Cissie Fuss

Eleanor Medill ("Cissie") Patterson's Washington Times-Herald picks up most of the bitterly anti-Roosevelt editorials and cartoons spawned by her brother Joe's New York Daily News and her cousin Bertie McCormick's Chicago Tribune. They rarely pick up any of hers. When 59-year-old "Cissie" takes pen in hand, the result is likely to be so rancorous that it shocks even a well-blunted masculine sense of fair play.

Last week, brought to boil by President Roosevelt's refusal to allow draft deferments for premedical students under 26, Publisher Cissie let go a characteristic kidney-punch. She filled a page with a signed editorial and pictures of 20 young (24 to 37) career men of the State Department "who do not choose to fight."

Hissed Cissie: "If the Army really needs ALL the able-bodied young men it can get," it can find in Secretary Hull's fold "an assortment of rich, able-bodied and unmarried boys of no particular use to anyone. ... There are plenty of intelligent girls available to more than adequately fill the jobs of these young men."

It would really be good for "the 'pantywaist brigade' (and isn't that vulgar?)," snapped Cissie, to have a taste of war. Even Bill Bullitt "might have lost his insatiable appetite for intrigue before the present disaster" if he had "risked his young blood and guts and tears in the last World War instead of cutting dramatic capers at the Versailles Peace Conference."

And just while she was on the subject, "the President himself has no first-hand knowledge of war either, we might add. Like his little boy friends, Pearson and Winchell, he stayed far away from the battlefield of the first World War.* Although at that time a young man, and in perfect physical condition, he did 'his bit' as Assistant Secretary of the Navy--right here in Washington."

"Violent, Unfair." At his next press conference, Cordell Hull angrily detailed the deferment record, age and marital status of every career man whose picture Cissie had printed. All but four, he announced, are overseas, many in jobs of direct military assistance. No man under 26 in his department is draft-deferred. Publicly, the whip-tongued old Secretary called Cissie's tirade "violent and unfair, grossly unfair." His private comments were probably purple.

** Columnist Drew Pearson, Publisher Patterson's onetime son-in-law, was in college during World War I, later served overseas with the American Friends Service Committee. Winchell was (and still is) in the U.S. Naval Reserve.

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