The Press: The Angry Old Man

“I call him Junior,” growled the country’s angriest columnist at a meeting of the Anti-Communist Christian Crusade in Tulsa. “I have to suit his brattish conniptions.” He is “lacking in character, ability or loyalty.” The invective was familiar, but the target was new. This time Hearst-man Westbrook Pegler was attacking neither a Roosevelt, nor a labor leader, nor Harry Truman. He was taking on his own boss, William Randolph Hearst Jr.

“Hearst’s chief baby sitter,” Pegler went on, is Frank Conniff (Hearst’s national news editor), and he characterized the pair as “juvenile delinquents.” The immediate reason for Pegler’s wrath: “I have received insolent, arrogant warnings that nothing unfavorable to the Kennedy

Administration will be allowed out of New York where the censors sit.” The Crusaders chortled heartily; Hearst & Co. did not. Last week, after 18 years with the Hearst chain, Pegler, 68, left. “The maximum tolerance is made in this organization for prima donnas,” said Conniff, “but this has become personal.”

The wonder is that Pegler lasted so long. The ultimate nonconformist, he came to hate almost everything he wrote about, from politics to literature to animals. Occasionally his tirades were hilarious ; more often they were simply ridiculous. No columnist in American history has heaped so much personal abuse on so many people over so long a period. “Liar,” “Communist,” “traitor,” “parasite” were words that Pegler commonly used to describe most of the people he disliked.

Choice Venom. With a father’s sure instinct, Arthur James Pegler. a Hearst reporter himself, forbade his son to go into journalism. But Westbrook heeded his father no more than he did anyone else. He quit high school to take a job with United

Press, became one of the youngest U.S. foreign correspondents in World War I. He infuriated every branch of the armed services by blasting away at their inefficiency, but he quickly began to build his angry reputation. After the war, he became one of the best sportswriters in the business, but at the beginning of the New Deal he made the mistake of turning political columnist.

At first, Pegler supported Franklin Roosevelt. He voted for F.D.R. in 1936 and called Eleanor Roosevelt the “greatest American woman.” But he soon turned misanthropic. In columns that grew steadily more vitriolic, he referred to Roosevelt as a “feebleminded fuehrer,” Eleanor as “La Boca Grande.” He reserved his choicest venom for Harry Truman: “thin-lipped, a hater and not above offering you his hand to yank you off balance and work you over with a chair leg, pool cue or something out of his pocket.” After the assassination attempt on Truman in 1950, Pegler berated “hypocrites” for getting excited. “I hope this will be a lesson to Truman,” he wrote in a column that was killed by Hearst. “I wasn’t shocked, I wasn’t horrified, and I believe that most of those who said they were were liars.” Pegler preferred the late Dominican Republic Dictator Rafael Trujillo to most of the world’s statesmen: “Trujillo is much more sensible, practical and helpful to his people than Roosevelt. Truman or Eisenhower has been to ours.”

Heavy Editing. In his earlier days, Pegler distinguished between good and bad labor leaders. In 1941 he won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing labor racketeers, who later went to prison. After that, he soon decided that the whole labor movement was “incurably vile,” delivered the opinion that packinghouse workers on strike in 1949 “deserved to be clubbed senseless or if it were necessary to be clubbed to death in the interest of public order and Government.”

None of Pegler’s legion of enemies turned out to be thornier than Correspondent Quentin Reynolds. After Pegler attacked Reynolds in print for “nuding along [with] a wench” and cowardice. Reynolds sued. In court in 1954, Reynolds’ attorney, Louis Nizer, forced Pegler to admit that 130 statements he had made about Reynolds were untrue, and Reynolds was awarded $175,001. After that, the list of newspapers that carried Pegler gradually dropped from more than 200 to 140, and the columnist was tamed by heavy editing from Hearst.

In the last couple of years, Pegler has largely confined himself to innocuous columns about George Spelvin, a Peglerian prototype of an average American: grumpy, antisocial and suspicious as a kulak. George still has a small, eccentric following, and chances are that he (and Pegler) will be kept by some papers even though he has been dropped by Hearst. But the demand is likely to be small. By week’s end, the Hearst papers had received only a handful of letters and a few phone calls protesting the loss of their onetime titan.