The Press: O'Donnell Apologizes

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The New York Daily News's poison penman, John Parsons O'Donnell, was caught in an untruth, and had to eat his words. In his Capitol Stuff column, which goes to the News's 2,000,000 readers, a good part of them Jewish, O'Donnell had put forth his own version of why General George S. Patton Jr. had fallen from power and glory. Hinted O'Donnell darkly: a Jewish plot.

According to O'Donnell, the soldier Patton slapped in Sicily was Jewish. Somehow, not very clearly explained, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Sidney Hillman and White House Aide David K. Niles subsequently got the General's scalp.

This collection of innuendoes and untruths was hardly on the streets before mischief-mongering O'Donnell found himself caught, for once. The soldier Patton had slapped, Charles H. Kuhl, was not Jewish but of German descent. All of the Jewish leaders except Justice Frankfurter (who follows the court custom of ignoring press comment) issued denials.

Last week the usually bumptious O'Donnell column was strangely becalmed. He confessed: "On the evidence, our statements in Capitol Stuff were untrue. We regret having made them."

The retraction did not satisfy New York's fiery Fiorello LaGuardia. Said he, in his Sunday radio chat: "The whole story was a mean, deliberate, cowardly lie. . . . It was published knowing it to be entirely false" . . . was retracted only "after some 14 to 20 large advertisers" squawked.