The Week the Dam Broke

"Up to just lately," said Editor William Calhoun Baggs of the Miami News, "it's been lean times for our front page. Our lead story one day last week was something like FHA FORECLOSURES AT NEW HIGH. Well, that was the way it was. Then, all of a sudden, the dam broke." Into the Miami News, and into newsrooms all over the U.S., spilled one of the heaviest torrents of big stories ever to tax the resources of the press.

Three major events broke with an abruptness that gave editors little time for orderly planning: the Walter Jenkins scandal, the deposing of Soviet Premier Khrushchev, the detonation of Communist China's first Abomb. Along with these came another flurry of fast-breaking news, including the new Nobel prizewinners and the unveiling of the U.S.'s controversial TFX fighter-bomber. And, as if that were not enough, newspapers had to cope with such predictable front-page stuff as the wind-up of the World Series, the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, and the British elections.

News Deluge. "I wish to hell these things would happen one at a time," said Editor Baggs. "We had special problems down here. We had a local boy over at the Olympics, [U.S. Sprinter] Bob Hayes, and we also had Hurricane Isbell on our hands. All you can do when it comes at you from all sides is throw it at the reader. As for Khrushchev--we just put all the rumors together to see if they spelled mother." The News approached the spelling job with utmost care. Its first headline,

KREMLIN RUMBLING WITH NIK RUMORS, gave way to NIKITA QUITS.

Here and there, the news deluge elevated a few newsroom temperatures to fever degree. "For a while," said Atlanta Constitution Managing Editor Bill Field, "it looked like the whole world was going to hell." And there were, of course, inevitable dislocations. The Denver Post, which had treated Recent Visitor Lyndon Johnson to a Page One portrait in color, decided to do the same for Barry Goldwater, and planned on having an appropriate banner headline. Only Barry's picture survived. The banner went to another sort of politician altogether: RUSS "RETIRE" KHRUSHCHEV.

Paddling Sedately. But daily crisis is, after all, a journalistic way of life, and most editors managed to hang onto their hats. "It was a hell of a dose of news," said Larry Fanning, executive editor of the Chicago Daily News, "so we printed it as it came along." The Boston Globe, which would feel naked without at least one Page One local story, managed to stay properly dressed all week. On a front page already jammed with developments in the Jenkins case and the latest word from Moscow, the Globe still found room to report that the wife of the new Massachusetts Registrar of Motor Vehicles did not have a driver's license.

The New York Times, which sets great store on self-composure, paddled sedately through the flood of news. "We consciously try not to get excited," said Assistant Managing Editor Theodore M. Bernstein, whose sleeves are rolled above the elbows every minute he is on the job. Besides, the Times commands a news force of 850 hands, most of whom, said Bernstein, know what to do without being told.

To corner the Khrushchev story, the Times mustered all three of its house Kremlinologists--Harry Schwartz, who knows Soviet economics, Harrison E. Salisbury, who can read Pravda and Izvestia without a pony, and Max Frankel, who taps Russian experts in the State Department. Foreign News Editor Emanuel Freedman calmly placed a phone call to Moscow 955477, three hours later was talking to the Times's Moscow Bureau Chief Henry Tanner. In the meantime, other messages had been relayed to Tanner through the Times's London and Paris bureaus.

"Damned Near a Record." About the only real concession that the Times made to last week's events was to charter planes two nights in a row. Normally, 17,000 copies of the Times's first edition--on the presses at 9:30--go by night train to Washington. But last week, to take advantage of interest in last-minute developments, the Times decided to fly copies of its midnight edition to the capital.

"Nothing got tossed out to make room for the big stories," Bernstein said. "We just increased the news hole. On the night that the Khrushchev story broke, we carried 239 columns. That's well over our norm--195--and if it wasn't a record, it was damned near it."

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