The Press: In Dubious Battle

When Clendenin J. Ryan, millionaire, amateur political reformer and onetime assistant to New York’s Mayor La Guardia, decided last summer to write a book on politics, he got together with Author & Lecturer William Bradford Huie. Turned by a self-described “yarn spinner,” Huie’s sensational stories, such as his highly exaggerated account of the missing uranium at Chicago’s Argonne Laboratory (TIME, May 30, 1949), made lively, if occasionally misleading, reading. But they dropped the book for something much bigger. Huie and Ryan decided to buy the faltering American Mercury. Since the Mercury’s circulation was down to 45,000 and it was losing $50,000 a year, Ryan was able to buy it for only $27,500. He became publisher and made Huie editor.

This week Publisher Ryan and Editor Huie brought out the first issue of the New American Mercury. Its avowed purpose: “To re-create the magazine in the Mencken tradition” and joust with bureaucrats, commissars and pressure groups as Mencken had tangled with boobs, censors and yahoos. But the first issue showed that Huie was no Mencken.

Presumably intended to fall into the Mencken tradition was Editor Huie’s own lead article, “Untold Facts in the Forrestal Case.” Based on word-of-mouth reports about the contents of Forrestal’s private papers, it belabored the backbiters and columnists responsible, as Writer Huie put it, for the “destruction” of the late Defense Secretary. Huie, whose book, The Case Against the Admirals, was an air-power fanatic’s assault against Forrestal’s program for a balanced defense force, now lauded Forrestal as the only Administration leader who had fully realized the threat of Russia and knew how to fight the Reds. Wrote Huie: “In December, 1947, when France was paralyzed by a general transportation strike, Forrestal summoned his most trusted friends to Washington. His friends produced $50,000 immediately; the money was carried that night to Paris by an American intelligence officer and paid next day to a prominent Communist leader. The strike ended within twelve hours.”

In all, wrote Huie, Forrestal spent $150,000 of his own and his friends’ money on such payoffs in France and Italy. When Forrestal was finally “driven from office” and suffered a nervous collapse, Huie implied, the Navy turned Forrestal’s suite in a Navy hospital into a kind of prison and barred him from people he wanted to see, notably Msgr. Maurice S. Sheehy of Catholic University, Washington, a Navy chaplain. Predicted Huie: “Unless the Administration can prevent it, there will be a Congressional investigation.”