A Letter From The Publisher, Oct. 11, 1948

Last spring, when the Soviet Government used U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Walter “Beedle” Smith’s suggestion that “the door is always open for full discussion and the composing of our differences” as a springboard for its own peace propaganda offensive, TIME Inc.’s Paris bureau chief, Andre Laguerre, cabled his analysis of the U.S. State Department’s strategy in the affair:

“It is undeniable, of course, that Soviet trickery got the U.S. into a jam. Somehow, I can’t get indignant about this trickery, any more than I can about the first baseman who hides the ball in his glove and waits for the runner to take a lead off the bag. In the major leagues, you just don’t fall for tricks like that.”

Laguerre’s use of the American idiom to make his point is one of the special qualifications he has for his job as TIME’S chief correspondent in Paris. A quiet, bespectacled Frenchman, he also probably has as intimate a knowledge of French and Western European politics as any reporter on the continent. He picked up his knowledge of the American idiom by virtue of some years spent in San Francisco, where his father was French Consul, his unquenchable enthusiasm for American baseball as a sports reporter on the San Francisco Chronicle. A fortnight ago he renewed both of these Americanisms during a visit here for conversations with our editors before returning to Paris to cover the reconvening of the U.N. Security Council there.

When World War II came, Laguerre was in France on political assignments for the London press and Paris-Soir, He was mobilized and sent into the Maginot line. He spent seven days on the beach at Dunkirk before being evacuated aboard a French destroyer, which promptly struck a mine and blew up. Fished out of the North Sea by a British destroyer, he was taken to England and given his choice of repatriation or joining the Free French forces. He chose General Charles de Gaulle, later became his liaison man with the English-language press in North Africa, Italy and France. At war’s end he went to work for TIME.

For a journalist, postwar Paris, where TIME Inc. maintains a twelve-man bureau, has a special quality. According to Laguerre, Paris is “the real meeting ground of the ideas and trends that indicate the shape of tomorrow’s Europe and, perhaps, of the world. As for our part in it, mostly it is a job of probing and explaining, trying to get at the facts behind the loose statements, to assess the trends correctly as they first manifest themselves.”

In other words, Paris is primarily a job for a first-rate reporter and political analyst, and Laguerre feels that his staff has had considerable success in winnowing the real news from the political chaff that whirls through the French capital each week. A case in point was the disclosure (in TIME’S June 3, 1946 cover story on French Communist Party Boss Maurice Thorez) of the now accepted fact that there can be a split between the different Communist parties of the world over the issue of nationalism.

As a further footnote to the business of political reporting, Laguerre says that the French Communists, who were once very helpful, have clammed up since the reinstitution of the Corn-inform. Like any other political party, however, they play politics within their own organization and can thus be approached individually. The trick then, as it is in all political reporting, is to distinguish between the real news the politico has to offer and the propaganda he is trying to put across.

Occasionally the trick is to decipher the information after you have it. At one time during the Paris Peace Conference the then U.S. Secretary of State, Jimmy Byrnes, was too busy to talk to Laguerre about an important issue and promised to write out the answer for him during that day’s session. At its close an aide handed Laguerre a sheet of paper written in Byrnes’s famed old-style court-stenographer’s shorthand. The trouble was that not even Byrnes’s own aides, who were used to it, could read the script, and the Secretary himself was not available to decipher it. The sheet of paper now reposes under glass on the wall of Laguerre’s office, and to this day nobody knows what it says.

Cordially yours,