The Press: The Rush of History

The New York Herald Tribune daubed a swastika on its front page and led a guided tour through the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The New York Daily News bought a full-page ad in the competitive Trib to deliver "an urgent message about the Eichmann trial to every responsible person in the United States." The message: read all about the trial in the News. EICHMANN is INNOCENT, proclaimed New York's radio station WNEW in a full-page teaser ad in the New York Post and the Journal-American. Then, having hooked the reader, the ad continued in small print ". . . until proven guilty"—and announced that WNEW was sending Telford Taylor, chief prosecutor of the war crimes trials in Nürnberg, to watch the proof unfold.

More than 500 correspondents from 40 countries flocked to Jerusalem last week for the decade's most publicized trial. From West Germany came Europe's largest single platoon: 45 newsmen. Japan and East Germany each sent six, Russia two, Nigeria one. Among the arrivals were many who had turned journalist just for the occasion: U.S. Novelist Irwin (The Young Lions) Shaw, whose "incisive understanding of the Nazi mentality" was under contract to Hearst; Indian Poet Dom Moraes, representing Encounter, a British magazine; U.S. Banker Ira Hirschmann for Look.

Short of granting interviews with Eichmann, the Israeli government outdid itself to accommodate the visitors. Censorship was lifted on all trial copy. In and around the courtroom building gleamed $350,000 worth of new transmission facilities, including banks of teletypes staffed by Jerusalem housewives hastily recruited and trained. Each guest was equipped with a headset radio on which he could follow the trial in four languages—French, English, German, Hebrew. If a reporter missed anything, he could refer to a daily mimeographed record of the court proceedings—also in four languages, plus a summary in Yiddish. Even the trial's stern security measures were gracefully applied: one radio newsman who surrendered a broken tape recorder for police inspection got it back repaired.

All the Stops. Long before the press corps actually got in to the courtroom to cover the trial, the Eichmann case was heralded, exploited, rehashed and explored with exhaustive thoroughness. In the U.S., papers that did not serialize Eichmann's life or revisit the Third Reich ranged far afield to fill space. Some went hunting for concentration camp survivors; the Denver Post interviewed 25-year-old Robert Kaye, who served when he was seven as Eichmann's orderly in a camp near Mannheim. Hearst's tabloid New York Mirror interviewed a bevy of teenagers in Queens, among them an 18-year-old rock-'n-roll singer who felt that death for Eichmann "might be letting him off too easy." From "J.C.," a man who spent 15 years in jail for a murder he did not commit, Gossip Columnist Hy Gardner solicited the "worst punishment" for Eichmann: isolation for life, with nothing to read but the Bible. Gossip Columnist Walter Winchell coined another word: "Eichmonster." Wrote the San Francisco Chronicle's TV Columnist Terence O'Flaherty: "I am waiting with a kind of cold horror, for fear that Dorothy Kilgallen and Jack Paar will announce they are attending in person."