"The Strategy of Truth"

Citizens might beef at the quality of information coming to them out of Washington, but no one could beef at the quantity. Tons of printed matter poured out of the Government press sections. U.S. citizens might not be fully informed of the war situation in the Pacific, but they still got recipes from Department of the Interior's Fish & Wildlife Service for the cooking of planked shad.

On top of the press sections of the regular Departments and agencies were the big new ones. In the OEM press section were about 400 people. Others: the Office of Censorship (OC); the Office of Government Reports (OGR); the Office of Government Films (OGF); the Office of the Coordinator of Information (OCI), the Army & Navy press sections, the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), and the White House's own Executive Office. The Office of Civilian Defense (OCD) is building a large press bureau.

Biggest of all is the Department of Agriculture's press division: 711 fulltime, 20,543 part-time employes, who cost the U.S. taxpayers last year $11,887,000 for salaries and printed matter.

Worse than the cost and waste was the confusion. Fortnight ago Franklin Roosevelt got fed up. He set the Office of Facts & Figures at the top, as No. 1 information agency of the Government; the same time he muzzled his Cabinet by ordering that all speeches and statements must be submitted first to OFF Chief Archibald MacLeish, Pulitzer Prize poet,* former FORTUNE editor, and Librarian of Congress.

The Editors of Truth. The U.S. knew little about Archibald MacLeish, Illinois-born 49-year-old journalist, who studied at Harvard to be a lawyer, was so highly regarded that men thought he might some day be the hope of the Boston bar. But at Yale MacLeish had begun to write poetry. He left the law, went to Paris, saw the town and the world much as other American expatriates. Returning, he became a writer-editor of FORTUNE in 1930. As a general journalist he was superb. When the Japs struck at Pearl Harbor, and Americans turned to their reference works to find out about Japan, the best one-volume collection of essays penetrating deep into all phases of Nippon was the brilliant Japan number of FORTUNE, chiefly written and edited by MacLeish (September 1936).

Two other journalistic highlights were the MacLeish-edited FORTUNE series (December 1937-June 1939) on South America and the MacLeish-edited FORTUNE study (June 1935), summing up the British Empire at its last great happy moment, the Jubilee of King George V, King-Emperor.

Under Editor MacLeish in OFF were other able men: Columnist (now Captain) Robert Kintner; Historian & Essayist Henry F. Pringle of Harper's and Collier's; former Washington Correspondent Ulric J. Bell, of the Louisville Courier-Journal; New York Times Book Reviewer Charles Poore; Columbia Broadcasting System's Vice President William B. Lewis; TIME'S Allen Grover, Chicago Daily Newsman Edgar Ansel Mowrer.

The Hounds. Some Congressmen were already baying on the trail of OFF. They had the help of Columnist Westbrook Pegler, a handy man with a stone, who now steadily threw rocks at OFF's Malcolm Cowley, an ex-New Republican. And one of the principal things that set the Congressmen baying was OFF's first publication, a grandiose 62-page, red-white-&-blue-printed Report to the Nation.

This brochure presented as facts and figures a roseate picture of extreme optimism about U.S. war production. The reaction of truth-hungry citizens to OFF's hearts-&-flowers was fierce. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch pictured OFF as "The Offices of Alibis and Excuses," whence issued "Rosy Reports."

OFF was on the spot and the spot was furnace-hot. The U.S. wanted a great deal of information, and all of it straight. Fortnight ago OFF Chief MacLeish had talked of "the strategy of terror" of the Axis Governments, had contrasted it with his own belief in a "strategy of truth." This was a heartening note. Citizens who could imagine what he was up against were inclined to reserve judgment; to hope that MacLeish's OFF would be able to give them not puzzling facts and figures but the enlightening truth itself.

* For Conquistador, an epic of Cortes' conquest of Mexico.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.