The Letter

In his Beverly Hills home, old William Randolph Hearst pulled the fat swatch of clippings out of a letter from a correspondent in Paris, sent them off to his editors for a quick translation. Cut from last month's Paris Le Figaro, they were the most sensational parts of the World War II memoirs of Jose Doussinague, Spanish diplomat, now ambassador to Chile. When Hearst read the translation, he thought he had a big beat on the rest of the U.S. press. On his orders, his papers last week splashed it across front pages from coast to coast. Screamed the New York Journal-American: "F.D.R.'s SECRET OFFER TO SHARE WORLD POWER WITH THE KREMLIN."

This shocker was based on a letter which "fell into the hands of the Spanish Chief of State" in 1943, according to Figaro. It was supposedly written by President Roosevelt to Jacob Zabronsky, president of the National Council of Young Israel, and it designated him Roosevelt's secret emissary to Stalin. It instructed Zabronsky to promise Finland and the Baltic states to Stalin, as well as a port on the Mediterranean, and commented on Red Marshal Timoshenko's "short but fruitful stay" in Washington. It ended with thanks to Zabronsky for presenting F.D.R. with a copy of the Scroll of the Jewish Torah on behalf of the national council.

Next day the State Department knocked down the Chief's beat; the letter was a fake. Said the State Department: "The alleged letter is not cut out of whole cloth but [is] ingeniously fashioned from fact, half-truth, rumor and inaccuracy." Zabronsky (whose name was misspelled in the letter) had indeed presented Roosevelt with a Scroll of the Torah at the White House, and Roosevelt had written his thanks--but in 1938. By 1943 Zabronsky, a certified public accountant who never left the U.S. during the war, was no longer council president. Another error: Marshal Timoshenko never visited the U.S.

Actually, Hearstlings had made no attempt to check the legitimacy of the Zabronsky letter. They,laid the blame for the blooper on Figaro for printing it in the first place.

Figaro frankly admitted that it had not checked either. Its excuse was that the Doussinague memoirs had been published a year ago, that the State Department knew of the letter, and yet no U.S. official had bothered to brand it a fake. The State Department's lame excuse: the memoirs had not been brought to the attention of anyone "in authority." But none of these excuses absolved the Hearst papers for failure to question their story before printing it.

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