Deadlines & a Gold Watch

"The atmosphere of Italy," wrote Anne Elizabeth O'Hare McCormick, "is like that of a warm day with an undercurrent of icy wind. . . . It is an odd combination of hopeful reconstruction and fearful suspense. Nowhere has the Communist victory in Czechoslovakia caused such reactions of glee among Communists and gloom among anti-Communists."

Would the weather be warm or icy after the Italian elections April 18 (see FOREIGN NEWS)? The New York Times's roving columnist-correspondent made no predictions. But, she wrote urgently, "everyone in the arena knows that the battle is as much against America as against Italy and can be lost unless the danger [of a Communist coup] is understood in Washington as well as in Rome."

On. her third postwar trip to Europe, tiny (5 ft. 2 in.), blue-eyed Anne McCormick had trotted around five nations, talking with the men in the chancelleries and the man in the street. She had scored no Page One beats and hunted no headlines; her job was to help Times readers understand the headlines. She had sat down with Italian Premier de Gasperi, found that he "has grown notably in office . . . the moderator has turned into a resourceful fighter." Astutely she had backgrounded the abortive Foreign Ministers' Conference. ("This . . . will go down in history as the last gesture of the victors to the pretense of a community of aims that never existed, even in ... the war.")

Anne McCormick's sharp reporting and coolheaded analysis of the news have won her a wide audience, including many an admiring and envious member of her own profession. This week her work also won her the Overseas Press Club's award for the best interpretive foreign correspondence of 1947. When she returns to the U.S. this week, she will add the award (a sheepskin citation and a gold watch) to an assortment of trophies that includes the first major Pulitzer Prize (1937) ever awarded a woman journalist.

No Tyro. Although never a cub in the Times shop, Mrs. McCormick schooled herself for years before filing a cable. British-born (in Wakefield, Yorkshire, of American parents) Anne O'Hare grew up in Columbus, Ohio, went to St. Mary of the Springs Academy ('98) and the College of St. Mary of the Springs. In Cleveland she worked as associate editor of the weekly Catholic Universe Bulletin, on which her mother, Poet Teresa O'Hare, was once woman's-page editor.

As the wife of Francis J. McCormick,* a prospering Dayton engineer and importer, she went along on his European buying trips, studied every country they visited, wrote a few pieces for the Times magazine section. In 1921, when they were about to sail for Europe once again, she jotted a timid note to the late, great Carr V. Van Anda, Times managing editor, asking if she might send him some dispatches from abroad. Van Anda wired her: "Try it." She did and impressed him with her shrewd judgment of Benito Mussolini ("Italy is hearing the master's voice") when other correspondents ignored the rising Fascist leader or brushed him off as a posturing lout. Van Anda hired her.

No Notes. The McCormicks still travel together. Her tall, hawk-faced husband, who has retired, plans things and sees that indefatigable Anne gets away from dinner parties in time to catch the trains. Gaily hatted, she goes about her round of interviews alone, absorbing facts & figures, analyzing the moods of cities and the attitudes of statesmen, to be sorted out later in cool, clear and neatly typed prose. She seldom takes notes: "It makes people too cautious if you do." Unlike some news-hens, she is neither strident nor a frump.

Absorbent, imperturbable and apparently immune to minor excitements, she is as tireless in her mid-sixties as a selfwinding watch. Says a Times executive: "She can sweat out her column, make a speech, sit up talking about international affairs until 3 or 4 in the morning -- and then start out all over again at 9 a.m." She hates to write her column until the last minute. No matter whether she files from Claridge's in London, a press camp in Germany or the Times office in Rome, she has an uncanny way of getting her dispatches to the cable desk in Manhattan about 9:30 p.m., just before her deadline.

No Editing. In her earlier days, a few Times copy readers sourly labeled her "Verbose Annie" and cut her dispatches down to size. Since then, she. has learned to tighten and sharpen her copy. Now it is seldom edited in the office. At home, her stateside routine is as full as abroad -- a column three days a week, editorials on two days and frequent lunches in the executives' dining room as the only woman on the Times editorial council.

A nonsmoker, and only a sipper of cocktails (old fashioneds), she is a witty, lively conversationalist. Her list of friends in high places is the envy of newsmen everywhere. (F.D.R. repeatedly broke his rule against private interviews because he enjoyed chatting with her.)

She is the Times's best ambassador. But she does not like the title; her opinion of ambassadors is not always high. Once, during a wartime press conference, Britain's Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden remarked condescendingly that some reporters had known, ahead of Britain's ambassadors, the menace of Mussolini and Hitler. "And why not?" snapped Anne McCormick. "An ambassador is only a badly trained reporter."

*No kin to the Chicago Tribune's Robert R. McCormick.

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