Inside Story

Inside StoryUneasy rumbling stirred in the Washington press corps last week and soon echoed on Capitol Hill. The cause: to a single newsman--New York Herald Tribune Correspondent Robert J. (for John) Donovan--the White House had given months to pore over classified documents, minutes of staff and Cabinet meetings and even personal letters by the President. They added up to an intimate insight of the Eisenhower Administration's first three years in a 423-page volume, Eisenhower: The Inside Story (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), which was on sale last week in Washington.

The Herald Tribune had run almost a fifth of the whole manuscript in daily excerpts through May, but the excerpts did not highlight Donovan's inside dope and thus failed to cause a stir. Last week, when Donovan's new material was brought into sharp focus in a New Yorker article by Richard Rovere, newsmen promptly tackled Presidential Press Secretary James Hagerty to find out how Donovan had got his inside track. Hagerty refused flatly and repeatedly to talk about the book. When a reporter finally asked in desperation, "Do you suppose you ever will?" Hagerty shot back: "No."

As New York Times Washington Correspondent James Reston noted, there have been major leaks by past administrations, e.g., Harry Truman opened his private papers for a book by William Hillman, let John Hersey sit in on official talks, and the Roosevelt Administration let the Times's Arthur Krock look at all U.S. ambassadors' reports covering the prelude to World War II. Reston credited Donovan with writing the book with "a minimum of political propaganda," but he charged that in opening its files to the Trib man, the Administration had surpassed all previous leaks in "calculated political advantage and unblushing hypocrisy."

"Q" Clearance. The idea for Donovan's project came not from the author but from the White House, most likely from the President himself, who has often felt that the public should get a better sense of the spirit and flavor of his Administration's deliberations. It was Sherman Adams, assistant to the President, who acted on the idea last July. Adams offered Columnist Roscoe Drummond of the staunchly Republican Herald Tribune full access to White House files and personnel if he would write the book. Drummond mulled over the chance, turned it down. But he sent Adams the names of three or four Washington newsmen whom he could recommend for the job.

From them the White House chose Bob Donovan, 43, a slim news veteran with a boyish face under prematurely white hair. Donovan began as a $7-a-week copy boy in his native Buffalo, joined the Herald Tribune in 1937, and went to the paper's Washington bureau in 1947. He had done a Cottier's article on Adams and had struck Ike favorably not only as the Trib's White House man but as the author of The Assassins, a history of assassination attempts on U.S. Presidents.

After security agents ran a check on him to give him "Q" clearance--enabling him to share the Government's most highly classified secrets--Donovan went to work. He was installed in the White House East Executive Wing, where he studied documents and took exhaustive notes for almost two months. Then he began interviewing some 50 key Administration officials, all of whom had been instructed to speak freely. In all his research he made no approach to two possible sources: Jim Hagerty, whom he saw only twice casually in groups, and President Eisenhower himself.

"A Killer." With free rein to use anything he had seen or heard, Donovan submitted about 20 or 30 pages of his manuscript for standard security clearance; otherwise he showed it to no Government official. In the home stretch of his 160,000-word writing job, he worked a 10 a.m.-to-3 a.m. schedule, left Harper no time to submit galley proofs on the last four chapters. Last week, as the results began simmering, Reporter Donovan relaxed with his wife Martha and his three children (Patricia, 13, Peter, 9, Amy, 8). "This was a killer," he said. "I wouldn't do it again for anything."

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