The folks were deluded then, the same way. They wouldn’t face the fury of Hitler’s Luft waffe—
and they wouldn’t admit the British had the guts to take such a beating. I went over, just so they could read the stories of a typical Middle Western editor—written from London, while the fire bombs fell and the ack-ack drummed. Remember?”
“Sure,” she said. “My husband was alive—then.” He ignored that human dating of the occasion. “I went because, by God, I’m an editor. Because I knew what the papers reported was the truth. Because I thought an editor, an American editor, was obligated to help the American people face facts. I still think so!”
“Even, Coley, if it means you commit newspaper suicide?”
He rocked forward in his chair and began, delicately, to straighten and align the objects which comprised his desk set: clock, calendar, pens, pencils, inkstand, paper cutter, memo pad, the engraved paperweight given him by the YMCA Newsboys Club.
He said, “Sure. Even if it marches me off the stage.”
“You think it’s right?”
“I think anything else is wrong. Dead wrong. And almost everybody is wrong. I was on the edge of that conclusion a long while back. Weeks. I reached it when good old Hank Conner came in tonight. Besides”—he turned and smiled at the big woman—“who knows? Minerva Sloan has brains. Lots of brains. The arguments in that editorial make plain common sense. She won’t listen to them; she won’t read them in the places where they’re appearing. In her own paper, though, she’ll have to read them!”
“You think you can change the mind of Minerva?”
“Stranger things have been accomplished.”