Monday, Oct. 11, 1943

To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

With Mussolini out, Fillmore Calhoun is on his way back to Rome for TIME.

Calhoun was running our Rome Bureau all through the dark spring of 1940 when France was collapsing and Britain was girding for invasion. He saw clearly that "it is inevitable that Italy will be involved; Il Duce has been building for this war as surely as Hitler"--and he was in the crowd beneath the balcony of the Palazzo Venetia when Mussolini delivered his stab in the back to France and called Italy to arms "to safeguard her honor, interests, and future."

Three weeks later Calhoun was kicked out of the country for a story that called Mussolini that "elderly butcher boy of Fascism" -- and rather than send another correspondent, we closed the Rome Bureau. In the face of wartime censorship there was no chance in Italy for TIME'S kind of reporting.

After he was ordered out of Italy, Calhoun did hitches for TIME in Lisbon, Ottawa, and Chicago, then joined our New York staff as one of our top writers in Foreign News. Early this August he took off for Cairo, and for the past two months he has been waiting in the Middle East to go into action with General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson's Ninth and Tenth British Armies.

But after Jack Belden was wounded during the first fighting at Salerno, Calhoun's long-time knowledge of Italy seemed to make him the logical man to replace Belden. And with veteran Harry Zinder still on the job in the Middle East, we lost no time rushing Calhoun back to Italy.

Fill Calhoun has been a newsman all his working life. Now 34, he graduated from the University of Washington and Columbia School of Journalism--broke in on the Seattle Star--worked for three other papers on the West Coast and in the Middle West, then spent three years as night manager for the United Press in San Francisco.

Calhoun was in Europe all during the summer of 1939, and when the Nazis marched into Poland he joined our overseas staff. He has been digging out the news for TIME on one front or another ever since.

When Calhoun reaches Rome, I suppose we will have to begin thinking about how soon we can re-open the Berlin Bureau which Steve Laird headed for us before America got into the war. Laird had to leave Germany for Switzerland in June 1941 in order to telephone us from a neutral country the true facts about Rudolf Hess and the background of all the sensational events that led up to Hitler's attack on Russia.

Cordially,

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