In Virginia: Tears and MacArthichokes

By Curtis Prendergast

The guests had plowed through Hearts of MacArthichoke d'Inchon and toyed with their Filet de Sole au Yalu River. They had survived bowls of kimchi, the mouth-searing concoction of pickled cabbage, hot peppers and garlic that is Korea's national dish. And now, with the speeches over, here they are, clustered around a piano in the Marriott Key Bridge Hotel, singing. Except for the gray in the hair, and a sagging of chests toward the belt line, the scene suggests (as it is meant to) a press billet in the city of Taegu, say, three decades ago when the United Nations forces were trying to hold the Pusan perimeter.

The melodies are old favorites like The Battle Hymn of the Republic, with not-so-old words.

Mine eyes have seen the censor

With my copy on his knee

He was crossing out the passages

That mean the most to me..

About 70 war correspondents, out of perhaps 400 who covered the Korean War, have turned up at the Marriott for a two-day reunion. Come June 25 it will be 30 years since the forces of North Korea's Kim II Sung rolled south over the 38th parallel and started the first hot war of the cold war period. Everybody present (wives excepted) is over 50. Most are over 60 and several over 70; most celebrated among them, Novelist James Michener.

The name tags they wear identify them by the publications they used to work for. And in some ways this is a sadder reminder than age of the wear and tear in the newspaper business since Korea. Gone the New York Herald Tribune (d. 1966) and the Chicago Daily News (d. 1978). Gone is Hearst's old International News Service, merged in 1958 with the United Press to form U.P.I. (United Press International).

In Korea the rival agencies used to fight for headlines with newsbeats about hills taken or Chinese hordes repelled. ("How many Chinese in a horde?" the gag used to be.) With Wirephotos from Tokyo, still photographers regularly beat the infant TV industry; television cameramen had to ship their film halfway round the world to San Francisco, a 36-hour flight in those prop-driven days.

The Korean War's three biggest reporting stars could not appear. In 1951 they shared the Pulitzer Prize. One, Keyes Beech, of the Chicago Daily News, was in Bangkok. At 66, he is charging around Asia again, now for the Los Angeles Times. Homer Bigart, 72, of the defunct Herald-Trib, sent a message of regret. He was, he explained, temporarily toothless: "I am capable of putting down the martini, but I can't handle the olives." The third, Marguerite Higgins, who worked with Bigart on the Trib, died in 1966 at age 45, of a tropical bug caught in Viet Nam. These days, when reporters with pretty faces are all over the TV news, Maggie Higgins might not be the sensation she was in 1950. (In the new journalism neither might Bigart; he stutters.) But Maggie was the Korean War's most famous correspondent, even though unkind (or envious) colleagues accused her of using feminine wiles to get stories she might not have otherwise got. To silence this still famous argument at the reunion, one correspondent snaps: "Damn it, Maggie did it on ability. She was just a woman before her time."

Michener pays tribute to the facilities of the Tokyo Correspondents' Club. "You'd have to go back to the Gallic Wars and the environs of what became Paris," he declares, "to find its equal." But there are surprisingly few "war stories," though a few guests strap on helmets with WAR STORIES stenciled on them in large white letters.

Memories run instead to press lord penny-pinching. The gathered clan recalls that when I.N.S. correspondents, risking their necks for as little as $45 a week, cabled home asking for more money, I.N.S. Chief Barry Paris cabled back: "Forget the raises, we're making you guys famous." Memory also turns to the U.P.'s Earnest Hoberecht, who chartered a plane to use as a flying darkroom for his great scoop -- photos of Tibet's young Dalai Lama fleeing the Chinese Communists. Hoberecht was savoring his triumph over the rival A.P. when rockets started whooshing in from headquarters in New York City. How come Hoberecht's Dalai Lama had hair, but later arriving A.P. pictures showed him bald? The answer: Hoberecht got the wrong lama.

General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is inevitably remembered by the press. Not fondly. But the correspondents assembled do give him backhanded credit for the occupation of Japan. There is also a consensus that Korea, as Michener put it, was the last war "in which the media and the public had no grave doubts." The circumstance of Communist invasion settled that.

Saturday veteran correspondents are driven to Arlington Cemetery to place a wreath. Eighteen correspondents were killed in Korea--a casualty rate proportionally more, it is claimed, than that of soldiers of the 16 U.N. countries that fought there. For newspapermen who so often in their working lives are overexposed to meaningless ceremony, the scene is strangely moving. The sentry in Army dress blues, who had been mechanically pacing up and down before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, halts as Michener and former A.P. Photographer Max Desfor, another Pulitzer prizewinner, put down a wreath. Taps sound. A couple of correspondents are seen brushing tears from their eyes.

Afterward television crews converge on Michener, shoving long, sponge-padded microphones into his face, and asking about the Korean War. Seeing so many graybeards among the assembled war cor respondents unsettles one of the young TV reporters, and she asks whether "earlier wars" were covered by "more seasoned" reporters. Nowadays, she says, they seem younger. Gently Michener points out that 30 years ago, this crew seemed younger too. -- Curtis Prendergast

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