Double Beating

Novelist John (Grapes of Wrath) Steinbeck, the Reds' favorite U.S. proletarian novelist even after the cold war began, is now an outspoken antiCommunist. Last week, in Italy on assignment from Collier's, Steinbeck heard a haunting voice from his past. In an open letter published in the Communist L'Unit`a (circ. 800,000), Italy's largest daily, a contributor named Ezio Taddei asked what Steinbeck thought of 1) the wickedness of American soldiers, 2) germ warfare in Korea, and 3) General Ridgway. Cried Taddei: "Let your voice be heard, John Steinbeck, and it will be welcome as it was in the past."

Steinbeck let his voice be heard, loud & clear:

P: "Why, if we are so brutal, do refugees always come to us, never to the Communists . . .? People do not run towards brutality."

P: "The germs the United Nations are dropping in Korea are little pamphlets . . . [which] contain the most dangerous and communicable germs in the world, the truth."

P: "Could your hatred of Ridgway be caused by the fact that he is too good a general?"

Summed up Steinbeck: "If you . . . meant to suggest that American soldiers are wicked, degenerate or brutish, you, Ezio Taddei, are a liar."

L'Unit`a took another beating last week from another American, Michael Stern, Rome correspondent for Fawcett Publications (True, True Confessions). Ten months ago, Stern wrote a sensational story for True that two former American OSS men had killed their superior officer, Major William Holohan, in 1944 in Italy, to help Communist partisans (TIME, Aug. 27). L'Unit`a fired back at Stern's charges against the Reds: Stern is a "false journalist" who is really acting as a spy for the U.S. State Department.

Reporter Stern slapped a libel suit on L'Unit`a, and last week he won it. Two L'Unit`a writers and the paper's assistant director sheepishly told a Rome tribunal that they meant "no reflection on Mr. Stern's professional honor." The court ordered the paper to pay 500,000 lire ($800) in damages, plus 350,000 lire ($560) in costs and fines.

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