The Press: A Marine Speaks His Piece

When genial, chubby-faced Jim Lucas joined the Marines, he left a reporting job on the Tulsa Tribune’s courthouse beat, and his Boy Scoutmastering. He became a crack combat correspondent, got out the first story of the landing on Tarawa—and was threatened with court-martial for writing that “something suddenly appeared to have gone wrong.” He covered eight Marine landings, then was sent home on a war-bond tour.

Like many another newspaperman derricked out of his old job by the war, Jim Lucas had no desire to go back. He came home a lieutenant, surprised to find a flattering array of jobs thrust at him. He took the best one—roving columnist for the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance —and went at it like a marine. Last week his first column kicked up a fine fuss.

” ‘Little people’ like to believe they don’t make wars,” he wrote. “After three years in the Pacific some of us reject that as rank escapism. We think you little people had a hand in making the war we just finished. We fear you may be making another. . . .

“It’s not that we like military life. Most of us don’t. We’ve been scared, uncomfortable, unhappy, lonesome. We’ve wanted to come home. But . . . we’ve always taken it for granted someone would take our place. . . . We are surprised to hear it seriously argued that we’ve always been able to train an army after we are attacked . . . and wouldn’t . . . recommend telling it to the boys who were on Wake or Bataan.

“It comes as a shock that a segment of the public . . . [is] campaigning noisily against universal training. . . . Okay, mother. Okay, professor. Okay, parson. But are you willing to take the consequences, if you lead us into World War III?”

The ex-marine’s opinions were frontpaged in 18 out of 19 Scripps-Howard papers. When Lucas promptly got 227 letters, all but three damning him, Scripps-Howard was sure that their marine had landed.