Feature Stories in the Sunday News

Despite its strong editorial antipathy to the UN and the concept of world federalism, on April 14 the Sunday News ran a feature story on the New York City lives of the Security Council delegates copiously illustrated with photographs. In some ways the UN was not a glamor assignment at the time. The city had not yet developed a sparkling diplomatic social life like Washington D.C. and the delegates faced the same housing problems as everyone else in Manhattan. Most were living in hotels, albeit the most luxurious hotels in town. Only Russia so far had bought housing for its UN delegation, the 50-room Killinworth Estate in Glen Cove on Long Island, although the Gromykos were living for now at a sumptuous suite at the Plaza. The UN had not yet chosen a site for a permanent headquarters.

Some of the delegates had their wives and family with them. The Van Kleffens of the Netherlands were housed at the Savoy Plaza with their French poodle. Mrs Van Kleffen's mother was American and her father an executive of a Dutch-American oil company. Secretary General Trygve Lie of Norway lived with his family at the Waldorf Towers. Polish delegate Oscar Lange's wife was a naturalized American citizen. Lange. who formerly taught economics at the University of Chicago, had himself taken American citizenship when he came to the US to escape the Nazis but had renounced it when he returned to Poland to join the new Communist government. Mme Helle Bonnet, the Greek wife of the French ambassador, had taken refuge in New York City during the war and had opened a hat shop at 38 E. 50th that served as a meeting place for the free French.

The Security Council was temporarily meeting at a great curved table in a pink-draped fishbowl at the Bronx campus of Hunter College. A limited number of tickets were available to the public for sessions. Russ Symontown, author of the article, wrote that US ambassador Edward R. Stettinius looked like someone out of the pages of Esquire, in contrast to the gruff Gromyko. Van Kleffen and Lange reminded him of unmade beds and Hodgson of Australia was also rumpled. Sir Alexander Cadogan of Great Britain was a tailor-made man, the picture of a diplomat despite his short stature. Francisco Najera of Mexico dressed in "average" business attire.

Another feature story that ran in the News that day explored the citizenship status of war brides and their children who were now arriving in the US in great numbers. It noted that children of an American citizen could claim American citizenship if they came to the US before their 16^th birthday. Shockingly, the story revealed that Chinese immigrants had only received naturalization rights in 1943 and that anyone who was of one-half or more Japanese ancestry still was barred from naturalization. Not mentioned in the story, but even more shocking, the US had only recently changed a law that stripped native-born American women of their citizenship if they married a citizen of some Asian countries. This. along with laws barring interracial marriages, was how marriage was defended in the early twentieth century.

True crime stories were a regular part of the Sunday News. The lurid story on April 14 told of a serviceman accused of killing his wife with sleeping pills after falling for a pretty defense plant worker.