All Set for a Super-Secret Session in Washington: Jim Berryman's empty table of cameras, July 1949

Jim Berryman's Washington Evening Star cartoon of 23 July 1949 shows no people at all: a committee table hemmed in by television, newsreel and radio equipment under the caption "All Set For A Super-Secret Session In Washington." The copy in the Senate's files carries a printed line calling it the 1950 Pulitzer Prize cartoon.

What the cartoon shows

A long table and the chairs behind it, waiting. Around it and on it, crowding the room, is the press: two television cameras and a newsreel camera on stands, a boom microphone overhead, a cluster of radio microphones on the table each with its own call letters, and at a side table a typewriter and a card that says PRESS. No senator, witness or clerk is drawn. The joke is in the caption.

TV · TV · NEWS REEL

WAHU · WUWU · WURZ · WHIM

PRESS

All Set For A Super-Secret Session In Washington

1950 Pulitzer Prize Cartoon

By Jim Berryman

The Washington Star

The prize line

The cartoon is dated July 1949, and the line under it names a 1950 prize. A caption like that is set after an award, which suggests the sheet in the National Archives is a later printing rather than the page readers saw that summer. The record says nothing else about the prize.

The record does not name the committee or the session the caption has in mind, and the drawing gives no clue. It reads as a comment on a habit rather than on one meeting.

Secrecy as a show

FRAME files it under limited hangout, a technique where an official discloses part of a story to steer attention from the rest, and notes that the fit is weak. The more natural reading is plainer. Berryman is laughing at a Washington in which "secret" sessions were announced in advance and staffed by the networks. Either the secrecy was a show or the leaks were, and the cartoon does not need to choose.

From a citizen's side of the table, the drawing takes the public's part. Government business done in closed rooms is the exception a free country has to justify, and a press that turns up with every camera it owns is how the public finds out whether the exception was earned. In 1949 a private newspaper could make that point at Washington's expense and, by the line printed under it, win a Pulitzer for it. The drawing now sits in the Senate's own records.

A cartoon Berryman's paper ran five years earlier, I Just Can't Stand Secrets, works the same seam from the other direction: a locked Pearl Harbor box, and a party drawn as Pandora for wanting it opened. The full run is on the Berryman cartoons hub.