Suburban Seer

The first time Wythe Williams went to Europe he watched Kaiser Wilhelm II and Theodore Roosevelt bury Edward VII. Wythe Williams was a reporter on vacation from the New York World. After the funeral, everybody went home but Wythe Williams. He worked in Europe for the next 25 years. During that time he called Georges Clemenceau "a terrible old man" and was thanked by the Tiger of France for "having the nerve to say such things"; he scooped the world on the substitution of Nivelle for Joffre as the French Army's Commander-in-Chief; he scooped it again by getting the text of the Versailles Treaty first to the London Times; he helped build up Universal Service (now INS) in Europe.

In 1937 Albert W. Johnston, owner of the Greenwich (Conn.) News-Graphic, who makes money from gold mines and doesn't like to lose it on newspapers, looked around for someone to put his paper on its feet. Johnston met Wythe Williams, and the Greenwich News-Graphic not only got a new editor but a new punning name, Greenwich Time. Wythe Williams set out to make his Connecticut suburban paper the Emporia Gazette of the East.

The Emporia Gazette is noted for editorial comment. Greenwich Time soon got a reputation for guessing what was going to happen next in foreign affairs. For Wythe Williams, before leaving Europe, had organized his own private foreign news service to an extent never before attempted by a paper in Greenwich or any other U. S. suburb. Equipped with his own hunches and reports from well-placed tipsters, Editor Williams made quite a local name for himself as a prognosticator in world politics. His major prediction was that Germany would precipitate a world war in the spring or summer of 1938 over the Czechoslovakia!! issue. A second prediction, the blunt assertion that "Germany will not march." appeared late in September when the Czechoslovakian crisis looked its blackest.

Another Williams news hunch came last week.

Greenwich Time'?, suggestion that the U. S. recall its Ambassador to Germany, and invite Germany to do likewise with her envoy in Washington, was followed, within one and four days respectively, by official announcement of the summons of Hugh R. Wilson from Berlin and of Hans H. Dieckhoff from Washington. It was an auspicious occasion on which to celebrate Greenwich Time'?, first birth day. Seer Williams is now betting on a world war within a year, foresees the removal of the British Empire's capital to Ottawa.

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