Battle Orders

Making the advance arrangements for press coverage of the eleven-country, 19-day good-will tour on which President Eisenhower left last week, Presidential Press Secretary James Hagerty was acutely conscious of the press's tendency, when gathered in more than platoon strength, to get out of control. On Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's visit to the U.S. last September, some 300 correspondents and cameramen, eagerly vying for the same story, several times turned the tour into a journalistic wreck (TIME, Oct. 5). Jim Hagerty was determined that there would be no such sideshow on Ike's trip. By the time he shepherded the traveling press corps and their gear aboard three buses outside the White House gate last week, Hagerty had laid out a set of battle orders that would have won any good general's enthusiastic acclaim.

Black Tie & Soap. Hagerty's first move was to shrink several hundred tour applications down to a manageable sum. In justice to all, he announced blandly, the White House would accredit all comers, but only one man from each news medium (the wire services and TV networks were allowed two reporters and two photographers each) would be put aboard Pan American's jet-powered Boeing 707 chartered for the press. The cost for transportation and hotels would be $4,000 per traveler, and a letter of application would be considered a contract for that amount. After this announcement, applications dwindled magically to 83 men and one woman, Elaine Shepard of Prentice-Hall (school books, trade publications), as nonworking applicants who were just going along for the ride dropped out and big agencies and publications cut their lists.

In the logistical planning, Hagerty left nothing to chance. Correspondents got a series of detailed memos advising just what shots to get (cholera, typhus, yellow fever, smallpox, typhoid and tetanus), how much luggage was allowed (66 lbs. in one piece), what to pack (three or four bars of soap, enough clean underwear to last until New Delhi, black tie for state occasions en route). Hagerty, who took a dry-run tour of the route in November, even thoughtfully published information on the availability of American cigarettes along the way ($5 a carton in Karachi, none to be had in New Delhi) and--a matter of vital importance to deadline-conscious newsmen--the time differential between New York and each stop.

Assignments by Lot. That unavoidable but unpopular concomitant of any press tour, the reporter's pool (one man covering for the group), was settled by lot. The lucky pool men would fly in the presidential plane on a rotating basis, one reporter and one cameraman for each leg of the tour, others to follow the President on the ground wherever all 84 could not go. Hagerty considerately arranged for the press plane to get pool copy quickly: by radio from Eisenhower's plane or, in the event of poor radio reception, handed around, freshly mimeographed aloft by a Government aide, at the next stop.

At the first stops on the 19-day itinerary, Hagerty's corps, competing with swarms of local reporters and photographers, knew exactly what the battle orders were and, with most of the variables removed from the operation, set themselves to cover a story of unprecedented proportions.

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