One night last January in Manhattan's Town Hall, portly, irascible Harold LeClair Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, met Publisher Frank Ernest Gannett in radio debate on the question: "Do we have a free press?" Secretary Ickes' answer was a querulous "No."
From time to time since then, Harold Ickes has repeated his thesis, with trimmings. Last week he returned to his attack in a book (America's House of Lords, an Inquiry into the Freedom of the Press*) richly documented with I-told-you-so's. America's House of Lords develops the same thesis which its author outlined on the...