Man of Sense

Radio's clearheaded, sensible Elmer Davis got the biggest new Federal job: to tell the U.S. as much about the war as possible, as fast as possible, with as few contradictions as possible.

The President had delayed for months before picking a man to head a new super-press bureau: the Office of War Information. Last week he finally summoned 52-year-old Elmer Davis to the White House, told him without fuss & feathers that he had been drafted for the job. Calm Mr. Davis, who dislikes fuss & feathers, took the President's order calmly. Two days later he made his last news broadcast. Two days after that he went to work in Washington.

The Job. The President abolished in one sweeping stroke a galaxy of conflicting agencies: the Office of Facts and Figures (Archibald MacLeish), the Office of Government Reports (Lowell Mellett), the division of information of the Office of Emergency Management (Robert Horton), the Office of the Coordinator of Information ("Wild Bill" Donovan). Donovan's agency was reorganized, its name changed to the Office of Strategic Services, and it was put under the general staffs of the Army & Navy.

Armed with new authority to issue directives to all Government departments and agencies on news practices, OWI is responsible only to the President. How well it will function depends on Army & Navy cooperation. But an astute civilian with authority conceivably might get that cooperation.

The Man. Forthright Elmer Davis knows what confusion has thus far been wrought in World War II. Said he, in a March broadcast: "The whole Government publicity situation has everybody in the news business almost in despair, with half a dozen different agencies following different lines. . . . Under one head, with real power, they might get somewhere. . . . Objection has been made that it might be hard to pick the man to head them. But almost anybody would be better than half a dozen heads."

Long before his low-pitched, easy, flat Midwestern voice became known to the U.S. over CBS, Indiana-born Elmer Davis had earned a reputation as one of the best newsmen in the business. A graduate of Franklin College (1910), he went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Then he worked ten years on the New York Times as reporter and editorial writer. He quit to freelance, wrote popular fiction. Scholarly in tone and appearance, he is no pedant. When the Saturday Review of Literature carried a weighty article on Indiana authors some years ago, he wrote a dour reply: Indiana's greatest contribution to culture was unquestionably the late Cinemactress Carole Lombard.

Elmer Davis likes to say that his broadcasts are successful because his voice "sounds like it came from back home." When he went on the air for the last time, he ended, without fuss & feathers: "This is my last broadcast as I have been called into Government service."

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