The Press: Black Back

In the chill quiet of a Virginia dawn last week, a small vessel lapped its way into the Chesapeake Bay toward Norfolk. Aboard was the man who for nearly three weeks had been the world’s most sought after newspaper figure. With little of the understanding of or co-operation toward the press which characterized him when he was making glowing headlines far himself as the Senate’s Great Investigator, Mr. Justice Hugo LaFayette Black, whom newspaper investigation had just revealed as a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. was slipping home from Europe as quietly as possible on the Baltimore Mail Liner City of Norfolk instead of sailing into New York Harbor on the United States Liner Manhattan as he had previously planned (see p. 16).

What. Mr. Justice Black did not seem to realize was that in the 20th Century there is simply no corner of the earth to which the press will not go—and in force —to get what it wants. Significantly, it was on Chesapeake Bay ten years ago that a group of U. S. newspapermen, tossing in a small boat, made the first contact with another diffident news character, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, homeward bound on the cruiser U.S.S. Memphis after his flight to Paris. Just as in 1927, a boatload of reporters had been out all night in a motor launch named Pirate just in case the City of Norfolk suddenly dropped Mr. Justice Black before docking at Norfolk. Only result of this precaution, as it turned out, was that the Pirate’?, bedraggled crew boarded the liner a little later than the landlubbing newsmen who had stayed ashore.

Twelve days earlier in London, Mr. Justice Black had snapped at a Hearst reporter who had pressed him for a statement on his Klan affiliation “I don’t see you! I don’t know you! And I don’t answer you!” But as he faced no less than 100 newshawks who swarmed outside the City of Norfolk’s, Cabin 18, the newest member of the Supreme Court was affability itself. Addressing Jesse Frederick Essary, Baltimore Sun man who is Doyen of the Washington press corps, as “Fred,” he drew him into the cabin, consulted with him and then sent him back out into the corridor with word that an interview would follow breakfast. Then Mr. Justice Black popped his head out in the hall to order ham & eggs; refused a pile of Pittsburgh Post-Gazettes offered by William Herman Mylander, Washington representative of the Paul Block paper, just in case Mr. Justice Black had not read the expose of his Klan activities in the paper of their origin; failed to recognize in spite of his 10 gal. hat Post-Gazette Reporter Ray Sprigle who had written the series; and retired to break his fast with Editor Max Lerner of the Nation, which had just received a demand for retraction from Publisher Block’s attorney because it had accused Mr. Block of “gum-shoeing.”

At 8:40, after a round of photographs during which Mr. Black and Mr. Sprigle unconsciously posed together (see cut), began the interview which promised to be the most exciting of the year. It was not quite that because at the outset Mr. Justice Black announced: “I appreciate very much this great reception you have given me. When I have any statement to make that’s definite and final on any subject, I will make it in such a way that I cannot be misquoted, and that the nation can hear me.”* But it is impossible to talk to 100 reporters and say nothing, as Mr. Justice Black soon found. Failing to get a straight answer as to whether or not Mr. Black admitted belonging to the Klan, the second most important question in the correspondents’ minds was whether or not he had any intention of resigning from the Court. Cagey Doris Fleeson of the New York News, for whom there are more ways of choking a dog than feeding it hot butter, got a pretty adequate answer to the second question by innocently inquiring: “Where can we find you in Washington, Senator? Will you go to your office-in the Senate Office Building?”

“I’ll probably go to my office in the Supreme Court,” answered Mr. Black, and a moment later blushed at his self-betrayal.

When the customs officer had made a routine examination of the Justice’s luggage and his friends and relatives had hustled him off to a waiting car, reporters saw an officer draw from his pocket a newspaper clipping. It was a Baltimore Sun cartoon of a customs man amazedly pulling a Klan nightshirt out of Justice Black’s luggage. The Norfolk customs officer was indignant. “That’s a hell of a way to draw a customs inspector,” he said.

* Each of the three radio announcers who introduced Mr. Justice Black when he spoke two nights later, jubilantly stressed the point that the Justice had chosen the radio (rather than the press) to reply to his critics.