The Press: No Use Trying

Kingsley Martin, anti-American editor of Britain’s pinko New Statesman and Nation (circ. 87,156), frequently writes as though the U.S., not Russia, is pushing the world toward atomic war. When Editor Martin heard U.S. Columnist Stewart Alsop assure Britain on a BBC program that “a certain left-wing British magazine,” i.e., the New Statesman, was all wrong in any such interpretation of U.S. policy, Martin’s feathers ruffled.

Piqued Editor Martin pecked back at the Columnist Brothers Alsop. “For light relief,” he scoffed in the New Statesman, “you ought to read [them]. Joseph Alsop is a familiar figure in this country. He eats and talks in labour circles, describing himself as a socialist. I often wonder whether he makes the same proud claim in Washington. His brother Stewart [says that] … no one in America really wants war . . . That some people want war, however, is very clear indeed from the Alsop brothers’ own column, which went so far the other day as to say that the World War had already begun.”

In Washington last week, Joe Alsop read Editor Martin’s non sequitur and said: “I don’t know what’s got into

Kingsley Martin, and I suppose there’s no use trying to find out. Almost everything he has said and written in the last year or so has sounded like a sort of excitable, left-wing parody of Colonel McCormick.”