Moscow Moods

Like the other 35 U.S. special correspondents at the Moscow Conference, dark little Joseph Newman put up at the fancy Hotel Moskva. Last week he moved into the drab Metropole, where most of the permanent correspondents live. Newman is going to stay as the New York Herald Tribune man.

On the day Newman moved, a tourist disclosed a fine compliment that was paid the Trib by Premier Stalin himself. The week before, at a midnight interview in the Kremlin, Minnesota's Harold Stassen had asked how come the Herald Tribune could not get a man into Moscow. Said Stalin, after a quick check with Molotov: "A part of the American correspondents have an ill mood toward us. But this Herald Tribune case is an accident. It is an outstanding newspaper." (It was an outstanding accident, for the paper had been trying to get a man to Moscow for more than a year. Newman's accreditation came through two days after Stassen's interview.)

Correspondents wondered why Visitor Stassen had not mentioned other hardship cases. Asked the Philadelphia Bulletin's blunt Carl McArdle: "Governor, are you on the Herald Tribune payroll?" No, Stassen grinned, he had just happened to run into Geoffrey Parsons Jr., editor of the Paris edition, who had told him about the Trib's troubles.

While he was at it, Stassen had asked Stalin about censorship. "It will be difficult in our country to dispense with censorship," his host told him. "Molotov tried to do it several times. ... In the autumn of 1945 censorship was repealed. I was on leave and they started to write stones that Molotov forced me to go on leave and then wrote stories that I should return and fire him. These stories depicted the Soviet Government as a sort of zoological garden. Of course, our people got angry and they had to resume censorship."

The Soviets had kept their bargain on Conference news, letting copy marked "CFM" go through uncensored. A few correspondents had let their wishes father the thought that restrictions might be lifted for good. But Stalin had made it pretty plain that when the show was over in Moscow, the curtain would fall again.

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