Post Joins McCarthy Crusade

A student whose summer job was reporting Harvard news to the Boston Post called in one day last July with what he thought was an interesting story, Palmer Hoyt, publisher of the Denver Post, and former President of the American Publisher's Association, was speaking at a Summer Conference on Education. He had rather bitterly attacked Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. After the student gave the editor some of Hoyt's quotes, the editor said he couldn't use them. "You know we're a McCarthy paper," he said, "We can't print that stuff."

Over the past year, it has become quite clear the Post is a "McCarthy paper." Led by its new owner, John Fox '29, multi-millionaire oilman and financial wizard, the Post has not only joined the Senator's crusade against Communism, but started crusades of its own: to ban books from Boston's libraries, prevent the appointment of James B. Conant as U. S. High Commissioner in Germany, and unseat the management of Harvard University. To accomplish his purposes, Fox has accepted severe financial losses, for his competitors can offer advertisers morning and afternoon papers for the price of one. But he has held on. Fox has run the Post a little more than a year, but has already so bred his personality and purpose into the paper that it has become the Chicago Tribune of the East Coast.

When Fox took over, he pledged on his front page that "Whenever news is of a controversial nature, the Post will endeavor to report both sides impartially." Which leads one to ask: what does being a McCarthy newspaper do to a newspaper's objectivity? In the case of the Post, it means reluctance to print attacks on the Senator, even when made in Boston by someone as prominent as Hoyt. It means hiring supporters of McCarthy off the staffs of competing papers. It means picturing Harvard as a beehive of Communists, its students as either playboys or radicals, and its professors as impractical fuzzyheads. Nor does the treatment stop at the banks of the Charles. Being a "McCarthy paper" means treating the news like this:

Hits Boston Public Library

On September 27, 1952, the Post's eight-column banner headlined KREMLIN NEWSPAPERS IN HUB LIBRARY READING ROOM. "Top-level Communists and their underlings," the story said, "get the latest dope straight from Moscow at the expense of the Boston taxpayers who are footing the bill for importing Pravda and Izvestia for the Boston Public Library." (Actually, the papers were financed from a private endowment.) The article told how Communists could lure children to the papers and fill their ears with translated propaganda. This story was part of the Post's effort to remove Russian-language newspapers from the Boston Public Library. So graphic was the story that the trustees of the library resolved to make sure their staff kept a close watch on readers, "alert," according to the resolution, "for possible Red agents using the reading room to spread their doctrines."

A few days later flared the headline LIBRARY URGES STUDY OF MARX. "The Boston Public Library is promoting Communist literature in a large-scale lobby display urging people to read the basic books of Communism." The exhibit happened to be for a Great Books discussion group which also considered the works of Plato, Aquinas and Jefferson.

Dr. Milton E. Lord, director of the library, at first refused to restrict the books in any way. But it was getting near election time, so members of the City Council and even Boston's Mayor, John B. Hynes, began to call for various forms of restriction. On October 4, 1952, the trustees voted to "weed out" certain "obvious Communist propaganda documents" from the library. The Post then sent reporters to the towns of metropolitan Boston to publicize any which kept Soviet and pro-Soviet periodicals in the open.

Regarding Harvard, Fox seems to have love-hate complex. He thinks the University is the greatest educational institution in the world. But he is convinced that its management has for years "lacked common sense," and made Harvard what he called in an editorial "the focus of infection from which the Communist poison has spread throughout the country."

In a series of ten editorials now running under the title "Communism at Harvard," Fox reiterates his contention that Professors Furry and Markham should have been fired for past activity for the Communist party. The Corporations' failure to do this, Fox says, shows it "suffered from one of two things: A general attack of gullibility so astonishing as to tax credulity; or a feeling of sentimental affection for faculty members who were at least former Communists so great as to approach the maudlin." A member of this year's twenty-fifth Reunion class, Fox also supports the "Free Enterprise Fund" of Kenneth D. Robertson Jr., '29, which is designed to force "socialistic" professors to bring their wives into open forums.

When the Senate Sub-committee on the Judiciary, headed by Sen. William E. Jenner (Rep.-Ind.) came to Boston last March, the Post gave the first day's hearings six pages of publicity. This, despite its editorial of the previous week, which opposed televising such hearings because "excess publicity is bad from any standpoint except that of the personal publicity that is likely to accrue to committee members." The day before the hearings opened, Kirtley Mather, professor of Geology, who for years has been accused of Communist front activities, announced he had been subpoenaed and said he "would cooperate to the fullest extent possible with the committee." The Post front-paged this under MATHER FACES RED PROBE. Mather must have satisfied the committee, for it did not call him into open session. This meant that at least tacitly, the Jenner committee had cleared a man widely accused of being a Communist. The Post did not consider this newsworthy enough to print.

Harvard is covered by the Post from Washington, too, by special correspondent John G. Kelso. Kelso's writing, sharp and fast-moving, makes easy reading. His favorite Washington lead is "Angry Senators today demanded . . . ," although his stock of Senators is usually limited to McCarran, McClellan, Ferguson, Dirksen and McCarthy.

On September 28 of this year, the Post published angry Senatorial attacks on the Russian Research Center under the banner HARVARD STUDY OF RUSSIA CALLED INSANE-COSTS U. S. $450,000. For three days, the front page emphasized the attack, quoting Senators like McClellan saying things like "If the army, navy and defense departments do not know how to counteract Soviet propaganda without hiring a bunch of college professors, this defense establishment is in darn bad shape in my opinion." Such quotes were not published in other papers, indicating Kelso had obtained them on his own. The Research Center's side of the story was not published in the Post, and the decision of the Air Force to let Harvard complete the project was on page three, eight inches down from the top of the issue of September 30.

Louis M. Lyons, curator of the Nieman Fellowships, offers an interesting sidelight on the Russian Research story. "The Post story--"Lyons says, "all their stories on the Harvard work for the Air Force, come out of the record of hearings held in Washington last June or July. It comes out of the record of the Senate Appropriations Committee hearings on the armed forces appropriations bill, HR 5969. The Post reporter has got up to page 1441 in the record, where Trenor Gardner, special assistant to the Air Secretary for research and development expressed to Senator Ferguson dissatisfaction "with both the scope and amount of money being spent in this area." Whether he meant just at Harvard or in the whole research area, you can't make out. The Post, of course, had no doubt and pinned it on Harvard."

"But undoubtedly," Lyons says, "this Post man in Washington who is industriously catching up with his work of last summer will read on 500 more pages of the record, and will get to page 1959. When he does he will find this and it will be interesting to see if the Post prints it:

Senator Ferguson: "You do not have that study going on up at Harvard on the Soviet Union?"

Mr. Gardner: "We looked into that."

Sen. Ferguson: "Is it still going on?"

Mr. Gardner: "It has produced excellent results."

Sen. Ferguson: "I want to see that."

Mr. Gardner: "Copies of the reports were provided to your committee. I was pleased to see that the results of that work were really fine."

Conant High-Jinks

Kelso had another exclusive on the appointment of President-Emeritus James B. Conant as High Commissioner to Germany last February. Compare the Post articles on the confirmation of Conant with the regular Associated Press stories, and you will find the AP's lead often buried in the fifteenth or sixteenth paragraphs of the Post. The Post deemed significant the fact that "Conant appeared to be talking nervously over the phone" after appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The day the AP reported Conant's confirmation virtually certain, the Post headlined PROTESTS MOUNT OVER CONANT, and Kelso predicted the fury generated by the appointment of Charles E. Wilson, with his General Motors stock, would be insignificant compared to the storm Conant's appointment would kick up.

This, then, is what becomes of objectivity on a McCarthy newspaper. For the Post, and along with newspapers equally influential in other parts of the country, are papers on a great crusade in which the normal standards of news reporting are just a deterrent. John Fox and the Post are becoming to Boston what Colonel Robert McCormick and the Tribune are to Chicago: for specific purposes, good or ill depending on your point of view, a vital, moving force in the thought and actions of the community.

A number of years ago, a Royal Commission studied the British Press. Compiling its report, it asked editors by what criteria they angled and reported the news. All professed strict standards of objectivity, except one, who said: "News is what we think is socially significant." John Fox might agree, at least if he were not told that the name of that paper was the London Daily Worker.