Word: polks
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Wallace started by getting the wrong foot in his mouth. He read a letter by George Polk, the CBS correspondent whose murder in Greece (TIME, May 24, July 5) is still unsolved. Next he attacked Newsweek (Folk's former employer), CBS and the press in general for not doing enough to clear up the crime. Perhaps he was trying to ingratiate himself with the newsmen by showing concern for their rights; more probably he was chiding them. In any case, he made the correspondents angry. Wrote Britain's discerning Rebecca West: ". . . Never have I seen ... such a miracle...
What George Polk (see above) and every other Balkan correspondent yearned to do, the New York Herald Tribune's Homer Bigart up & did. He found and interviewed Greek guerrilla General Markos in his Grammos Mountain stronghold. This week, after sitting on it for more than a fortnight (presumably to avoid competing with convention news), the Trib ran his interview as a four-part series. It tingled with some of the cloak-&-dagger thrills of an Eric Ambler novel...
...typical incident: early in 1947 a group of American, British and other journalists were crossing the border from Transjordan into Palestine. British sentries stopped them, demanded passports and press credentials-and the religion of each correspondent. Polk stated flatly that he had no religion. He was not Jewish, nor was he an atheist; he simply regarded the question as insulting to the concept of a free press. He refused, as a matter of principle, to dignify it with an answer. They finally, and very reluctantly, had to let him through...
...seems rather remarkable that the U.S., so jealous in guarding its press freedom, at home and so militant in advocating its extension at international conferences, should be willing to let the murder of George Polk fade into the limbo of unsolved mysteries. Newsmen, some of whom must continue to do their jobs in distant and risky areas, take a very different view...
...Three committees of U.S. newsmen are trying to solve the murder. None is fully convinced, as the U.S. State Department seems to be, that Greek Communists killed Polk. One committee, headed by Columnist Walter Lippmann and Washington Post Publisher Eugene Meyer, hopes to raise $50,000 to keep the investigation going...