How to Lose a Beat

At his home on Washington's Woodley Road one evening last week, New York Times Bureau Chief James Barrett Reston was getting ready to go out with his family when the telephone rang. "O.K.," said the voice on the phone. "You can get them." For Reston "them" meant only one thing: the secret records of the Yalta Conference. Like other Washington newsmen, "Scotty" Reston knew that the report might be released any time. Only the day before, the State Department had volunteered to supply 24 "confidential" copies of the record to Congress. But the Democrats, knowing the record might thus leak out. refused to go along with the idea (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). As the State Department withdrew its offer, Scotty Reston went to work on his sources to turn up a copy on his own.

Last week the result of his enterprise not only got him the first copy of the Yalta record; it forced the State Department to release the text to the press of the world. It also enabled the Times to perform a notable journalistic feat. While most other papers were carrying only sketchy Yalta stories, the Times set in type and printed the full text of the 200,000 -word Yalta Conference record, along with news stories, pictures and editorial comment. It ran nearly 32 full pages, the longest text the paper has ever run (second: the 15-page Pearl Harbor Report).

Phone Books. After the phone call, Reston hustled to "an office," there got the record from his caller. Reston refused to say who he was. but newsmen guessed Reston's source was someone in the State Department itself. He got the two-volume. 834-page report under three conditions : 1) the Times would publish the full conference record. 2) the books were to be kept handy so that they could be returned in 15 minutes, and 3) they were not to be taken apart. Thus the books could not be sent to the Times's New York office, but had to be copied in Washington. Reston had already phoned Times Managing Editor Turner Catledge to alert him that he might be getting the report, and the Times had decided to publish it, since "no question of national security" was involved. With the two volumes in hand, Reston set his Washington bureau to work transmitting the record to New York. Said he: "It was like being given two phone books to transmit."

One group of staffers started to copy Volume II (the conference record) page by page on the office Thermo-Fax machine ordinarily used to copy letters and other single sheets of paper. Meanwhile, Staff Photographer George Tames was put to work photographing Volume I (the background papers). As duplicates came off the Thermo-Fax machine, five Teletype operators began sending the conference record over the Times's leased wires to New York. They worked all night, and by next day had 14 additional Western Union circuits operating at one time to New York. They tied up so many wires that there were not enough left to send out the text of the President's press conference, and the Times had to give some of the lines up. Meanwhile, Times Correspondent Bess Furman took the filmed copy of the background papers to New York. (Excerpts were printed the day after the full conference record appeared.)

The Leak. All this feverish activity proved to be too much for the Times exclusive. In Manhattan the New York bureau of the Chicago Tribune is in the Times's building, and the Trib got wind of what was going on, tipped off Trib Managing Editor Don Maxwell in Chicago. He telephoned New York Times Managing Editor Catledge, tried to make a deal: he would split the costs of preparing the texts if the Times would cut in the Trib. When Catledge refused. Maxwell went after the text himself. He told his Washington bureau to stir up Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen. who, in turn, asked Republican Minority Leader William Knowland to protest about the State Department's "plan to 'leak' the text to one favored Eastern newspaper."

By then, word of the Times exclusive was racing around Washington. Newsmen began to badger their own sources, and copies of the report were leaking fast. Knowland and New Hampshire's Senator Styles Bridges, who were lunching that day with Secretary of State Dulles, angrily reported the uproar to him. As a result, Dulles' office told reporters after lunch that copies of the Yalta record and background briefings would be released to the entire press later in the afternoon.

Congratulations. By 4:50, when other newsmen officially got their copies of the report for release at 9 p.m., the Times, with as many as 84 Linotype machines at j work, had an 18-hour head start in setting the text. But the Chicago Trib, which learned how to print fast from photoengravings during a long (1947-49) typographical strike, remembered an easy way to catch up. A Trib staffer flew two copies of the documents to Chicago, where the paper quickly made photoengravings of the full conference record. Thus it was able to print a supplement with a reproduction of the record.* The Trib, however, was so rushed that it did not have time to write enough sidebar stories to go with the text. So it borrowed three stories from the Times, whose news service the Trib buys, simply marked them "Special," and ran them on its own front page.

After the Times and Trib were out, Times Editor Catledge phoned the Trib's Maxwell to congratulate him on his fast finish after his slow start. Joked Maxwell: "It's a mutual-admiration society. We've been agreeing with each other that w.e're the two greatest editors in the country."

*Long after the paper was printed, Trib typesetters had to set the full text in type anyway to satisfy the "bogus" type requirement (TIME, Nov. 24, 1952) of the typographical union's featherbedding rules.

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