Blackmail & Principle

The dispute between the nation's press and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles over his refusal to let American newsmen go to Red China flared up anew. Going beyond his original argument--an unconvincing one--that the U.S. would not be able to protect reporters behind the Bamboo Curtain, Dulles last week entered a new explanation that first confused and then angered editors across the nation.

"As you know, of course, the Chinese Communist government has for some time been trying to get reporters, preferably those it picked, to come into Communist China," Dulles told his press conference, "and it has repeatedly tried to use the illegal detention of Americans in Communist China as a means of pressure to accomplish its ends . . . That kind of blackmail I don't propose to satisfy."

Separate Issue. Newsmen not only did not know about the Red Chinese maneuver, but neither, apparently, did President Eisenhower. "This is a new thought that has come in," said Ike next day at his press conference. Newsmen could squeeze no details out of the State Department; this increased their irritation. "I'm not in favor of a blackmail proposition, either," said J. Edward Murray, managing editor of the Los Angeles Mirror-News. "Dulles is not wrong to refuse to bargain on the basis of the prisoners' release. But it's a separate issue entirely."

What galled pressmen most, beyond their inability to go after the news in a vital part of the world, was the inference, however unintentional, to be drawn from Dulles' ban: a seeming fear that American reporters who went to China could be led astray. The New York Times, four of whose staffers were among the 18 U.S. newsmen invited by the Chinese last August, complained that the Government appeared to believe that the correspondents "would write what the Chinese Reds wanted, and would help the Communists."

With his new statement, some felt, Dulles had invited pressure from Americans who, though uninterested in the spat between Dulles and the press, think that a lifting of the ban is a cheap enough way of rescuing ten U.S. citizens from Red imprisonment. Put that way, the trade sounded fine to the New York Post, most vocal of Dulles' critics: "In one single diplomatic coup we would liberate the Americans . . . and open the way for free press coverage of a decisive world area."

Bricks Added. In the six months since the dispute began, the press had done little more than fling hot words and editorial darts at the State Department, but last week it began adding some bricks. Two U.S. newsmen who have defied the ban--Edmund Stevens of Look and William Worthy Jr. of the Baltimore Afro-American--made ready to invoke open hearings to fight the State Department's move to revoke their passports. Said Worthy, back in the U.S. after 41 days in Red China: "I want to embarrass the hell out of the State Department." The American Newspaper Publishers Association formally entered into the issue by sending to the President and the Congress a weighty resolution protesting curbs on "travel in any country with which the U.S. is not at war."

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