Tempest in a Samovar

Don't write about Russia, comrades,

Write about anything else,

Write about Hearst and America First

And the sins of the Saxons and Celts ...

Don't stir up the Bennettsky Cerfskys

By taking a poke at Stalin,

Write as you will--it's a free country still--

But not about Russia--that's mean.

This "Advice to W. L. White and other Vanishing Americans" appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature. Its author was Ward Greene, executive editor of Hearst's King Features and understandably sympathetic with Bill White's plight last week. For no sooner had White's new book (Report on the Russians; TIME, March 19) popped down on bookstands than angry denunciations began popping down on the author. From the fury of the criticism, White might have been Joseph Goebbels instead of a veteran newsman, with his late father William Allen White's talent for making homespun phrases--and irritating snap judgments.

Said the New York Times: "Mr. White fires no guns for fascism, but he rolls ammunition for it." Said Manhattan's excitable PM: "Pernicious and irresponsible ... it might have been calculated to do the greatest amount of damage to the emerging comity of nations." Corliss Lament's top-heavily titled National Council of American-Soviet Friendship unrolled a 20-page dossier, quoting in parallel columns White and those who apparently disagreed with him. These included Churchill, Eisenhower, Roosevelt and Willkie, some of them obviously caught in mid-paragraph while making politic remarks about an ally. Sometimes N.C.A. S.F.'s rebuttal "proof" consisted in comparing White's prejudices with somebody else's. Sometimes N.C.A.S.F. seemed to be drubbing Reporter White over the head with a peppermint candy stick. (White: "The women are drab, sallow and tired." Rebuttal, by Private Howard Katzander in Yank: "They have beautiful complexions and some are beautifully built.")

More to the point, because it was calmly sensible, was a joint statement by 16 foreign correspondents who have covered Russia at war, including Quentin Reynolds, John Hersey, Edgar Snow, Edmund Stevens. Said the 16: "None of us is satisfied with the limited facilities extended to reporters by the Soviet Government, and none denies the truth of certain statements in Mr. White's book [but] for the totality of its effect . . . we feel it contains far too many inaccuracies ... a highly biased and misleading report." Eric Johnston, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who had taken White to Russia with him and who does not always talk in public the way he does to "off-the-record" groups, was moved to scoot to safety: "White overemphasized the bad . . . minimized the good. . . . Moreover, there is a generous dash of fiction . . . not labeled as such."

Bill White, blithely cutting across an ideological flower bed with his Kansas reaping machine, now knew, if he didn't know before, that Russia has definitely ceased to be a safe topic for unwary reporters.

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