The Press: Trial by Transcript

Washington reporters knew that the MacArthur story was shaping up as the greatest controversy on Capitol Hill since the debates on slavery. But all advance signs indicated that it would also be a historic case of journalistic frustration; the committee had decided to bar press and public from the hearings. The testimony would be fed out to the press through a system of stenographers, censors and press aides, and reporters feared that this cumbersome apparatus would delay the news for hours, if not shut much of it off.

As the hearings began, nail-biting wire-service men based their first bulletins and new leads on snippets of information from the caucus room’s white-haired Doorkeeper Gus Cook—mostly reports on who was talking and how many times MacArthur had lighted his pipe. But just 50 minutes later, newsmen got a pleasant surprise: the first pages of the censored transcript began to come through. Stenographers sitting in on the hearing delivered their batches of copy to the censor, Vice Admiral Arthur C. Davis. Davis blocked out whatever seemed to compromise military security, passed them along to two Ditto operators. They quickly turned out copies for 56 papers and news agencies (including Russia’s Tass), which had ordered the transcript at 12½¢ a page.

Find a Leak. Going beyond the transcript, newsmen kept on the alert to score beats from “leaks.” The first big leak came, inadvertently, from General MacArthur himself. As he walked into the room, the general was overheard telling Senators that the White House had assured him that “there would be no stenographers present” at his Wake Island conference with Harry Truman.

There were other leaks (but none of censored classified material) as newsmen buttonholed Senators leaving the hearing room. After one such furtive conference, two wire-service men got off 30-minute beats on MacArthur’s charge that the President, by his summary firing of the general, had jeopardized the security of the U.S. South Dakota’s Francis Case was not so useful; he bustled out with pages full of notes but couldn’t translate them for newsmen.

Photographers, barred from the hearing room except for recesses, had a hard time cracking Witness MacArthur’s studied immobility of feature. Suddenly one lensman tried an old stunt. “General,” he said, “your tie’s crooked.” As the general looked down, 40 flashbulbs went off.

Oceans of Words. The total output of news and picture copy broke all Senate records. The Associated Press alone sent out 402 “books” (i.e., separate pages of copy) between 9:30 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. on the first day (previous record in 1949’s “Five-percenter” hearings: 287). In addition, A.P.’s 174,000-word verbatim text moved on separate machines to 350 of its U.S. members, and half a dozen A.P. reporters telephoned additional material.

Newspapers grabbed for it all. The New York Times, with its usual sense of responsibility to history, carried the complete text of the MacArthur sessions, filling a total of 215 columns in three days. The New York Herald Tribune carried 121 columns of testimony and side stories. Across the U.S., papers published massive swatches of questions & answers.

By such yardsticks, the coverage of the hearings was a roaring success. The principal reason was that Georgia’s Russell had carried out his promise to “try to get every important fact out.” And newspapers, conscious of their own responsibility, had done a first-class job of getting the facts to their readers. Said Russell: “Never have hearings been reported as fully, completely and accurately.”