A Letter From The Publisher, May 3, 1948

Dear Time-Reader

For five hours one day last week, TIME Inc. Correspondent Thomas Dozier stood by at the funeral of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Colombia's Liberal chieftain, whose assassination had touched off Bogotá's insurrection. Later, he wired: "Since the shooting ended, life has settled down to trying to cover the Pan American Conference, which is five miles away, get stories written, and still be in the hotel before the 7 p.m. curfew. If you are out after that, you risk being shot first and identified later."

Like the other U.S. and foreign newsmen assigned to cover the Bogota Conference, Dozier had not bargained for an insurrection to boot. Once it was under way, however, he—and they—faced the familiar reporter's problem of how to get their copy out on a big, fast-breaking story in which national security was (or was thought to be) involved.

Most of the correspondents were lunching in their headquarters at the newly rebuilt Hotel Astor, across the street from the presidential palace, when they heard the news of the assault on Gaitán. They expected trouble and, within 30 minutes, got it. The Army took over their hotel as a strong point to defend the palace, and Dozier spent his first beleaguered night trying to sleep while two soldiers banged away at snipers from his bedroom window.

The next day Dozier learned that his story for TIME had been killed in its entirety. The Government had imposed a tight censorship on all communications—except for unaccountable slip-ups like Correspondent Mac Johnson's prearranged daily telephone call from his paper, the New York Herald Tribune. The call came through on schedule the first night of the insurrection and, with Dozier holding a candle for him to read by, Johnson got off a first-person account before the error was discovered.

Arrangements were made through the U.S. embassy to cable out a short pooled story every few hours, to which all the correspondents contributed, but pooled stories are highly unsatisfactory to reporters who want to write their own copy. To try to rectify the situation, the Chicago Tribune's strongwilled Jules Dubois "took his life in his hands" and barged across the street to the palace amid the rifle fire, demanding to see President Ospina about the communications blackout. He failed to see Ospina, but he did return with the news that dispatches would be accepted—subject to censorship.

Learning that a seat was available on an Army transport plane, the correspondents chose the New York Times's Milton Bracker to convey their uncensored stories to Panama, where they could be filed. The next day Dozier found that he could get out on an Army plane to Panama himself. With Robert Shellaby, of the Christian Science Monitor, he "crawled, ran and sneaked to the embassy and, by jeep and bus, guarded by two soldiers, dashed to the airport."

After filing his story and getting his first night's sleep in four days at Balboa, Dozier returned with Bracker and Shellaby. Wrote he: