Storm over Wake

As the senior wire-service correspondent at the White House, United Pressman Merriman Smith, 37, has enjoyed the affection of President Truman, the esteem of his colleagues and a time-honored privilege: he closes the presidential press conferences with his "Thank you, Mr. President." But at last week's conference (which Smith skipped), the President had no thanks for Mr. Smith. Harry Truman, notably in a touchy mood (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), tartly remarked that one news service at least had been something less than objective in its coverage of the Truman-MacArthur meeting on Wake Island. What galled the President was Smith's dispatches on the way to Wake describing Harry Truman as unusually snappish.

Through Red Tape. But the President's ire against Smith was nothing compared to the anger of the 22 correspondents on the trip. The dustup was over the newsbeat Smith had scored on the Wake meeting by breaking an agreement with his peers. At Wake, the correspondents had to share a single radio teletypewriter to Honolulu. As a result, they agreed to pool the first communique from the conference and send it as a joint dispatch to the three wire services, United Press, Associated Press and International News Service. When the communique--the only real news in the meeting--was issued, it was sent down to the radio shack for transmission. Before it could be sent, Smith took his own copy of the communique, rip-roodled off to the radio shack and peremptorily ordered the operator, "in the name of the White House," to send it. The trusting operator complied. By the time the pooled message was sent, Smith and the U.P. had a clear beat of 40 minutes.

Over the Shoulder. Smith's fuming rivals appointed the Chicago Sun-Times's acid-tongued Carleton ("Bill") Kent, president of the White House Correspondents Association, to tell Smith what they thought of him. What Kent said they thought was terse, pithy, unprintable. Smith, however, was unabashed, and, his rivals soon were claiming, unreformed.

At Honolulu, on the way back, the New York Times's Tony Leviero sent a story forecasting a "knockout blow" in Korea (last week's paratroop landing above Pyongyang). Leviero's dispatch was garbled in transmission, so the Times wired back to check some of the facts. Leviero never got the original query, and was burned up when Smith got a play in the afternoon Honolulu papers with a "knockout blow" story of his own plus a Page One spread next morning in the New York Herald Tribune, Leviero's opposition. Leviero cabled his boss, Washington Bureau Chief Arthur Krock, charging that Smith had waylaid the query and written a similar story. Krock fired a protest to U.P.'s Washington Chief Lyle C. Wilson. Smith stoutly denied he had taken--or even seen--the Leviero wire. As for that episode at Wake, his feat there was simply in the great tradition of enterprising journalism. Reporter Smith clucked his tongue and sadly observed: "I was trying to get the communique out first in Wake and I did. I know they are awful mad at me at the White House and in the press room, but there is nothing I can do about it."

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