The Press: Soul-Searching on the Left

As onetime (1943-49) art critic for the Nation, Clement Greenberg feels he still has “a certain real stake” in the magazine’s wellbeing. Recently, Greenberg decided that the weekly’s well-being was not being furthered by its foreign policy and its foreign editor, J. Alvarez del Vayo, veteran journalist and for a time (21 months) foreign minister in Spain’s Loyalist government. To the Nation’s editors, Greenberg sent a 1,200-word letter charging that Del Vayo’s column “invariably parallels that of Soviet propaganda.” Editor-Publisher Freda Kirchwey refused to print the letter. Her explanation: “It’s absurd, defamatory and libelous.”

Greenberg, associate editor of Commentary (TIME, Jan. 29), hustled over to another liberal weekly, the anti-Communist New Leader. Like the New Republic, which a fortnight ago trounced its British cousin, the New Statesman & Nation (TIME, March 19), for its anti-American line, the New Leader last week was delighted to further the latest bit of soul-searching on the left wing. It printed Greenberg’s letter and added editorially: “Since the Nation has campaigned for many years against censorship in all its forms, we cannot understand why it should itself now indulge in this form of censorship.”

In his letter, Greenberg argues that “evidence furnished by [Del Vayo’s] own words show that his column has become a medium through which arguments remarkably like those which the Stalin regime itself advances are transmitted in a more plausible form to the American public.”

Greenberg concedes that Del Vayo doesn’t always find Russia blameless, “yet somehow he always calls upon the West to take the first step—and make the first concession—to assure peace.” In such matters as the unification of Germany, the Korean war, the Chinese Communists, the United Nations debate on Red China, Greenberg says Del Vayo is guilty of “special and specious pleading on behalf of the U.S.S.R.. . .”

Replied the Nation tersely: “. . . A periodical has a public duty not to disseminate scandal.” Then Editor Kirchwey filed a libel suit against the New Leader and Critic Greenberg.