Part: 1234         Session: 12         Page 123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233 of 512

biased against them more on the basis of the headlines and on the general editorial position of the Post rather than what I myself wrote, but they took it out on me and caused me some very, very unpleasant moments on the grounds that I was writing unfriendly stories about them, which was very ironic, because actually I was trying to lean over backwards not to, because of my faith in the necessity of objective news reporting. So it did create an ironic position there; but in any case the War ended this whole question because I went into the Army in the spring of '41, which was really quite early, through the draft.

Incidentally, I preferred to go in through the draft rather than through any other way, rather than try to beat the draft, because I was extremely interested in seeing just what the draft would be like, what it would be about, how it would feel.

To just get back to this coverage of the Capitol, the very great efforts that I was making to be objective about the Committee did not prevent me at all from getting into all kinds of trouble with the various members of the Committee, which was partly directed against me personally, but I think a good deal stemmed from their antipathy towards the Post which had by this time taken quite a strong editorial line. And sometimes those headlines, I think, probably showed some editorial bias, too.

Isn't it practically impossible to cover something that you feel so strongly about objectively? To have any color?

That's exactly true and I suppose that my stories suffered from lack of color maybe - - I'm quite conscious that that's true - with the Post because I felt that it could have been so