ITALY: Walking Papers

Last week fog settled down a little closer around the darkling Axis. Herbert L. Matthews, Rome correspondent of the New York Times, one of the last newspapermen who contrived to cable anything from an Axis capital besides official communiques, was given ten days in which to get out of Italy.

The dispatch which ended Herbert Matthews’ two-and-a-half-year stay in Italy was the one in which he said that “the Axis is out to defeat President Roosevelt” (see p. 25). In high dudgeon Benito Mussolini’s Government declared that “the dispatch tended to disturb relations between the two countries.”

Herbert Matthews is a reporter of considerable personal bravery. He served as a private in the A. E. F. Tank Corps in World War I. The Italians themselves made him the first journalist, Italian or foreign, to win an Italian War Cross, for valor he showed when ambushed with some Italian soldiers in Ethiopia. It took courage to return to Italy after boosting the Loyalist cause for two years in Spain. His remarks to the press on receiving his walking papers took some courage, too. “I am told here that Mr. Roosevelt was making a political issue of my dispatch,” he said, “and that the Italians feel they must do likewise.”