Briefing the Outs

One day in September 1944, a U.S. Army colonel walked into Presidential Candidate Thomas E. Dewey's temporary headquarters in Tulsa, Okla. and told James Hagerty, Dewey's press secretary, that he had to see the Republican candidate on an urgent matter. His mission was so urgent that he would not even tell who had sent him, although he agreed to write a name on a piece of paper and place it in a sealed envelope for Dewey's perusal. When Dewey ripped open the envelope, he read the name of General George Catlett Marshall, Army Chief of Staff.

Ushered in to Dewey, the colonel produced a second sealed envelope, this one containing a lengthy dispatch from Marshall. After reading the first two paragraphs, which warned that disclosure of the contents might impede the U.S. war effort, Dewey silently folded the document, put it back in the envelope and returned it to the colonel. He explained that he did not want to be bound in discussing important campaign issues. Two days later, in Albany, the colonel approached Dewey with a dispatch almost identical to the one he had refused to read in Tulsa.

But there was one significant difference: the opening paragraphs had been deleted. Dewey read the document in full.

Top Secret. George Marshall had learned that Dewey knew the U.S. was cracking Japan's code. He feared that Candidate Dewe)7 might accuse the Roosevelt Administration of having blundered into Pearl Harbor even while intercepting messages spelling out the Japanese intention to attack. Marshall was not so much concerned about the political implications as he was about the military dangers: the fact that the U.S. had cracked the Japanese code was a zealously guarded military secret. Marshall begged Dewey to keep quiet about the code, and offered a weekly briefing on top U.S. diplomatic and military secrets.

Acting on his own, without President Roosevelt's knowledge. George Marshall established a custom that is now an accepted practice in presidential years, though never since has the briefing of the rival candidate been so important. In peacetime 1948, the recipient was again Tom Dewey. In 1952, both Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson were briefed regularly. In the case of Eisenhower, who had resigned as Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, the previous June to campaign for the presidency, the material was of slight value. Explained Ike last week: "I was in the middle of the military organization that had access to all of the type of information that I could possibly get. And so the additional information that I received, because of my peculiar status, was very limited, indeed."

No Strings. This year the situation is different. The U.S. is not at war. But the rival candidate for the presidency, who has not held a public office for four years, has had no access to U.S. secrets. A fortnight ago, after Adlai Stevenson had said at a press conference that he would "welcome" intelligence reports, President Eisenhower offered him "periodic briefings on the international scene from a responsible official in the Central Intelligence Agency." The information would be secret and exclusively for Stevenson's personal knowledge, he reminded, but otherwise with no strings attached.

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