Jimmy James's Boys

One day when Edward Angly, who later became a foreign correspondent, was just another reporter on the New York Herald Tribune city staff, he went to the Trib's assistant editor Wilbur Forrest, asked for an assignment abroad.

Asked Forrest: "What makes you think you could be a foreign correspondent?"

Replied Angly: "Oh, I know all about foreign affairs. I've been reading the New York Times for years!"

What Harvard is to U.S. education, what the House of Morgan has been to U.S. finance, the New York Times is to U.S. journalism. Rich in reputation, ripe in years, the Times is respected because it is thorough, dignified and decent. No one reads it for the lively approach. The Times has sometimes almost seemed to preen itself on its dowagerlike lack of humor, its presentation of all news in the same flat tone of voice.

There is a reason. Times editors, in judging the newsworthiness of stories, al ways keep a mental eye cocked on their rag-paper edition -- a special edition print ed on paper that will last longer than regular newsprint. This edition goes to libraries, museums and into the Times's own files as a record for history.

But war made this journalistic conservatism almost untenable. War was too real, too exciting.* By spring 1941, when Ray Brock wrote from Belgrade with glorious enthusiasm of the Yugoslav decision to fight the Nazis, the lid was off. Now Times correspondents are allowed always to write much as they please.

Today the Times is proud of its writing, and particularly proud of the writing of its far-flung staff of foreign correspondents, certainly the best such single newspaper staff in the U.S., perhaps in the world.

In 1859, eight years after it was born, the New York Times had one authentic foreign correspondent and he worked abroad only part of the time. He was Henry Raymond, one of the paper's co-founders (the other: Businessman George Jones). A dispatch that Correspondent Raymond wrote from Italy, an eyewitness account of the Battle of Solferino in the Austrian-Franco-Sardinian war, took 13 days to reach the U.S. by boat. Last week, the Times foreign staff included 34 men and two women/- scattered on the globe's continents and seas. They send well over 300,000 words a month to the Times by radio, telephone and cable.

War has taken toll of the Times foreign staff. Crack Correspondent Byron Darnton was accidentally killed in New Guinea. Robert Post failed to return from a bomber trip over Wilhelmshaven. Fred Wilkins, long the Times's Manila correspondent, is a Jap prisoner. Other able, famed Timesmen, like Otto Tolischus (author of the recent Tokyo Record) and Hallett Abend (Ramparts of the Pacific), are now in the U.S. because the countries they covered are enemy-held.

Chessmaster. On the checkered face of the world, Times correspondents are chessmen. Chessmaster is short, stocky 53-year-old Edwin L. (for Leland) James, a veteran foreign reporter himself. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Virginia's Randolph-Macon College, he worked for papers in Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Albany, came to the Times in 1915.

As a foreign correspondent, covering the A.E.F. in 1918, he outwitted military censors skillfully. Once he sent a long, inane, seemingly pointless dispatch containing, for no apparent reason, the names and home addresses of several Irish New Yorkers. Astounded at first, the Times's great Managing Editor Carr Van Anda finally realized James must be trying to say something. He sent reporters to the addresses. Soon he learned that all the men named were members of New York's great "Fighting Sixty-Ninth." Result: a Times scoop on the news that the Fighting Sixty-Ninth was going into action.

By 1919 James was chief of the Times's Bureau in Paris, where he so won the respect and friendship of French officials that he was made a member of the French Legion of Honor. In Paris he covered the arrival of Atlantic Flyer Lindbergh, considers that one of the most important stories he ever handled.

Careful, poised, experienced "Jimmy" James became the Times's managing editor in 1932, succeeding Van Anda, To Jimmy James goes the major credit for the Times's superb coverage of World War II. To the carefully chosen reporters he sends abroad James gives tremendous freedom. A departing correspondent is told, in effect: "The Times's attitude is that you are our ambassador.

If we did not have confidence in you, we would not send you. We will not second-guess you. We will go along with you, or we will bring you home. go on, now; and don't get us into trouble!" No Timesman's dispatch is cut except for space reasons, ever materially changed except for the necessary addition, by the paper's twelve cable copyreaders, of "ands" and "thes" (left out of cables to save tolls).

Proof that the Times does go along with its correspondents: though it buys seven press services, an estimated four-fifths of all the foreign news the Times prints (communiques excepted) comes from its own men.

Chessmen. Timesmen are by no means perfect. Daniel Brigham, in Switzerland, has often been fooled by German propaganda and has repeatedly missed accuracy, spurred by phony tips and his own imagination.

Cocky, cynical Frank Kluckhohn put his foot in his mouth early this year when he heard about President Roosevelt's imminent arrival in Africa. Kluckhohn, who was in Casablanca, demanded transportation to Dakar, where he was sure the President would land. He got it, had a fine view of Dakar while Roosevelt conferred in Casablanca.

Even able Hanson Baldwin, Times military analyst and perhaps the best in formed war writer in the U.S. today, in common with most experts predicted, soon after the German invasion of Russia, that the Nazis would win another quick victory.

But for every Timesmaris bobble, there are many triumphs.

> Herbert L. Matthews, 43, one of the ablest, is a deadly serious, intellectual reporter who lives meticulously on a rigid schedule, looks like a State Department attache, has a Phi Beta Kappa key, writes with steadfast accuracy. A native New Yorker, Matthews has been a Timesman since 1922, a foreign correspondent since 1928. He marched with the Italians into Ethiopia, covered the Spanish Civil War from the Republican side. In Italy when war between the U.S. and the Axis broke out, he was interned. Released last summer, he returned to the U.S. He has written two books: Eyewitness in Abyssinia, Two Wars and More To Come.

Today Matthews is in India. His only instruction from Managing Editor James : to tell Americans about the country. In the past seven months, as a result, Matthews has done a body of work that amounts to a major triumph, a job in India that no other reporter has ever done. Reporting only infrequently on Indian politics, as confusing to him as to anyone, he has concentrated on a long series of enlightening feature pieces that amount to the first real U.S. contribution to understanding of a largely undiscovered nation.

> Cyrus L. Sulzberger II has been a working newsman less than ten years, a Timesman only since 1939. Still young (29) and a nephew of Times Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger; he has bested both handicaps, has won the respect of Timesmen on his own merits.

Tall, dark-haired, an omnivorous reader (of history, philosophy) and an accomplished linguist, Cy Sulzberger joined the Pittsburgh Press when he graduated from Harvard in 1934, weekly spent most of his meager earnings on modern art and books. Later he went to the United Press's Washington bureau, mainly reported on labor news. There he was distinguished as the worst-dressed Washington reporter, wearing a frayed trench coat in all weathers. Then he wrote a book, Sit Down with John L. Lewis. In 1938 he went abroad on his own, joined the London Evening Stand ard. In 1939 he joined the Times' s London bureau. From 1938 until he returned to the U.S. in August 1942 he traveled an estimated 100,000 miles through 30 countries, visited many of the battlefronts of World War II. He wrote so many needling articles about Balkan and Axis politics that he was successively banned from Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Italy, was called by Italian Propagandist Virginio Gayda "a creeping tarantula, going from country to country, spreading poison." He was arrested by the Gestapo as a British spy.

He is now at the front in North Africa.

> Hanson Baldwin, long, lean, softspoken, is not properly a full-time foreign correspondent. But as military affairs analyst of the Times (he hates the word "expert") he periodically goes out to where things are happening, to get the feel of the news. Baltimore-born, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate (1924), he served with the Navy three years before becoming a Baltimore Sun reporter. He went to the Times in 1929, at once got all naval assignments. Coached by Managing Editor James, who saw war coming, Reporter Baldwin specialized more & more in naval and military affairs: in 1937 he toured Europe for four months, learning all he could about the land, air and sea strength of Europe's powers; steadily studied logistics, tactics, military history.

For Times readers Hanson Baldwin writes scholarly, precise essays, translating war developments into smooth, easily understood terms. Religiously he shies from using technical phraseology. Perhaps his best work: a brilliant series he wrote after a trip to the Southwest Pacific last summer. Another outstanding Baldwin series: the one in December 1942 in which he deftly exploded the popular theory that the United Nations have vastly more manpower available than the Axis, and made clear the need for an 11,000,000-man U.S. Army. Baldwin is also now in North Africa.

> Drew Middleton, newest addition to the Times foreign staff, is a brisk, cou rageous, 29-year-old New Yorker, who joined the Associated Press in 1937, shortly after leaving Syracuse University. He started with the A. P. as a sportswriter, was sent to England in 1939 to cover Euro pean sports. He spent his 26th birthday "somewhere behind the Maginot Line" in France, scurried back to England when France fell. He covered the Battle of Britain in late 1940.

Middleton did only passably well under the A.P.'s somewhat stuffy wraps until, last summer, he covered the Allied Commando raid on Dieppe. His dispatch on that assault was excellent reporting.

Raymond Daniell, the capable chief of the Times's London bureau and a topflight reporter himself, liked that dispatch. He also faced a shortage of hands. Drew Middleton became a Timesman. He went at once to North Africa, wrote part of the time from the front, part of the time from Algiers. From both areas his dispatches were clearly the best U.S. reporting, showing an understanding of international politics as well as of battle. He was the first to make sense of the Giraud-De Gaulle situation, and is an expert in not writing up American patrol skirmishes as the "biggest battle" of the war. Recently, for a rest, he returned to London.

And Others. Brooks Atkinson, longtime quiet, polished Times drama critic, is in Chungking to learn the ropes. He has much the same sort of assignment that Matthews has in India. One of his stories, costing $45 in cable tolls, told of the difficulties of taking a bath in China's capital; another described a St. Louisan who has been in Chungking 20 years and who makes "a kidney disintegrator labeled Chungking Gin, Grade D!'" Robert Trumbull, best-seller author (The Raft), is in Hawaii. Tillman Durdin and Harry Summers write from Australia. Ralph Parker, a Briton, is in Moscow; his dispatches are filled with Anglicisms that would confound U.S. readers, so they have to be unscrambled in London before being sent on.

These are the kind of men that make the Times foreign coverage great. When historians, years hence, come to render their verdicts on World War II, they will find in the color-rich, fact-filled rag-paper files irrefutable evidence that the New York Times is the nation's Great Recorder.

*An early crack in the Times's cold crust showed in 1937, when it printed verbatim excerpts from Ernest Hemingway's N.A.N.A. reports of the Spanish Civil War. t More correspondents than any other U.S. publication. TIME has 22, the Christian Science Monitor, 20; the Chicago Daily News, n; the New York Herald Tribune, 12.

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