The vision McCormick displayed built the Tribune into the largest full-sized newspaper in America, a position it has lost under his successors, hut possibly through circumstances somewhat beyond their control. As a publisher he had the vision to conquer Canadian forests, erect paper mills, establish his own towns, construct a private TVA dam and launch a whole fleet of vessels so that trees could grow into Tribunes.

He also pioneered with color, experimented with readability of type and fostered experiments which produced rubber out of wood as a step toward meeting the World War II tire shortage. I tried to persuade him to end this experiment, when the group of wood chemists he had brought over from Poland produced potable alcohol from wood pulp as their first step toward synthetic rubber.

After graduation I spent a few months in the New York City area, which I found unattractive, and returned to Chicago where I went to work covering police for the Chicago City News Bureau, a local press service familiarly known as the City Press, operated by the then six Chicago newspapers, two morning and four afternoon. Later I went on to cover every beat in the service.

I started covering the western suburbs of Cook County from Oak Park for $18 a week. I worked from 9 A.M. until 11 P.M. at night as well. And I got every other Sunday off! Yet I did not consider myself abused or overworked. I gloried in it and managed to leave some myths behind me which I am told live to this day.

This was in the days of gangster warfare. Many a dull gray dawn found me on a country road beside the bullet-riddled body of one who had served the rival gang of Al Capone or Roger Tuohy, too well but not too wisely, perhaps. Once because a coroner's physician had no taste for it, I grasped the slimy hair of a smelly corpse found in an abandoned auto in a cornfield and sawed off the top of his head in order to determine whether he had been killed by shotgun pellets fired by guards at fleeing bank robbers or by gangland bullets. Joe Lavandier, veteran City Press rewrite man, insisted I find out. There was no other immediate way.

I had my triumphs and my failures, but was considered a good reporter, getting $32 a week and had the promise of a two-dollar raise before I left to join the Tribune. Before leaving I directed the bureau's coverage of gangland's greatest story, the day Chicago's hoodlums graduated from murder to massacre.

I was the first man on the scene of carnage, being careful to avoid the hinging of the crazed police dog chained to one of the garage trucks. The most memorable remark of the day was that of O'Rourke of the Chicago Evening American who looked down at his feet after tracking around the garage and said: "I've got more brains on my feet than I have in my head." Other staffers joined me in tracing the path of ambush and the story of the slaying of six members of the George (Bugs) Moran mob, rivals of the Al Capone gang.

In these early days McCormick was a dim and distant figure in his twenty-fourth-floor office. Yet, his spirit was in the local room at all times, He was known affectionately as "the Colonel," but not without a tinge of awe and even fear. He was an admirable boss, because he was convinced, or at least convinced those in the vine-yard, that every employee with whom he dealt was the best possible man in his post. He was demanding and exacting, but he was also forgiving; he seemed to enjoy the making of mistakes by those about him, so that he could be forgiving...

The colonel seldom appeared in the local room until after Alfred (Jake) Lingle, a Tribune crime reporter, who was reputed to be an intimate of Capone and other gangland figures, was shot by a gunman in the pedestrian tunnel of the Illinois Central Railroad's suburban service off Michigan Avenue at Randolph Street. The slaying precipitated a violent exposure of municipal and county misgovernment that reached into newspaper offices and tarnished some reporters and editors. I have no intention of dwelling on it, except that the case was to be one of my stepping stones to Washington.

Jake Lingle was shot by Leo V. Brothers, a St. Louis hoodlum, imported to do the job for the the North Side gang, known as the Aieilo-Zuta-Moran mob after its more important figures. These gangsters suspected Lingle was taking advantage of his long friendship with Police Commissioner William F. Russell to raid and close their gambling establishments in order to help Capone advance and extend his gambling empire. Lingle, who was never more than a legman, cultivated a mysterious manner, which could be taken as proof of such suspicions and of rumors which, even in his lifetime, reported he was profiting from questionable connections.

Colonel McCormick began frequenting the local room. Now and then he would make a speech, which was aimed at restoring confidence, and he would talk over coverage of major stories, asking me to fill him in on such things as bank failures and the political manipulation of Cermak, who had become mayor.

In office, FDR overturned his campaign promises by inviting the professors and crackpots to launch the concept of big government, and socialist government at that. There was nothing new in his approach, although it was claimed to be new. It was the age-old game of taking from the haves and giving it to the have-nots... Class was pitted against class, even though FDR was promising to make all men equal. The favored ones were to be more equal than the others. The favored were the new federal aristocracy of planners and managers, who were wired into permanent jobs under the extension of civil service.

In my first weeks in Washington, a corner of the rug was lifted on Communist infiltration into the New Deal. The disclosure came with a mysterious one-line that the legal staff of the AAA was being reorganized... The next day the list of enforced partings included Alger Hiss, then known as one of the zealots of planned economy. My story bluntly branded him as a Red, one spawned in the Harvard classrooms of Felix Frankfurter...

The firing of Hiss from the AAA didn't check his career the slightest. He was able to get a job with the staff of a Senate committee, headed by Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, which was engaged in an inquiry into the activities of 'merchants of death', as those profiting from the sale and distribution of arms came to be known. Naturally communists favored the inquiry, supporting anything that would brand capitalists as warmongers. It wasn't long before rumours of Hiss's alleged communist connections reached Nye. He summoned Hiss to his office, as he told me, and said that he was satisfied with the lawyer's work, but wouldn't stand for any Communist connections.

Hiss looked Nye in the eye and solemnly swore he was no communist, but offered to resign in order to spare Nye, the committee and the investigation possible embarrassment. Nye said he would not sacrifice an innocent man and persuaded Hiss to remain.

Roosevelt and I became chummy from our meetings at Warm Springs. After all I had been friendly with Tony Cermak and Ed Kelly in Chicago without joining their ranks. FDR was gregarious, full of small talk, loved to laugh and genuinely liked people, even as I did. He was a gentleman, which I have always tried to be. It was not important to me that I share a man's political beliefs to be his friend. I had liked many a politician in Chicago personally, although I was prepared to strip off their masks or check their depredations. I must say for them that they expected me to do it, if I could, and respected me for it when I did. This was not true of FDR.

I genuinely liked the man, and I must confess I - was flattered being friendly with the President. I cooked for him, although I must say he was no gourmet, but rather one who ate to live. I poured drinks for him-and loaded them - although he was one who could take liquor or leave it. I shared many of his hours of leisure, where he could be the best of company. I don't pretend I was his favorite reporter, although I might have become so had I forsworn my loyalty to McCormick and pledged allegiance to him.

On his trips no one was permitted to photograph FDR getting in or out of his automobile. So successful was this protection that few of his countrymen knew that FDR could not walk without his braces and the assistance of canes or a friendly arm. Many a hapless cameraman, who knew nothing of the ban, had his box smashed by alert Secret Service men when he attempted to take a picture of the President being lifted from his limousine. At Indianapolis hundreds of yards of white muslin were wound around the spiral ramp of the George Rogers Clark Memorial to hide the fact that FDR was brought to the speaking podium in a wheel chair.

The manner of the unveiling of the Court plan did much to injure FDR in Congress... For once the Republican opposition adopted a wise course but not until after a heated battle within the party. They agreed to let the fight against the plan be carried by Democrats, who were alarmed that the Court proposal would put the Constitution in grave danger. The brunt of the struggle was carried by Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, a liberal in his own right, but one who regarded the attempt to dominate the High Court as dangerous to the liberty not only of that time but in future generations. Wheeler was also a liberal who regarded war as the greatest of evils.

He had the support of many senators, who dared not oppose FDR publicly, but could not go along with the experiment. He also received the help of members of the Court, including Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Justice Louis D. Brandeis. Curiously enough Wheeler did not know either man personally - although he had served in the Senate for twenty-four years- so scrupulously (did members of the Court preserve their aloofness from the political scene.

Shortly after the nomination the country was disturbed by the disclosure that Black had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. This was hardly a strange alliance for a southern politician, although many had courageously opposed the organization which enabled some to profit from bigotry. The story of Black's association was hardly new, but became so on his nomination.

I did see enough of Mrs Roosevelt to know she had as good a grasp - if not better - of political fundamentals as her husband and she had a far warmer and more generous heart. For all his gaiety and courtesy, FDR was a snob.

In anticipation of his bid for the presidency, Long was collecting a war chest, which reputedly contained two million dollars at the time of his death. The story is that it went to the first man to reach Long's room in a New Orleans hotel, after the senator was cut down by a bullet from a gun of a grievance-nursing dentist. At least I was told so by one who said he missed winning the race by the length of the victor's foot.

Joe Kennedy was no favorite of the politicos, who suspected him of trying to buy the White House. Farley was among those who didn't trust the tall redhead. When FDR named Kennedy to the chairmanship of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934, Farley protested. The Democratic party chairman considered the appointment a bad one in view of the fact that Joe had made a fortune selling short and helping to precipitate the market crash.

I began collecting everything I could about this romance (FDR and Lucy Mercer Rutherford) with the help of Lucy's friends and members of her family.... Colonel McCormick wouldn't print any part of the story, saying the Tribune didn't fight that way, a refrain I was to hear from time to time. So i turned over my files to Westbrook Pegler when the columnist approached me on the story and put him in touch with my sources. His stories on the relationship, the first to be published, resulted in his being assailed as the worst of gossipmongers and the epithet of "God's angry man."

Mrs Roosevelt had a relationship with a much married New York state trooper.... The trooper decided to remarry and won Mrs Roosevelt's permission to hold the wedding at Hyde Park. When Sistie, Anna's daughter, was introduced to the bride, she exclaimed: "I thought he was going to marry Grandma."

The sex gambit was employed to influence policy by the British on Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, one of the vainest men to serve in a body where egos are often king size... He was strongly opposed to American intervention, but made a fast switch to intervention. Before the about-face, he was a regular attendant at keep-out-of-the-war strategy sessions, organized by Wheeler and Nye....

When the Canadian woman (who Vandenberg was having an affair with) left the capital for her home, she was replaced by a British woman. The replacement convinced those in the know that the British were working on the senator. Proof came when I learned the Office of Naval Intelligence had intercepted the woman's reports to British intelligence on her progress with Vandenberg.

In the fall of 1941, a master plan was evolved, with White House support, to offset the Tribune's potent voice against entry into the war. This was the founding of the Chicago Sun by Marshall Field II. In order to help the paper get an Associated Press franchise, then a guarded possession, FDR had FBI agents call upon various small-town publishers and urge them to support Field's bid for a franchise. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, later showed me the order he had received to undertake a campaign, which he considered above and beyond his unit's functions.

Roosevelt was a spent and exhausted man on the way to Yalta. He stayed most of the time in his cabin, although he did appear in a wardroom for lunch and dinner, and did attend nightly movies. Leahy told me that in conversations on the way over, Roosevelt kept saying that when he met Stalin, the President would insist on this or that point or this or that course of action. Every day, when he returned from meetings, Roosevelt would exhibit a memorandum, which Leahy would remind him was the exact opposite of what he had said he would insist upon. "I know, Bill," Roosevelt would say, according to the admiral. "But I'm tired and I want to go home. If I argue, they'll keep me fighting over a comma for a month or more."

What a setting for permanent peace was Yalta! Roosevelt was a broken man, only a few steps from the grave on the lawn of his Hyde Park estate. Some, who knew him well, like Jesse Jones, did not expect FDR would return alive from Yalta, but the coffin that returned aboard the Quincy was that of his military aide, Pa Watson, by then a major general. This death shook FDR. On his return voyage he spent most of his day playing solitaire, staring over the water or reading detective stories whose plots kept evading his comprehension.

Certainly FDR was in no shape to understand postwar problems or the significance of letting Russia into the war in the Pacific. But at his side was Alger Hiss, who did understand and who obviously didn't work to keep Russia and communism from gaining in the Far Last. Harry Hopkins was also along but was so weak he spent most of his time in bed.

The host was Joseph Stalin, whose faculties were not dimming. Nor were his energies fading away. Photographs of the fateful conference reveal him as smiling. He must have wanted to laugh aloud, because he was the cat who swallowed an American canary. FDR thought he could charm Stalin. The more he tried, the more he gave in and the deeper became the winter of discontent of Churchill, who had charmed FDR himself so no one knew better that Roosevelt was being taken in by the wily Georgian.

Stalin got what he most wanted - dismemberment of Germany, domination of the liberated countries, a profitable role in Asia and three Soviet votes and a veto in UN. Roosevelt thought he got something - Russian participation in UN - and Churchill knew he had gained nothing but woe.

Dean Gooderham Acheson, a man of tremendous ability and a remarkable sense of humor, with whom I often disagreed, became Truman's fourth Secretary of State.... I had great respect, tinged with a little envy, for Acheson as a writer, often telling him I could not write nearly so well. His style was a modernization of the eighteenth-century love for balance, precision, well-turned phrases, understatement and the right word in the right place.

Whatever the reasoning, Truman chose to reaffirm the blunders of Yalta. Also he decided to drop the first atom bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When he hinted at America's powerful new weapon, Stalin appeared to be uninterested and switched to another subject Truman could not then know Stalin already knew what he wanted to know about the bomb from Communist spies and British and American traitors and dupes.

The first conference sessions were held with Churchill representing Britain. The war leader was defeated in the first election after German surrender and replaced by Attlee, who had given the Communist clenched-fist salute in reviewing the forces of the Red-dominated government in Spain's civil war.

Truman was impressed by Stalin, coming home to say that he "liked Old joe," and that the Soviet leader Was a prisoner of the Politburo. He would have been more correct if he had reversed it to make the Politburo the prisoner of the ruthless dictator.

Truman ordered the dropping of the bombs. Russia entered the Pacific war and communism made headway on the Asian continent. Truman has explained that he ordered the bombings in the interest of saving hundreds of thousands of American lives that might have been lost in an invasion.

Time will tell whether lie will be applauded for courage or blamed for faulty judgment, not only for ordering the dropping of the bombs but for his confirmation of the evils of Yalta and for the betrayal of Chiang Kai-shek and nationalist China by General George C. Marshall. After all, the only nuclear weapons ever fired were dropped at his direction and on civilian populations.