Joseph P. Kennedy, U.S. Ambassador to England, attacked Louis Lyons, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1938-39, as having committed "the first serious violation of the newspaper code of an off-the-record interview that I have ever experienced."

Lyons quoted the Boston diplomat as having said that "democracy is finished in Great Britain" and may be finished in the United States.

Charles Edmundson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a Nieman Fellow now at Harvard, was also present at the interview but refused to comment whether Kennedy had stated that what he said was not for publication.