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Truth or Travesty? When Lord Beaverbrook was shown Osborne's analysis, he snapped: "An absolute travesty of the truth. [It does] not in the least represent the attitude of the Daily Express." And to prove it The Beaver rushed into print an expression of his genuine liking for the U.S.:
"Never, never has this newspaper questioned the high ideals, the noble motives which inspire American policy and of which Britain, more than any other nation, has been the beneficiary . . .
"These bountiful acts [the American loan to Britain and the Marshall Plan], however mistaken from Britain's viewpoint, will indeed bring to the United States an immeasurable return in the affection and admiration of the world to which she gives moral and material leadership."
From two other British journalists, Britons last week got an earful about the U.S.
¶ Back from a U.S. visit, Editor Frank Owen of Lord Rothermere's super-Tory Daily Mail told an audience of London clubmen that "the war scare which is raging there is not only terrific, but almost terrifying. Americans are in a bigger flap than our Foreign office was last week [over the tension in Berlin]. If someone were suddenly to announce over the microphone that Red Army paratroops were dropping on Manhattan, there would be such a stampede of the human herd as had never been seen before."
¶ Editor Kingsley Martin wrote in his pinko New Statesman & Nation: "People in this country, where our press only 'tends toward monopoly,' have as little knowledge as most people in the U.S. itself of the degree to which the American press and radio is under the absolute control of a handful of big proprietors and their business associates."
Martin had been reading 1000 Americans, by Leftist Press-baiter George Seldes, a collection of truths, half-truths and untruths about the U.S. press and industry.
* Both are "imperialists," but Churchill is internationalist, Beaverbrook isolationist.