During the decade that Henry Morgenthau, Jr., had been Secretary of the Treasury and Arthur Sulzberger had been publisher of the New York Times, they had used their friendship in their professional roles only in the rarest circumstances. For Morgenthau, January 1944 was one of those times. After intense public pressure, and sustained private lobbying from the secretary and his staff, the president on January 22 had signed an executive order creating the War Refugee Board, a government agency charged with saving as many Jews as possible during what would turn out to be the war's last year and a half. The day after, the Times ran a story about the new agency on page 11. The newspaper's ho-hum response disappointed Morgenthau, who had waged bureaucratic warfare and risked political capital to see the refugee board established. On the morning of January 29, he made one of his infrequent phone calls to the Times publisher to complain.

“Well, you carried it on – on the back page, about 18 or 20; the Tribune carried it on the front page,” Morgenthau said in a phone conversation he recorded. (The secretary was mistaken about the page.) “A number of people have commented – they said, how funny that the Tribune should carry it on the front page, and the Times somewhere in the back.”