The Winner

A confident, confidential voice which seems to know all the answers last week won what may in time become the toploftiest prize in radio. The prize: a $1,000 Pulitzer-style award established last year by Mrs. Alfred I. du Pont and the Florida National Group of Banking Institutions for the year's best radio commentator. The winner: Mutual's Fulton Lewis Jr. He also got a solemn salute from the committee* which chose him: "In recognition and appreciation of his initiative in the aggressive, independent and meritorious gathering, interpretation and presentation of news through the medium of radio."

Swat the Government. The voice of big, sandy-haired, well-fed Fulton Lewis, one of the nation's better known news commentators, reaches a conservatively estimated 2,500,000 pairs of adult ears per night. Sixty-odd sponsors shell out $2,500 a week for his views, which are aired by 155 stations of the Mutual Network (Mon. through Fri., 7 p.m. E.W.T.). Special broadcasts and lecture tours add an additional $1,500 a week to his income.

Lewis is a native of Washington, D.C. One of his forebears founded the capital's swank Chevy Chase Club. Lewis' wife is a daughter of Claudius Hart Huston, onetime Republican National Committee chairman. Although the Lewises live on a Maryland farm, they pursue a very social Washington existence.

These circumstances are reflected in Lewis' professional outlook. He is against New Deal bureaucracy and bureaucrats, and he says that there is no one in the capital of whom he is afraid. Since Pearl Harbor, he has made successive crusades ("a series of little oomphs") on such obvious issues as the sugar situation, synthetic rubber, gasoline rationing.

Sometimes Lewis has got things done. On a recent western lecture tour, he hollered that ODT was making it difficult for farmers and truckers to get enough gasoline to do business on. He aired their grievances and ODT took corrective steps. His broadcasts last summer on synthetic rubber stirred Congress and were put into the Congressional Record. Lewis thereafter claimed virtually all the credit for straightening out the controversy. (He has a propensity for looking back on situations and observing: "I soon cleared that up.")

Mikeside Manner. Lewis' confidential manner is decidedly personal. Recently he advised striking Pennsylvania coal miners to trust the WLB to arbitrate their case. Said he: "I know these men. I know them personally. I can give you my personal guarantee that you'll get an absolutely fair deal."

Fulton Lewis was just another commentator until he arranged Charles Lindbergh's famed broadcast in September 1939. He met the aviator at a dinner party, heard his views on airpower, his recent European experiences, offered to put him on the air. Lindbergh was a national sensation. Lewis was "delighted. . . . It meant a scoop for a young guy." He has since objected mightily to being called an isolationist, but is proud of his record as a non-interventionist: "I was just yelling for a little more time, and I got it." Some of his critics think they hear echoes of this attitude of mind in Lewis' recent outcry against the "fundamental unsoundness" of canned-goods rationing ("Nothing will do but that we try the same thing immediately just because England is doing it").

New Style Frontiersman. Lewis is a product of the Hearst school of reporting. He got his first newspaper job on Hearst's Washington Herald soon after he left the University of Virginia in 1924. Before then he had been a sort of amateur Noel Coward, studying piano and voice, writing music and plays. Old Herald hands recall him as the noisiest man on the staff. He moved to Hearst's Universal Service, later INS, for which he wrote a Washington column.

Presently Lewis looked at radio and found it good ("It had frontier. At INS I was just writing for 5% of the people"). He persuaded a WOL (Washington) commentator to take a vacation and let him substitute without pay. He also did a commentary on District of Columbia fish and where to catch them. When WOL offered him a commentator's job in 1937 at $25 a week, he took it. A few years later Lindbergh came along.

Constant association with politicos has given 39-year-old Fulton Lewis many of their mannerisms. He indulges in deep senatorial guffaws, interminable telephone calls; gives his autograph freely and smokes his incessant cigarets in a long black holder. He loves his job, admits it is a cinch compared to newspaper reporting. He looks forward to the day when he will not have to move off his farm to do his broadcasts. Lacking the informed balance of an Elmer Davis or a Raymond Gram Swing, he has usually avoided international expertizing, has relied on his flair for exploiting home-front issues.

Few commentators have the personal get-up-&-go which led Lewis to crash the sacrosanct Capitol press galleries in 1939. Thanks to him, radio reporters are now regularly present in Congress. Accusations that his reporting is "destructive" distress him. He says he is just using radio to cut red tape. When he is in town, his plush office at WOL is a loud and tangy chatterbox. The clatter-chatter was finally too much for the female occupant of the adjoining office. While the commentator was on tour, arrangements were rushed to equip his office with a soundproof door.

-Washington and Lee University President Dr. Francis P. Gaines; Virginia's Rt. Rev. Henry St. George Tucker, president of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America; onetime NBC President Merlin H. Aylesworth; American Legion Auxiliary national President Ruth H. Mathebat; and Mrs. Du Pont. They gave the companion $1,000 award, for the radio station best serving its community and the nation, to General Electric's short-wave station KGEI of San Francisco.

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