National Affairs: Information Worse Confounded

Franklin Roosevelt, sensing that there was some confusion in the labyrinthine operations of his Government, last week decided to clarify everything: he set up a new bureau, the Office of Facts & Figures.

It was not the first time the President had similarly tried to bring order out of chaos. Two years ago the President set up the Office of Government Reports. Purpose: to keep the President informed. He put Lowell Mellett, a keen-eyed onetime news editor, at its head. This year it got $1,500,000 appropriation from Congress. Three months ago, with another fiat, the President installed Colonel William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan as Coordinator of Information. Purpose: to keep the President informed. Besides these special agencies, every Government department has its own information service to keep track of the nation’s defense effort.

The Office of Facts & Figures is not supposed to overlap these other information mills—its function is to see that they get their stories straight. OFF will try to keep the various Government services from tripping each other up, publishing contradictory figures, at least at the same moment. It will work behind the scenes with the Inter-Departmental Advisory Committee, will report to busy little Fiorello H. LaGuardia, director of the Office of Civilian Defense.

For chief of OFF, Franklin Roosevelt picked his friend Poet Archibald MacLeish,* Librarian of Congress, who occasionally helps draft a White House speech. To help him ferret out his facts & figures, Director MacLeish will have blond, chub-cheeked Captain Robert Kintner, who gave up a lucrative Washington column (with Joseph Alsop, just resigned from the Navy) to take an Army commission, and rich, personable Lieut. Barry Bingham (son of the late Ambassador to Britain Robert Worth Bingham), who gave up his job as publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal for a commission in the Navy.

The arch-Republican New York Herald Tribune editorialized: “OFF will coordinate the Office of Coordinator of Information (or OCI), report on the Office of Government Reports (the frequent reference to this as OGRE is just a typographical error), press-agent the innumerable Press Agents of the Individual Departments (often called the PAIDS) and will under no circumstances do anything whatever that anybody else is doing already. . . . When the Office of Utter Confusion and Hysteria (to be referred to as OUCH) has finally been created, then the capstone will have been set upon the pyramid and we can all die happy, strangled in the very best red tape.”

One Washington official who thought OFF almost as absurd as the Herald Tribune made it sound was Wild Bill Donovan, who, according to New York Times’s Arthur Krock, had dreamed up an ingenious idea: an immense glass globe, lighted from within, to show President Roosevelt the disposition of all the world’s armies, navies and air forces, and their positions from day to day, the economic resources of every theater of war, changes of population and their racial origins, war production in industrial areas—all projected on the surface of the globe in shining Technicolor from films inside. Somebody figured out that the globe would have to be about the size of the Perisphere at the late World’s Fair.

* Last week a patriotic song, Freedom’s Land (published by Mills Music Inc., with lyricist’s name printed as “Archibold MacLeisch”), words by MacLeish, music by Composer Roy Harris, rode the CBS air waves. First verse:

Stand, stand against the rising night,

O freedom’s land, O freedom’s air.

Stand steep and keep the fading light

That eastward darkens everywhere.

Hold, hold the golden light and lift

Hill after hilltop one by one.

Lift up America, O lift

Green freedom to the evening sun.