The Press: Friends & Elations

When the Chicago Sun-Times’s Pulitzer Prizewinning Cartoonist Jacob Burck, 49, was ordered deported to his native Poland last summer (TIME, July 20), Sun-Times Publisher Marshall Field Jr. sprang to his defense. Burck was charged with having been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, and never becoming a U.S. citizen. But Field, taking note of Burck’s long record of anti-Communism as exemplified in his political cartoons, backed him to the hilt and lined up top legal talent to fight the deportation. Last week Jerome T. McGowan, special inquiry officer of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, recommended that his own deportation order against Burck be suspended. Next step: approval by a board of appeals in Washington, and passage of a special relief bill by Congress. Said Cartoonist Burck, cautious in his moment of victory: “I am sitting on my elations.”