Y-Day

As one of journalism's classic suspense stories ticked toward its climax, most major afternoon dailies took special pains to avoid lagging in the rush to the newsstands. Almost everywhere, alternate front pages waited to be hustled onto the presses. Most featured a grinning President Eisenhower saying YES or a grim-faced Ike under a headlined NO. Some papers even hedged with a third version: MAYBE.

To get the word, a record 311 newsmen and newshens pressed into the old State Department building's Indian Treaty Room past Secret Service men who had to turn away 40 others for lack of space. The line for the 10:30 a.m. conference began forming at 7:50 a.m., when Newman Wright of the Passaic, N.J. Herald-News arrived. Under rules set by Presidential Press Secretary James C. Hagerty to prevent any leak before the conference ended, the Secret Service men frisked some women's large handbags for signaling devices. As an extra precaution, while the conference was on, they emptied the telephone booths in the corridor outside the room; legmen assigned to hold telephones had to wait outside the booths.

One-Minute Extra. Seven tantalizing minutes after the conference began, the President ended the suspense of the historic second-term question. But correspondents had to wait another 15 minutes before they could get the news out. Then the U.P.'s Merriman Smith uttered the conference-ending words ("Thank you, Mr. President"), and newsmen stampeded for the door. Against the risk that their White House correspondents in the front rows might lose precious seconds in the crush, all the wire services stationed extra men near the door; Smith tipped his own man with a wink and a nod as he rose to end the conference. Newsmen lucky enough to have staked out corridor phone booths leaped to call their offices. But some, like Harold Greer of the Toronto Star, ran four long blocks to the National Press Building to file their stories.

The wire services clacked out the news within seconds of each other. The first take on each wire was marked 10:52 a.m. Typical of the swift reaction was the Detroit News, which got the flash from its own correspondent, Martin S. Hayden. An operator waiting at a special number for Hayden's call connected him with a waiting editor, who was holding an extra phone open to the pressroom. There printers were poised over two silent presses with plates headed IKE SAYS YES and IKE SAYS NO. After Hayden's call it took the News one minute to start rolling out extras. Elsewhere extras hit the streets in as little as seven minutes (New York Post, Long Island's Newsday) and almost everywhere within the hour.

Poor Prophets. Ike's decision made some newsmen seem poor prophets. Notable example: U.P.'s Merriman Smith, who had staunchly insisted in stories that Ike would not run. A week after Ike's heart attack Columnist Joseph Alsop bet Mrs. Alice Roosevelt Longworth what he warily described as "a substantial sum" that the President would not run again. He gave her 100-to-1 odds. "Then things looked better," said Alice Longworth, "and Joe tried to buy the bet back. Well, he couldn't do that, so he got me to reduce it to 50-t01. I was willing to do that. One must be kind to the younger generation, you know, terribly kind." Within the last month Alsop coppered the Longworth bet by wagering heavily on Ike to run.

Ike's yes had been so widely anticipated that the official announcement sold fewer extra papers than an unexpected no might have done. The day's most offbeat headline (over a huge picture of a grinning Ike): the New York Daily News's FORE! ! The most original comment ran on the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser's editorial page. It was an uncaptioned photograph taken months ago at a prankish Arizona reception and blown up big. The picture showed Adlai Stevenson with a hangman's noose around his neck.

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