I SEE BY THE PAPERS'

...McCarthy always covers up a defeat with a startling new attack in some other direction, and all too often the press gladly or stupidly cooperates...

...whereby they undertook to publish and distribute 100,000 copies of this book, to pay him 10 cents a copy for these and 5 cents a copy thereafter...

...McCarthy could have been useful to the Lustron Co...

...Having criticized McCarthy for the $10,000 fee he received from Lustron Corp...

...The tricks of the Senator's trade would not have brought him as far aj they have if so many newspapers had not proved willing, consciously or unconsciously, to be exploited...

...This agreement was entered into after Sen...

...The New York Herald~Tribune found the decision to resist aggression in Korea "one of those basic decisions which really do change history...

...He made the deal, not at a time when he was in no position to be "useful" to Lustron, but at a time when he was vice-chairman of a joint committee on housing which proved quite useful to Lustron by preparing legislation for RFC loans to support mass-produced houses...

...It is not possible therefore that Sen...

...If this sort of thing were an isolated instance you could shrug it off, but any newspaper reader knows that it goes on all the time...

...Though our official line was that our stand had been dictated by humanitarian considerations, the reasons for it were far less idealistic...

...He waged a one-man campaign against the prevailing official and editorial view of truce issues which was no less creditable for being unsuccessful...

...The Geneva convention, signed by the United States less than a year before the outbreak of war in Korea, contains a clear injunction that "prisoners of war shall be released and repatriated without delay after cessation of hostilities...

...Truman...

...McCarthy's part in this transaction was on the same plane as the common practice of some legislators of accepting fees for speeches and earning other fees from legitimate services...

...A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, he served for a time as chief editorial writer for the Chicago Sun-Times before going to St...

...The gentleman from Independence would not, therefore, be needed as a witness...

...McCarthy's party, the Republican Party, had been defeated in the 1950 elections and had lost control of Congress and Sen...

...Mathews cogently pointed out that this meant prolonging a present war for a purely speculative advantage in an as yet non-existent war...

...William R. Mathews, editor and publisher of the Arizona Daily Star at Tucson, did his own thinking and gathered his own information...

...Most leading papers chose to remain silent...

...Mathews and the Arizona Daily Star, in contrast to the majority of the press, made these facts public and drew the logical conclusion— that the American stand on prisoners was unsound, and might be needlessly prolonging a war which our leaders told us could be ended any time the prisoner question was settled...

...The Enquirer served McCarthy even better...

...Louis...

...Last spring, after some pre-trial hearings had been held, the Post-Standard announced a settlement of the suit in an editorial retracting its criticisms of the Senator...

...McCarthy was very unpopular with the Truman Administration...

...Is it any wonder that he wrathfully accused our leadership of "disgraceful hum-buggery and misrepresentation...

...testify...

...According to the Hennings Subcommittee on Rules and Privileges, McCarthy made the deal with Lustron not in 1950, when his party had just been defeated, but in 1948, before the election of that year, when his party was still in the majority...

...Generally Republican in outlook, that newspaper of 81,000 circulation editorially denounced the Senator in October, 1951, and the Senator filed a libel suit for $500,000...

...No mention of who made it...

...He based the action on certain allegations which the Post-Standard had derived from testimony given in a Swiss court by a man claiming to have been a McCarthy spy...

...Truman was suspected of failing to turn over to the FBI the names of Americans brought out in the Canadian spy ring exposure of 1945...

...McCarthy had prepared a book advising veterans how they could finance home purchases and obtain full advantage of all helps and provisions of federal housing laws...

...Should the history of the Korean war, when it is written, show that the war was prolonged by Communist intransigence at some points, and by American pursuit of a dubious "psychological warfare" objective at others, many of the country's editorial pages and news commentators will have to bear the responsibility for conditioning the public mind to accept what will surely be seen in hindsight as a tragic error...

...It says nothing about sending home only those prisoners who say they are willing to be repatriated...

...If so, did the editorial mention the man who made the decision to make the stand...

...The Enquirer dutifully reported this in half a column on Page 2: "Truman Might Be 'Invited' by McCarthy to Give Data on Spy Group to Senators...

...As McCarthy must have known, it was practically foreordained that for many newspaper readers the small sound of the fizzle would never reach the proportions of the original bang...

...His article, "For A Free Press," won the Atlantic Prize for 1944...

...Somebody apparently got the idea that by exploiting the "voluntary repatriation" issue we could induce political refugees and enemy soldiers in a future war to desert the Communist cause...

...I can best illustrate the point by noting how one newspaper, the Cincinnati Enquirer, handled the McCarthy news during one of his periods of intense activity in late June and July...

...with the Truman Ad-mistration...

...Mathews expressed his views in letters to the New York Times and the Chicago Daily News, but found few takers...

...In the fall of 1952, when the truce talks got hung up on the single issue of repatriation of prisoners, Mathews made an interesting discovery...

...But never a word, in this Times stock-taking, of the President who persuaded us to regain our national soul...

...On the radio and in many of the newspapers, the forgotten man of truce day was Harry S. Truman...

...We did a difficult and costly thing because we thought it was right...

...Either through a quaint standard of news judgment or an unwarranted sympathy with McCarthyism, they have too often allowed themselves to be used...

...CIA Director Allen Dulles refused to bend the knee, and after his conference with McCarthy the latter's plan to subpena Bundy quietly evaporated...

...Somehow the first news of McCarthy's slanders generally gets the big play, and the later news of his backdowns is handled in dull, routine fashion if at all...

...Readers of the Cincinnati Enquirer, however, could be excused if they did not realize that Dulles rather than McCarthy had won the skirmish...

...The Associated Press carried the Truman item as just one of several McCarthy developments of the day, which meant that it was buried well down in the story and didn't get into the top headlines...

...He insisted, but found few editors to agree with him, that a nation which claimed to be struggling for the rule of law could riot well begin by breaking a law it had helped to write as recently as 1949...

...It took a very close reader indeed to remark that McCarthy gave no grounds whatever for the suspicion, and had merely said that Mr...

...Truman might be questioned if the Department of Justice, which he was querying, should indicate that the list of spy suspects had not been turned over...

...The Post-Standard is convinced that Sen...

...Then a thoughtful reporter asked him what reply he had ever received from the Department of Justice...

...He looked up the history of the 1949 Geneva convention on war prisoners, and found that, as the Communists were claiming, the stand taken by the UN command violated the provisions of that agreement...

...The New York Times, on truce day, had a thorough, sober piece called "The Stock-Taking...

...He knows as few demagogues do how to get the most out of a sensational accusation, and how to bury the news of his failure to substantiate it...

...He entered into an agreement with Lustron Co...

...The official defense then retreated to the line that, whatever the Geneva convention might say, "our side" had promised the North Koreans and Chinese asylum if they became prisoners, and as honorable men we had to keep the promise...

...In fact, when this question came up during the conference which wrote the convention, a clause giving prisoners the option of refusing repatriation was rejected under the joint leadership of Soviet and American delegates—both of whom argued that such a provision might permit the capturing power to exercise coercion...

...It chose to publish that day, instead of the AP dispatch, the McCarthy news as reported by the (Hearst) International News Service, and it so happened that the INS story as printed in the Enquirer had nothing to say on this particular development...

...If newspapers mold public opinion, which I sometimes doubt, they performed in this instance the same function which a government-controlled press would perform, of conditioning popular attitudes to accept and support the judgment of the policy makers in Washington...

...Playing a hunch based on his own World War I experience in taking prisoners, Mathews sent to Korea and obtained copies of the propaganda leaflets which, in accordance with standing operating procedure, had been aimed at the enemy...

...Nobody could rebut his facts, but few editors were ready to face their implications...

...To The Baltimore Sun, it looked as if the Korean action may "have turned the tide, to have performed the decisive action, to have called halt to a spreading darkness which threatened to engulf the globe...

...An editorial friend of his in Jackson, Miss., declared that Mathews must be "tetched in the haid...

...Louis Post-Dispatch, widely regarded as one of the best of the American dailies...

...Thus, when he was forced to back down on his hiring of J. B. Matthews, McCarthy promptly rushed forth with his assault on the CIA and one of its employes, William P. Bundy, who was alleged to be guilty of a double crime—of being related by marriage to Dean Acheson, and of having contributed to the Alger Hiss defense fund...

...He turned out to be an unreliable witness, and the Post-Standard was stuck with charges it could not prove...

...As far as Enquirer readers can be presumed to know, former President Truman is still under a dark suspicion of withholding facts on espionage from the FBI...

...I See by the Papers' By Robert Lasch When McCarthy Is News SENATOR Joseph McCarthy's success in building himself up as the high priest of anti-Communism has always depended on his skill at exploiting news opportunities...

...To those who judge ideas less by their content than by their endorsements, Communist sponsorship is enough to condemn a proposition out of hand...

...The action in Korea, said The Times, "represented something of a regaining of our national soul and our national conscience...

...Three weeks passed without word from McCarthy to support his dramatic innuendo...

...The Detroit News published a lead editorial headed, Mathews is Right, But We're Stuck With It...

...Voice in the Wilderness During the long drawn-out Korean truce negotiations, few American editorial pages covered themselves with glory by way of independent and original comment...

...With most of them it was a case of waving the flag, of parroting the official propaganda line, of following the simple formula that whatever "our side" proposed was ipso facto right...

...McCarthy, faced by Administration resistance for once, found that he had bitten off more than he could chew...

...For they read an INS dispatch which put all the emphasis, not on McCarthy's retreat, but on McCarthy's statement that Dulles had agreed to re-evaluate Bundy's security status if any seriously derogatory information on him was turned in...

...Mathews, however, allowed himself to be persuaded by the facts...

...Because the solidarity of editorial opinion was so conspicuous it is a pleasure to record an exception...

...Y.) Post-Standard...

...Here was a retraction indeed—one which undertook to rewrite history in respect to the key facts about McCarthy's Lustron fee...

...He learned that we had made no commitments to prospective prisoners except the usual ones of good food and decent treatment...

...No reference to you know who...

...Evidently by pre-arrangement with McCarthy, the Post-Standard retracted not only the statements which it was unable to prove, but statements for which a good deal of official support exists...

...To me the impressive thing about Mathews' little adventure in the art of influencing people in high places was the stone wall of intellectual resistance which he met among his colleagues of the press...

...I rather suspect that the answer, to that second question, in a lot of cases, would be "No...

...The Forgotten Man Did your newspaper publish an editorial, when the Korean truce was signed, in which you were told why the United States went to war, and what had been gained by this historic stand against aggression...

...McCarthy was compelled to confess that, according to the FBI, no information had been withheld by Mr...

...A Retraction Indeed For kindness to McCarthy above and beyond the call of duty, it is hard to beat the case of the Syracuse (N...

...for a pamphlet on housing prepared by his staff, the Post-Standard took it back: "The facts in this case are these: Sen...

...On a Monday, just to start off the week with a bang, the Senator burst into print with the shocking announcement that he might ask his Committee to invite, or "subpena if necessary," Harry S. Truman to ROBERT LASGH, who was educated at the University of Nebraska, Oxford, and Harvard, is an editorial writer for the St...

...A casual reader of this dispatch must have got the impression which McCarthy meant him to get, namely that Mr...