Radio: Gate Crasher

When radio tried to crash the sacrosanct U. S. press galleries eight years ago it was coldly informed that the galleries were open only to representatives of "daily newspapers or newspaper associations requiring telegraphic service." Last week, thanks to a tireless one-man campaign by MBS's 36-year-old Washington Commentator Fulton Lewis Jr., the gallery bars were let down for radio.

Fulton Lewis Jr. is big, blond, smart, a onetime ace Washington correspondent for Hearst. As a Universal Service correspondent, he uncovered the airmail scandal of 1934. In 1936 he turned up the espionage activities of since-jailed onetime Navy Lieut. Commander John Semer

("Dodo") Farnsworth. In 1937 after 13 years in the newspaper business (for four years of which he once covered fishing as well as politics) he quit Hearst for radio, has since been bucking his old crowd to get a place for radio in the press galleries.

Early this year, turned down by the Standing Committee of Correspondents that controls admission to the galleries, he took the case to the Senate and House Rules Committees, arguing that radio handles news just as newspapers do except for printing it and charging people for it, and that excluding radio from the press galleries was in effect giving special privilege to the printing trades. In the Senate New Jersey's Barbour and Iowa's Gillette, and in the House New Mexico's Jack Dempsey pressed his case. By last week both Rules Committees had decreed that henceforth radio should have "equal facilities" for covering Congress. Last week workmen began making part of the House visitors' gallery a radio gallery, and in the Senate the Rules Committee pondered whether to put radio right in with the press or give it a gallery of its own. This week, making Fulton Lewis' conquest of the Capital complete, White House Secretary Stephen Early issued permission for accredited radio men to attend White House press conferences.