One day when Edward Angly, who later became a foreign correspondent, was just another reporter on the New York Herald Tribune city staff, he went to the Trib's assistant editor Wilbur Forrest, asked for an assignment abroad.
Asked Forrest: "What makes you think you could be a foreign correspondent?"
Replied Angly: "Oh, I know all about foreign affairs. I've been reading the New York Times for years!"
What Harvard is to U.S. education, what the House of Morgan has been to U.S. finance, the New York Times is to U.S. journalism. Rich in reputation, ripe in years, the Times is respected because it is thorough, dignified and decent. No one reads it for the lively approach. The Times has sometimes almost seemed to preen itself on its dowagerlike lack of humor, its presentation of all news in the same flat tone of voice.
There is a reason. Times editors, in judging the newsworthiness of stories, al ways keep a mental eye cocked on their rag-paper edition — a special edition print ed on paper that will last longer than regular newsprint. This edition goes to libraries, museums and into the Times's own files as a record for history.
But war made this journalistic conservatism almost untenable. War was too real, too exciting.* By spring 1941, when Ray Brock wrote from Belgrade with glorious enthusiasm of the Yugoslav decision to fight the Nazis, the lid was off. Now Times correspondents are allowed always to write much as they please.
Today the Times is proud of its writing, and particularly proud of the writing of its far-flung staff of foreign correspondents, certainly the best such single newspaper staff in the U.S., perhaps in the world.
In 1859, eight years after it was born, the New York Times had one authentic foreign correspondent and he worked abroad only part of the time. He was Henry Raymond, one of the paper's co-founders (the other: Businessman George Jones). A dispatch that Correspondent Raymond wrote from Italy, an eyewitness account of the Battle of Solferino in the Austrian-Franco-Sardinian war, took 13 days to reach the U.S. by boat. Last week, the Times foreign staff included 34 men and two women† scattered on the globe's continents and seas. They send well over 300,000 words a month to the Times by radio, telephone and cable.
War has taken toll of the Times foreign staff. Crack Correspondent Byron Darnton was accidentally killed in New Guinea. Robert Post failed to return from a bomber trip over Wilhelmshaven. Fred Wilkins, long the Times's Manila correspondent, is a Jap prisoner. Other able, famed Timesmen, like Otto Tolischus (author of the recent Tokyo Record) and Hallett Abend (Ramparts of the Pacific), are now in the U.S. because the countries they covered are enemy-held.
Chessmaster. On the checkered face of the world, Times correspondents are chessmen. Chessmaster is short, stocky 53-year-old Edwin L. (for Leland) James, a veteran foreign reporter himself. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Virginia's Randolph-Macon College, he worked for papers in Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Albany, came to the Times in 1915.