Thank You for Calling... Collect

University Attorney Allan A. Ryan Jr., the former director of the Justice Department office assigned to find and prosecute Nazis living in America, was outraged by mainstream media coverage of a recent report on that office. So outraged, in fact, that he spent hours and some of The Crimson's money urging this newspaper to do a better job on the story.

The report, issued by a Tennessee judge earlier this month, suggested that Ryan's office had likely prosecuted the wrong man as the infamous Nazi death camp guard Ivan the Terrible. The judge concluded that John Demjanjuk, the man Ryan prosecuted, was probably a Nazi guard, but not Ivan the Terrible.

The judge's report also contained a lengthy discussion of mistakes made by Ryan's office. The Harvard attorney did not appreciate the media's focus on those mistakes, or the attempt by some writers to link those mistakes to the suggestion that the Justice Department had the wrong man. Ryan correctly noted that the judge himself avoided making such a connection.

Ryan was so eager to have The Crimson, which had been following the story for several months, get it right, that he called a reporter four times in less than a day. The calls were very kind, and made the reporter's job easier, but were still a bit strange.

The Crimson usually has to make the call first before getting someone to call us back, particularly on a controversial subject such as this report. Ryan was so eager that he made repeated calls even as he was leaving on vacation to an undisclosed location.

His final call, which came at 7 p.m. the night before the story ran, was a collect call. Ryan had apparently run out of change. The reporter, whose managing editor once refused to accept a collect call of his because of the $10 service fee imposed per call by the University, accepted the call anyway. The president of The Crimson was heard to groan loudly from across the newsroom.