Early in his detailed and gossipy book on The New York Times, Gay Talese describes the tension in The Times's newsroom on the day its editors had to decide whether to print secret information on the Bay of Pigs invasion, and if so, how. Rarely does an American newspaper need to weigh its First Amendment rights against such "national security" concerns--only once in a newsman's career, perhaps--and so when it does the decision can cause even a seasoned editor, as Talese puts it--paraphrasing Times editor Clifton Daniel---"to quiver with emotion and turn 'dead white.'"

Benjamin Pogrund wonders at this sort of fuss. In Johannesburg, South Africa, at The Rand Daily Mail (where Pogrund works as Associate Editor, third in command), decisions of this type--whether to or how much of a story to run, while trying to avoid a judicial run-in with the government--occur every day, and nobody bats an eyelash.

"I am told," Pogrund says, "that the editors consult their lawyer about once every six weeks here at The Globe." (The Boston Globe invited Pogrund to take a six-month position last year, and since June his byline has appeared atop stories on the mounting racial crisis in South Africa.)

"At The Mail we consult our lawyer often six times a day," he says, adding, "Generally we do take his advice, because it's our heads that are on the chopping block."

Investigating a lead, sifting out hard facts, even choosing one's words proves a ticklish, and often mind-racking chore, Pogrund says. Since he began to regularly but cautiously cover the activities of South African black nationalists and investigate what he terms the "appalling" conditions of government prisons (where mostly black political prisoners are held), Pogrund has had to go to court three times, and without the support of many First Amendment-like rights.

"This was the major effect of my first trial," he says on the subject of one safeguard, the right not to disclose sources. "I was convicted and I took the case on appeal. No precedent existed at the time, so the Supreme Court made one. It ruled that in this area the press has no legal rights under South African law."

Given this lack of legal protection, the white Afrikaaner government--the regime that imposes a nation-wide policy of apartheid, the racial segregation of South Africa's four million whites, 18 million blacks and 2.3 million coloureds (people of mixed racial ancestry)--can arbitrarily determine when The Mail has stepped out of bounds, and in some areas can demand a blanket right censor.

"Under the Defense Act, for instance," Pogrund says, "we cannot print anything about the government's purchase of military hardware from France, say, without clearance. Last fall, we couldn't publish a word about the Angolan war without checking with the Defense Ministry first."

What would happen if The Mail ignored the act? "Oh, that would mean a very serious trial," Pogrund says. "They'd charge us with printing military secrets--very serious."

Pogrund readily acknowledges the need to compromise principles involved in this type of compliance. "The press in South Africa has a very interesting history," he says. "Sometimes we can be brave as hell, and sometimes just as cowardly." Or, "editing a newspaper in South Africa is like walking blind folded through a mine-field," was the way Pogrund put it in an article that appears in the Autumn-Winter '75 issue of the Neiman Journal. "It is indeed a mine field of legal hazards."

But Pogrund also takes great pride in the stature and reputation for integrity that The Rand Daily Mail enjoys throughout the world. The American National Press or "Emperor" award for 1966 went to The Mail, South Africa's most widely read morning publication, and the paper still carries the award emblem above the masthead each day. The same front page, however, carries a box every day with the name of the Editor, Raymond Lauw; of each editorial writer for that day and of the newsman who wrote all the day's headlines.

"This lets our readership know who had said what, and also covers us in case the government brings suit," he says. "This makes clear that the editor carries the can."

In fact Prime Minister John Vorster's Afrikaaner regime never has jailed Lauw. But Pogrund, on his way up through the ranks as a reporter, has received a series of suspended sentences. "The story of my life,' he says.

Bringing a reporter before the bar in South Africa is simple enough, Pogrund explains. Under the Incitement Act, a newsman becomes criminally liable for stirring up racial conflicts just by the slant he takes on a given story, or for the language he uses.

The security police have also gone so far as to raid Pogrund's home. On one occasion raiders barged in on him in the middle of his work on a doctoral study of black nationalist movements in South Africa and arrested him, charging him with possession of banned leftist newspapers--all more than twenty years old. Ten years ago, when he began to report on prisons, the government confiscated his visa, later restricted it, and it was only last year that he regained the normal traveling privileges that allowed him to accept The globe's invitation.