The President & the Press

To the long conflict between Franklin Roosevelt and the U.S. press, the President added a new chapter last week. This time he accused the press of impeding the war effort and of encouraging the current confusion and bad temper among agencies and high officials of his own administration.

At his press conference the President was stiff, unsmiling. The morning papers had the text of an acrid exchange of letters between Mr. Roosevelt and his ex-Food Administrator, Chester Davis (TIME, July 5). The afternoons were ripe with the brand-new main bout between Vice President Wallace and Jesse Jones. One newshawk asked: Who was to blame for such bickering?

The President was ready for this: almost everybody in the room had had a hand in it, he said. Asked for specific instances, he said there were flocks of them. Read any columnist, he suggested. He went on: unfortunately, some reporters are forced to write stuff to conform with their publisher's line.

Then the President trotted out his example of newspaper home-front subversion: stories of WAAC immorality which the papers had carried. They were deliberate and shameful, he said.

Undoubtedly the President had not seen a survey of press handling of the women's auxiliary services. Conducted by the Twohey Weekly Analysis of Newspaper Opinion, it found: 1) one-third of the press branded the comments on WAAC immorality as vicious, lying propaganda; 2) another third was all for legislation to permit the WAVES to serve overseas; 3) the rest was merely commendatory.

Only one story, that by Columnist John O'Donnell in the New York Daily News, had received national publicity for implying immorality in the WAACs. (O'Donnell asserted that contraceptives were to be issued to the Corps.) Generally, the U.S. knew its newspapers had patriotically backed the WAACs. Everyone went away mad.

Wrong Again

Lean, acid, troublemaking Drew Pearson, famed Merry-Go-Round, keyhole columnist, got himself into a little more trouble than usual last week. John R. Monroe, host of the briefly renowned Red House on R Street (TIME, May 17), slapped a $1,000,000 libel suit on him, another for $350,000 on the Washington Post, which published the special Pearson article, for defamation of character. Meanwhile a posse of anti-Fourth Term Senators, mad enough to slap him with something else, contented themselves with giving the lie to another Pearson story.

The Senators' anger arose with the appearance of Pearson's Washington Merry-Go-Round column headlined: GILLETTE IS CHOSEN BY FARLEY TO BEAT ROOSEVELT IN 1944. The burden of Pearson's story was that James A. Farley had met with anti-Fourth Term Senators (including Missouri's Bennett Clark, Georgia's Walter George, Virginia's Harry F. Byrd, et al.) to choose a candidate to win the Democratic nomination from Franklin Roosevelt in 1944. The man they settled on, said Pearson, was Iowa's handsome, white-thatched Senator Guy M. Gillette.

According to the Senators, what really happened was that Gillette gave a luncheon for the Senators and Mr. Farley. They pondered ways of beating a Fourth Term nomination for the President, but neither discussed nor chose a candidate to do the wished-for scuttling. The keyhole eye of Columnist Pearson was evidently nearsighted -- again.

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