National Reports
PILAT, OLIVER
Westbrook Pegler and His Friends By Oliver Pilat Starting around 1950, sophisticates began to dismiss West-brook Pegler as a faded menace. His stuff was old hat, they said. He was losing his grip,...
...Think what Pegler stands for: his xenophobia, his hatred of foreign-born citizens, his apologies for lynch-ings and for organizations like the Klan...
...Angels smile," he noted with an embarrassed sideways jerk of the head, "but I never heard they carouse...
...Rumely once went to jail for taking German funds in wartime to buy a New York newspaper, but was later pardoned...
...Either way, would you say McCarthy or Pegler was worth more serious attention as a long-term threat to democratic stability...
...The column was yanked back by King Features at the last minute, but reports of it circulated, like a scandalous anecdote, until Representative Andrew Jacobs (D.-Ind...
...He was saved by the U.S...
...Regardless of the consistency that is said to plague little minds, he wanted to render his precise attitude as of the given moment...
...It was the first such verdict in Pegler's long career as a journalistic feudist...
...McCarthy obliged the very next day...
...New Leader readers are probably aware of the Trevor-Rumely crowd's back-to-McKinley economics and super-patriotism...
...Pegler seemed upset by sudden noise or the quick approach of unfriendly persons...
...They have a long way to go before they equal Pegler's efforts to pull our troops out of Korea, or his attack on war bonds as a way of short-changing investors...
...Pegler was lambasting the CIA long before McCarthy heard of it...
...At least 200 times, Pegler contradicted himself under oath...
...Behind the smokescreen of Communist-hunting, the For America crowd is reportedly beginning to shape up an anti-UN, anti-tax, anti-public-power, anti-Social Security program...
...put the text in the Congressional Record...
...It seemed to announce that the writer was planning to climb down from his ivory tower into the dusty arena of day-to-day politics...
...Pegler said in that column that he deplored "the stupid attack on the policemen guarding the house where President Truman lives," but "nowhere near as much" as he condemned attacks "by union goons of Truman adherents" on the wives of non-strikers in a Butte, Montana labor dispute...
...He could therefore be disregarded...
...People who relied on his columns for data to support their own views continued to find what they sought...
...It was an aggregation of rabble with which Broun was implicated," he said, with a glance toward his wife and secretary, who were sitting in a rear row...
...Courtroom visitors were numerous...
...Pegler may not have pleased Charles Henry, the Hearst libel lawyer, who had an almost impossible case plus a difficult client, but he was clearly acting out his own conception of the witness's role...
...Priority in this case is clear...
...Some of my writing was omitted, not because my arguments or facts were faulty, but because some phases of our journalism would rather have a friend in the White House than defend the Constitution which established freedom of the press...
...By the only standard of mental condition worth anything, that of functioning, Pegler seemed as sane as you or me...
...Every two years (most recently this year), King Features renewed his contract...
...Supreme Court in 1951 from another spell in jail, this time for contempt of Congress, after he refused to give an investigating committee the names of heavy contributors to one of his propaganda efforts...
...The Softball team on which he and Heywood Broun and various other celebrities of the suburban set used to play was not a regular team, he specified on one occasion...
...expressing the "hope" that the attempted assassination by Puerto Rican gunmen would "be a lesson" to President Truman...
...Any man who throws in with traitors and gorillas against the loyal, law-abiding people of the U.S...
...Think of his assault on all trade unions, and his openly expressed opinion that their free status amounts to fascism...
...He quite clearly was the star of this show...
...Quentin Reynolds's recent libel suit against the columnist marked a milestone of a sort, because the plaintiff was awarded $175,001 (payable by the Hearst papers, since Pegler is the only columnist besides Walter Winchell whose contract guarantees him against libel charges...
...Finalh, think of that Pegler column, distributed for use on November 14, 1950...
...But the trial, which consumed most of May and June, was also important because it gave the public a chance to take a new look at Pegler...
...Since Pegler has been lambasting the President freely for following "Marxist" advice and things of that sort, the comments which proved too hot for the Hearst papers to handle must have been really blistering...
...Possibly they can still be of use to the "constitutionalists" with whom Pegler wishes to associate or the rapidly expanding For America crowd...
...Earlier, Pegler had a column predicting that Senator McCarthy, who had previously been his house guest on the edge of the desert near Tucson, Arizona, would soon give renewed attention to the Central Intelligence Agency...
...Pegler lost some papers, but he gained others...
...Later, he revised this opinion...
...Declaring boldly that he had dined with a group including John Bond Trevor, head of the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, and Edward A. Rumely of the Committee for Constitutional Government, Peg-ler wrote: "I am ashamed to say that for some years I have avoided meeting individuals merely because I might be charged with guilt by association...
...After a while, Federal Judge Edward F. Weinfeld allowed a court attendant to relay all documents between Pegler and Louis Nizer, Reynolds's lawyer, to keep peace in the court...
...The only trouble with this modified form of quarantine was that it didn't work...
...maybe more sane, since he was functioning brilliantly...
...With the impudence of that Truman column in mind, what do you suppose Pegler wanted to reveal about President Eisenhower when he wrote on June 29: "Eisenhower looked fishy to me from the very beginning of his boom...
...They saw a red-faced, explosive-looking man of 60 who held himself like a military cadet...
...This was an unusual concession...
...The only question is whether Pegler was nudging McCarthy or calling the Senator's shot in advance...
...Pegler disclaimed any general approval of assassination as a political gesture, though he had urged the assassination of Stalin...
...On the very day that the jury returned the largest libel verdict in the country's history, a Pegler column appeared deploring the way Hearst editors had refused to print some of his sharper comments on President Eisenhower...
...one or two young people even sought and obtained his autograph, though they did not bother Ed Mur-row, John Gunther and others equally well known who appeared as witnesses...
...Oliver Pilat, New York Post reporter, wrote The Atom Spies and covered the Pegler-Reynolds trial...
...I am fed up with this cowardice and will not be guilty again...
...By God, I am going to be an American from now on...
...It has a lot to learn from Pegler...
...Pegler testified that a smirk on the face of a general in a pertinent photo might have indicated off-stage carousing...
...One of the columnist's few contemporary heroes is For America co-chairman Clarence Manion, who visited New York recently to assert that Senator McCarthy (another Pegler hero) represented a "very constructive force" in the land...
...Trevor's loose coalition has included 80 or 100 very dissimilar outfits, some of them as respectable as the Daughters of the American Revolution, others racist in tendency, like Harry Jung's American Vigilante Intelligence Federation...
...Pegler is now heading in approximately the same political direction as For America, the new nationalist grouping backed by Hamilton Fish and Colonel Robert R. McCormick, to which Gerald L. K. Smith is also currently attracted...
...Certainly he was losing circulation and influence...
...He was losing his grip, physically and perhaps mentally...
...Most of them favored Reynolds, but their attention was concentrated on Pegler...
...The "constitutional Republicans" want to hamstring the President's power to conduct foreign relations and collect taxes...
...He said he was now prepared to take an open stand with and for what he called "constitutional Republicans"—by which he apparently meant the anti-Eisenhower wing of the GOP...
...is asking for the same kind of treatment and is getting off easy when his guards take the rap," he added...
...As to Harry S. Truman, at the present stage of the game I am willing to settle for the impudence, the scare and the reminder of the scene at Blair House," he wrote...
Vol. 37 • August 1954 • No. 32
