Best Beat on Earth

In Washington last week, the Manchester Guardian's brilliant, bookish Max Freedman attended an Old Vic performance of Saint Joan at the National Theater and escorted an old friend--Jacqueline Kennedy. The week before, Freedman sat down in the White House for a chat with another old friend--John F. Kennedy. Rated by his peers as the best foreign correspondent covering the U.S. capital, Max Freedman boasts channels of communication that few of them can match. But even those on less familiar terms with the President and his wife share Freedman's conviction that Washington is the best news beat on earth. Says he: "I wouldn't change my office here for a reserved seat in heaven."

A Problem of Overabundance. The Washington beat offers endless possibilities to foreign newsmen, particularly if they are fluent in English--and most are. All have ready access to high-level officials. All have at their fingertips the greatest daily outpouring of source material on earth--U.S. newspapers--and few hesitate to borrow heavily, with or without attribution. "If there is a real problem," says erudite Werner Imhoof of Switzerland's Neue Zuercher Zeitung, "it's that you are overwhelmed by news."

Imhoof himself is rarely overwhelmed, and is adept at cutting through an overabundant supply of material to the really major stories. A shy, spare man, Imhoof, 52, studied law and history at Zurich, Vienna and Paris, speaks French, German, Italian and English fluently, probably knows more about the Common Market than any other reporter in Washington.

Equally skillful in sorting the wheat from the chaff is O. (for Oscar) Henry Brandon, 45, of the London Sunday Times. Urbane, Czech-born Henry Brandon, a naturalized Briton, ranges with catholic and insatiable curiosity over the entire U.S., detailing everything from traffic jams to supermarkets. "Europe has become more and more Americanized," he says, "so Europeans are greatly interested in how the U.S. copes with such things." Best known for his probing interviews, he has lugged his tape recorder into sessions with Leonard Bernstein, Marilyn Monroe, Reinhold Niebuhr, Wernher von Braun, a spate of politicians from Nixon to Kennedy.

Unbeatable British. No one understands better than President Kennedy the importance of Washington's foreign newsmen. Shortly after taking office, he added a foreign press assistant (Jay Gildner) to the White House staff--the first such presidential assistant in U.S. history. Freedman, Brandon and Imhoof are clipped for the President's attention, and his aides take regular readings on everybody from France-Soir's Adalbert ("Ziggy") de Segonzac to Masaya Miyake of Japan's Asahi Shimbun.

But of all the foreign correspondents in Washington, U.S. officials give highest marks to the British, whose tradition of excellence dates from the late Sir Willmott Harsant Lewis, witty correspondent for the Times of London from 1920 to 1947. "Next to our own people, who are unbeatable, the British correspondents report and interpret the U.S. better than anybody else," says a senior State Department official. "The British are great--and have tremendous influence."

None has more influence than stooped, abstemious Max Freedman. Born in Winnipeg, Canada, to Ukrainian Jewish parents, he was raised on a diet of politics and literature, had devoured every word of Burke and Macaulay by 16. At the Freedman dinner table, the meaty editorial page of the Winnipeg Free Press was a mandatory conversation piece. In 1936, Max joined the Edmonton Bulletin; in six months he had his own political column.

Underdeveloped Area. After wartime service in the Canadian army, Max turned down a $16,000 job with a Toronto brokerage house for a $6,000 post on the Winnipeg Free Press. Soon he was a roving reporter, and on April 4, 1949, the day NATO was born, he arrived in Washington. Some of his files went to the Guardian, and by 1953 its impressed editors had hired him.

In Washington, Freedman rises at 5 a.m. to read Burke, Gibbon, Thackeray, British and U.S. history. After two hours, he turns to the daily papers, then begins his rounds of press conferences and interviews. Freedman seasons his conversation with quotes from Emerson and Carlyle, manufactures epigrams with ease. "I regard the mind of Senator McCarthy," he once said, "as one of the great underdeveloped areas of this continent."

A Badly Handled Story. To Freedman, one of the most important stories in the U.S. is desegregation. The foreign press has covered it copiously, critically and, Freedman thinks, badly. "The importance of Little Rock was not Faubus, or the mob, but the presence of the armed forces of the U.S. to protect the rights of nine little colored children."

Freedman does not actually consider himself a reporter, but rather "a reflective observer of events." Says he: "I write what I'm interested in. I don't have to worry about the news." What interests Max Freedman quite often interests Washington, London and Moscow as well. The foreign correspondent, said he last week, quoting from Burke, is a man "set upon a conspicuous stage, and the whole world marks his demeanor."

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