To John Parsons O'Donnell, Washington bureau chief of the anti-New Deal New York Daily News, a Philadelphia jury last week made one of the biggest libel awards of recent years: $50,000. Loser was the Philadelphia Record and its publisher, J. David Stern.
On April 16, 1941 Reporter O'Donnell sent his papers a dispatch which they printed next day and which said: "Charges that battlecraft of the Navy and Coast Guard are now giving armed escort to munition-laden British merchantmen leaving Atlantic ports exploded . . . tonight." Next day the strongly pro-New Deal Record printed an editorial saying: "A few hours after the [O'Donnell] story appeared, the President denounced it as 'a deliberate lie.' . . . John O'Donnell is a Naziphile. ... On numerous occasions, to all friends and barflies within hearing, he has broadcast his sympathy with most of Hitler's aims—such as destruction of the British Empire, suppression of labor unions and liquidation of Jews." O'Donnell sued for libel.
On the first day Senator Charles W. Tobey of New Hampshire took the stand to defend O'Donnell. Tobey, a 100% Isolationist before Pearl Harbor, stated his belief, unshaken by repeated official U.S. Navy denials, that U.S. warships actually were convoying British vessels long before the U.S. went actively to war. O'Donnell testified that seven Senators and Representative Sol Bloom had told him so. O'Donnell's attorney, former G.O.P. National Chairman John D. M. Hamilton, questioned Publisher Stern:
"What do you mean by bar fly?"
"A man who hangs around bars and gets in everyone's hair like a fly."
"What did you mean by calling O'Donnell a Naziphile?"
"I used the term to mean he was partial to the Nazis and their program, as we might say an Anglophile is sympathetic to the British."
"What did you mean by saying O'Donnell subscribed to the liquidation of the Jews?"
"I meant by that he agreed with Hitler's plan to deprive the Jews of property, segregate them and deprive them of civil rights."
One question before the jury was whether O'Donnell's story about the charges of convoying was true. A further problem: Publisher Stern's editorial (he admitted authorship) was on its face libelous to O'Donnell's character. Could Stern prove his charges about O'Donnell? To the witness stand trooped Washington newsmen.
Said the Louisville Courier-Journal's former Washington correspondent Ulric Bell (now with OWI): "We thought John definitely anti-British. . . ." Kenneth Crawford, Washington reporter for PM, said he had concluded from remarks he had heard O'Donnell make that O'Donnell thought Hitler's oppression of the Jews justified.
The London Times's Sir Willmott Lewis described him as "an unbiased writer with a good journalistic reputation." Warren B. Francis of the Los Angeles Times said he had never heard O'Donnell support Naziism.
The jury found for Reporter O'Donnell. But Reporter O'Donnell has not quite got the $50,000. Publisher Stern's attorney charged that the verdict was "a palpable miscarriage of justice,", moved for a new trial.