All the News Unfit to Print

EXCEPT FOR THOSE TIMES WHEN HE WAS DENYING THE Ukrainian famine, ridiculing it as bunk, what Walter Duranty demonstrated is that it is possible for a journalist to lie without actually misstating the facts, that the same results can be achieved by simply turning one’s back on the truth. Actually, the latter is an easier way to lie than misstating the facts; it does not require any energy or special storytelling skills, nor does it require that one remember the details of the falsehood so that he can recall them later. One can be passive, not active. For this reason, ignoring the truth has been an attractive alternative to many dishonest journalists over the years for many different reasons, from ideological bias to financial gain to sheer indolence. In New Orleans, in 1927, the motive was, of all things, civic pride.

Late in the winter of that year, a man named John Klorer, a local government official who had formerly been an engineer, was asked to inspect the city’s levees. There had been reports of severe flooding on the Mississippi north of New Orleans, and city officials wanted to make sure that they were prepared when the high waters made their way past them into the Gulf of Mexico. Thinking he had no time to waste, Klorer went promptly to his task.

He found some sections of the levees in good shape, but others weakened to such an extent that, in his opinion, they needed to be shored up immediately. That was what he reported to the city council, where he received a respectful but not enthusiastic hearing. It would cost money to shore up the levees. It would make the city look bad to admit it had let them deteriorate. It would frighten the townsfolk to know the levees were not ready for the churning river.

Some members of the council wanted to follow Klorer’s recommendation. Some did not. Those who did were overruled by three men who held no positions in local government, men who knew nothing whatsoever about the condition of either the levees or the raging waters heading toward them. They were Jim Thomson, Robert Ewing, and Esmond Phelps, and it was because of them that the levees would remain as they were. After all, there had been a flood in 1922, hadn’t there? The levees had held back then, hadn’t they? They would be just as likely to hold now, wouldn’t they?

The Red Cross did not believe the city council’s decision. Nor did it care about the flood of 1922. It sprang into action immediately, setting up relief stations throughout the city, preparing for the worst as the disaster upriver surged toward them. It had no faith in the levees, no faith in the three men who had ignored Klorer’s warning.

The residents of New Orleans were confused. Why was the Red Cross preparing for the worst when the city’s elected officials, having heard the latest reports, had decided there was no reason to act? Another question: everyone knew about the damage that the river was causing elsewhere in the state, and in other states; why were the local newspapers not keeping them better informed? “No word of this activity appeared in any New Orleans paper,” says historian John Barry. “As the Mississippi grew more threatening, New Orleans papers gave it less space. This lack of news attention was no accident.”

Barry exaggerates and in fact contradicts himself. If no word of this activity appeared in any New Orleans paper, how could a paper give it less space as the threat grew greater? There is nothing less than zero. In truth, the papers did cover the flooding to the north; there was just not enough coverage and not enough detail to warn a reader sufficiently. There was not, in other words, enough of a connection between what was happening within a hundred miles or so of New Orleans and what was likely to happen in the city several days hence.

Barry is correct, however, when he says this inadequate reporting was not an accident. The city’s newspapers had a history of aversion to bad news. Three years earlier, a ship from Greece had docked in New Orleans with a sailor on board suffering from bubonic plague. He was taken immediately to a hospital and isolated from other patients. His condition was grave.

When the New Orleans Association of Commerce found out about the man, it pleaded with the papers not to run the story. It would frighten away tourists. It would even frighten away natives, who might be afraid to leave their homes and would therefore not spend money in shops and restaurants.

The Association of Commerce did not have to plead hard. The four major dailies in New Orleans either ignored the story altogether or claimed, in a paragraph or two buried in the back pages, that the sailor had an ailment other than the plague. He would be fine. He had been quarantined merely as a precaution. That his symptoms resembled those of bubonic plague was merely a coincidence. His actual ailment had not yet been identified. The papers blathered on.

But the people who worked at the hospital knew the truth, and despite warnings from their superiors to keep silent, they began to tell friends and family. Word circulated through the city, one person informing another in tones that were whispered headlines. As a result, the following year, 1925, “the papers helped the Association of Commerce circulate seventy-two different articles boosting New Orleans, including a piece claiming that it was one of the healthiest cities in America.”

The four newspapers in question were run by Thomson, Ewing, and Phelps. So was much of the rest of New Orleans. There was nothing special about any of the men. Every city has its power brokers. These three just happened to be New Orleans’s in the mid-twenties. In another decade, they would be replaced by three other men who would be equally forgotten after another ten years had passed.

Thomson, who, as seems to be the case with so many pompous men, liked to be called “the Colonel” despite a lack of military background, oversaw two papers, the New Orleans Morning Tribune and the New Orleans Item. Yet he had always shown more of an interest in politics than in journalism. He “had worked in several presidential campaigns and, using family like a medieval potentate cementing alliances, became the son-in-law of the Speaker of the House and the brother-in-law of a senator, with his niece married to a senator.” The Morning Tribune and the Item, then, were meant to promote his political interests more than the public good. He paid just enough attention to them to make sure they did not stray from either the Democratic party line or the service of his personal interests. When they did, he saw that they strayed back the following day and that those responsible were punished.

Ewing, the head man of the New Orleans States, was also a politician at heart, once serving as a Democratic national committeeman and afterward keeping his contacts alive as much as he could, often by seeing to it that the States published stories that read more like Democratic press releases than investigative journalism. Ewing also served as a thorn in the side of several New Orleans mayors, as he was constantly demanding, and usually receiving, favors for his friends—sometimes jobs, sometimes higher pay for those already employed. One of those mayors described him as “the most insatiable patronage grabber” in the city. Like Boss Tweed, although on a smaller scale, Ewing dispensed favors as well as demanded them. He considered each of the former an IOU made out specifically to him, and he did not hesitate to call them in.

Phelps too had a political background, but despite lacking any journalistic training, he was the most interested of the three in his paper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Although he was only a member of the paper’s board, not even its chairman, he took an extraordinarily active role in the Times-Picayune’s daily operations. He called the newsroom several times a day and paid a personal visit once or twice a week. He loved to give advice to reporters and editors—or, as the reporters and editors would have put it, loved to distort the news, and sometimes turn his back on it, for his own gain and that of his cronies. His stature in the city was such that he always got his way. The Times-Picayune was a reflection of the city not so much as it was but as Esmond Phelps intended it to be.

The three men were not close friends. In fact, they were often at odds, engaged in power struggles that resulted in bitterness and resentment, sometimes using their papers to carry out attacks against one another. But in the early spring of 1927, as the floodwaters continued to roar toward New Orleans, they put aside their animosities and organized themselves and their associates into a kind of information-withholding monopoly.

First they assured the general public that they would not withhold information; they would publish news of the Mississippi’s behavior quickly and honestly so that the citizens would be ready for whatever happened. They did not. Then they assured the city’s business interests that they would stifle the news if it looked bad for them. This was the promise they kept.

On April 9, 1927, the New Orleans Morning Tribune printed an article about damage caused upriver by the flooding. Then, right next to it, under a larger headline, it printed another article about what would not happen when those waters made their way farther south. With the weather bureau predicting a possible river stage three inches higher than in 1922, previously the highest ever recorded, Guy L. Deano, president of the Orleans levee board, said that New Orleans was amply protected by her reinforced levees. “We were able to take care of the flood stage of 1922 and since then a survey of all levees has been made,” he said. “Whatever low gaps there were have been built up. The levees in Orleans parish are in much better condition than they were in 1922. We do not expect any trouble.”

Peter Muntz, secretary of the board, concurred with President Deano’s opinion that New Orleans had nothing to fear. But the city was not amply protected. The levees had not been reinforced. They were not in better condition than they had been in 1922. The whole story was, quite simply, a fairy tale.

It is hard to imagine what Thomson, Ewing, and Phelps were thinking, impossible to believe they did not realize what harm they were likely to cause with their monkey act of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil toward the approaching floodwaters. They did not want to alarm anyone, but for the most selfish of reasons. When alarming circumstances exist, only an alarmed—or at least an informed—citizenry can react to them properly.

But Thomson, Ewing, and Phelps would not allow such news to roll off the presses. There had been reams of information about the 1922 flood, and what had happened? New Orleans had been made to appear an uncivilized outpost at the whim of nature. And the damage, once all was said and done, hadn’t been that bad. Not really. To the city’s reputation, yes. To the city itself, no.

Well, nothing like that was going to happen again. Maybe the waters would not be so high this time. Maybe there would be no reason for angst, for bad press, for financial loss. Why not look at the bright side of flooding so bad that a man upriver could not see the tops of the waves as they thundered toward what was left of his town? Why not whistle a happy tune and hope to be on key?

So it was that the three monkeys made a kind of Faustian bargain, only dumber: for the sake of a few days of good press in New Orleans, good press that a lot of people had already begun to doubt, the city’s ruling triad was laying the groundwork for something much more likely—years of bad press around the nation and a depressed economy at home for a similar period.

In the end, however, it did not matter. For perhaps the first time in his canny and timeless career, the all-knowing Faust got caught unaware. Through the most fortuitous and unforeseen of circumstances, the city of New Orleans would be saved.

The great Mississippi flood of 1927 was the worst in the history of the United States. At one point, the river was seventy miles wide, and more than twenty thousand square miles of land, mostly farmland, were underwater in Illinois, Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Seven hundred thousand people were driven from their homes. More than 1.3 million acres of corn were not planted, and the same was true for almost half a million acres of hay, not to mention more than two million acres of other crops, including cotton, soybeans, and sorghum. Twenty-five thousand horses lost their lives, as did twice as many head of cattle.

In New Orleans, fifteen inches of rain fell in slightly more than eighteen hours. But, as it turned out, the city did not suffer nearly as much damage as it might have. At the last minute, state engineers surprised everyone by deciding to plant thirty tons of dynamite on the levee in the nearby village of Caernarvon. When they set it off, a huge section of the levee collapsed, causing the floodwaters to take a mighty detour into the village, submerging it for a time and causing major destruction in two counties, or, as Louisiana calls them, parishes.

So as the Mississippi continued to make its way south, it was calmed somewhat, the pressure eased, and it became even calmer as levees in other small towns gave way without the aid of dynamite, rerouting even more of the surging river. By the time the waters reached New Orleans they were still surging, but not nearly as much. The city, even with its inadequate levees, a few of which gave way just as Klorer had predicted, and the enormous rainfall it was still receiving, managed to survive. The cleanup lasted only a few days, and business and social activity were back to normal after only a week or so.

Thomson, Ewing, and Phelps were lucky. But their behavior is not to be excused. When they published their articles of reassurance, and when they refused to emphasize articles telling the truth about the deadly, overflowing Mississippi heading toward New Orleans and the towns that had been overrun in its path, they had no idea what would eventually happen at Caernarvon. In retrospect, they must be judged on their actions, not the unexpected intervention of state engineers, of which they had been totally ignorant. Had it not been for that intervention, Thomson, Ewing, and Phelps would have been remembered as three of the greatest villains ever known to journalism. Instead, they are not remembered at all. For a time, in fact, they were hailed as civic benefactors, calming influences in a literal time of storm. Then history, as is its way, forgot them.

Fifty years later, on March 27, 1977, Pan American World Airways Flight 1736 took off from Los Angeles International Airport, bound for Las Palmas on Gran Canaria, an island off the north-west coast of Africa. It would make an intermediate stop at New York’s JFK. On the same day, KLM Flight 4805 set out from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, also bound for Las Palmas. Both planes were Boeing 747s. Both planes had more empty seats than usual. Both planes would fail to arrive at their destination. They would crash into each other that afternoon at Los Rodeos Airport in the Spanish Canary Islands, killing 583 people. Not counting casualties on the ground, it was the deadliest aviation accident of all time.

“Neither of the planes had been scheduled to stop at the airport where they collided,” the next day’s New York Times reported. They had been diverted after a bomb went off in a florist’s shop at the Las Palmas airport and a phone call had been received threatening a second bomb, to be placed somewhere else at Las Palmas, that would cause far more damage. The call came from a group calling itself the Movement for the Independence and Autonomy of the Canaries Archipelago. Authorities had never heard of the group, but they took the call seriously. They shut down Las Palmas and diverted air traffic to several nearby airports. The Pan Am and KLM flights were among five 747s rerouted to Los Rodeos, which is known today as Tenerife North, and which, in 1977, had but one runway, and it had not been built to support jumbo jets.

While there the planes refueled and the passengers on one or two of them were given a few minutes in the terminal to buy snacks, use the restrooms, and stretch their legs. Then they were herded back into their seats to grumble about the delay and wait for clearance to take off. When it finally came a few hours later, Las Palmas officials now certain that there would be no second bomb, the planes at Los Rodeos were notified to start their engines.

For Captain Jacob Van Zanten of KLM, the signal came not a moment too soon. In fact, it might even have come a few moments too late. According to Dutch law, pilots were required to take rest periods a certain number of hours after their flights initially took off. “Flying after the start of his mandated rest period was out of the question [for Van Zanten]—it wasn’t just against policy; it was a crime punishable by imprisonment.” Van Zanten checked his watch. His hand twitched on the throttle.

Adding to his anxiety was the layer of fog that had suddenly begun to envelop the airport. It was crucial, Van Zanten believed, that he take off immediately. Within seconds, apparently, he could; for some reason, he seems to have believed that the control tower had given him permission to begin taxiing. Unfortunately, and no more explicably, the Pan Am crew believed that it had been given permission as well.

The two airplanes, facing each other at opposite ends of the runway, began to inch toward each other, slowly at first and then more quickly. It is not known whether the fog prevented the pilots from seeing each other’s craft, but in retrospect, what was happening now looked like a game of chicken that neither pilot wanted, but neither thought was his responsibility to avoid.

The KLM flight was going 165 miles an hour, full takeoff speed, at the moment of impact. The sound of the crash, as described by people standing nearby, was like thunder in their eardrums, and it continued to echo long after the planes had come together. The crash was followed by a burst of flame so intense that it caused the onlookers to back up; it was the heat of a blast furnace, of incineration, of skin feeling as if it were peeling off the body. After a few moments other sounds could be heard—of screams, of people starting to run for cover, of sirens in the distance.

A later investigation by officials from the United States, Spain, and the Netherlands would assign a number of causes to the disaster. Among them:

• The KLM plane had begun taxiing without proper clearance from the control tower.

• Radio messages between the two planes and the tower were indecipherable because everyone was talking at the same time.

• The Los Rodeos Airport was not equipped to handle the air traffic that had been diverted to it that day.

• The air traffic controllers were also overwhelmed.

• It was charged, although never proven, that the controllers were listening to a soccer game on the radio when the KLM and Pan Am planes began rolling toward each other.

None of the questions has ever been answered to anyone’s satisfaction. Neither has the most obvious. Why did the pilots keep on their collision course rather than stop or veer off in different directions out of simple self-preservation? Was the fog that thick? Why would anyone play chicken when the stakes were so horribly high?

A few days after the accident, newspapers reported that Lee Fried, a student at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, had predicted the disaster a week before it happened. He had written his prediction on a sheet of notepaper, sealed it in an envelope, and then placed it in the safe of Duke’s president, where it could not be tampered with.

When the envelope was opened and the sheet of paper read aloud before a number of witnesses, including the president and other school officials, it was found to contain the following message: “Five Hundred Eighty-three Die in Collision of 747s in Worst Disaster in Aviation History.” Almost as one, the witnesses, stunned beyond comprehension, drew in a collective breath. They looked at one another through suddenly widened eyes. What was going on here? How could Fried have known? What kind of powers did this Lee Fried possess?

James Randi, a magician known as the Amazing Randi but who has devoted more of his professional life to debunking rather than performing, does not believe that human beings possess extrasensory abilities. He does not believe we can communicate with the dead or communicate with the living telepathically. He does not believe we can bend spoons by force of will or cite the details of an airline crash that has not yet happened. He does not, in short, believe in magic except as a display of gimmickry. And he has written scores of articles and conducted scores of demonstrations proving his point, providing practical explanations for what seem to be otherworldly phenomena. There remain, however, doubters, which is to say, those who insist on powers beyond the quotidian and are bitter about Randi’s constant efforts to spoil their various parties.

I have in my possession seventeen newspaper clippings dealing with that prediction. Some are from England, one from Canada, one from France, and the rest are from the United States. In that collection is ample proof that the media are editing news items to slant them toward promoting belief in the paranormal; for in all but one [italics in original] of these articles, an important section is cut out. That section reveals that Fried, unlike other claimed “psychics,” is quite clearly admitting that he is a conjuror and makes no claim to divine inspiration or to supernatural abilities.

Fried, eighteen, an electrical engineering student from New Orleans who described himself as an amateur magician, said in an interview, “I don’t claim to have any supernormal abilities, ESP or anything else like that. I don’t claim to have any of these things. I’ve been a performing magician for some time.”

Another claim Fried did not make was that he had good judgment. To use an airplane crash that killed almost six hundred men and women as the basis for a magic trick only a matter of days after the crash occurred is, to say the least, insensitive to both the magnitude of the disaster and the pain of the victims’ families.

But the larger point is not Fried’s timing; it is the actions of the sixteen papers that wrote about his prediction without including the disclaimer. There are many who disagree with Randi’s explanation, many who do not believe that the disclaimer was omitted to promote a belief in the paranormal. Surely that was the effect among some people, a number of Americans suddenly given reason to accept the presence of a seer in their midst, perhaps the prophet of a new faith. But the newspapers intended nothing so otherworldly.

Instead, for financial reasons, the press ignored Fried’s stated lack of supernatural abilities. Publishers had known, since the days of William Randolph Hearst, if not before, that the more sensational their stories, the more product they would sell. And now, the age of broadcast having arrived, such stories would attract more viewers for television and listeners for radio.

In this case, the newspapers and broadcast outlets had three choices. The first, and most responsible, was not to run the story, as it had no news value whatsoever and in fact served to trivialize the importance of the crash, making it secondary to Fried’s showmanship. The second was to do what the Daily News did, run the story with the caveat. The problem with this option is that when you acknowledge Fried was a prestidigitator rather than a psychic, you emphasize the pointlessness of his deed. Magic tricks are not news. Why treat this one as if it were? The third was to do what the other sixteen newspapers did, make it seem as though Fried was a man of inexplicable gifts and, at least by implication, raise the possibility that he might be able to use those gifts not just to predict catastrophes in the future but to prevent them. Lee Fried, Superman of the mind.

But, ultimately, Fried was a young man who probably ended up wishing he had not done what he did. Writes Randi about the eighteen-year-old in the weeks after the story, “Fried says that he has received requests for assistance in locating missing persons, medical advice, and other boons that ‘psychics’ claim to be able to grant. And the believers are ready to pay.” Just as the newspapers would be ready to print.

Some years earlier, the Wall Street Journal had demonstrated that it was possible to tell a lie not by omitting the truth, but by hiding it away in the interior pages of the paper. In other words, a publication does not have to ignore reality to provide a disservice to its customers; it needs only to report it in a context that makes it seem less significant than it really is.

Burying the lead, this is called in the news business, and it is usually not a nefarious practice. It is, rather, a mistake by the reporter or the result of an honest difference of opinion between the reporter and those who supervise or read his story. What follows, however, is an account of lead-burying that reflected a sameness of opinion between reporter and readers, and was so nefarious, not to mention so obvious, that it is in its own unintended way laughable.

The Wall Street Journal was founded as a telegraphic news service in 1907, but it took on its present form as a conventionally formatted newspaper in 1941. That year, under the leadership of managing editor Bernard Kilgore, who would later go on to be the paper’s CEO, its circulation was 33,000. By the time Kilgore passed away in 1967, the circulation was 1.1 million and growing, and the Journal, despite being named after a single street in a single American city, had become the country’s first great national newspaper.

The Wall Street Journal was always a business publication, always a conservative publication—the two, of course, going hand in hand. It supported tax breaks for investors, less government interference for corporations, and Republicans for president. It was especially hopeful of the latter in 1940, when the Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, seeking an unprecedented third term, seemed especially vulnerable.

One of the reasons had to do with the very fact of precedent. As the first incumbent in American history to seek a third term, Roosevelt seemed to some voters megalomaniacal. Two terms had been good enough for Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln—why shouldn’t they be good enough for Roosevelt? Even some of those who supported him were puzzled. There was a war on the horizon, and Americans did not like to change chief executives at so critical a time; they would like to have defended Roosevelt on the grounds that he was merely doing his duty, putting his concern for country above his desire to leave the White House behind and retire to Hyde Park. But Roosevelt, like Wilson before him, had insisted that the United States would not enter the war. Thus there was no reason for him to stay on. What was a person to make of all this?

And what was he to make of surveys revealing that the majority of Americans still respected Roosevelt and believed he had done a good job, at the same time that fewer said they would vote to reelect him a second time? Perhaps they simply thought that the president, capable though he had been, had overstayed his welcome. It was nice to have had him around for all these years but it was time for him to go now, if for no other reason than that this was the time when all of his predecessors had gone.

Republicans certainly wanted him to go. Although willing to give him a chance in the woeful early days of the Great Depression, they had since come to despise him. They thought him not just the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time but, worse, a traitor to his people. To a degree, it was true.

Roosevelt’s father, although not as wealthy as the so-called robber barons, had amassed at least a small fortune in coal, while his mother had inherited a million dollars from her own father, who had made it selling opium to the Chinese during America’s Civil War. As for Roosevelt himself, his pedigree could hardly be improved upon; he had gone to Groton, Harvard, Columbia Law, and even clerked on Wall Street for a time. He should have been more sympathetic to the desires of the moneyed classes. He should have been less concerned with people who did not have the Ivy League in their backgrounds. He should have been a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal.

But even though Roosevelt’s answer to the Depression, a basketful of programs called the New Deal, began by trying to strike a balance between the needs of big business and the needs of the laboring man, Roosevelt had in time concluded that the latter’s needs were greater, and the New Deal began to tilt leftward. It provided jobs for the unemployed or underemployed, allowed people on the payrolls of private business to join unions, and perhaps most controversial of all, at least as far as some Republicans were concerned, insisted that working men and women invest a portion of their paychecks with the government so that they would have money to live on when they retired. The government had no business, Republicans believed, coddling people like this.

And Roosevelt would have gone even further had the Supreme Court not struck down even more of his coddle-the-working-man measures. The president, it was charged by those on the extreme right, was “killing free enterprise; he was destroying the instinct for competition; he was regimenting and cheapening the whole American society; he was ending the power of management to manage and the willingness of the worker to work; he was sapping the vital strength of capitalism, and so on, and so on.”

Roosevelt also seemed vulnerable in 1940 because his opponent, Wendell Willkie, a corporate lawyer who had never before held public office, had a certain “rough-hewn, benignly ursine Midwestern integrity.” He also had a large, full-cheeked smile that came to him naturally, rather than as an effort, something he called upon as a campaign device. His hair was rumpled, his clothes rumpled; he did not have the look of a corporate lawyer, but rather of the fellow next door, someone you could trust not to pervert democracy to get you back on your feet, but who would help you stand again by giving you sound advice and timely exhortations that would, in the long run, be much better not only for you but for the nation as a whole.

Even the Republican’s foe was impressed, Roosevelt admitting to a friend at one point during the campaign that he could not help but admire Willkie, albeit grudgingly. He had not felt that way about Herbert Hoover in 1932 or Alf Landon in 1936.

By the summer of 1940, Willkie was trailing Roosevelt in various public opinion polls by between five and ten points. But as election day grew closer, the margin narrowed. The Republican arguments against Roosevelt seemed to be taking hold, as did a new one, which was whispered more than shouted from the stump. Agree with him or not, even a Republican had to admit that the president was a hardworking man. Maybe too hardworking. Didn’t he seem worn out sometimes? Weren’t his cheeks sagging a bit, his eyelids drooping? Wasn’t his facial tone more gray than rosy? What were the chances he would survive a third term in the world’s most demanding job? After all, as a Yale man named George Frederick Gundelfinger wrote in a pamphlet he distributed anonymously, Roosevelt was “a crippled imbecile, paralyzed in body and mind.” Didn’t he deserve to retire?

The voters did not want him to. On November 5, 1940, almost fifty million Americans marked their ballots, with 27,313,945 of them deciding to give Franklin Delano Roosevelt a third term as president, and 22,347,744 choosing to give Willkie a first term.

The Wall Street Journal covered the story on November 7, 1940, with its eyes closed and its teeth gritted. It was the most embarrassing display of reporting on a presidential election that the country has ever witnessed from a major newspaper.

WASHINGTON—A reshuffling of the personnel and policies of the National Defense Advisory Commission tops the list of important defense and diplomatic events which will follow in the wake of the Presidential election.

Emergence of a new official, probably to be known as defense coordinator, is the most important pending change in the NDAC organization. On the policy side, the pressure of rearmament will force an abatement of the NDAC policy of superimposing defense on normal business without interfering with the latter.

WASHINGTON—So far as national legislation is concerned, particularly legislation related to domestic economic policy, a significant fact about Tuesday’s elections is that the political complexion of Congress did not change very much.

At the top of the same page, a relatively brief story focused on the loser in the presidential race, with the headline reading:

MILITANT WILLKIE MINORITY LOOKED LIKE MAJORITY SAYS KILGORE OF VOTE WHICH UPSET PREDICTIONS

Under that account, which had been written in an apologetic, even puzzled tone, was the small headline “Election Results,” with the Wall Street Journal finally getting around to giving its first clear indication that Roosevelt had won a third term:

Tuesday’s election lined up like this on the basis of the latest returns Wednesday night. President Roosevelt had apparently won 449 electoral votes and Wendell Willkie 63, with Michigan’s 19 votes still in some doubt. President Roosevelt’s popular majority, on basis of the latest tabulation, was something over 4,000,000 votes.

And on page 7, an editorial pointed out that opposition to the current administration was more important than ever because “ten million people started regularly receiving [Social Security] checks from the United States treasury,” and this was something that could not be allowed to pass unnoticed. The editorial went on to say that “for the opposition to cease opposition . . . for it to slink away, crushed and cowed—that is not in the national interest and no such obligation rests upon it. . . . On the contrary, to cease opposing now is distinctly against the national interests. Quite clearly opposition is more vital now than ever before.”

Perhaps. But so were several stories on page 1 about Roosevelt’s history-shattering third term. The National Defense Advisory Commission—now there was a story that could have waited for page 8. Even November 8!

The lead, of course, would not stay buried. Leads never do. If the most important facts in a story have been interred accidentally by a reporter, an editor will usually spot the infraction and have the story rewritten. If one has been interred deliberately, by editorial policy, the attentive reader will spot it with no less difficulty.

Even readers of that day’s Wall Street Journal, no matter how much they might have disliked the man and his politics, knew that Roosevelt’s election to a third term in the White House was the most important story in the country and would affect the nation dramatically for the next four years.

The Journal had made its position on the president clear—in fact, it had done so many times in the past. All that it accomplished with its election coverage, at least for the time being, was to bury its own reputation for presenting news that did not agree with its collective editorial conscience.