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I was there until I went into the Army in '41. As far as Washington goes, I started there as strictly general assignment, a very first-rung reporter. And I'm sure that the only reason I got the job was that a relative of mine [Julian Ochs Adler, 1st cousin] had written a letter for me to Mr. Meyer, the publisher of the paper. I'm not proud of getting a job that way. I'm sure that's how I got the job, but I don't think it's how I kept it because I worked very hard and was a general reporter and had the break, after about 14 months or so, of being sent up to Capitol Hill for the opening of the new Congress in 1939, after the '38 election, and this was an experience of course that was exceedingly valuable as well as terribly interesting. And it was, of course, precisely what I wanted to do. I had a little more than a year of general reporting, covering everything in Washington, all the usual run of reportorial activity in a city. It wouldn't have mattered whether it was Washington or any other place, except that occasionally one would have the assignment of covering something going on at an embassy, and in that sense it was a little different, but that wasn't very frequent.

However, after I got this Capitol job to cover Congress, then it was really marvelous because I was terribly interested in everything I was covering, I covered mainly the House, but during one awful period when we were shorthanded I was covering both House and Senate as well as the Supreme Court thrown in, more or less by myself (This was a couple of years later). At any rate, I had a lot of experience in both the Senate and in the House and in the Supreme Court and less, but some, in other government department. I even, at one point, when our regular government columnist was away--we had a column about government personnel, government employee activities--I even ran that column for a period during his absence. And so I had quite an extensive general reportorial experience in