In the Middle of the Night

A ringing telephone shattered the silence in the bedroom of a two-story brick duplex in Philadelphia's Burholme Park section one morning last week. Associated Press Newsman Lee L. Linder, 38, looked at his watch. It was 3 a.m. Groggy with sleep, he lifted the receiver off the hook. "Who is it?" demanded his wife Thelma. "The FBI," Linder said. "They've got their nerve," said his wife. "Hang up on them." Linder did. But within the hour, two FBI agents were knocking at the Linders' door, and Linder let them in. As he talked to his visitors, Linder thought of serving hot coffee, but decided that he did not want any and they did not deserve any. He could not understand why the FBI, at this ungodly hour, should be so interested in his routine coverage of a Bethlehem Steel Corporation stockholders' meeting two days before.

About an hour later, elsewhere in the city, John Lawrence, Philadelphia bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, was roused from sleep by the same callers. He refused to talk--at first cock's crow, anyway. At 6:45 that same morning, in Wilmington, Del., James T. Parks Jr., 28, business writer for the Wilmington evening Journal, arrived for work to find two FBI agents waiting for him. Parks saw no reason not to show the agents what they had come for: the notes that he had taken at the Bethlehem stockholders' meeting and the story that he had written for his paper.

Fury & Urgency. In staging its curious predawn raids, the FBI was acting on orders from President John F. Kennedy himself. But for all the President's fury at the U.S. steel industry's unexpected price boost (see THE NATION), the early morning urgency was a pretty highhanded use of the FBI. The three newsmen had indeed all attended the Bethlehem stockholders' meeting, but what they had reported was far from earth shaking. Two of the men--the AP's Linder and the Wilmington Journal's Parks--had put Bethlehem President Edmund F. Martin on record as opposing any price hike.

In the Wilmington Journal, Reporter Parks quoted a prepared statement from Martin that read in part: The settlement with the steel unions "represents a cost increase at a time when we are trying to hold the line on prices. We should be trying to reduce the price of steel if at all possible." The AP's Linder caught the following remarks from Martin after the meeting: "There shouldn't be any price rise. We shouldn't do anything to increase our costs if we are to survive." Parks recorded much the same remarks in his notes, but because his story appeared after the price increase, he did not use them.

Honest to Goodness. What was the motive for the visits? To gather ammunition against big steel? To prove that Bethlehem's Martin, who issued a statement denying some of the remarks attributed to him ("Mr. Martin was, in fact, indefinite about the matter of prices"), had been pressured into line? To demonstrate the power of the White House? Whatever the Administration had in mind, the sudden raids looked silly in the light of day. Even the FBI felt embarrassed and said so before dispatching its agents. "Gestapo tactics," thundered Republican National Chairman William E. Miller, in search of a headline or two, and a few papers took up his cry. By week's end, it seemed clear that Bethlehem's Martin had meant what he said the first time: his company was the first to announce that it was rescinding its price increase.

The newsmen themselves took the whole incident calmly. "My wife thought the FBI should have apologized for disturbing us, but they didn't," said the AP's Linder. Then he went off to soothe his two daughters, Rhonda, 12, and Sharon, 8, who had slept through the raid and were still furious at missing the chance to see some honest-to-goodness G-men.

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