Exception

For nearly a month, Moscow's censors had hardly touched blue pencil to any correspondent's copy (TIME, Nov. 19). But Randolph Churchill, the conceited son of a great man, was still being censored.

"Demobbed" from his father's old regiment, the 4th Queen's Own Hussars, and unseated from Parliament at the last election, Randolph at 34 was still regarded by his friends as "promising." His latest fling was in an old Churchillian field: journalism. United Feature Syndicate had signed him to a one-year contract, sold his column to 80 papers in the U.S. and abroad, told him Europe was his beat. His first col umns were windy pieces about Eire, and under anyone else's name would hardly have been printed. When they appeared, Randolph was in Moscow, trying to line up an interview with Molotov. In his room at Moscow's National Hotel, he picked up the telephone, asked in English for the French Embassy. When the operator replied in Russian, Randolph burst out: "I say, it's no good your speaking to me in that foreign language!" He kept repeating this Briticism until the Moscow telephone system found someone who could speak his language.

Before he left town, young Churchill submitted three columns to Soviet censorship. The reported score: one passed, one chopped in half, one killed.

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