San Francisco Spectacle

The United Nations Press Secretariat had handed out San Francisco credentials like tickets to a two-bit political clambake; accredited correspondents outnumbered delegates six to one. Legmen, pundits, gossip columnists, hatchetmen, trained seals and freaks--1,600 of them, all classified as newsmen--fought for seats in a press section big enough for 600.

Show Business. Newsmen and pseudo-newsmen who couldn't get into the conference sessions, or didn't want to, mobbed the Palace Hotel's Pied Piper bar, interviewing each other, exchanging rumors.

Walter Winchell breathlessly reported that Helen Hayes's cast in Harriet had been given poor hotel accommodations and quoted her: "Argentina, which declared war against the Axis at the last minute, gets swanky suites for her delegates. But some of us in the show who have been fighting Axis supporters over here are being put out of hotels." The San Francisco Chronicle drily reminded Winchell and Miss Hayes that Argentina had not been invited to San Francisco. The unabashable Winchell was off on another rumor. He persuaded Hearst's Examiner to by-line his prediction that the conference might be adjourned while Truman flew to meet Stalin and Churchill.

Not all the reporting was at this low level. There were also responsible men like Walter Lippmann, David Lawrence, Jay Hayden. The New York Times's star-studded eight-man staff, topped by Managing Editor Edwin L. James, included Anne O'Hare McCormick, Arthur Krock, James ("Scotty") Reston. British newspapers sent 43 men; the Russians, seven; the Chinese, five.

Wisdom & Poison. Nudging these working newsmen for space were big-name specialists, with varying claims to international wisdom: Westbrook Pegler, George Fielding Eliot, Ludwig Bemelmans, Drew Pearson, Ely Culbertson, Orson Welles. Mixed in were avowed propagandists, ranging from Edgar Ansel Mowrer (who was pleased to call the conference "the most important human gathering since the Last Supper") to the New York Daily News's poison penman John O'Donnell. Even before the conference opened, O'Donnell said that "nothing ever was staged in this generation on such a scale of mass hypocrisy and global double cross." The News's isolationist sister, the Chicago Tribune, had already passed similar judgment : "The prime purpose . . . is to make certain that whenever the next war comes . . . we shall be in it."

Legitimate newsmen debated whether the men who were intent on wrecking the conference were as dangerous as those who were determined to wisecrack about it. They heard Hedda Hopper cooing in a hotel lobby: "My dear, if this thing doesn't pick up pretty soon, it's going to be the dullest clambake ever held." They read Elsa Maxwell's astute comments on the Russians: "a bunch of magnificent he-men." They debated who was to blame--the officials who issued the credentials wholesale, or the newspapers that assigned the freaks.

Final Goad. The New York Post's self-styled Saloon Editor Earl Wilson, whose usual preoccupation is with movie stars' brassieres and "derrieres," interrupted Molotov's press conference to ask whether vodka was pronounced "wodka" and whether it could "be consumed . . . without fear of internal injury." This was the final goad to Scripps-Howard's Peter Edson, who promptly exploded in type:

". . . Some of the hacks in this business never seem to learn. . . . Obviously annoyed, Mr. Molotov broke off the interview, with a number of other more important questions still unasked. ...

"The U.S. press is on exhibition at this conference and a lot of showoffs in the business aren't doing it any good. The wild predictions about what's going to happen and the utterly irresponsible experting by amateurs and cookoos ... don't reflect any credit on the once-proud fourth estate."

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