China Incident

With smiling faces and with thankfulness in their hearts, foreign correspondents in Peiping threw a farewell party. Their guest of honor had made their lives miserable with his peculiar scoops. The peculiarity of his scoops lay in the fact that so many of them were phony. His imminent departure made him very popular. At the party, he was presented with a silver flask filled with his favorite fluid.

Fat, flamboyant Reynolds Packard, 43, tossed off the vodka in, one neat kan pei (bottoms up). Then he made a speech, whose opening remark was directed at the editor of the Peiping Chronicle:

"I appreciated the story you had about me in the paper today," he boomed. "But I'd hoped that you would have the courage to say I was fired by the United Press. This is the fifth time, and it makes us even, since I've quit five times. And this is going to be the last."

The United Press felt the same way. The U.P. had built Packard's by-line into a big name; but it was a name known more for flamboyance than accuracy. Pack had once summed up his odd philosophy in three sentences which would have horrified the Commission on Freedom of the Press: "If you've got a good story, the important thing is to get it out fast. You can worry about details later. And if you have to send a correction, that will probably make another good story."

Removing so expensive an item as Reynolds Packard from the U.P. payroll called for more than a routine cable. U.P. president Hugh Baillie personally ordered Reynolds fired. Walter Rundle, China bureau chief at Shanghai, flew to Peiping to break the news. The U.P. was fed up with such Packard specials as the Russian "evacuation" of Dairen last fall, the "human-headed spider" he discovered near Peiping, and the discovery of a Russian atomic bomb plant on Lake Baikal.

Dear Readers. "What I want to do," Packard had frankly told a Peiping Rotary Club luncheon, "is let my readers participate in my experiences in collecting news, whether it's real or phony." He had been letting his readers in on his facts & fancies since he joined U.P. in South America at 19. Fired in Paris (for wearing a red beard, according to Pack), he was rehired to cover the Ethiopian and Spanish wars. He was Rome bureau chief when the Fascists interned him and his wife, Eleanor, whose by-line had become as well-known and somewhat more reliable. The Packards got even with Mussolini by writing a book called Balcony Empire.

Pack and his "Pibe" (Argentine slang for "The Kid") got back in time to cover Italy's fall. One night in Naples, tipped off that an Allied bigwig was arriving, they invited fellow reporters in for a binge. While Pibe got them drunk, Pack slipped out to get his interview. When the boys missed him and scrambled in pursuit, they found that he had crippled their jeeps.

Two years ago U.P. fired Pibe (to save one expense account), sent her husband to China. When she joined him last fall, she had a limp. A guy had insulted her in a Manhattan bar, she explained; she had swung on him, missed, broken her ankle. When they get home next month, the Packards will finish two books. In Dust Against the Sun, anybody who cares may learn how the authors live their own lives though married. The other will be History for Sale. "I'll do a story of the news agencies," glowed Pack, adding needlessly, "in Hucksters fashion."

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