The Press: The Unacceptables

To Editor Ben Hibbs of the Saturday Evening Post came an angry cable from Manila. His foreign correspondent and associate editor, slight, gaunt-faced, 40-year-old Edgar Snow, had just learned that Chiang's Government had barred him from covering U.S. Marines' operations in China.

Postman Snow was burned up to be excluded "on the laconic grounds that I am unacceptable. ... It is a vicious violation of ... freedom of the press." Edgar Snow had visited Mao Tse-tung and his Yenan Communists in 1936, had perhaps done more than any other man to sell their case to the U.S. His Red Star Over China has sold 52,000 copies. In The Pattern of Soviet Power, published in July, he argued for Big Three pressure to squeeze China's two factions into one, mostly by putting the squeeze on Chiang.

Presumably it was such writing that had made him "unacceptable" to Chiang's Government. Editor Hibbs passed the protest along to Harry Truman, Jimmy Byrnes, General Eisenhower, the press. At Chungking, officials told the A.P. that there was no "final decision" to bar Snow. But the record there already showed other unacceptables: the New York Post's Darrell Berrigan, Newsweek's Harold Isaacs were barred last. summer. The New York Times counted nine unwanted, including Vincent Sheean, the Times's Brooks Atkinson, the Chicago Daily News's Leland Stowe.

When the first two were barred, other newsmen asked a Chungking spokesman what they had to do to stay acceptable. Said he blandly: "Use common sense."