"No Intelligent Person"

Sunday before last, Washington Columnist Drew Pearson, speaking as a guest at the weekly unrehearsed Round Table discussion of the University of Chicago over the 58 stations of the NBC Red Network, remarked that proponents of Herbert Hoover were already active in Louisiana and Mississippi "buying up" delegates to the 1940 Republican National Convention.

Mr. Hoover indignantly yelped at this "vicious personal slander and libel in which there is not the remotest possible truth," demanded an apology in the next Round Table broadcast. In Washington, Columnist Pearson stuck by his pea-shooters, remarked: "No intelligent person would construe my remarks to mean that Mr. Hoover personally was buying up Southern delegates . . . they are being rounded up by his political friends in the manner that politicians usually round up Negro and poor white Republicans in the solid South. . . . As to how that is done, I refer to Bascom Slemp and Perry Howard, who did valiant work on Mr. Hoover's behalf prior to the 1928 Republican convention. . . ."

Last Sunday the half-hour Round Table discussion was opened and closed with an apology by the University's vice president Frederic Campbell Woodward (a Hoover aide with the U. S. Food Administration in 1917): "That statement should never have been made. We have ample assurance that it is absolutely untrue. We not only wish to state our regret but our full confidence that Mr. Hoover's public life stands out for high standards of probity, political honesty and abhorrence of political corruption."

This disclaimer may have satisfied Mr. Hoover, but it irked Columnist Pearson considerably to be thus roundly denied. Next day his attorney, Ernest Cuneo, wired Vice President Woodward, curtly labeling the denial "a statement . . . viciously attacking the professional integrity of my client," and winding up: "Unless proper apologies are made to Mr. Pearson, immediate legal proceedings will be instituted."

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