24 Hours to Leave

With most of the nations of the world determined to keep the others from knowing what they are up to, nowadays a foreign correspondent's job is tough. One correspondent who has had his share of trouble is Minnesota-born Frank L. Kluckhohn of the New York Times. He was the first to report direct German and Italian aid to General Franco. After several months it became impossible for him to file stories from Rebel Spain. Then the Times sent Kluckhohn to Mexico City.

In Mexico, Correspondent Kluckhohn's reports soon took on a tone unsympathetic to the Cardenas regime. He was the first reporter to discover that proletarian Mexico was bartering expropriated oil for products from Nazi Germany. He reported the woes of foreign businessmen with such zeal that Mexican authorities lost patience.

Last week, when Correspondent Kluckhohn returned to Mexico City from St. Louis, where his first child had been born, he called on the Department of Publicity and Propaganda for comment on a report that Mexico was trying to sell bartered German goods to other Latin American countries. Mr. Kluckhohn was told to come back in an hour. When he went back, accompanied by a U. P. man who was after the same story, he was told to wait while the U. P. man was called upstairs. When Kluckhohn tired of waiting, he started to leave. Two guards grabbed him, hustled him off to the Interior Department where he was told he had 24 hours to get out of Mexico.

Said Propaganda Chief Agustin Arrayo of the first correspondent to be deported from Mexico in years: "Mr. Kluckhohn, in his very active work, maliciously misinterpreted the doctrines of the Mexican Government ... in absolute conflict with the most elemental ethics of journalism. . . ."

The Times issued a statement declaring its utter confidence in its man, revealing that it had sent a representative to Mexico not long ago to check on his authenticity. Kluckhohn was assigned to cover Mexico from Brownsville, Texas. Other sectors of the U. S. press were less temperate. The Hearstian New York Mirror shrilled: "Presidents Roosevelt and Cardenas ought to realize that a lot of Americans are saying: 'Why not just go down there and take over Mexico? . . . The Mexicans themselves would be better off.' " In Mexico City the conservative Ultimas Noticias declaimed: "Kluckhohn sees everything the color of earthquakes or cyclones or black small pox and consequently could not send news of our splendid economic conditions. . . ."

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