Headline of the Week

In the New Orleans Item:

NEW HEADS

INSTALLED BY

MORTICIANS

Credit Line of the Week

Under a photo in the New York Daily News of Pope Pius X (see RELIGION): "Stork Club foto."

How to Interview MacArthur

The Manhattan newsmen-covering General Douglas MacArthur at the Waldorf-Astoria have had a dull time. They have seen little of MacArthur himself, gotten no interviews, spoken only with his spokesman, Major General Courtney Whitney.

Before most newspapers gave up the chase as a waste of time, the newsmen paraphrased an old bit of doggerel:

Here is the Waldorf-Astoria

The home of the rich and the odd,

Where the press speaks only to Whitney,

And Whitney speaks only to God.

Last week a visiting Negro newspaperman named Stanley Roberts put their lack of reportorial enterprise to shame. Roberts, 36, Washington bureau chief of the Pittsburgh Courier, got the first published interview with MacArthur since his return to the U.S. It was not the first time Cincinnati-born Roberts has scored a newsbeat. He got the first exclusive interview with Dr. Ralph Bunche when the United Nations mediator returned from Israel, was the first to uncover the court-martial death sentence of Negro Lieut. Leon Gilbert in Korea (TIME, Dec. 11).

Roberts got his interview by an old reporter's trick: he sent word to MacArthur that the Communist Daily Worker and some Negro papers had been calling MacArthur a "white supremacist," blaming him for Army segregation in the Far East and for "excessive" court-martialing of Negroes. Roberts asked for an interview to get MacArthur's views on the race question, and the summons came.

While MacArthur let his waiting lunch grow cold, he spent an hour telling Roberts how he had spent the last 25 years of his life "among the colored peoples of the world," sympathized with their aspirations and needs. As for courts-martial, MacArthur agreed that they might have been excessive, pointed out that he had launched an investigation. And if he had used "Jim Crow" military units, he had not created them: "They were created in Washington and sent to me ... I did not ask for men by race, I asked ... for 'men.' " Then MacArthur fixed Roberts with a stern stare, and gave him his lead for his two-part Courier series this week. Said the general: "I have one criticism of Negro troops who fought under my command in the Korean war. They didn't send me enough of them."

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