General Lee's Spokesman

Editor Douglas Southall Freeman last week celebrated his 3Oth anniversary as editorialist of the Richmond News Leader. In Richmond, as in many a Southern city, newspaper editorials are read and solemnly debated. Many a dinner table rings with arguments over what Virginius Dabney said this morning in the Times-Dispatch, what Douglas Freeman wrote in this afternoon's News Leader. Today few papers in the U. S. have such an editor as Freeman.

To Douglas Freeman, whose biography of Robert E. Lee won a Pulitzer Prize in 1934, the great Commander in Chief of the Confederacy is far from dead. From his study of Lee's campaigns Editor Freeman has acquired such note as an amateur strategist that he is invited once a year to lecture at the War College in Washington.

Editor Freeman made the Civil War in Spain clear to Richmond readers by comparing Talavera de la Reina to Burkeville Junction, Va. When German troops concentrated at Aachen, soon after World War II began, Dr. Freeman wrote in the News Leader:

"Perhaps we best can illustrate the immense potentialities of this news by citing a simple and familiar Virginia parallel. Assume that all counties south of the James River . . . were French territory, and that the counties north of the James , . . were German. Let Powhatan be Belgium, which is neutral. Goochland would correspond to The Netherlands. ... If in this situation the Germans were crowding . . . with hundreds of planes into the western corner of Henrico . . . what would be your suspicion?"

To cram all his activities into the time allotted him, Editor Freeman orders his life by a military schedule. He rises at 4:45 each morning, drives to work (solemnly saluting a statue of General Lee along the way), reaches his office at precisely 5:40. At 1:15 he drives home (again saluting General Lee), spends his afternoon working on books, articles, lectures, talks for an hour with his wife, climbs to the third-floor suite where he has a bedroom, study, bath, and a little chapel (with stained-glass window) for meditation. At exactly 8:45 he goes to bed.

"Don't take your ease in Zion," he tells his newsmen. But if an insomniac reporter beats him to the office, Editor Freeman is rather piqued than gratified. Sometimes he stomps through the city room and salutes his staff: "Good morning, Christian warriors! What the News Leader needs is more news and less bull."

Last week, after peace came to weary Finland, Strategist Freeman wrote: "Men of short memory and shorter patience are demanding a more vigorous prosecution of the war. . . . Will the dead be given leave to speak from the grave? They have one answer to all the insistence upon rash offensives. It is compressed into seven words: Do not attack until you are ready! "President

President Lincoln was led to disregard that counsel in July, 1861, and as the price of haste saw the Federal columns come streaming back in defeat from Manassas. General Lee steadfastly declined to espouse the offensive until Virginia was mobilized, and as his reward was strong enough in June, 1862 to drive McClellan from Richmond. . . ."

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