The Press: Ain't We Got Fun?

To most moviegoers—and to some deskbound newsmen—it sometimes seems that the globetrotting, glamorized foreign correspondent has all the fun. But in the current Atlantic Monthly, Paul Scott Mowrer, longtime foreign correspondent, Pulitzer Prizewinner and onetime editor of the Chicago Daily News, gives a more realistic account of the lonely, often frustrating, sometimes wildly exasperating life of a correspondent.

"At home," said Mowrer, "[the reporter] had a deep sense of being where he belonged. Abroad . . . he is quite by himself, in a strange place of which he can never be really...