"Keep Your Shirt On"

At printing plants in Concord, N.H. and Dayton, Ohio, the presses had run off a third of the 11-million-copy run of the January issue of the Reader's Digest last week before they were abruptly stopped. Digest Editor DeWitt Wallace and his staff had decided, after reading the late war news, to replace the lead article on MacArthur's Korean triumph titled "The Right Man in the Right Place." (About 4,000,000 copies had already been distributed.) Collier's, with a closing five weeks in advance of publication, could not do anything about its issue. To its 3,161,048 readers last week went an issue bearing a full-color cover picture of MacArthur smiling happily at Vice Admiral A. D. Struble over the streamer, "MacArthur's Greatest Battle," i.e., Inchon.

Orders from the Chief. If magazine editors as well as generals and statesmen were tripped up by the turnabout in Korea, so were many U.S. newspapers. In their efforts to keep up with fast-moving news, some editorial writers had a hard time deciding where to stand.

Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner cried that "we should come home to our own country," while Hearst's other Los Angeles paper, the Herald & Express, was saying: "The situation is serious but not hopeless . . . With Chinese actually in Korea we can hit back for the first time." Next day, the Herald & Express also got its new orders from the chief. It reversed its field and asked: "Why should our boys die by the thousands in Korea? . . ."

The Culprits? Many newspapers currycombed the woods for scapegoats. In the influential Emporia Gazette, William L. White angrily charged the war to an Administration plot to influence the elections by the "heaven-sent opportunity of Korea ... Until we are stronger ... we should try to cut to the bare minimum the number of wars we enter solely to win local American elections." The New York Herald Tribune blamed General MacArthur for a "colossal military blunder" and said it is "impossible to put confidence in the military capacity of a headquarters which has so gravely compounded blunder by confusion of facts and intelligence." Manhattan's Daily Worker gleefully pointed out that in an article on Reds in the same issue, the Trib called criticism of MacArthur part of the party line.

In general, those who had roasted the Administration and Secretary of State Acheson in the past simply turned up the heat. Most of the rest withheld their fire. Even some of MacArthur's severest critics eased up. Said the usually critical Des Moines Register: "We are compelled to say in fairness that the 'kicking around' which the U.N. supreme commander in Korea is now getting seems most unjust and irresponsible."

Atom Bombers. While such big-city papers as the New York Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the San Francisco

Chronicle were wary of using the atom bombs against the Chinese, a few papers in smaller cities showed no such restraint. The Denver Post (circ. 226,826) saw no moral issue in the use of the bomb. It made a point of the fact that Pope Innocent III* had banned the crossbow in the 16th Century as too inhumane a weapon. Said the Post: "Mr. Truman, it is said, has indicated that the atomic bomb will not be dropped until such time as this country is in grave danger . . . That day is today . . ."

In the Green Bay, Wis. Press-Gazette (circ. 35,138), the motto for the day was: "Be no brawlers, but gentle, showing meekness to all (Titus 3:2)." Below it, the Gazette said belligerently: "How many [atom] bombs have we. . . ? If we have sufficient of these bombs to reduce the Chinese cities to ruins and kill off 50 to 100 million of their teeming population and therefore paralyze the Chinese Soviets, the use of this extraordinary weapon may be considered in a practical light."

Looking over the great mass of proposals, counterproposals and editorial blasts, Chicago Daily News Publisher John S. Knight had one more suggestion to make. Said he in his "Editor's Notebook" column: "Under these circumstances, our advice to one and all is: Keep your shirt on."

*The Post was wrong. It was Innocent II who forbade the use of the crossbow by Christians --except against the infidel.

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