The Press: On the Grid

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For 50 Washington newsmen, peace finally declared itself last week. Slicked up in white ties & tails, they trooped with 500 bigwig guests (most of the hosts brought their bosses) into the swank Statler Hotel. There they revived a 60-year-old tradition, lapsed for four wartime years: the famed Gridiron Club dinners.

To the slightly jealous working press, the Gridiron is the "Hardened Arteries Club," top-heavy with conservative pundits and alumni who have grabbed fancy public-relations jobs. Its roster is sprinkled with able men, but some of them, like veteran Scripps-Howardman Tom Stokes, had to win a Pulitzer Prize to get in. People like Pearson & Allen have never been admitted, nor has anyone from such left-of-center papers as the Chicago Sun and Times, the New York Post and PM. One blackball is enough. The bureau chiefs of A.P., U.P. (U.P.'s Lyle Wilson, Gridiron's outgoing president, ran the dinner), New York Times and Herald Tribune are invariably invited to join.

Gridiron merrymaking follows a peculiarly American pattern. Nowhere else could so many watch the faces of a President, his Cabinet and Supreme Court Justices taking lampoonery aimed right between their eyes. In one satiric skit, Gridironers ribbed U.S. foreign policy aboard "The Acheson, the Clayton & the James F. Byrnes." In another, "General MacArthur" sang:

Although my contact with U.S. has largely been non-resident,

If God so wills there's still a chance they'll draft me to be President.

Harry Truman, Gridiron Target No. 1 for the first time, saw a newsman dressed in double-breasted grey suit, handkerchief sticking from his breast pocket, singing Wanting You to Joe Stalin. What the real Harry Truman had to say in reply was—by Gridiron custom—off the record.