polish border on September 1, 1939: "Poland is being crushed like a soft-boiled egg." The correspondent, Otto Tolischus of the New York Times, neither wept nor philosophized. He reported with utter candor that Polish defenses had been thin, weak, and archaic, that 4,000 German planes had control of the air, and that seventy Nazi divisions had moved in on wheels with devastating effectiveness. "God," he wrote, "has been with the bigger battalions." 1 A new type of correspondent was reporting a different kind of war. The colorful, romantic figure exemplified by Richard Harding Davis had gone out of style. In his place had come calm, determined, professionally trained men such as Tolischus. Fresh out of Columbia, he had been disciplined in a Cleveland city room and given his first European assignment by International News Service. Working under a dictatorship, this new breed had to take a lot of abuse. Correspondents like Louis Lochner of the Associated Press were accused unfairly of being apologists for the Nazis, on the one hand; on the other, correspondents like Emlyn Williams of the Christian Science Monitor were forced out of the country. Experienced men like Frederick Oechsner of the United Press, Pierre J. Huss of INS, and the radio correspondents, Max Jordan of N B C and William L. Shirer of CBS, were under constant pressure. The Nazis were determined to build up a good press in neutral America. Tolischus incurred their displeasure and was barred. It took skill, devotion, and sheer luck to stay in the country and still refuse to play the Nazi game, a feat that was accom-

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plished by Joseph C. Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor, among others.2 In those first months of the Nazi blitz, correspondents worked under incredible conditions and performed with extraordinary skill. It was James Bowen, N B C correspondent in Montevideo, Uruguay, who first brought the sea war home to the American public. On Sunday, September 17, while he was waiting to broadcast the departure of the trapped Nazi warship Graf Spee, he suddenly yelled, "Give me the air!" The crew of the Graf Spee had blown her up rather than deliver her over to the British. Bowen poured out a memorable eyewitness account that thrilled all who heard it.3 The land war, far less dramatic and far more difficult, endangered both Ed Beattie of the UP and Richard Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News, son of the old correspondent, Paul Scott Mowrer. They both got out of Warsaw just in time; Melvin Whiteleather of the AP, coming from the east with the Russians, was first into the ruined city after it surrendered September 27. On November 30, Norman Deuel of the UP heard the shriek of sirens and crump of Russian bombs in Helsinki. While the raid was still on, he dictated the first bulletins of the Finnish war to Copenhagen.4 Leland Stowe of the Chicago Daily News scored over all others as the Nazi blitz spread to Norway. On April 16,1940, a week after the invasion of Oslo, he reached Stockholm with the story of how the traitor Vidkun Quisling had helped the Nazis take Norway. With Edmund Stevens of the Christian Science Monitor and Warren Irvin of N B C , Stowe was an eyewitness—and got over the border first with the news. Stowe's exploit was all the sweeter for him because the New York Herald Tribune, for which he had been a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for thirteen years, had declined to send him to war in 1939 on the dubious ground that he was too old at 40. He had promptly joined the Chicago Daily News.5 Yet, the fortunes of war did not smile on all veteran journalists. On the morning of May 8, 1940, the body of Webb Miller was found on the railroad tracks near his home in London. As Hugh Baillie explained, Miller had been on the way home the night before "when he stepped off or was flung from the train at the high curve near Clapham Junction." 8 Eleven wars had not harmed him. A blackout accident, however, proved fatal. An even greater tragedy than Norway's was in the making then: the

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fall of France. It came with a tremendous shock because the world was so little prepared for it. Since the previous autumn, a generation reared on the legend of the bravery of the French poilu and the unbreakable Maginot Line had waited confidently for the Nazi attack. A few correspondents—Geoffrey Cox of the London Daily Express and Eric Sevareid of CBS among them—had covered the debarkation of the first British troops at Cherbourg as if they had been the "Old Contemptibles" of glorious memory. People had been trying to recapture the spirit of "Tipperary," of "Madelon," and even of "Over There," but the best they had had was a ridiculous ditty called, 'We'll Hang Out Our Washing on the Siegfried Line." The French and British had been stuffy about letting correspondents move about the quiet front, and they had been censoring a war in which there was no news. Tough, capable young correspondents like William McGaffin of the AP had taken in despair to writing about what French women were doing while their men were at the front, an always interesting subject. The world could not really grasp the shocking swiftness of the Nazi attack in the West on May 10, 1940, until the correspondents' stories came in. M. W . Fodor of the Chicago Daily News, falling back with the Allied armies, told how Louvain once again had been mercilessly bombed by the Germans, how Brussels and Antwerp had shuddered under the attack. A trail of refugees 200 miles long, he reported, was pouring from Belgium into France.7 Taylor Henry of the AP and Britishborn P. J. Philip of the New York Times tried to get through the mob of refugees by using bicycles. At one point Philip was seized and nearly shot as a spy, but he and his fellows managed to get through to Paris. The Nazi propaganda machine, just to be certain that the West appreciated what was going on, transported Lochner, Oechsner, Huss, Shirer, and the rest from Berlin to the Western front. The Nazis needn't have bothered. On May 15, Joseph Kessel, a war correspondent for Paris Soir, staggered into the office of his chief, Pierre Lazareff, and told him it was all over. It was the first word Lazareff had had that General Corap's army had been broken before Sedan, that the Germans this time would overwhelm Paris. There would be no heroic resistance on the Mame. 8 But there would be a Dunkerque. For nine days, from May 28 to June 4, almost unbelieving correspondents saw the Royal Air Force battling the Luftwaffe over the Dunkerque beaches while a remnant of the French army held off the Germans, thus

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permitting 330,000 British troops to be saved. By June 1, Douglas Williams of the London Daily Telegraph was referring to the operation as a miracle.9 On June 4, the Times of London proudly reported that a motley array of British rescue vessels had completed, in the words of the Admiralty, "the most extensive and difficult combined operation in naval history." 1 0 Now Winston Churchill, the old war correspondent and historian, assuming his greatest role as the King's First Minister, rose on June 4 in the House of Commons and made the most celebrated speech of the war. Raymond Daniell, the slim and high-spirited chief of the New York Times's London bureau, one of more than a hundred foreign correspondents who heard him, called it "moving and dramatic." He told how the sonorous Churchillian phrases rolled out in their majesty before a hushed Commons: "We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France; we shall fight on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with the growing confidence of strength in the air; we shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on landing grounds; we shall fight in fields, streets and hills. We shall never surrender." 1 1 Unlike Lincoln's Gettysburg address, which was rescued from oblivion by his admirers rather than the correspondents who heard him, the greatness of Churchill's speech was recognized at once. But even had the correspondents been cold to his magnificent rallying cry, the tens of millions who heard him by radio would have been deeply moved. The time had passed when world leaders had to depend on the newspapers or their correspondents to communicate with their publics. There is no doubt whatever that radio magnified the influence of Churchill that day and helped him arouse the world's admiration for Britain at a time when she confronted the Nazi aggressor almost alone. By June 12, the Nazis were in the suburbs of Paris. The Paris Herald, true to its tradition of being more French than the French themselves, came out for the last time with the banner: GREAT BATTLE FOR PARIS AT CRUCIAL STAGE. 1 2

At the Paris Soir, Lazareff turned the keys over to two neutral office boys who were staying. He said good-by to an elevator operator, Joseph Schlesse, who remarked, "Don't worry about me. I'll be all right." He was. When the Nazis marched in next day and draped the swastika from the Eiffel Tower, the elevator operator, a German army officer in dis-

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guise, took over the new Nazi edition of Paris Soir as personnel director.13 The Nazis may have thought that all resistance to their will in Europe had been crushed when they forced the French to sign the papers of surrender in the old railroad car of 1918 in the Compiegne Forest on June 22. Correspondents like Shirer mourned. In his CBS broadcast that day, he cried, "What a turning back of the clock, what a reversing of history." 14 But all Europe did not despair. On the very border of the all-conquering Reich, Willi Bretscher, editor of the Neue Ziircher Zeitung, wrote: " W e are not called upon to glorify the new masters of Europe, nor to praise their political ability and insight: in doing so we should implicitly approve in advance the most cruel measures which may be taken . . . in the conquered and occupied states and in yet others which may include our own." That editorial was published on July 1, 1940. That same day, Reto Caratsch, the N.Z.Z.'s able Berlin correspondent, reported that the Nazis were uneasy over Russian occupation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Caratsch was accused of poisoning Soviet-German relations and ordered out of the Third Reich in twenty-four hours. There was at least one great newspaper in Europe that dared to print the news and speak its mind, whatever the cost.18 Such was the new role of the correspondent in a world of total war. In less than a hundred years, from the battlefields of the Crimea to the battlefields of France, his freedom of movement had been increased by the swift development of his communications, but his freedom of expression had been vastly curtailed. Moreover, if he did not go to the battlefield, it now came to him. It was so in France. It would be so again in Britain. 2. T H E C O N Q U E R O R

FALTERS

For most of the summer and fall of 1940, Britain presented to the world an image of unmatched gallantry and courage while her enemies pressed for victory in the air. Of the correspondents who came and went in London during the Battle of Britain, none was more persevering or more influential than Edward R. Murrow of CBS. Night after night he began his broadcasts with a sepulchral, "This . . . is London." He would relate in calm and measured tones the extent of the bomb-

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ings he had observed. Sometimes he would even kneel in a gutter and reach out his microphone so that people in the United States could hear the crump of the bombs as they whacked into the ancient streets. "If the purpose of the bombings was to strike terror into the hearts of the Britishers," he reported on the climactic night of September 15, 1940, "then the bombs have been wasted." 1 6 Another who had wide influence in the United States was a large, 38-year-old Brooklyn Irishman, Quentin Reynolds, an editor for Collier's. In his magazine articles, radio talks, books, and a movie he brought back to the United States with him, he sounded the constant theme, "London can take it." And he was right. For that matter, so was the more experienced newscaster, Raymond Gram Swing. Among those who carried the heaviest responsibility was the New York Times bureau chief, Raymond Daniell, who from August 8, 1940, and for nearly five years thereafter, directed the London staff of this most influential of American newspapers. He was, as Meyer Berger often said, a man utterly without fear. On many a night, as he did on September 8, near the climax of the air war over London, he drove for miles through the bombed city to see for himself what damage the Nazis had done. Of the British, he wrote, "They are living through hell and behaving like angels." 1 7 There were many, many more—Drew Middleton, William McGaffin, and Robert Bunnelle in the AP office; Wallace Carroll of the UP; Robert J. Casey, the great Chicago Daily News reporter, and his sardonic colleague, William H. Stoneman; the tall and gracious Helen Kirkpatrick, who came to the same bureau out of college and distinguished herself; Rebecca West, the Scottish-born novelist whose pieces in the New Yorker caused the more elegant American readers to shudder quite as much as the mass audience. To the Times office, joining Daniell, came a solemn-eyed, 31-year-old Scot, James B. Reston, who had been successively a sports writer, baseball publicity man, and AP correspondent in London, and a charming girl from the New York Herald Tribune, Tania Long, who became Mrs. Daniell. The cumulative effect of the reporting of the Battle of Britain by such talented journalists was incalculable. It served to generate an atmosphere in which President Roosevelt could arrange with Churchill for the destroyers-for-bases deal, for lend-lease, and for the close cooperation that made continued British resistance stronger. As Churchill him-

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self said, "The effects in Europe were profound." 18 All these things served as a counterweight to Japan's menacing move in joining the Berlin-Rome Axis with the conclusion of the tri-partite pact. The spearhead of the war on land, meanwhile, had turned to the Greek front. Mussolini, understandably upset over being reduced to a minor figure in the Axis, made a bid to restore Italian prestige by invading Greece on October 28 with an army that had no stomach for a fight. While Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times, John T. Whitaker of the Chicago Daily News, and Richard Massock of the AP vainly sought permission to go to the scene, Reynolds Packard of the UP suddenly turned up near the front lines and began filing. His wife and fellow-correspondent, Eleanor Packard, had doctored up an old pass with which he had fooled the Italians. Then, he had sent his dispatches back to Mrs. Packard in Rome through the kindness of an Italian correspondent. Thus, the UP had the first nonpropaganda dispatches from the front and the first intimation that the Italians would not easily defeat the tough Greek army. Ultimately, Packard was expelled from Albania and reprimanded, but he and Eleanor remained in Rome.19 One of the most active of the war correspondents was killed that winter of 1940-41 as the Italians faltered in the winter war. Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune died in a British bomber crash in Yugoslavia. As spring approached and the Nazis moved in the Balkans, Ray Brock of the New York Times reported a dramatic turn of events. He telephoned from Belgrade that the Yugoslav military had seized power, throwing out a pro-Axis cabinet. It didn't help Yugoslavia. On April 6, Brock phoned again (he worked through Beme) with a bulletin that the Nazis had invaded Yugoslavia. He escaped. Others weren't so lucky. Robert St. John, a 41-year-old Chicagoan, fled from Belgrade to the Adriatic shore with Russell Hill of the New York Herald Tribune and Leigh White of CBS. In a 2o-foot sardine boat without a compass and provisioned only with black bread, they started for Corfu. Dive bombers killed their pilot. In subsequent raids, both St. John and White were wounded, the latter critically. When the frail craft reached Greece, White wound up in a hospital there as a Nazi captive, but St. John and Hill kept going. Three weeks after the fall of Yugoslavia on April 18, St. John turned up in a Cairo hospital. Some of those who escaped unscathed from Yugoslavia were caught

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soon afterward in the collapse of Greece under the Nazi pile-driver. Max Harrelson, a quiet young Arkansan who had narrowly avoided capture in the Nazi invasions of Denmark, the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia, where he had been an AP correspondent, was evacuated safely from Greece. Another AP correspondent, Dan DeLuce, a tall, 30-yearold Arizonan, and his wife, fled in a fishing boat to Izmir, Turkey. Cyrus L. Sulzberger of the New York Times, then 28 years old and at the outset of his career, went with them. Sulzberger also had been in Belgrade and escaped just before the entry of the Nazi forces. Many another British and American correspondent was trapped in the evacuation of the defeated British Expeditionary Force that had been sent in to bolster Greek resistance. Geoffrey Cox of the London Daily Express was caught when the Nazi parachutists took Crete, but managed to escape. Richard D. McMillan and Henry Gorrell, both of them seasoned UP war corespondents, underwent constant machinegunning with the British forces as they plodded toward the Greek beaches. So did Brooklyn-bom, 36-year-old Edward Kennedy of the AP, who wrote of plunging from his truck with the Tommies and lying flat in ditches many times while the Nazi dive bombers thundered past.20 Cecil Brown of CBS, who had been working previously for INS at $65 a week, was captured by the Nazis in Belgrade. With Sam Brewer of the Chicago Tribune, he was shipped out through Rumania to Istanbul, where they were catapulted into the Middle East war. Such British correspondents as Alan Moorehead of the London Daily Express, David Woodward of the London News Chronicle, and Leonard Mosley of the London Daily Sketch already were active there, and many more were to come. Moreover, a newer generation of American war correspondents, typified by mild-looking Richard Mowrer, had begun work under fire.21 There were hazards for correspondents outside the battlefield, of course. Richard C. Hottelet, who was on the UP staff in Berlin, was held by the Nazis all that spring on trumped-up espionage charges and eventually expelled from the Third Reich. There was no peace for any correspondent in Europe, either at the front or behind it.22 As for the major newsgathering organizations, all of them were under a strain that brought many changes. Havas, after more than a hundred years of European domination, had gone under with the fall of France. In its place was an official Vichy agency, Office Francais d' Information, an admitted propaganda organ. Reuters took over some of Havas' staff

The Ordeal of World War II 34° and newspaper contracts, but also accepted help from the British government—additional transmissions facilities and a defraying of some of the heavy cable costs—on the theory that it should spread the British view throughout the world. The only trouble with this was that the government soon began to insist on editing Reuters, objecting to the inclusion of enemy communiques in its service, among other things. Sir Roderick Jones, the managing director, a wholehearted sponsor of government aid for Reuters, finally resigned on February 5, 1941, at the climax of the struggle for a more independent agency. Reuters then broadened its base to reduce the need for government assistance, being reorganized as the Reuter Trust, jointly owned by both the London and provincial newspapers, on October 17, 1941. 23 At about the same period, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the leading independent paper in neutral Switzerland, was undergoing trouble of a different kind. Its London correspondence had aroused bitter Nazi criticism. In a dispatch to the N.Z.Z. dated November 28, 1940, reporting on the Nazi terror raid at Coventry, the London representative, Egli, had called it futile: "In Coventry, the determination of the people to stick it out has been fortified." The response was an all-out drive in the Nazi press against Switzerland. Editor Willy Bretscher was unmoved, however. There would, he wrote, be "no spiritual blackout upon Switzerland" to appease the Nazis.24 It was the paper's finest hour. The Nazi attempt to intimidate the neutral press was no accident. It was the N.Z.Z. which had first published reports of rising tension between the Third Reich and Russia. Throughout the spring of 1941, from Swiss, Turkish, and Finnish sources, the rumors kept building up. German troops were concentrating in eastern Poland. There were a million more in the Balkans. Yet, as late as April 13, 1941, Ambassador von der Schulenberg was wiring Berlin: "Stalin publicly asked for me . . . and threw his arm around my shoulders: 'We must remain friends and you must now do everything toward that end.' " 25 The Soviet dictator's private attitude of blind hope which was, of course, not known to the correspondents, seeped out to the world in strange and indirect ways. Tass on June 13 denied that Nazi and Soviet troop movements toward their common frontier were "of a hostile character." The Soviet propaganda apparatus screamed "warmonger" at all who differed. The Moscow correspondents, prisoners of censorship, were powerless to combat this monumental example of the Communist failing for self-deception.

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On Sunday, June 22, when Hitler gave the signal for the grand assault, the first break in the story came not from Moscow but from Berlin. It was an announcement from the German propaganda ministry which was heard in New York shortly after midnight. The lead in the New York Times,* locally written, was: "Germany last night declared war on Soviet Russia, according to an official Berlin radio broadcast heard by short wave listening stations." 26 It should not be imagined that this was a violation of Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels' declared policy: "News policy is a weapon of war. Its purpose is to wage war and not to give out information." 27 Rather, the prior announcement of such major developments, couched in a manner tending to support Nazi war aims, tended to build up credibility in German communiques which conformed to Goebbels' policy. As long as the wat swung in Hitler's favor, Goebbels could therefore count on propaganda successes. It could not work, however, in support of failures, because with rare exceptions they cannot be kept secret. The hard-pressed Moscow foreign correspondents, thus, usually came trailing in with their dispatches after the Nazi victory announcements. It was by no means their fault, for there were excellent men on the job—among them Henry C. Cassidy and Robert Magidoff of the AP, Harold King of Reuters, and Henry Shapiro and M. S. Handler for the UP. As the Nazi armies drove deeper into Russia, the Goebbels-created legend of Nazi invincibility gained wide acceptance. In Cairo, where the British even then were wondering how they could stop Marshal Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Corps beyond Tobruk, Cecil Brown noted somberly that "the Russian show will be over in anywhere from five to six weeks." 28 That was on June 29, a week after the invasion. The world press faithfully mirrored that opinion. Even in a Moscow air raid shelter Ilya Ehrenburg reported on July 24 that he had talked with Alexander Werth, Erskine Caldwell, and others who were in a "skeptical mood" and feared a "lightning denouement." 29 Ehrenburg, Vassily Grossman, Konstantin Simonov, Mikhail Sholokhov—journalists, poets, novelists—joined with many less famous to report on the rising Russian resistance in Pravda, Izvestia, Red Star, and the rest of the Soviet-controlled press. The foreign correspondents had to get their information from that source until September 14, when * There were only three American correspondents in Moscow at the time. The New York Times was unrepresented.

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Nikolai G. Palgunov, director of Tass, took a party to a point near Vyazma. Major General Vassily Sokolovsky was one of the Red Army briefing officers whose estimates impressed the correspondents—among them Werth, a Reuters special correspondent at the time; Cyrus L. Sulzberger of the New York Times; Arch Steele of the Chicago Daily News; Philip Jordan of the London News Chronicle; Mrs. J. B. S. Haldane, wife of the British scientist and correspondent of the London Daily Sketch; A. T. Cholerton of the London Daily Telegraph; Henry C. Cassidy of the AP; Wallace Carroll of the UP; Vernon Bartlett, a member of Parliament and the BBC representative; and Erskine Caldwell and his wife, the Life photographer, Margaret Bourke-White. It was an influential group. Persuaded by what they saw and by the eloquence of Sokolovsky's briefing, they began reporting things differently. Carroll, for one, vigorously disputed the view, prevalent at the time, that the Russians would be finished by Christmas. He wrote for the UP that the Russians by the spring of 1942 would still be resisting and gathering strength. The whole tone of the world press began to change. Even though the Battle of Moscow was joined shortly afterward, even though Leningrad was besieged for many terrible months, even though the diplomatic staffs and foreign correspondents were moved to Kuibyshev, no one of importance again would write that the Russians were licked. It was, as Cassidy reported, "a frightful, all-devastating struggle between two giants, fighting savagely to the death." 30 As the winter of 1941-42 approached, the Germans had enough power left to fling themselves savagely at the British in Africa. The most prominent correspondent in the area was Harold Denny of the New York Times, who then was 52 years old and had been a World War I sergeant. He was a correspondent who had covered six foreign wars and spent nearly ten years in Russia. He had been in Ethiopia, in Finland, and at Dunkerque. Now, attached to the British Eighth Army, he looked for action and on the morning of November 22, 1941, he ran into it. The British were attacked by forty-five German Stukas and, next day, by Rommel's tanks. Denny was captured with Edward Ward, a BBC correspondent, and several others. Rommel's depleted reserves, which had been drawn off to the Russian front, frustrated his offensive, but Denny wasn't around to report it. "We correspondents," he wrote, "had all accepted the possibility of being killed or wounded, though the mathematical chance of being hit

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was small. But we hardly thought of being captured." 31 The attitude was typical of correspondents. They didn't really think the war could go on without them. In one sense, they were right. For these relatively few men and women were the ones on whom the world depended for the truth at the high tide of Hitler's conquests. 3. T H E T U R N I N G P O I N T Cecil Brown, a brisk, aggressive American in his thirties, landed at Singapore's Kalang Airport on August 3, 1941, prepared for a new CBS assignment. A British official said, "It sounds bad when all you journalist vultures start flocking here." 3 2 Brown was not alone. All over the Pacific, and elsewhere, correspondents were getting into place. In Indo-China that hot and menacing summer, Relman Morin of the AP was on a bus between Pnom Penh and Saigon when he saw a column of tough little men in baggy uniforms slogging through the beautiful countryside. They were the vanguard of 50,000 Japanese troops who had taken over Indo-China under a phony "protective occupation" which the Nazis had forced on the Vichy French. Morin realized at once that Malaya was outflanked, that Singapore could be attacked from the rear, that war could come at any time. 33 In Tokyo, Otto Tolischus noted that Rear Admiral Tanetsugu Sosa, a naval commentator, on August 4 demanded strong measures against Britain and the United States, warning that East Asia was on the verge of war by reason of an economic blockade against Japan. Moreover, in his careful way, Tolischus suggested in the New York Times that the Japanese march across Indo-China to the borders of Thailand might have still graver consequences. Having seen Germany at war, Tolischus knew all the signs, and they were present in Japan. The Japanese press fairly bristled at the warning by the United States and Britain of "grave consequences" if Thailand were invaded.34 The correspondent was not taken in when the Japanese military appeared temporarily to have backed down. But it was difficult to specify exactly what Japan would do. The atmosphere in Tokyo was not reassuring to any correspondent from the West except, of course, the Germans and Italians. On the previous July, in 1940, Melville James Cox of Reuters had been seized

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by the secret police during a spy scare and found dead under mysterious circumstances. The Japanese had contended that Cox had jumped out of a 6fth floor window while he was being questioned, but nobody who knew the correspondent believed them. Moreover, Relman Morin had been taken from the AP office and questioned sharply because he had sent a story advancing the theory of murder as well as suicide. The Japanese from then on redoubled their surveillance of correspondents. Somehow, they still overlooked Dr. Richard Sorge, who had now become the correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung and functionary in the German embassy as well. In his double role, he learned of the Japanese plan to attack Pearl Harbor, and sent his information to Moscow. 35 In Washington, D. C., during the summer of 1941, Masuo Kato was working as a special correspondent for Domei, the Japanese news agency, reporting on the negotiations for the settlement of the crisis. He had been sent over from Tokyo shortly after Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, the new ambassador to the United States. Joseph C. Harsch, the Christian Science Monitor correspondent, newly returned from Berlin, had told him, "It will be the biggest diplomatic juggling trick of all time if Japan can come to an understanding with the United States while having an alliance with Germany." The antagonistic atmosphere was thick, Kato observed. Like other Japanese, he resented the increasing American trade restrictions on Japan and the freezing of Japanese assets in the United States. By September, he was beginning to hear some of the Japanese embassy staff predict war.36 Not even the arrival of Saburo Kurusu, the special "peace envoy" from Tokyo, could change that feeling, for by November, when he arrived, the whole world knew the hour was late. On November 28, Tokyo set up its "winds code" by notifying its operatives in Washington secretly that notice of an emergency would be inserted in the middle of the daily Japanese language short-wave news broadcast as follows: " 1 . In case of Japan-U.S. relations in danger, HIGASHI NO KASEAME (east wind rain). "2. Japan-U.S.S.R. relations, KITANOKAZE KUMORI (north wind cloudy). "3. Japan-British relations, NISHI NO KAZE HARE (west wind clear)." 3 7 The bitterly neutralist Chicago Tribune was to disclose later the ex-

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tent to which the United States had been able to break the Japanese code, but for the present the secret was safe. The American intelligence officers began listening for the "winds code execute" message. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and the Nomura-Kurusu team kept up their interminable and futile talks in Washington, which reassured nobody. Most correspondents were certain that the Japanese intended to strike, but neither they nor the War Council in the United States were prepared for the daring and brilliance of the enemy's concept. The consensus in the War Council late in November was that a Japanese attack was most likely in Thailand, Malaya, or the Dutch East Indies. Hawaii wasn't mentioned in this estimate,38 although as early as January, 1941, the Peruvian embassy had accurately forecast it to Ambassador Joseph C. Grew in Japan. It was then that Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had begun serious staff work on a Pearl Harbor attack, but the Peruvian rumor had been dismissed by both Grew and American intelligence as fantastic.39 Grew, however, had later given the sternest warnings that Japan was planning a major military adventure and in mid-November had told Washington that he was in no position to forecast the timing of any surprise attack. Yet, even then Consul General Nagao Kita in Honolulu was sending itemized news to Japan of movements at Pearl Harbor, which was intercepted and faithfully decoded by American specialists for the edification of Washington. On November 26, the thirty-two warships bearing the Japanese Pearl Harbor striking force sailed from Tankan Bay in the Kuriles. At dawn on Sunday, December 7, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, leader of the attacking force, approached Vice Admiral Chichi Nagumo on his flagship, AkagL. "I am ready for the mission," Commander Fuchida said. "I have every confidence in you," was the quiet reply of the Japanese leader. The fleet was then 230 miles north and slightly east of Oahu. The final signal for the attack had been flashed in code from Tokyo on December 2, so the airmen had known for five days that they were going in, and they were prepared. The small midget submarine force had been on its way to Pearl Harbor for some hours then. Up on the Akagi's mast fluttered the flag Admiral Togo had flown at Tsushima Straits in 1905. At 6 a.m., the 353 attack aircraft began taking off in

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two great waves—the torpedo and dive bombers first, with their cover of fighter aircraft, and the high-level bombers, more dive bombers, and more fighters afterward. An hour and forty-five minutes later, Commander Fuchida was over Oahu and fired his signal pistol for the beginning of the attack. Nobody except Private Joseph Lockard had noticed the flight of enemy aircraft coming in on Hawaii that peaceful Sunday morning in December, and he had been told to forget about it. The commanders at Pearl Harbor couldn't have their sleep disturbed.40 When the Japanese swooped over the Aloha Tower in Honolulu, the great clock registered 7:55 a.m. At 8 a.m., Frank Tremaine, the UP manager in Honolulu, woke up with a start when he heard antiaircraft guns. From his living room, which overlooked Pearl Harbor, he saw a sky full of hostile aircraft and the pride of America's Pacific bastion exploding. To his wife, who was still in bed, Tremaine yelled, "It's an attack by Jap planes. . . . I'll put in a call for San Francisco. If it comes through, you tell them everything you can see." In a half-hour San Francisco was on the line, and Mrs. Tremaine, standing at her living room window, told how the second wave of Japanese planes was coming in over the wreckage in Pearl Harbor. Her story, the first eyewitness account, went out as she gave it until drastic censorship cut off Hawaii, and all communications were closed down.41 Not all correspondents were in Tremaine's position and did not realize what was going on. As experienced and able a man as Joseph C. Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor, who had just arrived in Hawaii, woke up his wife and told her the noise was a "good imitation" of an air raid in Europe.42 He thought it was practice and went for a swim, only to find out by radio that he had missed the big story. In Washington that day, the UP was so unprepared for big news that Arthur F. DeGreve, upon receiving word from the White House during a conference call with the AP and INS also on the line, found he couldn't flash New York by teletype. He telephoned Phil Newsom on the news desk in New York, yelling: "This is DeGreve in Washington—FLASH—White House announces Japanese bombing Wahoo." "Bombing what?" "Wahoo, dammit, Wahoo." "Spell it, for pete's sake."

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"O-A-H-U—Wahoo! We've got a war on our hands." The AP flash went out at 2:22 p.m., Eastern Standard Time. An N B C correspondent broke into the account of a New York Giants football game with the thundering news, told his stunned listeners that it was no drill, and was cut off. Masuo Kato of Domei, on his way to attend a friend's funeral in Washington, heard the report in a taxicab by radio and obtained an immediate reaction from his driver: "God damn Japan. We'll lick hell out of those bastards now." 44 The F B I soon took him and other Japanese officials and correspondents into custody, but treated them with courtesy and consideration. It was not so in Tokyo. There, patriotic hysteria had taken hold. All foreign correspondents were regarded as spies, and Otto Tolischus of the New York Times was one of the first to suffer. Marched off to prison, mercilessly questioned, forced to sit on his heels for hours, given little to eat, he felt his days were numbered. Nor was he alone. Max Hill of the AP and other American correspondents were reduced to mere shadows of themselves by the police treatment.45 In Saigon, Relman Morin was seized by Japanese soldiers and imprisoned with seven other correspondents. The AP correspondent was told he was being "protected." 46 Robert P. Martin and William H. McDougall of the UP bureau in Shanghai had better luck. They feigned drunkenness and managed to get through the Japanese lines, turning up later at the Chinese wartime capital, Chungking. They were able to warn their colleague, Frank Hewlett, at the UP office in Manila, just before the Japanese bombs began to fall on Luzon.47 In Singapore, Cecil Brown knew the war was on when the bombs began dropping around him while he was in a rickshaw on his way to a British press conference. It was the British way to call a press conference to announce that a war was on. The bombs made it unnecessary. It wasn't very long before Brown, O'Dowd Gallagher of the London Daily Express, and Tom Fairholl of the Sydney Telegraph were being asked by a British officer if they wanted to go on a four-day assignment, nature unspecified. Fairholl refused, saying Singapore was the story. But Gallagher, after a brief reconnaisance, came panting to Brown: "Cec, it's the Prince of Wales. . . . They're just asking one American and one Britisher to go. . . . We've got to pull out right away." The Prince of Wales and the Repulse, the pride of the British fleet, were lying in the harbor, awaiting action. When they steamed into the

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Straits of Johore at twilight on December 8, Brown and Gallagher were on the Repulse. It was there that they heard President Roosevelt make his "Day of Infamy" speech before Congress, committing the United States to war. It was on the Repulse, too, beginning at 1 1 : 1 5 a - m - o n December 10, that they witnessed the beginning of the Japanese torpedo bomber attack that destroyed both the great warships. Admiral Tom Phillips had run his powerful fleet, with accompanying destroyers, headlong into disaster 150 miles north of Singapore and 50 miles from the Malayan coast in the South China Sea. Without air cover, without sufficient antiaircraft weapons, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse were sunk in a little more than an hour. Fished out of the water by doughty seamen, Brown was dumped halfdead on the deck of the destroyer Electra. Gallagher also was saved. But it was Brown, somehow, who revived sufficiently to get on the air when he reached Singapore next day and make one of the most dramatic broadcasts of the war for CBS: "I was aboard the Repulse with hundreds of others and escaped. Then, swimming in thick oil, I saw the Prince of Wales lay over on her side like a tired war horse and slide beneath the waters. . . . I jumped twenty feet to the water from the up end of the side of the Repulse and smashed my stopwatch at 12:35. The sinking of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales was carried out by a combination of high-level bombing and torpedo attacks with consummate skill and the greatest daring." 48 The action now centered on the Philippines where the Japanese invaders soon seized Manila and penned General Douglas MacArthur and his little American army into Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor. Hong Kong fell, and Singapore, too. The Japanese swarmed into Burma and Thailand and the Dutch East Indies. But on Bataan and Corregidor, to the wonder of the world, the Americans tenaciously held out in a stubborn exhibition of gallantry as remarkable in its way as that of the city of London. The few correspondents remaining in the Philippines told the story of that tragedy with heroism worthy of the deeds they recorded. Big Clark Lee remained in bombed, fire-swept Manila until the last moment, as did Frank Hewlett of the UP and Melville and Annalee Jacoby of Time, a brave young couple who had been married only a month. On New Year's Eve, Hewlett left his wife in the care of the American High Commissioner in Manila and, accompanied by

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Richard Wilson and Julio Carpió, drove to Bataan just before the bridges were blown up. Lee and the Jacobys got out of the wrecked Filipino capital on New Year's Day, 1942, on a small freighter and safely landed in Bataan. Franz Weissblatt of the UP wasn't so fortunate. He was wounded and captured by a Japanese patrol.49 Once on Corregidor, they found Brigadier General Carlos P. Romulo, then a colonel on General MacArthur's staff, who as editor and publisher of the Philippines Herald had won a Pulitzer Prize for his foreign correspondence. Romulo had warned often enough in print of Japanese ambitions, of the mistakes of the British and the United States in the Far East. He had not been heeded. As he walked into the Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor that New Year's Day, he recalled: "The smell of the place hit me like a blow in the face. There was the stench of sweat and dirty clothes, the coppery smell of blood and disinfectant coming from the lateral where the hospital was situated. . . . I stood there gaping, bewildered and alarmed by the bedlam going on about me. This was the final refuge of a fortress we had all assumed had been prepared and impregnable for years. Now that disaster was upon us, soldiers were rushing about belatedly installing beds and desks and sewage drains and electric lights." 50 The correspondents covered the war, day by day, and lived through the Japanese assaults by air and land. On March 11, when General MacArthur roared away from Corregidor in a PT boat on direct orders from President Roosevelt, it was the signal that the end was near. His departure, leaving General Jonathan M. Wainwright in command, was disclosed seven days later after he had succeeded in reaching Australia. In the Chicago Sun on March 19, H. R. Knickerbocker radioed from Melbourne, called the exploit "harrowing," and told how MacArthur saved himself, his wife, his four-year-old son, and his staff by "speeding through enemy-infested waters by night and hiding in jungles by day." It was a true index of the extent to which the Japanese dominated the Pacific. The correspondents slipped away from Corregidor from then on by whatever means were available—PT boats, fighter aircraft, even trainers. Clark Lee and the Jacobys were among those who made it safely to Australia but, only a short time later, Melville Jacoby was killed in an air crash. Finally, only Frank Hewlett of the UP and Dean Schedler of the AP were left. After the fall of Bataan on April 9 and the beginning of the terrible "death march" of the prisoners taken by

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the Japanese, everybody knew it was only a question of time before Corregidor would have to surrender. Only two trainer aircraft were in flying condition when General Wainwright quietly advised the correspondents that they had better go. Schedler departed on April 12, Hewlett the following day. The last man off Corregidor was the indomitable Romulo, who followed the rest on the long and arduous trip to Australia where he once more joined MacArthur's staff. On May 6, 1942, Corregidor fell. An epic of resistance against overwhelming odds had been written into American history by the correspondents who had remained almost until the last.51 MacArthur wrote: "Corregidor has sounded its own story at the mouth of its guns. It has scrolled its own epitaph on enemy tablets. But through the bloody haze on its last reverberating shot, I shall always seem to see a vision of grim, gaunt, ghostly men, still unafraid." 52 The nightmare of defeat glowered over the Pacific. Just before the surrender of Singapore on February 15, the last correspondents left. Yates McDaniel of the AP caught a ship bound for Java with fifty-five other men and a Chinese girl. "In my seven and one-half day journey," he wrote, "I abandoned a bombed ship, was cast up on an uninhabited island, made my way through a storm in a small launch to Sumatra, crossed the island's mountain wilds by truck, rail, and pony cart, and completed 1,200 roundabout miles safely through the Indian Ocean aboard a destroyer." There was a more tragic outcome to the Java defeat for some of the veteran correspondents. McDaniel, Harold Guard of the UP, and others who had fled from Singapore were taken off the Dutch island by bombers flying to Australia. Only Bill McDougall of the UP, DeWitt Hancock of the AP, and Kenneth Selby-Walker of Reuters chose to stay to the end. When the enemy was very near, McDougall and Hancock boarded a ship for Ceylon March 4, but it was sunk by Japanese bombers. Hancock was killed. McDougall was rescued but dumped into a Japanese prison camp. Selby-Walker's last dispatch on March 6 ended: "I'm afraid it is too late now. Good luck!" 63 It seemed as if the Japanese would sweep everything before them until, on April 18, an electrifying announcement came over the Japanese home radio. Tokyo had been bombed that day. So had Yokohama, Nagoya, and Kobe. Washington grimly withheld the details until, days later, President Roosevelt at the White House publicly awarded the

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Congressional Medal of Honor to the leader of the raid, Brigadier General James H. Doolittle. Even then, instead of telling the story of how the planes had taken off from carriers, the President reported they had left from a base, Shangri-La, the mythical Asian land invented by novelist James Hilton. The Berlin radio took him seriously. With that, the United States had to be satisfied until newsmen interned in Japan came home. Then, Joe Dynan of the AP and others told how the raiders gave them "the thrill of a lifetime" as they swooped low over their prison camp.64 Early in May, the first great American victory, the battle of the Coral Sea off Australia, also produced one of the most dramatic narratives of the war and made a hero for a few weeks out of Stanley Johnston of the Chicago Tribune. He was a plucky, 42-year-old Australian who had fought in World War I, become an American citizen, and turned himself into a war correspondent almost by accident during the Nazi invasion of the Low Countries in World War II. As a Press Wireless official caught in the war, he had begun filing for the Chicago Tribune and after Pearl Harbor had been transferred to the Pacific. He was the only American correspondent with the fleet at the battle of the Coral Sea and was saved when the aircraft carrier Lexington went down. The battle disclosed, Johnston later wrote for an appreciative American audience, "how completely the carrier has displaced the battleship in importance in modem war." The two fleets never saw each other but struck all their blows with their air arms. Two Japanese aircraft carriers, a number of other ships, and eighty aircraft were lost. The American losses were heavy, although not as great. Of the Lexington, Johnston wrote the magnificent epitaph: "She never wavered. She kept her head up and went down like the lady she was." 58 That was on May 8 at the end of an epic five-day running battle. In a little more than a month, after the American victory at Midway on June 3-6, both Johnston and his paper were in deep trouble. The correspondent was accused of publishing information concerning the Japanese strength at Midway that could have tipped the enemy that the United States had broken the Japanese code. A federal grand jury investigated, but nothing ever happened either to Johnston or the Chicago Tribune. Subsequently, it was shown that the Japanese had not realized at that time that the United States had the secret of their code. Yet, the issue haunted the Tribune for the rest of the war and thereafter.68

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It was one factor that led to more tolerance for the government's own news coverage in the field, the Office of War Information, headed by Elmer Davis. The road back in the Pacific was long and wearisome for the United States. For the troops who began the bloody campaign of island-hopping, as well as for the correspondents assigned to tell their story, it was an arduous, often tragic, and seldom rewarding struggle. On the day of the first landing by American forces at Guadalcanal in the Solomons on August 7, Vem Haugland of the AP had to bail out of a plane over New Guinea and for a month wandered in the jungle, living on grass and roots, until he was rescued. Soon afterward, aboard the heavy cruiser Astoria off Guadalcanal, Joe James Custer of the UP lost his left eye in a Japanese dive bomber attack. Jack Singer, a 27-year-old INS correspondent, was killed when the aircraft carrier Wasp, to which he was assigned, took a torpedo amidships during a battle in the Solomons September 15. His shipmates forwarded his last story. In the thick of the Guadalcanal battle, meanwhile, another INS man, Richard Tregaskis, escaped without a scratch only to be wounded later in the war in Italy. An even more ironic fate befell Byron Darnton of the New York Times, who volunteered for war duty at 45 years of age. He was killed in action on October 18 when American warplanes mistakenly shot up a small landing craft laden with American soldiers bound for an attack on nearby Buna. One of the few fortunate ones was Ira Wolfert, a 32-year-old New Yorker who in mid-November witnessed the decisive fifth battle of the Solomons from a Guadalcanal beach and wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning story for North American Newspaper Alliance.57 Such experiences as these set the pattern for the correspondents in the Pacific war—a crazy-quilt patchwork of heroism, tragedy, and good fortune. Theirs was the toughest profession. Unlike the fighting men whose deeds they recorded day by day, they had to keep slogging along without even the satisfaction of being able to strike back at the enemy. The exchange of interned diplomats and correspondents that spring and summer told the Allies something of the plight of their enemies. Twenty-two Americans came home on the Drottningholm, a Swedish liner, after internment at Bad Nauheim. Lochner, Oechsner, Huss, and others reported rising difficulties on the home front in the Reich. Their colleague, Richard Massock of the AP, called Italy a "hungry land with

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no love for her war partners, rife with defeatism and disillusion." Harold Denny of the New York Times, greatly cheered by the first bomber raids over Germany, returned with such colleagues as Herbert L. Matthews. The only American of this group to stay behind was a South Carolinian who had worked for the UP in Vienna, Robert H. Best. He was to die in a Boston prison after the war. One other who stayed behind was Sisley Huddleston, who had broken his connection with the Christian Science Monitor and chose to stay in Vichy France. The rest of the Americans came out of Bad Nauheim with only one thought—to get back to their dangerous trade. From the twenty-six who were interned in Japan came tales of great personal hardship, torture, beatings, and worse. John B. Powell, the Chicago Tribune correspondent, came back crippled from his confinement in freezing prisons, injuries that were to prove fatal. Otto Tolischus of the New York Times was another who suffered brutal mistreatment. Max Hill of the AP, who had been seized at the same time as Robert Bellaire of the UP and placed in solitary confinement, told of being tortured and starved in an icy cell. At Lourenco Marques, where the Japanese repatriates were waiting, Hill heard from Masuo Kato how the Japanese had been maintained in the greatest luxury at the fashionable Greenbriar Hotel, White Sulphur Springs. The emaciated Hill said quietly, "I am proud of my country." 58 Unlike the desperation of the Pacific war, the Allied fortunes changed dramatically as 1942 progressed; yet, it was no easier on the correspondents. Larry Allen, a 33-year-old AP man, went down with the British cruiser Galatea on December 16, 1941, in the Mediterranean but survived, even though he could not swim, when he was picked up by a rescue party. His colleague, Alexander Massey Anderson, of Reuters, was killed.59 Larry Meier of INS, covering his first big battle at Dieppe during the Allied raid of August 19, 1942, took a burst of shrapnel in the face and chest, wounds from which he never recovered. A. B. Austin of the London Daily Herald, covering at Dieppe for the combined British press, sent back his messages hour after hour and, in an older tradition of war correspondence, passed mortar shells in his spare moments. He was to lose his life later in the Italian fighting.60 The correspondents never knew precisely what to expect, although the best of them kept looking for action. On the night of October 23, 1942, outside El Alamein, three of them showed up at a brigade head-

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quarters of one of the key outfits commanded by General Bernard Law Montgomery, the 51st Highland Division. They were Richard D. McMillan of the UP, Christopher Buckley of the London Daily Telegraph, and an Australian correspondent, Jack Hetherington. Shortly after their arrival, under cover of an earth-shaking barrage, the British surged over the desert. It was the opening of Montgomery's offensive. "The biggest battle of Egypt is under way," McMillan wrote. "The British have attacked violently and have penetrated the enemy position at many points. . . . I walked five and a half hours and covered nearly five miles, two of which were into the German lines." 6 1 On November 8, when Rommel had fallen back to the Libyan frontier with no more than 25,000 of his original army, the Americans struck their first massive land blow at Africa to catch the Axis forces in a pincers. Under the command of General Dwight David Eisenhower, an Anglo-American army stormed ashore on the North African beaches of Morocco and Algeria before dawn. By radio and loudspeaker, they trumpeted messages to the Vichy French, held captive by Marshal Petain and Hitler: "Cease firing. We are your friends." But in some sections, French warships and armed forces blindly followed orders and resisted. Nowhere was the action hotter than in the harbor of Oran in Algeria. Leo Disher, a UP correspondent on the former American Coast Guard cutter Walney, found himself in the thick of the battle and at an extreme disadvantage. On the way from England, he had slipped on deck and broken his ankle, which was put in a cast. Now, on the bridge of the Walney, he was under fire from both French warships and harbor guns. The cutter shuddered under repeated hits. Disher fell, wounded in both legs. Everybody else on the bridge was killed. As the cutter sank, the correspondent drifted clear. Although he was hit by many more bullets, he managed to swim to a pier, kept afloat by his life belts, and eventually was hauled in by a French patrol. In an Oran hospital, a doctor found twenty-six wounds but, somehow, Disher managed to survive.62 The smooth leads out of headquarters at Algiers, of course, gave no hint of such experiences that first night. Everything was neatly laid out so that the main points could be quickly absorbed by editors, writers of headlines, and the public. Wes Gallagher of the AP, one of the

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best, and a correspondent who had undergone his own share of frontline activity, wrote: Sunday, Nov. 8—American soldiers, marines and sailors from one of the greatest armadas ever put into a single military operation swarmed ashore today on the Vichy-controlled North Africa shore before dawn, striking to break Hitler's hold on the Mediterranean.63

ALLIED HEADQUARTERS IN NORTH AFRICA,

Such was the way things looked from headquarters. Of course, it wasn't the way Disher saw the war. Nor was it the way a weazened, gnome-like little man saw it when he staggered from a British transport two weeks later at Mers-el-Kebir in Algeria, suffering from "one of the Ten Best Colds of 1942." Ernie Pyle, then just another writer for Scripps-Howard newspapers, poked around outside General Eisenhower's headquarters and soon cabled: " W e have left in office most of the small-fry officials put there by the Germans before we came. W e are permitting Fascist societies to continue to exist. Actual sniping has been stopped but there is still sabotage. The loyal French see this and wonder what manner of people we are. . . . Our enemies see it, laugh, and call us soft. . . . Our fundamental policy still is one of soft-gloving snakes in our midst." It kicked up a sensation. Nobody knew how the story ever got through censorship. But then, the censors didn't know Ernie Pyle at that time, which explains a lot of things. Soon, as the invasion of North Africa gathered headway and Emie went out and lived with the "God-damned infantry," all America began reading him and admiring him. A1 Jolson, who had come to North Africa to entertain the troops, said enviously: "Everywhere I went the soldiers told me how wonderful Ernie Pyle was. Heck, he doesn't sing or dance and I couldn't figure out what he did to entertain them, but they acted like he was Mr. God." A new force had been found to bring the war home to the American people, a force weighing a mere 1 1 0 pounds who sometimes wrote his stuff in the field with a pencil while under fire. And yet, A. J. Liebling truly wrote of him: "War for him meant not adventure, as for Bob Casey; a crusade, as for Bill Stoneman; and enthrallment, as it did for Hemingway; or a chance to be a prima donna or get away from the sports department, as for a number of other fellows. He treated it as an unalienated misfortune." 64

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The American public, having discovered Ernie Pyle, eagerly followed the progress of the war in North Africa—and scarcely realized until it was over that one of the decisive battles of history was being fought at Stalingrad. Nor was the world much better informed, although Allied leaders, of course, were well aware of the significance of the struggle. The Russians, cautious in the extreme, kept foreign correspondents away from the city and, at the most critical stage, held up even the work of inspired Soviet correspondents. The foreign press kept in touch with developments through communiques issued in Moscow and the Stalingrad dispatches of such writers as Ehrenburg, Grossman, Simonov, and a score or more of less prominent Red Star combat reporters.85 The crucial hour came between 6 and 7 a.m. on November 19, 1942, when the defenders of Stalingrad at last heard intensive gunfire on their own side north and south of the city—the signal, as they later learned, for the opening of the Soviet counteroffensive that was to destroy the German Sixth Army. However, there was no announcement of the Russian action for three days. On November 27, when the Soviets broke through the German salient north of Stalingrad and joined forces, there was a special communique. But not until December 1 was there a correspondent's article in Red Star—Grossman's—and not until December 12 was a foreign correspondent able to write directly from Stalingrad. Henry Shapiro of the UP was the first to visit the Volga battleground after the encirclement of the Nazi forces. "I found among the officers and soldiers an air of confidence the like of which I had never seen in the Red Army before," he recalled. "When I returned to Moscow, I wrote, 'The Germans are doomed.' " 66 Alexander Werth, writing for the London Sunday Times, came to Stalingrad afterward and wrote: "Walking over the frozen, tortured earth of Stalingrad, you felt that you were treading on human flesh and bones. And sometimes it was literally true." 67 The end came on February 2, 1943. Only 91,000 Germans remained of the 330,000 in the Sixth Army, and they were prisoners. On February 3, there was a roll of muffled drums over the German radio, followed by the second movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Then the High Command broke the news to the German people with this bulletin: "The battle of Stalingrad has ended. True to their oath to fight to the last breath, the Sixth Army under the exemplary leadership of Field Marshal von Paulus has been overcome

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by the superiority of the enemy and by the unfavorable circumstances confronting our forces." Thus, after three years and five months of war under Hitler's demoniac leadership, the German people faced their moment of truth. Beaten at El Alamein, beaten at Stalingrad, reeling back under the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa, facing the invasion of Hitler's Fortress Europa itself, the Germans could have little hope for the future.68 In this manner the turning point of the war was reached and in this manner it was made known to a suffering world.

4. VICTORY IN EUROPE The work of Ernie Pyle was inextricably bound up with the reporting of the victory of the United Nations coalition in Europe. Among the professional correspondents, there were many whose work was outstanding, some who achieved fame, and a few who became truly distinguished. But there was only one Ernie Pyle. Not even Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck, who descended from the lofty heights of literature to come to grips with the blood and sweat of wartime journalism, were able to attract so large and ardent a newspaper audience. Nor were their dispatches preserved in book form with the same reverence, and even love, that was bestowed by many millions of Americans upon the little man from Indiana who hated war and yet gave up his life to it. William Howard Russell, the great Britisher, proudly called himself the first war correspondent. The mild and self-effacing Ernie Pyle wanted to be the last. Pyle was one of those kindly and modest men who regard fame as a curious kind of insect when it alights by chance upon their chest and gently try to brush it off. He was born Ernest Taylor Pyle, although nobody in later life ever called him that, on August 3, 1900, in the village of Dana, Indiana. He acquired an education in fits and starts, attending journalism classes and editing the Daily Student at Indiana University for four years, leaving before graduation in 1923 to become a reporter on the LaPorte Herald. Soon, he was able to move on to the Washington Daily News, a new Scripps-Howard newspaper, where he wound up on the copy desk, editing reporters' copy, and scribbling headlines. With the exception of a brief stint in New York on the Evening World and the Evening Post in 1926, he remained with the

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Daily News until 1935, rising unhappily to the estate of managing editor and quitting as soon as he was decently able to do so. Nothing in those early years marked Ernie Pyle as a man who could move a great mass audience with his simple, kindly, and unaffected prose. But in 1935, when he set out on a career as a wandering columnist with his deeply troubled wife, Jerry, whom he had married in 1925, people began to notice him and read him. In five years as a wanderer who crisscrossed America in an old jalopy and wrote about the plain people he met and the things he saw, he attracted a modest public in two-score newspapers that carried his column. Briefly, in 1940, he was in London covering the Blitz, but personal troubles and his wife's mental state brought him home. He was divorced in 1942. On November 9 of that year, when he was desolated over his shattered marriage, he sought release on the war front. That was the day the UP in London cabled the home office informatively, "Pyle Frontwarded." The weazened little man in the ill-fitting, sloppy correspondents' uniform was just one of seventy American war reporters in North Africa at the beginning. At 42, he was the oldest of them all, save the ancient Gault MacGowan of the New York Sun. The younger correspondents somehow thought of Pyle as fragile and slightly elderly, although he was tougher than any of them, and tried to take care of him. Hal Boyle of the AP, one of his major rivals, saw him first sprawled in bed in a drafty Oran hotel, "mopping his nose and gently cursing the people who had reported that Africa was a warm country." He went to Biskra and did some pieces about the bomber crews, but his heart wasn't really in his work. Then, suddenly and quite astonishingly, he met GI Joe fighting his heart out in the mud on the Tunisian front during the last gasp of the Nazi legions there—the beginning of a historic mutual admiration society. "Now to the infantry," he wrote, "the God-damned infantry as they like to call themselves. . . . I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can't be won without." 69 From then on, Pyle made common cause with the infantryman and became his hero. In the thick of the fighting in Tunisia, on desolate night marches, in retreat, and in sudden and daring offensive actions that finally crushed Rommel's forces, G I Joe from then on was seldom

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without his Boswell. Across America, newspapers began running his column, many on Page One, under massive human-interest headlines, and millions who had never before heard of Ernie Pyle took him nightly into their homes and their hearts. Somewhere, in this new career, he found the courage to remarry his Jerry by proxy in a cable ceremony and think of renewing life with her after the war. The difference between Ernie Pyle and his colleagues was that he never bothered to whip up a newsy first paragraph on which an editor could slap a sensational headline. He didn't pay much attention to the formal communiques out of headquarters, out of which almost any competent news mechanic could manufacture what is known to the trade as a lead story. Instead, he looked for the story of the individual swallowed up on the massive battlefront, and he took his time about gathering the material for his work. He was respectful of deadlines, but never enslaved by them. There were others like Pyle who, by the nature of their assignment, had to follow the news closely and didn't have his comparative freedom of action. There was John O'Reilly of the New York Herald Tribune, known as Tex, who had begun as an itinerant printer and was also over 40 now. He followed the Tunisian war from start to finish, the surrender of 25,000 Germans of the Afrika Korps on the Cape Bon peninsula on May 9, 1943. With the other reporters a month later, he heard General Eisenhower at headquarters tell them in confidence that the overture to the invasion of Europe, an offensive against Sicily, would begin in a month. O'Reilly called home for reinforcements and soon was joined by a big, slow-moving, 36-year-old reporter with a mild manner and a controlled stutter—the introduction of Homer Bigart to front-line reporting. At first, O'Reilly was at the front, going ashore four times on the night of the Sicilian landings, July 9-10, with Bigart backing up the Herald Tribune from headquarters in Algiers. But later, they switched and Bigart, born in Hawley, Pa., and introduced to newspaper work as a Herald Tribune copy boy, began his own career under fire as a great war correspondent.70 This was the method, too, for Milton Bracker and Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times, who both saw action as the Italian campaign progressed. Pyle and Hal Boyle and O'Reilly and the rest of their celebrated company did the G I proud, but the interpreters among the war correspondents were important, too. Soon after landing in Sicily, Matthews warned

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that "one ought to ask not whether Italy is going to collapse but whether she can collapse." The point was that Matthews expected the Germans to take over Italy and the Italians and force the continuation of the fighting. The only trouble was that he made it two days after the aged Marshal Pietro Badoglio seized power in Rome and forced Benito Mussolini to resign on July 25 while the Allies were still fighting in Italy. It was clear that Matthews had not anticipated so sudden an Italian overturn, which to the casual reader, at least, made him look a little foolish. Yet, very soon, his fear of a continued Italian campaign by the Germans proved correct. There was another aspect to the war that drew the attention of many a war correspondent other than Ernie Pyle and the rest who preferred to slog along with the foot soldier. That was the steadily rising fury of the Allied bombing raids over Germany and, to a lesser extent, other Axis centers. Walter Cronkite of the UP, flying on a raid over Wilhelmshaven on February 26 of that year, had written that it was "an assignment to hell—a hell 26,000 feet above the earth, a hell of burning tracer bullets and bursting gunfire, of crippled Fortresses and burning German fighter planes, of parachuting men and others not so lucky." 7 1 Among the unlucky ones on that raid was Robert P. Post, a former Washington correspondent of the New York Times who had briefly attracted attention when he had had the temerity to ask President Roosevelt his intentions about a third term and had been told to "go over in the corner and put on your dunce cap." Bob Post was killed in action over Wilhelmshaven.72 Matthews flew on the first raid over Rome on July 19 with six other correspondents. "The irony of fate and journalism," he wrote, "brought me back, watching with no satisfaction . . . a triumphant Allied force landing something more than 1,000 tons of bombs in the heart of Italy's capital." All the correspondents came back from that raid, but three of them—Raymond Clapper of Scripps-Howard service, Joseph Morton of the AP, and Tom Treanor of the Los Angeles Times—lost their lives before the war ended.73 That's the way it was for the correspondents. They never knew whether they would get it in some major battle or fall prey to a sniper on a sunny day when little or nothing was going on. Nevertheless, they accepted one mean assignment after another. With the crossing of the Straits of Messina by American and British forces on September 2, the way was open for the long-awaited Italian

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surrender which was announced on September 8. The joy was premature. Tex O'Reilly, going into Salerno next day to cover the 36th Division's amphibious landing, reported terrific German resistance in his New York Herald Tribune story. After a bloody ten-day battle, O'Reilly entered Naples with the first patrol and was appalled at the destruction. Matthews, who followed him, found that the Germans had destroyed the University of Naples with its priceless heritage of art and literature.74 Ernie Pyle, returning from a brief rest in the United States, joined the 36th Division in its mountain fighting against the Germans. It was during the bitter winter campaign that he wrote one of his most famous stories—the death of Captain Henry T . Waskow of Belton, Texas. 75 It helped win him a Pulitzer Prize.76 On the beachhead at Anzio not long afterward, he had a narrow escape in a place he called "Shell Alley." Outside Naples, artillery fire killed Stewart Sale of the London Daily Herald, A. B. Austin, then of Reuters, and William Mundy, of the Australian AP. Pyle wrote to Jerry: "I really was tremendously lucky to come out alive." 7 7 Of the almost 500 American correspondents who gathered in England in the spring of 1944 for the cross-Channel invasion, twenty-eight were picked to go in by sea and land. Emie Pyle was one. W i t h the other old hands, he figured his chances. Bill Stoneman of the Chicago Daily News, who had been wounded, was ready to go. So were Don Whitehead of the AP, Henry Gorrell of the UP, winner of the American Air Medal for bravery, Clark Lee of INS, Tex O'Reilly of the New York Herald Tribune, and Jack Thompson of the Chicago Tribune. All had seen a great deal of action. Pyle wrote: " W e felt our chances were not very good. . . . I was the worst of the lot and continued to be."78 It didn't help much when the correspondents learned on June 4 that the A P London office had let loose a flash by mistake: EISENHOWER HQ ANNOUNCES ALLIED LANDINGS IN FRANCE

However, the German Fifteenth Army had been fed so many phony messages that the AP's slip was discounted, particularly when a check showed all quiet along the Channel coast. Thus, when General Eisenhower moved, he managed to surprise the defenders.79 Walter Cronkite, at 28 a UP veteran, flew in over the invasion coast at dawn, one of

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several reporters in a B-17 bomber group.80 Leonard Mosley of the London Daily Telegraph, a veteran of some of the great battles of the war, jumped with the paratroops.81 Collie Small of the UP flew with the Ninth Air Force. Don Whitehead hit the beach on D-Day with the troops, going in under heavy enemy fire. Jack Thompson of the Chicago Tribune was in soon afterward. Roelif Loveland of the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote: "We saw the curtain go up this morning on the greatest drama in the history of the world, the invasion of Hitler's Europe." 82 And George Hicks of ABC stood on the U.S.S. Aneon as a network pool reporter and gave a superb description of the panorama of D-Day on the Normandy shore.83 Knowing that these and many others had ably covered the first shock of the invasion, Ernie Pyle spent most of the time walking up. and down the beach when he went in on the morning after D-Day. The action, by that time, had moved inland. As always, he wrote about GI Joe. But in a letter home, after ten days under fire, he wrote of himself: "I haven't had too bad a time, and yet the thing is about to get me down. . . . I'm so sick of living in misery and fright." 84 But he went on. The nature of the correspondent in the Western world is such that he will take incredible chances, at times, to get a story. Every one in France, from the greenest youngster to 57-year-old Mark Watson of the Baltimore Sun, wanted to be in on the capture of Paris. In fact, after the American breakout in that summer of 1944, all the correspondents watched each other to make certain that nobody took off alone for Paris. On August 15, there was a diversion when Eric Sevareid, Chester Morrison, and Vaughn Thomas led with radio reports, in colorful detail, of the Allied landings in the south of France.85 The race for Paris was stepped up. When the First Army was a hundred miles west of Paris, Pyle, Thompson, Gorrell, and Clark Lee asked for permission to move ahead but were refused. Nevertheless some correspondents got into the City of Light as early as August 23-24, among them Ernest Hemingway. Larry Lesueur, a CBS war correspondent with extensive service in Russia and the Middle East, broadcast from Radio Paris before the French troops entered the city. So did Jim McGlincy of the UP and three Britishers. The bold vanguard of the corps of correspondents was set down with light penalties, a temporary suspension of credentials, for failing to submit their copy to censorship.86

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But that did not lessen the enthusiasm of the main groups who came in with the French forces, leading the Americans and the British, on August 25, one of the great days of the war. Ernie Pyle, riding in with Hank Gorrell of the UP in a jeep, wrote of the hysterically joyful Parisian crowds: "We all got kissed until we were literally red in the face, and I must say we enjoyed it. . . . The fact that I hadn't shaved for days and was gray-bearded as well as bald-headed, made no difference." 87 But it was just about all he could take. He had been overseas for twenty-nine months, nearly a year of that in the front lines, and had written 700,000 words. "The hurt," he concluded, "has finally become too great. All of a sudden it seemed to me that if I heard one more shot or saw one more dead man I would go off my nut. And if I had to write one more column I'd collapse. So I'm on my way." 88 Among many others, he left durable Mark Watson of the Baltimore Sun behind him to report the entry of General Charles de Gaulle into Paris on August 26 amid sniper fire at the Hotel deVille, one of the fine and colorful stories of the war. Watson won a Pulitzer Prize for that, and the bulk of his war correspondence, in the following year. And there were many, many others now, seasoned and reliable, to tell the story of the American dash across France, the stubborn British action at Arnhem, the battle of the Bulge, the spanning of the Rhine at the Remagen bridgehead, and the final thrust into a shattered and bombedout Germany to meet the Russians. Some of the finest correspondence in these latter stages of the war in Europe came from the relatively small staff of the Christian Science Monitor, whose instructions were to play down adventure and the "home town boy" angle and concentrate on the significance of the war. Under the supervision of Charles E. Gratke, foreign news editor, and the veteran European editorial manager, Walter Mallory-Browne, who worked for six years in bomb-wracked London, the Monitor's men ranged over the European battlefields. Probably the most active was Ronald Maillard Stead, who observed the fighting in North Africa, at the Anzio beachhead, and went into Germany with the U.S. Ninth Army, finally being rowed across the Elbe by two Russians in a racing shell. Emlyn Williams, the veteran correspondent in Germany, was among the earliest to return to destroyed Berlin. Joseph Harrison, who escaped from Greece after the Nazi takeover, and Dan DeLuce of the AP were among the first to go back to Europe, making their way into

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Yugoslavia and reporting on the resistance of the Communist partisans headed by the enigmatic Tito. Edmund Stevens, a youthful Columbia graduate at the outset of the war, followed up his frustrating experience during the Nazi conquest of Norway by covering the war in Russia, the Middle East, and Africa. Their business, as the Monitor stated it, was "to keep the long-range meaning in view and to write about it." 89 These things were not easy to do, either for the Monitor men or anybody else. One of the Reuters correspondents with the U.S. First Army, William Stringer, was killed in action during the dash across France. In Moscow, Harrison E. Salisbury, who had been sent there by the UP late in the war to relieve Henry Shapiro, was threatened with expulsion. A UP man in London had filed a tale, current at the time, that Stalin had hit Marshal Semyon Y . Timoshenko over the head with a bottle to silence him during a party for Winston Churchill. In vain, Salisbury pleaded that he knew nothing of the story and presented UP's apologies. The Russians would have turned him out but for the agency's own apology. Still another hazard for correspondents was illustrated by the plight of John Wilhelm of the Baltimore Sun, caught with the American army in the Bulge, who told of soldiers "fighting even when surrounded beyond hope," and seemed to have little hope left himself. Thus, even in victory there was turmoil and heartache and grief. On April 12, 1945, when President Roosevelt died at Warm Springs, Ga., there was such a universal outpouring of sadness that even the German radio for a short time stilled its venom and its lies. The first word to the United States was an INS flash, read over C B S by John Daly. Then in rapid succession came the B B C , in London, and in Paris. Charles Collingwood of C B S truly said in his Paris broadcast, "It is as though a light went out." Six days later, on tiny Ie Shima in the Pacific, Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper. He had been in the Pacific for four months and had gone into Ie Shima with the 77th Division. When the sniper opened up, Pyle hit the ditch beside the road, then raised his head to see if everybody else was all right. The bullet hit him in the right temple. Again, the United States mourned, this time for a gnome-like little man who had been almost as well-loved as his commander-in-chief. There were formal statements of grief from President Truman and all the other great ones. But none missed him more than his own kind.

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For when Hal Boyle cried out to his sleeping colleagues in ruined Leipzig, "Ernie got it!" they got up and drank themselves into a stupor.90 Now, the European war surged toward its climax. In mid-April, the Allied armies began overrunning the Hitler concentration camps. Shocked correspondents, seeing the terrible evidence of Nazi mass murders and listening to the numbing tales of atrocities that were told by emaciated survivors, poured out the truth. From the beginning of the war, the world had heard such stories from time to time. William Shirer, while he was still in Berlin, had noted them in his diary. Almost from the outset of the German attack on Russia in 1941, Ilya Ehrenburg had been reporting instances of the mass extermination of Jews by Nazi murder squads. In 1942, following a joint statement by the Allied governments 011 the persecution of the Jews in Europe, the Soviet foreign office had charged the Nazis with seeking the systematic extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe. But, as Alexander Werth wrote, "it was all so monstrous that even in Russia many felt that these things had first to be seen to be believed." 91 Now they were seen. One of the first accounts, and among the most searing, was a CBS broadcast on April 15, 1945, from Buchenwald by Edward R. Murrow. Three days later, Gene Currivan piled up still more horror in a dispatch to the New York Times from the same spot. As more and more correspondents entered the death camps, it became all too tragically certain that Hitler's Einsatzgruppen under the domination of Adolf Eichmann had killed 6,000,000 Jews and millions of other helpless people, chiefly Slavs, in the murder factories of Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Maidanek, and all the rest.92 This was to be the "final solution" of the Jewish problem for the Nazis. Yet, no government opened up this story. It was the correspondents who did it, and it was the correspondents, too, who did not let the world forget what had happened. The meeting of the Americans and Russians at the Elbe River broke in a curious way toward the end of April as the murder camp story was developing. A UP woman correspondent, Ann Stringer, was in a small U.S. Army plane with two officers when it landed at the town of Torgau, Germany, on the Elbe. There, she saw a Russian soldier running through the streets and, later, she noticed Russians swimming in the Elbe. That was on April 25, when it was not definitely known the Russians had reached the river.93 Within a short time, Don Whitehead and Hal

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Boyle were in Torgau, too. On April 26, they described the meeting of American and Soviet troops there, an outburst of good will between G I Joe and his Russian counterpart that lasted for only a day or two.94 Three days later, on April 29 in Milan, Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were strung up by the ankles from the girder of a gasoline station in Milan by infuriated partisans. Milton Bracker of the New York Times was there to see it and wrote in next day's paper: "Benito Mussolini came back last night to the city where his Fascism was born. He came back on the floor of a closed moving van, his dead body flung on the bodies of his mistress and twelve men shot with him." The Times also published exclusively the pictures of Mussolini's end, taken by an Italian photographer and radioed across the Atlantic. Then, in a grand gesture, despite offers as high as $5,000 for republication, Arthur Hays Sulzberger released the pictures free for the use of any newspapers that wanted them.95 In the splash made by the Times's exploit, a first-rate reporting job by James E. Roper of the UP received less attention than it deserved for he, too, had trailed Mussolini to Milan and sent the story of the end of the Sawdust Caesar in pitiless detail.96 Fittingly enough, the German armies in Italy surrendered unconditionally on the day that Mussolini's body was flaunted in disgrace before the Milanese who had witnessed his rise to power. In the Fuehrerbunker in Berlin, Hitler learned of Mussolini's ignominious end and made elaborate preparations for his own demise. On April 30, he shot and killed himself, and his mistress, Eva Braun, whom he had married the day before, took poison. The Hamburg radio made the announcement next day, which the Russians soon confirmed when they took over the chancellery. Pierre J. Huss of INS, who came in as an American war correspondent, learned the story of Hitler's last days up to April 22 from his secretary, Gerhardt Herrgesell. Another who pieced together the factual account of Hitler's end was Jack Fleischer of the UP. But not until official American, British, and Russian accounts were made available, based on sworn testimony taken from many survivors, did the full story become known.97 Once again, as in World War I, there was trouble over the announcement of the end of the war in Europe. The German surrender came at 2:41 a.m. Monday, May 7, 1945, in General Eisenhower's Reims headquarters. At 2 p.m. the same day, the Germans used the Flensburg, Denmark, radio to broadcast a cease-fire order to their troops. At 3:24

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p.m., Edward Kennedy, the chief AP correspondent at Eisenhower's headquarters, phoned this bulletin from Paris to London over regular military lines: reims, France, May 7—Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Western Allies and the Soviet Union at 2:41 a.m. today. The British cleared it. The AP in New York, after eight minutes' delay, flashed it around the world. It was a monumental beat for Kennedy, but it cost him his job. Fifty-three correspondents in Paris charged him with a violation of confidence. The New York Times, after using his story, denounced him for a "grave disservice" to his profession. Robert McLean, president of the AP, expressed his regret that the news broke "in advance of authorization" by SHAEF. Like Roy Howard's experience with the UP false armistice report at the end of World War I, Ed Kennedy's premature disclosure of the Nazi surrender made journalistic history of a sort and led to years of argument. His experience began on Sunday, May 6, when he was selected by Supreme Allied Headquarters as one of seventeen representatives of the world press to be flown to Reims for an "important announcement." Once aboard an Army Air Force C-47, he and the rest were told they were to cover the German surrender. But the SHAEF public relations director, Brigadier General Frank Allen, pledged them not to make public the story until 3 p.m. on Tuesday, May 8. This was done by agreement between President Truman and Prime Minister Churchill. The press delegation duly covered the story at the big red schoolhouse in Reims, then was flown back to Paris. Boyd Lewis of the UP and Jim Kilgallen of INS filed their material in the communications center at the Scribe Hotel in Paris ahead of Kennedy on all five outgoing routes and at five times normal cost. But Kennedy didn't seem particularly worried. Lewis and Kennedy repeatedly protested the embargo, particularly after the BBC used the Flensburg announcement. Finally, Kennedy told the SHAEF censor, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Merrick, that he intended to file by any means that he could. "I give you warning now that I am going to send the story," he said. Supposedly, all outgoing lines from Paris were strictly controlled. But Kennedy had a member of his staff, Morton Gudebrod, put through a call to the London AP bureau, and it was handled routinely through the military switchboard. Kennedy himself then told London to clear

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his story. T h e worst of the imbroglio that followed was due to the refusal of the military for all the rest of May 7 to permit correspondents to explain to their home offices what was going on and why. T h e home offices, meanwhile, sent furious "rockets" to their correspondents, demanding confirmation or denial of the A P story. T h e correspondents, including E d Beattie (who had just been freed from a German prison camp), Ray Daniell, Mark Watson, and Charles Collingwood of C B S wrote to General Eisenhower: " W e have respected the confidence placed in us by S H A E F and as a result have suffered the most disgraceful, deliberate, and unethical double cross in the history of journalism." T h e rest was anticlimactic. T h e first A P flash reached New York at 9:35 a.m. (3:35 p.m., Paris time) on Monday, May 7. At 1 1 : 1 5 a.m., the A P was told its story was "unauthorized," but by then newspapers all over the world were carrying the news. All the A P could do was to report that S H A E F had neither authorized nor denied the story. Four hours after the first flash was sent, the British Information Ministry announced that Prime Minister Churchill would proclaim V - E Day at 3 p.m., May 8, and shortly afterward an announcement by President Truman was scheduled for the same hour, which was 9 a.m., Washington time. Premier Stalin's announcement was then synchronized with those of the other leaders. But, the New York Times observed, "Washington . . . was confused." T h e A P was denied filing facilities from Europe for six hours and twenty minutes. W h e n that ban was lifted, however, a specific exception was made for Kennedy, whose suspension lasted until July, 1946. The defiant correspondent, who became managing editor of the Santa Barbara (Calif.) News-Press after leaving the AP, insisted for the remainder of his career that he'd have done the same thing again, given the chance. He maintained that the Flensburg announcement had been authorized by S H A E F , that the censorship was political, and that he had given fair warning that he no longer felt bound by it.98 But if statesmen, generals, and journalists were disturbed and upset, the people were not. In bomb-ravaged London, Paris, Washington, Moscow, and hundreds of other cities that had felt the war in greater or less degree, there was rejoicing and thanksgiving that was exceeded only in the ranks of the front-line soldiers who had bome the brunt of the fighting. Ernie Pyle had begun a column for that day: " M y heart is still in Europe, and that's why I'm writing this column. It is to the boys who

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were my friends for so long. My one great regret of the war is that I am not with them when it has ended. For the companionship of two and a half years of death and misery is a spouse that tolerates no divorce."99 The piece was never finished. It was found in his pocket the day they picked him up and buried him on Ie Shima.

5. PACIFIC FINALE The war in the Pacific—"the war of magnificent distances," as Ernie Pyle called it—was being reported with gallantry and devotion by a small army of correspondents. From the Times alone went such men as Foster Hailey, who was on Guadalcanal; Tillman Durdin, one of the wisest and most experienced of correspondents in Asia; Robert Trumbull, who had an excellent knowledge of the Pacific area; Frank Kluckhohn, a veteran Washington correspondent who had covered the Spanish civil war; George Home, the Commodore, from ship news; Lindesay Parrott, a first-rate rewrite man; Warren Moscow, from City Hall; William H. (Political Bill) Lawrence, from Washington; and even Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic.100 There were the heroics of Jack Belden, the reporter from Time, Inc., who retreated from Burma with General Joseph W . (Vinegar Joe) Stilwell in May, 1942, and with others faithfully reported his words: "I claim we got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma, and it is humiliating as hell. I think we should find out what caused it and go back and re-take it." After Guadalcanal, there were more heartening experiences, such as that of Gordon Walker of the Christian Science Monitor, who went into New Georgia in the Solomons with the Marines in June, 1943, then hired a native war canoe which conveyed him and his copy to a base at Rendova after a ten-hour night journey.101 Moreover, there were human interest stories in the Pacific that cried for a master's touch. One of the best broke on August 19, 1943—the heroism of Lieutenant (j.g.) John F. Kennedy, the 26-year-old son of Joseph P. Kennedy, the former American ambassador to the Court of St. James's. As the AP reported the story, Kennedy's PT boat No. 109 was rammed and cut in two on August 2 in Blackett Strait west of New Georgia. Two of the crew of twelve were killed. Kennedy himself saved another, who had been badly bumed, by clenching his teeth about the

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strap of the victim's life preserver and swimming with him for five hours to an island three miles away. From island to island, the party slowly made its way for four days until, eventually, all were rescued. Ten months later, John Hersey, one of a brilliant group of New Yorker war correspondents that also included Janet Flanner, Mollie PanterDownes, and A. J. Liebling, did a full-dress job on the Kennedy story. It was called "Survival," and it became the basis for innumerable accounts of the exploit after John F. Kennedy was elected President of the United States. 102 Perhaps it was inevitable, but the most violent of all the political disagreements within the Allied coalition developed in the Pacific, which added spice to the correspondence. The center of the action was Chungking, the wartime Chinese Nationalist capital; the actors, for the most part, were quartered in the Press Hostel which was made available by Hollington K. Tong, in charge of press relations. It was a distinguished group—A. T . Steele of the Chicago Daily News, a correspondent in China for many years; Theodore H. White (summa cum laude, Harvard, 1938), correspondent for Time-Life-Fortune; Brooks Atkinson and Tillman Durdin of the New York Times; Spencer Moosa of the AP, Walter Rundle of the UP, Jack Belden, who had shifted to INS, Tommy Chao (Chao Ming-heng) of Reuters, and many others. The touchiest story with which these correspondents had to deal was the relationship between General Stilwell, the commander of the C.B.I, theatre, and Chiang Kai-shek. The story which was subject to the heaviest censorship was anything that impinged on relationships with Mao Tse-tung's Communist regime in Yenan. The fight between Chiang and Stilwell reached such a point that the crusty general finally told his story to Brooks Atkinson. And it was Atkinson, the drama critic, who made his way out of wartime China and broke the detailed account of how Chiang had forced Stilwell's recall.103 Going on to Moscow, Atkinson was later to win a Pulitzer Prize for his war correspondence. It was the Stilwell story, however, that blew the lid off the unsavory situation in Chungking. Hanson Baldwin, Tillman Durdin, and others of the New York Times, Teddy White, Belden, and Edgar Snow of the Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald Tribune, Harrison Forman of the Times of London, and many others participated in the searching criticism of Chiang's regime. The Chinese Nationalists re-

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sponded with bitter criticism of the press for its supposed bias against the government to which it was accredited. Hollington Tong complained of a "flood of pro-Yenan publicity from Chungking correspondents in 1944" which didn't help matters. Neither did the killing of dispatches written by Atkinson and White, among others. Finally, capping the argument over Stilwell, correspondents like Harrison Forman and Edgar Snow traveled to Yenan and pointed up the sharp differences between the Nationalists and the Communists. Nor did Mao, Chou En-lai, and Chu Teh fail to take advantage of their opportunity to present their case in the world press, to the disadvantage of Chiang's unhappy regime in Chungking. The uproar became so great that the Nationalists late in the war barred Harold Isaacs of Newsweek and Darrell Berrigan, a former UP man who later worked for the New York Post, from returning to their territory. Isaacs' major offense was that he had written: "The Americans will at best find themselves backing a government with no real basis of power except American support." The correspondents did not create the difficult situation in which Chiang found himself toward the end of the war, but they used every bit of influence they could exert to explore the reasons for it. Yet, for all that, the world was ill-prepared for the startling rise of the Communists and their transformation of China into a great power.104 While the China argument was raging, American forces in the Pacific were engaged in their long and difficult campaign of island-hopping. The public at home could understand this—desperate landings, resistance to the death by the defending Japanese, tales of great heroism and, above all, a steady and measurable progress that could be shown on maps with arrows in the Pacific. Beside the glowing superlatives of the correspondents who covered these events and lived through them, the quarrel over China seemed a pale matter, indeed. Battles won, battles lost, that was the news! Nothing else seemed to matter on Page One, or in the broadcasts that dinned in the ears of the American public. At Tarawa in the Gilberts, Richard W . Johnston of the AP went in with the Marines in this situation: " I landed at the center beach . . . and like the Marines I had to walk 500 yards shoreward through a machine gun crossfire. . . . Throughout the last sixty hours, and probably through the next sixty, Japanese snipers have been taking, and will take, a heavy toll." That was on November 23, 1943, when the American.

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drive was beginning to make headway. On the morning of October 20, 1944, William B. Dickinson of the UP waded ashore with General MacArthur on the island of Leyte in the Philippines and recorded the General's first dramatic words: "I have returned." During the succeeding days, George E. (First Wave) Jones of the UP waited aboard the carrier Lexington for the outcome of the second battle of the Philippine Sea, then wrote: October 25 (UP) Today the Japanese fleet submitted itself to the destinies of war and lost. Four enemy carriers have been sunk, eight battleships have been damaged. ABOARD ADMIRAL MITSCHER'S FLAGSHIP,

It was, as Jones later learned, a far greater victory than that. Forty Japanese ships had been sunk, 46 others damaged, 405 planes destroyed. Moreover, Jones had a lucky break. He was able to get the news out by giving his story to a fighting politician, Commander Harold E. Stassen, who flew it to Guam and filed it at the radio station there. Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Saipan—one by one the Japanese island strongholds fell, and the American bombers moved their bases ever closer to the Japanese home islands. But eagerly as the American public read of these victories, the greatest boost to home front morale was yet to come. In the fighting for the then little-known island of Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945, an AP photographer, Joe Rosenthal of San Francisco, went in on a landing craft to get pictures of the Marines in action during the early days of March. "See that spot of red on the mountainside?" shouted the bos'n. "A group of Marines is climbing up to plant our flag up there. I heard it from the radioman." It was all the encouragement Rosenthal needed. He toiled up Mount Suribachi, paying little attention to the fighting, and reached the top just as five Marines were propping a long flagpole into place. He shot three pictures blindly, fearing he would miss. A Marine near him was killed. Until sometime afterward, he didn't know that he had taken the greatest picture of the war—the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi— which thrilled the nation. It won him a Pulitzer Prize.105 6. T H E B O M B In all of World War II, the least probable candidate at the outset for distinction as a war correspondent was a fiercely intense, graying

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science writer for the New York Times, William Leonard Laurence. By 1939, at the age of 51, much of his career was behind him, fine as it had been. As a native of Lithuania who had emigrated to the United States in 1905, Bill Laurence had picked his family name from a street sign in Boston and proceeded to make it famous in the annals of journalism. He had taken his LL.B. at Harvard in 1921, worked on the New York World, then joined the New York Times in 1930. In 1937, with four others, he had won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of science. Yet, nobody was quite prepared for the story that Bill Laurence would tell at the climax of the Pacific war, least of all Laurence himself. Edwin L. James, the old World War I correspondent who had become managing editor of the Times, obviously couldn't grasp the significance of Laurence's inquiries when the reporter came to him in the spring of 1940 with a detailed memorandum about atomic energy. "Go ahead and write it," James said, the invariable answer of an editor to something he doesn't understand. Laurence warned, "I'll need a good deal of space to tell it properly." "You may have a column and a half." "I'll need more than that." "Then make it two columns. There's a war on." To the credit of Jimmy James and the Times, Laurence's story ran nearly seven columns on May 5, 1940. It disclosed for the first time that German and American physicists were working to develop atomic energy from an isotope of uranium. However, the reaction to the story was zero. Like Laurence's piece in the Times of January 31, 1939, reporting a Columbia University announcement that an atom of uranium had been split with an enormous release of energy, nobody seemed to care. Subsequently, Laurence submitted a detailed article on the subject to the Saturday Evening Post, which published it on September 7, 1940, after much checking with scientists, under the title, "The Atom Gives Up." But it seemed to Laurence, at least, that Washington couldn't have cared less. From August 2, 1939, when Albert Einstein had written to President Roosevelt that it had become possible to construct an atomic bomb and that the Germans were working at it, the United States had proceeded on the great experiment with dismaying slowness. Until December 2, 1942, when Enrico Fermi had demonstrated the first nuclear chain reaction on a squash court under Stagg Field in Chicago, there

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had been intense doubt, even among scientists close to the project. But soon afterward, the genius and wealth of America were mobilized in secret to do what man had never done before—to unlock the power of a thousand suns on earth in one blinding release of energy that would wipe out a city and perhaps win the war. Neither Bill Laurence nor any other journalist knew what was going on at that time, although the editors of the Saturday Evening Post should have been suspicious at the very least. Late in 1942, the Post was told to remove the September 7, 1940, issue from circulation and to notify the F B I if anyone so much as asked for a copy of the magazine. As for Laurence himself, he was subjected to a thorough check by the F B I because he already had demonstrated an astonishing amount of knowledge of the theory behind the atomic bomb. However, if he thought of being deeply involved in the biggest story of the war and one of the most significant of all time, it was only a dream. All he knew was that any story he wrote speculating on the atomic bomb was promptly returned from Byron Price's voluntary press censorship office with a request not to publish. It seemed that he was doomed to fight the war in Times Square.106 The Pacific and Japan were far removed from his thoughts. As for Hiroshima, he knew only that there was such a city in Japan. Was there a place for a science writer? It seemed not. The stories of the war correspondents and the tremendous impact of Joe Rosenthal's great picture of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi left their mark on Bill Laurence, who by the spring of 1945 had passed his fifty-seventh birthday. It had never occurred to him that his own contribution might be as great until Jimmy James stopped him one day in the Times's city room and said that a General Leslie R. Groves wanted to see him. "What do you suppose he wants of me?" Laurence asked. "Don't know," was the reply. "Better be here. He's coming tomorrow." General Groves gave James and Laurence no inkling of his mission in their discussion next day, but asked for and received permission to borrow the reporter for work on a top-secret job. Laurence shrewdly suspected what was up and couldn't help needling the general. "If you want me to do any writing," he said, " I must be given access to firsthand sources. I hope you'll permit me to go to Tennessee, Washington, and New Mexico."

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So it happened that a tense little man with the eyes of a scholar, the pressed-in nose of an unsuccessful prize-fighter, and the keen brain of a first-rate scientist vanished from his usual haunts in New York. Not even his wife knew where he was. In order to allay her alarm, it was arranged to plant a story in the Times under his by-line, dated London. But in reality, Laurence never saw London. He had been whisked inside the secret atomic empire headed by General Groves, the Manhattan Engineer District. Here, he worked in the cities that had been built to develop the $2 billion project—Oak Ridge, Tenn., Richland, Wash., and Los Alamos, N.M. And he associated with the worldrenowned scientists who had been brought together to construct an atomic bomb that would bring about Japan's ruin. Laurence was, in effect, the official historian of the project. More than that, he was the only journalist permitted to have an inside view of all its ramifications. Consequently, he was entrusted by General Groves and his associates with the responsibility of preparing all the public announcements and descriptions that were to be released once the first bomb was used as a weapon against the enemy. The trickiest part of the assignment was to develop cover stories to explain away the tests that might come to public attention and to account for the possibility of failure. The security on the story was the tightest of the war. On July 12, 1945, after Laurence had been at work for two months and knew the climax was near, he wrote to James in a confidential letter: "The story is much bigger than I could imagine, fantastic, bizarre, fascinating and terrifying. . . . The world will not be the same after the day of the big event. A new era in civilization will have started. . . . After the story breaks I will be the only one with firsthand knowledge of it, which should give the Times a considerable edge. Much of it, however, will be kept on ice for some time." James sent the letter to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher, who scrawled across the top of it: "This looks like IT." Near Alamagordo, N.M., in the great southwestern desert, all preparations for the first atomic test were completed on July 16. At dawn Laurence waited in a control tower five miles from Ground Zero, where the bomb was to be set off in its steel cage. "From the east," he wrote, "came the first faint signs of dawn. And just at that instant there rose as if from the bowels of the earth a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one. It was a sunrise such as the world had never

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seen. . . . On that moment hung eternity. Time stood still. Space contracted to a pin point. It was as though the earth had opened and the skies had split. One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the Birth of the World." The announcement that went out to the press, however, was maddeningly prosaic, and it was sent in this form by the AP from Albuquerque, N.M.: An ammunition magazine exploded early today in a remote area of the Alamagordo Air Base reservation, producing a brilliant flash and blast, which were reported to have been observed as far away as Gallup, 235 miles northwest. The native curiosity of American editors was not piqued in the slightest by the kind of ammunition that could produce so catastrophic an explosion. The cover story was published. Except for the disturbed citizenry of New Mexico, nobody wondered very much. The arrangements proceeded for the use of the bomb against Japan, including a vaguely phrased warning by President Truman during the Potsdam conference. As for Laurence, he was given sealed orders, put on an airplane, and headed for the Pacific, thinking that he would be the reporter on that first atomic flight. When he finally arrived at Tinian island after being delayed three days en route, he was crushed to discover that he was too late. The first atomic bomber was scheduled to go next morning, August 6, 1945. That was how it came about that Laurence, with the rest of the military spectators, watched the Enola Gay and two other B-29S take off that day from parallel runways at 2:45 a.m., Marianas time, on their 3,000-mile round-trip flight. The target, depending on the weather, was to be either Hiroshima, Kokura, or Nagasaki. As he watched the big bombers disappear into the night, Laurence was in the unenviable position of a man who had provided the world with the raw materials of history and expected to receive scant notice for it. Many another unsuspecting reporter would inherit the responsibility of telling the story, not he. Or so he thought. The first reporter on the job was Bin Nakamura, sub-chief of the Domei bureau in Hiroshima. In a suburb of the city that morning of August 6, he had seen three enemy planes on what he guessed was a reconaissance mission. The air raid alarm had been sounded, then the all-clear. Nakamura had gone on with breakfast, seated on a mat

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inside his house, after coming in from his garden. At 9 : 1 5 a.m. (8:15, Hiroshima time) an earth-shaking blast flung him sprawling, and a wave of intense heat singed his face. Disregarding splintered window glass, he rushed outside and saw an orange ball of fire and smoke shooting up from the center of Hiroshima, two miles away. He got out his bicycle and raced furiously toward the Domei office. When he got there, he found only rubble. In common with the rest of the center of the city, the office had been vaporized and only the outer walls of the concrete building still stood. Of the Domei staff, some of whom were away on volunteer work, seven out of twenty were killed, two were injured seriously, and two were slightly burned. Tokuho Koyabashi, the chief, was fatally injured. Appalled by the death and destruction he had seen, Nakamura gathered as many details as he could. Twelve hours later, he arrived at a radio station in suburban Haramura and dictated a story to the only point he could reach, Okayama. It was the first story of what had happened to Hiroshima* While Nakamura didn't know what had hit the stricken city, the Japanese soon found out. The first word came in early on the morning of August 7 when a Domei monitoring station outside Tokyo picked up President Truman's announcement that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Saiji Hasegawa, Domei's foreign news editor, was awakened and told the news, but he couldn't put it out immediately. The Japanese army tried to keep the destruction of Hiroshima a secret, issuing the following announcement at 6 a.m. on August 7: A small number of B - 2 9 S penetrated into Hiroshima city a little after 8 yesterday morning and dropped a small number of bombs. As a result, a considerable number of homes were reduced to ashes and fires broke out in various parts of the city. To this new type of bomb are attached parachutes, and it appears as if these new bombs exploded in the air. Investigations are now being made with regard to the effectiveness of this bomb, which should not be regarded as slight. But by that time the United States Office of W a r Information, under the direction of Edward W . Barrett, the overseas chief, was beaming its broadcasts of the story to all Japan. Millions of leaflets were being loaded at Tinian to be dropped from planes over the home islands. * In the spring of 1964, Nakamura retired from the Kyodo News Agency in Tokyo, successor to Domei, after many years of faithful service. He was still in excellent health at that time.

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The Japanese were not in doubt for very long over what had hit them. Long afterward, the dread totals were issued: 78,150 dead, 13,983 missing, 9,428 seriously injured, and a city destroyed. Curiously, the United States was extremely reticent at the outset to claim great damage. At the hour the bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, it was 6:15 a.m., August 5, in Washington. General Groves had not scheduled a presidential news release at the White House until 11 a.m. on August 6, Washington time. He knew that Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr., the pilot of the Enola Gay, had radioed Tinian fifteen minutes after the atomic strike, "Mission successful!" After the Enola Gay had landed at Tinian safely five and one-half hours later, there had been a great deal of awesome eyewitness detail. But the pall of smoke that billowed over Hiroshima had made it impossible for photographic reconaissance planes to get a decent picture. Therefore, General Groves decided to go with the dropping of the atomic bomb and announce the details of the destruction later. At the White House, the reporters were told on the morning of August 6 that there would be an "important announcement" from the President at 11 a.m. It didn't arouse much interest. Some correspondents sent their assistants. Even so, the White House moved up the time to 10:45 a.m. and provided piles of publicity releases, including all the material over which Bill Laurence had labored during his secret mission. First, the President's announcement was read. The reporters grew tense. At the words that the new bomb had released the force of "more than 20,000 tons of TNT," there was a great surge toward the press handouts. The race for the telephones was on—and soon the bulletins were out. The New York Times, of course, had many hours to prepare its paper next morning. Despite Laurence's service, it did not receive a break on the news, only an intimation. Well in advance, General Groves was thoughtful enough to alert Turner Catledge, the acting managing editor, and suggest the assignment of Sidney Shalett, the Times's man at the War Department. On the weekend before the bomb was dropped, Catledge made all the necessary arrangements to cover a major story. When he received the first bulletin from Washington, he phoned Arthur Hays Sulzberger: "They dropped it—on Hiroshima." On August 7, 1945, the Times ran the atomic story across ten of its thirty-eight pages, with this Page One headline of eight columns:

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FIRST ATOM BOMB DROPPED ON JAPAN; MISSILE IS EQUAL TO 2 0 , 0 0 0 TONS OF TNT; TRUMAN WARNS FOE OF A *RAIN OF RUIN'

Even then, the White House and the W a r Department made no claims of major destruction, saying that "an impenetrable cloud of dust and smoke" hung over the target area. There was a UP story, quoting an Osaka radio announcement that all train service to Hiroshima and adjacent areas had been suspended. The Osaka radio by that time had also given the bare news of President Truman's statement, but nothing more. The awesome tale of Hiroshima developed in succeeding days, bit by bit, as the Japanese government anxiously debated whether to surrender. Now, at last, Bill Laurence's moment came. The Times had disclosed in its August 7 issue (on page 5) that he had been the sole reportorial witness and chronicler of the story of the atomic bomb. On the next evening in Tinian, August 8, while he was having a beer at the Officers' Club, a messenger summoned him to duty. He was to fly with the second atomic bombing mission next morning as the official reporter. At 3:50 a.m., August 9, when the B-29 The Great Artiste took off from Tinian, the 57-year-old correspondent could see for himself how an atomic bomber looked on its way to wipe out a city. He rode in one of the two B - 2 9 S that accompanied The Great Artiste, with the second atomic bomb in its bomb bay. This, he wrote, is what happened when the plane arrived over Nagasaki at 12:01 p.m.: " W e heard the prearranged signal on our radio, put on our arc welder's glasses, and watched tensely the maneuverings of the strike ship about a half mile in front of us. " 'There she goes,' someone said. "Out of the belly of The Great Artiste what looked like a black object went downward. . . . A giant flash broke through the dark barrier of our arc welder's lenses and flooded our cabin with intense light. " A tremendous blast wave struck our ship and made it tremble from nose to tail. This was followed by four more blasts in rapid succession, each resounding like the boom of cannon fire hitting our plane from all directions. "Observers in the tail of our ship saw a giant ball of fire rise as though from the bowels of the earth, belching forth enormous white

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smoke rings. Next, they saw a giant pillar of purple fire, ten thousand feet high, shooting skyward with enormous speed. . . . "Only about forty-five seconds had passed. Awestruck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. . . . "Then, just as it appeared as though the thing had settled down into a state of permanence, there came shooting out of the top a giant mushroom that increased the height of the pillar to a total of 45,000 feet. . . . " W e landed in Okinawa in the afternoon, our tanks nearly empty, and there, to our great relief, was No. 77 [The Great Artiste]. . . . While we were refueling we learned that the Soviet Union had entered the war against Japan." That account, and his preparatory work for the government, earned Bill Laurence his second Pulitzer Prize. It also made him the first, and for at least the succeeding generation, the only correspondent to witness an atomic strike in wartime. A plane-load of correspondents, chaperoned by Lieutenant Colonel J. F. Reagan McCrary, had flown from Washington through Europe and India on the supposition that they were to cover a "big story," but on August 6 they had only been able to read about the dropping of the atomic bomb in the newspapers of Calcutta. That was the closest anybody came to rivaling the work of one of the oldest—and most effective—war correspondents of all time. Nagasaki meant the end for Japan. Casualties later were estimated by the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey at 35,000 killed and 60,000 injured, with 44 percent of the city destroyed. On August 10, Japan announced acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration with a reservation that insured the continued reign of the emperor. Domei was permitted to broadcast the news outside Japan to stave off more attacks, if possible, but the Japanese people were told by the Japanese Board of Information to continue their resistance. On August 12, at 9:33 p.m., the New York office of the UP flashed a false report of the Japanese surrender, but killed it three minutes later. Subsequently, the UP offered a reward for the conviction of the author of the hoax, but nobody ever collected. Finally, after an attempted insurrection in Tokyo had failed, Emperor Hirohito on August 15 broadcast his cabinet's acceptance without qualification of the Potsdam Declaration. That meant unconditional surrender. At 7 p.m. on August 14, Washington time, President Truman

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called a special press conference at the White House, signified his satisfaction, named General MacArthur to receive the formal surrender, and told the Japanese to order their forces to stop fighting. The news crowded the wires, the cables, and the air waves. Jubilant crowds cut loose with victory celebrations, the wildest of all by people who jammed into New York City's Times Square.107 Yet, in the Pacific, the killing and the destruction went on. There was no cease-fire order on either side. Bill Laurence's work as a war correspondent was over. But for the rest, there was still much to do. Of them all the correspondent who had won the most respect, and even in a way taken the place of Ernie Pyle, was Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune. That night when all America was celebrating peace, he was riding toward Japan with a cluster of B - 2 9 S for a raid on the small industrial city of Kumagaya. Aboard the bomber City of Saco, Bigart and the crew heard a San Francisco announcer say, "I hope all you boys out there are as happy as we are at this moment. People are yelling and screaming and whistles are blowing." To which a crewman sourly replied, "Yeah, they're screaming and we're flying." The B - 2 9 S unloaded their bombs and returned to Guam despite determined Japanese antiaircraft fire. It was the last raid of the war. In subsequent dispatches, Bigart described the ruins of Japan. Joining Colonel McCrary's group of delayed newsmen, direct from the Pentagon, the big Herald Tribune correspondent ventured into Hiroshima. On the outskirts, he saw destruction that resembled the ruins of Europe's bombed cities. But in the city, he reported, "there was only flat appalling desolation, the starkness accentuated by bare, blackened tree trunks and the occasional shell of a reinforced concrete building." A month after the atomic blast, he found that survivors were "still dying at the rate of about one hundred daily." The descriptions he and his associates filed of Hiroshima touched off a shocked reaction in the United States. Few stories about the consequences of atomic bombing had such an impact, the only one that exceeded it being John Hersey's exhaustive and lengthy study of Hiroshima long afterward. General MacArthur and his staff came to Japan in his private plane on August 30. Both Allied and Japanese reporters clustered about him at Atsugi Airport, a strange fraternity bent on covering the same story. MacArthur held a casual and impromptu press conference, just as if he

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had been talking with old friends, which impressed the Japanese. After that, despite the most earnest warnings of the Japanese newsmen, some of the Americans took off for Tokyo. They wanted to describe the ruins, of course; but, even more, they wanted to find the woman who had been broadcasting over the Japanese radio for so long as Tokyo Rose. Bigart and Arch Steele, who now was on the New York Herald Tribune staff, were among those who made that first expedition. With them went Gordon Walker and Frank Robertson of the Christian Science Monitor, Frank Kluckhohn of the New York Times, Clark Lee of INS, Robert Reubens of Reuters, and a number of others. Thus, the occupation of Japan began. On September 2, aboard the U.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay, more than 200 Allied correspondents and four Japanese covered the formal surrender by the Japanese. It was an anticlimax. Bigart, in a plain and straightforward report, began his story: "Japan, paying for her desperate throw of the dice at Pearl Harbor, passed from the ranks of the major powers at 9:05 a.m. today when Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the document of unconditional surrender." Masuo Kato, covering for Domei, had far different thoughts than the mere formal beginning of a news story calculated to take a Page One headline. As he watched General MacArthur and reflected on the weakness of General Wainwright, the hero of Bataan and Corregidor, the Japanese journalist couldn't help wondering. "When Perry's ships came, the people of Japan did not welcome them, but they had no choice except to yield," he wrote. "Now that the Americans had come again, there was, perhaps, much of the same feeling. How long would they stay? How many would come? What would happen to Japan? Those questions were foremost in the minds of Japan that day. There were few who recognized the occupation forces as benefactors any more than Perry had been regarded as a benefactor. I was wondering how many years Japan had been set back." Having returned to the United States to work among the scientists and in the laboratories in which he had found so much world-shaking news, Bill Laurence was not as discouraged. He dared to hope that the atomic bomb—and the refinements that were certain to follow— would make peace inevitable. "These earth-destroying weapons, now being constantly reduced in size and increased in power," he wrote,

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"thus make it certain that no nation, no matter how powerful, could dare risk a thermonuclear war." Out of the seventy million who fought in World War II, with an estimated death toll of seventeen million who died in battle and eighteen million civilians who were killed in other ways, the total number of war correspondents on all sides could not have amounted to much more than a brigade. The United States, by all odds, had the largest number of working journalists at the war fronts, with 1,646 accredited correspondents in service, of whom 37 were killed and 112 wounded. This did not take into account the combat correspondents who worked for Stars and Stripes, the soldier's newspaper, and Yank, the GI magazine, but their numbers were never great. Moreover, with the exception of the British, no other belligerent power sent independent war correspondents to the front in any significant number, although the Germans and the Russians, in particular, organized efficient groups of propagandists for their newspapers and radio and used soldier correspondents freely. As for the Japanese correspondents, many underwent great hardship at the front. Yet, whether these observers worked for a free or a controlled press, they did not exceed a few thousand in total numbers at any time during the war.108 It may be taken for granted that the world tended to see the war most frequently in the terms presented by the wire services—the AP, UP, INS, Reuters, and Tass and, to a lesser extent, DNB and Domei. As for the newspaper correspondents, those who worked for powerful individual newspapers, newspaper groups, or radio organizations exerted a greater effect on public opinion than their fellows.108 Finally, there were a few journalists of outstanding talent who stood far above the rank and file—Ernie Pyle, Homer Bigart, William L. Laurence, Alan Moorehead, Edward R. Murrow, Ilya Ehrenburg. Each in his own way was more important to his own country than an army when home front morale was sagging and all seemed lost. With the end of the war in Japan, the demobilization of the correspondents in the Allied nations was even swifter than that of their victorious armies. A hard core group remained to cover the war crimes trials and the execution of the culprits. But after that, the slow and painful news of reconstruction and reconciliation persuaded only the leading news organizations to leave correspondents in Japan and Ger-

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may. The bitter division of the wartime coalition, which left Russia glowering at the West, caught the journalists of the United States, Britain, and France ill-prepared; few, unhappily, knew much about the Soviet Union and even fewer could speak the language. Despite the possession of the atomic bomb, the United States soon found itself at a disadvantage with the well-prepared Russians in a propaganda struggle for world opinion. Thus, while the guns of World War II had fallen silent and the bombs no longer dropped, there was no peace. The most durable of all war correspondents, Herbert Bayard Swope, was the first to call it the Cold War.

XI: Through Time and Space 1. THE PEACE CORRESPONDENTS During the sultry summer of 1944, James Reston began publishing the secret papers of the Dumbarton Oaks conference in the New York Times. Through his enterprise, the initial planning for the United Nations was spread before the world. It was his special virtue as a journalist that he made the reporting of peace as exciting as that of war. Reston did not act alone in disclosing the Dumbarton Oaks proceedings. When Under Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius protested to the Times, Arthur Hays Sulzberger coolly replied: "I think, Mr. Stettinius, that the Times will feel compelled to continue Reston's series. The documents are authentic, and the people have a right to know what they contain. It is their interests that are at stake in this meeting." The frustrated government officials then turned loose the FBI on Reston and the Times to try to find his sources, an unpleasant maneuver that ill became the United States, but finally gave up.1 Despite Reston's supposed interference, the delegates of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union successfully completed their talks at the lavish Dumbarton Oaks estate in Georgetown, on the fringes of Washington, D.C. Reston's example of independence as a diplomatic correspondent soon encouraged others. In the waning days of the war in Europe, Bert Andrews of the New York Herald Tribune broke the story of the secret UN voting agreement at Yalta. Under it, the Soviet Union was to receive three votes in the General Assembly, its own and the captive ballots of the Ukraine and Byelo-Russia. While the decision was one of the least important at the controversial Yalta conference, its disclosure

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served once again to underline the futility of a policy of secrecy in areas where it didn't apply. As Sulzberger had said, "The people have a right to know." At the U N Conference on International Organization at San Francisco, beginning April 25, 1945, the New York Times demonstrated its leadership again by publishing a daily four-page wirephoto edition in San Francisco. Once more, Reston and his colleagues demonstrated that it was possible to cover the news of closed as well as open meetings without doing violence to world concord. The result was that the new world organization won a favorable press at the outset, for most of the correspondents followed Reston's lead.2 Few since Blowitz' time had established such prestige in the diplomatic field. Thus, the United Nations at birth was a wonder child. And if Reston could take a fair share of the credit for the favor with which it was regarded in the United States, he also had to accept part of the blame for overselling it. Reinforcing the glowing promises of world leaders, who should have known better, the press as a whole helped raise public expectations for the United Nations out of all proportion to its powers. Inevitably, disappointments were to follow. No doubt the United Nations would have been buffeted by every political storm whatever its location in those tense postwar years. But by being set down in New York City, 3 center of a great engine of publicity, it could not hope to escape being turned into what Sir Winston Churchill inelegantly called a "brawling cockpit." For it became that, too. If the world's diplomats had any lingering notion of working in private at their leisure in 1946, as they had at Geneva in the days of the League, they were quickly disabused. The opening salvo of publicity in the Iranian case, when Andrei A. Gromyko of the Soviet Union became a world figure by walking out on the Security Council at Hunter College in the Bronx, stirred attention in the United Nations to fever pitch. More than 1,000 correspondents from all parts of the world had seen him and understood that Russia would be difficult to deal with in the peace-making. It scarcely mattered that Russian troops eventually were withdrawn from Iran, despite Gromyko's protest over the UN's decision to hear the case. The pattern had been set.4 It was made even firmer in the opening negotiations before the U N Atomic Energy Commission, when the Russians rejected every American effort to interest

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them in effective international inspection and control of atomic energy.5 Although the diplomats had their doubts about encouraging the press to participate in the work of the United Nations after these opening diplomatic setbacks, Secretary General Trygve Lie was more favorable to publicity. He brought into his personal staff such press experts as Byron Price, the former Associated Press executive who had headed the American voluntary wartime censorship; William H. Stoneman, on leave as the European manager of the Chicago Daily News; Benjamin A. Cohen, a Chilean editor, and Tor Gjesdal, the former head of the Norwegian Information Service. Cohen and Gjesdal, with Wilder Foote and Matt Gordon, both Americans, ran the information office. Stoneman was Lie's personal assistant. Price took charge of administration and finance.6 They were delighted when a permanent press corps took shape beginning with the Assembly session in the fall of 1946 and provided press quarters both at Lake Success and the temporary Assembly hall in a former skating rink at Flushing Meadow. The AP and the New York Times, at the outset, maintained the most sustained and intensive coverage on a day-to-day basis and expanded their staffs for the inevitable crises. Perhaps a dozen major American newspapers sent correspondents, plus a few of the leading British newspapers, and a scattering of others. Some of the veterans of European campaigns appeared for this new assignment, among them Max Harrelson and Charles Grumich of the AP, Pierre J. Huss of International News Service, Thomas J. Hamilton of the New York Times, and Michael Frye and John (Pat) Heffernan of Reuters. The Agence France-Presse, successor to Havas, opened up with Jean Lagrange in charge. Newcomers arrived, too, including Robert J. Manning of the United Press, who would later become an assistant secretary of state; William R. Frye of the Christian Science Monitor, and Peter Freuchen, the old Arctic explorer now turned correspondent for the Politiken of Copenhagen. Alex Faulkner and Barbara FischerWilliams of the London Daily Telegraph and Henry Brandon of the London Sunday Times were among the earliest British correspondents at the UN. Sven Ahman, whose father had been Berlin correspondent for the Dagens Nyheter of Stockholm, arrived to cover for the same paper. The Neue Ziircher Zeitung, which was now expanding its foreign coverage, sent its former League correspondent, Max Beer. About a score of such highly qualified journalists made up the per-

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manent UN press corps during the organization's formative years. For crises, this nucleus would expand to several hundred. At the first Paris Assembly in 1948, some 1,500 journalists were accredited. But unhappily, these figures represented neither intensity nor quality of coverage. After the first burst of excitement about the new organization Soviet obstruction beat down both extravagant hopes and public interest on key issues. It soon became apparent that the work of the permanent press corps was not widely published except in the time of crisis, that crisis coverage in itself was not sufficient to explain the operations of the United Nations, and that lack of funds was preventing the press of many smaller nations from sending their own correspondents. Despite the deepening cleavage between East and West, there were issues on which the UN correspondents exerted a certain amount of influence in an indirect way. The Palestine issue was the earliest. Without the constant hammering of the American press, it is doubtful whether the American delegation would have fought quite as hard for the winning 33 to 13 Assembly vote on partition on November 29, 1947. That, however, was the extent of the correspondents' contribution on this issue. Once the State of Israel was established on May 14, 1948, and President Truman granted it recognition, the Israelis themselves won the right to nationhood by beating the Arab armies in the field. To a lesser extent, the same thing happened in the case of the Dutch "police action" in Indonesia, which the United States opposed. The United Nations finally achieved a cease-fire there and in the Kashmir war, as well. During the Soviet blockade of Berlin, the UN's efforts to work out a diplomatic solution failed, but it provided the meeting ground for the opening of direct negotiations that succeeded. Without any peace-keeping forces of its own and without the implicit confidence of the great—and some of the intermediate—powers in its slow processes, the United Nations became a watchtower from which correspondents could only survey turbulent events. Others covered them on the spot. The cold war deepened. The United States set up the Truman Doctrine to safeguard Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan to aid European recovery. The great ones of the world continued to declare their faith in the United Nations. But for all that, the main achievement of the world organization was to keep itself alive and build a fine new headquarters in New York City.

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Within five years, there was no longer a favorable press. Such men as Reston and Hamilton and Walter Lippmann, the New York Herald Tribune's wise commentator, searchingly examined the United Nations as it was, not as it was meant to be. They stimulated a similar process of realistic appraisal, both in the United States and abroad, which for the first time gave promise of developing into a dialogue about the possibilities as well as the shortcomings of international organization. The few radio commentators who had become familiar with the United Nations—Pauline Frederick of NBC, Larry Lesueur of CBS, and John MacVane of ABC—did their part to restore a more sensible attitude toward it. And beginning in 1948, when television became prevalent throughout the United States, millions of people were able to watch the United Nations in action in their own living rooms when the occasion warranted it. Thus, in an atmosphere devoid of flaring headlines, sensation, and bulletins carrying the voting scores or veto totals, a more basic understanding of the world organization began to develop in a small but important public area.7 Nevertheless, as the summer of 1950 approached, the United Nations was at the nadir of its influence as a peace-keeping organization. On September 23, 1949, President Truman had announced that the Russians had exploded an atomic bomb. Early in 1950, he had ordered the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to "continue with the development of the so-called hydrogen, or superbomb." 8 It was a fair assumption that Russia was doing the same thing and that, in consequence, all hope had vanished for years to come for any meaningful agreement between East and West. The ranks of the faithful at the United Nations, the permanent correspondents, were thinned. The few who remained gloomily concluded that a war that might be a curtain-raiser to World War III was likely. Some of them wrote articles predicting that the UN would be unable for much longer to keep the peace between the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and Communist North Korea. On a beautiful summer Sunday, June 25, 1950, it happened. Communist armies swarmed south across the 38th Parallel. At the request of the United States, the Security Council went into emergency session at Lake Success. When Russia's Jacob Malik boycotted the session because of the UN's failure to admit Communist China, his fellow-members of the Council promptly ordered intervention against the Communist invaders and on June 27 authorized

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armed resistance. By that time, the Americans already were in the war. The difference was that General MacArthur became not only the American commander but the UN commander as well, with fifteen nations providing contingents to assist the United States and the wavering Korean army.9 With the UN forces came foreign correspondents from all parts of the world. Yet, nobody inside or outside the United Nations went into the Korean war with any enthusiasm. In the thick of the fighting, a G I once said, "It's a war we can't win, we can't lose, we can't quit." The correspondents spread the remark widely. It was an expression of the frustration and resentment within the United States. To a large extent, it explained why the hard and hazardous work of the correspondents, seventeen of whom were killed, including ten Americans, failed to arouse the nation.

2. THE UN'S WAR Peter Kalischer of the UP watched the first American infantrymen go into action in Korea on July 5, watched them break and run before Communist tanks, and himself narrowly escaped capture. When he walked into a makeshift pressroom at Taejon nearly three days later, he had a tragic story to tell. But neither he nor any of the other seventy correspondents who had come to Korea by that time (only five had been around at the beginning) could get much out unless they flew back to Japan. In 24th Division headquarters at Taejon, there was only one military line to Tokyo over which the correspondents could phone messages. They had to stand in line, rationed to a few minutes each, and dictate bulletins or detail. The bad news came in small doses. Moreover, General MacArthur made things worse by decreeing a policy of self-censorship. The correspondents never knew, therefore, when they would be accused of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and some of them suffered unjustly. The policy did not last long, giving way to a more conventional censorship system, but while it existed it complicated an already difficult situation.10 There was no place to hide in Korea. Ray Richards of INS, who wrote his first story of the war on June 28, was killed in action July 9. Five other American newsmen and photographers were also killed that

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month. Maurice Chanteloup, an Agence France-Presse correspondent, was captured. Burton Crane of the New York Times and Frank Gibney of Time, Inc., were injured in the blowup of the Han River bridges outside Seoul during the first day of the retreat. Yet, correspondents kept coming in. By September, 238 were accredited to Korea and eventually there were 270, but the best estimates were that less than a quarter of that number were ever at the front at one time. As for the hard day-to-day coverage, no more than a score stuck at it throughout the war. At one time or another, twenty-three countries were represented including, in the early stages, Russia and Red China. The celebrated correspondents of World War II, the "retreads," as the AP's Don Whitehead called them, came in early. Among them were three others from the AP, Relman (Pat) Morin, Robert Eunson, and Hal Boyle, who had distinguished themselves under fire. Homer Bigart, the old pro from the New York Herald Tribune, and tough little Bobby Vermillion of the UP, both of whom had survived World War II, also saw the worst of Korea. Then, there were former GI combat correspondents, the fiercest competitor being Jim Lucas of the ScrippsHoward newspapers. New men came in, among them William J. Jorden of the AP and later the New York Times; Dick Applegate of the UP, who would spend eighteen months in Communist prison camps, and an Asian specialist, Philip Potter of the Baltimore Sun. It was Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune, however, who became the most discussed correspondent of the war. She insisted on taking as many risks as the bravest men. She was also a courageous competitor. Early in the war she was ordered back to Japan because, as General Walton H. Walker put it, "There are no facilities at the front for ladies." Miss Higgins, who had been viewing the front from foxholes, violently objected. With the support of her newspaper she appealed to General MacArthur, who permitted her to remain. The result was a perpetual stream of anecdotes, some flattering, some unkind, and a keen professional rivalry with Bigart, whose superiority she would not acknowledge. Jimmy Cannon of the New York Post once said to her when she griped about the attention she received, "If the Racing Form sent a race horse to cover the war, he wouldn't be any more of an oddity than you are." The Oddity was with the fifth wave of Marines at Inchon on September 15 when MacArthur made his first offensive move, halting the re-

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treat. 11 But it was Bigart, with the methodical care of a veteran correspondent, who carried off the honors. He filed his story of the Inchon landing in both Korea and Tokyo, hoping one or the other would be cleared by the censor. The Tokyo copy went through by mistake, the censor being under the impression that it had been approved in Korea, and Bigart had a world beat. 12 The correspondents went into recaptured Seoul and crossed the 38th Parallel with the troops when MacArthur gave the order. They didn't worry about the well-nigh fatal command. The correspondents, as always, preferred action to the dull and prosaic exploration of background. Moreover, because the North Koreans didn't seem to know much about the Geneva Convention and cared less, many correspondents began carrying weapons. As Fred Sparks of the Chicago Daily News explained it, "Suppose a Gook suddenly jumps into my foxhole. What do I do then? Say to him, Chicago Daily News?" Even Maggie Higgins packed a carbine on occasion. "Most correspondents," she wrote sedately, "carried arms of some kind. The enemy had no qualms about shooting unarmed civilians. And the fighting line was so fluid that no place near the front lines was safe from sudden attack." 1 3 Illustrative of the chances some took, Bob Vermillion jumped with the paratroops behind Red lines, broke his ankle, managed to get back and then, despite his pain, dictated his story over a field telephone line.14 Although the United States was privately warned on October 3 by K. M. Panikkar, Indian ambassador to China, that the Communists would enter the war if UN forces crossed the 38th Parallel, nobody paid serious attention to it.* The UN armies took the North Korean capital of Pyongyang on October 19 and some 135,000 Communist troops began surrendering. General MacArthur, having assured President Truman at Wake Island on October 15 that the war was all but over, now did not bother to disguise his confidence in public. It scarcely seemed a matter of concern when a UP man, Glenn Stackhouse, learned on October 25 that a Chinese prisoner had been taken by an American unit. But a few night later, another UP man, Joe Quinn, had to swim across the Kuryong River to escape a Chinese attack.15 There was now no longer any doubt that the Chinese were in the war, fighting to save the North Koreans. On November 1, MIG-15 jets were in action. So was Chinese cavalry. Two U N divisions suddenly were * Albert Ravenholt warned of a Chinese attack as early as August, 1950, in the Chicago Daily News.

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thrown for a loss, had to fight a battle against them, and the whole Eighth Army line began to contract. MacArthur, on November 5, delivered a formal report to the Security Council that "the United Nations are presently in hostile contact with the Chinese Communist military units deployed for action against the forces of the U N Command." Yet, the U N Commander evidently couldn't believe there would be massive intervention by the Chinese. 18 Nor was there any newspaper correspondent brave enough to question publicly whether he had overextended his forces by miscalculating Chinese strength and intentions. It was a time for the daring of a William Howard Russell or an Ernie Pyle. Instead, Charles R. Moore of the UP reported that he had reached the Yalu River with the 7th Division and spit in the water.17 It is easy to see in retrospect, as did the correspondents who were critical of MacArthur after the fact, that the Chinese Communists had been in earnest. But the truth of the matter was that neither the American government, American diplomats, nor American journalists were conditioned to anticipate what happened. Red China, after all, closed its vast territory to prying American eyes after the completion of its conquest on December 8, 1949, when the Chiang Kai-shek regime fled to Taiwan. The United States did little except to try to assess the blame for Chiang Kai-shek's defeat, thus in effect disregarding Mao Tse-tung's military potential. It is true that correspondents at Hong Kong waited patiently for admission to Red China and sent what they could. But even those who were inclined to warn of the growing Chinese Communist strength found their work viewed with suspicion.18 As for Edgar Snow, Mao Tse-tung's biographer, he had his troubles as well. The United States eventually was to pay dearly for its basic ignorance of Mao Tse-tung, his principal followers, and his formidable military organization. For Mao fought a different kind of war and he had a different kind of army. In short, he trapped his foe. The Americans observed Thanksgiving that year on November 23. MacArthur interrupted his holiday in Tokyo to alert five wire service correspondents to fly with him to Korea next morning. Once on the plane, he gave them a communique announcing the opening of his "end the war" offensive. With such a blaze of MacArthurean rhetoric to transmit, the correspondents were certainly in no mood to worry about the Chinese. But there was still more to come. Later that November 24 in Korea, MacArthur remarked to an aide, in the presence of the

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AP's Relman Morin and a few others, "You tell the boys that when they get to the Yalu, they are going home. I want to make good on my statement that they are going to eat Christmas dinner at home." No great commander was ever more positive—or more in error. On November 25, the Chinese began probing attacks. Next day, amid bugle calls, whistles, and the clash of cymbals, 250,000 Chinese troops attacked before dawn. The U N had ground forces of 205,000 at the time, mostly Americans and Koreans, but also including two British brigades, a Turkish brigade, and a battalion each from Canada, the Philippines, the Netherlands, and Thailand. The Chinese thrust was aimed at the weakest part of the Eighth Army. That was. a gap in the U.S. X Corps which was strung out along seventy-eight miles of a slender, curving road between Hungnam and the Chosin Reservoir. The xst Marine Division and a part of the 7th Division had to absorb the full force of the Chinese offensive. These were the key units in the X Corps order of battle. If they could be wiped out, then there was a good chance that the Chinese could catch more than 100,000 U N troops in a pocket.19 A few of the correspondents at once hitched rides in C-47S that were being used to bring supplies to the besieged force and take out wounded. A single narrow air strip was still available, but no one knew how long it would be before the Chinese closed in. Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News, who stayed three days with the 1st Marine Division, called it a "trial by blood and ice." The mercury was 15° below zero in a hostile land. Beech wrote of that Marine breakout that saved an army: "Whatever this campaign was—retreat, withdrawal or defeat—one thing can be said with certainty. Not in the Marine Corps' long and bloody history has there been anything like it. And if you'll pardon a personal recollection, not at Tarawa or Iwo Jima, where casualties were much greater, did I see men suffer so much. The wonder isn't that they fought their way out against overwhelming odds but that they were able to survive the cold and fight at all." 20 Marguerite Higgins, who also went in for a short time to see how the Marines were doing, gave this graphic report: "It was a battle all the way. The frost and wind, howling through the narrow pass, were almost as deadly as the enemy. Bumper to bumper, trucks, half-tracks and bulldozers slipped and scraped down the mountain. Half a dozen vehicles skidded and careened off the road. Mortars lobbed in and sometimes

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the convoy had to stop for hours while engineers filled in the holes. . . . Most of the Marines were so numb and exhausted that they didn't even bother to take cover at sporadic machine-gun and rifle fire. When someone was killed they would wearily, matter-of-factly, pick up the body and throw it in the nearest truck." 2 1 There were a number of other such reports, which at last deeply moved the nation and finally brought it to realize that the United States, fighting for the United Nations, was engaged in one of the bloodiest and most desperate wars in its history. The Marines made it. They fought their way through the Chinese, bridged a river at Koto-ri under heavy fire, and reached safety. As Major General Oliver Smith said at the time, "Gentlemen, we are not retreating. We are merely attacking in another direction." 22 Gallant though their conduct was, the correspondents in the field now could not tell the whole story. Many of the nations that had contributed arms, funds, or other assistance to the Korean war effort were alarmed and brought pressure to try to obtain an armistice with the Chinese Communists. The story was passed back to the diplomatic reporters at Lake Success. While the war correspondents almost to a man were scornful of the diplomatic niceties, the UN correspondents could easily understand General Omar Bradley's stern warning against involving the United States further "in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." On December 1, General Wu Hsiu-chuan led a Chinese Communist delegation to Lake Success to talk over armistice terms with Secretary General Lie. On December 14, the General Assembly voted for an armistice in Korea. But the Chinese Communist offensive was still going well, and the diplomatic brakes could not then be applied. The war seesawed across the 38th Parallel throughout the winter. Then, suddenly, on March 24, 1951, General MacArthur in effect defied President Truman's orders not to make any declarations on foreign policy and issued the sternest warning of a broadened war to the Chinese Communists. This time, the crisis at the United Nations over the actions of its Supreme Commander spread to Washington.23 After midnight on April 11, 1951, calls went out from the White House that the President would have an important statement at 1 a.m. William H. (Political Bill) Lawrence of the New York Times, who

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had covered the Korean fighting, was among the first to arrive. He warned his office, then put a photographer on an open telephone line to New York. At 1:04 a.m., he rushed from the White House conference chamber with the big news. Truman had removed MacArthur. Lawrence dictated his story, scanning the documents he had been given whenever he had a few moments. After twenty-eight minutes, he was through with his story for the edition. At 1:46 a.m., the Times was on the street ahead of its competitors in New York. The same thing was going on all over the country as the newspapers raced to publish the news and the pertinent documents. The radio, of course, had had the first break, but the hour was so late in the populous centers of the eastern United States that its impact was not as great as that of the press.24 When the nation read the story, the perplexity over the Korean war deepened still more. It was as if Alexander the Great had been removed from command of his legions. Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway, MacArthur's successor, was something more than a successful commander who had seen major combat action in both World War II and Korea. He had put in many months of service at the United Nations as a member of the U.S. Mission and was thoroughly familiar with the conditions under which he would have to operate, using 60,000 foreign troops in addition to Americans and Koreans. The contrast between this soldier-diplomat and MacArthur was striking. As the war continued, it became more so; by June 13, 1951, the new Supreme Commander had forced the Communists back across the 38th Parallel. Jacob A. Malik, the Soviet delegate, now proposed a truce, and on July 10 the talks began at Kaesong. The war was stalemated, but it would be many weary months before a cease-fire could be signed. George Barrett of the New York Times, talking with a sergeant who had just lost a leg on the second anniversary of the war, reported his stoical remark: "That's the way the ball bounces."26 It summed up the feeling of the troops, and of the correspondents, toward the war. The fighting men never really understood, as a group, why they were in Korea, and the correspondents, despite great efforts made by the best ones, never were able to explain it cogently to the nation. The Communist invasion was stopped, true enough; but nobody was satisfied with such an outcome. Among the most critical correspondents of the conduct of the Korean

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war were the British. One of the most outspoken was Randolph Churchill, son of Britain's wartime leader, who was shot in the leg when he ventured out with a patrol. It didn't interfere with his effectiveness, however, for he merely transferred his base to a hospital ship. Wearing a uniform of his own design, he would reproach his American colleagues, "You Americans can look like garage mechanics if you wish. I shall be properly dressed." 28 There was a journalistic epilogue to the long and weary conflict, which introduced so many difficult elements into the reporting of the war. After General Eisenhower's successful campaign for the Presidency in 1952, he made a six-day trip to the Korean battlefields in fulfillment of a pledge he had given during his drive for election. The Koreans, in their battle-scarred cities and at the front, knew all about it. So did the Americans and their fellow-soldiers in the UN ranks. Moreover, many American journalists were well aware of where the Presidentelect was. But to maintain his safety in flight, not a line of his whereabouts was published, nor was anything broadcast, until December 5, 1952, when he was well on his way back to Washington. Then, one of the three wire service "pool" reporters on the trip, Don Whitehead of the AP, wrote a masterful account of what he called "The Great Deception." 27 It won him the second of the two Pulitzer Prizes that were awarded to him during the war. Despite the President-elect's flight, the peace-making was not easily accomplished. The new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who always had fancied himself as a manipulator of press opinion, became involved in a dispute with several Washington correspondents in April, 1953. After a dinner he had attended with them, during which the Lindley "background rule" was invoked, articles in the New York Times and other newspapers on April 10 suggested that the Eisenhower administration was about to accept a partitioned Korea.* While the Times's piece carefully masked the identity of the author of the suggestion, British and French correspondents were not as reticent. Having been shut out of the confidential meat, potatoes, and gossip, they took pardonable satisfaction in identifying Secretary Dulles as the source of * This "rule," originated by Ernest K. Lindley of Newsweek, specifies that the reporter will not identify his source but will be permitted to use the information he receives.

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the Korean policy suggestion. The Eisenhower administration was embarrassed. The White House promptly denied the whole business, all of which caused James Reston to comment sadly in the Times, "The official art of denying the truth without actually lying is as old as government itself. . . . In announcing that the reported policy on Korea . . . was 'without foundation of fact,' the White House denied what was essentially true about Korean policy." 2 8 A little more than three months later, Reston's plaint was shown to have been justified. On July 27, 1953, when the cease-fire finally came and the war ended, Korea was partitioned in fact. Prisoner exchanges remained to be covered and various cleanup stories had to be done. But within a year, Korea once again was being surveyed by a bare minimum of the foreign press corps. When there were flare-ups, reinforcements came in from Japan. But the weight of Communist pressure shifted toward more promising weak spots in Asia. 3. T H E I R O N C U R T A I N The Moscow Radio announced at 4 a.m. on March 6, 1953, that Joseph Stalin had died at 9:50 the previous night. In this manner the world learned that nearly three decades of a reign of Byzantine intrigue and unexampled ferocity in Russia had come to an end. The manner of the dictator's death and the reason for the six-hour delay in the announcement were not satisfactorily explained at the time or thereafter. All the handful of Western correspondents in Moscow knew was that the Stalin era was over. Harrison E. Salisbury, the lean, sandy-haired New York Times correspondent, had to wait until 9 a.m. before his story was cleared through censorship and transmitted. When he left the telegraph office at last, he was astonished to find that the troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the MVD, had moved into the central part of the city with tanks. As Salisbury quickly realized, that meant the boss of the M V D , Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, could make himself the master of Russia if he chose to do so. Why he did not, nobody outside the Kremlin ever knew, for the M V D kept its grip on Moscow until March 9, then unaccountably retreated.29 The follow-up to the Beria mystery became public knowledge months later as Georgi Malenkov sought to consolidate his rule as Stalin's sue-

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cessor. The luckless Beria was arrested within three months and executed in December, 1953. Although the correspondents were permitted to infer that the deed was done in the blood-stained cellar of Lubianka Prison, tales went around that he had been surprised, shot, and killed in his own office. Nor was this the only rumor of foul play in the Kremlin. While the official version of Stalin's death had it that he was unconscious for three days after suffering a stroke on March 1 and then died, many heard far different stories. One was that the 73-year-old dictator was stricken when he excitedly tried to call for help to quell a revolt in the Party Presidium. Another, even more widely circulated, was that while Stalin lay ill, he was poisoned.30 None of this, obviously, could go through censorship. The correspondents were sealed up as long as they stayed in the Soviet Union. Truly, as Winston Churchill had said at Fulton, Mo., on March 5, 1946, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent."31 The influence of Stalin, in death, still spread throughout the Soviet Union. After three decades, it would not easily be exorcised. Salisbury was one of the few seasoned foreign correspondents who had witnessed the climactic years of the Stalin era. He was then 44 years old, a cool and capable Midwestemer, Minneapolis born, who was impervious to the pressure of events. For that he could thank his wire service training—eighteen years with the UP during which he had been by turn Washington correspondent and European manager. When Salisbury first came to Moscow in 1943 as a UP correspondent assigned to temporary relief duty for Henry Shapiro, the bureau manager, it was a far different place. In wartime, when Stalin tried to maintain better relations with the United States and Britain, the strict controls over the entry of correspondents into Russia and their subsequent movements were relaxed. Most of them lived then in the old Hotel Metropole, a faded hostelry with few comforts. There, Salisbury's fellow-guests included such correspondents as Henry Cassidy, Eddy Gilmore, and Robert Magidoff of the AP; Walter Kerr, the New York Herald Tribune's foreign expert; Leland Stowe of the Chicago Daily News; Alexander Werth, then of the London Sunday Times and later the Manchester Guardian; Edmund Stevens of the Christian Science Monitor; John Hersey of The New Yorker, and such traveling correspondents as Edgar Snow, Godfrey Blunden, David Nichol, and many others.

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Shapiro, Magidoff, Stevens, and Werth, who were thoroughly at home with the Russian language, had an advantage over their fellows. But everybody was able to get along in wartime. Of course, the Russians watched all the foreign correspondents with great care and were sparing with their news. But it took some extreme act to be expelled at that time from the country. Ed Fleming of CBS made it when the Russians accused him of tearing up a heavily edited script and throwing it in the face of a censor. Otherwise, the traditional Russian disciplines for correspondents were comparatively mild.32 With the end of the war, the Iron Curtain slammed down. The Soviet regime went back to its hard, suspicious ways. Reuben Markham, a respected foreign correspondent who had covered the Balkans off and on since 1927 for the Christian Science Monitor, was among the first to go. His criticism of Communist methods led to his expulsion from Rumania in 1946.33 One by one, as other correspondents left the Soviet Union for brief trips home, they found their visas were not renewed. The Russians made a particular example out of Robert Magidoff, the AP veteran who had become a correspondent for NBC. He was wrongfully accused of being a spy and expelled in 1948.34 The correspondents who remained received no cooperation. They were harassed, spied upon, refused permission to travel. Joseph Newman, the New York Herald Tribune correspondent, was refused reentry to Russia after a brief trip to Paris in 1949, and his newspaper closed its bureau for the time being. The New York Times for eighteen months had been trying to get a correspondent back into Moscow after Drew Middleton had been refused reentry. By a coincidence, Salisbury was negotiating at the time with Edwin L. James, the Times's managing editor, for a place on the staff abroad. He was offered the Moscow post, but demurred at first because he didn't know Russian and wasn't particularly attracted to Moscow. However, he wanted to leave the UP and eventually decided to try for a visa. James, having an imaginative turn of mind, then wrote an "open letter" in the Times addressed to Stalin, advancing various reasons why Russia should now grant a visa to a new Moscow correspondent for the newspaper. The appeal worked. In 1949, to his surprise, Salisbury was on the way back to Russia and soon began a new, hard, and trying existence. Edmund Stevens of the Christian Science Monitor, after three years in postwar Moscow and fifteen years of expert correspondence about

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Russia, became persona non grata soon afterward. He gave up, went home, assembled his notes, and wrote a scathing series for his paper entitled, "This Is Russia—Uncensored," which won him a Pulitzer Prize.35 Yet, for all his suspicion of the Western press, Stalin found it uncommonly useful when he decided it was time to liquidate his unsuccessful blockade of Berlin. Over the years, correspondents had flooded him with questionnaires in the hope that he would answer one of them and thereby give them an exclusive story. There was no particular friendliness for Communism in these procedures. It was just ordinary newspaper enterprise, and Stalin understood it perfectly well. That, of course, was why, when he chose to answer one of these questionnaires on the Berlin airlift and blockade, it was a message from J. Kingsbury Smith, European manager of Hearst's INS. Smith, based in Paris, was a veteran correspondent, respected both for his ability and his agreeable personality; moreover, his employer demonstrably was the outstanding journalistic anti-Communist in the United States. But then, Stalin never had permitted principles to stand in the way of his power plays. He not only sent Smith the questionnaire toward the end of January, 1949, suggesting that the Berlin dispute could be settled, but carefully avoided all reference to the key Russian demand—the use of Communist currency in all of Berlin. The sharp-eyed Smith noticed the omission. Even more important, Professor Philip C. Jessup of Columbia University, the American representative in the Security Council's futile debate on Berlin, found it strange that Stalin would drop his insistence on currency reform. Before a Council meeting in the lounge at Lake Success, he asked the Soviet representative, Jacob A. Malik, if the omission had been purposeful. Malik didn't know, but said he would find out. On March 15, he informed Jessup that the neglect of the currency question had not been accidental. Thereupon, negotiations to wash out the Berlin blockade began and were completed on May 12 after 321 days of airlifting supplies to 2,100,000 residents.36 Stalin, of course, had no particular reason to be grateful to the correspondents in general or Smith in particular. Nor was the talented INS correspondent made welcome in Moscow. By 1950, in fact, only six Western correspondents remained in Moscow—Eddy Gilmore and Thomas Whitney, AP; Shapiro, UP; Salisbury, New York Times, and

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two lesser known reporters for Reuters and Agence France-Presse. In Magidoff's opinion, the only reason why this basic group was permitted to remain was Soviet fear of Western retaliation against Tass foreign correspondents.37 During the following year, when the West seemed to accept the situation, the screws were tightened another turn. On April 26, 1951, William N. Oatis of the AP was seized as a spy in Prague, then quickly thrown into a Czech prison with a ten-year sentence after a trial that violated every basic principle of justice. Thus, wherever Soviet power could be exerted, the correspondents from the West found themselves reduced to copying from Tass or the official Soviet journals. Naturally, a few tried some old tricks to outwit the censors, but the results were uniformly disappointing. Salisbury once tried to show that Soviet cattle production was off by sending the telltale figures through censorship as an example of Soviet "agricultural gains." He hoped, of course, that his foreign desk in New York would check and write the real story. It didn't work. Instead of congratulations, he received a stern "rocket" warning him against using Soviet propaganda in the future. The correspondents settled down to a dangerous and inhospitable regimen in Moscow for what Salisbury called "the growing madness of Stalin's last years of terror." Few had confidence in their Soviet secretaries or chauffeurs, who were under the control of the government and as likely as not reporting to Soviet intelligence. As for the Russians, in and out of government, they feared any contact with the foreigners because they knew even the most casual and innocent meeting might be made the pretext for prosecution under the Soviet Official Secrets Act, sentencing to a lingering death in a slave labor camp or, perhaps worse, in Lubianka Prison. The correspondents thereby were cut off from all contact with the people around them. They were forced to route all calls for information, even about laundry or theater tickets, to a single inefficient and frightened government bureau. Any correspondent who happened to feel inclined to revolt against this impossible situation could reflect on the fate of Bill Oatis and the strange death of George Polk of CBS who, during the Communist uprising in Greece, had been found slain on a lonely beach after trying to see the Communist guerrilla leader, Markos Vafiades. In its outrageous treatment of the foreign press, Russia had come full circle. Conditions had been no more in-

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tolerable a century before when Charles Dickens had sent George Augustus Sala on his "Journey Due North" (Dickens's sense of direction) into the Tsar's domain.* There was still another hazard for the Western press in this repressive situation. Newspapers in the United States, Britain, and Western Europe, which made a practice of buying articles at space rates from free-lancing foreign correspondents, discovered that they had to be on their guard. The Christian Science Monitor, whose foreign dispatches carried weight in the United States because of the paper's prestige, found it had to exercise the greatest vigilance in handling its 2,000 annual contributors. One of these, Wilfred Burchett, an Australian, was cut off by the Monitor in 1950 after sending in a few dispatches and soon afterward turned up as a correspondent in North Korea. Another, Guenther Stein, dropped out of sight after the Defense Department in Washington sought to question him about the Sorge spy ring which had operated in Japan for the benefit of the Soviet Union. Neither Burchett nor Stein did any work for the Monitor that would have benefited Russia, however.38 Stalin's death brought no immediate release to Russia, nor were the foreign correspondents aware of any major changes. They knew, of course, that a great power struggle was under way in the Kremlin, and some of them already were aware that Nikita S. Khrushchev was likely to win out. But by the beginning of 1954, nine months after Stalin's death, the entire regular corps of Western correspondents in Moscow consisted of five men—Richard R. Kasischke, AP; Kenneth Brodney, UP; Sidney Wieland, Reuters; Jean Nau, Agence France-Presse, and Salisbury, who at the time was on leave in the United States. They worked seven days a week, twelve to fourteen hours a day, and were dismayed at the smallness of their yield. Their main work was usually between 11 p.m., when they were able to pick up the Tass report, until as late as 5 a.m., when they were usually able to get a copy of Pravda. They filed their copy at the Central Telegraph Office, not far from Red Square, for scrutiny by censors whom they never saw but were able to put through their telephone call only after their work received approval. When Pravda, Izvestia, and Trud came in early, around 2 a.m., they were in luck. Otherwise, they just had to wait. Once they had filed, * That was the title Dickens gave to Sala's book about Russia.

Through Time and Space there were other chores later in the morning—papers from the provinces, lunch with some member of the diplomatic colony, and perhaps, later in the day, a cocktail party or an ambassadorial briefing. William L. Ryan, the AP's foreign news analyst who visited Moscow at about this time, wrote: "There are many frustrations in a correspondent's life in the Soviet capital. Nothing—absolutely nothing—is easy for him in Moscow. Everything is done the hard way. Everything is time consuming. The correspondent is not allowed to drive his own car, but must hire a chauffeur assigned to him. . . . He finds his telephone failing him at the worst times. He finds himself balked on all sides even when seeking the most innocent information from Soviet authorities. He finds red tape and bureaucracy on all sides. And, of course, there is the ever-present censor." 39 As far as the journalists were concerned, the only sign of a possible relaxation of tension was the release of Bill Oatis from his Czech prison on May 16, 1953, soon after Stalin's death. It was obviously done on orders from Moscow—a small and hesitant olive branch extended toward the West. But within a month there was so much trouble in the Communist empire that nothing else mattered for some time. The Czechs went on strike, unheard of in the people's democracies, and the Berlin riots broke out in the East Zone of Germany. The new masters of the Kremlin, being either unable or unwilling to adopt a bloody Stalinist policy of repression at that time, were in very real difficulties. One of the signs came in 1954 when Salisbury began publishing some of the things he had seen and heard during his five years in Russia in the New York Times. He was barred as a correspondent for "slandering the Soviet Union." The collectivist regime was in no mood then to have the world hear suggestions that Stalin might have been assassinated. Salisbury wrote later: " I was more than happy to leave Russia . . . a country where I had known the chill of terror, the shadow of suspicion, and the blackness of tragedy." 40 Early in February, 1955, the canny Kingsbury Smith led his boss, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., and an associate, Frank Conniff, into Moscow on an exploratory mission. There had been no Hearst representative in Moscow for years. Smith picked an excellent time. The Hearst team enjoyed a world-wide press for its interviews with Khrushchev, Marshal Nigolai Bulganin, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, and the crusty old diplomatic undertaker, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov.

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The U.S. Navy at the time was evacuating 15,000 Chinese Nationalist troops from the Tachen Islands, and Khrushchev was voluble with assurances that the Red Chinese wouldn't interfere. Before the Hearst team left, they had another story. Khrushchev, from his strategic post as First Secretary of the Communist Party, brought about the fall of Premier Malenkov on February 8, and made Bulganin his successor. However, the Hearst team returned convinced that Khrushchev was the boss.41 The rise of a new dictator in Russia was felt in many ways. On February 10, 1955, Lauren K. Soth in a Des Moines Register editorial invited the Russians to "the greatest feed-livestock area in the world" to leam from the Iowans. A party of twelve showed up that summer.42 That same year, the Austrian State Treaty was signed, an armistice in the Indochina War was agreed to by the Far Eastern conference at Geneva, and President Eisenhower met Khrushchev at a Geneva Summit conference that produced nothing except misleading publicity. Even more important, Khrushchev made his "secret speech" denouncing Stalin before the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow on February 14, 1956. The name for the period, "The Thaw," was derived from a book by Ilya Ehrenburg about the post-Stalin years. The signs of a relaxed atmosphere in Russia were seized upon mistakenly in the satellite nations. The Poznan riots broke out in Poland in June, 1956, but Wladyslaw Gomulka, who became First Secretary of the Polish Communist Party, was careful not to make too many demands in the name of his "national Communism" and thus unduly annoy the Kremlin. Poland thereby was able to wriggle in the Soviet grasp without being hurt. But when the Hungarians demonstrated in favor of the Poles in Budapest on the night of October 23, security police opened fire on them. There was no "thaw" in Hungary. Within hours, a full-scale revolution was on. Hundreds of correspondents flocked to the Hungarian border. Within Budapest, Endre Marton of the AP carried the burden of reporting, a dangerous task because he was a Hungarian national. He kept going as long as he could, then saved himself. For the UP, Russell Jones carried on until he was the only American correspondent left in embattled Budapest, working with two British, a Frenchman, and a stateless person. Watching the senseless destruction and loss of life by Russian military strength, he wrote, "For the first time since I was a boy, I

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wept." Both the Soviet course and the self-righteous manner in which it was reported to the Russian people did more to hurt the Soviets with the uncommitted nations than anything else that had happened since World War II.44 Nor did Russian actions during the brief Suez war, which erupted in the midst of the Hungarian revolution, do anything to recoup the Kremlin's damaged position. It was the United States, acting on President Eisenhower's initiative, that forced a cease-fire on the British, French, and Israelis on November 7, 1956, thus saving the defeated Egyptians. The Russians were put in the position of supporting the American initiative, although the Soviet propaganda machine might have taken a far greater advantage of the rift in the ranks of the West.45 However, if there was any Western complacency, it was severely jolted on October 5, 1957, by a Tass announcement that the first Sputnik had been put into orbit.48 The space race thus burst upon man in a blaze of headlines and electronics. While the British and French greeted the Russian feat with acclaim, and correspondents tried to explain to the public a phenomenon they didn't really understand themselves, a large section of the U.S. press fairly howled that the Russian success presaged a national disaster. It was a display of the uninhibited American trait for self-criticism at its worst. In a hair-shirt mood, Walter Lippmann wrote that it was a "grim business" because "a society cannot stand still." He went on ominously, "If it loses the momentum of its own progress, it will deteriorate and decline, lacking purpose and losing confidence in itself." 47 Nor was the American press mollified when a 30-pound satellite shot into orbit the following year. It was too small. Soon after Khrushchev's assumption of the Soviet premiership on March 27, 1958, a few more foreign correspondents were permitted to enter the Soviet Union. But life still did not change materially for independent foreign journalists behind the Iron Curtain. On November 11, 1958, A. M. Rosenthal, the New York Times correspondent in Poland, who had a distinguished record at both the United Nations and India, was unceremoniously ordered out of Warsaw. When asked what he had done, Rosenthal was told by a functionary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: "The question of falseness or otherwise does not enter into this. You have written very deeply and in detail about the internal situation,

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party matters and leadership matters, and the Polish government cannot tolerate such probing reporting."48 It was still difficult for a regime in the Soviet orbit to countenance truthful, conscientious reporting, even if psychological censorship had partly replaced the old-fashioned article. As Rosenthal, his wife, and three sons moved out to Vienna on their way to their next assignment, Japan, the small band of Western correspondents behind the Iron Curtain absorbed the lesson. Thaw or not, everybody was still on trial who did not conform to the Soviet methods of journalism. The authoritarian concept of the press was deeply imbedded in Russian thought, whatever the philosophy of the regime in power. It changed with appalling slowness. The Communist theoreticians seldom appeared to be influenced by facts that did not conform to the way they thought life should be. The party line told them what should be released for publication inside Russia and how it should be slanted. As Salisbury once described the position: "The Kremlin told Tass what to put out to the domestic press—how much, what words, what headlines. There was a small internal bulletin circulated among, perhaps, 5,000 top officials. This was supposed to be 'informational'—a report of what was really happening in the outside world. Inevitably, it grew too highly distorted and censored." 49 Khrushchev's contribution to Russian journalism was a decision to see for himself what was going on outside the Iron Curtain. In preparation, he sent his first deputy foreign minister, Anastas Mikoyan, to the United States in the winter of 1959 and received Vice-President Richard M. Nixon in the Soviet Union from July 23 to August 5. Nixon flew in with a small army of American journalists, including Salisbury, for whom Mikoyan had interceded. Salisbury noted changes in the handling of the foreign press behind the Iron Curtain, but not with much favor. The correspondents from Communist nations now didn't have to worry about censorship. As for the others, the "carrot and stick" treatment was applied. Those who were agreeable received favors. Those who did not were subjected to all the annoyances of which a dictatorship is capable. The promising aspect was the extent to which Russian correspondents, usually a docile lot, stuck with Nixon, took down what he said, got names of local figures who spoke with him, even battled Soviet and American security officials to keep their places. Of course what was

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printed did not reflect these factual reporting methods, but it was a big change for journalism in the Soviet Union.50 As one Soviet reporter said with engaging frankness, "We ordinarily stay in the office and write our articles there." 8 1 When Khrushchev toured the United States that fall from September 15 to 28, thirty-nine Soviet correspondents accompanied him. With the support of the Premier's son-in-law, Alexei I. Adzhubei, the editor of Izvestia, the Soviet journalists for the first time tried to cover the news as it happened. If Khrushchev praised the U.S. economy or found broad support among the American people for the policies of its government, that's the way it went into Pravda and Izvestia, for once. There was even an air reminiscent of an American political campaign, with a Soviet cameraman delightedly taking a shot of Khrushchev in a butcher's apron in Iowa.52 Of course, Khrushchev had his troubles, too. Wherever he went, he was asked to explain his celebrated remark about the United States, "We will bury you." At the National Press Club in Washington, he retorted that he meant it in its historical, not in its physical, sense. In Los Angeles, when Mayor Norris Poulson made some rough remarks about the proposed burial ceremonies, Khrushchev angrily threatened to go home. He also was put out because the American authorities, with a myopia quite as strange as anything that had come out of Russia during the Nixon visit, wouldn't let the Soviet leader go to Disneyland. The tour had everything a good newspaper story should have—a Hollywood can-can dance which Khrushchev denounced as immoral, a mob scene on an Iowa farm where the host kicked out at correspondents and hit Harrison Salisbury, a formal luncheon at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City where the Premier's hosts serenaded him with the "Star-Spangled Banner," a disarmament speech at the United Nations which was standard for the occasion and, finally, a private meeting with President Eisenhower at Camp David, Md. Out of the whole emerged something which the Russians hopefully called the "Spirit of Camp David," in the expectation of drawing concessions from the United States that didn't materialize. Instead, President Eisenhower managed to put off the day of reckoning in Berlin still further and let himself be persuaded to consider a summit meeting in i960. From the work of the 375 correspondents who traveled with Khrushchev from coast to coast, the additional hundreds of local and regional

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reporters, and the many hours of television film, Khrushchev emerged as a curiosity—an international celebrity seen at close quarters. His imprint on America, in the light of subsequent events, was not as strong as the impression that America made on him. Over Soviet T V , kinescopes of his greatest moments were put together in an effort to portray his American tour as a sweeping triumph for the leader of the Communist cause. Only a simple-minded Russian would have believed it, however. For American journalists, the traveling mob scene—a by-product of a free press in a less responsible mood—was the subject of a great deal of debate. A sizable segment of American editors favored the imposition of limitations on the number of correspondents. But they could not agree on who would set the limits and which correspondents would be excluded. During President Eisenhower's good will missions abroad, the debate was intensified. Yet, no formula could be devised for setting up a "pool" method either for a presidential tour or a Khrushchev visit.53 There was no help for it. The traveling mob scenes continued to perplex the West, just at a time when the Russians were beginning to find some usefulness in them. Khrushchev's publicity campaign to stimulate support for the Soviet Union and its objectives received unexpected assistance from the United States during the following year. On May 1, i960, Francis Gary Powers and his U-2 plane were shot down by Soviet antiaircraft over Sverdlovsk. The State Department, not knowing that both plane and pilot were in Soviet hands, blandly announced that "there was no deliberate attempt to violate Soviet air space and there never has been." Khrushchev brushed aside the American cover story that Powers might have strayed off course. On May 7, he waved pictures of the wrecked plane and announced Powers had confessed and would shortly be brought to trial. It was a moment of great confusion for the American press, which had been misled by its own government, and a triumph for the Soviet press, which was able to present Khrushchev's factual statement as the truth. Such a reversal of position was an extreme embarrassment to the West and one with which the Soviets might have made great capital, had a moderate position been taken that did not repel the uncommitted nations. But when Khrushchev wrecked the Summit conference in Paris on May 16 by demanding apologies from President Eisenhower and bandying both insults and threats, his favorable world press vanished abruptly.

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He completed the seemingly impossible job of dissipating his tactical advantage at a two and one-half hour press conference in Paris on May 18. More than 3,000 persons crowded in, swamping the correspondents and creating still another mob scene. As the central figure, a shouting, arm-waving Khrushchev used the occasion to heat up the Cold War almost to the breaking point, which cost him much of the sympathy he otherwise would have enjoyed in the world press as the aggrieved party.84 It did not, of course, make the original American denials of the U-2 flight any more palatable to the press either inside or outside the United States. When Powers was tried and sentenced to prison in Moscow during August, the Soviet Union made an effort to accelerate the transmission of copy direct from the courtroom, but clamped down on many other restrictions. Visas were refused for correspondents from any organization not regularly represented in Moscow. All contact with the defendant, attorneys, and witnesses was refused. A limited number of reporters from abroad had to make the best of these conditions. The AP, for instance, used two men, Preston Grover, the bureau chief, and Stanley Johnson, who dictated running detail direct to London from one of the twelve phone booths outside the courtroom. The AP observed no direct censorship. However, the bureau was expected to provide a copy of the entire file to the authorities for examination of "purity of style and accuracy." 65 Still in a bellicose mood, Khrushchev called on the heads of government of the United Nations to attend the General Assembly session in New York that fall, beginning September 20. Before a distinguished audience three days later, the Soviet dictator demanded the removal of the United Nations from the United States, the removal of Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold in favor of a "troika" or committee of three, the abolition of all American bases abroad, and complete and total disarmament on Russian terms. Later, he heckled British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, was gaveled down by the chairman, and proceeded to beat his desk with his fists as a sign of disapproval. Finally, when Lorenzo Sumulong of the Philippines referred on October 12 in unflattering terms to the Soviet domination of eastern Europe, Khrushchev shouted in Russian that the Filipino was an "imperialist lackey" and a "jerk." Then, with American TV cameras trained on him, he took off his shoe and pounded his desk. Throughout the Assembly, until his

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departure for Moscow on October 13, he gave interviews from the balcony of the Soviet mission at 68th St. and Park Ave., at the gates of the Soviet estate at Glen Cove, and elsewhere. Khrushchev was too shrewd and capable a politician to be making such a show of himself without excellent reason. Had he wished to hurl insults at the West, he could have done so from Moscow by summoning in the foreign press. But at the time, Max Frankel of the New York Times observed that "right in the midst of the great story, it is nowhere to be had." He echoed the familiar plaint that a foreign correspondent in the Soviet Union was just "a secret agent in the eyes of the government." 86 In journeying to Paris and the U N , therefore, Khrushchev's principal purpose undoubtedly was to attack the "imperialists" on their own ground for a prolonged period in order to bolster his own defenses at home. The U-2 affair, after all, had betrayed Russian weakness at a time when Khrushchev was being reproached by the Stalinist minority for his soft line on Berlin. His posture of defiance in the lair of the "aggressors" was his answer. It didn't seem to matter to him that the Assembly rejected his program and gave Hammarskjold an ovation. There was still control over what Tass could say on the home front and what Pravda and Izvestia would print. More than a score of Western correspondents, including seventeen Americans, were now in Moscow. In a gesture toward the foreign press, indicative of the lessons Khrushchev had learned abroad, the Soviet Union ended its formal censorship in March, 1961, and permitted correspondents a limited amount of editorial discretion and travel. Those who interpreted this action to mean that they could do as they pleased soon discovered their error. Two West Germans and a Frenchman were expelled. Another German was barred for "systematic slander of Soviet leaders." The Soviet authorities also handed out reprimands freely for "creative inventiveness," sometimes with justification, sometimes not. The effect of the lifting of censorship was to place the burden entirely on the correspondent. A few were able to produce exclusive stories of a mild nature, the result either of Soviet favoritism or minimal enterprise. But there was no indication of when the Russians would permit the Western correspondents to witness a missile shot or an atomic test. "Moscow," concluded Earl J. Johnson, the editor of UPI, "is no post for the hip-shooting cowboys of journalism." 87

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The public confirmation of the ideological clash between the Soviet Union and Red China at the 22d Congress of the Soviet's Communist Party had to be covered by the foreign press corps from the basement. The correspondents were admitted to the first two sessions only and had to take the rest from the usual official Soviet sources. Khrushchev's attack on Albania, Chinese Premier Chou En-lai's defense, and Chou's abrupt departure after only six days of the Congress had to be largely reported at second hand. The foreign press also had to feel its way when rumors flooded Moscow of a number of high Soviet personages who had been downgraded in Khrushchev's continued attack on Stalinism. It took a long time to confirm or deny anything in this new, uncertain Moscow. Harrison Salisbury wrote: "Russia was losing—at least temporarily— the iron, regimented character which had so long been its most notable feature. Moscow was becoming a city of gossip and tittle-tattle, of rumor and talebearing. . . . With the intermingling of foreign diplomats and Russians, the embassies now often found themselves in the possession of so many different versions of a given rumor that it was impossible to know which might be true." 58 Ehrenburg's "thaw" had produced new problems as well as a somewhat more abundant life for the Russian people. There were even greater difficulties for those who sought to tell the world the Soviet story day by day. No correspondent in Moscow could feel secure about the future, either Russia's or his own. 4. T H E W E S T E R N

ALLIANCE

The transfer of power in the West from London and Western Europe to Washington, D.C., made it the news capital of the world. The importance of the American press was increased thereby because it became the source for much of the news and opinion that shaped the image of the United States abroad. Out of the 500 foreign correspondents from 300 news organizations in 55 countries who were based in the United States after World War II, relatively few had either the money or the time to travel extensively.89 They had to depend on what the wire services could give them, if their papers subscribed, or what they could pick out of the newspapers or off the TVradio networks.

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There were usually between fifty and sixty foreign correspondents in Washington alone. They, of course, had a firsthand view of the workings of government although, until the 1960s, neither Democratic nor Republican administrations paid much attention to them. It didn't help the American position overseas. Naturally, there were exceptions. The correspondents of major newspapers and wire services in Western Europe and Japan, plus a sprinkling of others, roamed the nation. They were admitted to the atomic proving grounds in Nevada and Cape Canaveral, Fla., for the space shots. If they wanted light material, they could go to Hollywood or Broadway. Nor did they neglect the industrial centers of the North and the cities and towns in the grip of racial conflict in the South. With the exception of Soviet bloc correspondents, whose restrictions roughly tallied with the curbs on Americans behind the Iron Curtain, the more fortunate foreign correspondents saw what they wished and wrote as they pleased. The attitude toward the Soviet bloc journalists was typified by Philip C. Jessup while he was a U.S. ambassador at the United Nations. He mistakenly greeted a gentleman from Polpress, the Polish news agency, as a representative of Tass. "No, no," protested the reporter. "Not Tass. I am from Polpress." Jessup nodded sagely. "Ah, yes. Demi-Tass." Just as foreign correspondents flocked to the United States, American news agencies now broadened their overseas press coverage as did the relatively few newspapers with established foreign staffs. If the permanent coverage was thin outside the major world centers and the various crisis areas as they developed, it couldn't be helped. No independent agency, no matter how wealthy and efficient, could cover the whole world in a manner that would satisfy each nation. The best that could be done was to hire foreign nationals who were qualified, something the American wire services began to do very quickly. At the end of the Eisenhower years, costs had gone up to such an extent that the AP alone was spending nearly $5,000,000 on foreign news out of a total operating expense of nearly $36,000,000 to cover its 1,778 member publications and 2,042 radio-TV associate members.60 INS had found the going too difficult and consolidated on May 24, 1958, with the UP. Rising world news costs had been a major motive.61 The once-dominant position of the British press in the foreign news field passed to the United States in general, although a few individual

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British publications and Reuters still maintained great prestige. The American leaders, better than anyone else, had the means and the correspondents to do the job as well as it could be done under the circumstances. No other newspaper in the world could approach the New York Times's staff of fifty-odd permanent foreign correspondents and its dozens of stringers. In the twenty years following the end of World War II, the imprint of the American press abroad was unmistakable. American correspondents generally outnumbered all others by far at every major story, whether it was a Big Four conference, a negotiation on disarmament, atomic controls or a test ban, on UN, NATO, or other international meetings. Nor were mere numbers the only guide. What the New York Times and a few other influential American newspapers published and what AP and UPI carried were bound to be reflected in most parts of the world. Only Reuters, the Manchester Guardian, the Times of London, the London Daily Telegraph, he Monde, and the Neue Ziircher Zeitung had comparable standing. To a limited extent, these world leaders were even able to penetrate the vast reaches of the Communist empire where Tass and Hsin Hua, the New China News Agency, Pravda and Jen Min Jih Pao, the People's Daily in Red China, were supreme in their respective areas. Nowhere was the change more marked than in the coverage of India, where Reuters had been well-nigh unopposed for almost a century. Yet, when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in the Delhi garden of Birla House on January 30, 1948, a number of American correspondents were at the scene. Price Day of the Baltimore Sun and Robert Stimson of BBC had been among the last to interview him. Robert Trumbull of the New York Times and Vincent Sheean heard the fatal shots fired and were among the first at the scene. A UP resident correspondent, James Michaels, moved one of the first bulletins. Edgar Snow had been waiting to keep an appointment for an interview and was nearby. While such coverage was by no means massive, it was considerably ahead of what American foreign correspondents had been able to provide in India in the past.62 As the Americans assumed the old British role of poking about the far places of the earth where their country's wealth and power had been committed, correspondents came up with critical articles that scarcely coincided with the State Department's position in various

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places. Saville R. Davis, one of the Christian Science Monitor's roving correspondents, noted in Indo-China how American dollars and goods were flowing to the "rich man and the racketeer" in too many instances. He wrote with keen insight: "Corruption is taking the place of imperialism as the number one political issue in Southeast Asia. . . . The Americans are being tarred with it, though it is not directly their fault. As the new foreign power in this part of the world, they live in a goldfish bowl and they are seen swimming around with some pretty ugly fish."83 In peace as in war, a price had to be paid for this kind of extensive coverage. On July 12, 1949, a KLM plane bearing twenty-four correspondents back from the Indonesian war crashed against a rainswept hillside in India, killing all of them. H. R. Knickerbocker, a veteran of many battles, was one who died. Nat Barrows of the Chicago Daily, News was another. On May 1 1 , 1955, Gene Symonds of the UP was beaten to death by an infuriated mob while covering a Communist demonstration in Singapore.94 Nor was all the sacrifice of life in the underdeveloped areas of the world. Paul L. Guihard, a 30-year-old correspondent for Agence France-Presse, was shot and killed on the night of September 30, 1962, during the University of Mississippi riots over the admission of a Negro student.65 There were other ways in which the cost of the emergence of the United States as a world power had to be reckoned. When Dictator Juan Peron seized the greatest independent newspaper in Latin America, La Prertsa, in Buenos Aires, he also cut off UP service in Argentina at a loss to the agency of $500,000 a year. It was not restored until the overthrow of Peron in 1956, five years after the expropriation, when Alberto Gainza Paz was restored to the control of La Prensa.M The end result of all this sacrifice, toil, effort, and heavy expense on the part of the independent press was presumed to be a better informed public in the United States. But as repeated surveys showed, it didn't work out that way. Just as the American press was too large, too unruly, too independent, and too scattered to be as effectively managed on security matters as the British press, the American reader and viewer seemed to be stubbornly determined in the mass to pay little attention to foreign affairs unless war threatened. In this respect, he was no better and not much worse than his British counterpart had been for two centuries or more. Of the 200,000 words of foreign news that

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poured into the United States each week from the AP and UPI alone, a 1953 survey showed that ninety-three leading newspapers ran an average of 4.4 columns a day, the largest being the New York Times with 32.08 columns a day.67 Ten years later even the Times had dropped below that average. It was against this background that the tension between the U.S. government and the leaders of the American press developed in the years following World War II over the handling of sensitive news. While there had been flare-ups in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, no issue of real consequence developed until Secretary of State Dulles took a firm position against the assignment of U.S. correspondents to cover Communist China. Under pressure, he agreed on April 23, 1957, to let a limited number of American correspondents enter Communist China "on behalf of the newsgathering community as a whole"; in other words, pool reporting. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, protested both the limitation in numbers and the provision for making his correspondents' news as well as others available to all takers. "I cannot escape the feeling," he wrote, "that the Administration is abridging the freedom of the press and using the press as an instrument in its diplomacy." To this, Dulles replied a week later that a "general influx of Americans into Communist China at this time" would "gravely impair" the policies of the United States. He cited the state of war that still existed between the two countries and the consequent application of the Trading With The Enemy Act. "You suggest," Dulles wrote, "that our policy, with respect to Americans going to China 'abridges the freedom of the press.' The Constitutional 'freedom of the press' relates to the publication and not to the gathering of news. . . . United States foreign policy inevitably involves the acceptance of certain restraints by the American people." 68 There was no division of consequence in the American press on the issue. The various newspaper associations opposed Dulles, Roy A. Roberts of the Kansas City Star crying out before the AP Managing Editors Association, "How are we going to call AP a world-wide service if we don't cover China?" Dulles backed down a little more. He agreed to permit representatives of twenty-four newspapers and news services, one per organization, to enter Red China but only if each was prepared to

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stay a minimum of six months. However, since he refused at the same time to extend reciprocal rights to Red Chinese newspaper and wire service representatives, the Communist regime blocked the entry of the Americans. Editor Publisher, the weekly magazine of the industry, declared editorially: "Red China contains 650,000,000 people, nearly one-fourth of the human race. The area is too important to the American people and to their government to have it hidden behind a Bamboo Curtain of censorship which we have helped to create ourselves. American newsmen owe it to themselves, their readers, and their government to get these restrictions on news coverage eliminated. The fight for freedom to report the news of the world wherever and whenever it happens should be renewed with vigor." 69 Despite the American government's position, Red China's importance as a news center steadily increased. There was no way of ignoring the truculent and often violent attitude of the Peking government toward the West, its ideological quarrel with the Soviet Union over Moscow's less rigid attitude, its drive toward atomic power, and its ruthless subversion in Southeast Asia. The high point of the presidential campaign of i960 came during the national T V debate between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice-President Richard M. Nixon over how much or how little the United States should do to defend the off-shore islands of Quemoy and Matsu in the event of Red Chinese attack. In the Summit meeting between President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev in Vienna on June 3-4, 1961, the only subject of agreement was on a "neutral and independent" Laos, which was scarcely what Red China wanted. However, any thought of an American-Soviet rapprochement at that time died when the Berlin Wall went up two months later on August 12, and the city was cut in two. Regardless of the quarrel between the two Communist giants, the West was still their enemy. In their separate ways, they did what they could to help the Algerian rebels win their freedom from France. And they dabbled recklessly in the Congo civil war despite UN armed intervention to put down the Katanga insurrection, an effort that brought death to Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold in a 1961 Rhodesian plane crash. The American press, therefore, was far from satisfied to leam its news of Red China at second hand, either from the correspondents' outpost at Hong Kong or from British, French, Canadian, and Indian cor-

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respondents in Peking.* There were some in government, notably Carl T. Rowan while he served as an Assistant Secretary of State, who viewed the whole debate over "the public's right to know" as "the fourth estate's right to make a buck." 70 It wasn't quite that simple. A mass public was scarcely likely to overwhelm the newspapers with patronage for news out of Red China from the source. Homer Bigart, after weary months of covering the frustrating war in Viet Nam for the New York Times, seemed closer to the truth when he gave a correspondent's frontline view: "I am sick of it." 7 1 It was a hardy American who ventured to buck the system and go to the root of the Asian unrest. One was John Strohm, an agricultural writer, who obtained the necessary clearances and toured Red China, later writing a mild series of articles for Newspaper Enterprise Association. The other was the veteran, Edgar Snow, who went back to Peking in i960 after Gardner Cowles, the publisher of Look, had interceded for him with the State Department and helped him obtain a visa. Mao Tse-tung's first Western biographer came out with some articles, a book, and a warning that Red China would "seek no exchange of correspondents unless the United States reconsidered its Taiwan policy." 72 And there the matter rested until the end of 1962, when Red China suddenly smashed the Indian army along its border, showed how easily its troops could penetrate Indian soil, and then withdrew. It was a pointed warning to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru not to press his border arguments to the point of war, as he had against the less powerful Pakistanis in Kashmir. The handful of American correspondents in India could only look on in frustration. An even graver crisis of confidence in the relations between press and government in the United States developed coincidentally during this period over the Cuban story. Once again, as in the events leading up to the Spanish-American War sixty years before, the enterprise of a newspaper correspondent played a major role. This time, however, the principal actor was no sensational journalist like James Creelman or matinee idol war correspondent like Richard Harding Davis, but a spare, rugged, and dedicated 57-year-old journalist, Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times. At a time when Fidel Castro was just a beleaguered rebel who was believed to have been killed in the wilds of Cuba's Sierra * There are now thirty correspondents in Peking, of whom only two, Reuters and Agence France-Presse, represent Western media.

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Maestra, Matthews eluded censors and Dictator Fulgencio Batista's soldiers to reach Castro, interview him, and make him an international figure. Long afterward, Matthews wrote, "It was an accident that my interview with Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra on February 17, 1957, should have proved so important. There was a story to be got, a censorship to be broken. I got it and I did it—and it so happens that neither Cuba nor the United States is going to be the same again." 73 An older journalist, out of completely different motives, had said sixty years before on the battlefield at El Caney, "Wasn't it a splendid fight? We must beat every paper in the world."74 There were inevitable consequences when a journalist fell in love with a story, whether he happened to be William Randolph Hearst or Herbert L. Matthews. Although they were opposite in the extreme, neither was dealt with kindly for what they did to Cuba—and what Cuba did to them. At the time of the Matthews interview, Castro had only eighteen men under arms with him in the Sierra Maestra. He was almost surrounded by Batista's troops and in momentary danger of extinction. His only previous revolutionary experience had been his unsuccessful attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953, from which his movement had taken its name. He was not well armed and had very slender funds. His resources were an idea, a cause, a talent for guerrilla warfare, and a lot of stupid opponents.75 "Fidel Castro, the rebel leader of Cuba's youth, is alive and fighting hard and successfully in the rugged, almost impenetrable fastnesses of the Sierra Maestra, at the southern tip of the island," Matthews wrote in his first story, published in the Times on February 24, 1957. "President Fulgencio Batista has the cream of his army around the area, but the Army men are fighting a thus-far losing battle to destroy the most dangerous enemy General Batista has yet faced in a long and adventurous career as a Cuban leader and dictator. "This is the first sure news that Fidel Castro is still alive and still in Cuba. No one connected with the outside world, let alone with the press, has seen Senor Castro except this writer. No one in Havana, not even at the United States Embassy with all its resources for getting information, will know until this report is published that Fidel Castro is really in the Sierra Maestra." The story was built almost entirely on the theme of adventure— Castro's guerrilla battle against overwhelming odds and Matthews's

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hazardous journey to find him. It was in an older journalistic tradition, made famous by Forbes and MacGahan and Henry Morton Stanley. Here was Matthews's first impression of Castro: "Castro is a great talker. His brown eyes flash; his intense face is pushed close to the listener and the whispering voice, as in a stage play, lends a vivid sense of drama. " 'We have been fighting for seventy-nine days now and are stronger than ever,' Senor Castro said. 'The soldiers are fighting badly; their morale is low and ours could not be higher. We are killing many, but when we take prisoners they are never shot. We question them, talk kindly to them, take their arms and equipment and then set them free. . . . " 'The Cuban people hear on the radio all about Algeria, but they never hear a word about us or read a word, thanks to the censorship. You will be the first to tell them. I have followers all over the island. All the best elements, especially all the youth, are with us. The Cuban peope will stand anything but oppression.' " 76 The Cuban regime called the interview a fake. The Times replied by publishing a dark but clear picture of Matthews with Castro. The American ambassador, Arthur Gardner, was displeased. Matthews's dispatches, which criticized the ambassador's friendship for Batista, eventually were believed to have been a factor in his replacement by Earl E. T. Smith. Nor was Matthews alone in his views of the state of American diplomacy in Cuba. Jules Dubois of the Chicago Tribune wrote on March 21, 1958: "Cuban public opinion, although throttled by the most severe censorship ever exercised by Batista, is outspoken against the United States . . . [Ambassador] Smith is branded as worse than his predecessor, Arthur Gardner." 77 Castro's press in the United States was generally favorable in this period, although it was soon to turn against him. A few did picture him as a Communist or one likely to be taken over by Communists, among them Joseph Martin and Philip Santora of the New York Daily News, who had also correctly predicted his rise to power. But even though his brother, Raul Castro, and his principal tactician, the Argentine physician Ernesto (Che) Guevara, were even then in the Communist camp, few worried about the exuberant Fidel. He benefited primarily because anybody looked better in print than the brutal Batista. In the reporting of the Castro revolution, there were many other

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miscalculations. On April 9, 1958, when the young rebel called for a general strike and it failed, few correspondents gave him a chance to survive. On the night Batista fled from Cuba, December 31, 1958, the AP circulated a dispatch reporting that he had won the decisive battle of Santa Clara, which he lost. Next day, Castro took Havana, and Batista was in exile. Matthews himself was not always right, although he insisted that what he wrote on July 16, 1959, was true at the time: "This is not a Communist revolution in any sense of the word and there are no Communists in positions of control. . . . Premier Castro is not only not a Communist but decidedly anti-Communist." In any event, the American Society of Newspaper Editors thought enough of him as a news story to invite him to Washington and listen to him respectfully. And Jules Dubois of the Chicago Tribune, another eminent Latin American specialist, had his second thoughts about Castro only after he assumed power.78 All in all, there was ample reason for confusion about Castro, not only in the United States but also in the world press. The Soviets alone seemed sure. They took the relatively elementary line that whatever embarrassed the United States could not be too bad for their side. Two years of Castro bore out the worst fears that had been expressed about him in the United States. Accordingly, when refugee groups in New York and Florida began talking openly about an invasion of Cuba to overthrow him, they generated a certain amount of popular support. It became a story that was rather widely published in Florida, although it was not too generally believed. Correspondents who knew that Castro had an army of 250,000 men ready to oppose any invaders calculated that it would take a major effort by the United States, not just a handful of poorly armed refugees, to carry out a realistic move against him. Yet, on April 8, 1961, in New York, Jose Miro Cardona, president of the Cuban National Revolutionary Council, appealed to all Cubans to participate in "an inevitable and just war" to remove Castro. So many reports were published thereafter of an imminent invasion that President Kennedy, who had been in office then a little more than three months, announced on April 12: "There will not under any conditions be an intervention in Cuba by United States armed forces. . . . The United States government will do everything it possibly can . . . to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba."

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The President's statement did not set at rest broadcasts and news stories heavily involving the Central Intelligence Agency in the direction of the invasion preparations. The sources were Cuban exiles who, for one reason or another, were annoyed at being passed over or given subsidiary roles. No armed attack ever was quite so widely publicized in advance. But even if there had been no publicity, Castro's own agents among the Cuban exiles would have picked up the information in any case. On April 15, three old B-26 bombers made ineffectual raids on three Cuban air fields. Two days later, 1,400 Cuban exiles and a few sympathizers left Guatemala and landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba's Las Villas Province. Any correspondent in Florida who was not ready to handle the story would have been amateurish, indeed. Dozens of them were on the job, but all treated the matter with great reserve. Some had been tipped that the CIA expected a rising inside Cuba to help the invaders, but nothing of that nature happened. Instead, Castro appeared to have mobilized an effective counterattack within a short time. It wasn't long before all doubt vanished about the fate of the invaders. They were crushed. By April 20, most of them were either killed, wounded, or captured.79 Within a few days, the full story of the role of the CIA in the failure came out. The AP informed its subscribers: "The process of 'agonizing reappraisal' of the Cuban invasion has produced one of the greatest information foulups in Washington history. . . . The contradictions over the CIA's role characterized the mixup. One source said faulty intelligence from the CIA had caused the invasion's defeat; later, another said CIA did just fine but some other branch of the government fell down." 80 But the White House at no point denied the CIA's involvement, nor was it excused in a subsequent Senate inquiry. President Kennedy, annoyed by the advance publicity for the invasion, called on April 27 for some form of voluntary self-censorship by the press.81 He succeeded only in drawing a delegation of protesting editors and publishers to the White House. The dilemma in which General Marshall had found himself in 1948 now descended crushingly upon another and younger war hero. The New York Times, in an indignant editorial on May 10, summed up for the press: "A democracy . . . our democracy . . . cannot be lied to. This is one of the factors that makes it more precious, more delicate, more diffi-

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cult, and yet essentially stronger than any other form of government in the world. "The basic principle involved is that of confidence. A dictatorship can get along without an informed public opinion. A democracy cannot. Not only is it unethical to deceive one's own public as part of a system of deceiving an adversary government; it is also foolish. Our executive officers and our national legislators are elected on stated days, but actually they must be re-elected day by day by popular understanding and support. "This is what is signified by a government by consent." 82 Eighteen months later, in early October, 1962, Hal Hendrix of the Miami News published a story from his own sources that Russian military experts were building rocket bases in Cuba. The correspondent, however, could obtain no confirmation from official sources. The Kennedy administration had been stressing that it had no objections to purely defensive measures by the Castro regime, but now it took on an air of reticence about the whole business. However, on October 21, as a result of a dinner party leak the previous night, the Washington Post reported an air of crisis in the capital. The New York Times also had information that something was up but didn't publish it after a personal appeal from Ptesident Kennedy himself. The Washington press corps, however, had been alerted. It would have been a dull reporter, indeed, who could not see that there was extraordinary activity in the White House, Defense Department, and State Department. The wires were carrying reports of Army and Air Force movements towards Florida. As a climax to this activity, President Kennedy announced on the night of October 22 in a nationwide T V address that the Soviet Union was building offensive missile and bomber bases in Cuba in violation of its pledges not to do so. He ordered the imposition of a naval and air "quarantine," which was broadly interpreted as a blockade, on all further shipments of offensive military weapons to the island. In such a direct confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, the usual Congressional reaction was, "Stand by the President." The press kept digging. The Washington Post broke a story, through clever deductions and intelligent questioning of key officials, that Premier Khrushchev had sent a letter proposing to withdraw Soviet bombers from Cuba. Endre Marton of the AP disclosed that U Thant,

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the UN Secretary General, had conferred with Castro a little more than two hours after a top secret report on it had been given to top State Department officials. It became clear that the Russians were backing down, to the disadvantage of their protégé, Castro. On October 24, the Defense Department announced that some Soviet bloc ships bound for Cuba had already changed course. Eventually, on November 20, President Kennedy ordered the Cuban "quarantine" lifted. For the time being, the crisis was over.83 Once the immediate danger had been averted, the old argument of freedom versus security broke out all over again. The center of the storm was the main source of information in the Pentagon, Arthur Sylvester, a Washington correspondent who had become Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. On October 27, he instituted a system of monitoring all reporters' interviews with Defense Department officials and three days later explained bluntly, "The generation of news by actions taken by government becomes one weapon in a strained situation. The results in my opinion justify the weapons we used." 84 There was an outcry against managed news. The State Department, which had also been monitoring interviews, hastily canceled its program. The President himself had to intervene finally, explaining in a nationally televised news conference on November 20 that extreme measures would be dropped and news would "pour out" on all but sensitive matters.85 The question of what was sensitive, as always, remained unsettled. It was the government's job to decide what was secure, and the duty of the press to make certain there was no skullduggery. There the matter rested. In the West, as the cold war continued, the strain on AP, UPI, and Reuters increased. As the principal sources of foreign news outside the Iron Curtain, they were able to maintain their global coverage, but the pressures kept increasing. As the London Sunday Telegraph pointed out: "Many of the most respected governments subsidize national news agencies for propaganda purposes." 88 These subsidized agencies were stiffening the competition. Regardless of their limitations, the world news agencies in the West could be expected to continue to do everything in their power to maintain the independent coverage of foreign affairs. The policy of the AP's ninth general manager, Wes Gallagher, was as firm on this issue as that

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of his predecessor, Frank J. Starzel, whose fourteen-year term ended in 1962. As the ward of the British press, Reuters also was able to attain a more independent posture. The UPI, in its search for more revenue to sustain the independence it had always cherished, resorted for a time to a sideline that both Reuters and Havas had once practiced—a Special Services Division which undertook "a wide variety of assignments" for both foreign and domestic clients including public relations firms. INS, as an independent service, had done the same thing.87 The whole system of independent foreign correspondence, in summation, was being squeezed between rising costs, the increasing drive of all governments for security, and the manifold threats of new methods of censorship and control. Drew Middleton, the veteran foreign correspondent for the AP and later the New York Times, commented sadly as he watched the trend in the United States: "In a country that is sold on security and 'togetherness,' the reporter represents an attitude which increasingly is deemed old-fashioned. He is an individualist working by himself and for abstractions he seldom puts into print." 88 Sanche de Gramont, a French count who won a Pulitzer Prize while working for the New York Herald Tribune, was such a reporter. In the Congo, he nearly lost his life when he was accidently shot by United Nations troops. The broadening of the atomic age into space could not change the essential nature of the reporter. He went where the news was —danger or not. 5. T H E C O N Q U E S T O F S P A C E A giant rocket roared from the Soviet launching site at Baikonur in desolate Kazakhstan at 9:07 a.m., Moscow time, on April 12, 1961. Within minutes, it hurled a spacecraft, approximately 12 by 20 feet in size, into orbit more than 100 miles from the earth at a speed of more than 17,000 miles an hour. The spacecraft was the Vostok I (meaning East). It bore, as its pilot, Major Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, a 27-yearold member of the Soviet Air Force. The operation was a secret, kept without the slightest difficulty in a closed society, until fifty-five minutes later. Then, with a flourish, Moscow Radio broke the story that the Soviet Union had shot the first man into space. The foreign correspondents all began writing their stories in Moscow, picking up the official Soviet accounts for lack of any other

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source. They did not expect to be taken to the secret launching site, nor were they. But they also had no competition from Russian television. Fifty-three minutes after the first announcement, while the correspondents were still struggling with their first stories, Major Gagarin landed safely. It was a triumph for Soviet prestige. "Let the whole world see what our country is capable of," thundered Premier Khrushchev.89 That first experience in space coverage in Moscow was matched on August 6,1961, with Major Gherman S. Titov's seventeen-orbit journey. Once again, it was just another glorified rewrite job in Moscow for the foreign correspondents. They used the official handouts to compare Gagarin's single-orbit trip of 108 minutes with Titov's flight of 25 hours, 18 minutes, both greatly exceeding the two American sub-orbital flights that had been made up to that time. As in the case of Gagarin, the only "live" coverage was the Moscow reception for Titov. The first American orbital flight of Lieutenant Colonel John H. Glenn Jr., on February 20, 1962, from Cape Canaveral, Fla., took place under entirely different circumstances. Hundreds of correspondents, including many from foreign countries, came to the Florida beaches early in February and saw almost everything that went on, noted the delays and the difficulties, and talked with both Glenn and those in charge of his flight. From the blast-off until the recovery of the Friendship VII capsule in the Atlantic near the Bahamas, the wire service and newspaper correspondents were in constant touch with everything that was going on. They sent flashes, bulletins, reams of copy, the AP output alone being 50,000 words, and accompanied it with wirephoto pictures that went all over the world. But to the dismay and even the chagrin of the press, it was the all-seeing eye of television that took over the direct coverage of the story. For this kind of story, which so largely told itself, television could not be beaten for sheer drama and instantaneous coverage. Television caught the blast-off and all the events that led up to it, the crucial minutes when the rocket soared into space, the announcement that Glenn and his capsule were in orbit. Then, throughout the four hours and fifty-six minutes of his three-orbit journey, television and radio poured out the story, attracting enormous crowds in public places where sets were available.90 They were first, too, with the news of the landing and capsule recovery, and their pictures and their words were relayed around the world wherever they could be shown and heard.

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The newspaper coverage, particularly in the great newspapers in the United States and abroad, was as complete and colorful as the public had any right to expect. Only the printed word could provide such thorough background and explanation of what was, without doubt, the most complex scientific story that had been placed before the public since Hiroshima. Yet, with the coverage of the Glenn flight, electronic journalism came into its own. The romantic foreign correspondent of old, who had roamed the jungles and the mountain heights and deserts and brought back exciting news after months of hardship, was now gone almost beyond recall. Science had short-circuited him. When Commander Scott Carpenter virtually duplicated the Glenn three-orbit flight from Cape Canaveral on May 24, 1962, under the same reportorial conditions, one commentator remarked, "It was hardly a newspaper story at all." The newspaper correspondents, who had managed to survive the competition of radio for thirty years, still kept on doing the same job in the same way. Outmatched by electronic journalism though they were, their work boosted street sales of newspapers in major American cities. In New York, one newspaper sold 80,000 more copies on the day of the Glenn flight, 40,000 more for Carpenter. There were increases of 26,000 for a Chicago newspaper, 25,000 for one in Philadelphia, 20,000 for another in San Francisco. That was comforting but scarcely reassuring for an industry that had become scientifically archaic.91 The next step for TV was the beginning of a global space communication system. It came during the summer of 1962 when NASA sent Telstar, a 34Vi-inch communications satellite, into orbit from Cape Canaveral for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which paid the costs. It ranked, said William L. Laurence in the New York Times, "with the transmission of the first telegraph message by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1844, the laying of the first Atlantic cable in 1858, and the sending of the first radio signal across the Atlantic in 1901." 92 And yet, for the first "live" news program from Europe to the United States, David Brinkley faced the NBC-TV cameras in Paris and announced rather sheepishly, in saluting a great scientific achievement, that there was no news of moment to transmit. Man's speed of communication had, for the time being, outstripped his ability to gather news. But there was entertainment, of a sort. On the night of July 23, more than 100,000,000 people in the United States and Europe witnessed a "live" ex-

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change of 20-minute T V shows—the Statue of Liberty being a U.S. contribution and Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower coming from Europe.93 T V had the method. The substance had to be provided. The foreign press covered the next two Russians in the same way as always from Moscow—the four days and nights in orbit by Major Andrian Nikolayev beginning August 1 1 , 1962, and the three days of Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Popovich beginning the following day. The Russians made T V pictures available. The foreign corespondents did their usual rewrite job from the official Soviet sources. By contrast, there was record coverage of the next two flights from Cape Canaveral—Commander Walter Schirra's six orbits on October 3 and Major Gordon Cooper's 22 orbits on May 15-16, 1963. The T V and radio networks had 400 persons at the Cape and spent $1,000,000, while the wire services sent about 50 representatives and the newspapers still less. For the Cooper flight, more than 700 reporters were accredited. The Russians loosened up in this celestial contest for prestige during the 81 orbits of Lieutenant Colonel Valery F. Bykovsky and the 48 orbits of Junior Lieutenant Valentina V . Tereshkova, ending June 19, 1963. They permitted selected Soviet reporters to view takeoff and recovery and pumped up T V pictures of both astronauts in flight. For Earl Ubell, the science editor of the New York Herald Tribune, the threat of T V seemed more compelling than the achievements of the Russians. Pointing to the dominance of T V at Cape Canaveral, he wrote: "The T V pooled resources enable them to prepare for a flight in a way that would be impossible for individual newspapers. . . . How are the newspapers going to keep up to the minute information on a fourteen day flight to the moon? Will they depend somehow on government? Or will they watch T V ? " 94 While the colorful space competition held the forefront of public attention, the trained diplomatic correspondents of the major newspapers and wire services in the West carried on coverage of the difficult and unpopular East-West negotiations to achieve atomic control and regulation and reduction of armaments. The public seemed to want to ignore the hard fact that rockets capable of boosting people into orbit for prolonged periods could also deliver atomic warheads to any part of the earth, with a death toll of 80,000,000 to 100,000,000 in a large nation. It continued, therefore, to be the task of the responsible press to assign competent and highly trained correspondents to this forbid-

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ding subject. They did not have the glamor of TV or the excitement of a space shot to focus public attention on their work. Theirs was the responsibility of obliging editors to publish material that was complicated and not at all easy for an indifferent public to grasp. It had to be done by abandoning the familiar cliches of journalism in favor of the care and the art of the superior historian. For thirty-four months, beginning with the opening of negotiations for a treaty prohibiting nuclear tests in the fall of 1958, the correspondents were able to hold out some hope. That was the period of the atomic testing moratorium which the United States, Russia, and Britain observed. The Soviet Union suddenly resumed testing in September, 1961, and in November rejected the theory of international inspection, upon which the West insisted. At that time the French were on their way to becoming an atomic power, the Chinese Communists were known to be on the way to producing their own atomic device, and a dozen other countries had the know-how. The conclusion was inescapable that an atomic accord and some progress toward disarmament had to be made if the world hoped to escape the holocaust of a nuclear war. John Hightower, the diplomatic correspondent of the AP, wrote on March 1,1963, at a particularly difficult time in the atomic talks, "More than a test ban is involved. A treaty to end atomic testing with all that it would entail in the way of inspection procedures and the potential growth of confidence and cooperation is widely regarded as the opening wedge for a general disarmament program."96 Three months later, in response to a question from Hightower, Secretary of State Dean Rusk agreed with his view, then went on to emphasize the American insistence on ending atmospheric testing as a first step. "We will continue to gnaw away at this, Mr. Hightower," the Secretary said." The gnawing was successful. The limited test ban treaty was signed. But the gnawing process was not one for which either TV or radio or mass circulation newspapers had any enthusiasm. By default, therefore, a few great newspapers and the wire services were left with this most vital of all the news situations of our time. On such an assignment, no correspondent was a "foreign" correspondent. The term was outdated. Those who wrote about the painfully long, detailed, and gloomy conferences on which the fate of civilization rested could not escape the feeling that they addressed the whole world. They had to

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live with their problem and do the best they could. No electronic device such as Telstar would bring their stories to them, neatly tailored in minute-long packages between patent drug commercials, and no world statesman would be able to exert his magic to bring about a sudden, easy, and simple solution. This was a story for a lifetime.

XII: Tomorrow's Foreign Correspondents 1. T H E S T A T E O F T H E

ART

T h e masters of Western statecraft today generally grant professional foreign correspondents the same status as a brass band at a Chinese funeral. T h e diplomats agree, of course, that correspondents are necessary. But like the Chinese mourners who trudge along to the blare of "Auld Lang Syne," many a statesman is somewhat unnerved by the whole business. They believe it overdone. They don't like all the noise. If they dared fly against custom and public sentiment, they would try to work out some agreeable regulations. Failing that, they strenuously object to the enthusiasm with which the correspondents so often proceed with the burial of outworn policies and/or statesmen. T h e correspondents, who are understandably not impressed by such views, have troubles of their own that only compound the difficulties of awakening the interest of a mass public in international affairs. In much of their work, whether routine or not, they are bedeviled by sharply rising costs, savage competition, increasing censorship in many guises, and obstacles that are deliberately raised by a large number of new nations and some older ones as well. The worst of these, in the correspondents' view, is the increasing tendency in the West, for all its liberal tradition, to look upon news and those who deal in it as tools of national and international policy. After a century and a half of independent foreign reporting, no correspondent of integrity is likely to be flattered by a governmental proposal to use him as a hammer, saw, or knife, however noble the purpose. There are disheartening thrusts from other directions. T h e public opinion polls drum away at the comparatively small global-minded audi'

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ence for all but crisis foreign news. Editors of even the better papers demand articles on the most delicate and confused situations that will make sense to the average reader. The intellectuals, horrified as a result, declaim against simplified writing and thinking on international affairs, holding that they alone are a sufficient audience. In consequence, no foreign correspondent is in the process of becoming a millionaire by reason of the overwhelming demand for his writings in the press. The wage offerings, although improved, continue to be modest. All this points up what probably was an inevitable decline in the personal influence of most foreign correspondents, once their golden age ended. A younger China hand, meditating on that era, once remarked sourly that the coming of Marconi made it possible for anybody to be a foreign correspondent. In any event, a cabinet minister's hand no longer trembles when he picks up the Times of London to turn to its foreign dispatches. A king does not halt a palace coup and hurry to the telephone because he hears an Associated Press man is on the wire. The William Howard Russells, Richard Harding Davises, Ernie Pyles, and Edward R. Murrows can never be replaced. In fact, if journalism were a logical profession, the foreign correspondent would be on his way to join the knight in armor and the cavalryman as romantic relics of a bygone day, leaving the mechanics to be conducted by the wire services. But that is not to be his fate. Despite all the discouraging factors, more major newsgathering organizations are putting their own foreign correspondents in the field. With a few more U.S. media represented abroad, there has been a modest increase in the total number of American citizens who are foreign correspondents and a substantial gain in the total number of foreign nationals who work for American newsgathering organizations. At the beginning of 1964, it was safe to say that American news media had more foreign correspondents at permanent posts abroad than at any other time since the end of World War II. Even more important, since it represents a new trend, there was constant movement of Americans from home offices or Washington toward every foreign crisis centers as short-term observers.1 More European, Japanese, and Indian media, at the same time, were maintaining their own special coverage of the United States instead of depending wholly on the agencies. The Japanese, for example, had fifty correspondents in the United States in 1964, more than any other nationality except the British, with eighty-eight. Moreover, every major

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paper in India—perhaps a dozen in all—either had a correspondent in the United States or was planning to send one. That, too, marked a change.2 All the information on the public's appraisal of foreign correspondence was by no means as dismal as it once had seemed. During the 114day New York newspaper strike in 1962-63, a total of 70.9 percent socalled hard-core readers reported they missed international news "very much." Among readers with shifting attitudes, 58.1 percent in one category and 44.7 in another gave the same reply. One explanation was: " T V is very brief on foreign affairs." And another: "A newspaper is my way of knowing what is going on in the world." 3 No realist could use such things to discount the prevailing public apathy toward foreign correspondence, however, although they did show that public attitudes could be changed. There was one other patch of brightness in the bleak world scene. That was the well-nigh universal conclusion of experienced newsmen that the powerful agencies of the Communist world, Tass and the New China News Agency (Hsin Hua), had failed thus far to make substantial progress in vending their services outside their own respective orbits. The propaganda content of their file continued to make them unattractive, even as giveaways, to all but the Communist faithful and those who either could be frightened or bought. Yet, even here, reservations could be noted, for both the Soviet and Chinese Communist agencies were strenuously attempting to copy Western agency procedures with some success. Consequently, no realistic journalist, particularly in Asia, was willing to write them off as competitors for tomorrow. They, of course, had no economic problems as the strong propaganda arms of their respective regimes, and their work, with particular reference to Red China, had to be picked up by Western agencies and correspondents as authoritative voices of their respective governments. These hard and sometimes melancholy reflections on the state of foreign correspondence today are based on a tour of many of the world's principal news centers during late 1963 and early 1964, which helped sharpen the ideas derived from years of personal experience. The centers included London, Paris, Rome, Karachi, New Delhi, Bangkok, Taipei, Manila, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Tokyo. In each, news executives and correspondents of many nationalities

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were interviewed on their problems, their needs, their hopes, and their aspirations. Out of these disparate views, and similar discussions in New York and Washington both before and after the trip abroad, my own independent conclusions emerged and are set down here. I tax no others with responsibility for them and hold in confidence the opinions that were given to me on that basis.

2. THE MULTITUDE T h e jet planes that have annihilated distance now bring swarms of correspondents to any major break on the world's news fronts within a matter of hours, and the new electronic communications marvels insure quick transmission, although at relatively high cost. But a piece of wire, a beam of electrons, and some machinery, no matter how ingenious, have never yet covered a story. Before anything can be sent, some correspondent with the understanding of a Grotius and the physique of a long-distance runner must thread his way through the crowd, get at the news, understand it, write it, and hand it to the operator. It is not difficult to understand, therefore, why the public believes that so much of our foreign reporting today resembles an unrehearsed mob scene in a Grade B movie. This impression is not confined to the United States by any means. T h e unfavorable image of the mass correspondent exists, too, in Britain and Western Europe, in Japan and India, and doubtlessly in a number of other places. T h e Communist press, having no bothersome tradition of press freedom, merely looks on and registers sardonic comment from time to time, reaping a certain amount of propaganda benefit. T h e public's notion is, of course, grievously unfair to the serious professional correspondents of all nations who provide the world outside the Iron Curtain with the bulk of its international news. But it is not based on fancy. Let there be a summit meeting, a Cape Kennedy space shot, or a grand tour by president, pope, or queen, an emergency session of the United Nations, or a sally by a Soviet potentate into the unfriendly West, and the correspondents pour in by the hundreds. No correspondent who has ever labored in such a strained situation can forget his angry first impression that most of the newcomers were phonies, that their credentials were wangled from careless or conniving

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news organizations, that they didn't file every five minutes and should therefore be barred. But on closer examination, in such instances, the so-called phonies turned out to be perfectly respectable and professional foreigners representing the major papers and other services of smaller countries, the correspondents of prestige weeklies or monthlies, and the indefatigable; radio correspondents. Whether they were alone in a country, or part of a small global team, it would have been difficult to bar any of them. The nature of the problem may be illustrated graphically by examining the foreign correspondent force registered at the United Nations. To obtain accreditation, it is necessary not only to have a letter from the managing editor of a responsible newsgathering organization, but also to be scrutinized by the wise and experienced professionals who run the UN's press section. In normal periods when there is no crisis atmosphere at the green glass house on New York's East River, a total correspondent force of anywhere from forty to fifty does the global news work. But when there is an emergency, some 500 or more correspondents, at least half of them non-U.S. correspondents, show up with their valid accreditations and demand entry to the limited press space. The United Nations, accordingly, sets up a system of priorities, with wire services and major dailies, T V and radio, talcing precedence, and the smaller papers last. At its greatest emergencies during the Suez crisis and the Khrushchev visit, the United Nations had to screen out correspondents in accordance with the circulation of their newspapers,4 the lowest receiving least attention. At fixed spots, such as presidential news conferences in the United States and appearances of other national leaders in places where the news media can be controlled, similar procedures are routine when attendance must be limited for any reason. But where no control is possible, the very size of the correspondents' corps and the fast movement of the principals in the news make for complete chaos. This situation was not created overnight. It is true that there were some like Herbert Brucker who during his term as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors blamed much of the overcoverage on the growth of the electronic media. Certainly, the development of both radio and T V created complications. But long before the birth of world broadcasting, diplomats at Versailles bitterly attacked the work of the press. And in the 1920s, in the United States, foreign com-

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mentators were accustomed to reflect ungraciously on the unique ability of the American press to fall all over itself while covering such celebrated trials as the Hall-Mills and Snyder-Grey cases. In 1935, before T V , there were international complaints against the press for the circuslike nature of the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann in Flemington, N.J., for the kidnap-murder of the Lindbergh baby. The issue was muted during World War II. There was more than enough work to keep thousands of correspondents busy, and the public wanted all the news it could get. But shortly thereafter, the press's foreign legion once more stirred up angry debate. At every international conference of moment after V-J Day, the spectacle of mass coverage sorely troubled diplomats, editors, and thoughtful correspondents alike. Then, in 1959, during Soviet Premier Khrushchev's tour of the United States, the so-called Battle of Coon Rapids brought the issue to a head. That was at the Roswell Garst farm in Iowa, which the Soviet leader visited at the head of a mob of correspondents, photographers, and technicians. In the aftermath of that garish exhibition, James Reston of the New York Times wrote, "We didn't cover the Khrushchev story, we smothered it. We created the atmosphere of hysteria. We were not the observers of history, we were the creators of history." 8 The AP sounded out its members at that time on whether some limitation should be imposed on correspondents, but the returns were inconclusive. The debate flared again after President Eisenhower's 22,000-mile good will tour of Asia. Robert W . Richards of the Copley Press commented sourly: "Our part of the trip was herd journalism at its worst. . . . It's stupid, ridiculous and isn't worth it. The job should be left to the wire services." 8 At the Kennedy-Khrushchev meeting in Vienna in 1961, the confusion became pandemonium. "Perhaps," the AP reported, "the meeting was designed to ease the nerves of a jittery world. It did little for the nerves of jittery newsmen. The joint news conference was a study in babel: Too many questions, not enough answers. Picture 1,500 newsmen all trying to ask questions in a score of languages, simultaneous translation, a la United Nations. . . . The confusion was terrific."7 However, no method was developed for a limitation on correspondents. Then came the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The correspondents were the eyes and ears of the

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world that tragic day. What they did and what they wrote, in a magnificent display of journalism under pressure, helped piece together the murder of John F. Kennedy for a stricken nation and showed the rest of the world that it was closing ranks behind Lyndon B. Johnson, his successor. The period during which the news agencies and newspapers, the news magazines, the T V and radio stations poured out the story in the United States sent a thrill of sorrow and compassion around the world. It brought a Pulitzer Prize to Merriman Smith of UPI. The kings and the dictators and the democratic leaders all heard the news first from him and his fellow correspondents in Dallas, as did the humblest citizens. Halfway around the world, outside Madras, an unlettered Indian sweeper woman asked her employer in wonderment, "Is it true that the King of America has been killed?" Yet, there was criticism of the role of the press as well as praise. When Lee Oswald was led manacled before the T V cameras as the alleged slayer and himself was shot and killed before 40,000,000 witnesses by Jack Ruby, the proprietor of a strip-tease emporium, the New York Times wrote: "The Dallas authorities, abetted and encouraged by the newspaper, T V and radio press, trampled on every principle of justice in their handling of Lee H. Oswald." To which the Dallas Times Herald added that the police made the second murder possible by accommodating the press in announcing the hour for Oswald's transfer. Nevertheless, on March 14, 1964, when Ruby was convicted and sentenced to death in Dallas, the proceedings were on T V . "It will be a long time," Brucker wrote, "before the full story of what happened in Dallas is told. But there seems little doubt that T V and the press must bear a share of the blame." Again, Brucker raised the cry for pool coverage on a limited scale but, for all his eloquence, he did not rally many from the profession itself to his side. This was not so much because of any presumed invasion of the rights of a free press; rather, as it was put by Wes Gallagher, general manager of the AP, a pool could very well result "in hundreds of newspapers depending on the reportorial skills of Joe Glotz of the Toonerville Blatt. This is not the type of service the members of the AP should receive." Granting the "priceless values" of unrestricted news coverage, Brucker pleaded nevertheless, "But why should that mean also that we must allow regiments of reporters, photographers, broadcasters and their camp

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followers to multiply without limit or purpose? They all see the same thing. And all they do is get in each others' way, if indeed they do not distort or besmirch the event whose independent course they are supposed to chronicle. "Publishing an infinite variety of news and views is one thing. A thousand eyes on a single event is another. Just how many lads does it take to watch one rat hole?" 8 If there had been a great revulsion against herd journalism, it would have come early in 1964 when Pope Paul V I was trapped in a screeching mob in the Old City of Jerusalem, partly because the Jordanian authorities failed to provide security, partly because there were too many journalists, real and fancied. But the Pontiff made no protest at the time, nor did any move to limit correspondents gain many supporters. As Milton Bracker wrote in the New York Times just a short time before his death: "The symbolism of where the Pope was, and what he did, as recorded by T V , radio, tape recorder, color camera and typewriter was more important than the degree of serene piety he was able to attain while doing it. . . . It is now unmistakably apparent to millions of people around the world, including many to whom the Pope was a vague figure . . . that he is actually one of the most important human beings on earth." 9 There is bound to be a further increase in the numbers of correspondents. That means there will be more incidents, more protests, more pressures for self-regulation by the press under threat of some more arbitrary intrusion. It is possible, of course, that some more responsible system may be worked out on a trial-and-error basis. In the United States, at such a major event as the presidential election night of 1964, wire services, newspapers, and television joined forces to obtain the voting results, enabling T V to concentrate on the immediate news and the press to put its major effort on detail and analysis. Some such division of labor and responsibility, arrived at through sheer necessity, will be required if the problem of the multitude is to be resolved. Herd journalism has reached such a hopeless state of confusion abroad that it is nothing more nor less than an international disgrace. Some form of regulation, voluntary or not, is bound to come by public insistence if for no other reason.

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3. THE MISSING FACTOR The foreign news editor of the New York Times, Emanuel R. Freedman, once asked a dozen journalism graduate students where they would want to be assigned if they worked for him. With one exception, the youngsters chose London or Paris. The nonconformist, a trenchcoat type, bravely chose a supposedly wild and uncivilized area, Hong Kong. Freedman, having piloted his staff into a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting, wasted no time explaining the missing factor in the calculations of the would-be correspondents. He needed no correspondents in London, Paris, or Hong Kong. "Where we do need young correspondents of good health, energy, and ability," he went on, "is in Africa, particularly sub-Sahara Africa and East Africa. That is where a great deal of news will be made from now on, and we want good people, trained people, to cover it. Also, we need more young and active correspondents in Southeast Asia. We want good people, too, who are trained to appreciate the growth of India and Pakistan, and we look just as hard for specialists in Latin America. But they must be trained journalists first." He was asked about the linguistic qualifications of correspondents of the future and set back his auditors once again. "It is all very well to cultivate an expert knowledge of Spanish, French, and German," he replied, "but to some Russian will be more useful. And to young people who want to get on as foreign correspondents, I'd say that it was important to learn such languages as Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, and Swahili. We can't cover the world from Washington, London, Paris, and Hong Kong, and our correspondents can't go on not knowing languages that are spoken by far more people than there are in any country in Europe except Russia." 10 Slowly the global news network is being extended to cover the missing factor in international correspondence. It may take years to right the imbalance, costs being what they are and journalistic budgetary efficiency being in short supply. While all newsgathering organizations jealously guard their profit-and-loss sheets, it is scarcely a secret that some American managers pay as high as $50,000 a year to maintain a correspondent abroad while others do a more modest job for $18,000. These figures do not include transmission costs of messages and articles.

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Some foreign newsgathering organizations claim to be able to cover the United States at $15,000 a year per correspondent, with transmission costs extra, but some kind of subsidy is probably involved. The figure given by a first-rate Indian newspaper manager, who said he had to spend $25,000 a year to maintain an American correspondent before even a single message was sent, is undoubtedly more realistic.11 The wire services, being able to concentrate their staffs and arrange for less movement per correspondent, have the lowest individual costs. If there is any single factor that encourages the transmission of news from the world's underdeveloped areas, it is the British penny-a-word rate, formerly known as the "Empire Rate," which is available to any bona fide correspondent transmitting press messages from one part of the Commonwealth to another. On October 1, 1941, on the initiative of Brendan Bracken, then Minister of Information, the rate was set to stimulate maximum news exchanges between Commonwealth nations during World War II. Cable & Wireless Ltd., by 1945, was handling 2,000,000 words a week of press material. Six years later, the file was down to 500,000 words a week, but even this was 136 percent more than the prewar total. The extent to which foreign reporting between Commonwealth countries has increased since is shown in the 1,320,000 words a week of press material that were handled at Commonwealth Rates in the twelve months ending in April, 1963. The totals were issued by the British Post Office Overseas Telegraph Services at Electra House, London, now the operative agency. Few seriously believe that the Commonwealth Rate is economically feasible, particularly with the coming of the trans-Atlantic and transPacific telephone cables, and the expanded microwave system for overland transmission. These new links, with their manifold channels for the transmission of messages and pictures and teletypesetter tapes at rates of up to 1,000 words a minute, have greatly reduced disruption of service. While the radio communications satellites eventually may be a challenge, the cables operated by multinational agencies have come to stay.12 And although they are efficient, they are also expensive. Thus, it may fairly be said that all the wire services benefit from the Commonwealth Rate. Reuters may be aided more than the others because much of its traffic is between Commonwealth countries. But Agence France-Presse routes its Far Eastern service from India and Singapore through London, then back to Paris, in order to take ad-

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vantage of the penny-a-word rate where it does not have radio teletype service which is paid for on a time basis. The American agencies and newspapers do much the same thing where it is to their advantage. Press Wireless, Inc., an American cooperative that is privately operated, also reduces the transmission costs to its members, which include the most powerful organizations engaged in the dissemination of international news. And the International Telecommunications Union, a specialized agency of the United Nations, exists for the purpose of trying to equalize transmission rates, press and others, a process that has made comparatively little headway in recent years. If correspondence in the world's underdeveloped areas is to be substantially increased, some international arrangement similar to the Commonwealth Rate will be necessary. Those who are familiar with the operation of the British arrangement have speculated, for example, on whether there could be a NATO Rate, binding together the nations of the Atlantic alliance, or a SEATO Rate for Asia. It would take something like this to make correspondence between African nations and Asian nations more practical for more newspapers. As the matter now stands, such agencies as Reuters are handling the bulk of the traffic between African nations south of the Sahara, and all four global agencies are fighting for a share of the business in Asia and Latin America as well. The distribution of correspondents for American news media on a global basis in 1963 illustrates the problem in general, since they are the most prosperous and therefore able to maintain the largest group outside their own borders. A recent census taken in eighty-four countries by John Wilhelm, director of McGraw-Hill World News, gave these totals: OVERSEAS CORRESPONDENTS FOR U . S .

Area

MEDIA

1963

US. citizens

Local or other nationals

Total

Asia and Australia Europe Middle East Africa Latin America

109 285 17 20 84

146 341 47 39 145

255 626 64 59 229

World Totals

515

718

1,233*

* Of this total, 310 are listed as stringers. Since there are literally thousands of stringers, these presumably are the ones who were considered by the checkers to be more or less permanently employed and file at regular intervals. J. H.

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Wilhelm's total appeared to be more realistic than some of the previous efforts at such a census, although he couldn't please everybody. Admittedly, he failed to list some correspondents. He was also too charitable in extending his definition of a foreign correspondent to some part-timers, stringers, and free-lancers. And he was ungenerous to the wire services and the New York Times, which in 1964 still maintained the best foreign service in the world.13 Without underwriting every figure in his survey, an independent check indicated that he had at least outlined the main trends in the growth of the work of American news media abroad. London was still the leading news center overseas, with a listing of 183 correspondents, 73 of them Americans. Paris, Rome, West Germany, and Brussels all were reasonably well covered in Europe. In Moscow, there were 16 correspondents for American news media. By contrast in the Far East, only Tokyo and Hong Kong rivaled the European news centers. India, Pakistan, and Indonesia all were underrepresented, as was much of the rest of the world. The dictates of national pride, plus the undoubtedly more economical operation, were the chief factors in the very large engagement of nonAmerican citizens by the American news media, particularly the wire services. At the home office of Reuters in London, seventeen nationalities were represented in the editorial department in 1964, and there were almost as many in the home office of the French news agency. By and large, the trend toward the internationalization of the global news agencies, in personnel as well as in service, had been long overdue. It was brought about by sheer necessity. As far as American newspapers were concerned, American correspondents still predominated in the mid-6os. The main reason for the gain in American foreign coverage was the establishment of new foreign services and combinations of older ones. Among the newcomers was the combined Washington Post-Los Angeles Times service and the Copley Press service. The older New York Herald Tribune and Chicago Daily News services also effected a working combination. There was growth, too, in the staffs of the three national TV-radio chains, NBC, CBS, and ABC, and spot foreign coverage by Westinghouse radio. The news weeklies all broadened their foreign staffs, with

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Time-Life as the leader by far. The specialized staffs, including those of the Wall Street journal, McGraw-Hill, and Fairchild, also gained. Smaller syndicates were in operation, such as North American Newspaper Alliance, while the Patriot-Ledger of Quincy, Mass., was running a foreign background service for small papers known as "the poor man's New York Times foreign service." Among the papers that maintained foreign specialists in the home office, ready for service where needed, were the Miami Herald and Miami News in Florida, the St. Louis PostDispatch, and others. It was one way to beat the cost of a permanent foreign service.14 Such pressures resulted in gains in Latin American coverage in the mid-6os. Fourteen new bureaus were established by U.S. media alone in Latin America, notably in Mexico City, Rio de Janiero, and Buenos Aires. Reuters joined the other three global agencies in opening a special service to Latin America. The Latin American journalists themselves began moving at a faster rate to cover their own continent. Yet, there and elsewhere, the bare spots—the missing factors—continued to trouble every thoughtful and discerning editor. They were doing what they could with available resources, but they knew it wasn't enough. Great stretches of Africa and Asia, in particular, were still without representation in the world's news network. And in a country as important to the United States as the Republic of Korea, where 55,000 American troops still remained after an uneasy ten-year truce, not a single U.S. national was permanently assigned. While the Korean correspondents in the area were first-rate, the great concern about nonAmerican correspondents there and elsewhere was over the possibility that they could be put under pressure by their governments in time of crisis. The answer from the agencies was what it always has been, "We can get men in there in two hours, if necessary." 15 Impressive though the gains were, they did not cancel out the reality that the great bulk of foreign news was still brought into the United States by the wire services, principally UPI and AP with Reuters maintaining a foothold. After that came the newspapers—the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune-Chicago Daily News, Washington Post-Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Wall Street journal, Washington Star, Copley Service, and a scattering of others; the news weeklies, Time-Life, Newsweek, and

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US. News and World Report; McGraw-Hill and Fairchild, of the specialized services, and the TV-radio chains, NBC, CBS, and ABC, with Westinghouse showing new foreign interest for radio alone. The old Paris Herald, as the New York Herald Tribune's Paris edition was still known to newsmen, carried on despite the challenge of the New York Times International Edition. Although the Herald was not a great money maker, it was in better shape than its rival in early 1964. At that period, the Times had suspended publication of its West Coast edition, and it also had to change its original concept of the International Edition as a mere duplicate of the New York edition. The Times's troubles with its satellite publications did not, of course, affect its overall position which remained affluent. While no one can guarantee a completely accurate count of all the permanent foreign correspondents outside the Iron Curtain, most knowledgeable editors believe the American force represents from onequarter to one-third of the total. This is predicated mainly on the roughly 625 foreign correspondents in the United States in 1964, with slightly more based in London and Paris. The smaller European newspapers, particularly the Swiss under the leadership of the Neue Ziircher Zeitung, cover Europe more intensively than do the Americans. The British put considerably more manpower into the Commonwealth countries. As for the French, Agence France-Presse is putting up a stubborn and determined campaign to get back into major competition in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as in Europe. The fact that various French government agencies paid a substantial sum in annual subscriptions to Agence France-Presse, as reported in L'Echo de la Presse et de la Publicite, indicates the interest of the nation in this effort.18 There is one other difference with American practice: most great newspapers in England, Europe, and Japan want more direct news from Moscow and Peking than does the bulk of the American press. It should not be imagined, however, that American newspapers are the most prosperous in the world or that American news coverage dominates the world media outside the Iron Curtain, despite numerical superiority. The British, the West Germans, the Japanese, and the French are all serious competitors. While the Times of London may have lost part of its intellectual leadership to the Economist and some of the Sunday newspapers, the old Thunderer still maintains a small staff of foreign correspondents and sets the pattern on many a major

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foreign story. There is substantial influence, too, among the other foreign staffs of the London Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Observer, and the Sunday Times, while the Daily Mail and Express, the mass circulation leaders, can always kick up a row. The influence of the United States is even less apparent in the columns of the French press where he Monde, Figaro, and France-Soir usually set the tone of a thoughtful and well-ordered foreign coverage. If the critical content of French foreign correspondence has increased in recent years on most news bearing on American foreign policy, it is readily understandable. The French have elected to go their own way, within Gaullist reason; it is reflected, therefore, in their press. The 100 percent American, in fact, will search in vain for a foreign newspaper of standing anywhere in the world that is a mere echo of Washington. From West Germany to Japan, from Italy to Korea, from Scandinavia to India and Pakistan and the Philippines, it is a hard but scarcely unpalatable truth that foreign correspondents writing on American affairs reflect their national interests to a very large extent. The same thing is true when such correspondents venture to explore those areas of the world that constitute the missing factor in international coverage. In view of the sophisticated methods of the newer censors over threequarters of the earth's surface, such diversified reporting is likely in the long run to be a help rather than a hindrance to international understanding. Thus, there is essentially little difference between the lack of direct censorship in most Communist bloc countries and Red China, and the very heavy, virtually punitive censorship that exists in a number of the newer nations of Africa and the Middle East. The end result is the same. As the AP put it in its annual report for 1963: "The traditional censor is not the only foe of a free flow of information. Just as effective is censorship at the source—a reluctance by responsible officials to talk to newsmen or even make themselves available to answer questions. "Still another formidable weapon is 'responsibility censorship.' This entails reprimands to newsmen for articles after they appear in print. Sometimes there is expulsion or threat of expulsion from a country." 1 7 The comment of Earl J. Johnson, editor of UPI, is pertinent in this connection: "Experience in global reporting teaches us that almost no government anywhere would scruple to take advantage of a supine press. . - . There is no doubt that official restrictions tend to dampen news

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initiative. In countries which have had censorship over the years, editors begin to accept it as a way of life." 1 8

4. PRESS VS. POLICY Just before the 1963 revolt in South Viet Nam, Joseph Alsop, Marguerite Higgins, and Time magazine bitterly accused a few resident American correspondents in Saigon of being unfair to the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. The defendants replied in kind. It was the most violent argument over journalistic practice since the McCarthy era. Yet, despite the charges of the Alsop-Higgins-Time alliance, most of the foreign correspondents familiar with Saigon tended to support the chief defendants—Malcolm Browne of the AP, Neil Sheehan of UPI, and David Halberstam of the New York Times. In fact, Charles Mohr, chief Time correspondent in Southeast Asia, resigned in protest over his magazine's highly unusual role in the affair and joined the New York Times.19 Sheehan went to the Times a year later for more conventional reasons. Nobody accused the correspondents of lying except, of course, the embattled Diem government. Alsop conceded that what they had written was "true or part true." What he objected to was what he termed a "high-minded crusade" against President Diem. Miss Higgins, on her part, took offense at the repeated stories out of Saigon that the United States and the Diem forces were losing the war against the Viet Cong, the Communist guerrillas. "Reporters here," she wrote angrily, "would like to see us lose the war to prove they're right." As for Time, no model of disinterested journalism, it complained piously of distorted and exaggerated reporting: "The reporters have tended to reach unanimous agreement on almost everything they have seen. But such agreement is suspect because it is so obviously inbred. The newsmen have themselves become a part of South Viet Nam's confusion; they have covered a complex situation from only one angle, as if their own conclusions offered all the necessary illumination." To which Halberstam replied with no less vigor and forthrightness: "What's been exaggerated? The intrigues, the hostility? It's all been proven. We've been accused of being a bunch of liberals but even that's not true."

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As a matter of fairness, the critics of the resident correspondents of 1963 should have looked at the record a year earlier. Had they done so, they would have found the redoubtable Homer Bigart writing of his experiences as a New York Times correspondent as follows: "Saigon is a nice place to spend a few days in. The food and wine are good, the city is attractive, most hotels and restaurants are air-conditioned. But to work here is peculiarly depressing. "Too often correspondents seem to be regarded by the American mission as tools of our foreign policy. Those who balk are apt to find it a bit lonely, for they are likely to be distrusted and shunned by American and Vietnamese officials." 20 Just how far the Vietnamese government and the infamous Times of Viet Nam might have gone in their war on the correspondents will never be known. For at 4:14 a.m. on November 1, 1963, the first bulletin on the military revolt in Saigon banged into the New York office o'f the AP. It came, not from the correspondents in Viet Nam whose output was tightly controlled, but from Bangkok. Tony Escoda, an energetic and talented Philippine citizen who had taken no part in the argument, scored a 42-minute beat for the AP over his American opposition. It was some time before the regulars in Saigon could get their stories out through censorship. But when they did, the fact that the Diem regime was overthrown and its two leaders killed bore out the worst forebodings of the resident correspondents. Browne, Sheehan, and Halberstam were credited with having helped change the policies of the U.S. government in Viet Nam by their accurate reporting that the war was being lost at a time when all officials on the spot were claiming victory. "We maintained an independent position," Halberstam said. "While we were sympathetic to the aims of the U.S. government, we had to be critical of the representatives of our government who created a policy of optimism about the war that simply was not justified. There was no choice for us. We had our duty to our newspapers, the public that reads them, and that was to tell the truth." 2 1 Browne and Halberstam won a Pulitzer Prize for their work in Viet Nam. Sheehan, despite his excellent work, was unfortunate enough to have missed the reporting of the revolt, having been recalled to Tokyo for two weeks at the time. Even though the revolt did not produce a strong government, and in early 1964 was succeeded by still another coup, the argument against

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the resident correspondents was dropped. Alsop and Time went on to other things. So did Miss Higgins from a new base, Newsday, at Garden City, N.Y. The Viet Nam affair demonstrated anew that foreign correspondents, like all other journalists of consequence, are able to exercise an entirely independent ability to shape the news in an open society. It is a unique function that not only approaches diplomacy but, at times, actually becomes a part of the diplomatic forces that bear on the conduct of international relations. As such, it can serve as a stimulant in changing the course, and sometimes even the character, of the flow of international news for public consumption. There is nothing particularly new about this. George Wilkins Kendall was no mere fact-gatherer when he was under fire with the American armies in Mexico in 1846 and 1847 while he was the war correspondent of the New Orleans Picayune. He was the glorifier of the spirit of manifest destiny and he pretended to be nothing else. Nor did William Howard Russell topple the Aberdeen cabinet and save Britain's beleaguered forces in the Crimea a few years later with pat-a-cake journalism in the Times of London. Well-nigh a century later, no reader of Ernie Pyle's World War II pieces for the Scripps-Howard newspapers could fail to be moved by his personal involvement with GI Joe, a powerful factor in creating a toughened national morale. Until the advent of an era when a whole civilization could be destroyed by a careless or accidental act, putting in flight an unstoppable missile carrying a hydrogen bomb, there was no serious thought of curbing the power of the journalist in the Western world. His news-generating function, even when used to excess, was viewed as a desirable part of the Western liberal tradition. Indeed, the Constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press was upheld, even when it was irresponsibly abused, on the ground that the right to untrammeled publication was worth the cost of the excesses. Yet, in the sixteen years that followed the birth of the atomic age, three Presidents spoke out in one way or another against what they considered to be security violations of the American press. To keep the record straight, such alleged violations were consistently denied and not one was ever proved. In any event, President Truman issued Executive Order #10290, setting what he called "minimum standards" for government procedures in 1951 and thereafter for handling security information. While Presi-

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dent Eisenhower modified the order, he struck out in another direction by commanding Defense Department officials to measure any proposed news release by determining whether it would make "a constructive contribution to the primary mission" of the military.22 Finally, in the sodden aftermath of the Cuban invasion disaster in 1961, President Kennedy challenged American publishers as follows: "Every newspaper now asks itself, with respect to every story, 'Is it news?' All I suggest is that you add the question, 'Is it in the national interest?' " 23 Viewed in this context, the events in Saigon preceding the violent end of the Diem regime take on a deeper meaning. If the American authorities there did consistently mislead reporters and investigate their news sources, as David Halberstam has charged,24 then certainly the press was entitled to ask whether such actions were in the national interest. It took all the tact and diplomacy of Henry Cabot Lodge, in the role of American ambassador after the Saigon uprising, to smooth over the difficulties between the American mission and the correspondents and prepare the way for his successor, General Maxwell Taylor. What Lodge could not do was to lay down, with finality, a position between the press's insistence on the public's "right to know" and the government's eifort to substitute for it, in sensitive cases, the public's "need to know." Many have attempted to provide a workable policy that would satisfy both these conditions, but none have succeeded. The reason is quite clear. It was stated as follows by Clifton Daniel, one of the most distinguished of the New York Times's foreign correspondents: "If you ask me who decides what the people need to know, I can only say, 'the editor.' If he can't do that, he has no right to the title. If he allows someone else to do it for him—the government or some special interest—he forfeits his freedom." 25

5. SUMMATION It would be both an indignity and an injustice to the professional foreign correspondents of well-nigh two centuries to consider their efforts as a mere prelude to some thunderous development in the international reporting of tomorrow. Furthermore, it would not be true. Changes, on the whole, come slowly in journalism. With all the troubles that lie ahead of tomorrow's foreign correspondents, they will do very well, indeed, if they are able to maintain the

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right to present an independent point of view in international affairs to a sufficiently large and appreciative audience. If they can manage to attract a greater audience, or extend their services to places where independent voices are not now heard, then a free society will be deeply in their debt. Unless circumstances change drastically, however, the odds may often be against them in their quest for news. The spread of censorship and of authoritarian press methods is not likely to be halted and rolled back very soon. Nor is the deadly contest between the independent nations and the regimented society of the Communist states on the way to a quick settlement, regardless of the thaw in Eastern Europe and the SinoSoviet conflict. In such a situation, the independent correspondent is likely to encounter increasing difficulty. The handicap of heavier costs will be another constricting factor in tomorrow's foreign correspondence. If the new communications satellites, submarine cables, microwave towers, and facsimile processes are to be used effectively for the benefit of the public in the dissemination of foreign news and pictures, some more equitable way of sharing expenses will have to be devised. Most of today's operations are, to put it mildly, economically unrealistic. The programs that offer specialized area and language training for journalists interested in foreign correspondence make more sense.26 Among these are the Nieman Fellowships at Harvard, which include foreign news specialists, the advanced international reporting program at Columbia, and the foreign fellowship offered by the Council on Foreign Relations. The basic difference between these programs and less practical studies offered elsewhere is that they insist, in the first instance, that the student should show professional achievement as a journalist. Too often, foreign affairs specialists, their Ph.D. work behind them, assume that they can bestow their special talents on some palpitating newspaper, merely by making themselves available. But experience has shown that it is more practical to try to make an area specialist out of a capable journalist than to turn a scholar loose in a profession for which he generally has little capacity, scant sympathy, and no understanding. There have been exceptions, of course, but they have been rare. The drawback to the specialized training program work is that some of the best prospects, having completed their courses, too often are

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451

attracted to opportunities in government or institutional public relations. The remedy is, of course, apparent. If prospective foreign correspondents are to be asked to undergo a longer and therefore more expensive preparation, then their rewards will have to be increased. In another area, the effort to find a better way of telling foreign news, some progress has been made. Newspapers like the Times of London, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, Die Welt of Hamburg, and the Hindu of Madras, to name a few of the leaders, are featuring well-rounded, coherent, and interesting reports on particular foreign problems from time to time instead of trying to cover everything daily in bits and pieces somewhere inside the paper. The Economist and the Sunday Observer, in London, both dare to be expert in their respective fields, political economy and cultural affairs. The American news weeklies frequently devote a large part of a single issue to an international issue of paramount interest. And television, with its occasional foreign documentaries and its superb reporting of major news, is making a significant contribution of its own, even though it has not yet devised an effective daily illustrated news program that can rival the report of a major newspaper. These and other signs of progress would seem to indicate that the public interest is being broadened in international affairs. Progress may be slow and the gains may be small, but the public's reading and listening habits cannot be changed overnight. There are too many demands on public attention for any one to take precedence. It may well be asked: "Why bother?" In the atomic age, when national survival may demand decisions that are reached within ten minutes or less, there is no time for popular government to function in a crisis. That was made tragically clear in the "eyeball to eyeball" confrontation of the United States and the Soviet Union over the Cuban missile bases in 1962. The argument has been advanced, therefore, that it is sufficient to inform an elite group of foreign developments through the mass media.27 Aside from the commercial impracticality of such a program, elite groups being in short supply as patrons of the mass media, the argument misses the point. While no one can say with certainty that the efforts of an informed public will be able to preserve the spirit as well as the form of democratic government in the years to come, an ignorant and craven public assuredly will kill it through indifference and neglect.

452

Tomorrow's Foreign

Correspondents

The work, therefore, goes on. There is no doubt that, while the mass media cannot and should not assume the burden of a whole society, their influence is vital in the campaign to persuade the public to accept broader information on foreign affairs. It is obvious that nothing can be accomplished without such pressure in the first instance. But taken by itself, that is not enough. It is most encouraging that impressive and influential forces are attempting to stimulate even wider interest in foreign news. Chief among those special interest organizations are some of the American foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations and other foreign policy discussion groups, the American Press Institute, the International Press Institute, and the various international societies of a more general nature. Probably the greatest stimulus toward the broadening of public interest in international affairs, however, should come from the colleges and universities of the United States as their enrollments increase steeply in the late 60s. The preparation of effective survey courses in international relations at the undergraduate and pre-professional levels would offer an increasingly large proportion of students the kind of background that is necessary if they are to understand popular government. Eventually, such studies also would help create a much larger public that is knowledgeable in foreign affairs. But whether his public is great or small, the foreign correspondent must persevere. In the years to come, he will face his greatest challenge. Whatever his influence may be, he will have need of it. For in every gathering crisis of the atomic era, it will be his highest duty to make himself heard and understood in a cruelly divided world. In an age when the leaders of government will exercise frightening power in defense of national interests, it will be the role of the foreign correspondent to seek to create understanding between peoples by bringing to them more meaningful news of each other. As such, he may very well be a decisive element. For it may fall to him in the future, as it has in the past, to represent the difference between war and peace.

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Bernhard Knollenberg, Origin of the American Revolution, 1759-1766 (New York, i960), XX, 221 et seq.; L. H. Gipson, The Triumphant Empire: Thunder Clouds Gather in the West, 1763-1766 (New York, 1 9 6 1 ) , pp. 272-73; L. H. Gipson, fared Ingersoll (New Haven, 1920), pp. 140-41. 2. Wilbur C. Abbott, New York in the American Revolution (New York, 1929) attributes the founding of the Sons of Liberty to the Ingersoll dispatch. See also Gipson, Triumphant Empire, X, 300. I. T H E FIRST FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS 1. Times, the, History, I, 206. 2. Ibid., p. 65. 3. Ibid., p. 69. 4. Snyder and Morris, p. 34. See also Arthur Young, Travels during the Years 1787, 1788, 178g, 1790, 1792-94, C. E. Maxwell, ed. London, 1929. 5. Matthews, p. 43. 6. Ibid., p. 127. 7. Ibid., pp. 137-70 passim. 8. Bullard, pp. 6-8; on Finnerty, see Mathews, pp. 44-45, and Sala, II, 84-85. 9. Wiskemann, pp. 1-31 passim. 10. UNESCO, pp. 146-53. 11. Weigle, pp. 277-86; see also UNESCO. 12. Cooper, Barriers Down, pp. 6-9. 13. Weigle, p. 277, quotes Revue Parisienne, Aug. 25, 1840. 14. Alfred Fontenay, "The Power of the News Agency," Magazine Digest, 14 (Feb. 1937), 74~7515. J. Hall Richardson, From the City to Fleet Street (London, 1927), pp. 169-71. 16. Bullard, p. 6. 17. Ibid., pp. 216-26. Times, the, History, I, 216-26. 18. UNESCO, p. 1 1 . 19. "Havas in the U.S.," Time (March 19, 1934), pp. 40-41. 20. Weigle, p. 278. 2 1 . Times, the, History, I, 419-20; Essary, pp. 24-25. 22. Times, the, History, I, 240; Sala, II, 83; Bullard, pp. 8-9; Lucas, p. 20.

454

Notes: I. First

Correspondents

23. UNESCO, p. I i . 24. Weigle, p. 278. 25. Ibid., pp. 279-80. 26. Storey, p. 7. 27. Ibid., pp. 1 - 3 1 . 28. Cooper, Barriers Down, p. 27. 29. Ibid., p. 28. 30. Storey, p. 3 1 . 31. UNESCO, pp. 1 8 - 1 9 . 3 2 - Storey, pp. 32-34. 33. I bid., p. 37. 34. Carlson, pp. 1 - 6 0 passim; Seitz, Bennetts, pp. 1 - 3 0 passim; Pray, pp. 1 - 4 6 passim; Rosewater, p. 10. 35. Bleyer, p. 186. 36. Carlson, p. 168. 37. Hudson, pp. 4 5 0 - 5 1 ; Seitz, Bennetts, pp. 80-81; Carlson, pp. 200-2. 38. Carlson, p. 202. 39. Ibid., pp. 1 6 8 - 9 0 passim. 40. Ibid., p. 240. 41. Mott, pp. 248-50. 42. Carlson, pp. 2 2 7 - 4 5 passim. 43. Carlson, p. 242. 44. Rosewater, p. 8. 45. Lee, pp. 488-89. 46. Hudson, pp. 365-67; Gramling, AP, pp. 13-15; Rosewater, pp. 5 7 60. 47. Stone, pp. 204-7; Gramling, AP, pp. 19-21; Hudson, pp. 610-11. 48. Rosewater, pp. 3 2 - 3 3 ; O'Brien, pp. 1 6 6 - 6 7 ; Gramling, AP, p. 69. 49. Lee, pp. 499-502. 50. Pray, p. 377. 51. Lee, p. 500. 52. Gramling, AP, p. 42. 53. UNESCO, p. 18. 54. Rosewater, pp. 100-37. 55- Storey, pp. 5 2 - 5 3 ; UNESCO, p. 18. 56. Cooper, Barriers Down, p. 43.

II. T H E PROFESSIONALS 1. Essential material on Heine has been drawn mainly from Louis Untermeyer, Heinrich Heine: Paradox and Poet (New York, 1937) and Lewis Browne and Elsa Wiehl, That Man Heine (Boston, 1 9 2 7 ) . See also Heinrich Heine's Memoirs, Gustav Karpeles, ed., Gilbert Cannan, trans. (New York, 1 9 1 0 ) . 2. Hudson, pp. 494-95. 3. Essential material for this section has been drawn mainly from Fayette Copeland, Kendall of the Picayune (Norman, Okla., 1943). Bullard, pp. 351-74, Mathews, pp. 54-56, and Mott, pp. 248-49 have briefer accounts. 4. Schlesinger Jr., pp. 427-28. 5. New Orleans Picayune, Oct. 14, 1847. 6. Furneaux, pp. 7 - 2 0 ; see also Russell, Crimea, Atkins, and A. W . Kinglake, The Invasion of the Crimea (London, 1863-67; 8 vols). 7. Cook, p. 6. See also Dasent. 8. Cook, p. 10. 9. John Forster, Life of Charles Dickens (London, 1 8 7 2 - 7 4 ) , I, 9 9 100. 10. Times, the, History, II, 68-82. Lieut. Thomas Waghorn opened the first practical overland route from India for dispatches. 11. Cook, pp. 28-30. 12. Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (London, 1856), p. 270.

Notes: II. The

Professionals

455

13. Furneaux, p. 21. 14. Ibid., pp. 29-30; Bullard, pp. 34-35. 15. Furneaux, pp. 30-35. 16. Ibid., pp. 43-44; Bullard, pp. 37-40. 17. Furneaux, pp. 45-47. 18. Bullard, p. 41; Times, the, History, II, 174-75. 19. Furneaux, pp. 42-43; Bullard, p. 42; Times, the, History, II, 176-78. 20. Bullard, p. 46. 21. London Times, Nov. 1 3 , 1 8 5 4 . 22. Furneaux, p. 60. 23. Ibid., p. 66. 24. Times, the, History, II, 181-84. 25. Furneaux, p. 74. 26. Ibid., p. 86. 27. Times, the, History, II, 185. 28. Furneaux, pp. 92-93. 29. Times, the, History, II, 192. 30. Ibid., p. 186; Furneaux, pp. 2 1 7 - 1 8 . 31. Furneaux, pp. 2 1 7 - 1 8 . 32. Furneaux, p. 93. 33. Ibid., pp. 98-108 passim. 34. Lucas, pp. 85-90, on Borthwick's experience with Mrs. Norton; other material, pp. 48-125 passim. 35. Ross, pp. 400-3. 36. Richmond Croom Beatty, Bayard Taylor: Laureate of the Gilded Age (Norman, Okla., 1936), pp. 1 0 - 1 1 . 37. Bayard Taylor, A Visit to India, China, and Japan in the Year 18;3 (New York, 1855), p. 354f. 38. Marie Hanson Taylor and Horace Scudder, Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor (Boston, 1884), I, 252. 39. Taylor, India, China, and Japan, p. 414. 40. Taylor, The Poetical Works of Bayard Taylor (Boston, 1880), p. 69. 41. Elmer Davis, pp. 42-46. 42. Salmon, p. 164. 43. Russell, Diary, I, 57. 44. Times, the, History, II, 359-61. 45. Ibid., p. 364; Russell, Diary, I, 7-8. 46. Times, the, History, II, 364. 47. Furneaux, pp. 127-30. 48. Ibid., pp. 1 3 1 - 3 2 . 49. Albert Deane Richardson, The Secret Service, the Field, the Dungeon and the Escape (Hartford, 1865), pp. 189-90. 50. Russell, Diary, 1,164-65. 51. Furneaux, p. 133. 52. Starr, pp. 48-49. 53. New York Herald, July 2 3 , 1 8 6 1 . 54. Starr, p. 50. 55. London Times, Aug. 6 , 1 8 6 1 . 56. Starr, pp. 56-57; Bullard, pp. 57-58. 57. Atkins, II, 69. 58. Times, the, History, II, 368-69. 59. Ibid., pp. 372-73. 60. Furneaux, p. 155. 61. Ibid., p. 159. 62. Atkins, II, 1 1 4 . 63. Furneaux, p. 163. 64. Times, the, History, II, 364, 384. 65. Ibid., pp. 377-78» 384, 387-8966. George Adam, The Tiger (New York, 1930), pp. 27-28. 67. DAB, article on Smalley. 68. Smalley, pp. 129-56. 69. Furneaux, pp. 164—72. 70. Smalley, p. 165. 71. Seitz, Bennetts, p. 202; Bullard, p. 10; Storey, pp. 32, 61. 72. Furneaux, pp. 208-17.

456

Notes: III. World

News

Revolution

III. T H E W O R L D N E W S R E V O L U T I O N 1. Baehr, p. 32. 2. Smalley, pp. 220-23. 3- Baehr, p. 33. 4. Smalley, pp. 224-27; McCarthy and Robinson, pp. 100-1; Baehr, p. 775. Smalley, pp. 218-20; Furneaux, p. 180; Baehr, pp. 77-78. 6. Bullard, pp. 15-16; Smalley, pp. 235-36; Baehr, pp. 78-79. 7. Forbes, quoting White, Memories, p. 79, on White's journey, ibid., 220-21; Smalley, on White, pp. 236-42. See also Forbes, Experiences. 8. Smalley on Mueller, pp. 245-46; Bullard, pp. 21-22; Times, the, History, II, 434; Forbes, Memories, pp. 223-25; Smalley's conclusions, p. 228. 9. Bullard, p. 69. 10. Forbes, Memories, pp. 7, 88-90, 349-50; Bullard, pp. 80-81. 1 1 . Robinson, pp. 169-70. 12. Forbes, Memories, pp. 227-28. 13. Bullard, p. 83. 14. Furneaux, p. 198. 15. Forbes, Memories, pp. 120-26, 228-30. 16. London Daily News, Feb. 4, 1871. 17. Times, the, History, II, 436; Forbes, Memories, pp. 230-31; Bullard, pp. 86-87. 18. Forbes, Memories, p. 148. 19. Ibid., pp. 169-71. 20. Stanley, Livingstone, Introduction, xv-xx. 21. Stanley, Autobiography, chs. I-XI. 22. Seitz, Bennetts, pp. 214-50 passim. 23. New York Herald, Aug. 10, 1872; Stanley, Livingstone, of course, contains the best account. Stanley, Autobiography, ch. XIII, is condensed. 24. Stanley, Autobiography, pp. 264-66, 268, 278-84. 25. Stanley, Livingstone, pp. 616-19. 26. Stanley, Autobiography, p. 295. 27. Ibid., pp. 512-16. See also Stanley, Dark Continent. 28. De Blowitz, pp. 79-90. 29. Times, the, History, III, 125-27, 783. 30. Ibid., pp. 23-39. 31. Ibid., II, 461-62. 32. De Blowitz, pp. 9 1 - 1 1 5 passim. 33. Times, the, History, II, 463. 34. Ibid., p. 525. 35. Ibid., p. 526; De Blowitz, pp. 116-38 passim. 36. De Blowitz, p. 139. 37. Times, the, History, III, 27. 38. The Birth of Modern Italy; Posthumous Papers of Jessie White Mario, edited, with introduction, notes, and epilogue by the Duke of LittaVisconti-Arese (New York, 1909), pp. xix-xxv; McCarthy and Robinson, pp. 63-65. 39. McCarthy and Robinson, p. 65; Modern Italy, pp. xxv-xxvi. 40. Modern Italy, pp. 323-26 passim. 41. Carducci's estimate was in "Confessioni e Battaglie." 42. J. W. Robertson Scott, The Story of the Pall Mall Gazette (Lon-

Notes: IV.

Glory and

Empire

457

don, 1950), pp. 203-7; Times, the, History, II, 505-6. DNB, article on Greenwood. 43. Times, the, History, III, 43-89 passim; see also ibid., IV, 1145-48 for corrections of vol. Ill; Bonsai, p. 32. For detailed studies of Pamell, see biographies by his wife, Katharine Pamell ( 1 9 1 4 ) , his brother, J. H. Pamell (1916), by St. John Ervine (1925), and Hemy Harrison ( 1 9 3 1 ) . 44. Josef Patai, Star Over Jordan: The Life and Calling of Theodore Herzl, trans, from the Hungarian by Francis Magyar (New York, 1946), pp. 13-67, 351-52; see also Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error (New York, 1949), pp. 43, 87. 45. Nicholas Halasz, Captain Dreyfus: The Story of a Mass Hysteria (New York, 1955), pp. 1 - 3 4 passim, 64-67, 119-20, 130-35, 159, 23639, 250-52, 265-66; Times, the, History, III, 795-98; Steed, I, 58-60, 14950. 46. Seitz, Pulitzer, p. 356. 47. Ibid., pp. 95-96. For Pulitzer's life, see also Barrett. 48. DAB, article on Curtis; Stone, pp. 108, 1 1 8 , 127-28; William F.leroy Curtis, The Capitals of Spanish America (New York, 1886); Chicago Record Herald, Oct. 6 - 7 , 1 9 1 1 . 49. Barrett, pp. 156-62; Seitz, Pulitzer, pp. 201-9. See also Robert H. Ferrell, American Diplomacy (New York, 1959), pp. 187-89. 50. Seitz, Pulitzer, pp. 374, 352-85; Ferrell, pp. 244-50; E. E. Morison, pp. 1 1 2 - 1 8 . 51. Seitz, Pulitzer, pp. 4 1 4 - 1 5 . IV. FOR G L O R Y AND E M P I R E 1. Churchill, Ian Hamilton, p. 279. 2. MacGahan's book on Khiva is the primary source for his ride. See also McCarthy and Robinson, pp. 1 0 9 - 1 1 ; Robinson, pp. 183-85, and Times, the, History, II> 464-65. 3. J. A. MacGahan, The Turkish Atrocities in Bulgaria: Letters of the Special Commissioner of the Daily News (London, 1876). Robinson, pp. 185-86. 4. McCarthy and Robinson, pp. 107-8, 1 1 3 . 5. Daily News, pp. 1 - 2 . 6. Forbes, Memories, p. 16. 7. Forbes, Memories, pp. 23-24, 236-39; Smalley, pp. 247-50; Daily News, pp. 420-21,482-83; Villiers, I, 8 1 - 1 1 4 ; Greene, pp. 36-87. 8. Villiers, I, 126-33; Greene, pp. 162-67; Robinson, pp. 185-87; see also DAB sketch, VI, 187, and Bullard, pp. 153-54. 9. Times, the, History, III, 20-24; Steevens, Kitchener, p. 324. 10. Robinson, p. 178; Bullard, p. 232; DNB, see sketch on O'Donovan. See also Edmond O'Donovan, The Merv Oasis (London, 1882; 2 vols.). 1 1 . E. H. Vizetelly, Cyprus to Zanzibar (London, 1901). 12. McCarthy and Robinson, pp. 123-25; Rudolf C. Slatin Pasha, Fire

458

Notes: IV.

Glory and

Empire

and Sword in the Sudan (New York, 1897); Churchill, River War, I, 4960; Bullard, 269-70. 13. Churchill, River War, I, 1-56. 14. Churchill, River War, I, 57-68 passim; Times, the, History, III, 25-27. 15. Churchill, River War, I, 76-77. 16. Churchill, River War, I, 68-75; Times, the, History, III, 29-34. 17. Villiers, I, 291-316 passim; Bullard, pp. 204-6. 18. Times, the, History, III, 38-42. 19. Villiers, I, 63-65; Bullard, p. 209. 20. Slatin, pp. 205-7; Churchill, River War, I, 95-109 passim. 21. Villiers, I, 71-72. 22. Churchill, River War, I, 110. 23. Lucas, p. 385. 24. Churchill, Frontiers, p. 70. 25. Ibid., pp. 65, 87. 26. Lucas, p. 368. 27. Churchill, River War, II, 107-39 passim. 28. Churchill, River War, casualty tables. 29. Bullard, p. 220. 30. Burleigh, Khartoum, pp. 204-5. 31. Steevens, Kitchener, p. 287. 32. Ibid., p. 324. 33. Ibid., p. 325. 34. Coblentz, p. 59. See also Gramling, AP, p. 137. 35. James Creelman, Pearson's Magazine (Sept. 1906). 36. Abbot, p. 217. 37. Creelman, pp. 181-86; Mott, pp. 529-30; Swanberg, p. 120. 38. New York Journal, Feb. 9, 1898. 39. Swanberg, p. 138. 40. Ibid., p. 144. 41. Leech, pp. 203-5. 4 2 - Barrett, p. 178. 43. Seitz, Pulitzer, p. 241; Leech, pp. 304-5; Swanberg, pp. 159-60; R. H. Davis, Harper's (May 1899), pp. 941-42; Arthur Brisbane, Cosmopolitan (Sept. 1898), pp. 556-57. 44. Brisbane, Cosmopolitan, pp. 552-56. 45. Creelman, pp. 177-78. 46. Ibid., pp. 1 - 1 1 9 passim; Seitz, Pulitzer, p. 197; Bullard, pp. 343-44. 47. Langford, pp. 1 6 6 , 1 7 9 , 1 9 2 - 9 3 . 48. Ibid., p. 201. 49. New York Times, Feb. 26,1933. 50. Creelman, pp. 196-212 passim. 51. R. H. Davis, Notes, pp. 95-97. 52. Gramling, AP, pp. 143-47. See also Brisbane, Cosmopolitan; R. H. Davis, Harper's; John R. Spears, Scribner's (Oct. 1898). 53. Essary, p. 38. 54. Seitz, Pulitzer, p. 241; Leech, pp. 304-5; Swanberg, pp. 159-60; R. H. Davis, Harper's, pp. 941-42. 55. Leech, p. 230, 270-71. 56. Brisbane, Cosmopolitan, p. 553. 57. Churchill, London to Ladysmith, pp. 24-25. See also Churchill, Early Life. 58. Nevinson, pp. 94-95. 59. Churchill, London to Ladysmith, pp. 74-95, 102; New York World, Nov. 25, 1899. 60. Churchill, London to Ladysmith, pp. 177-204 passim. War poster

Notes: V . Shaky Alliance

459

description is from Bullard, p. 320. Snyder and Morris, pp. 250-51, reprints original account of escape as sent. 61. Churchill, London to Ladysmith, p. 386. 62. Nevinson, pp. 100-2,140. 63. R. H. Davis, Notes, pp. 176-77. 64. Storey, pp. 134-35. 65. Ibid., pp. 131-37. 66. Langford, pp. 215-18. See also Pittsburgh Leader clipping May 7, 1916, discussed on pp. 2 1 1 , 219-20. 67. Churchill, Ian Hamilton, pp. 279, 296. 68. Langford, p. 220. List of correspondents killed in Boer War, London Times, Jan. 16,1905. 69. Leech, pp. 519-20. 70. Dennis, p. 268. 71. Times, the, History, III, 713-33 passim. 72. Ibid., pp. 409-23. 73. Ibid., p. 204. 74. Ibid., p. 355. See also Walter Lord, The Good Years (New York, i960), p. 18, for a popular account. 75. Leech, pp. 522-23. 76. Times, the, History, III, 356-57. 77. Ibid., pp. 379-82. 78. Ibid., p. 381. V. THE SHAKY ALLIANCE 1. Cooper, Barriers Down, p. 100. 2. Gramling, AP, pp. 122-23. 3. Storey, p. 117. 4. Stone, pp. 50-116 passim, 179-82; Dennis, pp. 1 - 1 1 0 passim. 5. Dennis, pp. 186-98; Rosewater, pp. 207-28. 6. Gramling, AP, p. 121. 7. Rosewater, p. 219. 8. Ibid., pp. 220-21. 9. Ibid., p. 222; Dennis, 1-99 passim. 10. Rosewater, p. 225. 1 1 . Ibid., pp. 262-63, 266-67; Gramling, AP, p. 155. 12. Rosewater, pp. 268-69, 271-77 passim; Dennis, pp. 296-98; Gramling, AP, pp. 154-5713. Stone, p. 244. 14. Stone, pp. 243-78 passim. Gramling, AP, pp. 164-74. Rosewater has technical material on rates, costs, methods of transmission, etc. 15. Storey, pp. 88, 104; Gramling, AP, pp. 83, 95, 104; see also UNESCO, pp. 148,151-55. 16. UNESCO, pp. 125-27; Storey, pp. 47-48, 103. 17. Storey, pp. 109—10. 18. Ibid., p. 1 1 1 . 19. Ibid., pp. 92-93, 97,123-25. 20. Ibid., pp. 1 1 4 - 1 7 , 122; UNESCO, pp. 18-19. 21. Storey, pp. 148-50; Cooper, Barriers Down, pp. 21-22. 22. Lazareff, p. 32. 23. Lazareff, p. 32. 24. Lewis S. Gannett, "The Secret Corruption of the French Press," TheNation, 1 1 8 (Feb. 6, 1924), 136-37. 25. Morris, pp. 26-27. See also McCabe.

460

Notes: V . Shaky Alliance

26. Morris, pp. 17-24. See also Gilson Gardner, Lusty Scripps (New York, 1932), pp. 152-63. 27. Morris, p. 27. 28. Ibid., pp. 32-52. 29. Cooper, Barriers Down, pp. 1 0 0 - 1 . 30. Cooper, Associated Press, p. 197. 31. Swanberg, pp. 82, 256. 32. M. Koenigsberg, King News (Philadelphia, 1 9 4 1 ) , p. 454. 33. Gramling, AP, pp. 284-86; Emery and Smith, pp. 557-59. Cooper, Associated Press, pp. 197-98. 34. Emery and Smith, p. 558. 35. Berger, pp. 99-106; Elmer Davis, pp. 173-90. 36. Ibid., pp. 107-8. 37. Elmer Davis, pp. 1 9 1 - 2 3 8 passim; Berger, pp. 1 1 9 - 3 0 passim. 38. Berger, pp. 129-30; Elmer Davis, pp. 239-40; Mott, p. 580. 39. Berger, p. 133. 4°- Ibid., p. 1 5 1 . 41. Times, the, History, III, 580. 42. Pound and Harmsworth, pp. 306-8; Times, the, History, III, 4 3 1 5943. The lives of Newnes, Pearson, and Northcliffe are interestingly summarized in Times, the, History, III and Pound and Harmsworth. 44. Pound and Harmsworth, p. 322. 45. Times, the, History, III, 734. 46. Pound and Harmsworth, pp. 440-43. VI. THIS S H R I N K I N G W O R L D 1. Gramling, AP, pp. 161-62. 2. Seitz, Bennetts, pp. 371-72; Stone, pp. 239-40. 3. Gramling, AP, p. 163. 4. Gramling, AP, pp. 176-77. 5. Dennis, pp. 268-69. 6. Lionel James, "The Times and Wireless War Correspondence," a 5,ooo-word article dated Wei-hai-wei, June 20, 1904, and published in London Times, Aug. 27, 1904, p. 6, is source of much of this account. Other data from unsigned article, "Wireless Workers Back from the Scene of War," the New York Times, Aug. 21, 1904, and Times, the, History, III, 429-30. Berger, pp. 162-63, is under the impression James's ship functioned throughout the war, which is erroneous. See James, High Pressure. 7. Gramling, AP, pp. 177-78. 8. James (see note 7). 9. J. B. Scott, ed., Texts of the Peace Conferences at The Hague, 1899 and 1907, pp. 55-56, 359, 360, 392, traces the development of regulations for war correspondents. See also Sir Garnet Wolseley's The Soldiers' Pocket Book for Field Service (London, 1882; 4th ed.), pp. 1 7 1 - 7 2 ; editorial in Army-Navy Journal, May 21, 1904. 10. William Maxwell of the London Standard, writing on "The War Correspondent in Sunshine and Eclipse" in the Nineteenth Century (March 1 9 1 3 ) , pp. 6 1 1 - 1 8 .

Notes: VI.

Shrinking

World

461

1 1 . Downey, p. 207, quotes Willard Straight. 12. Ibid., p. 212. 13. Ibid., p. 217. 14. R. H. Davis, Allies, pp. 231-33. 15. "Correspondent Escapes from Port Arthur," New York Times, May 14,1905. 16. Gramling, AP, p. 184. 17. Richard Hough, The Fleet That Had To Die (New York, 1958), p. 187. 18. "Famous News Writers Are Gathering Here," New York Times, Aug. 3,1905. 19. Times, the, History, III, 424. 20. Ibid., p. 822. 21. "Russia Expels Correspondent," Philadelphia Bulletin, Sept. 21, 1904, based on Exchange Telegraph dispatch from St. Petersburg reporting Danchenko's expulsion. 22. Gramling, AP, pp. 185-86. 23. Nevinson, pp. 189-90. 24. Ibid., p. 6. 25. Nevinson's complete record is in three volumes: Changes and Chances, 1923, More Changes, More Chances, 1925, and Last Changes, Last Chances, 1928, published in London. The volume Fire of Life is a condensation of these by Ellis Roberts, with an introduction by John Masefield. 26. Nevinson, pp. 184-85. 27. Ibid., p. 186. 28. Ibid., p. 191. 29. Ibid., pp. 193-95. 30. Ibid., pp. 196-200. 31. Ibid., pp. 219-20. 32. Ibid., p. 247. 33. Snyder and Morris, pp. 258-62. 34. Gramling, AP, pp. 205-6. 35. Ibid., p. 205. 36. Berger, pp. 181-82. 37. Pound and Harmsworth, pp. 271-72. 38. Gramling, AP, p. 206. 39. Pound and Harmsworth, p. 324. 40. Gramling, AP, p. 206. 41. Pound and Harmsworth, pp. 200-1. 42. Ibid., p. 301. 43. Ibid., pp. 324-25. 44. Pound and Harmsworth, p. 375. 45. Gibbs, Adventures, pp. 165-66. 46. Pound and Harmsworth, p. 375. 47. Pound and Harmsworth, p. 375. 48. Berger, pp. 187-88. 49. Pound and Harmsworth, p. 420. 50. Gibbs, Adventures, pp. 36-37. 51. Berger, p. 172. 52. Gibbs, Adventures, pp. 38-45. 53. Wile, p. 223. 54. Ibid., pp. 224-25. 55. Elmer Davis, p. 291. 56. New York Times, Sept. 7,1909. 57. Gramling, AP, p. 209. 58. Berger, p. 176. 59. Gibbs, Adventures, p. 51. 60. Gramling, AP, p. 228. 61. Berger, p. 194. 62. Elmer Davis, p. 284; New York Times, Oct. 18, 1907; Berger, p. 166. 63. Gramling, AP, pp. 228-29. New York Times, April 28, 1912, published Bride's story.

Notes: VII. Challenge of World War I

462

64. Berger, pp. 199-201. See also Alex McD. Stoddart, Independent magazine, May 2, 1912, for an account of the way the Titanic news was handled. VII. T H E CHALLENGE OF W O R L D W A R I 1. 3. 4. 6. 8. 10.

New York Times, June 29, 1914. 2. Gramling, AP, p. 235. Wile, pp. 245-48; London Daily Mail, June 29, 1914. Williams, pp. 41-47 passim. 5. Steed, I, 393. New York Times, June 29,1914. 7. Times, the, History, IV, 186. Steed, I, 404. 9. Times, the, History, IV, 187-88. Steed, I, 407-8. 11. Times, the, History, IV, 189. 1 2 . Wile, pp. 2 5 3 - 5 4 . 1 3- ibid., p. 256. 14. Ibid., pp. 257-61. 15. Crozier, p. 8, quotes Donohue's dispatch. 16. Times, the, History, IV, 203. 17. Pound and Harmsworth, pp. 462-63; Steed, II, 7-10. 18. Times, the, History, IV, 208. 19. Pound and Harmsworth, p. 463. 20. Steed, II, 16-25. An interview Ballin gave to Karl H. von Wiegand for the New York World in 1915 caused publication of the original letter in the Times, which Ballin disavowed. Later, the Times insisted the letter was accurate. 21. Tuchman, pp. 107-8. 22. Ibid., pp. 84, 109. 23. Steed, II, 26-27. 24- Ibid., p. 30. 25. Fermi, p. 103. 26. Tuchman, p. 128. 27. Wile, p. 288. 28. Ibid., p. 289. 29. Pound and Harmsworth, p. 464. 30. Williams, pp. 50-51. 31. Viscount Grey of Falloden, Twenty-Five Years (London, 1935), II, 20. 32. London Chronicle, Aug. 23, 1914; New York Tribune, Aug. 24, 1914. See also R. H. Davis, Allies. 33. Langford, p. 290. 34. Ibid., p. 293. 35. New York Tribune, Aug. 31, 1914. 36. Times, the, History, IV, 222-26. 37. Williams, pp. 54-55. 38. Forrest, pp. 106-12. 39. Palmer, p. 300. 40. Ibid., pp. 307, 319-20. 41. Pound and Harmsworth, pp. 476-80. 42. Huddleston, pp. 59-60. 43. Williams, p. 56; Palmer, p. 330. 44. New York Tribune, April 25, 27, 1915. 45. Herbert Bayard Swope, Inside the German Empire (New York, 1 9 1 6 ) , pp. 1 9 5 - 2 0 8 .

46. Mowrer, pp. 229-52 passim. 47. Forrest, pp. 25-45; Gramling, AP, pp. 238-39. 48. Gramling, AP, pp. 2 3 9 - 4 0 .

49. Downey, pp. 2 9 2 - 9 3 .

50. London Daily Telegraph, Oct. 19, 23, 26, 31, 1916. 51. Gibbs, Now Told, pp. 384-85; H. G. Wells in London Chronicle,

Dec. 1 8 , 1 9 1 6 .

Notes: VIII. Not So Brave . . . Not So New 52.

Williams, p.

68;

Mowrer, pp.

271-72;

Gibbs, Now Told, pp.

463 248-

54-

53. Nevinson, p. 318. See also Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, The Uncensored Dardanelles (London, 1 9 2 8 ) . 54. Williams, pp. 8 8 - 9 6 ; Berger, pp. 2 1 6 - 1 8 . 55. Times, the, History, IV, 292, 304. 56. Gramling, AP, pp. 257-61. 57. Forrest, p. 82; Times, the, History, IV, 437. 5 8 . Times, the, History, IV, 2 4 2 - 4 3 . 5 9 . Sala, I, 2 5 1 et seq. 60. Thomas F. O'Donnell and Hoyt C. Franchere, Harold Frederic (New York, 1 9 6 1 ) , pp. 5 6 - 6 0 . 6 1 . Times, the, History, III, 3 8 2 - 8 6 , 4 0 6 , 4 8 9 - 9 1 . 6 2 . Ibid., p. 2 4 4 . 63. Ibid., p. 244. 64. Shub, p. 176. 65. Ibid., p. 178. 6 6 . Ibid., pp. 1 8 1 - 8 2 . 6 7 . Ibid., p. 1 8 4 . 6 8 . Wiskemann, p. 4 6 . 6 9 . Shub, pp. 1 8 6 - 8 7 . 7°- Times, the, History, IV, 2 4 9 . 7 1 . Isaac Don Levine, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1 9 1 7 ) , pp. 275-80.

72. Gramling, AP, p. 262. 7 3 . Hicks, pp. 1 - 2 4 8 , gives Reed's early career. I O , 3 2 3 - 2 4 , 3 3 0 - 3 1 , has details on relations between

Gelb, pp. 3 0 1 - 2 , 3 0 9 Louise Bryant, O'Neill,

and Reed. 7 4 . Hicks, p. 2 6 0 . 7 5 . Ibid., pp. 2 6 6 - 6 7 . 76- Ibid., pp. 2 7 6 - 7 7 . 77. Details in Reed. 78. Times, the, History, IV, 256. 7 9 . Ibid., p. 2$j. 80. Gramling, AP, pp. 2 6 9 - 7 0 . 8 1 . Storey, pp. 1 6 5 - 6 6 . 8 2 . Hicks, p. 2 8 2 . 8 3 . Shub, pp. 3 1 8 - 1 9 . 84. Hicks, pp. 400-1. Louise Bryant later married William C. Bullitt in 1923 and was divorced in 1930. She died in Paris at 41. See Gelb, O'Neill, pp. 8 0 1 - 2 . For commentators on Russia, see George F. Kennan, The Decision to Intervene (Princeton, 1 9 5 8 ) , pp. 3 3 1 - 3 4 . 85. Forrest, p. 87. 86. Gibbons, p. 74. 87. Palmer, Parts I-VI, gives his career. Crozier lists all accredited American correspondents in World War I. 88. Palmer, p. 338. 89. Crozier, pp. 132-33. 90. Palmer, p. 359. 9 1 . Palmer, p. 3 6 2 ; Crozier, pp. 1 3 8 - 3 9 . 9 2 . Gibbons, pp. 7 6 - 7 7 . 9 3 . Palmer, p. 3 6 4 . 9 4 . Ibid., p. 3 6 6 . 9 5 . Williams, pp. 1 1 3 - 1 6 . 9 6 . Berger, p. 2 2 0 . 9 7 . Gibbons, pp. 8 5 - 9 3 . 98. Fenton, p. 6 5 . 9 9 . Morris, pp. 9 0 - 9 2 . 1 0 0 . INS Report, Oct. 1 9 , 1 9 1 7 . 1 0 1 . Berger, pp. 2 2 1 - 2 4 . 1 0 2 . Swanberg, pp. 3 0 7 - 8 , 3 1 6 ; Huddleston, pp. 6 5 - 6 9 . 1 0 3 . Morris, pp. 9 4 - 1 0 1 ; Gramling, AP, pp. 2 7 7 - 8 3 . VIII. N O T SO BRAVE . . . N O T SO N E W 1. Barrett, pp. 3 6 0 - 6 1 . Steed, II, 2 6 7 ; Huddleston, pp. 1 2 7 - 3 0 ; Mowrer, pp. 3 3 3 - 3 4 . 3. Bonsai, Business, pp. 1-2. 4. Ibid., p. 28. 5. Morris, p. 116.

2.

464

Notes: VIII. Not Brave . . . Not New

6. Bonsai, Business, p. 48. 7. Steed, II, 296, 317; Huddleston, p. 152. 8. Barrett, p. 361. 9. Snyder and Morris, p. 3 1 1 . 10. Ibid., p. 3 1 1 ; Barrett, p. 362. 1 1 . Mowrer, p. 345. 12. Berger, p. 233. 13. Ibid., p. 233. 14. Huddleston, p. 169. 15. Baillie, pp. 60-64. 16. Bonsai, Business, pp. 249-50, 259. 17. Ibid., pp. 275-76. 18. Times, the, History, IV, 5 1 2 - 1 3 ; Barrett, pp. 327-28. 19. Times, the, History, IV, 624. 20. Ibid., p. 584. 21. Ibid., pp. 6 1 1 - 1 2 , 669-77 passim; Steed, II, 365-69. 22. Times, the, History, IV, 678-98; Steed, II, 384-85; Pound and Harmsworth, pp. 859-81 passim. These three versions of Northcliffe's last days differ markedly in their conclusions. 23. Pound and Harmsworth, pp. 872, 877-78; Times, the, History, IV, 699. 24. Times, the, History, IV, 765-66. 25. Steed, II, 385. 26. Times, the, History, IV, 815. 27. O'Connor, p. 291. 28. Laney, p. 52. 29. Ibid., pp. 53-54. 30. Ibid., p. 31. 3 1 . Ibid., p. 59. 32. Emery and Smith, p. 527; Laney, pp. 60-61; Mott, pp. 554-57. 33. Heywood Broun, It Seems To Me (New York, 1 9 4 1 ) , pp. 201-4. 34. Mott, p. 643. 35. Fermi, pp. 209-10. 36. Shirer, Third Reich, pp. 46-48. 37. Jones, pp. 108-19 passim. 38. Storey, pp. 148-51 passim. 39. Ibid., pp. 1 7 0 - 7 1 . 40. Ibid., pp. 170-74; Jones, pp. 137-62. 41. Cooper, Barriers Down, p. 100. 42. Ibid., p. 1 0 1 . 43. Cooper, Associated Press, pp. 41-42. 44. Cooper, Barriers Down, pp. 1 5 - 1 6 , 34,44. 45. Ibid., pp. 50-51. 46. Ibid., p. 79. 47. Morris, p. 106; Cooper, Barriers Down, pp. 81-84; Jones, pp. 371— 7448. Cooper, Barriers Down, pp. 92-93. 49. Ibid., p. 53. 50. Storey, p. 192; Morris, pp. 1 0 1 , 119. 51. Cooper, Barriers Down, pp. 146-48. 52. Jones, pp. 340-41. 53. Cooper, Barriers Down, pp. 182-299 passim; Storey, pp. 193-94; Jones, pp. 386-90. 54. Berger, p. 249. 55. Ibid., p. 240. 56. Ibid., pp. 2 5 1 - 5 2 , 254-5557. Ibid., pp. 257, 270. 58. Ibid., pp. 239, 270. 59. Ross, pp. 360, 366-68; Berger, p. 327. 60. Webb Miller, pp. 1 3 2 - 3 3 . 61. Berger, p. 326. 62. Ibid., pp. 327-28. 63. Duranty, pp. 95-96. 64. Ibid., p. 122; see Gibbons, pp. 150-59. 65. Duranty, pp. 129-34 passim. 66. Ibid., p. 329. 67. Mowrer, p. 400. 68. Huddleston, pp. 3 1 2 - 1 4 .

Notes:

IX. Darkening

Horizon

465

69. Clarence Streit, Union Now (New York, 1939), pp. 1-11, 300-1. 70. Berger, pp. 280-90. 71. Markham, pp. 135-36. 72. Berger, pp. 292-93. 73. Edwin L. James in New York Times, May 27, 1927; Berger, pp. 294-305; Laney, pp. 218-30. See also Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis (New York, 1953), p. 501. 74. Russell Owen in New York Times, Nov. 30,1929. 75. New York Times, Oct. 30,1929. 76. Gibbons, pp. 160-77 passim. 77. Sheean, pp. 95,127-28. His exploit is on pp. 9 1 - 1 2 4 . 78. Ibid., pp. 174-75. 79- Shirer, Berlin Diary, p. 4. 80. Williams, pp. 208-9; Ross, pp. 360-66. 81. Schorer, pp. 488,494, 502-3. 82. Mowrer, pp. 532-33. See also Time (April 14, 1958), pp. 44-52. 83. Canham, pp. 1 5 9 , 1 7 5 , 1 8 3 , 216, 240, 242. 84. Johnson, p. 414. 85. Laney, pp. 129-31. 86. Ross, 372-73. 87. Laney presents a delightful account of the English language press in Paris. 88. I was in Paris during this period and summation is based on my observations. 89. Fen ton, pp. 137-38. 90. Ibid., pp. 65-66. 91. Ibid., p. 136. 92. Ibid., p. 140. 93. Ibid., p. 142. 94. Ibid., pp. 255-56. IX. THE DARKENING HORIZON 1. Morris, pp. 169-70; Snow, pp. 204-5. 2 - Morris, pp. 172-73. 3. Gibbons, p. 278. 4. Snow, pp. 96-97. 5. Storey, pp. 204-5. 6. Willoughby, pp. 30-33. 7. Morin, pp. 183-94. 8. Snow, pp. 100-1, 157-83; see also Snow's Red Star Over China (New York, 1936). 9. Mowrer, p. 616; Shirer, Third Reich, pp. 191-200. 10. Tolischus, They Wanted War, pp. 97-108, Shirer; Third Reich, pp. 244-48. 1 1 . Mowrer, pp. 616-17. 12. Lochner, pp. 225-27. 13. Shirer, Berlin Diary, p. 14. 14. Shirer, Third Reich, pp. 280-81. 15. Shirer, Berlin Diary, elaborates on this, entry of March 16, 1935. 16. Mowrer, p. 618. 17. Lazareff, p. 199. 18. Ibid., p. 198. 19. Ibid., pp. 196-97. 20. Ibid., pp. 200-1. 21. Robert Dell, '"Hie Corruption of the French Press," Current History, 35 (Nov. 1 9 3 1 ) , 19422. Laney, p. 74. 23. Ibid., p. 75. 24. Desmond, p. 5777. 25. Lazareff, p. 33. 26. Desmond, pp. 199—200. 27. Leland Stowe, "Propaganda Over Europe," Scribner's (Aug. 1934), pp. 99-101. 28. Lazareff, pp. 1 0 1 - 3 . 2 9- Sevareid, p. 125. 30. Webb Miller, p. 242. 31. Fermi, pp. 3 1 1 - 1 3 .

4

66

Notes: IX. Darkening

Horizon

32. Ibid., p. 314. 33. Ibid., p. 316. 34. Gramling, AP, pp. 407-13. 35. Gibbons, p. 315. 36. W . Miller, pp. 243-47. 37. Gibbons, pp. 3 1 5 - 1 6 . 38. Webb Miller, pp. 2 5 5 - 6 2 ; Gibbons, p. 315. 39. Morris, pp. 207-8; W e b b Miller, pp. 2 6 4 - 7 1 . 40. Hohenberg, pp. 1 3 8 - 4 2 . 41. Gibbons, pp. 3 1 7 - 1 8 . 42. Webb Miller, pp. 294-98. 43. Gramling, AP, pp. 4 1 4 - 1 5 . 44. Matthews, Education, p. 44. 45. Berger, p. 420. 46. Matthews, Education, pp. 44-63 passim. 47. Ibid., p. 63. 48. Times, the, History, IV, 1 0 2 7 - 2 8 . 49. Duke of Windsor, A King's Story (New York, 1947), p. 3 1 7 . 50. Morris, p. 213. 51. Times, the, History, IV, 1028. 52. ibid., p. 1 0 3 1 . 53. Windsor, King's Story, pp. 340-42. 54. Times, the, History, IV, 1038. 55. Ibid., pp. 1 0 3 4 - 3 5 . 56. Berger, p. 428. 57. Times, the, History, IV, 1038. 58. Morris, pp. 214, 215. 59. Berger, p. 428. 60. Ibid., p. 428. 61. Gramling, AP, p. 444. 62. Times, the, History, IV, 905. 63. Morris, p. 209. 64. Berger, pp. 424-26. 65. Matthews, Education, p. 93. 66. H. T . Gorrell, " W a r Reporter's Own Story," E&P (Sept. 25, 1 9 3 7 ) . 67. Gibbons, pp. 3 2 1 - 2 2 . 68. Matthews, Education, pp. 95-96. 69. New York Times, April 25, 1937. 70. "Spain's Revolt Draws Newsmen," EÖP (July 25, 1936), p. 6. 7 1 . Matthews, Education, p. 105. 72. Gramling, AP, pp. 444-52. 73. Ibid., pp. 4 5 2 - 5 7 ; "3 War Correspondents Die," E 6 P (Jan. 8, 1938). 74. Morris, p. 2 1 1 . 75. Matthews, Education, p. 192. 76. Duranty, pp. 199-200. 77. Canham, p. 242. 78. Morris, pp. 1 3 7 - 3 8 . 79. Lyons, p. 96. 80. Ibid., pp. 82, 291, 465-66. 81. Berger, p. 364. 82. Isaac F. Marcosson, Before I Forget (New York, 1959), p. 340. 83. Lyons, pp. 3 3 6 - 3 7 . 84. Ross, p. 378. 85. Lyons, pp. 3 8 1 - 9 2 ; Desmond, p. 26771. 86. Duranty, p. 326. 87. Lyons, pp. 600-9. 88. Joseph E. Davies, Mission to Moscow (London, 1943), pp. 1 8 0 - 8 1 . 89. Kruglak, pp. 35-38. 90. "U.S. Newsmen Dodge Death in Shanghai War," EÖP (Aug. 21, 1 9 3 7 ) , p. 12; "China War Toughest News Job in Years," EÖP (Jan. 1, 1938)7 P- 5- Morris, pp. 1 7 3 - 7 5 . 91. Snow, pp. 1 9 5 - 9 7 . 9 2 - Morin, pp. 3 1 5 - 1 9 . 93. "Writer Dies, 2 Others Hurt in Bombing of Panay," EÖP (Dec. 1 8 , 1 9 3 7 ) , P- 6. 94. A. T . Steele, Chicago Daily News, Dec. 1 5 - 1 8 , 1 9 3 7 . 95. Shirer, Third Reich, pp. 305-8. 96. New York Times, Aug. 1 0 and 1 4 , 1 9 3 7 .

Notes: X. Ordeal of World 97. 99. 100. 101. 103. 105. 106. 108.

War

II

467

Shirer, Berlin Diary, p. 78. 98. Times, the, History, IV, 9 1 1 . Shirer, Berlin Diary, pp. 80-87; Sevareid, pp. 106-8. Shirer, Berlin Diary, pp. 96-103. Times, the, History, IV, 929-30. 102. Ibid., p. 934. Gramling, AP, p. 483. 104. Ibid., p. 485. Shirer, Berlin Diary, entry August 23, 1939, pp. 178-81. Times, the, History, IV, 977. 107. Morris, p. 221 Berger, pp. 433-34. 109. Gramling, AP, p. 491.

X. T H E ORDEAL OF W O R L D W A R II 1. Tolischus, New York Times, Sept. 1 1 , 1939. Shirer, Third Reich, p. 625. 2. Canham, pp. 292-97; Lochner, pp. 285-87. 3. Louis L. Snyder and Richard B. Morris, They Saw It Happen (Harrisburg, Pa., 1 9 5 1 ) , pp. 398-401. 4. Morris, p. 226. 5. Chicago Daily News, April 16,1940. 6. Baillie, p. 143; Storey, p. 223. 7. M. W. Fodor, Chicago Daily News, May 17,1940. 8. Lazareff, p. 288. 9. Douglas Williams, London Daily Telegraph, June 1,1940. 10. London Times, June 4,1940. 1 1 . Berger, pp. 437-38. 12. Laney, pp. 3 1 7 - 1 8 . 13. Lazareff, pp. 1 1 - 2 3 passim. 14. Shirer broadcast, CBS, June 21, 1940. 15. Wiskemann, pp. 72-73. 16. CBS, Sept. 15,1940. 17. New York Times, Sept. 8,1940. 18. Churchill, Finest Hour, p. 416. 19. Morris, pp. 229-30. 20. Berger, pp. 446-47; Gramling, Free Men, pp. 176-92 passim; Morris, pp. 234-35; Brown, p. 13; Max Harrelson to author, 1963. 21. Brown, pp. 1 - 5 2 passim. 22. Morris, pp. 235-36. 23. Jones, pp. 455-90 passim; Storey, pp. 2 1 2 - 1 8 . 24. Wiskemann, pp. 74-76. 25. Shirer, Third Reich, p. 839. 26. Berger, p. 448; Cassidy, pp. 38-42; Morris, pp. 238-39. 27. Louis Lochner, ed., The Goebbels Diaries (New York, 1948), p. 210. 28. Brown, p. 73. 29. Ehrenburg, pp. 9 , 1 5 - 1 6 . 30. Morris, pp. 239-40; Cassidy, pp. 109-23 passim. 31. Berger, pp. 449-51. 32. Brown, p. 126. 33. Morin, p. 352. 34. Tolischus, Tokyo, pp. 222-24. 35. Morin, pp. 304-14, 334-40 passim. 36. Kato, pp. 18-32 passim. 37. Wohlstetter, p. 51. 38. Ibid., p. 241. 39. Ibid., p. 368. 40. Lord, pp. 1 2 - 5 1 passim. 41. Morris, pp. 241-42. 42. Time (Dec. 15, 1941). 43. Morris, p. 244. 44. Kato, p. 58; Gramling, Free Men, pp. 271-73. 45. Tolischus, Tokyo, pp. 322-26. 46. Morin, pp. 357-59. 47. Morris, pp. 247-48.

4 68

Notes: X . Ordeal of World

War

II

48. Brown, pp. 3 1 1 - 3 0 passim; CBS, Dec. 1 1 , 1 9 4 1 . 49. Morris, pp. 248-49; Gramling, Free Men, pp. 3 1 2 - 1 5 ; Mott, p. 753. 50. Carlos P. Romulo, I Saw the Fall of the Philippines (New York, 1942). 51. Morris, p. 250; Mott, p. 753; Chicago Sun, March 19, 1942; Gramling, Free Men, pp. 344-46. 52. Snyder, p. 138. 53. Morris, pp. 251-53; Storey, p. 224; Gramling, Free Men, pp. 3293254. Gramling, Free Men, pp. 351-53, 419-20. 55. Ibid., pp. 368-80 passim. 56. "Stanley Johnston Is Dead at 62," New York Times, Sept. 14, 1962; see also J. Russell Wiggins, Proceedings of ASNE Convention, 1957, for his defense of the Chicago Tribune. 57. Morris, pp. 254-55; Mott, pp. 753-54; Bob Considine, On The Line column, May 30, 1958, distributed by INS; Berger, pp. 460-62; Hohenberg, 148-52. 58. Gramling, Free Men, pp. 389-94, 402-3, 419-26; Berger, pp. 4 5 1 52; Lochner, pp. 275-76; Baillie, pp. 127-28; Kato, pp. 77-81; Mott, p. 742. 59. Hohenberg, pp. 152-57. 60. Snyder and Morris, pp. 609-13. 61. Morris, p. 258; Shirer, Third Reich, pp. 919-21; Richard McMillan, UP file, Oct. 26,1942. 62. Morris, pp. 258-68 passim. 63. Wes Gallagher, AP file, Nov. 8,1942. 64. Lee Miller, pp. 218-19, 220-21, 293. 65. Werth, pp. 208-312 passim. 66. Ibid., pp. 353, 357. 67. Ibid., pp. 438-60. 68. Ibid., p. 435; Shirer, Third Reich, pp. 932-33. 69. Lee Miller, p. 252. 70. Mc Namara, pp. 147-63 passim. 71. Walter Cronkite, UP file, Feb. 27,1943. 72. Berger, p. 463. 73. Matthews, Education, pp. 408-10. 74. McNamara, pp. 156-60; H. L. Matthews in New York Times, Oct. 12,1943. 75. Lee Miller, pp. 297, 299-301. 76. Ibid., pp. 320-21. 77. Ibid., pp. 239, 316-17; Matthews, Education, p. 436. 78. Lee Miller, p. 328. 79. Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day (New York, 1959), p. 31. 80. Morris, p. 272. 81. London Daily Telegraph, June 9,1944. 82. Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 7, 1944. 83. Berger, pp. 481-82; files of AP, Reuters, ABC for June 6, 1944. 84. Lee Miller, pp. 330-36. 85. Sevareid, pp. 431-32. 86. Morris, p. 274. 87. Lee Miller, p. 361. 88. Ibid., p. 363. 89. Canham, pp. 3 1 1 - 2 2 passim. 90. Lee Miller, pp. 424-27. 91. Werth, p. 370.

Notes: XI. Time and Space

469

92. CBS, April 15, 1945; New York Times, April 18, 1945; Shirer, Third Reich, pp. 937-79 passim. 93. Morris, pp. 284-85. 94. AP file, April 26,1945. 95. Berger, pp. 486-87. 96. Morris, pp. 285-86. 97. Primary sources are H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (New York, 1947); Shirer, Third Reich. See also Pierre J. Huss, INS file, May 15, 1945, and Morris, pp. 286-87. 98. Mott, pp. 757-58; Morris, pp. 287-90; Ed Kennedy, in Atlantic Monthly (Aug. 1948); AP file, May 7-8, 1945; New York Times, May 8, 1945; Snyder and Morris, pp. 688-93. 99. Lee Miller, p. 421. 100. Berger, p. 488. 101. Time (May 4,1942); Canham, pp. 307-8. 102. AP file, Aug. 19, 1943; Burns, pp. 48-52; John Hersey, The New Yorker, June 17,1944, pp. 31-43. 103. Berger, pp. 490-92; Hollington K. Tong, Dateline: China (New York, 1950), pp. 226-28; Snow, pp. 218-19. 104. Tong, China, pp. 241-57 passim. 105. AP file, Nov. 23, 1943; Morris, pp. 279-82; Hohenberg, pp. 3024. See also Vincent S. Jones, "The True Story of a Famous Picture," Rochester (N. Y.) Times-Union, April 7, i960, p. 28. 106. Laurence, pp. 1-94 passim. 107. Berger, pp. 510-15, 524; Laurence, pp. 42-43, 95-97, 1 1 2 - 1 4 , 1 1 5 18, 153-60; Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can Be Told (New York, 1962), pp. 325-32, 364; Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, No High Ground (New York, i960), pp. 1 1 4 - 1 5 ; Kato, pp. 196-98, 236-44; Japanese home service broadcast, 6 a.m., Aug. 7, 1945, included as Knebel and Bailey, No High Ground frontispiece; New York Times, Aug. 7, 1945; Dickson Hartwell and Andrew A. Rooney, eds., Off The Record (Garden City, 1952), pp. 224-28; Hohenberg, pp. 251-55; Mott, p. 759. 108. New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 16, 31, Sept. 1, 2, 3, 1945; Kato, pp. 261-62; Canham, pp. 306-8. Casualty figures from L. L. Snyder, The War, A Concise History, 1939-1945 (New York, i960), pp. 501-2.

XI. THROUGH T I M E AND SPACE 1. Berger, pp. 498-99. 2. Ibid., pp. 505-6. 3. Lie, p. 64. 4. New York Post, March 25, 26, 27, April 4, 5, May 6, 1946; New York Times, March 26, 27, 28, 1946. 5. Lie, pp. 89-93; New York Post, June 14, 1946; New York Times, June 15,1946. 6. Lie, pp. 1 4 , 4 7 - 5 1 , 133. 7. Observations of mine, a UN correspondent, 1946-50. 8. Laurence, p. 180. 9. Lie, pp. 327-40 passim.

47°

Notes: XI. Time and Space

10. Beech, p. 150; Higgins, pp. 15-34 passim; Monis, pp. 321-22; Mott, pp. 848-53. 1 1 . New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 18, 1950; Higgins, pp. 95-109; see also James Michener's estimate of correspondents in Beech, pp. 7 - 1 5 . 12. Mott, p. 853. 13. Higgins, pp. 1 3 0 - 3 1 . 14. Morris, pp. 323-24. 15. Truman, II, 362-65; Morris, p. 325. 16. Lie, pp. 349-50; Leckie, pp. 176-82. 17. Morris, p. 326. 18. Leckie, pp. 193-206 passim. 19. Ibid., pp. 207-9. Relman Morin, "Home by Christmas," EÓP (Feb. 22, i960), p. 56. 20. Chicago Daily News, Dec. 1 1 , 1 9 5 0 . 21. Higgins, pp. 195-96. 22. Leckie, pp. 218-28. 23. Lie, p. 349; Truman, II, 436-42. 24. Berger, pp. 550-51. 25. Beech, p. 207. 26. Baillie, p. 261. 27. AP file, Dec. 5,1952. 28. New York Times, April 9 - 1 1 , 1 9 5 3 . 29. New York Times, Sept. 21,1954. 30. Dallin, p. 1 1 8 . 31. Lie, pp. 35-36. 32. Snow, pp. 285-90 passim; Salisbury, Moscow, p. 2. 33. Canham, pp. 347-49. 34. Snow, pp. 294-95; Salisbury, American in Russia, pp. 4-6, 1 2 - 1 5 . 35. Hohenberg, pp. 185-88; Canham, p. 345. 36. Lie, pp. 216-18. 37. R. F. Anderson, Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review, LVII, No. 10 (Dec. 9, 1950), 7-8. 38. Canham, pp. 341-43. 39. W. L. Ryan, "Moscow Correspondents See Some Rays of Hope," E&P (Jan. 2,1954), pp. 7-8. 40. Salisbury, Moscow, p. 3. 41. New York Journal-American, Feb. 5-10, 1955. 42. Des Moines Register, Feb. 10,1955. 43. Russell Jones, UP file, Oct. 29-Dec. 3, 1956; Morris, pp. 334-35 44. Dallin, pp. 371-78 passim. 45. Ibid., pp. 4 1 2 - 2 1 passim. 46. New York Times, Oct. 5,1957. 47. New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 10,1957. 48. Times Talk, New York Times house magazine, XIII, No. 3 (Nov. 1959)49. Salisbury, Moscow, p. 259. 50. Ibid., pp. 256-70; UPI Reporter, Aug. 13,1959. 51. Salisbury, Moscow, p. 61. 52. Ibid., p. 262. New York Times, Sept. 15, 28, 1959. 53. AP Log, Dec. 1 1 - 1 6 , 1959. "Weary Reporters Puff But Ike Gets Lift," EóP (June 18, i960), p. 79. 54. New York Times, May 1 - 1 8 , i960. 55. AP Log, Aug. 1 1 - 1 7 , i960. 56. New York Times, Sept. 20-Oct. 13, i960. Max Frankel, quoted in Byline magazine (Fall, i960), New York Reporters' Association publication.

Notes: XI. Time and Space

471

57. Earl J. Johnson, UPI Reporter, Dec. 2 1 , 1 9 6 1 . 58. Salisbury, New Russia, p. 122. 59. "The Foreign Press in the U.S.A.," E&P (June 1 1 , i960), p. 15. 60. "One Day in the World Costs AP $98,597," E&P (April 9, i960), p. 13. 61. "UP and INS Merge," E&P (May 3 1 , 1 9 5 8 ) , p. 10. 62. Price Day, Baltimore Sun, Jan. 19, 1948; Snow, pp. 398-400; Vincent Sheean, Nehru (New York, i960), pp. 3-5; UPI Reporter, Jan. 30, 1948. 63. Canham, p. 366. 64. Morris, p. 332; Hohenberg, p. 304. 65. New York Times, Oct. 2, 1962, p. 27. 66. Morris, p. 316. 67. IPI, pp. 156, 219-20. 68. New York Times, May 2, 1957. 69. "APME Approves Efforts for Getting News In China," E&P (Nov. 22, 1958), p. 1 1 ; see also "News From the Far East," EÖP (April 4, 1959), p. 6. 70. "U.S. Secrecy Blamed on Scoop Hunters," EÖP (Oct. 7, 1961), p. 11. 71. Homer Bigart, Times Talk, X V , No. 8 (April 1962). 72. Edgar Snow, The Other Side of the River: Red China Today (New York, 1961-62), pp. 9-10. 73. Matthews, Cuban, p. 15. 74. Creelman, pp. 2 1 1 - 1 2 . 75. Matthews, Cuban, pp. 41-42. 76. New York Times, Feb. 24, 1957. 77. Matthews, Cuban, p. 84. 78. Ibid., pp. 77, 84, 290, 292. 79. New York Times, April 8-20,1961. 80. AP Log, April 20-26,1962. 81. Ibid, (no page, no top sheet) 82. New York Times, May 10, 1961. Ben H. Bagdikian, "Press Independence and the Cuban Crisis," Columbia Journalism Review (Winter, 1963), pp. 9 - 1 1 . 83. New York Times, Oct. 23, 25, and Nov. 21, 1962. 84. Bagdikian in Columbia Journalism Review, p. 8. 85. AP Log, Nov. 16-21, 1962; Nieman Reports, Dec., 1962, pp. 6-7. 86. UPI Reporter, Feb. 28,1963. 87. New York Times, June 15, 1963, p. 1 1 ; AP World magazine, XVII, No. 3 (Autumn, 1962), 3-5. 88. Drew Middleton, "A Correspondent Looks at His Job," New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 16,1958. 89. Osgood Caruthers, New York Times, April 1 3 , 1 9 6 1 . 90. New York Times, Feb. 21, 1962; AP Log, Feb. 1 5 - 2 1 , 1962. 91. UPI Reporter, June 7, 1962. 92. New York Times, July 15, 1962, p. 5E. 93. New York Times, July 24, 1962. "The Telstar Story," Quill magazine (Sept. 1962). 94. Earl Ubell, Bulletin of ASNE, No. 460, Jan. 1, 1963, p. 4; "Gordo In Trouble, 1 in 700 Spots IT," EÖP (May 25, 1963), p. 10; Laurence, pp 180-81.

472

Notes: XII.

Tomorrow's

Correspondents

95. John M. Hightower, AP file, March 1 , 1 9 6 3 . 96. Dept. of State press release No. 288, May 29,1963. XII. TOMORROW'S F O R E I G N CORRESPONDENTS 1. This scheme of coverage was used particularly in the Far East. 2. State Department statistics. 3. Columbia Journalism Review (Fall, 1963), pp. 54-55. 4. Personal observation, UN public information policies. 5. Herbert Brucker, "When the Press Shapes the News," Saturday Review (Jan. 1 1 , 1 9 6 4 ) , pp. 75-85. 6. AP Log, Dec. 1 1 - 1 6 , 1959; "Ike's Tour Herding Irks Some Specials," E&P (Jan. 2, i960), p. 12. 7. AP Log, June 1-7, 1961. 8. Brucker; AP Log, Nov. 20-26, 1963; Four Days: The Historical Record of the Death of President Kennedy (New York, 1964); anecdote related to author on Nov. 25, 1963, by A. G. Venkatachari, editor of the Tamil daily, Dimani, in Madras, India. 9. "Pope's Visit to Holy Land Enlarges His Stature," by Milton Bracker, New York Times, Jan. 12, 1964, p. 6E. See also AP Log, Jan. 1 - 7 , 1964: "Assembled to record a never-before-in-history event, some 1,500 reporters and photographers struggled through or around predictable difficulties." 10. Emanuel R. Freedman at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, Spring, 1963. Author's notes. 1 1 . Figures on cost-per-correspondent from confidential sources. 12. Francis Williams, Transmitting World News: A Study of Telecommunications and the Press (Paris, 1953), pp. 53-54, for the background of the "Empire Rate"; Press Handbook and Tariff, issued by H. M. Postmaster General, Electra House, London, for current rates and regulations; latest statistics from press statement, Facts and Figures, issued from Press Liaison Office, Electra House, Jan., 1964. Details of telephone submarine cable from "First Link," and "Compac," issued by Cable & Wireless Ltd., Mercury House, London. 13. John Wilhelm, "The Re-Appearing Foreign Correspondent: A World Survey," Journalism Quarterly (Spring, 1963), pp. 147-68. Previous surveys included those of Russell F. Anderson, "The Disappearing Foreign Correspondent," Michigan Alumnus Quarterly (Dec. 9. 1950) and "News from Nowhere," Saturday Review (Nov. 17, 1 9 5 1 ) ; Theodore E. Kruglak, The Foreign Correspondent: A Study of the Men and Women Reporting for the American Information Media in Western Europe (Geneva, 1955); Overseas Press Club survey summarized by Elmo Roper, EÖP (May 3, 1958), p. 14. Anderson reported only 293 American foreign correspondents in service, which drew denials from the major wire services and others. Kruglak, five years later, estimated there were 286 American foreign corre-

Notes: XII. Tomorrow's Correspondents

473

spondents in Western Europe and called this 75 percent of the total U.S world force, although he gave no figures to support his projection. Like the Anderson survey, Kraglak's census found little support in the profession, but was cited by its critics with approval. While Wilhelm's count is closer to figures compiled on a name-by-name basis by USIS and other official agencies in the various capitals, it has its drawbacks, too. His Rome figure of 64 includes such foreign correspondents as those of the Long Island Advocate, Travel Agent, Travel and Billboard magazines. However, his London figure of 183 checks with the roster of "The Association of American Correspondents in London, 1963." In Tokyo he recognizes the correspondents of the Quigley Publications, Zenier Brothers TV News, and the American Red Cross, but omits the correspondent of the Chicago Tribune and of the Seattle Times. In New Delhi, he omits the correspondent of the Washington Star. It all depends on what is meant by the term, "foreign correspondent," and who is doing the census-taking. 14. "New York, Chicago Papers Expand Wires," EÓP (July 20, 1963), p. 52; "Rembert James Heads Copley News Service," EÖP (July 20, 1963), p. 53; other developments reported as author's observations. Wilhelm (see note 13 ) reported opening of fourteen new U.S. bureaus in Latin America. 15. Korean correspondents noted by author in Sept., 1963. 16. Agence France-Presse figure was in L'Echo de la Presse et de la Publicité in Nov., 1963. 17. "Censorship—An Old But Still New Problem," Overseas Press Bulletin, Jan. i l , 1964, pp. 4-5. 18. UPI Reporter, Nov. 22,1962. 19. "Foreign Correspondents—The View from Saigon," Time (Sept. 20, 1963), p. 44; "Foreign Correspondents—The Saigon Story," Time (Oct. 1 1 , 1963), pp. 65-66; "Dateline, Saigon: War of Words," Newsweek (Oct. 7, 1963), pp. 44-45; UPI, Memo from the ME, Nov. 7, 1963; David Halberstam, "The Best of All Possible Assignments," ASNE Bulletin, Nov. 1, 1963, p. 15; "Halberstam Hits U.S., Diem Officials for Interfering in Viet Nam Coverage," Overseas Press Bulletin, Jan. 18, 1964, p. 3. 20. Homer Bigart, "Bigart Tangles with Red Tape in Viet Nam Jungle," Times Talk (April 1962), pp. 1-8. 21. Halberstam in lecture at Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, March 19,1964. 22. Douglass Cater, The Fourth Branch of Government (Boston, 1959), PP-119-2123. New York Times, April 28,1961. 24. Halberstam in Overseas Press Bulletin, Jan. 18, 1964, p. 3 (see note 19).

25. Clifton Daniel, "Responsibility of the Reporter and Editor," Nieman Reports, Jan., 1961, pp. 12-15. 26. The Overseas Press Club survey of 448 foreign correspondents, summarized by Elmo Roper in 1958, reported that 88 percent attended college,

474

Notes: XII. Tomorrow's Correspondents

16 percent did graduate work, 13 percent have an M.A. or Ph.D., 66 percent of those who attended college did not study journalism at the undergraduate level and, of those who did, a majority approved of journalism instruction. Of those surveyed, 55 percent reported annual earnings of $11,000 a year or more, although 10 percent said they earned less than $8,000. (Actually, the leaders earn $15,000 to $20,000 and more.) Political preferences were reported as follows: 23 percent Republican, 36 percent Democrat, 37 percent independents, 1 percent Socialist. From E&P (May 3, 1958), p. 14. 27. Bernard C. Cohen, The Press and Foreign Policy (Princeton, N. J., 1963), pp. 259-63.

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Coblentz, E. D. William Randolph Hearst: A Portrait in His Own Words New York, 1952. Cook, Sir Edward. Delane of the Times. London, 1916. Cooper, Kent. Barriers Down. New York, 1942. Kent Cooper and the Associated Press. New York, 1959. Creelman, James. On the Great Highway. Boston, 1901. Crozier, Emmet. American Reporters on the Western Front, 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 8 . New York, 1959. DAB. Dictionary of American Biography. New York, 1935. Daily News. The War Correspondence of the Daily News. London, 1877. Dallin, David J. Foreign Policy after Stalin. Philadelphia, 1961. Dasent, A. I. John Thadeus Delane: Editor of the Times. 2 vols. London, 1908. Davis, Elmer. History of the New York Times, 1 8 5 1 - 1 9 2 1 . New York, 1921. Davis, Richard Harding. Notes of a War Correspondent. New York, 1910. With the Allies. New York, 1914. De Biowitz, M. de (Henri Georges Stefan Adolphe). Memoirs of M. de Blowitz. New York, 1903. Dennis, Charles H. Victor Lawson. Chicago, 1935. Desmond, Robert W . The Press and World Affairs. New York, 1927. DNB. Dictionary of National Biography. New York, 1912. Downey, Fairfax D. Richard Harding Davis: His Day. New York, 1933. Duranty, Walter. I Write As I Please. New York, 1935. E&P. Editor 6 Publisher. Emery, Edwin, and Henry Ladd Smith. The Press and America. New York, 1954. EB. Encyclopedia Britannica. 14th ed., vol. 16. Articles on newspapers by Sir Robert Donald, incorporating earlier material by E. Edwards and H. Chisholm and by James Melvin Lee. Ehrenburg, Ilya. The Tempering of Russia. New York, 1944. Essary, J. Fred. Covering Washington. Boston, 1927. Everyman's United Nations. 6th ed. New York, 1959. Fenton, Charles A. The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway. New York, 1954Fermi, Laura. Mussolini. Chicago, 1961. Forbes, Archibald. Memories and Studies of War and Peace. London, 1895. My Experiences of the War Between France and Germany. 2 vols. London, 1 8 7 1 . Souvenirs of Some Continents. London, 1885. Forrest, Wilbur. Behind the Front Page. New York, 1934. Fumeaux, Rupert. The First War Correspondent: William Howard Russell of the Times. London, 1944.

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Gelb, Arthur and Barbara Gelb. O'Neill. New York, 1962. Gibbons, Edward. Floyd Gibbons. New York, 1953. Gibbs, Sir Philip. Adventures in Journalism. New York, 1923. Now It Can Be Told. New York, 1920. Gramling, Oliver. AP: The Story of News. New York, 1940. Free Men Are Fighting. New York, 1942. Greene, F. V. Sketches of Army Life in Russia. New York, 1885. Hartwell, Dickson and Andrew A. Rooney, eds. Off the Record: Inside Stories by Members of the Overseas Press Club. New York, 1952. Hicks, Granville, with John Stuart. John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary. New York, 1936. Hohenberg, John, cd. The Pulitzer Prize Story. New York, 1959. Huddleston, Sisley. In My Time. New York, 1938. Hudson, Frederic. Journalism in the United States from 1690 to 1872. New York, 1873. IPI. International Press Institute. The Flow of the News. Zurich, 1953. James, Lionel. High Pressure. London, 1929. Johnson, Gerald and others. The Sunpapers of Baltimore. New York, 1937Jones, Sir Roderick. A Life in Reuters. London, 1951. Kato, Masuo. The Lost War. New York, 1946. Kinsey, Philip. The Chicago Tribune: Its First Hundred Years. 3 vols. New York, 1943; Chicago, 1943; Chicago, 1946. Kruglak, T. E. The Foreign Correspondents. Geneva, 1955. The Two Faces of Tass. Minneapolis, 1962. Laney, Al. Paris Herald. New York, 1947. Langer, William L. and Everett S. Gleason. The Undeclared War, 194041. New York, 1953. Langford, Gerald. The Richard Harding Davis Years. New York, 1961. Laurence, William L. Men and Atoms. New York, 1946,1959,1962. Lazareff, Pierre. Deadline. New York, 1942. Leckie, Robert. Conflict: The History of the Korean War. New York, 1962. Lee, Alfred McClung. The Daily Newspaper in America. New York, 1937. Leech, Margaret. In the Days of McKinley. New York, 1959. Lie, Trygve. In the Cause of Peace. New York, 1954. Lochner, Louis. Always the Unexpected. New York, 1946. Lord, Walter. Day of Infamy. New York, 1957. Lucas, Reginald. Lord Glenesk and the Morning Post. London, 1910. Lyons, Eugene. Assignment in Utopia. New York, 1937. McCabe, Charles R. Damned Old Crank. New York, 1951. McCarthy, Justin and Sir John R. Robinson. The Daily News Jubilee. London, 1896. MacGahan, J. A. Campaigning on the Oxus and The Fall of Khiva. New York, 1874.

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McNamara, John. Extra! U.S. War Correspondents in Action. Boston, 1945-

Markham, James W. Bovard of the Post-Dispatch. Baton Rouge, 1954. Mathews, Joseph J. Reporting the Wars. Minneapolis, 1957. Matthews, Herbert L. The Cuban Story. New York, 1961. The Education of a Foreign Correspondent. New York, 1946. Miller, Lee G. The Story of Ernie Pyle. New York, 1950. Miller, Webb. I Found No Peace. New York, 1936. Millis, Walter. The Road to War: America, 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 7 . New York, 1935-

Morin, Relman. East Wind Rising. New York, i960. Morison, Elting E. Turmoil and Tradition: The Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson. Boston, i960. Morris, Joe Alex. Deadline Every Minute: The Story of the United Press. New York, 1957. Mott, Frank Luther. American Journalism. 3d ed. New York, 1962. Mowrer, Paul Scott. The House of Europe. Boston, 1945. Murrow, Edward R. This Is London. New York, 1941. Nevins, Allan. The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism. New York, 1922. Nevinson, Henry W. Fire of Life. New York, 1936. Nicolson, Harold. Peacemaking, 1919. New York, 1933. O'Brien, Frank M. The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918. New York, 1918. O'Connor, Richard. The Scandalous Mr. Bennett. New York, 1962. Palmer, Frederick. With My Own Eyes. Indianapolis, 1933. Pound, Reginald and Geoffrey Harmsworth. Northcliffe. London, 1959. Pray, Isaac C. Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett and His Times. New York, 1855. Pringle, Henry F. Theodore Roosevelt. New York, 1931. Ralph, Julian. The Making of a Journalist. New York, 1903. Reed, John. Ten Days That Shook the World. New York, 1919. Robinson, Henry Crabb. Diary. Thomas Sadler, ed. 3 vols. London, 1869. Robinson, Sir John. Fifty Years of Fleet Street. London, 1904. Rosewater, Victor. History of Cooperative Newsgathering in the United States. New York, 1930. Ross, Ishbel. Ladies of the Press. New York, 1936. Russell, W. H. The British Expedition to the Crimea. London, 1858. My Diary North and South. 2 vols. London, 1863. Sala, George Augustus. Life and Adventures. 2 vols. New York, 1895. Salisbury, Harrison E. An American in Russia. New York, 1955. To Moscow and Beyond. New York, 1959. A New Russia? New York, 1962. Salmon, Lucy M. The Newspaper and the Historian. New York, 1923

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Journalism Quarterly, Vol. X, No. 3 (Sept. 1942), pp. 277-86. Werth, Alexander. The Year of Stalingrad. London, 1946. Wile, Frederick W. News Is Where You Find It. Indianapolis, 1939. Williams, Wythe. Dusk of Empire. New York, 1937. Willoughby, C. A. Shanghai Conspiracy: The Sorge Spy Ring. New York, 1952. Wiskemann, Elizabeth. A Great Swiss Newspaper, The Story of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. New York, 1959. Wohlstetter, Roberta. Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. Palo Alto, 1962.

Index Abbot, Willis J., 130, 280 Abbott, Freddy, 273 A B C , 389, 442, 444 Abd el Krim, 275, 276 Abdication of Edward VIII, 305-9 Abdullhi, Khalifa, 127 Abel, Carl, 96 Abend, Hallett, 290, 322 Abetz, Otto, 295, 297-98, 325 Ackerman, Carl W . , 232, 277 Addis Ababa, 305 Adowa, 302, 303 Advertising by Havas, 1 5 , 1 5 9 , 296 Adzhubei, Alexei I., 408 Africa, coverage, 342, 439, 444 Afrika Corps, 341, 359 Agence France-Presse, 387, 444 l'Agence Havas, see Havas Agit-Rosta, 234 Ahman, Sven, 387 Airplane, development of, 189-91 Alamagordo, 3 7 ; , 376 Algeria, 276, 354, 355, 4 1 7 AUegemeine Zeitung (Augsberg), 9, 36, 37-38 Allen, Larry, 353 Alsace-Lorraine, 249 Alsop, Joseph, 446, 447, 448 Amann, Max, 259 "America First," 327 American Broadcasting Company, 389, 442, 444 American Civil War, 62-71 American Press Institute, 452 American Red Cross, 473 American Relief Administration, 270 American Revolution, 8 American Society of Newspaper Editors, 421,435 American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 427 America's Cup Race, 175

Amery, Leopold S., 139 Amiens Telegram, 2 1 5 Amundsen, Roald, 196 Anderson, Alexander Massey, 353 Anderson, Russell F., 472-73 Andrews, Bert, 281, 385

Angriff, 292

Antietam, battle of, 70-71 Antisemitism, 106; in Russia, 188, 226; in Germany, 292, 365 AP, see Associated Press; New York Associated Press Applegate, Dick, 391

Army and Navy Gazette, 68 Army and Navy Journal, 178

Amhem, 363 Ashmead-Bartlett, Ellis, 221, 3 1 8 Asia, coverage of, 444 Associated Press of Illinois (new), 1 5 1 , 152, 158 Associated Press of New York (new), 282; independence of, xvii, 162; formation and organization, 153-55; policies, 162, 424-25; cartels and, 1 6 3 64, 165, 261-65; logotype, 165; RussoJapanese War, 176, 177, 178-79, 1 8 1 ; Portsmouth Conference, 184-85; Wright brothers, 189; Peary expedition, 197, 198; Titanic, 199; Sarajevo assassination, 202-4; World War I, 216, 218, 223-24, 239, 242; Lusitania, 219; Russia, 231, 233, 270, 3 1 7 , 320, 321, 341, 401; Ethiopian war, 299, 300-1, 303, 304; Spanish Civil War, 3 1 3 , 3 1 4 - 1 6 ; China, 322; World War II, 333, 334, 337, 338, 339, 343, 344, 347, 354-55, 367-68, 372, 383; United Nations coverage, 387; Korean War, 391; Hungarian revolt, 405; costs, 413; influence, 414, 443; Cuba, 421, 422; space shots, 426; election coverage, 438; Viet Nam revolt, 447

482

Index

Associated Press of New York (old), 29-30, 32, 137, 1 5 1 , 1 5 2 - 5 3 Astor, Colonel and Mrs. John Jacob, 200, 201 Astor, Lord and Lady, 326«. Atkinson, Brooks, 369, 370, 3 7 1 Atlantic cable, 427 Atom bomb: development, 3 7 3 - 7 5 , 389; use, 376-78; control, 428-29 Atomic Energy Commission, UN, 3 8 6 87 Atter, Robert, 202 Aubert, Louis, 245 Auschwitz, 365 Austin, A. B., 353, 361 Austria, 1 1 8 ; World W a r I, 98-99, 204-8, 240; annexation, 294, 325, 327-28 Austrian Korrespondenz-Bureau, 157, 260 Austro-Prussian W a r of 1866, 72 AvantiI, 2 1 2 Azana, Manuel, 3 1 0 Baillie, Hugh, 249-50, 306, 333 Baker, Ray Stannard, 245 Balaclava, 5 0 - 5 1 Balderston, John L., 282 Baldwin, Hanson, 370 Baldwin, Stanley, 306-9 Balkans, 95, 147; Sarajevo crisis, 2 0 2 - 6 Ball, Albert, 222 Ballin, Albert, 2 0 9 - 1 0 , 460 Baltimore Sun, 28, 167, 233, 2 8 0 - 8 1 , 443; Mexican War, 25, 40 Balzac, Honoré de, xvii, 10 Barber, Frederick Courtenay, 303 Barber, Will, 281, 299, 303 Barcelona, 310,315 Bard, Josef, 278 Barnes, Joe, 320 Barnes, Ralph, 273, 281, 338 Barnes, Thomas, 45 Barres, Philippe, 294 Barrett, Edward W . , 377 Barrett, George, 396 Barrows, Nat, 4 1 5 Barthou, M. Louis, 252 Bartlett, Vernon, 342 Barzini, Luigi, 324 Bass, John, 1 7 6 Bataan, 348 Batista, Fulgencio, 419, 4 2 1 Bay of Pigs invasion, 422 B B C , 342, 364, 367

Beattie, Edward W . Jr., 293, 333, 368 Beatty, Bessie, 230 Beaverbrook, Lord, 260, 305 Beebe, William, 266 Beech, Keyes, 394 Beer, Max, 387 Beiden, Jack, 322, 369, 370 Belgium: neutrality guarantees, 2 0 8 - 1 0 ; Britain and, 2 1 1 ; invasion, 2 1 1 - 1 2 , 2 1 3 , 218, 334; Versailles Treaty, 249 Bell, Alexander, 1 5 5 Bell, John, 1 - 2 Bell, Moberly, 1 4 7 , 1 6 9 , 1 7 1 - 7 2 Bellaire, Robert, 353 Belleau Wood, 239 Bennett, James Gordon, Jr., 75, 1 1 5 , 1 7 5 , 255-56; Stanley and, 86-87, 89, 92; Paris Herald, 2 5 4 - 5 5 Bennett, James Gordon, Sr., 2 1 - 2 6 , 28, 75, 76 Bennett, Maude Potter, 255 Berget, Meyer, 337 Beria, Lavrenti Pavlovich, 398-99 Beringer, Guy, 2 3 1 Berlin, 147; as news source, 5 - 6 ; blockade, 388, 401; riots, 404 Berlin, Congress of, 95, 96-98 Berlin Lokal-Anzeiger, 203, 204, 207 Berlin National-Zeitung, 15 Berlin Norddeutsche Zeitung, 205 Berlin Post, 94 Berlin Tageblatt, 250, 258, 268; Scheffer, 2 7 1 , 318; expropriation, 292 Berlin Wall, 4 1 7 Bernhard, Georg, 2 7 1 Berrigan, Darrell, 3 7 1 Bertelli, C.F., 273 Bess, Demaree and Dorothy, 286-87 Best, Robert H., 3 2 7 - 2 8 , 353 Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von, 204, 211-12 Bigart, Homer, 359, 3 8 1 - 8 2 , 383; Korea, 391, 392; Viet Nam, 418, 447 Bigelow, John, 68 Billboard, 473 Binns, Jack, 200 Birchall, Frederick T . , 272, 273, 309 Bird, William, 272 Bishop, W . A., 222 Bismarck, Prince Otto von, 76, 94, 99; news agencies and, xvii, 157, 158; Blowitz and, 96-97, 1 0 0 - 1 Blair, Francis P., 40 Blake, Harry, 2271., 28 Bleriot, Louis, 192

Index Biowitz, Henri Stefan Opper de, 9 3 - 1 0 1 Blunden, Godfrey, 399 Boelcke, Oswald, 222 Boer War, 1 1 3 - 1 4 , 138-44, 157 Bolitho, William, see Rvall, William Bolitho Bolo Pasha, Paul, 241 Bolshevik Revolution, 228-31 Bonsal, Stephen, 24;, 250 Borah, William E., 246, 248 Borodin, Mikhail, 289 Borthwick, Algernon, 56-58 Borthwick, Peter, 57-58 Bosnia, 95, 99, 1 1 8 , 202-3 Boston American, 164 Boston Globe, 1 5 5 Boston Journal, 63 Bourchier, James David, 147, 231 Bourke, Robert, 1 1 7 Bourke-White, Margaret, 342 Bovard, Oliver Kirby, 272 Bowen, James, 333 Boxer Rebellion, 144-49, 235 Boyle, Hai, 358, 365-66, 391 Bracken, Brendan, 440 Bracker, Milton, 359, 366, 438 Bradford, James M., 40«. Bragg, Braxton, 41 Braham, D. D., 226 Braithwaite, John Sidney, 280 Brandon, Henry, 387 Branley, Edouard, 175 Brest La Depeche, 241 Bretscher, Willi, 336, 340 Brewer, Sam, 339 Bride, Harold, 201 Brinkley, David, 427 Brisbane, Arthur, 1 3 7 Brisson, Henri, 107 Britain: Congress of Berlin, 99; Boer War, 1 1 3 - 1 4 , 138-44, 157; Sudan, 1 2 1 - 2 8 ; Boxer Rebellion, 149; Hearst and, 164-65; World War I, 2 1 1 - 1 2 , 2 1 4 - 1 5 ; Germany and, 2 1 1 , 325-26; Spanish Civil War, 310; USSR and, 325; World War II, 3 3 1 , 334-38, 342, 343; Korean War, 394; atomic tests, 429 Britain, Battle of, 336-38 British Broadcasting Company, 342, 364, 367 British Information Ministry, 368 British Post Office Overseas Telegraph Services, 440 British press, 12, 306, 307

483

Brock, Ray, 338 Brodney, Kenneth, 403 Brooks, Alden, 221-22 Broun, Heywood, 235, 237; Sacco-Vanzetti case, 257-58 Brown, Cecil, 339, 341, 343, 347, 348 Brown, Constantine, 279 Brown, Cyril, 268 Brown, Jim, 320 Brown, Louis Edgar, 232 Browne, Malcolm, 446, 447 Browne, Mallory, 363 Brucker, Herbert, 435, 437 Bryan, William Jennings, 219 Bryant, Louise, 229 Buchanan, James, 20 Buchenwald, 365 Buck, Edward, 157 Buckley, Christopher, 354 Buckley, Henry, 3 1 2 Buenos Aires La Prensa, 262, 4 1 5 Buenos Aires La Nation, 261-62 Bulganin, Nigolai, 404, 405 Bulgaria, 99, 120, 147; atrocities in, 95, 114-18 Bulge, battle of the, 363 Buller, Sir Redvers, 1 4 1 , 142 Bullitt, William C., 319-20 Bullock, W . F., 1 9 1 Bull Run, 64, 70 Bunau-Varilla, Maurice, 294-95 Bunau-Varilla, Philippe, 294 Bungay, George Washington, 27 Bunnelle, Robert, 337 Burchett, Wilfred, 403 Bureau of the American Republics, see Pan American Union Burke, Edmund, 2 Burleigh, Bennett, 125, 126, 128, 129, 139, 214 Burma, 348, 369 Bykovsky, Valery F., 428 Byrd, Richard Evelyn, 272, 274 Cable and Wireless, Ltd., 440 Cables: trans-channel, 16; costs, 19; Atlantic, 20 Caillaux, Henriette and Joseph, 206, 208 Caldwell, Erskine, 341, 342 Callender, Harold, 273 Calmette, Gaston, 206 Cameron, John, 126 Campbell, Sir Colin, 55 Canada, 165, 394; Morning Herald coverage, 24

484

Index

Canham, Erwin Dain, 380 Cannon, Jimmy, 391 Caratsch, Reto, 336 Cardigan, Lord, 51 Carducci, Giosue, 103 Carlist Wars, 14, 1 1 6 Carlson, Evans, 323 Carnegie, Andrew, 168 Carpenter, Scott, 427 Carpio, Julio, 349 Carrier pigeons, 16, 23, 27 Carroll, Raymond, 237, 238 Carroll, Wallace, 330, 337, 342 Casement, Sir Roger, 241 Casey, Robert J., 337, 355 Cassidy, Heniy C., 341, 342, 399 Castro, Fidel, xvi, 418-22, 424 Castro, Raul, 420 Catledge, Turner, 378 CBS, see Columbia Broadcasting System Censorship, xvi-xvii, 1 1 3 - 1 4 , 243, 431, 445-46, 448-50; Switzerland, 8; Germany, 36-37; Civil War, 65; Russia, 119, 231-34, 318, 320, 32», 398404; Russo-Japanese War, 177, 17879, 180-81; World War I, 215, 21619, 221-22; British, 234, 236; United States, 234-38, 352, 355, 368, 37778, 424; Hungary, 277; France, 297; Korean War, 390; Cuba, 420; wire services, 425; Viet Nam, 447 Central Intelligence Agency, 421, 422 Central News, 156 Central Press, 156 CeSoir, 236 Chamberlain, Sir Austen, 263 Chamberlain, Joseph, 142 Chamberlain, Neville, 326, 329, 331 Chamberlin, William Henry, 270, 280, 317, 318 Chancellor, Christopher, 288 Chang Hsueh-liang, 286 Chanteloup, Maurice, 391 Chao Ming-Heng (Tommy), 370, 371 Chaplin, William W., 304 Chapp£, Claude, 28 Charleston Courier, 21, 22, 25 Charleston News and Courier, 108 Chassaigne, Condurier de, 205 Chattanooga Times, 165,166,169 Chautemps, Camille, 297 Cheradame, Andre, 247 Chiang Kai-shek, 286, 289, 290, 323; Stilwell and, 370-71; Taiwan, 393 Chicago American, 301

Chicago Daily News, 443; founding and development, 152,167, 279-80; RussoJapanese War, 176; World War I, 214, 218, 232, 237; Versailles Treaty, 248; Russia, 268, 270, 271; Manchurian war, 288; World War II, 291, 333, 334, 337, 338; China, 322, 324; N.Y. Herald Tribune and, 442 Chicago Inter Ocean, 153 Chicago Record, 1 3 2 , 1 4 6 Chicago Record-Herald, 110, 192 Chicago Tribune, 32, 167, 274-76, 278, 443; Civil War, 63; Spanish-American War, 132; World War I, 214, 223, 234, 235, 248; Paris edition, 255, 282; Russia, 269; League of Nations, 271; Manchurian war, 288; Ethiopian war, 299, 301, 303; isolationism, 327; World War II, 351; Castro, 420; Japan, 473 Chicherin, Georgi V., 284 China: Boxer Rebellion, 145-47, 14849; Japan and, 286-89, 321-23; USSR and, 289; see also Communist China China Weekly Review, 288 Chinese Nationalists, 370-71 Chirol, Sir Valentine, 147, 150 Chisholm, Hugh, 208 Cholerton, A. T., 342 Chou En-lai, 290, 371, 412 Christian Science Monitor, 167, 280, 382, 443; Spanish-American War, 130; World War I, 218; Russia, 232, 27071, 317; World War II, 332, 333, 363-64; United Nations, 387 Churchill, Randolph, 397 Churchill, Lord Randolph, 127 Churchill, Winston, xviii, 337; Sudan, 123, 127-29; Boer War, 1 1 3 - 1 4 , 13839, 140-41, 143, >44; World War I, 221, 222; speeches, 300, 335, 368, 386, 399 Ciano, Count Galeazzo, 301 Cincinnati Commercial, 63, 77 Cincinnati Gazette, 63 Cincinnati Post, 161-62 Cisneros, Evangelina, 1 3 1 Civil War, American, 62-71 Clapper, Raymond, 360 Clay, Henry, 25 Clemenceau, Georges, xviii, 69, 101, 238, 239; Dreyfus case, 106, 108; World War I, 217-18; Versailles, 245, 248 Clemens, Samuel, 283 Cleveland, Grover, 109, 1 1 0

Index Cleveland Press, 161 Clipper ships, 23 "Cliveden Set," 253-54 Cobb, Frank I, 245 Cobb, Irvin S., 214, 237 Codes, 344-45, 351 Cohen, Benjamin A., 387 Cold War, 384 Collier's, 312, 324, 337; Boer War, 139; World War I, 214, 215, 221-22, 235 Collingwood, Charles, 364, 368 Collins, Henry, 142 Coltman, Robert, 146 Columbia Broadcasting System: radio, 327, 3?o, 332, 334, 336, 364; Murrow, 336-37, 365; Brown, 343, 348; election coverage, 438; growth, 442, 444 Columbia University, 1 1 1 , 450 Communist China, 289, 290, 370, 371, 4 1 7 - 1 8 ; Korean War, 392-98; USSR, 412, 417; coverage of, 416-17; nuclear power, 429; censorship, 445 Concentration camps, 214, 365 Conger, Edwin H., 145, 148, 149 Conger, Seymour Beach, 224 Congressional Record, 248 Conniff, Frank, 404 Consolidated Press, 288 Conway, Moncure D., 77-78 Cook, Clarence, 75 Cook, Dr. Frederick A., 193-96, 198 Cook, W . H „ 88 Cooper, Gordon, 428 CoopeT, Kent, 261-65; on news agencies, 18-19, 32, 159 Cooper, Merian, 275 Copenhagen Politiken, 387 Copley Press service, 442, 443 Coral Sea, battle of the, 351 Corregidor, 348, 349, 350 Correspondents: role, ix, xvii-xix, 1 1 3 , 119, 431-34, 451-52; numbers, 43438, 441-44, 472-73; education, 47374 Corriere della Sera, 258 Cortesi, Arnaldo, i54n., 267 Cortesi, Isabelle Lauder Cochrane, 154*1. Cortesi, Salvatore, 154 Costs of foreign correspondence, xvii, 1, 413, 431, 439, 45o; cable, 72, 425; Spanish-American War, 136, 137 Council of Ten, Versailles, 244 Council on Foreign Relations, 450, 452 Covenant, League of Nations, 246-48

485

Cowles, Gardner, 418 Cox, Geoffrey, 334, 339 Cox, James M., 251 Cox, Melville James, 343-44 Craig, Daniel H., 27, 29-33 Crane, Burton, 391 Crane, Stephen, 134, 135, 137, 283 Creelman, James, 130, 133, 134, 135, 138 Crimean War, xvi, 18, 47-52 Crispi, Francesco, 157 Cronkite, Walter, 360, 361-62 Crouch, Henry Charles, 266 Cuba: Spanish-American War, 1 3 0 - 3 1 , 133; Castro regime, 418-22; missile crisis, 423-24, 451 Currivan, Gene, 365 Curtis, Cyrus H. K., 277 Curtis, William Eleroy, 1 1 0 Curtiss, Glenn H., 192 Custer, Joe James, 352 Czechoslovakia, 294, 325, 328-29, 404 Daladier, Edouard, 297 Dallas Times Herald, 437 Dalton, E. A., 213 Daly, John, 364 Dana, Charles Anderson, 58, 70 Danchenko, Nemirovich, 1 8 1 , 184 Daniel, Clifton, 449 Daniell, Raymond, 335, 337, 368 Daniell, Tania Long, 337 Dardenelles, 221 Darnton, Byron, 352 Darrah, David, 275 Dashiell, Sam, 277 Davies, Joseph E., 320 Davis, Elmer, 327, 352 Davis, J. Bancroft, 68 Davis, Matthew J., 13 Davis, Oscar King, 178 Davis, Richard Harding, 77, 137, 284; Spanish-American War, 133, 134-35; Boer War, 139-40, 142, 143, 144; Russo-Japanese War, 179, 180; World War I, 213-214; death, 219-20 Davis, Saville R., 415 Dawson, Geoffrey, 172, 252, 253, 306, 307, 308, 326n., 328-29 Day, Price, 414 Dayton (Ohio), Daily News, 251 Deat, Marcel, 295 Decker, A. R., 279 Decker, Karl, 131 DeForest, Lee, 175

486

Index

DeGreve, Arthur F., 346-47 Delane, John, 44-47, 73; Crimean War, 47-48, 53; Sepoy mutiny, 56; American Civil War, 67, 68, 69; Blowitz and, 93, 95 Delane, William Frederick Augustus, 45 Dell, Robert, 271, 295, 296 Delmer, Sefton, 312, 313 DeLuce, Dan, 339, 363-64 Democracy, role of press in, 422-23 Denny, Harold, 320, 342-43, 353 Denoyer, Pierre, 296 Derby, Lord, 1 1 5 Des Moines Register, 405 Detroit News, 161 Deuel, Norman, 320, 333 Deuss, Edward, 318 Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 268 Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, 265, 292, 383 de Valera, Eamon, 252 DeWet, Christian, 143 Dewey, Commodore George, 1 3 1 , 132 Dewey, Stoddard, 218 Did, 58 Diaz, Porfirio, 163 Dickens, Charles, 45, 76-77, 226, 403 Dickinson, William B., 372 Diels, Rudolf, 291 Diem, Ngo Dinh, 446 Dieppe raid, 353 Dillon, Dr. Emile Joseph, 184 Dimitroff, Georgi, 292 Diplomatic correspondents, 183-85; Berlin, Congress of, 95-98; Versailles, 245-48; disarmament conferences, 428-29 Disarmament, 428-29 Disher, Leo, 354, 355 Dispatch bearers, correspondents as, 4041 Disraeli, Benjamin, 103; Bulgarian atrocities, 114, 1 1 5 , 1 1 7 DNB, see Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro Doletzky, Jacob, 317, 320 Domei, 344, 347, 377, 380, 382, 383 Donahue, Martin H., 208 Donald, William Hemy, 286 Doolittle, General James H., 351 Dosch-Fleurot, Amo, 214, 218, 270, 282 Dos Passos, John, 312 d'Ossoli, Giovanni, Marchese, 59 Doumer, Paul, 216 Doumergue, Gaston, 297 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 139

Draper, Arthur, 281 Dreiser, Theodore, 279, 319 Dreyfus, Captain Alfred, 69, 100, 106-8 Dublin Daily Express, 175 Dubois, Jules, 420, 421 Dulles, John Foster, 397-98, 4 1 6 - 1 7 Dumas, Alexandre, 13, 36 Dumbarton Oaks conference, 385 Dunant, Jean Henri, 61 Dundas, Henry, 2 Dunkerque, 334-35 Dunning, John P., 135, 136 Duranty, Walter, 212, 238, 268, 269-71, 316-20 Durdin, Tillman, 322, 369, 370 Dynan, Joe, 351 Early, Steve, 224 Eastman, Max, 232, 233, 319, 320/1. Ebbut, Norman, 293, 294, 326 Ebel, Gottfried, 8 Echo de Paris, 245, 271 Eckermann, Johann Peter, 58 Eckhardt, Heinrich von, 224 Economist, 444, 451 Eddy, Mary Baker, 167 Ederle, Gertrude, 281 Editor & Publisher, 417 Edward VII, 73 Edward VIII, 306-9 Edwardes, Sutherland, 81 Egan, Martin, 182, 220 Egypt: Sudan and, 121-30; Suez war, 406 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 341, 356, 365, 383, 405, 412 Eichmann, Adolf, 365 Einstein, Albert, 266, 373 Eisenhower, Dwight David: World War II. 354» 361-62; Korea, 397; summit conference, 405; Suez war, 406; Khrushchev and, 408; Asian trip, 436; censorship, 449 Ekins, H. R. (Bud), 287-88, 321-22 El Alamein, 353-54 Election coverage, 438 Eliot, T. S., 229 Elliott, John, 281 Elliott, Walter, 330 El Obeid massacre, 122-23 El Paso Herald, 163 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 46, 58 "Empire Rate," 440-41 Emporia Gazette, 256 Englaender, Sigismund, 17, 156, 157

Index Eniwetok, 372 Enola Gay (plane), 376, 378 Erzberger, Matthias, 227 Escoda, Tony, 447 Espionage charges, 213, 326, 339, 402; Sorge, 289, 344, 403 Essen National Zeitung, 292 Ethiopia, 298-305 Europe, coverage, 444 European Times, 169 Exchange Telegraph Company, 1 5 5 , 1 5 6 Fairholl, Tom, 347 Far Eastern Review, 287 Faris, Barry, 165 Farrelly, Richard A., 164 Farson, Negley, 280 Fascists, rise of, 267, 284 Faulkner, Alex, 387 Favre, Jules, 82 FBI, 347, 374, 38s Ferguson, Fred F., 237, 239, 246 Fermi, Enrico, 373-74 Field, Cyrus W „ 20 Figaro, 206, 445 Finland, 333 Finnerty, Peter, 6-7 Fischer, Louis, 270, 319 Fischer-Williams, Barbara, 387 Flanner, Janet, 370 Fleischer, Jack, 366 Fleming, Ed, 400 Foch, Marshal Ferdinand, 218, 239, 242 Fodor, Marcel William, 268, 277-78, 280; World War II, 328, 334 Fodor, Martha, 328 Fonck, Rene, 222 Foote, Wilder, 387 Forbes, Archibald: Franco-Prussian War, 77, 79, 80-84; Paris Commune, 8486; Russo-Turkish wars, 118-20 Foreign Press Association, 205, 292-93 Forman, Harrison, 370, 371 Forrest, Wilbur, 215-16, 219, 281, 283 Fouchardiere, Georges de la, 295 Fourteen Points, 240, 244, 245 Fox, John Jr., 2, 179 France, 12, 13, 20; revolutions, 8, 43, 1 0 1 ; Congress of Berlin, 99; World War I, 206-8, 210, 2 1 1 ; Versailles Treaty, 250; journalistic corruption, 295-97; Spanish Civil War, 310; Hitler's view, 325; fall of, 334-36; Suez war, 406; Algeria and, 417; nuclear power, 429

487

France-Soir, 445 Francis Ferdinand, Archduke, 202-4 Franco, Francisco, 310, 3 1 1 , 3 1 5 Frankel, Max, 4 1 1 Frankfurt Zeitung, 258, 268, 291, 292, 344 Franklin, Benjamin, xvi, 21 Franklin, P. A. S., 200 Freaner, James L., 40 Frederic, Harold, 226, 283 Frederick, Pauline, 389 Freedman, Emanuel R., viii, 439 Freedom of the press, 9, 1 1 , 236, 265, 448-49, 450 French Revolution, 8, 101 "French scare, the," 94-95 Freuchen, Peter, 195, 197, 198, 387 Frohman, Charles, 219 Frye, Michael, 387 Frye, William R., 387 Fuchida, Commander Mitsuo, 345, 346 Fugger era, 1 1 Fuller, Margaret, 58-59 Fiissli, Johann Heinrich, 8, 9 Fyfe, Hamilton, 2 1 4 - 1 5 Gagarin, Yuri, 425, 426 Gainza Paz, Alberto, 415 Galignani, Giovanni Antonio, 254 Gallagher, O'Dowd, 347, 348 Gallagher, Wes, viii, 354-55, 424-25, 437 Gambetta, Leon, 1 1 6 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 325, 414 Gardner, Arthur, 420 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 1 0 1 - 2 , 103 Garst, Roswell, 436 Garvin, J. L., 326«. Gaulle, Charles de, 363 Gazette (London), 2 Gellhom, Martha, 3 1 2 Geneva Convention, 61, 392 George, David Lloyd, 217, 252; Northcliffe and, 222; Versailles, 245, 247 Geraud, Andre ("Pertinax"), 271, 295; Versailles, 245, 247 German Press Bureau, 205, 207 Germany: Boxer Rebellion, 149; World War I, 204-10, 213, 223-25; Russia, 204-9, 227, 330, 340-41; reparations, 247, 249; rise of Hitler, 291-93; Spanish Civil War, 3 1 0 - 1 1 ; Italy and, 325; Britain, 325-26; Austria, 327-28; Czechoslovakia, 328-29; World War

488

Index

Germany (Continued) II, 329-32, 333, 342, 356-57, 360, 366-67, 383 Gibbons, Floyd, 274-75; World War I, 223, 334, 235, 237-39; Russia, 269; Manchurian war, 288; Ethiopian war, 299, 301, 302, 303-4; Spanish Civil War, 312 Gibbs, Philip, 192; Cook expedition, 193-99; World War I, 215, 218, 220, 221 Gibney, Frank, 391 " G I Joe," 358-59, 362 Gil Bias, 212 Gilmore, Eddy, 270, 399, 401 Giornale d'Italia, 258 Girardin, Emile de, 14 Gjesdal, Tor, 387 Gladstone, William Ewart, 1 1 4 - 1 5 , 117, n 8; Sudan, 122-23, 126, 130 Glasgow Herald, 226 Glenn, John H. Jr., 426-27 Gobright, "Father," 30, 64-65 Godkin, Edwin Lawrence, 47, 66 Goebbels, Paul Joseph, 292, 293, 341 Goering, Hermann, 291, 292 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7, 8, 59 Goldschneider, Max, 205 Gomulka, Wladyslaw, 405 Goode, William A. M., 136 Gordon, General Charles George ("Chinese"), 123-24, 125, 126-27 Gordon, Matt, 387 Gorgas, Dr. William C., 134 Gorrell, Henry T., 3 1 1 , 339, 361,362,363 Gottberg, Otto von, 203 GrafSpee (ship), 333 Graham, Cunninghame, 188 Gramont, Sanche de, 42; Grant, James, 17 Graphic, 142 Gratke, Charles E., 363 Greece, 99, 338-39, 388 Greek-Turkish War, 235, 271 Greeley, Horace, 25, 26 Greenwood, Frederick, 103 Grenville, George, xv Grew, Joseph C., 345 Grey, Sir Edward, 207, 2 1 1 , 213 Gringoire, 295 Groat, Carl D., 242 Gromyko, Andrei A., 386 Grossman, Vassily, 341, 356 Grover, Preston, 410 Groves, General Leslie R., 374, 375, 378

Grumich, Charles, 387 Gruneisen, Charles Lewis, 14 Guadalcanal, 352 Guard, Harold, 350 Gudebrod, Morton, 367 Guevara, Ernesto (Che), 420 Guihard, Paul L., 415 Guimier, Pierre, 295 Gumberg, Alexander, 229, 230 Gunther, John, 280 Guynemer, Georges, 222 Gwynne, H. A., 142, 157 Hague convention, 178 Hague International Peace Conference; 188 Haile Selassie, 299, 300, 303, 304 Hailey, Foster, 369 Halberstam, David, 446, 447, 449 Haldane, Mrs. J. B. S., 342 Hale, David, 28-29 Hale, William Bayard, 240-41 Hall-Mills case, 436 Halstead, Murat, 77 Hamburg Die Welt, 451 Hamilton, Thomas J., 387 Hammarskjold, Dag, 410, 417 Hance, Joseph, 75, 77 Hancock, DeWitt, 3 50 Hand, Augustus N., 165 Handler, M. S., 341 Hansen, Harry, 214 Harbor News Association, 29 Harden, Edward Walker, 132, 133 Hardie, Keir, 188 Harding, Warren Gamaliel, 251 Hardman, Frederick, 94 Harmsworth, Alfred Charles William; see Northcliffe, Lord Harmsworth, Esmond, 305, 307 Harper, Samuel Northmp, 232, 280 Hanelson, Max, 339, 387 Harris, Morris, 322 Harris, Walter Burton, 147 Harrison, Joseph, 363 Harrison, Mrs. Marguerite, 233 Harsch, Joseph C., 333, 344, 346 Harvard University, Nieman Fellowships, 450 Harvey, Colonel George, 232, 233 Hashiguchi, Jihei, 183 Hasson, John, 64 Haugland, Vern, 352 Hauptmann, Bruno Richard, 436 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 214

Index Havas, Auguste, 159 Havas, Charles, 10, 1 1 - 1 2 , 1 4 Havas (agency), 209, 321, 339; government and, 1 0 - 1 1 , 19, 296; as first news agency, 10, 13, 14; cartel, 16, 32, 33, 163, 165, 260, 262, 265; role, 157. 158, 159-60, 296-97 Hawaii, 345-47 Hay, John, 1 4 5 , 1 4 9 Hearst, William Randolph, 89, 130; Spanish-American War, 110, 130-31, 133, 134» 135, 138, 419; INS formation, 164-65, 282; World War I, 24041; isolationism, 246, 327; failure, 256; Spanish Civil War, 312 Heffernan, John, 387 Heine, Heinrich, 36-38, 101 Hemingway, Emest, 239, 283-84, 313, 355» 357; Spanish Civil War, 3 1 2 - 1 3 ; Paris liberation, 362 Hendrix, Hal, 423 Henry, Taylor, 334 Henty, George Alfred, 47 Herbert, St. Leger, 126 Herbette, Jean, 247 Herrgesell, Gerhardt, 366 Herrings, Joseph, 190 Hersey, John, 370, 381, 399 Hertz, H. R., 175 Herzegovina, 95, 99, 118, 202 Herzl, Theodore, 105-6 Hetherington, Jack, 354 Hewlett, Frank, 347, 348-49, 350 Hicks, George, 362 Higgins, Marguerite, 391-92, 394-95, 446, 447, 448 Hightower, John, 429 Hilgert, F. J., 130 Hill, Frank, 76 Hill, Max, 347, 353 Hill, Russell, 338 Hiller, Ferdinand, 36 Hilton, James, 351 Hindenburg, General Paul von, 218, 291 Hindu, 451 Hindus, Maurice, 319 Hiroshima, 376-78, 381 Hitler, Adolph, 268, 291-92, 294, 298, 325-26, 366 Hitler-Stalin Pact, 330, 341 Hobson, Harold, 280 Holme, Christopher, 304 Hong Kong, 348 Hood, Edwin M., Zimmerman telegram, 223-24

489

Hooker, Joseph E., 70-71 Hoover, Herbert, 218, 270 Home, George, 369 Hottelet, Richard C., 339 House, Colonel Edward M., 245, 24648, 250 Houssaye, Charles, 159, 262 Houssaye, Henri, 159 Houston, Edward Caulfield, 104 Howard, Hubert, 128, 129 Howard, Roy W . , 161; UP and cartel, 162-65, 256, 264; World War I armistice and, 241-43 Howe, James, 239 Hozumi, Ozaki, 289 Hsin Hua, see New China News Agency Hubbard, Elbert, 219 Huddleston, Sisley, 218, 271, 280, 353 Hudson, Frederic, 29, 65 Hull, Cordell, 345 Hungary, revolt, 405 Hunt, Frazier, 275 Hunter, Edward, 290 Hunter, William, 31 Huntington, William H., 76 Huss, Pierre J., 293, 3 3 334. 352, 366, 387 Illustrated London News, 128 Immelman, Max, 222 Inchon landing, 392 India, 325, 414, 418, 439 Indiana University, Daily Student, 357 Indianapolis News, 108-9, m , 161 Indianapolis Press, 261 Indo-China, 343, 405, 414 Indonesia, 388 Ingersoll, Jared, xv, xvi, 101 International Brigade, 311 International Mercantile Marine, 200 International News Service, 273, 282; formation, 164-65; World War I, 239; Hearst loss of, 256; Manchurian war, 288, 290; Ethiopian war, 301; Spanish Civil War, 312, 313; Russia, 318, 320; World War II, 332, 364, 383; United Nations, 387; costs, 413; UP consolidation, 413 International Press Institute, 452 International Telecommunications Union, 441 International Times, 169 Ireland, 186, 241, 252 Irvin, Warren, 333 Irwin, Will, 218

49°

Index

Isaacs, Harold, 371 Ismail Pasha, 103, 1 2 1 Israel: establishment, 105, 388; Suez war, 406 Italy, 99; World War I, 221, 250; Ethiopian war, 298-305; Spanish Civil War, 310, 3 1 1 ; World War II, 325, 338 Iwanaga, Yukichi, 263 Iwo Jima, 372 Izvestia, 232, 317, 321, 341, 403, 408, 411 J'accuse, 106 Jackson, Thomas J. (Stonewall), 42, 70 Jacoby, Melville and Annalee, 348, 349 James, Edwin L. (Jimmy), 237, 238, 265, 2 7 3 , 304, 3 1 8 - 1 9 , 3 7 3 , 3 7 4 , 3 7 5

James, Lionel, 128, 139, 157, 460; RussoJapanese War, 176-78 James, Weldon, 324 Jameson, Leander, 139, 142 Jamestown Morning Post, 235 Japan, 343; Perry expedition, 26, 59-60; Port Arthur massacre, 133; Boxer Rebellion, 149; Russia and, 150, 176-82; Hearst and, 165; Portsmouth Conference, 184-85; Germany and, 224; Versailles Treaty, 250; AP and cartel, 263; Manchurian war, 286-90; China and, 321-25; United States and, 3 2 3 25, 344-47; World War II, 345-47, 380-82, 383 Japanese Board of Information, 380 Jaures, Jean, 108 Jen Min Jih Pao, 414 Jessup, Philip C., 401, 4 1 3 Jewett, Ellen, 23 fiji, 180 Joffre, Joseph, 221 Johnson, Alva, 266 Johnson, Bradish, 3 1 4 - 1 5 Johnson, Earl J., viii, 4 1 1 , 445-46 Johnson, Lyndon B., 437 Johnson, Stanley, 410 Johnston, Richard W . , 371 Johnston, Stanley, 351 Jones, Dr. Alexander, 30-31 Jones, George E., 372 Jones, Kennedy, 1 7 1 Jones, Sir Roderick, 142, 259-60, 26263, 264; resignation, 340 Jones, Russell, 405-6 Jordan, Max, 332 Jordan, Philip, 342

Jorden, William J., 193 Jour, he, 295 Journal, he, 295 Jouvenel, Bertrand de, 298 Judenstaat, Der, 106 Kalischer, Peter, 390 Kaltenbom, H. V., 330 Kamenev, Leo, 316, 320 Kansas City Star, 239, 283 Kashmir, 388, 418 Kasischke, Richard R., 403 Katanga insurrection, 4 1 7 Kato, Masuo, 344, 347, 353, 382 Katowice, 330 Kawaii, Tetsuo, 323-24 Kearney, Phil, 42 Keen, Ed L., 163, 283 Keen, Victor, 290 Kellel, Joseph, 334 Kelly, A. B., 84 Kendall, Adeline de Valcourt, 43-44 Kendall, Amos, 40 Kendall, George Wilkins, 25, 38-40, 4 3 44, 448; Mexican War, 40-43 Kennan, George, 232 Kennedy, Edward, 339, 367-68 Kennedy, J. D., 199, 200 Kennedy, John F., 4 1 7 , 449; World War II, 369-70; Cuba and, 421-423; assassination, 436-37 Kennedy, Joseph P., 369 Kerensky, Alexander, 227, 229, 230, 231 Kerillis, Henri de, 295 Kerr, Walter, 399 Khalifa Abdullahi, 127, 128, 129 Khartoum, siege of, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127 Khrushchev, Nikita, 403-6; American visit, 407-9, 436; international conferences, 409-11; Southeast Asia, 4 1 7 ; Cuban missile crisis, 423; space shots, 426 Kieran, Leo, 322 Kilgallen, Dorothy, 322 Kilgallen, Jim, 367 King, Frank, 313 King, Harold, 341 Kipling, Rudyard, 139, 143, 220 "Kirilov" (Nicholas E. Popov), 1 8 1 Kirk, Grayson, vii Kirkpatrick, Helen, 337 Kishinev pogrom, 226 Kita, Nagao, 345 Kitchener, Sir Horatio Herbert, 127, 128,

Index 129; Boer War, 141; World War I, 217; death, 222 Kluckhohn, Frank, 3 1 0 - 1 1 , 369, 382 Knickerbocker, H. R., 270, 279, 293, 313, 318, 349, 415 Knight, Edward Frederick, 139 Knoxville Chronicle, 166 Kohlsaat, Herman, 246 Kokusai agency, 263 Korea: Japan and, 184; war, 389-98; coverage, 443 Kossuth, Louis, 46 Koyabashi, Tokoho, 377 Kravchenko, M., 177 Kruger, Paul, 138, 144 Kruglak, Theodore E., 472-73 Kuh, Frederick, 308, 317 Kuhn, Ferdinand Jr., 308 Ku Klux Klan, 257 Kurusu, Saburo, 344, 345 Labour Party, British, formation of, 188 Ladysmith, 138, 139, 141-42 Lagrange, Jean, 387 Lambert, Ambrose, 269 Laney, Al, 295, 296 Lansing, Robert, 223-24 Laos, 417 LaPorte Herald, 3 57 Lardner, Dr. Dionysius, 24 Larkin, Thomas D., 26 Laski, Harold, 308 Latham, Hubert, 191 Latin America, 22; coverage, 439, 443, 444

Laurence, William Leonard, 373-76, 378, 379» ?8o, 382-83, 427 L'Aurore, 106 Laval, Pierre, 298, 299 Lavater, Johann Kasper, 8 Lavino, William, 100 Lawley, Francis, 68 Lawrence, David, 219 Lawrence, William H., 369, 395-96 Lawson, Victor Fremont, 146, 167, 256; Associated Press, 152, 153 Lazareff, Pierre, 159, 296, 334, 335 League of Nations, 245-48, 250; Manchurian war, 287, 290; Ethiopian war, 299-300, 304 L'Echo de la Presse et de la Publicité, 444

Lee, Clark, 348, 349, 361, 362, 382 Lee, Robert E., 42, 70

491

Lenin, Vladimir, 227-28, 229, 230, 231, 270, 316 L'Epoque, 295 Lesueur, Larry, 362, 389 L'Europe Nouvelle, 295 Levine, Isaac Don, 228 Lewis, Boyd, 367 Lewis, Sinclair, 278-79, 319 Lewis, Sir Willmott, 325 Lexington (carrier), 351, 372 L'Homme Enchaine, 217-18 L'Homme Libre, 217 Libel suits, Panama Canal case, 1 1 0 - 1 1 Liberator, '232 Lie, Trygve, 387, 395 Lieber, Dr. Francis, 178 Liebling, A. J., 355, 370 Life, 342; see also Time, Inc. Light Brigade, charge of the, 51-53 Lincoln, Abraham, 21, 62, 67 Lindbergh, Charles Augustus, 272-73 Lindley, Ernest K., 324 Lindley "background rule," 397 Linotype, 167 Lippmann, Walter, 229, 232, 233, 245, 389, 406 Little, Richard Henry, 275 Litvinoff, Maxim, 233, 269, 319-20, 330 Livingstone, David, 86, 90-92 Lloyd, Demarest, 280 Lochner, Louis, 293, 329, 332, 334, 352 Lodge, Henry Cabot, jr., 250, 449 Lodge, Henry Cabot, sr., 245, 246 L'Oeuvre, 295 Logotype, 165 London, Jack, 179 London Chronicle, 2, 6-7, 45, 128, 139, 186, 193, 208, 221 London Daily Express, 247, 293-94, 312, 334, 339, 347 London Daily Herald, 308 London Daily Mail, 142, 196, 203, 293, 445; Steevens, 128, 139; Boer War, 139-40; Northcliffe and, 1 7 1 , 172; aircraft development, 190, 191-92; World War I, 207, 215, 217, 218; Paris edition, 282 London Daily Mirror, 445 London Daily News, 47, 59, 75, 102-3, 119-20; American Civil War, 66-67; Franco-Prussian War, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80-81, 82, 84, 85; Bulgarian atrocities, 95, 114-15, 116, 117-18; Sudan, 122; war prospects (1914), 208, 209

492

Index

London Daily Sketch, 342 London Daily Telegraph, 323, 387, 414, 424, 445; American Civil War, 67; Franco-Prussian War, 77; Stanley, 92; Sudan, 125, 128, 129; Boer War, 139; Kipling, 220; League of Nations, 247; Ethiopian war, 299, 300-1; abdication, 306; Spanish Civil War, 314-15; World War II, 335, 342 London Evening News, 171 London Gazette, 4n., 49 London Globe, 128 London Graphic, 122, 128 London Morning Advertiser, 17, 80 London Morning Post, 3, 14, 56-58, 126, 141, 218; Churchill, 128; Boer War, 138, 139; Ethiopian war, 300; abdication, 306 London News Chronicle, 342 London Standard, 126, 139 London Star, 190 London Sun, 2, 3 London Times, see Times of London Long, Gerald, viii Long, John D., 136 Long, Ray, 161 Long Island Advocate, 473 VOrdre, 295 Lorelei, Die, 38 Los Alamos, 375 Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and, 442, 443 Loubet, Emile, 107 Louis Napoleon, see Napoleon III Loveland, Roelif, 362 Lübbe, Marinus van der, 291, 292 Lucas, Jim, 391 Lumsden, Francis, 39, 41 Lyons, Eugene, 258, 270, 317-20 Lyman, Lauren D. (Deak), 272-73 Maass, Emil, 328 MacArthur, Douglas, 348, 349, 350, 372, 381-82; Korean War, 390-96 McCormick, Anne O'Hare, 267 McCormick, Francis J., 267 McCormick, Robert R., 237, 274, 327 McCoy, Bessie, 213 McCrary, J. F. Reagan, 380 McCutcheon, John T., 132, 214 McDaniel, Yates, 322, 350 MacDonald, Carlyle, 273 McDonald, Colin, 322, 324 MacDonald, John Cameron, 99 MacDonald, Ramsey, 188

McDougall, William H., 347, 350 MacDowell, Irvin, 64 McGaffin, William, 334, 337 MacCahan, Januarius Aloysius, 101, 120; Bulgarian atrocities, 1 1 5 - 1 8 ; Russo-Turkish War, 118-19, 120 McGlincy, Jim, 362 MacGowan, Gault, 358 McGraw-Hill, 443, 444 McGraw-Hill World News, 441 Mackay, Charles, 68 Mackay, W. H., 142 Mackenzie, DeWitt, 329 MacKenzie, J. E., 172 MacLean, James, 20, 21 McLean, Robert, 367 Maclean, Robinson, 303 MacMillan, Harold, 410 McMillan, Richard D., 339, 354 McRae, Milton A., 161 Mac Vane, John, 389 Mad Mullah, 128 Madrid, 310, 316 Mafeking, siege of, 138, 142 Magidoff, Robert, 341, 399, 400 Mahdi, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126 Maidanek, 365 Mail ships, interception of, 27-28 Maine (battleship), 130, 1 3 1 Mainichi, 180 Malaya, 343, 345 Malenkov, Georgi, 398-99, 405 Malik, Jacob, 389, 396, 401 "Managed news" controversy, 424 Manchester Guardian, 268, 271, 27778, 295, 296, 414, 445; war prospects (1914), 208, 269; Russia, 228 Manchuria, 286-87, 2 9 ° Manhattan Engineer District, 374 Manning, Robert J., 387 Mao Tse-tung, 289, 290, 323, 370, 393, 418 Marconi, Guglielmo 175, 201 Marco Polo Bridge, 321 Marcosson, Isaac F., 319 Mario, Alberto, 102 Mario, Jessie Meriton White, 75,102-3 Marion (Ohio) Star, 251 Markham, Reuben, 400 Mark Twain, see Clemens, Samuel Marne, battles of the, 215, 239 Marshall, Edward, 133, 134 Marshall, Jim, 324 Marshall Plan, 388 Martin, Joseph, 420

Index Martin, Robert P., 347 Martineau, Harriet, 59, 66 Marton, Endre, 4 0 ; , 4 2 3 - 2 4 Marx, Karl, 35, 37 Masaryk, Jan, 329 Mason, James M., 67 Massachusetts Sentinal, im. Masses, 229 Massingham, H. W . , 280 Massock, Richard, 313, 320, 338, 3 5 2 53 Mata Hari, see Zelle, Gertrud Margarete Matin, Le, 225, 298 Matthews, Herbert L.: Castro interview, xvi, 4 1 8 - 2 0 , 421; Ethiopian war, 299, 304-5; Spanish Civil War, 3 1 2 , 3 1 3 , 3 1 5 , 316; World W a r II, 338, 353, 359-6o, 361 Maud, Willie, 142 Maxwell, William, 139 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 35, 102, 103 Medill, Joseph, 32 Meier, Larry, 353 Mejanel, M., 76, 7 8 - 7 9 Mencken, Bessie McCoy, 2 1 3 Mergenthaler Linotype, 167 Metropolitan magazine, 229 Mexican revolution of 1 9 1 0 , 163 Mexican War, 25, 28, 40-42, 235; Kendall, 38, 40 Miami Herald, 443 Miami News, 423, 443 Michaels, James, 4 1 4 Middleton, Drew, 337, 4 0 0 , 4 2 5 Midway, battle of, 351 Mikoyan, Anastas, 407 Milan Corriere Delia Sera, 324 Miliukov, Pavel Nicolaievich, 188, 227 Mills, James A., 270, 283, 299, 300, 304, 3 1 7 , 322 Miller^ Charles R., 165, 166-67, 240 Miller, Webb, 267-68, 283, 308, 333; Ethiopian war, 298, 299, 3 0 1 - 2 , 3 0 3 - 4 Millet, Frank D., 200, 2 0 1 Millet, Philip, 245 Miro Cardona, Jose, 4 2 1 Mississippi, University of, 4 1 5 Missouri (battleship), 382 Mitre, Jorge, 2 6 1 Mitsunaga, Yoshio, 263 Moderwell, H., 279 Möhr, Charles, 446 Mola, Emilio, 310, 3 1 1 Mole, St. Nicholas, 1 3 6 Molotov, Vyacheslav M., 330, 404

493

Moltke, Helmuth von, 78 Monde, Le, 414, 4 5 1 Montgomery, Bernard Law, 3 54 Moore, Arthur, 2 1 4 - 1 5 Moore, Charles R., 393 Moorehead, Alan, 339, 383 Moosa, Spencer, 370 Morin, Relman, 287, 323-24, 343, 344, 347; Korea, 391, 394 Morris, John R., 322 Morris, Mowbray, 17, 55, 62; on American press, 66; Russell and, 44, 62, 67, 68 Morrison, Chester, 362 Morrison, George Emest, 146, 1 4 7 - 5 0 , 183 Morse, Samuel F . B., 14, 427 Morton, Joseph, 360 Moscow, Warren, 369 Moscow News, 3 1 9 Mosley, Leonard, 339, 362 Mowrer, Edgar Ansel, 218, 268, 278, 279, 291, 292 Mowrer, Paul Scott, 218, 2 2 1 , 248, 2 7 0 7 1 , 279, 294 Mowrer, Richard, 333, 339 Mueller, Gustav, 79, 80 Mukden incident, 286-87 Mundy, William, 361 Munich conference, 329 Munsey, Frank A., 256 Murphy, Pat, 293-94 Murray, James, 14 Murrow, Edward R., 327, 328, 3 3 6 - 3 7 , 365, 383 Mussolini, Benito, 2 1 2 , 284, 299, 338; rise of, 258, 267; Ethiopian war, 300, 301, 305; resignation and death, 360. 366 Nagasaki, 379, 380 Nagoya, 350 Nakamura, Bin, 3 7 6 - 7 7 NANA, 275, 3 1 2 , 3 5 2 , 4 4 3 Napier, Mark F., 260 Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon), 17, 56, 57, 76, 78 Nation, The, 232 National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 427 National Agencies' Alliance, 260 National Broadcasting Company: radio, 301, 327, 332, 333, 347; United Nations, 389; election coverage, 438; growth, 442, 444

494

Index

National Gazette, 23 National Intelligencer, 39 National Press Club, 408 National Socialist Party, 259, 291-94 Nau, Jean, 403 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 418 Neil, Edward F., 299, 304 Neil, Edward J. jr., 3 1 4 - 1 6 Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 214, 228, 336, 340, 387, 4M, 444, 45»; origin of, 9 Neues Wiener Tageblatt, 205 Nevinson, Henry W . , 139, 142,- 144; Russia, 185-88; World War I, 209, 214, 215, 221 New China News Agency, xvii, 414, 433 New London Gazette, xv Newman, Joseph, 400 Newnes, George, 1 7 1 New Orleans Crescent, 25 New Orleans Delta, 40 New Orleans Picayune, 43, 448; Mexican War, 25, 38, 39, 41 Newport Mercury, xv New Republic, 232, 245 News agencies, 77, 167, 282-83, 293, 317, 383, 442; Havas as founder, io, 15; cartels among, 1 5 - 1 6 , 19, 32-33, 1 5 1 - 5 2 , 153, 157, 163-64, 173; Smalley, 74-75; costs, 158, 160, 44041; role, 413, 429-30, 443; see also individual agencies Newsome, Phil, 346-47 Newspaper Enterprise Association, 418 Newspaper Proprietors' Association, 263 Newspapers: governments and, xvi, xvii; circulation, 20, 427; television and, 428 Newsweek, 303, 324, 371, 443 New York American, 237 New York Call, 229, 230, 231 New York Courier, 13, 22, 29 New York Daily Advertiser, 23-24 New York Enquirer, 13, 22, 29 New Yorker, 337 New York Evening Post, 103, 218, 268, 270, 277-79, 318, 357 New York Express, 29 New York Herald, 23-27, 28, 29, 40; Civil War, 63, 65, 66; Smalley and, 72, 75; Franco-Prussian War, 77; Stanley, 89, 90-92; Russo-Turkish War, 1 1 5 - 1 6 , 119-20; Spanish-American War, 1 3 1 , 132, 133, 137; Boer War, 139; prestige, 166, 167, 168; wireless use, 175; Russo-Japanese War,

178; Cook expedition, 193, 194; League Covenant, 248; merger with Tribune, 254, 256 New York Herald Tribune, 425, 442-43; foreign staff, 281; Manchurian war, 290; Russia, 320, 400; World War II, 333, 337, 338, 361, 381-82; Yalta agreement, 385; United Nations, 388 New York Joumd American, 2371., 164, 166, 168; Spanish-American War, 1 1 0 , 1 3 1 , 133, 134, 137, 138 New York Journal of Commerce, 28-31 New York Mirror, 23 New York Morning News, 39, 327, 445 New York newspaper strike, 433 New York Press, 235 New York Sun, 23n., 25, 29; Mexican War, 40-41; Dreyfus case, 108; Spanish-American War, 137; prestige, 166; Titanic disaster, 200; Manchurian war, 282, 288 New York Telegram, 1 1 1 , 256, 258 New York Times, 25, 414, 443, 451; Matthews' Castro interview, xvi, 4 1 8 20; Civil War, 63, 65-66; Ochs and, 165-69; Russo-Japanese War, 176-77; Portsmouth Conference, 183; aviation, 189-90, 192, 272-73; polar exploration, 197-98, 274; Titanic, 199201; Sarajevo assassination, 203; World War I, 215, 218, 221-22, 232, 237-40, 462; Russia, 226, 232, 2707 1 , 316, 3 1 8 - 1 9 , 320, 400; League of Nations, 247, 271-72; Versailles Treaty, 248; growth, 265-69, 272; Manchurian war, 290; Ethiopian war, 299, 304; abdication of Edward VIII, 308, 309; Spanish Civil War, 3 1 0 - 1 1 , 3 1 2 , 3 1 3 , 315; China, 322, 324; interventionism, 327; World War II, 332, 334, 337, 338, 341-43, 347, 365, 366-69, 373, 375, 378, 379; Dumbarton Oaks, 385; San Francisco conference, 386; United Nations, 387; achievements, 388-89; Korea, 396, 397, 398; on role of press, 422-23; Cuban missile crisis, 423; Telstar story, 427; Oswald case, 437; election coverage, 438; number of foreign correspondents, 442; International Edition, 444 New York Tribune, 25, 26, 29, 58, 59; Marx, 35, 37; Civil War, 63, 65; Smalley 70, 7 1 , 72, 74-76, 78-80; FrancoPrussian War, 78-80, 103; World

Index War I, 218, 228, 235, 243; merger with Herald, 256 New York World, 164, 166, 168, 192, 244-45, 247-48; Civil War, 63; Townsend, George Alfred, 72; Franco-Prussian War, 77-78; Panama Canal scandal, 108, 109, 1 1 0 - 1 1 ; Venezuelan border crisis, 109-10; Spanish-American War, n o , 131-34, 137-38; Boer War, 139, 140; merger with Telegram, i n , 258; World War I, 214, 218; 1920 election, 251; failure, 257; Sacco-Vanzetti case, 257-58 New York World-Telegram, 258, 270, 275-76, 282, 357 Nichol, David, 399 Nieman Fellowships, 450 Nightingale, Florence, 50, 53 Nikolayev, Andrian, 428 Nippon Dempo Tsushin Sha, 263 Nippon Shimbun Rengo, 263, 264 Nixon, Richard M., 408, 417 Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 189 Normandy invasion, 361-62 North African campaign, 353-54 North American Newspaper Alliance, 275, 312, 352, 433 Northcliffe, Lord, 170-73, 240, 252-53, 266; aircraft development, 190-93; World War I, 207, 208-10, 212, 217, 222 North Korea, 389-94, 397 North Pole, 193-99, 272 Norton, Mrs. Caroline, 46, 56-58 Norton, George, 57 Novoe Vremya, 182 Novy Mir, 228 Noyes, Frank B., 153 Nuremburg trials, 291 Nutter, Charlie, 320 Oak Ridge, Tenn., 374 Oatis, William N., 402, 404 Observer, 445, 451 Ochs, Adolph Simon, 165, 166-69, 240, 265, 279 Ochs, George, 169 Ochs, Iphigene, 169 O'Connell, Daniel, 44 O'Donovan, Edmond, 122 Oechsner, Frederick, 332 , 334, 352 Office Francais d'Information, 339 O'Flaherty, Hal, 279 Oliphant, Laurence, 94 Omdurman, 128, 129, 130, 157

495

O'Neill, Eugene, 229 Oracle, 1, 3, 4 O'Reilly, John, 359, 361 Osaka Asahi, 289 Osaka Mainichi, 319 Osman Digna, 123, 124, 125 O'Sullivan, John L., 39 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 437 Outlook, 232 Overseas Press Club, 473 Owen, Russell, 272, 273, 274 Owens, John W., 281 Packard, Reynolds and Eleanor, 304, 313, 338 Palestine, 47, 388; see also Israel Palgunov, Nikolai G., 341 Pall Mall Gazette, 76, 1 0 3 , 1 2 3 Palmer, Frederick, 215, 216, 218, 235-38 Panama Canal, 294; scandal, 108, 109, 110-11 Pan American Union, 1 1 0 Panay incident, 324 Pancho Villa, 163, 223, 301 Panikkar, K. M., 392 Panter-Downes, Mollie, 370 Paris: as news source, 6; Franco-Prussian War, 83-84; Commune, 84, 116; liberation of, 362-63 Paris Assembly, UN, 388 Paris Herald, 169, 254-56, 273, 28182, 295, 296, 335, 444 Paris Le Gaulois, 77 Paris he Journal, 241 Paris Le Matin, 281, 293-95 Paris Le Monde, 445 Paris Le Temps, 69 Paris Messenger, 254 Paris Midi, 298 Paris-Soir, 271, 294, 295, 296, 298, 33436 Paris Times, 282 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 103-5, 170, 252 Parnell, Kitty O'Shea, 104-5 Parrott, Lindesay, 369 Patrie, La, 58 Patterson, Joseph Medili, 327 Paul VI (pope), 438 Paul, Elliot, 281 Paulhan, Louis, 192 Paz, Ezequiel, 262 Pearl Harbor, 345-47 Pears, Sir Edwin, 1 1 4 Pearson, Sir Cyril Arthur, 170

496

Index

Pearson's magazine, 130 Peary, Robert E., 1 9 7 - 9 8 Peel, Sir Robert, 46 Pegler, Westbrook, 235, 237, 275 People's Daily in Red China, 4 1 4 Perón, Juan, 4 1 5 Perris, E. A., 193 Perry, Commodore Matthew Calbraith, 26, 59-60 Peny-Robinson, Sir Harry, 266 Pershing, General John J., 2 3 4 - 3 5 "Pertinax," see Geraud, Andre Petacci, Clara, 366 Pétain, Henri, 2 2 1 - 2 2 , 276 Peters, Harold, 3 1 5 Petit Papier, Le, 11 Petit Parisién, Le, 225, 295, 296 Petrograd Telegraph Agency, 2 3 3 - 3 4 Philadelphia Inquirer, 63 Philadelphia Press, 63 Philadelphia Public Ledger, 25, 28, 40, 237, 2 7 1 , 2 7 7 - 7 8 , 279, 3 1 8 Philby, Harry, 314, 315 Philip, P. J., 273, 334 Philippines Herald, 349 Philippines, 163, 348, 394 Phillips, Joe, 320 Phillips, Percival, 218, 299, 3 0 0 - 1 Phillips, Wendell, 70 Piccard, Auguste, 266 Picquart, Georges, 1 0 7 Pigott, Richard, 104 Pilsudski, Marshal Josef, 329 Poincaré, Raymond, 203, 206 Poland, 249, 405, 406-7; German conquest, 329, 330, 332, 333 Politiken, 197 Polk, George, 402 Polpress, 4 1 3 Pony express, 23, 28 "Pools" of correspondents, 409, 4 1 6 , 437-38 Popolo d'Italia, II, 258, 267 Popov, Nicholas E., 1 8 1 Popovich, Pavel, 428 Popular Front (Spanish), 3 1 0 Port Arthur, 133, 177, 182 Portsmouth Conference, 1 8 3 - 8 5 Post, Robert P., 360 Potsdam Declaration, 380 Potter, Maude, see Bennett, Maude Potter Potter, Philip, 3 9 1 Powell, John Benjamin, 288 Power, Frank le Poer, 1 2 0 - 2 4 , 125» 126

Powers, Francis Gary, 409, 4 1 0 Poznan riots, 405 Pravda, 227, 3 1 7 , 3 2 1 , 341, 403, 408, 411.414 Presidential news conferences, 435 Press Association, 156, 260, 263, 264 Presse, La, 14 Press Trust of India, 157 Press Wireless, Inc., 267, 441 Pretoria, 1 4 0 , 1 4 2 , 1 4 3 Price, Byron, 374, 387 Price, Ward, 293 Prima Press, 295 Prince of Wales (ship), 347-48 Prinzip, Gavrilo, 202 Prior, Melton, 139 Prisoners, correspondents as, 39, 2 1 3 , 214, 347, 350, 352-53 Pritchett, V . S., 280 Propaganda, xvii, 3 5 Provincetown group, 229 Prussian State Telegraph, 16 P T 109, 369 Public relations, 4 5 1 Publishers Press Association, 1 6 1 , 1 7 5 ; see also United Press Associations Pulitzer, Joseph, 109, 1 1 1 - 1 2 , 192; Panama Canal scandal, 108, 109, 1 1 0 - 1 1 Pulitzer II, Joseph, 108 Pulitzer, Ralph, 2 5 7 - 5 8 Pulitzer prize, m , 1 1 2 ; Swope, 218; Alva Johnson, 266; Knickerbocker, 279; Mowrer, 293; Romulo, 349; Wolfert, 352; Pyle, 361; Watson, 363; Rosenthal, 372; Laurence, 373, 380; Whitehead, 397; Stevens, 400-1; de Gramont, 425; Smith, 437; New York Times, 439; Browne, 447; Halberstam, 447 Punch, 190 Purge trials, 320, 3 2 1 Pyle, Ernie (Ernest Taylor), xix, 137, 355-65, 368, 383,448 Pyle, Jerry, 358, 359 Quemoy, 4 1 7 Quigley Publications, 473 Quincy Patriot-Ledger, 443 Quinn, Joe, 392 Quisling, Vidkun, 333 Radek, Karl, 227, 3 1 7 , 320 Radio, 176, 199-200; influence of, 335; newspapers and, 427; costs, 450 Radio Paris, 362

Index Raglan, Lord, 48, 49, 53, 54 Ralph, Julian, 108, 139 Ramm, Frederick, 272 Ransome, Arthur, 228 Rasmussen, Mrs. Knud, 194-95 Rasputin, Gregory, 225 Ravenholt, Albert, 392 Raymond, Henry J., 25, 6 1 , 65 Red Cross, 61, 270 Red Star, 341, 356 Reed, John, 163, 229-32 Reed, Louise Bryant, 229, 230 Reichstag fire, 291 Reid, Ogden, 256 Releases, post dated, 1 7 - 1 8 Remington, Frederic, 133, 155 Repulse (ship), 347-48 Reston, James B., 337, 385, 386, 389, 398, 436 Reubens, Robert, 382 Reuter, Baron Herbert de, 1 5 1 , 152, 155-58, 163-64, 259 Reuter, Julius, 1 5 - 1 6 , 1 8 - 1 9 , 20-21, 109 Reuters, 128, 340, 387, 425, 440; cartel and, 19, 32, 33, 157-59, 260, 262, 263-64; mail boat interception, 20-21; Boer War, 140, 142-43; policies, 1 5 1 53, 155-59, 163-65; World War I, 209, 218, 236; Russia, 225, 231, 3 2 1 , 341; sale to Jones and Napier, 260; Japan, 263, 288-89, 3 2 2 ; Ethiopian war, 304; Spanish Civil War, 314; World War II, 339-40, 342, 383; influence, 414, 443 Reuters Bank, see British Commercial Bank Reuter's Telegram Company, 16 Review of Reviews, 196 Revue des Deux Mondes, 37 Reynolds, Quentin, 337 Rhineland, reoccupation, 294 Rhodes, Cecil, 139 Richards, Ray, 390 Richards, Robert W . , 436 Richardson, Albert Deane, 63-64 Richland, Wash., 375 Richthofen, Manfred von, 222 Rickenbacker, Eddie, 222 Rickett, Francis M., 300-1 Riddle, Sir George, 245, 267 Ridgway, General Matthew, 396 Riesbeck, Kaspar, 8 Rif expeditions, 275-76 Roberston, Frank, 382 Roberts, Lord, 1 4 1 , 142

497

Roberts, Elmer, 216, 218 Roberts, Roy A., 4 1 6 Robertson, Sparrow, 282 Robinson, Boardman, 230 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 4-6 Robinson, H. Perry, 218 Robinson, John R., 76, 81, 1 1 5 Robson, Karl, 3 1 4 - 1 5 Rocketry, 266 Rolland, Romain, 2 1 4 Rommel, Erwin, 341, 342, 354 Romulo, Carlos P., 349, 350 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 325, 337, 348, 350-51, 364 Roosevelt, Theodore, 1 1 0 , 1 3 8 , 1 7 9 , 1 8 4 , 193; Panama Canal scandal, 108, 1 1 0 1 1 ; Spanish-American War, 1 3 1 , 1 3 3 , 134-35 Roper, James E., 366 Rosenberg, Alfred, 259 Rosenthal, A. M., 406-7 Rosenthal, Joe, 372, 374 Rosta, see Tass Rothschild, house of, 12, 208 Rothschild, Baron James de, 37 Rothschild, Lionel de, 103 Rothschild, Nathan, 12 Rough Riders, 133, 134 Rowan, Carl T., 418 Rowlands, John, see Stanley, Henry Morton Roy, K. C „ 157 Royal Geographic Society, 86, 89,90 Ruby, Jack, 437 Rue, Larry, 275 Runciman, Walter, 307 Rundle, Walter, 370 Runyon, Damon, 237 Rusk, Dean, 429 Russell, Herbert, 218 Russell, William Howard, 28, 55-56, 72, 357, 448; Crimean dispatches, 18, 4754, 1 0 1 ; criticism of, 62-69; biography, 44-47, 68, 73; Franco-Prussian War, 77, 79, 81, 82, 84 Russia, 160, 232; Crimean War and, 47; Turkish War, 95, 118-20; Congress of Berlin, 99; MacGahan and, 1 1 6 ; Boxer Rebellion, 149; Japan and, 150; Portsmouth Conference, 184-85; Nevinson in, 185-88; World War I, 206-9, 221, 225-26, 227, 231; Duranty, 268-71; see also Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Russian Telegraph Agency, 234

498

Index

Russo-Japanese War, 176-82, 235 Ryall, William Bolitho, 269, 271, 282, 317 Ryan, James, 219 Ryan, William I., 403 Sacco, Nicola, 257 Saint-Arnaud, Marshal, 48 St Francisville Timepiece, 4 0 T I . St. James Gazette, 1 8 - 1 9 St. John, Robert, 338 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 273 St. Louis Missouri Democrat, 88 St. Louis Post Dispatch, 109, 1 1 2 , 132, 1 6 1 , 272, 273. 443 Saipan, 372 Sala, George Augustus, 77, 226, 403 Salchow, Ulrich, 228 Sale, Stewart, 361 Salisbury, Lord, 70 Salisbury, Harrison E., 364, 398, 399, 400, 401, 403, 404, 407, 408, 4 1 2 Sandri, Sandro, 324 San Francisco conference, 386 San Juan Hill, 134-35, 137 Sanjurjo, Jose, 310, 3 1 1 San Stefano, treaty of, 95-99, 120 Santa Anna, General Antonio Lopez de, 39, 41, 43 Santa Barbara News-Press, 368 Santora, Philip, 420 Santos-Dumont, Alberto, 190 Sarajevo, 202-4, 206 Satellites, communication, 440; see also Telstar Saturday Evening Post, 277, 287, 290, 319, 323; Cobb, 214, 237; Laurence, 373, 374 Sauerwein, Jules, 271, 281 Saunders, George, 147 Saunders, William, 156 Schedler, Dean, 349, 350 Scheffer, Paul, 271, 318, 319 Schirra, Walter, 428 Schlesse, Joseph, 336 Schmidt, Martin, 2 1 2 Schultz, Sigrid, 275, 278 Schuschnigg, Chancellor Kurt von, 327 Schwarzkoppen, Louise von, 108 Schwarzkoppen, Max von, 108 Scott, General Winfield, 42-43 Scovel, Sylvester, 138 Scribner's, 133, 213 Scripps, Edward Wyllis, 160-62, 256 Scripps, George H., 1 6 1

Scripps, James E., 1 6 1 Scripps, John, 160 Scripps, Robert P., 256 Scripps-Howard newspapers, 256; WorldTelegram merger, 1 1 1 ; Pyle, 355, 35758, 448 Scripps-McRae Press Association, 1 6 1 , 162, 164, 261; see also United Press Associations Scripps News Association, 161; see also United Press Associations Scudamore, Frank, 128 Seattle Daily Call, 319 Seattle Times, 473 Sebastopol, 49, 55 Security Council, UN, 386, 389 Sedan, 78, 80, 242, 334 Seitz, Don C., 108 Selby-Walker, Kenneth, 350 Seldes, George, 269, 275 Sepoy mutiny, 55-56 Serbia, 95, 99, 1 1 8 , 202-8 Sevareid, Eric, 298, 327, 334, 362 Seven Arts, 229 Shalett, Sidney, 378 Shanghai Evening Post, 287 Shapiro, Henry: Russia, 270, 320, 399, 400, 401; World War II, 356, 364 Shaplen, Joseph, 278 Sharkey, Joseph, 271 Shatoff, Bill and Anna, 230 Shatoff, Zorin, 230 Shaw, George Bernard, 188 Sheehan, Neil, 446, 447 Sheean, Vincent, 275-76, 319, 414 Sheepshanks, Richard, 3 1 4 - 1 5 Shepherd, William G., 163, 214 Sheridan, General Phil, 80 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 57 Shigemitsu, Mamoru, 382 Shirer, William L., 276, 294, 326, 32728, 330, 332, 334, 336, 365 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 341 Siècle, Le, 14 Simms, William Philip, 163, 218, 241 Simonov, Konstantin, 341, 356 Simonton, James W . , 32 Simpson, Ernest A., 305 Simpson, Mrs. Wallis Warfield, 305, 306, 307, 308-9 Singapore, 343, 347, 348, 350 Singer, Jack, 352 Skinner, Hilary, 79 Slatin, Rudolf Carl von, 122, 127 Slidell, John, 67

Index Small, Collie, 362 Smalley, George Washington, American Civil War, 69-72; news bureaus and syndication, 74-76; Franco-Prussian War, 76, 78-80; Portsmouth Conference, 183 Smith, Charles Stephenson, 231 Smith, Delavan, 108-9, n o Smith, Earl E. T., 420 Smith, F. E., 215 Smith, J. Kingsbury, 401, 404 Smith, Leslie, 322 Smith, Meniman, 437 Smith, Rex, 281 Smith, Richard, 140 Snow, Edgar, 282, 370, 371; China, 288, 290, 323, 393; Russia, 399, 414, 418 Snyder-Grey case, 436 Social Revolutionaries, Russian, 230 Société Générale des Annonces, 1 5 Sokolovsky, Vassily, 342 Sokolsky, George, 287 Solomon Islands, 352, 369 Sommers, Martin, 286-87 Sons of Liberty, xv, xvi, 1 0 1 Soong, Norman, 324 Sorge, Dr. Richard, 289, 344, 403 Soth, Lauren K., 405 Southeast Asia, coverage of, 439 Soviet Official Secrets Act, 402 Soviet Press Bureau, 233-34 Soziologische Magazin, 289 Space travel, 425-28 Spain, Carlist Wars, 1 1 6 Spanish-American War, 130-33, 168, 235; newspaper promotion of, xviii, 1 1 0 , 1 3 0 - 3 1 , 1 3 3 , 134, 135, 138, 419 Spanish Civil War, 3 1 0 - 1 2 Sparks, Fred, 392 Spender, Hugh, 280 Spewack, Samuel, 270 Spirit of St. Louis, 272-73 Sputnik, 406 Stackhouse, Glenn, 392 Stalin, Joseph, 340, 364, 368; rise, 227 2 3 1 , 270, 316; purge trials, 320; death and castigation, 398, 399, 403, 405; Berlin blockade, 401 Stalin-Hitler Pact, 330 Stalingrad, battle of, 355 Stanley, Henry Morton, 86-87, 89-92 Stars and Stripes, 282, 383 Starzel, Frank J., 425 Stassen, Harold E., 372 Statesman, 23

499

Stavisky, Serge Alexander, 297 Stead, Ronald Maillard, 363 Stead, W . T., 200, 201; Cook expedition, 196, 198 Steed, Wickham, 172, 252-53; World War I, 203, 205, 206, 209, 2 1 1 , 212, 225-26, 245 Steele, Arch, 322, 324, 342, 370, 382 Steevens, George Warrington, 1 2 1 , 128, 129-30,139,142 Stefani, Guglielmo, 19 Stefani Agency, 19, 1 5 7 , 1 5 8 Steffens, Lincoln, 319 Stein, Gunther, 403 Steinbeck, John, 3 57 Stephens, Pembroke, 323 Stettinius, Edward R., 385 Stevens, Edmund, 333, 364; Russia, 399, 400-1 Stickney, Joseph L., 1 3 2 Stilwell, Joseph W . , 369, 370 Stimson, Henry L., 1 1 1 , 287 Stimson, Robert, 414 Stock exchange, 163; quotations, 10, 13, 1 6 - 1 7 ; collapse, 274 Stockholm Dagens Nyheter, 387 Stone, Herbert, 219 Stone, Melville Elijah, 260-62; AP formation, 1 5 1 - 5 3 , 155, 162 Stoneman, William H., 279, 337, 355, 361, 387 Storey, Graham, 17 Stourza, Alexander, 14 Stowe, Leland, 281, 333, 399 Straight, Willard, 178-79 Straus, Mr. and Mrs. Isidor, 200, 201 Streit, Clarence, 271-72 Stringer, Ann, 365 Stringer, William, 364 Stringers, 75, 88; number of, 44m. Strohm, John, 418 Strong, Anna Louise, 279, 319 Strong, Walter A., 256 Submarines, 223, 345 Subsidies, government, 35, 37, 38, 159, 160, 424, 440 Sudan, 1 2 1 - 3 0 , 157 Sudetenland, 328 Suez Canal, 103, 130 Suez war, 406 Summit conferences, 409-10 Sumulong, Lorenzo, 410 Sun Yat-sen, 286 Supreme Court, A P decision, 165 Suribachi, Mount, 372, 374

500

Index

Sutton, Robert, 24 Sverdrup, Otto Neumann, 1 9 6 , 1 9 7 Swing, Raymond Gram, 337 Switzerland, censorship, 8 Swope, Herbert Bayard, 218, 235, 257, 258, 384; Versailles, 244, 245, 247-48 Sydney Telegraph, 347 Sylvester, Arthur, 424 Symonds, Gene, 4 1 5 Szapiro, Jerzy, 330-31 Tabouis, Genevieve, 295 Taiwan, 393 Tammany, 166 Tanks, 220 Tardieu, Andre, 245 Tass, xvii, 234, 258, 3 1 7 , 318, 321, 402, 403, 407, 4 1 1 , 414, 433; World War II, 340, 342, 383 Taylor, Bayard, 26, 59-61 Taylor, Zachary, 40, 41 Telegraf noie Agenstvo Sovietskavo Soyuza, see Tass Telegraph: semaphore, 10, 28; invention, 14, 174-75; rates, 3 1 ; Crimean War, 49; remittances, 158 Telegraphen Korrespondenz-Bureau, 2023 Telegraphen Union, see D N B Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union, see Tass Telegraphic Despatch Company, 21 Telephone, 155 Teletype, 155 Television: invention, 266; role, 389, 426-28, 437, 451; costs, 450 Telstar, 427 Temps, Le, 245, 247, 295 Tereshkova, Valentina V., 428 Test-ban treaty, 429 Thailand, 345, 348, 394 Thiers, Adolphe, 94 Thomas, Vaughn, 362 Thomas, W. Beach, 218 Thompson, Dorothy, 276-79, 293, 319, 362 Thompson, Howard N., 182 Thompson, Jack, 361, 362 Tighe, Matthew, 136, 1 3 7 Tilden, Samuel J., 39 Time, Inc., 369, 442-43 Time magazine, 446, 447, 448 Times of London, 13, 14, 17; Russell Crimean dispatches, xvi, 18, 44-54, 448; first correspondent, 1, 3; mail

drops, 4, 20; Robinson as foreign editor, 5; India, 55; American Civil War, 62-69, 72; Franco-Prussian War, 75, 77, 79, 80-81, 82, 84; Congress of Berlin, 93-100, 1 0 1 ; Suez Canal sale, 103; Parnell affair, 103-5; Dreyfus affair, 107; Sudan, 1 2 1 - 2 6 , 128, 129; Spanish-American War, 133; Boer War, 139; Boxer Rebellion, 146, 1 4 7 50; sale, 170-73; Russo-Japanese War, 176-77; Portsmouth Conference, 183; German war plans, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210; World War I, 2 1 4 - 1 5 , 2 1 7 , 218, 225-26, 2 3 1 , 233; Russia and, 22526, 231, 233; 1 9 2 1 - 2 2 , 251-52; sale to Astor, 253; rise of Hitler, 268; abdication of Edward VIII, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309; Manchuria, 322, 324; German expansion, 325, 326, 328-29; Dunkerque, 335; United Nations, 387; role, 444, 445, 451 Times Square, 168, 169 Times tower, 169 Times of Viet Nam, 447 Tito, 364 Titanic disaster, 199-201 Titov, Gherman S., 426 Togo, Admiral, 177, 182, 345 Tokyo, 350 Tokyo Rose, 381 Tolischus, Otto, 332, 343, 347, 353 Tolstoy, Leo, 185-86 Tomara, Sonia, 281 Tong, Hollington K., 370, 371 Topliff, Samuel, 22n., 28 Torgler, Ernst, 292 Toronto Star, 283, 284 Toronto Telegram, 303 Townsend, George Alfred, 72 Trafalgar, battle of, 4-571., 9 Trans-Siberian Railway, 184 Treanor, Tom, 360 Tregaskis, Richard, 352 Tremaine, Frank, 346 Trevelyan, George Otto, 66 Trotsky, Leon, 227, 228, 229, 230, 2 3 1 , 270, 316, 318 Trud, 403 Truman, Harry S., 364, 388, 448; World War II, 368, 376, 377, 380-81; MacArthur removal, 396 Truman doctrine, 388 Trumbull, Robert, 369, 414 Tukhachevsky, Mikhail, 320 Turin La Stampa, 324

Index Turkey, 95, 98, 99, 394; Bulgarian atrocities, 1 1 4 - 1 5 , 1 1 7 ; Russian W a r , 1 1 8 20; Truman doctrine, 388 T V News, 4 3 7 Typewriter, invention of, 1 5 5 Twain, Mark, 76 Tweed, William Marcy (Boss), 1 6 6 U-2 incident, 4 0 9 - 1 0 , 4 1 1 U Thant, 4 2 3 - 2 4 Ubell, Earl, 428 Uhl, Alexander, 313 Ulianov, Vladimir Ilyitch, see Lenin Ullstein Gruene Post, 292 Union Now, 2 7 1 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 3 1 6 2 1 ; China and, 289, 4 1 7 ; Chinese Communists, 290, 4 1 2 ; Spanish Civil W a r , 3 1 0 , 3 1 1 ; purge trials, 3 1 8 , 3 2 5 ; Japan, 325; Finnish war, 333; World W a r II, 3 5 5 , 383; U N and, 385; atomic bomb development, 389, 429; censorship, 398, 399, 4 0 0 - 1 , 402, 4 0 3 - 4 , 4 1 1 ; U-2 incident, 4 0 9 - 1 0 ; Hungarian revolt, 405; Suez war, 406; space shots, 4 2 5 - 2 6 , 428; Cuban missile crisis, 4 2 3 , 4 5 1 United Nations: formation, 3 8 5 - 8 6 ; press coverage, 386-88, 4 3 5 ; Korean W a r , 3 8 9 - 9 7 ; membership, 389; Khrushchev, 408, 4 1 0 United Press (old), 1 5 2 , 1 5 3 , 1 6 2 United Press, 282; independence of, xvii, 2 6 1 - 6 3 , 264, 265; World W a r I, 2 1 5 1 6 , 2 1 8 , 2 1 9 , 2 3 7 , 239, 2 4 1 - 4 3 ; Russia, 2 3 2 , 270, 3 1 7 , 320, 3 2 1 , 3 2 2 , 341, 342, 3 5 6 , 364, 4 0 1 ; League of Nations, 246, 2 7 1 ; Manchurian war, 286-87; German expansion, 293, 324; Ethiopian war, 303, 304; abdication of Edward VIII, 306, 308-9; Spanish Civil W a r , 3 0 9 - 1 0 , 3 1 1 , 3 1 3 , 3 1 5 ; World W a r II, 3 3 2 , 3 3 3 , 3 3 7 , 338, 3 3 9 , 346, 360, 379, 380, 383; Packard, 338; Tokyo, 347; United Nations, 387; Hungarian revolt, 405; Argentina, 4 1 5 ; costs, 4 1 3 ; INS consolidation, 4 1 3 United Press Associations, 1 6 1 - 6 5 United Press International, 4 1 4 , 4 2 5 , 437, 443 United States: Boxer Rebellion, 1 4 5 , 1 4 9 ; public opinion, 2 1 9 ; Russia and, 2 3 2 , 3 1 9 , 4 0 8 - 1 0 ; world role, 234; League Covenant, 2 4 7 - 5 1 ; Press, compared with British, 306, 307; Spanish

501

Civil W a r , 3 1 0 ; isolationism, 3 2 7 ; Japan and, 3 2 3 - 2 5 ; neutrality, 324, 3 2 5 ; World W a r II, 3 4 3 , 344, 362, 3 6 3 , 383; Indonesia and, 388; Korean W a r , 3 9 0 - 9 8 ; Suez war, 406; Khrushchev visit, 408-9; U-2 incident, 4 0 9 - 1 0 ; foreign correspondents in, 4 1 2 - 1 3 , 4 1 5 1 6 , 4 3 2 - 3 3 ; consorship, 4 1 6 - 1 7 ; missile crisis, 4 5 1 U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 389 USIS, 473 U.S. News and World Report, 444 Universal Service, 2 7 3 , 282, 294, 3 2 7 University of Copenhagen, 1 9 6 , 1 9 8 UPI, 414, 425, 437, 443 Urch, R. O. G „ 233 Usten, Paulus, 9 V - E Day, 368 Vafiades, Markos, 402 Van Anda, Carr Vattel, 272; Titanic disaster, 1 9 9 - 2 0 0 ; World W a r I, 2 1 2 22, 238, 240 Vanderbilt, Alfred Gwynne, 2 1 9 Vandercook, John, 1 6 2 Vanderlip, Frank, 1 3 2 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 2 5 7 Verdun, battle of, 1 0 8 , 2 2 1 Verlag, Ullstein, 292 Vermillion, Bobby, 3 9 1 , 392 Versailles conferences, 2 4 4 - 4 9 Versailles Treaty, 293 Vienna Neue Freie Presse, 1 0 5 - 6 , 203 Viet Cong, 446 Viet Nam, 4 1 8 , 446-48, 449 Villard, Henry, 65 Villard, Oswald Garrison, 2 3 2 , 2 3 3 Villiers, Frederick, 1 2 5 , 1 2 7 , 1 2 8 , 1 3 9 , 214, 218, Viviani, René, 206 Vizetelly, Frank, 1 2 2 Voelkischer Boebachter, 2 5 8 - 5 9 , 292 Vossische Zeitung, 268, 2 7 1 , 292 Waddington, William Henry, 96 Wainwright, General Jonathan M., 349 Wales, Hank, 239, 2 7 1 Walker, Gordon, 369, 382 Walker, Robert J., 2 6 - 2 7 Walker, General Walton H., 3 9 1 Wallace, Donald Mackenzie, 97, 1 0 0 183-84 Wallace, Edgar, 1 4 3 Wall Street Journal, 443, 4 5 1 Walsin-Esterhazy, Count Ferdinand, 1 0 6

502

Index

Walter, Arthur Fräser, 170, 172 Walter IV, John, 172, 252, 253 Walter, John Jr., 3-4, 45 Walter, John sr., 1, 3 Walter, William, 2 War crimes trials, 383 Ward, Edward, 342 War Information, Office of, 352, 377-78 War Weekly, 232 Washington Daily News, 357 Washington Post, 423, 442, 443 Washington Star, 153, 443,473 Waterloo, battle of, 9 , 1 2 Watson, Mark, 362, 363, 368 Weekly Graphic, 126 Weissblatt, Franz, 349 Weizmann, Chaim, 106 Welle, Ehm, 292 Welles, Sumner, 3 1 1 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, duke of, 1 1 - 1 2 , 46,47 Wellman, Walter, 192 Wells, H. G., 220-21 Werth, Alexander, 341, 342, 356, 365, 399, 400 West, Rebecca, 337 Western Associated Press, 32 Western Union Telegraph Company, 31 Westinghouse radio, 442, 444 Wheeler Syndicate, 213 Whitaker, John T., 281, 304, 338 White, Holt, 76, 78 White, Jessie Meriton, see Mario, Jessie Meriton White White, Leigh, 338 White, Paul W . , 327 White, Theodore H., 370, 371 White, William Allen, 220, 256 Whitehead, Don, 361, 362, 365, 391, 397 Whiteleather, Melvin, 333 Whitlock, Brand, 213 Wiegand, Karl H. von, 283, 3 1 2 , 462 Wieland, Sidney, 403 Wier, William, 102 Wile, Frederic William, 172, 196; World War I, 203, 206, 207, 2 1 2 Wilhelm, John, 364, 441-42 Williams, Albert Rhys, 230 Williams, Charles, 128

Williams, Douglas, 335 Williams, Emlyn, 332, 363 Williams, George Douglas, 157 Williams, Harold, 232 Williams, Walter, 288 Williams, Wythe, 212, 268, 277; World War I, 215, 218, 221-22, 238 Willington, Aaron Smith, 21, 22, 28 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 23, 59, 61 Wilson, Alexander, 32 Wilson, H. W., 191 Wilson, Richard, 349 Wilson, Woodrow, 249-50; U.S. neutrality, 223; Russian views, 232, 233; 14 Points, 240; Versailles conferences, 244-49 Wilton, Robert, 225-26, 228, 231, 233 Windsor, duke of, 306-9 Wire services, see News agencies Witte, Count Sergei Yuleivich, 183, 184, 185 Wolfert, Ira, 352 Wolff, Dr. Bernhard, 15, 16 Wolff Bureau, 16, 157, 158, 210, 260; cartels and, 19, 32, 163, 165 Wolff, Theodore, 250 Wood, Henry, 163 Wood, Junius, 237, 279, 3 1 8 Woodward, David, 339 World War I, 202-43; air war, 222-23; armistice, 241-43 World War II, 332-84 Wreford, Harry, 102 Wright, Orville and Wilbur, 189, 190 Yalta agreement, 385 Yalu river, 178, 393, 394 Yank, 383 Young, Arthur, 3, 1 0 1 Young, Gordon, 293 Young, John Russell, 74 Zelle, Gertrud Margarete, 239-40 Zenier Brothers, 473 Ziffren, Lester, 309-10 Zinoviev, Gregory, 316, 317, 320 Zionism, 105 Zola, Emile, 106-7 Zürcher Zeitung, 7-9