"Unofficial but Authoritative"

Snapped the Army & Navy Journal impatiently: it is high time for Russia to help her Allies with a "second front" in Poland. Quick as an echo last week came the reply of Russia's own army journal, Red Star: such talk bears "the Goebbels trademark." Izvestia chimed in: "Small-caliber strategists. . . ." Russia's mighty Pravda (circulation: 2,000,000) had already paid its blunt respects: "This journal looks ugly."

All this attention from Russia was due not to the Army & Navy Journal's circulation (27,568 weekly) but to its reputation as an "unofficial but authoritative" spokesman for the U.S. Army & Navy. The Journal itself likes to foster this impression by reprinting each week from its 1863 announcement: "Established in obedience to an insistent demand for an official organ for members of the American Defense and those concerned with it." Actually, the Journal is not in the least official. Nor is it always authoritative.

Eruptions and Opinions. One month before George Catlett Marshall declared for conscription in 1940, the Journal authoritatively reported that the Army was against it. In September 1943, it hinted authoritatively that General Marshall would be "kicked upstairs" from his Chief of Staff job. Three months later, its authoritative guess was that a British general would lead the invasion. These wrong guesses were dropped in beside carefully compiled lists of official orders, communiques, casualty lists (usually, officers only) and social notes on the doings of the officer caste--all reported as staidly as in the Journal's rival, the equally unofficial Army & Navy Register.*

In recent months the Journal has sounded off more & more on foreign policy; last month it trumpeted that the war in Europe would be over by now if Britain and Russia had not got sidetracked in politics. Such eruptions would be important if they were planted in the Journal by the Administration (as the Russians apparently suspect). But generally they are simply the opinions of the Journal's jovial, rosy-cheeked Publisher John Callan O'Laughlin, 72; less often they are the opinions of O'Laughlin friends in the Army & Navy.

Colonel O'Laughlin (a reserve rank) covered St. Petersburg (now Leningrad) for the Associated Press in 1904, and subsequently was used by Theodore Roosevelt as a go-between with the Russians in arranging the Russo-Japanese peace. For two months in 1909, he was Teddy's first assistant secretary of state, then he trekked to Africa with Roosevelt as a personal secretary. In World War I, he was a Major in the Quartermaster Corps, later for a time a U.S. secretary for the Inter-Allied Munitions Council. He bought the 81-year-old Journal in 1925, still does much of its leg work. He has five assistants, only one of whom (a former chaplain) has a military backgound. O'Laughlin's closest friend: John J. Pershing.

* Three other service publications--the Infantry, Cavalry and Coast Artillery journals--carefully identify themselves as unofficial, but some of their editors and many of their contributors are on active duty, and hence are responsible to the War Department. Unlike the Army & Navy Journal, which carries whiskey and cigaret ads, they take no paid advertising.

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