Sir Bill

One day in 1924, Sir Willmott Harsant Lewis, the wise and witty U.S. correspondent of the London Times, was waiting for a spent and deadlocked Democratic convention to make up its mind between McAdoo and Smith. To a fellow newsman he remarked: "I've been around here so long I'm impinging on eternity." By last week his crack (like many he had minted) had become legendary among Washington correspondents, and Sir Bill, willing to impinge but not to intrude upon eternity, was getting ready to retire (at 69) from a career no living newsman could match.

It was a career well spent, not in search of scoops but in quest of understanding between peoples. In characteristic Lewis fashion, it would not end abruptly. First he would break in a successor. Then, some time in the spring, his spare, well-clad frame and his bass-drum voice would clear out of his small, wildly cluttered office in Washington's National Press Building. After that, he and the leisurely Times didn't quite know.

Sir, It's This Way. Bill Lewis made his living by interpreting the U.S. to Britons, but he won his knighthood for explaining Britain to Americans. He never took his official honor too seriously, or his titles of "unofficial ambassador" and "dean of correspondents." When a friend asked what it meant to be a knight, he boomed: "Well, I'll tell you, old boy. Willmott Lewis used to fetch $250 per lecture. Sir Willmott Lewis gets $500."

In the beginning, he had fetched far less: as a tyro with a Welsh burr, he had covered smoke-hall concerts in Brighton for 25 shillings a week. He got his fill of spot news and close calls in the Boxer Rebellion and the Russo-Japanese war. In his day he had run the Manila Times, worked for Hearst and Pulitzer and--luckily--for George Creel at the World War I Peace Conference. Lord Northcliffe, then in control of the London Times, hired him at Versailles for the Washington job.

For many years, British journalists had considered an assignment to the U.S.--the "sphere of the fabulous"--as the uttermost exile. Willmott Lewis did more than any other man to make it a prize. Working a little above and behind the area of spot news, he aimed at "discovering American policy." To that kind of job he brought sound scholarship, a facile tongue, a pen that turned out discursive and thoughtful prose, ideal for London's "Thunderer." He became friendly, but never too friendly, with men who made U.S. history, a subject he knew well enough to assess them against.

Press Parasite. When he came to Washington, the British Embassy was impregnable to U.S.-reporters. Today, six Ambassadors and 26 years later, its doors are open to them, and they know whom to thank for it. Lewis regarded himself as a guestly parasite on the American press, read it with a cocked and tireless eye, picked its best brains as charmingly as he captivated capital hostesses. He called Dorothy Thompson the discoverer of "perpetual emotion," once rebuffed a girl reporter from Manhattan's PM: "Don't tell me you print just facts. Nobody knows what a fact is." Since 1942 Frank Oliver, a restless redhead from Reuters, has been Bill Lewis' legs and has filed the bulk of the Times's copy.

Sir Bill's job has been offered to an Englishman who has never worked for a newspaper. John Duncan Miller, 44-year-old Cambridge man, onetime book publisher and architect, was a wartime colonel, now works in Chicago for the British Information Service. His tough assignment: to explain Britain to a Midwest whose loudest citizen--Colonel Robert R. McCormick's Anglophobic Chicago Tribune--doesn't want to listen. Miller was offered the new job not on the strength of his only published writing, a book of Clerihews,* but because he is a friendly fellow with a considerable awareness of Anglo-American viewpoints and a wide acquaintance in Washington. He will have to live a long time, he figures, before it comes up to Sir Bill's.

* A four-line rhyme that has had a continuing vogue in England, named for its inventor, mystery writer E. C. (for Clerihew) Bentley (Trent's Last Case). Sample Clerihew by Miller:

What keeps me in the dark

About Iraq

Is that I never can

Tell it from Iran.

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