Newspapers' relationship with government and government officials seemed to crack in the early 1950s, challenging press practices on several fronts. National security concerns rooted in the Cold War accelerated a trend toward greater secrecy in government, igniting a "freedom of information" (FOI) movement in professional associations to fight the growing secrecy at both federal and local levels. At the same time, journalistic coverage of one of the most important news stories of the early 1950s--the rise of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy--prompted a reappraisal both of objectivity as a press standard and of newspapers' ability to meet that goal. Journalists' devotion to objectivity was shaken, not shattered, by these events, but their relationships with government officials suffered more substantially. Newspaper-government relations began what was to be a long, steady deterioration.

Through World War II, newspapers' relationship with government had been characterized more by trust than by disharmony. Press censorship was entirely voluntary and overseen by the Press Division of the Office of Censorship, itself staffed with newspapermen on leave from their jobs. In complying with government requests to withhold information, journalists prided themselves on their contributions to the war effort. As the New York Times' Raymond Daniell once put it, "There isn't any story in the world that is good enough to justify risking the life of a single American soldier."⁽¹⁾ Voluntary censorship worked, believed Theodore F. Koop, one of the self-described "blue pencil boys" in the Press Division, because editors were willing "to lean over backwards when security was involved."⁽²⁾ Office of Censorship director Byron Price, closing his bureau at war's end, told President Truman that the censorship program was "a heartening example of democracy at work."⁽³⁾

The experiences of the Associated Press' Edward Kennedy and the New York Times' William L. Laurence at the close of the war demonstrate the degree of newspaper-government cooperation. His fellow war correspondents were outraged when Kennedy, on May 7, 1945, filed an exclusive story from Paris announcing the end of the war in Europe. Kennedy had broken his promise to military authorities to withhold the information until a government-approved release time. More than fifty correspondents signed a letter describing his action as the "most disgraceful, deliberate, and unethical double cross in the history of journalism."⁽⁴⁾ Laurence, by contrast, worked on a secret, four-month assignment for the government preparing articles about the invention and deployment of the atomic bomb. His articles were withheld until after the bombs were dropped in Japan, when his carefully censored articles were published in the Times and elsewhere. Laurence considered the opportunity to work in secret for the government to be a high honor for both him and his newspaper.⁽⁵⁾

Such press willingness to cooperate with the government--and press outrage at breaches of this relationship--did not preclude, of course, criticism of government officials, either before or after the war. Robust criticism by American newspapers of both the New Deal and the Fair Deal characterized many newspapers; a perusal of the Chicago Tribune or any of the William Randolph Hearst newspapers in this period provides ample evidence. But central to a newspaper's relationship with government officials was an understanding that the government's security aims, especially in wartime, deserved journalistic support. For their part, journalists expected easy access to newsmakers and to information. Such access was relatively easy even in wartime, but reporters and editors began to concern themselves with overcoming government obstacles to news as the United States emerged from World War II.⁽⁶⁾

At first, these obstacles were centered in the international arena. Journalists, through their trade associations, threw themselves into an effort to incorporate free press guarantees into postwar charters of the United Nations. The goal was to thwart the growth of totalitarianism by spreading democracy through an international free exchange of information, and the establishment of the United Nations seemed to provide an opportunity to lower the many barriers to a free press worldwide. Publishers wanted foreign correspondents to have easy access to news in foreign countries, unrestricted by any foreign censorship. "It is something of a shock," said International News Service general manager Seymour Berkson in 1946, "to realize that, of the fifty-four countries which are members of the United Nations, only a minority of those very countries have the same principles of freedom of information which we recognize and abide by in the United States."⁽⁷⁾ The American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME), and Sigma Delta Chi (now the Society of Professional Journalists) each organized Freedom of Information committees to deal with world press issues and to lobby the United Nations.

But journalists' efforts to further world freedom of information were frustrated from the beginning. In 1945, three editors representing ASNE toured the world to survey press freedoms and were disappointed at their findings. The three presented a 40,000-word report to President Harry S. Truman, concluding that "facts are going to have as hard a time as ever getting around after the war."⁽⁸⁾ ASNE editors also took part in U.N. freedom of information conferences, but the promising treaties and proposals that emerged from the sessions later stalled.⁽⁹⁾ At an international conference on freedom of the press held in 1948 in Geneva, Switzerland, for example, fifty national governments approved drafts of treaties to protect the worldwide flow of news, but the treaties were whittled away later before the U.N. General Assembly. The Soviet Union was a particular opponent of the U.N. efforts, and the drive for world freedom of information withered as the Cold War accelerated.⁽¹⁰⁾

At the same time international proposals for freedom of information faded, press barriers seemed to rise at home. "FoI's spiritual sire was a noble experiment called World Freedom of Information," recalled James S. Pope, executive editor of the Louisville, Ky., newspapers and an ASNE activist in FOI efforts, in 1958. "The leaders [of the FOI movement] were the first to see . . . that it was not possible to liberate information across the world until we had mastered the art in our own nation, our own States and cities."⁽¹¹⁾ In the early postwar years, government secrecy seemed to rise on all fronts. Journalists believed the federal government's increased emphasis on secrecy was rooted in the tense state of postwar international affairs, the increasing influence of the military in Washington, and the technological revolution in high-tech weaponry. Security measures had taken root in World War II only to expand in the postwar years as Cold War tensions escalated.⁽¹²⁾ J. Russell Wiggins of the Washington Post, chairman of APME's freedom of information committee in the early 1950s, blamed several other factors as well. Wiggins believed that the overall growth of government had increased secretiveness, particularly as power had increased in the 1930s and 1940s in the executive branch, with its numerous administrative agencies and bureaucracies.⁽¹³⁾

In the late 1940s, the greatest domestic freedom of information questions concerned military security surrounding atomic secrets and the development of new weapons for the military. New York Times correspondent Hanson W. Baldwin complained to ASNE editors in 1948 of what he called a "velvet curtain." The curtain consisted, he said, of military restrictions that kept reporters from getting information, even information already known to the American public or to the Soviet Union. Military officials had tried to suppress, for example, news articles about the building of a new missile center in El Centro, Calif., and the development of new missiles. In one instance FBI agents had questioned the publishers of Aviation Week about its articles on the development of a supersonic plane, even though the plane was based on a Russian prototype. "In many cases we don't give the potential enemy credit for brains and we deny to the American people what is known to foreigners," Baldwin said.⁽¹⁴⁾

Baldwin was typical of journalists who believed that military withholding of information in peacetime was unnecessary and should be resisted. National security could be protected, he said, not by military censorship but by responsible journalists, just as in wartime. Newspapers could continue to guard national security, Baldwin believed, because responsible editors "will pause and ask before they publish technical stories dealing with military facts, `Is it in the national interest to publish this?'"⁽¹⁵⁾ The 1948 convention of ASNE editors adopted resolutions urging press-government cooperation in the publication of news about military weapons but opposing all censorship.⁽¹⁶⁾

But while journalists were inclined to cooperate with government officials not to divulge vital military information, they vehemently opposed any government secrecy in nonmilitary matters. The secrecy in nonmilitary matters also showed a marked increased in the postwar years, journalists believed. "Most federal agencies are showing exceptional zeal in creating rules, regulations, directives, classifications and policies which serve to hide, color or channel news," Pope said in 1951.⁽¹⁷⁾

An early and significant example of this phenomenon occurred in 1947, when the national Security Advisory Board released model security regulations to be used by federal agencies in their compliance with the president's federal loyalty program. The regulations, adopted first by the Veterans Administration, instructed officials to withhold any information that "would be prejudicial to the interests or prestige of the nation, any governmental activity or any individual, or would cause administration embarrassment or difficulty."⁽¹⁸⁾ Journalists reacted with outrage. The Minneapolis Tribune dismissed the order as an "unprecedented attempt to bottle up news and information at the source."⁽¹⁹⁾ The ASNE board of directors urged repeal, saying the directive would "place even the ordinary affairs of federal civilian agencies beyond public scrutiny." Truman responded that he had not heard of the regulations and would not approve them as written.⁽²⁰⁾ The regulations were revised to eliminate official embarrassment as a cause for withholding information. But they did establish a uniform classification system for security-related documents kept by the military: "top secret," "secret," "confidential," and "restricted."

The ASNE World Freedom of Information Committee had expressed concerns about domestic secrecy from its founding in 1948. "It seems to me our responsibility lies in the domestic field as well as the international field," committee chairman Basil L. "Stuffy" Walters wrote to fellow committee members in 1948. "I have noted a growing tendency of some officials in some of the smallest governmental units, as well as the largest, to forget that they are servants of the people and to act instead as though the taxpayers were their servants." Walters, executive editor of Knight Newspapers, instructed three committee members to keep track of domestic secrecy problems and to help any editors around the country facing difficulty.⁽²¹⁾ By 1950, with international freedom of information efforts stumbling and domestic secrecy on the rise, the committee dropped the "world" from its title to reflect its changing mission.⁽²²⁾

Journalists grew steadily more alarmed about the domestic secrecy problems through 1950 and 1951, believed Pope, the successor to Walters as ASNE's FOI chairman. After Pope enumerated secrecy difficulties at the 1950 ASNE meeting, he received 200 requests for copies of his talk from journalists around the country. "It was as if everybody suddenly had waked up to the dangers we had been far too busy to see," Pope said in 1951. Pope, echoing other journalists, maintained that the denial of information was an issue touching on the very essence of press freedom, since freedom of the press was worthless if public officials withheld journalists' source material.⁽²³⁾

The litany of withheld information investigated by journalism groups in 1950 and 1951 alone was long indeed. The federal Board of Reserve was holding secret meetings. The Department of State was withholding a large volume of material from reporters. The U.S. military forbade photographers from taking pictures of airplane crashes on civilian property. At the local level, a school board in Torrington, Conn., closed its sessions and its minutes to the public. Pawtucket, R.I., officials refused to release tax abatement records. The governor of Arizona was declining to release public reports.⁽²⁴⁾ "As FoI groped for a stance, a game plan," Pope later recalled of these early years, "the custodians of public business were romping over the field."⁽²⁵⁾

Litigation by newspapers to force open records and meetings increased substantially. Harold Cross, the media lawyer hired by ASNE to survey the growing secrecy and suggest how newspapers should respond, noted this trend in a report to the association in 1951. "The last five years brought more newspaper lawsuits to open records than any previous twenty-five years," Cross said. For most of his thirty-five years in newspaper law Cross said he had encountered few cases involving access to information. "Now scarcely a week goes by without a new refusal," he said.⁽²⁶⁾

-length work intended to serve both as a guide and a casebook for editors in their freedom of information battles. The book, The Public's Right to Know, was published in 1953. Cross was the FOI movement's most prominent spokesman and legal specialist until his death in 1959.⁽²⁷⁾

While journalists on the FOI committees could often pry loose withheld information through protests, publicity, or lawsuits, they often encountered government arrogance that appalled them. When the U.S. Board of Parole flatly refused to supply records requested by the Louisville Courier-Journal, the ASNE committee intervened and the records were released, but under protest. "In the future," the Parole Board chairman haughtily explained, "desired information will be supplied if, in our opinion, such information would be compatible with the welfare of society."⁽²⁸⁾ When, in what Pope called "a particularly horrible crime," the Alcohol Tax Unit in Albany, N.Y., accused local bars of watering down their liquor, tax officials reached a settlement but refused to release details.⁽²⁹⁾ "This settlement is of concern only to the proprietor of the tavern and to the ATU," one tax official said. Officials ultimately relented, and, to journalists' relief, the names of the offending bars were made public.⁽³⁰⁾

For journalists, the stakes in fighting government secrecy were high, justifying the harsh rhetoric of an all-out war. Secretive government officials were "a well-entrenched enemy," declared Pope. "Certainly there is a vital connection," he said, "between growing scandals in government and the growing concealment of information."⁽³¹⁾

-the-record conferences to further their bosses' public image. "I have never heard of a single government press agent who ever issued a news handout that was critical of his political boss," said V.M. Newton, Jr., of the Tampa Tribune in 1951. "Every line written by a government press agent is designed to reflect glory upon his government agency and to prolong the political life of his boss, regardless of whether it is the truth, half truth or no truth."⁽³²⁾ The twin problems of public relations and concealed information, Washington reporter Clark Mollenhoff said in 1954, served to throttle democracy.⁽³³⁾

The relationship between government and journalists was changing. Just as a government grown larger and more complex had forced changes in newswriting, it also forced changes in how reporters dealt with sources. David Lawrence, a newspaper columnist and publisher of U.S. News & World Report, said in 1950 that while the number of Washington correspondents had multiplied since he had first moved to Washington four decades earlier, the government had grown even faster, and it was much more difficult to cover capital news. Journalists now found themselves dealing more and more with intermediaries--public relations people--and thus more subject to manipulation. "This Government of ours has grown so big," Lawrence said, "that it is easy for our newspapers to take the mimeographed handouts and give digests of them on their front pages, as we do every day." The result, Lawrence believed, was that much government propaganda was getting into the newspaper.⁽³⁴⁾

This government public relations created resentment at the same time it helped journalists cover a complex government. Some Washington correspondents said that government handouts had made reporters lazy--victims of "handoutitis"--and more reliant upon official government pronouncements for news.⁽³⁵⁾ Others complained that public relations offices created a "paper curtain" between reporters and sources, a familiar barrier newly ominous as secrecy increased.⁽³⁶⁾ Still, many journalists agreed that modern institutions had become so large and complex they would be impossible to cover without the help of public relations people. "The good the press gets from handouts far outweighs the potential evil opponents of handouts talk about," said Ben Cole, the Indianapolis Star's bureau chief, in 1951.⁽³⁷⁾ Philip W. Porter of the Cleveland Plain Dealer told an ASNE panel the same year that press agents are "in the same category as women--they are often puzzling and amazing, but we couldn't get along without them."⁽³⁸⁾

Press agents were ubiquitous in both state and federal governments. A 1951 report by Editor & Publisher found 700 press agents in state government and 2,400 in the federal government, the latter considered a conservative estimate.⁽³⁹⁾ A 1949 federal study, much more liberal in whom it counted as a public relations worker, put the number at 45,000, at a cost of $74.8 million a year.⁽⁴⁰⁾

A low point of press-government relations in the early 1950s was the imposition by President Truman of a new executive order providing for a classification system of government information. The order, Executive Order 10290, was released September 24, 1951, for use by forty-five government agencies to classify information into categories of top secret, secret, classified, and confidential, the same categories already used by the military but now to be used by approved civilian agencies.⁽⁴¹⁾ Truman said many civilian departments needed the power to classify information because they, too, often handled sensitive government documents. Information must be protected, he said, that might otherwise be published by the news media and provide assistance to the Communist enemies in the Cold War. Truman cited a report compiled by the Central Intelligence Agency that found that "90 percent of all our top secret information had been published in either the daily newspapers or in the slick magazines."⁽⁴²⁾

Truman's order met immediate criticism from journalists. His press conference of October 4, 1951, was devoted entirely to a defense of the order, and the White House issued a memorandum explaining that the directive did not amount to censorship.⁽⁴³⁾ The APME, which was holding its annual convention when the order was released, denounced it as "a dangerous instrument of news suppression." The APME said the order was unnecessarily vague and lacked an appeal process. Truman met with a delegation of APME editors to discuss their concerns on October 17, but neither side budged in their position on the order.⁽⁴⁴⁾

Editor & Publisher editorialized that the security order amounted to "the most drastic peacetime censorship ever attempted in this country." Even in wartime, civilian agencies had not been given such power to suppress news, the magazine's editors warned. "The Washington news arena, already noted for numerous incidents of suppression and censorship, is now facing the imposition of an all-inclusive security measure which will make possible almost a complete blackout of important news from the nation's capitol."⁽⁴⁵⁾ The delegates to the Sigma Delta Chi convention in 1951 passed a resolution opposing the directive, saying the order "duplicates in the name of national security the practices of totalitarian states."⁽⁴⁶⁾ A New York Times editorial said the order was unnecessarily vague and would invite abuse.⁽⁴⁷⁾

Truman instituted an appeal process to address reporters' complaints, but the order remained unchanged until Eisenhower took office.⁽⁴⁸⁾ Eisenhower's attorney general, Herbert Brownell Jr., announced before APME editors in 1953 that the order was being revised to limit classification power to seventeen agencies. The "restricted" category was eliminated, leaving only "top secret," "secret," and "confidential," and authority to classify information was given only to the chief administrative officers of each of the seventeen agencies. Brownell said Truman's order had been "repressive and applied the military formula to a lot of things entirely outside the scope of national defense." The order had also led to overclassification. "We actually have buildings full of classified documents," Brownell said.⁽⁴⁹⁾

Journalists were divided over the Eisenhower order. J. Russell Wiggins of the Washington Post said the revised order had remedied the shortcomings in Truman's directive and was probably the best compromise newspaper editors could hope for in such insecure times. "I doubt that any administration ever will wholly abandon the system of classifying security matters, in the present state of the world," Wiggins said.⁽⁵⁰⁾ Other editors said the order demonstrated that Eisenhower had accepted Truman's precedent to withhold government information. "It is not a `milestone,'" Indianapolis Star editor Jameson G. Campaigne complained of the order. "It is a `millstone' around the necks of the editors of the nation."⁽⁵¹⁾

The Truman and Eisenhower security orders had one advantage, that of contributing to a greater public awareness of the press' freedom of information campaign. "Millions have read and heard of freedom of information for the first time," James S. Pope said in 1952. The Milwaukee Journal had printed a fourteen-part series on news suppression by Wisconsin officials. Also in 1951-1952, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Detroit Free Press, the Associated Press, and the Scripps-Howard news service had each published articles or series on government withholding of information. The Los Angeles News had printed a yearlong series of reports on school boards that operated in secrecy.⁽⁵²⁾

Paradoxically, the Korean Conflict, which lasted from June 1950 to July 1953, created few freedom of information concerns under either Truman or Eisenhower. Censorship was kept to a minimum and followed the World War II model of voluntary censorship. Military personnel and reporters engaged in the usual battles over the release of certain information, but by and large press-military relations reflected the consensus that journalists should cooperate with the government to withhold vital security information.⁽⁵³⁾ Journalists' freedom of information concerns were centered on efforts to obtain nonmilitary information.

At the same time that a growing government secrecy pushed newspapers to ferret out nonmilitary information to which they had previously had open access, newspapers faced a separate challenge that also strained government-press relations. This challenge was posed by the anti-Communist accusations of the junior United States senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy. His political rise, like the growth of government secrecy in the same era, was tied to an increasing Cold War emphasis on national security and forced newspapers to change their practices. McCarthy would prove a formidable challenge to the nation's editors throughout the early 1950s, from his infamous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, to his censure by his fellow United States senators in 1954.

Jack Anderson and Ronald W. May, two critics of McCarthy and his anti-Communist crusade, summarized in a 1952 book the essential dilemma that the senator's charges posed to newspapers in the early 1950s. They imagined the editor of an afternoon newspaper, worried in the last few minutes before deadline about what to place on Page One. Then, the latest charge leveled by McCarthy arrives on the wire. At last, the editor had his lead Page One story.

There, in a nutshell, you have 99 percent of the reason for Joe McCarthy's success. You can discount his personal ambition: that may have started the McCarthy flywheel, but it was the press that kept the wheel turning. . . . Any way you slice it, it adds up to the same thing: if Joe McCarthy is a political monster, then the press has been his Dr. Frankenstein.⁽⁵⁴⁾

Anderson and May's view of McCarthy as "a political monster" was by no means unanimous among journalists. But the two expressed a common sentiment in the nation's newsrooms in the early 1950s: that McCarthy's newfound political power owed much to the publicity afforded him by the nation's newspapers. There was little doubt, Washington Post editorial writer Alan Barth said at the height of McCarthy's power, that most newspapers' unquestioning coverage "serves Senator McCarthy's partisan political purposes much more than it serves the purposes of the press, the interest of truth."⁽⁵⁵⁾ McCarthy's masterful ability to stay in the nation's headlines delighted his allies and confounded his enemies and reflected his skill at manipulating the news media. Journalists, increasingly aware of the difficulty of proving many of McCarthy's charges of Communist infiltration in the State Department, the Army, and the press, soon felt trapped by the journalistic conventions that required them to report every charge, no matter how outrageous.⁽⁵⁶⁾

McCarthy had indeed manipulated the news media skillfully. Particularly in the beginning of the senator's climb to national prominence, reporters were willing to cooperate because he was news. "McCarthy was a dream story," remembered Willard Edwards, who covered the senator in Washington for the Chicago Tribune. "I wasn't off page one for four years."⁽⁵⁷⁾ McCarthy, gregarious and cooperative, was helpful to reporters, often providing tips to those in need of a story. Sometimes, he even telephoned government officials to fish for information while reporters listened in on the extension.⁽⁵⁸⁾ "He was the most cooperative guy in the world with the press," recalled television correspondent George Cheeley. "That had an awful lot to do with his getting heavy press play."⁽⁵⁹⁾

More significantly, the senator knew newspapers' and wire services' deadlines and timed his public releases for maximum exposure. Often he would call a morning press conference only to announce the scheduling of an afternoon press conference, reaping double the publicity in the process. "If, as if often the case, he has nothing of news value to announce, he has at least profited by the afternoon headlines," observed correspondent Richard H. Rovere of the New Yorker in 1950.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Milwaukee Journal editor Wallace Lomoe complained that McCarthy was "a sideshow barker" in dealing with the press. "He can get three stories instead of one. First he drops a hint. Then he gives out a name. Third, he gives out his version of what the name said or did. And the press carries all three."⁽⁶¹⁾

McCarthy's technique of leveling charge and counter-charge left reporters little time to confirm his allegations; they were too busy keeping up with new revelations that emerged by the day. "He has always kept one sensation ahead of his trackers," wrote Christian Science Monitor correspondent Richard L. Strout of McCarthy a few months after the senator's speech at Wheeling. "He has blanketed replies with fresh attacks." Even if an old charge was quickly disproven, news of the truth applied to the old was quickly buried by the sensation of the new. The freshly leveled charge, as Strout put it, "always has the head start."⁽⁶²⁾

Journalistic conventions of newsworthiness and objectivity also helped McCarthy. McCarthy's statements were automatically considered news because of his status as a United States senator, and convention required journalists to report them objectively no matter how preposterous his charges might seem to them. "My own impression is that he was a demagogue, but what could I do?" recalled Bob Baskin of the Dallas Morning News. "I had to report--and quote--McCarthy. That's all I could do. How do you say in the middle of your story `This is a lie'? The press is supposedly neutral. You write what the man says."⁽⁶³⁾ Once when McCarthy leveled a new charge at a hearing in 1950, two reporters from large Baltimore and New York City newspapers agreed between them that the new accusation was baseless. But, one reporter said with a shrug, "The people who read my story tomorrow won't know it."⁽⁶⁴⁾ The tradition of objective reporting required that the story be reported without qualification no matter what. Strout described the process this way: "The writer takes the statement of one man, tries to find the reply of another man, puts them competently together in one story, adds a little color and goes home to his wife and three children in the happy satisfaction of a day's work well done."⁽⁶⁵⁾

The McCarthy story both shook journalists' faith in objectivity and pointed to a need for better reporting. Broadcast commentator Elmer Davis said in 1952 that reporters were too often writing "objective" accounts of McCarthy's charges without checking them out. "[O]bjectivity often leans over backward so far that it makes the news business merely a transmission belt for pretentious phonies," said Davis, a former New York Times reporter. The result was that the average newspaper reader was being denied the full story. "The newspaper," Davis argued, "is not giving him his money's worth if it tells him only what somebody says is the truth which is known to be false."⁽⁶⁶⁾

-handedness in treatment of charges and replies. "There is nothing in the canons of objectivity that requires newspapers to treat with even-handed indifference the dredged-up reminiscences of professional witnesses and the denials of their victims," Barth said. "They may have to report the statements of a demagogue, but they do not have to leave their readers in exclusive reliance on their statements. It is part of their job to put them in perspective. Their aim must be to present not only the truth but the whole truth."⁽⁶⁷⁾

What were newspapers to do about McCarthy, then? How were they supposed to present "the whole truth"? Some journalists believed that nothing at all should be done, that McCarthy's status as a United States senator made him a bona fide newsmaker, and that his views should be published, and objectively reported at that, without elaboration. Other journalists faced a dilemma in reporting McCarthy--how to cover him adequately without promoting him personally or trampling on the rights of those he accused. Editors and publishers across the country pursued different ways of solving this dilemma.

A very few newspapers simply withheld news dealing with charges of Communism. The Claremont (N.H.) Daily Eagle, for example, announced in its columns in 1951 that it was not releasing a list of prominent Americans named by the House Un-American Activities Committee as having been involved in a Communist peace initiative. The newspaper declared that it was withholding the accusations because of the committee's record for making unsubstantiated charges.⁽⁶⁸⁾ For the same reason, the newspaper had refused to print any news about McCarthy for eight or ten months in 1950, finally relenting out of concerns that readers were being denied the news. "It wasn't fair to them," recalled Daily Eagle publisher Melvin Wax. "A newspaper can't put its head in the sand."⁽⁶⁹⁾

At the Christian Science Monitor, editors tried to avoid overplaying McCarthy's charges. In 1953, the board of directors of the Christian Science Monitor, published in Boston and circulated nationally, expressed concern to the newspaper's editors that the Wisconsin senator was using the press solely to obtain publicity for running for office. Accordingly, the board proposed that the Monitor "desist from lending itself to such a purpose by omitting [McCarthy's] name from headlines and from copy where the name of [his] committee can be substituted." The board also proposed that the newspaper minimize its use of the word "McCarthyism" on the grounds that Mary Baker Eddy, the founder both of Christian Science and of the Monitor, would not have approved. The board's suggestions were carried out. Monitor editors, who had been considering such actions on their own, agreed that "McCarthyism" was a dubious term and should be avoided, except in quotations. Editors also consented to exercise caution in using McCarthy's name in headlines and in placing stories about him on the front page. "In addition we should avoid build-ups for Senator McCarthy," Monitor editor Erwin D. Canham directed his top editors in a memorandum. "Without deviating from absolutely objective news standards, let us do what we can to avoid excessive promotion--either positive or negative--for the junior Senator from Wisconsin."⁽⁷⁰⁾

Despite their concerns about his tactics, even publishers of liberal newspapers wanted to treat McCarthy fairly. Underplaying the senator's charges, publishers feared, might help the enemy, the Communists. Joseph Pulitzer II, the publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, told his editors in 1953 that although he despised McCarthy and his methods, many Post-Dispatch readers believed deeply in the senator's anti-Communist crusade. Accordingly, the newspaper's McCarthy coverage, Pulitzer said, should be fair and generous to McCarthy while supplying readers the facts they needed to judge the senator. "I repeatedly run into people who are honestly confused, who unquestionably have been influenced by pro-McCarthyites but who are hungry for information," Pulitzer said.⁽⁷¹⁾ The publisher had a continuous disagreement with his editorial page editor, Irving Dilliard, over Dilliard's persistent criticism of McCarthy's abuses of civil liberties. Pulitzer didn't want criticism of McCarthy to undermine the newspaper's anti-Communist stance.⁽⁷²⁾

Most often, newspapers solved their dilemma about how to treat McCarthy by turning to greater use of interpretative writing. At the nation's most influential journalistic institutions--the large metropolitan dailies and the Associated Press--the McCarthy phenomenon accelerated the trend toward interpretation that was already underway in the postwar years. The McCarthy story seemed to embody the kind of complex news story that needed to be explained to readers. Among the dailies, the trend toward interpretation was seen primarily in larger newspapers that had their own Washington correspondents and at journals that tended to be skeptical of McCarthy's charges. The trend was widely noted at editors' meetings and at press association meetings, and while many editors agreed that more interpretation was necessary, they interpreted that necessity and carried it out in different ways.

At the Denver Post, a memorandum instructed the staff to take special care in reporting "loose charges, irresponsible utterances and character assassination by spokesmen, official or otherwise," noted the Post's managing editor, Ed Dooley, in 1953. The memo, written by editor-publisher E. Palmer Hoyt, instructed reporters and editors to evaluate the source of the charges and to consider withholding the story until proof and/or the victim's response could be obtained. Reporters were instructed to ask themselves whether they knew the charges to be false, and then to explain any reasonable doubt in their articles. The memo represented an expanded effort "to try and get all the facts," Dooley said.⁽⁷³⁾ Editors were also told to take special care that headlines were not biased. One historian of the Post said the McCarthy period was "[p]erhaps the finest hour for Hoyt's Post in the eyes of professional journalists."⁽⁷⁴⁾

The foremost advocate of interpretation was the New York Times. Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger believed that interpretative analyses were necessary to understand a complex world. But Sulzberger believed that interpretive pieces should be separated from news articles, which should be objective. "Despite everything I have said about the need for interpretation of the news, it does not take the place of the factual news report," Sulzberger said in a speech to journalism educators in 1952. "It is supplementary and, essential as it is, it is dangerous if not watched and done correctly within rigid limits. The balance between interpretation and opinion is delicate and it must be preserved."⁽⁷⁵⁾

Many reporters and editors had concrete suggestions as to how to better report McCarthy using interpretive methods. Dozier C. Cade, a former reporter for the Atlanta Journal and a teacher at Northwestern University, suggested in 1952 that newspapers should play down unsubstantiated accusations and expose untruths in such stories by investigating them before publication. Without such innovations, Cade said, the McCarthy "witch-hunters" would continue to stifle self-expression. "The press should lead the fight for a free country and a free world," Cade said.⁽⁷⁶⁾ Melvin Mencher, a reporter at the Albuquerque Journal, suggested in Nieman Reports in 1953 that newspapers should require McCarthy to submit advance copies of his speeches with supporting documents to allow reporters time to check them for accuracy. Newspapers should also put victims' responses to the charges in the lead paragraph of their news articles, Mencher said. The next demagogue to follow McCarthy would have equal opportunity to take advantage of the press without such changes, Mencher said.⁽⁷⁷⁾

Nieman Reports was a leader in urging the expansion of interpretive reporting, encouraging the trend by often printing articles about the subject. Louis M. Lyons, curator of the Nieman Foundation and a veteran reporter for newspapers in Boston and elsewhere, applauded the trend. He opposed McCarthy's methods and believed reporters had an obligation to set the record straight concerning his allegations. "Who but a newspaperman can show you the record?" Lyons told a Newspaper Guild audience in 1953. "If a politician distorts it, the newspaperman needs to straighten it out for the reader."⁽⁷⁸⁾

Lyons, a perceptive observer of newspapers and their reporting practices who was active in the Nieman program through the early 1960s, believed McCarthy's rise led to the rapid spread of interpretive reporting. The McCarthy era, he said in 1971, was a "dim period" for the press, when objective reporting was proven to be shallow reporting. In Lyons' words,

McCarthy's success in exploiting a watered-down "objectivity" of the press forced newspapers and wire services alike to consider their responsibility for what they were printing, and to undertake what was called "interpretive" reporting. This meant simply reporting in more depth--to look below the shallow surface, to explore, explain, analyze the meaning of an event. Some papers cautiously at first labeled such fuller reporting "news analysis." But it was soon expected of a competent reporter that he would bring out as far as he could the full meaning of the news.⁽⁷⁹⁾

The wire services, and the Associated Press (AP) in particular, were a battleground for editors as they wrestled with the McCarthy story. The wire services were especially vulnerable to the senator's methods in two ways. First, their intense competition pushed reporters to get newsworthy copy onto the wires quickly, often without a response to McCarthy's charges. Second, wire services faced intense pressure to file inoffensive, straightforward copy that would please a myriad of newspapers with disparate political views. Disputes about McCarthy within the Associated Press from 1950 to 1953 illustrate both the concerns that McCarthy raised among journalists and the trend toward interpretation to which those concerns contributed.

In 1950, William T. Evjue, editor and publisher of the Madison (Wis.) Capital-Times, an anti-McCarthy newspaper, complained in a letter to the AP that the wire service was exhibiting right-wing bias by playing up McCarthy's stories unquestioningly. "The Associated Press flagrantly violates the principle of objective journalism in seeking to build up Senator Joseph McCarthy as a present-day Horatio Alger of the United States Senate," Evjue said.⁽⁸¹⁾ The editor had complained, to cite one example, that the AP had distributed a picture of McCarthy on the front steps of the U.S. Capitol posing with a broom sent to him by constituents for use in sweeping the government clean of Communist influence. The caption on the photograph accepted McCarthy's assumption, Evjue said, that there indeed was Communist infiltration into the government.⁽⁸²⁾

Other editors complained, however, that the AP was anti-McCarthy. In 1950 Charles A. Hazen, editor of the Shreveport (La.) Times, filed a sixty-six-page report with the Associated Press management alleging fifty-eight instances of left-wing bias within the wire service, with most of the complaints involving McCarthy. With Hazen's charges, the AP now stood accused of bias by both sides in the volatile McCarthy debate. "Thus we have one sincere editor accusing the AP of being flagrantly anti-McCarthy and another sincere editor accusing the AP of being flagrantly pro-McCarthy," V.M. Newton, Jr., of the Tampa Tribune summarized the situation before the APME in 1950. Still other editors had taken a different position, Newton said. Many had complained that the AP "is too timid, frightened at the very thought of being accused of partiality, and utterly bound by a too rigid adherence to the principle of objectivity."⁽⁸³⁾

Newton was chairman of the APME Domestic News Committee, which investigated both Evjue's and Hazen's charges and found no willful bias on the part of the wire service. Newton said that he believed the AP's coverage of McCarthy sometimes showed incompetence--occasional carelessness and incomplete reporting--but not bias. Hazen's accusations of left-wing bias were especially disturbing, Newton said, because they pointed to "a general lack of initiative, due mainly to a rigid adherence to a too narrow and frustrating definition of objectivity, which shackles enterprise and leaves many questions unanswered and truth unsought."⁽⁸⁴⁾

In both 1950 and 1952, the AP's Washington News Committee recommended that the wire service use more background articles to get at the truth involving McCarthy. AP executive editor Alan Gould reiterated in 1952 that AP reporters had latitude to interpret the news, meaning that they were allowed to appraise the cause and effect of news developments and to state as facts--without attribution--what they knew to be true from their own experience and observations. Gould said that interpretive writing was encouraged "assuming that certain safeguards are established to preserve the fundamental objectivity of the AP news report."⁽⁸⁵⁾

Many, but not all, AP editors were convinced of the need for interpretation. Charles H. Hamilton of the Richmond News Leader complained that in its zeal to interpret the news the AP was introducing opinion into the news columns. "I firmly believe there is no place for `think pieces' on the AP wire," he said. "A fact needs no defense." Warden Woolard of the Los Angeles Examiner decried "so-called interpretive writing" and proposed a resolution in 1952 requiring that any complaints about abuses of the practice come before the entire membership for action. The resolution died; the debate over interpretation was largely settled within the wire service.⁽⁸⁶⁾

The McCarthy story both encouraged the trend toward interpretation and contributed to the growing breach between press and government. McCarthy was a constant critic of journalists, heaping abuse on what he called "the left-wing press." McCarthy "concentrated his attacks upon those newspapers he knew were opposing him," concluded Edwin R. Bayley, who covered the senator as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal and who later wrote a book about McCarthy's press relations.⁽⁸⁷⁾ In particular, McCarthy carried on running feuds with the Milwaukee Journal and the Madison (Wis.) Capital-Times, the largest papers that opposed him in his home state. The Journal, lukewarm for McCarthy in his 1946 Senate race, grew steadily more critical of him in his first term and later exposed his lies about his military record. McCarthy had falsely claimed to have suffered war wounds and had exaggerated his battle experience. In response, McCarthy frequently ridiculed the newspaper and even urged an advertiser boycott of the newspaper.⁽⁸⁸⁾ McCarthy also urged a boycott against the Capital-Times, whose editor was one of McCarthy's harshest critics and which had unearthed McCarthy's failure to pay taxes on stock income.⁽⁸⁹⁾ McCarthy's anti-newspaper campaign also included the Washington Post, the Portland Oregonian, and the Christian Science Monitor, all of which had been critical of the senator, as well as individual reporters and newspaper columnists who had attacked him.⁽⁹⁰⁾ McCarthy once told a reporter privately that his antipress campaign was intended to dilute newspapers' criticism of him. "[I]f you can show a paper as unfriendly and having a reason for being antagonistic, you take the sting of what it says about you," McCarthy said.⁽⁹¹⁾

McCarthy's feud with the New York Post and its editor, James Wechsler, seemed to enlarge the crack in the press-government relationship most substantially. As part of his Senate investigation into alleged Communist influences in books in U.S. State Department libraries, McCarthy called Wechsler before his committee on April 24 and May 5, 1953. The pretext was Wechsler's background, particularly his membership as a youth in the Young Communist League and whether books he had written that were now in Department libraries manifested Communist influences. Wechsler agreed to answer McCarthy's questions, saying that he feared that McCarthy would distort his stand if he refused. McCarthy asked about the Post's editorial policies and the background of its editorial employees, including the editor's. Wechsler told McCarthy's committee that he had left the Young Communist League in 1937 and had since been an ardent anti-Communist, which was true. He said he believed his appearance before the committee was intended solely to intimidate editors who had criticized McCarthy. "I regard this inquiry as a clear invasion of what used to be considered the newspaper's right to act and function independently," Wechsler told the committee. "I am hopeful that there will be voices raised by newspapers throughout the country in protest against this inquiry."⁽⁹²⁾

Indeed, a number of newspapers and journalists criticized McCarthy after Wechsler's appearance. Criticism was most often found in newspapers that had opposed McCarthy. "In fact, in my view, far and away the most serious danger to American newspapers today lies in the success of such strong-arm politicians as McCarthy," said John B. Oakes, New York Times editorial writer.⁽⁹³⁾ The Washington Post decried McCarthy's "star chamber" treatment of Wechsler and said that while he was not intimidated by it, others might be.⁽⁹⁴⁾ The New York Times editorialized that McCarthy's obvious purpose was to intimidate the New York Post and that the committee's effort "gets very close to an infringement of one of America's basic freedoms." Wechsler's crime, the Times wrote, "seems clearly to be that he has also fought Mr. McCarthy's methods, a fight in which this newspaper, too, has been proud to participate."⁽⁹⁵⁾

An ASNE committee, at Wechsler's request, investigated McCarthy's hearing on the Post to determine if it amounted to an infringement of the press. A majority of the divided committee found that it did not.⁽⁹⁶⁾ The committee, and a panel of newspaper editors who appeared on the television show "Meet the Press" in May 1953, believed that no press rights were violated since Wechsler's newspaper remained free to print the news afterward. New York Times political columnist Arthur Krock said he agreed with the panel of editors, who were "unanimously bearish on any contention that these actions infringed on the freedom of the press." Krock said that Wechsler's repeated statements that he refused to be intimidated weakened his arguments that free press rights were violated.⁽⁹⁷⁾

The McCarthy years accelerated trends already well underway by the early 1950s. Press-government relations had begun to deteriorate in the late 1940s as increasing government secrecy in the Cold War required journalists to lobby for nonmilitary public information that previously had been accessible to them. Truman and Eisenhower's security orders widened the breach between press and government. This fissure was evident but not great; journalists remained respectful of government's security interests in military information. Indeed, journalists often worried that they were too respectful of government. The press-government breach would not reach great proportions until the early 1960s.

The trend toward interpretation demonstrated the changing press-government relationship. Government was now so complex that objective journalism could no longer explain it. McCarthy's mastery of the press illustrated both the greater need for interpretation and newspapers' difficulty in coming to terms with meeting this increased need. Events later in the 1950s would further challenge newspapers to change their methods of gathering and presenting the news.

1. Quoted in Theodore F. Koop, "Censors Saved Lives," Quill, July-August 1945, 9.

2. Ibid. The considerable extent of press-government cooperation during World War II is documented in Koop's book, Weapon of Silence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946).

3. Byron Price report to Harry S. Truman, quoted in James L. Butler, "Price Closes Book on War Censorship," Editor & Publisher, 22 December 1945, 72.

4. Quoted in "Kennedy of AP Scoops Whole World But Writers Call Him Double Crosser," Newsweek, 14 May 1945, 80. Kennedy was disaccredited by the military authorities, shipped home, and later forced to resign from the AP. Kennedy claimed that public announcement of the armistice in Germany had negated the necessity for honoring the government's release time. General Dwight D. Eisenhower later reviewed his case, found that through several misunderstandings Kennedy was not to blame, and reaccredited him. See Edward Kennedy, "I'd Do It Again," Atlantic, August 1948, 36-41.

5. Meyer Berger, The Story of the New York Times, 1851-1951 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951), 514; S.J. Monchak, "Laurence Relates His Role on Atomic Bomb Project," Editor & Publisher, 22 September 1945, 9, 60. For Berger's account of Laurence's experiences, see pp. 510-523. After his bomb assignment, which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1946, Laurence was known in the Times newsroom as "Atomic Bill."

6. See George Kennedy, "Advocates of Openness: The Freedom of Information Movement," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Missouri, 1978. Kennedy's thesis, which focuses on national anti-secrecy efforts and especially the development of the federal sunshine law, is the only comprehensive account of the domestic freedom of information movement. For Kennedy's account of the movement's early years, see Chapter 1, pp. 16-62.

7. Quoted in "Notable Talks: Free Press Theme of Convention," Quill, November-December 1946, 5. A thorough contemporaneous account of U.S. publishers' efforts on behalf of world freedom of information is Gilbert W. Stewart, Jr., "World Threat to Free Press," Quill, July 1951, 5-7, 20-21.

8. ASNE report to Truman, quoted in "The Well Traveled Skeptics," Time, 25 June 1945, 62.

9. Stewart, "World Threat to Free Press," 7.

10. "Report on Freedom of Information," Quill, January 1951, 12; Herbert Brucker, Freedom of Information (1949; reprint ed., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 210-211; ASNE Proceedings, 1951, 189. The authoritative account of the international freedom of information movement is Margaret A. Blanchard's Exporting the First Amendment: The Press-Government Crusade of 1945-1952 (New York: Longman, 1986). For Blanchard's description of the decline of the world movement and the rise of domestic secrecy concerns, see pp. 373-378. A useful synopsis of Blanchard's book is found in her article "The Business of a Free Press," Gannett Center Journal 4 (Fall 1990): 17-29.

11. James S. Pope, "Freedom of Information: A Ten-Year-Old Prodigy," Speeches: First Annual Freedom of Information Conference, December 11-12, 1958 (Columbia, Mo.: Freedom of Information Center, School of Journalism, University of Missouri, 1960), 1.

12. For journalists' assessment of the roots of the secrecy problem, see Hanson W. Baldwin, "`Secrets' Arouse Foes of Censorship," New York Times, 16 November 1947, E4. Baldwin reported that "numerous restrictive incidents encountered by the press in the coverage of news . . . have stirred up a hornets' nest."

13. Associated Press Managing Editors Red Book (New York: Associated Press, 1952), 26. Hereafter cited as APME Red Book. The Red Book, published first in 1948, is the published proceedings of the yearly meeting of the APME.

14. ASNE Proceedings, 1948, 191-196.

15. Ibid., 197.

16. Ibid., 296-297.

17. ASNE Proceedings, 1951, 174.

18. Quoted in undated letter from N.R. Howard, ASNE president, to Truman, in minutes of the American Society of Newspaper Editors board of directors, October 25-26, 1947, American Society of Newspaper Editors headquarters, Reston, Virginia. Hereafter cited as "ASNE minutes."

19. Quoted in "Gag Rule Protest By ASNE Board Widely Acclaimed," Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1 December 1947, 4, which contains a roundup of negative press reaction to the order. Hereafter cited as ASNE Bulletin.

20. Both the ASNE board and Truman are quoted in ASNE minutes, October 25-26, 1947. To ASNE's protest, Truman replied, "I never heard of the program to which you refer and I am very sure that such a program could not possibly go into effect without my approval."

21. Walters letter to the World Freedom of Information Committee, quoted in "Walters Demands Publicity Spotlight on Public Servants," ASNE Bulletin, 1 October 1948, 1.

22. ASNE Proceedings, 1951, 12-13.

23. James S. Pope, "U.S. Press is Free to Print the News But Too Often is Not Free to Gather It," Quill, July 1951, 9.

24. Ibid., 9, 21. The FOI committees were successful in getting much of the information released in these cases. ASNE's protest against the military's withholding of information about plane crashes resulted in one of its significant early successes when the policy was revised in 1952. See Pope, "Freedom of Information," 2.

25. James S. Pope, "On the Domestic Front," in Alice Fox Pitts, Read All About It! 50 Years of ASNE (Reston, Va.: American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1974), 186. Pitts' book, ASNE's official history, includes many useful, lengthy recollections from ASNE members about the postwar era. A more recent, scholarly history of the organization is Paul Alfred Pratte, Gods Within the Machine: A History of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1923-1993 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995). For Pratte's account of ASNE's early FOI struggles in the 1950s, see pp. 85-100.

26. ASNE Proceedings, 1951, 181.

27. James S. Pope, "Harold L. Cross: Arch Foe of Secrecy," in Speeches: Second Annual Freedom of Information Conference, November 5-6, 1959 (Columbia, Mo.: Freedom of Information Center, School of Journalism, University of Missouri, 1960), 38-42; Harold L. Cross, The People's Right to Know (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953).

28. Quoted in Pope, "On the Domestic Front," 187. Emphasis in the original.

29. ASNE Proceedings, 1951, 174.

30. Quoted in Pope, "On the Domestic Front," 187.

31. Pope, "U.S. Press is Free to Print the News," 9, 22.

32. ASNE Proceedings, 1951, 59.

33. Clark Mollenhoff, "Follow Through--That is the Newspaper Answer to Secrecy in Government, Says a Crusading Correspondent," Nieman Reports, January 1954, 3.

34. ASNE Proceedings, 1950, 167.

35. Ibid., 183-185. "The handout," declared Walter Trohan, the Chicago Tribune's Washington correspondent, "is a great destroyer of reportorial initiative in this town." For a biting critique of lazy correspondents in the nation's capital, see "Washington's Armchair Correspondents," Harper's, February 1949, 49-52.

36. Jerry Walker, "Editors Would Rip Curtain That Shields New York Officials," Editor & Publisher, 21 October 1950, 5.

37. Quoted in Robert Early, "Handouts Are Helpful to Press, ME Insists," Editor & Publisher, 9 June 1951, 22. Indianapolis Star editors estimated that the elimination of government handouts would force the newspaper to increase by six-fold its four-person Washington staff.

38. ASNE Proceedings, 1951, 68.

39. Erwin Knoll, "43 States Employ 700 to Publicize Governments," Editor & Publisher, 7 April 1951, 13. The federal statistics quoted by the magazine were compiled in 1949 by the federal Budget Bureau.

40. "Report on Freedom of Information," Quill, January 1952, 18. The rapid growth in the number of government press agents had begun in the 1930s with the rise of the New Deal and was accompanied by rising press and Congressional concerns about news management. See Dick Fitzpatrick, "Measuring Government Publicity: Volume of Press Releases," Journalism Quarterly 26 (1949): 45-50.

41. "U.S. Adds Controls on Security Data," New York Times, 26 September 1951, 17; W.H. Lawrence, "President Accuses Press of Revealing Vital War Secrets," New York Times, 5 October 1951, 1, 12.

42. Truman memorandum to the secretary of defense, 24 September 1951, quoted in Herbert Lee Williams, The Newspaperman's President: Harry S. Truman (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1984), 113-114. Truman said he was particularly upset that Fortune magazine had recently published maps showing the location of the United States' atomic energy plants. (Truman press conference, 4 October 1951, quoted in ibid., 118.)

43. "Text of Truman Security Statement and Transcript of Discussion," New York Times, 5 October 1951, 12.

44. APME Red Book, 1951, 224-226, 231-231. The APME refused to suggest changes in the order on the grounds that the order was a barrier to news. Truman accused the editors of being critical but not constructive. (Herbert F. Corn to Truman, 4 December 1951; Truman to Corn, 17 December 1951, both quoted in "Letter to Mr. Corn," Editor and Publisher, 22 December 1951, 9, 47. Corn was the APME president in 1951.)

45. "Blackout," Editor & Publisher, 29 September 1951, 38.

46. Resolution passed by Sigma Delta Chi delegates, quoted in George A. Brandenburg, "Sigma Delta Chi Opposes Secrecy Rule," Editor & Publisher, 24 November 1951, 12.

47. "Classifying Information," New York Times, 28 September 1951, 30.

48. "Security Committee," Editor & Publisher, 19 January 1952, 34.

49. APME Red Book, 1953, 175-176.

50. J. Russell Wiggins, "No Compromise of Principle," ASNE Bulletin, 1 February 1954, 4.

51. Jameson G. Campaigne, "Milestone or Millstone," ibid., 3.

52. ASNE Proceedings, 1952, 96-100, 104.

53. One of the few conflicts over news coverage in Korea occurred when military officials accused reporters of writing biased accounts after United Nations forces reached a stalemate in fighting the North Koreans. See "Korean Coverage Warmly Debated," Editor & Publisher, 1 December 1951, 10.

54. Jack Anderson and Ronald W. May, McCarthy: The Man, the Senator, the "Ism," (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), 266-267. Anderson was an assistant to columnist Drew Pearson, an early McCarthy ally who later engaged in a celebrated feud with the senator.

55. Alan Barth speech before Association for Education in Journalism, quoted in "Better Reporting Held Modern Need," New York Times, 27 August 1952, 21.

56. Secondary works on McCarthy and Cold War anti-Communism abound. Two standard biographies of McCarthy are Thomas Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), and Richard H. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1959). The only book-length work on McCarthy's relationship with newspapers is Edwin R. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981). Bayley, who covered McCarthy as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal, provides a scholarly overview of press coverage of the period, though about half of the book is devoted to the Wisconsin press' coverage of the senator. A useful chapter on McCarthy and the press is found in David M. Oshinsky's biography, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: The Free Press, 1983), 179-190. See also Jean Franklin Deaver, "A Study of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and `McCarthyism' as Influences upon the News Media and the Evolution of Reportorial Method," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1969; and Lloyd Chiasson, Jr., "McCarthy's Journalism," in The Press in Times of Crisis, ed. Lloyd Chiasson, Jr. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995), 153-167. Press coverage of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the postwar years is detailed in Frank J. Donner, The Un-Americans (New York: Ballantine Books, 1961), 147-162.

57. Quoted in Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense, 118.

58. Anderson and May, McCarthy, 267.

59. Quoted in Deaver, "A Study of Joseph R. McCarthy," 87.

60. Richard H. Rovere, "Letter From Washington," New Yorker, 13 May 1950, 96, 98.

61. Quoted in APME Red Book, 1953, 53. McCarthy's skill with the media was by no means unique; the House Un-American Activities Committee showed similar savvy in scheduling news conferences and public hearings for maximum media exposure. (Donner, The Un-Americans, 148-149.)

62. Richard L. Strout, "Ordeal by Publicity: McCarthy Hearings Prove Once More the Distorting Effects of `Straight Reporting,'" Christian Science Monitor Magazine, 27 May 1950, 5.

63. Quoted in Deaver, "A Study of Joseph R. McCarthy," 91.

64. Quoted in Strout, "Ordeal by Publicity," 5.

65. Ibid.

66. Elmer Davis, "News and the Whole Truth," Atlantic Monthly, August 1952, 32, 35. Davis' article received wide notice. See "The Whole Truth?" Time, 28 July 1952, 51.

67. Alan Barth, Government by Investigation (New York: Viking Press, 1955), 195. Also see Alan Barth, The Loyalty of Free Men (New York: Viking Press, 1952), 11.

68. Claremont (N.H.) Daily Eagle, 5 April 1951, cited in "Notice," Nieman Reports, July 1951, 34.

69. Quoted in Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press, 16-17.

70. Erwin D. Canham memorandum to Saville R. Davis, 12 June 1953; Saville R. Davis memorandum to American News Department, 15 June 1953, in personal and professional papers of Richard L. Strout, in possession of Alan Strout, Weston, Mass. Strout was a longtime Washington correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor. His papers are held by his son, Alan Strout. Copies of these memoranda are in possession of the author.

71. Joseph Pulitzer II memorandum to Raymond L. Crowley, 7 July 1953, Papers of Joseph Pulitzer II, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Crowley was the Post-Dispatch's managing editor.

72. See Daniel W. Pfaff, "The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Debate Over Communism, 1940-1955," Paper presented to the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, 10-13 August 1989.

73. APME Red Book, 1953, 51, 53. The memo and a 1953 speech by Hoyt justifying it are reprinted in Palmer Hoyt, "New Dimensions in the News," in The Press and the Public Interest: The William Allen White Lectures, ed. Warren K. Agee (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1968), 39-48.

74. William H. Hornby, Voice of Empire: A Centennial Sketch of the Denver Post (Denver, Colo.: Colorado Historical Society, 1992), 64. A detailed account of the Post's stand concerning McCarthy is found in Bill Hosokawa, Thunder in the Rockies: The Incredible Denver Post (New York: Morrow, 1976), 307-315.

75. Arthur Hays Sulzberger speech to Association for Education in Journalism, quoted in "Better Reporting Held Modern Need," New York Times, 27 August 1952, 21. Bayley, in Joe McCarthy and the Press, 77, reports that his analysis of the Times' news articles about McCarthy found that, indeed, they were mostly reported "straight." Interpretation was limited to separate news articles analyzing the day's news.

76. Dozier C. Cade, "Witch-Hunting, 1952: The Role of the Press," Journalism Quarterly 29 (1952): 404-407.

77. Melvin Mencher, "McCarthy: Who Made Him?" Nieman Reports, January 1953, 47.

78. Proceedings, Twentieth Annual Convention (New York: American Newspaper Guild, 1953), 72.

79. Louis M. Lyons, Newspaper Story: One Hundred Years of the Boston Globe (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1971), 317-318.

80. Ibid., 317. Bayley, in Joe McCarthy and the Press, 125-175, also named the above newspapers as McCarthy opponents as well as the Madison (Wis.) Capital-Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Denver Post, and the Christian Science Monitor.

81. Quoted in APME Red Book, 1950, 69-70.

82. Anderson and May, McCarthy, 269. Evjue said reporters would have treated with contempt any Democrat attempting such a stunt.

83. APME Red Book, 1950, 75-76.

84. Ibid. Hazen appealed to the APME membership to reopen the investigation but members refused. See ibid., 63-79.

85. Ibid., 109; APME Red Book, 1952, 170-171.

86. APME Red Book, 1952, 176-177, 227-228.

87. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press, 126.

88. Will C. Conrad, Kathleen F. Wilson, and Dale Wilson, The Milwaukee Journal: The First Eighty Years (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 165. A detailed first-hand account of McCarthy's feud with the Journal is Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press, 131-135. See also Michael O'Brien, "Robert Fleming, Senator McCarthy and the Myth of the Marine Hero," Journalism Quarterly 50 (1973): 48-53.

89. Anderson and May, McCarthy, 272. McCarthy once accused the Capital-Times of employing a Communist and mailed a booklet detailing his charges to every newspaper and radio station in Wisconsin. The senator's frequent calls for boycotts of newspapers angered usually conservative Editor & Publisher, whose editor said in 1952 that the boycott tactics might violate federal antitrust laws. ("Shop Talk at Thirty," Editor & Publisher, 16 February 1952, 72.)

90. Anderson and May, McCarthy, 280-284. McCarthy's complaints against the press are outlined in his book McCarthyism, the Fight For America; Documented Answers to Questions Asked by Friend and Foe (New York: Devin-Adair, 1952).

91. Memorandum, January 1952, Robert H. Fleming Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis.

92. State Department Information Program--Information Centers, Hearings Before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate, Eighty-third Congress, First Session, Parts 4 and 5, 24 April 1953, 5 May 1953, 253-281, 289-324. For Wechsler's account of his testimony, see James A. Wechsler, The Age of Suspicion (New York: Random House, 1953), 266-288.

93. John B. Oakes, "The Dangerous Obligations of a Newspaperman," Nieman Reports, October 1953, 6.

94. Washington Post, 28 April 1953, quoted in "Definition of Tyranny," Nieman Reports, July 1953, 22.

95. "Freedom and Fear," New York Times, 9 May 1953, 18.

96. The text of the committee report is reprinted in "The ASNE Report on the Wechsler Case," Nieman Reports, October 1953, 25-26. A minority on the committee dissented. See "Additional Comment on the Wechsler Case," ASNE news release dated 13 August 1953, contained in ASNE minutes for 10 October 1953.

97. Arthur Krock, "In the Nation: A Professional Survey of Press Freedom," New York Times, 19 May 1953, 28.

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