What's a Radical?

With the fall of Czechoslovakia, the world's areas of press freedom were narrowed down more than ever. Nevertheless, the U.S. last week sent a delegation to the U.N. Freedom of Information Conference at Geneva. The State Department had found it hard to fill the team, captained by William B. Benton, ex-Assistant Secretary of State. Part of the trouble had been the State Department itself.

Department underlings had proposed Harry Martin of Memphis, anti-Communist president of the C.I.O. American Newspaper Guild, as a delegate. But he had been turned down by higher-ups as a radical. His sin: in 1938 he had given a small sum to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. Martin told the New York Herald Tribune that his name "had been taken to the top three times but that the answer was 'no' each time."

When Presidential Press Secretary Charlie Ross read about this striped-pants stupidity, he took the clipping in to the boss. He told Harry Truman that he was "damned sick & tired of this guilt by association and pillorying of decent citizens." The President agreed, picked up a phone, and told State to okay Harry Martin. This week, Delegate Martin flies the Atlantic to join the rest of the team.*

*Including Sevellon Brown, Providence Journal publisher; Erwin D. Canham, Christian Science Monitor editor; Harvard Professor Zechariah Chafee Jr., and John Carter Vincent, U.S. Minister to Switzerland.

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