Veteran to Rome

Some of the world's most fascinating news is beginning to be written: the story of what really has been happening in Occupied Europe during the past five years, in Nazi Germany since 1933, in Fascist Italy since 1922--and the story of these nations' slow awakening to new freedom.

A few veterans have already begun digging into the rich mines of political and human interest news long sealed by dictatorial censorship, but the digging has been difficult. In Italy, reports have been sharply restricted by military censorship. The ablest reports to date have come from the New York Times's Herbert L. Matthews, whose stories on the Ciano execution (TIME, July 10) and the Matteotti murder (TIME, Aug. 7) stirred international interest. Other political writers who have begun to clear the picture of Europe under Fascism are the U.P.'s Reynolds and Eleanor Packard, I.N.S.'s Mike Chinigo, A.P.'s Edward Kennedy, New York Herald Tribune's Homer Bigart. Most had been in Italy before the war, all have old contacts there from which new material has begun to flow.

Last week a new series of dispatches from Rome revealed another veteran U.S. political reporter on the job. They came from Anne O'Hare McCormick of the New York Times, who probably knows from of old more about Italy and the rest of Europe than any of her competitors. Revisiting many an old friend, she has found Italians hungry ("For the first time in Rome an American feels a little uncomfortable before the hungry eyes of the inhabitants"), eager to regain self-respect and self-government, but resigned to paying "in humiliation, impoverishment and a long status of probation for fatal mistakes of fascist policy."

This week she cabled that one of the most striking changes in Italy during the war has been the great increase in popularity of the Pope. She quoted an "old liberal" as declaring: "The Pope remains the winner of Italy's one victory--the saving of Rome."

First & Only. Plump, greying Anne McCormick, born in England, reared in Dayton, Ohio, began acquiring European background on trips abroad with her husband, Francis J. McCormick, a Dayton importer. In 1921 she became a free-lance contributor to the Times, soon landed a fulltime, roving job. She was one of the first reporters to spot Mussolini as a coming leader of Italy.

In more than 20 years of roving an uneasy Europe, she has interviewed nearly all the top history-makers, including Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, De Valera, Blum, Dollfuss, Schuschnigg. She is the only woman ever to serve on the governing editorial council of the New York Times. In 1937 she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence. For her, President Roosevelt regularly violates his rule against private interviews with reporters.

On duty in Rome, Mrs. McCormick shuns correspondent's uniform, but also suppresses her yen for exotic hats. She lives in the Grand Hotel with the rest of the Times staff, where she rubs elbows with senior Allied officers, high Italian political and social figures. As one correspondent remarked, "She looks as though she ought to be home minding grandbaby or puttering around in the garden, but you change your mind when she starts talking."

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