"Just What He Should Be"

When a newspaper correspondent makes an error which gets published, he usually receives a thoroughgoing reprimand in private from his chief. Should he then exert himself to make amends, he is usually patted on the back and told he is "good." But, again, this is done privately. Sometimes, however, the initial fault is so grievous that the correspondent's employers feel obliged to seize the first opportunity to pat the erring one publicly, so that all may know his professional family is still proud of him.

Was such the case last week with Correspondent Wilbur Forrest, amiable chief of the New York Herald Tribune's Paris bureau?

Two months ago, well-meaning Mr. Forrest, whose years of scrivening and dubious golf game have not dulled his sensibilities and his imagination, stood outside the offices of a leading Paris newspaper and watched the posting of bulletins about ill-fated Flyers Coli and Nungesser. Several thousands of Frenchmen surrounded Mr. Forrest and when a bulletin was posted saying that the flyers had been falsely reported safe in the U. S., Mr. Forrest interpreted the Frenchmen's noisy grief and disappointment as an "anti-A m e r i c a n demonstration." Other U. S. correspondents in Paris soon and roundly denied this interpretation and for several days after the incident, U. S. editors were kept busy explaining that the French were not an irrationally peevish people (TIME, May 23). What the Herald Tribune management said to Mr. Forrest about his putting the newspaper in such a position, has never come out. But last week the Herald Tribune left no doubt in the public mind but that Mr. Forrest is now in the best of standing. Mr. Forrest, like many another correspondent, had hurried last fortnight from Paris to Ver-sur-Mer on the Channel coast as soon as news was flashed that Flyer Byrd and comrades had come down there. Mr. Forrest was alert and daring enough to get a commercial pilot to whisk him off to the coast through the stormy night so that he arrived before any of his competitor-colleagues. Of this feat, said the Herald Tribune's unconventional editorial last week: "Just what a foreign correspondent ought to be is Mr. Wilbur Forrest . . . Wherever trouble is brewing or news is breaking he has the habit of being first on the spot ... It is work like his which has given the Herald Tribune so notable an advantage in the collection and presentation of big first-page news."