Hearst's Third War

Said Marion Davies one day last week: "Gosh, I'm getting so fed up with Pop spending the whole time talking politics." It was politics that had brought William Randolph Hearst, 78, from San Simeon to San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel, whither he summoned his editors and publishers to discuss war policy. Springy of step, looking fitter than he had in years, the old publisher seemed to his admiring Hearstlings well nigh indestructible.

This is Hearst's third war. For his first war, the Spanish-American War of 1898, he sent Richard Harding Davis, a half dozen other star correspondents to Cuba. A year before the Maine disaster, Hearst is supposed to have wired Artist Frederic Remington: "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."

In his second war, Hearst was less bellicose. In February 1917, alarmed by the German submarine menace, Hearst wired General Manager Carvalho of the New York American that the British would be starved out in six months. Three months after the U.S. got in, Hearst gloomed:

"We are simply wasting sorely needed men and supplies by sending them abroad." The Hearst press took such a strong pro-German, anti-British line that an aroused public, all over the country, burned Hearst in effigy. As usual, Hearst plastered his pages with red, white & blue U.S. flags until the excitement subsided. Once he wired Carvalho: "I think they [the flags] have been good for this week, giving us a very American character and probably helping sell papers, but to continue effective they should be reserved for occasions."

For his third war, the only thing predictable about Hearst's editorial policy was more dizzy unpredictability: waving the flag with one hand and attacking the war Administration with the other. High points in the extraordinary Hearst editorial record:

Four days before Pearl Harbor, Hearst wrote in his column In the News: "The war in the Orient is between Japan and China. . . . Our sympathies are with China but our interests are not with China. . . . Certainly it is not Japan which is precipitating war with the United States."

The day after Pearl Harbor, he changed tack, declared: "But we will get better and stronger every day, and we will not have to get very good and very strong to knock the everlasting daylights out of Japan."

A froth-mouthed isolationist, before Dec. 7 Hearst published yapping anti-British editorials which sometimes outdid the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News. Afterward, for a time, the anti-British editorials disappeared. But not for long. Presently Hearst's 4,110,270 daily readers were informed that Churchill remains in power "notwithstanding his incompetence because he has succeeded in dragging the United States into England's European entanglements. . . ." The British were denounced for enslaving India. But, as if taking it all back, the Hearst-papers ran a cartoon depicting Churchill's speech as the tourniquet on a British arm bleeding from wounds labeled "Nazi Fleet Escape" and "Singapore." Another cartoon pictured Uncle Sam with a gas mask labeled "Unity" while poison gas labeled "Distrust in Our Allies" swirls up from a cesspool marked "Berlin and Tokio."

Meanwhile Hearstpapers beat the drums for savings bonds, Buy-a-Bomber campaigns, the immediate relief of MacArthur. But at the same time the Russians and the New Deal sent up the Hearst blood pressure even more than the Axis did. It took no expert at reading between lines to see the drift in an editorial on the Riom trials of Daladier and Leon Blum: "[The trials] may be the beginning of a new era of justice and of peace on this earth. . . . It is surely time that the men responsible for the murder and misery of war should be tried and convicted and deservedly punished. . . ."

The U.S. was not very quick in knocking the everlasting daylights out of Japan, and Hearst began to do a series in his column on the history of Japan. Said the man who once thundered against the "Yellow Peril": White men had taught the Japs the "mysterious medicine" of firearms. His moral: "And now, friends and fellow citizens, we 'barbarians' are being given a taste of our own 'mysterious medicine' by the Japanese--the just reward for exploiting them."

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