Up rose Kansas' florid-faced Senator Clyde Reed, 72, ranking Republican on the Post Office Committee, to demand how it was that private letters were read on the floor of Congress. He referred to the violet-scented correspondence between greying, blue-eyed Vivien Kellems, the Connecticut manufacturess of cable grips, and Count Frederick von Zedlitz, a Nazi engineer in Argentina. The letters had been read into the Congressional Record fortnight ago by Washington's New Dealing John M. Coffee (TIME, April 10).
Clyde Reed well knew, as did all Washington, how the personal letters had become public. As a regular part of its work, the Office of Censorship excerpts such portions of foreign letters as it thinks "valuable in fighting the enemy." Such excerpts, supposedly highly confidential, are sent to other Government agencies. Plainly, someone in the Office of Censorship had slipped the juicier portions of the Kellems-von Zedlitz correspondence to Columnist Drew Pearson and Representative Coffee. Clyde Reed called for a full-dress Senate investigation. Not too gallantly, he added: "The letters may have been mushy, but they weren't seditious."
At week's end, fair-minded Censor Byron Price seconded Clyde Reed. Said he: "It is more important to me than to any Senate committee to find out who was faithless enough to violate these confidences."