Exclusion Act

After trying for more than a year to get a staff man permanently accredited to Moscow, the New York Herald Tribune (circ. 340,430) finally managed to do it in 1947, thanks to Tourist Harold Stassen.

He put in a good word with Premier Stalin himself (TIME, April 28, 1947). The Trib's new correspondent was Joseph Newman, veteran of the Japan and Argentina beats, who was already in Russia as a special correspondent for the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers and just stayed on.

Last June Newman left for Paris to take a vacation and get married, after Soviet Press Chief Georgi Pavlevich Frantsev promised that there would be no trouble getting a re-entry permit. (Until the regulations were changed last spring, such a permit had been automatically issued with the exit visa.) But when Newman tried to return to Moscow three months ago, he found the door shut. Last week the Herald Tribune reluctantly announced the closing of its vacant Russian office. That left just five U.S. correspondents in Moscow,* about half the number that was there when Reporter Newman arrived.

Said bitter Correspondent Newman: "The purpose of the new visa system is ... to exclude an accredited correspondent without resorting to the clumsy device of expelling him on trumped-up charges of espionage." Then, in the "fresh air" of Paris, Newman began a 15-installment, uncensored report on life in Russia.

* The five: Eddy Gilmore and Thomas Whitney of the Associated Press, Henry Shapiro of the United Press, Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times, Andrew Steiger of McGraw-Hill.

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