Around the world in 13 days

I got a special present from a friend yesterday: a booklet written by Frank Gannett about a trip he took after flying around the world in 1947. My friend came across it when he was going through papers in the home of his parents, who recently died.

Gannett is the guy who founded the company that issued me paychecks regularly for 35 years, and 1947 was the year I was born, so the booklet is of particular interest to me.

He was part of a group of about 12 press barons and a few others who circled the globe in 13 days in June of 1947, apparently to promote new service being provided by Pan American Airways. (Gannett is silent on who picked up the tab. You can bet it wasn't him.)

He was obviously a man of his time and place. He expresses admiration for some of the men he met on the trip who turned out to be, shall we say, flawed (Chiang Kai-Shek and Douglas MacArthur), demeans others almost in passing ("The Chinese are a wonderful hard-working people. They are more intelligent than most other peoples in the Orient.'') and has what looks like wildly inflated view of American virtue ("We need to give them a spiritual lift and wise guidance,'' he said of the rest of the world.)

He also had virtually given up on Great Britain ("Personally I consider the future of Britain dark and doubtful'') and India ("Now that the country is to be turned back to the Indians, there is no telling what will happen.'')

But after all it was just two years after the end of World War II and most of the world was flat on its back, and looking for us to help them stand up. The Marshall Plan, which helped to revive Europe, the Green Revolution that helped India to feed itself, and the rise of China and other Pacific Rim countries were all in the future, as were wars in Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf.

And to be fair, he got some calls right: he said Japan was on the road to becoming a stable democracy, plane travel would help to knit the world together and that the combination of oil and autocracy in the Middle East would likely spawn trouble.

Still it is a bit wrenching for a modern reader to hear him first describe seeing people in Calcutta "in about the lowest state human beings can reach,'' and in the very next paragraph to describe "a good room I had at the hotel. An Indian servant, called a 'bearer,' looked after me. He slept on the floor outside my door, brought food to my room and took good care of me.''

The biggest disappointment was that most of the discussions he had with world leaders were "off the record,'' meaning he couldn't report what they said.

Gannett newspaper readers would have been better served if the money spent on the trip had been used to open some news bureaus in some of these far-away places that it turns out we knew so little about so that actual reporters could have asked questions of these people and maybe even gotten some answers.

Instead, Gannett got to experience, the evening after viewing the slums of Calcutta, a lavish dinner.

"Here all were in evening clothes and there was music, dancing and wonderful food. It was a fine party and seemed especially remarkable in contrast to the sights we had seen in the afternoon,'' he wrote.

Indeed.