What are the first names of the people who flew from Sicily to Algiers with Quentin Reynolds?
Word of the slapping incidents spread informally among soldiers before eventually circulating to war correspondents. One of the nurses who witnessed the 10 August incident apparently told her boyfriend, a captain in the Seventh Army public affairs detachment. Through him, a group of four journalists covering the Sicily operation heard of the incident: Demaree Bess of the Saturday Evening Post, Merrill Mueller of NBC News, Al Newman of Newsweek, and John Charles Daly of CBS News.  The four journalists interviewed Etter and other witnesses, but decided to bring the matter to Eisenhower instead of filing the story with their editors. Bess, Mueller, and Quentin Reynolds of Collier's Magazine flew from Sicily to Algiers, and on 19 August Bess gave a summary on the slapping incidents to Eisenhower's chief of staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith. The reporters asked Eisenhower directly about the incident, and Eisenhower requested that the story be suppressed because the war effort could not afford to lose Patton. Bess and other journalists initially complied. However, the news reporters then demanded Eisenhower fire Patton in exchange for them not reporting the story, a demand which Eisenhower refused.The story of Kuhl's slapping broke in the U.S. when newspaper columnist Drew Pearson revealed it on his 21 November radio program. Pearson received details of the Kuhl incident and other material on Patton from his friend Ernest Cuneo, an official with the Office of Strategic Services, who obtained the information from War Department files and correspondence. Pearson's version not only conflated details of both slapping incidents but falsely reported that the private in question was visibly "out of his head," telling Patton to "duck down or the shells would hit him" and that in response "Patton struck the soldier, knocking him down." Pearson punctuated his broadcast by twice stating that Patton would never again be used in combat, despite the fact that Pearson had no factual basis for this prediction. In response, Allied Headquarters denied that Patton had received an official reprimand, but confirmed that Patton had slapped at least one soldier.Patton's wife, Beatrice Patton, spoke to the media to defend him. She appeared in True Confessions, a women's confession magazine, where she characterized Patton as "the toughest, most hard boiled General in the U.S. Army  ... but he's quite sweet, really." She was featured in a Washington Post article on 26 November. While she did not attempt to justify Patton's action, she characterized him as a "tough perfectionist," stating that he cared deeply about the men under his command and would not ask them to do something he would not do himself:
Demaree Merrill