Potent Postscript

Three months ago, Reporter Alva Johnston appended a postscript to a routine letter to the editors of the Saturday Evening Post: "How about Jimmy R.?" To the Post Jimmy R. sounded good. The postscript became an article on James Roosevelt's thumping success in the insurance business. Last week Reporter Johnston's article (TIME, July 4), published in the Post with none of the author's charges changed or deleted, got more attention in the U. S. press than any magazine article in recent years.

At the age of 16 Alva Johnston gave up wrangling with high-school geometry, went to work for the Bee in his native Sacramento, Calif. Some 18 years later he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the sessions of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for the New York Times. After 16 years with the Times and four years with the New York Herald Tribune, he began a lucrative career as a freelance writer, achieved wide renown as a frequent author of the New Yorker's Profiles."

Last week, Reporter Johnston, who does his own legwork and his own checking, was surprised but not fazed by reactions to his story. From the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., where he was undergoing treatment for a stomach ulcer, the President's son authorized the statement that he "naturally is indignant over certain outright misrepresentations . . . he has requested his attorneys to consider the matter for future conference." Mr. Johnston's comment was: "Let 'em sue. I have only scratched the surface on Jimmy." Young Roosevelt as a whiskey insurance man and Ambassador Joseph Patrick Kennedy as a whiskey salesman had found their dealings with each other un usually satisfying, according to Mr. Johnston's article. Sailing back to his post in London last week, Mr. Kennedy was categorical: "If all of it is as true as the part I have read about myself, it is a complete, unadulterated lie." Reporter Johnston dismissed Mr. Kennedy as "our Ambassador to the Court of Haig & Haig."

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