(7 of 8)
After Allen went off to war in 1942, some of the steam went out of the Merry-Go-Round, but it never broke down. Pearson got many a beat like the General George Patton* slapping story merely by printing what other newsmen knew, but had kept to themselves from feelings of patriotism or a foggy sense of newspaper ethics. He also made many a wild forecast —among them, that Marshal Tito would be assassinated in 1947 and, along with almost every pundit, that Truman would be beaten in 1948. He has not yet lived down his 1946 "disclosure" that U.S. troops had sired 14,000 Japanese bastards—though the G.I.s had been in Japan only six months. Such bobbles did little harm. But his campaign to bring the boys home in 1945 was more serious. Insofar as it succeeded, it weakened the hand of the State Department around the world.
On the other hand, Pearson's showmanship and love of spectacles combined with his Quaker faith to produce the Friendship Train. He first voiced the idea, and spent thousands of dollars to get it rolling across the U.S. last year, gathering up 700 carloads of food (worth $40 million) for France and Italy. It was not only potent propaganda for the U.S. in the East-West battle, but a memorable and characteristically Quaker act. Said the Christian Science Monitor's Roscoe Drummond, of the Friendship Train: "One of the greatest projects ever born of American journalism." Next month, as a Gallic gesture of gratitude, a "Merci, America" train of 49 French boxcars will be shipped across the Atlantic, with such gifts for the 48 states and Hawaii as Sevres vases from President Vincent Auriol and bronze school bells from Caen.
Take That. For a mild man, and the begetter of Friendship Trains, Drew Pearson has had more drawn-out feuds than an Irishman could shake a shillelagh at. The loudest was the one with Maryland's Senator Millard Tydings, which started when Tydings called for. a Senate investigation of father Paul Pearson's regime as governor of the Virgin Islands.
In Pearson's long feud with the late "Cissy" Patterson, he learned that you can't win an argument with mother-in-law (TIME, May 18, 1942 et seq.). Cissy and Pearson had continued to get along fine even after Drew and Cissy's daughter Felicia got a friendly divorce. ("He wanted me to be too domestic," says Felicia. "I'm not much for pressing pants." Grandfather Pearson still dotes on their daughter Ellen and her year-old son Drew.) Cissy and Pearson split over politics: Pearson & Allen became too New Dealish for Cissy's taste. Mrs. Patterson not only threw the column out of her Times-Herald, but fired Movie Reviewer Luvie Pearson out of spite.