The Press: Golden Words from Brass Hats

Caesar was the first big by-liner to do it, and it’s been going on ever since: when a general finishes a war, he sits down and writes about it. Last week this postwar prerogative got off to a pedestrian start when Major General Edward P. King Jr. led off with five articles (for NANA) about his internment in Jap prison camps. A faster-talking general, in a press interview, had already stolen General King’s newsiest plum: that King’s superior (and prison roommate), General Jonathan M. Wainwright, was twice knocked down by Jap guards.

Bigger, better and costlier memoirs were on the way. With General Wainwright at Ashford General Hospital, White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., last week was Hearst’s ace story fixer, Bob Considine, who put together Captain Ted Lawson’s Thirty Seconds over Tokyo. Beginning Oct. 7, the Wainwright story will be syndicated in 42 installments (to some 250 newspapers) by King Features, which is paying the General a reported $155,000—the equivalent (before taxes) of 19 years’ base pay.

General Dwight Eisenhower will be heard from, at secondhand, from his old friend and aide, Navy Captain Harry C. Butcher, onetime CBS vice president. Last week the Saturday Evening Post bid $175,000, highest price of the war, for serial rights to the war diary which Harry Butcher wrote from North Africa to the Rheims surrender, photographed on microfilm, and kept in a safe.

Britain’s Montgomery, asked by a high Hearstling to sell his memoirs, declined (see PEOPLE). Washington heard that General Omar Bradley’s story is being written by an aide. Yet to be heard from: General Douglas MacArthur, who has frequently mentioned to callers that he is writing his memoirs.