Current Events

On April 14 Joe DiMaggio was on the cover and the headline hyped the inside story, “Play Ball,” a photo feature on dignitaries who had thrown out the first pitch of the season, including Truman, LaGuardia, Wallace, Hoover and Roosevelt. The article claimed that LaGuardia, who performed the ritual 11 times, had grown most proficient, FDR threw high and wide and Wallace threw to left field.

A box on the cover promoted the feature story “Truman: One Year After” by the Herald Trib’s Washington bureau head Bert Andrews and Jack Steele. The article noted that Truman had begun his tenure by rewarding old cronies and old-line Democrats, alienating the New Dealers, but that he had aligned himself in recent months more with FDR’s crowd. While he had been the butt of jokes on first assuming office, he had won increased respect of late. That did not last long. The Republican press turned him into the constant butt of jokes and it would be decades before he was recognized widely as an effective president.

Also on the serious side was the third installment in a series, “Forecast for Americans.” This was written by Vincent Sheean, author of the recently published book This House Against This House. In his article Sheean argues for the need to establish a working partnership with China, undergoing postwar turmoil but still largely in the hands of the Nationalists. Sheean’s earlier memoir, Personal History, was the basis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, which had starred Joel McCrea as a fictional character based on Sheean. His new book was partially a memoir of his war years, when he had served as an Army Intelligence officer, and partially a call for a rapprochement between the US and its ideological rival, the Soviet Union, to prevent another devastating war.