FOREIGN RELATIONS: Hull v. the Press

Old (72) Cordell Hull gave young (42) Thomas Dewey the lie direct: “Governor Dewey is 100% wrong in the accuracy of his statement.”

The statement to which the Secretary of State referred was made by Tom Dewey in a New York City speech last fortnight (TIME, April 3): “When we find the State Department requesting the British censor to suppress political news sent to American papers by American correspondents abroad, it begins to amount to a deliberate and dangerous policy of suppression of the news at home.”

Day after the Secretary’s denial, the New York Times’s veteran Washington correspondent Bertram D. Hulen marched into the regular Hull press conference armed with a dispatch just received from a Times London correspondent. The dispatch asserted that “there have been repeated instances of objections from Washington to stories by American correspondents for American newspapers about diplomatic developments which had been passed in regular routine through the British censorship.”

Confronted with this charge, Cordell Hull was courteous and evasive as usual. But other correspondents were startled to note that for the first time in 18 years of covering the State Department, Bert Hulen was far from his usual peaceful, pipe-puffing self. Plainly irked by the Secretary’s evasive generalities, he persistently demanded specific answers. But Mr. Hull would not be pinned down. All he would reveal was that the Department had indeed protested to London about premature leakage of diplomatic news which the two Governments had agreed to release simultaneously.

The reporters adjourned for an explanatory session with the State Department press chief, white-haired, closemouthed Mike McDermott. Search of the records finally produced four specific protests to the British Foreign Office, since last Oct. 1, concerning premature London reports of : 1) Secretary Hull’s impending arrival in Moscow; 2) the Italian declaration of war against Germany; 3) signing of the third Lend-Lease agreement with Russia; 4) the Roosevelt-Churchill-Chiang conference at Cairo. A fifth had already been mentioned in the Times dispatch from London: a report that a U.S. plan for postwar Germany had been submitted to the European Advisory Commission.

Britons, privately seething, for the most part held their peace in public. But the London News Chronicle’s Edward Poor Montgomery blazed away at the State Department’s “slur upon the discretion and loyalty of both British officials and journalists.” His prime points: i) Washington has leaked more diplomatic news than London; 2) the London leaks, as the State Department very well knew, had come from sources entirely outside the British Government.

Amid this general confusion of charge and countercharge, Governor Dewey was by now pretty well lost from sight. That cool politician’s case seemed to depend on what he meant by “political news.” But however technically correct Secretary Hull may have been in his denial, the affair had certainly not lessened the ten sion between him and the U.S. press. Said one Washington correspondent:

“Hull doesn’t recognize his chickens coming home to roost. He makes vague statements, then blames newspapers for reading various meanings into them. If he were specific, only the truth would appear in the press.”