Into the Breach

Able, hard-hitting Editor Clayton Fritchey of the New Orleans Item has been in a hot spot ever since brash, bouncy David ("Tommy") Stern III bought the paper and became publisher 16 months ago (TIME, July 25, 1949). Fritchey seldom saw eye-to-eye with his boss on how to run the paper, ran into more trouble when Stern launched a Sunday edition last spring and began to lose heavily on it.

Last week, to nobody's surprise, Editor Fritchey quit his hot spot. But to the amazement of many a Washington newsman, Fritchey hopped on to a still hotter spot. He became the $11,200-a-year head of public information for the Department of Defense, a job that has gone begging for ten months.

The reason was that almost no one in the armed forces wanted the top information boss to do the job he was supposed to do. Under the armed forces unification, the information boss was supposed to handle all information and publicity in Washington for the three services. But under Secretary Louis Johnson, the services had managed to take over most of the job, and Johnson himself had handled the rest. The Army, Navy and Air Force now have a plan afoot to run their own publicity shows completely, leaving Fritchey little more than the task of supervising the mimeographing machines.

Defense Secretary George C. Marshall was ready to give Fritchey the power to channel all information about the services through his office. But the three services were bound to fight any such centralization. Sighed one bureaucrat about his new boss: "Fritchey has about as much security as a Kamikaze."

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