Here the Gavel Fell

After her election to Congress last November, Connecticut's Representative Clare Boothe Luce was swamped with bids to write a column about Washington. News syndicates and magazines guessed that millions of the U.S. reading public would be interested in what Clare Luce had to say. Offers ran up to four figures a week. Congresswoman Luce, intent on learning her new job, turned them all down.

Last May she changed her mind. She decided to devote the midnight oil one night a week to pounding out a weekly column, free, to the CBI Roundup, weekly paper published in New Delhi for U.S. troops in China, Burma and India under command of Lieut. General Joseph Stilwell. She had met U.S. soldiers in China and Burma in 1942, she knew how they longed for news from home.

Roundup was proud and pleased. It advertised Clare Luce's column as its only exclusive feature. Last week, on orders from the War Department, Clare Luce's column was killed.

Columnist Luce had written mostly about Congress, The column's title: Here the Gavel Fell. Its motto: "Don't undersell your Congress." Her weekly reports ran 1,200 to 1,600 words, gave soldiers a brilliantly readable summary of the political week. When she wrote, early in May, that home-front journalists were predicting that WPBoss Donald Nelson might be on the way out, she added a gag making the rounds of Congressional cloakrooms: "Don't be too sure. An awful lot of the rubber we are short of went into the construction of Donald Nelson." When the House revised the Senate's anti-strike bill, she reported it had "so many teeth in it labor could claim it was written by an Elks' convention."

When Congress recessed, she summed up its work, dealing out pats and lumps as she saw fit. Said she: "An intransigent, unyielding, bitter-end Congress ... is confronted by an equally stubborn, unbending, unmollifying Chief Executive. . . . Members of Congress are going home for nine weeks to the grass roots. . . . One hopes that the well-manicured lawns around Hyde Park will also serve the President well this summer--as grass roots."

The War Department explained that the column had contained the writer's views on controversial political questions, and therefore had no place in an Army publication. The Department did not explain why this rule was not applied to Columnist Drew Pearson, who is also published in Roundup.

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