Damned Lie

New York's tabloid Daily News splashed it on Page One: TRUMAN ASKS 4 JUSTICES TO QUIT. In Washington, Cissie Patterson's sister paper, the Times-Herald, gave it a black bannerline buildup. It was one of the biggest news stories of the year--if true. Never in U.S. history had a President told Supreme Court justices to get out. The story even named the four justices: Black, Jackson, Frankfurter and Murphy. To devoted News and Times-Herald readers, it looked like the straight dope. To newsmen, it did not: the "scoop" was signed by poison-penman Columnist John O'Donnell.

Wrote O'Donnell: "The request . . . has been conveyed to each [justice] by word of mouth. . . . Frankfurter got the bad news directly across the White House desk from Truman." The denials came fast and hard. Said White House Press Secretary Charles Ross: "The most cockeyed thing I ever heard of." O'Donnell's story, he said, was "false in every particular. . . . Truman has not seen or talked to Frankfurter since he became President. . . . Frankfurter has never been in the White House since Truman became President."

President Truman, asked about it in a press conference on the battlefield of Gettysburg, snapped: Just another one of O'Donnell's damned lies. Out of whole cloth. It's beneath an answer.

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