"Nothing Personal"

Last week Italy ejected Chicago Daily News Correspondent John Thompson Whitaker, third able Rome representative of his paper to be told in the past 27 months he must go. Fascist officials found genial Tennessean Whitaker's dispatches "displeasing." They could not have liked much better the Daily News's general treatment of Fascist Italy and of Benito Mussolini. Il Duce was recently cartooned in the News puking over the side of a ship into the Mediterranean while the Fuehrer rushes up with a trayful of seasickly dishes tagged "Spanish Hot Tamales, Greece, Turkey, Hungarian Goulash." The Daily News announced that it will send no replacement to Rome, will be without direct staff coverage in Italy for the first time in 30 years.

The Daily News observed that after Correspondents Frank Smothers and Richard Mowrer got their walking papers it "made one final effort to cover Italy by assigning to Rome one of its most experienced and tactful correspondents. . . . Whitaker had won the friendship of Count Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law and Italian Foreign Minister, Marshals Graziani and Badoglio and other Italian notables. . . . Although Whitaker was strongly democratic in his personal convictions, he was at great pains in his dispatches to reflect Fascist policies and views accurately. . . . Whitaker was frequently denounced as a pro-Fascist in letters from Daily News readers."

Democrat Whitaker accepted an Italian War Cross after reporting the Fascist conquest of Ethiopia, and Fascist bigwigs sorely embarrassed him by insisting that they had "nothing personal" against him, would not formally expel him. He demanded formal expulsion. Instead, red-faced John T. Whitaker was told with Italian finesse: "You are not expelled, but you must leave." Pressed, Italian officials finally set the time limit for Correspondent Whitaker's departure at "about ten days." To the credit of tall, slender, wavy-dark-brown-haired Oustee Whitaker is a recent realistic work Americas to the South (Macmillan; $2.50), which he wrote on a tour of duty for the Daily News in South America (1938-39) before he was given the thankless Rome trick.

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