A Letter From The Publisher, Nov. 4, 1946

Our Lisbon correspondent, Piero Saporiti, his wife, their belongings, and a lame dog, turned up in Paris a few weeks ago somewhat the worse for wear. They had been kicked out of Portugal because Dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar disapproved of TIME’s July 22nd cover story about himself and his regime.

The story has been a cause celebre in Portugal since the first copies of the July 22nd issue arrived there. The Government censor prohibited the distribution and sale of TIME, thus adding it to Portugal’s long list of forbidden foreign publications. Police were ordered to confiscate all copies found in private hands and to record the names of their possessors.

Customs guards were alerted to watch for incoming copies.

These precautions did not prevent TIME subscribers from getting their copies of the July 22nd issue by mail. As the demand for TIME rose more copies were smuggled in. Their black market price reached the sum of 300 escudos ($12) a copy, and Portuguese paid as much as $2 to rent a copy for 24 hours. Portugal’s clandestine anti-Fascist Committee typed translations of the Salazar piece for distribution.

Meanwhile, the story was being widely quoted and reprinted in the European press. It was a typical TIME story which originated out of a query by TIME’S International and Foreign News editor asking the present state of the postwar political situation in Western Europe’s oldest dictatorship. Percy Knauth, one of our most experienced European hands, was dispatched to Portugal to get the facts. Saporiti, who knows Portugal intimately, worked with him. Knauth mailed his voluminous, documented research to New York, and the story was written.

Its impact upon the Portuguese might have been less if they had been accustomed to the benefits of a free press. As it was, opinions about the Salazar cover ranged from extremes of approval to extremes of disapproval. Government officials and party supporters were “outraged” at its description of “another European dictatorship [that] had failed”; oppositionists felt that it should have been stronger. Middleof-the-roaders commented that the story had “really hit pretty much the nose.”

On Aug. 2 7 th Saporiti, a 43-year-old Italian journalist who had worked in Lisbon for two years under a sojourn permit, was notified that he would have to leave Portugal by Sept. 3. When he tried to have the order rescinded, he was advised that something mi^ht be done if he would hand in his resignation as TIME correspondent for publication in Portugal’s press.

Unable to get away by the deadline (or to reach our Paris office by telephone), Saporiti won a stay of expulsion until Oct. 3. About the middle of September he ostensibly booked passage on a Portuguese ship for France. On the morning of Oct. 3 he boarded a train bound for the French frontier. At the border a P.I.D.E. guard told him: “You haven’t got an exit permit; so you can’t continue.” Displaying his expulsion document, Saporiti said: “What more of an exit visa could you want?” The guard went away; the Saporitis entered France.

Last week, we were notified that shipments of TIME into Portugal could be resumed. But the Salazar Government made no overtures for returning our correspondent to Lisbon.

Public scrutiny of the doings of politicians has been going on at least from the time of Plutarch, the Greek essayist-biographer, who wrote some 1,900 years ago: “Statesmen are not only liable to give an account of what they say and do in public, but there is busy inquiry made into their very meals, beds, marriages, and every other serious or sportive action.”

For the time being — so far as the relationship of Portugal and the U.S. press is concerned — the custody of this kind of journalism is in the hands of Portuguese citizens, who are the representatives of the major U.S. press services in Lisbon.

Cordially,