The Press: Row at the New Republic

From the moment that Gilbert Harrison, owner of the New Republic for 20 years, sold his magazine last March, there was talk around its Washington, D.C., offices of inevitable changes and trouble to come. The buyer of the 60-year-old liberal weekly, once edited by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, was Martin Peretz, a wealthy social studies lecturer at Harvard, who paid $380,000 for the magazine.

The expectation of trouble stemmed directly from Harrison’s arrangement to stay on as editor for three years. The prickly Harrison—and the equally prickly Peretz—quickly parted company over Harrison’s heavy editing of Peretz. Harrison departed last January. Peretz, 35, a political iconoclast of the left, soon began to impose his mark—including a greater, more personal devotion to Israel than the New Republic had shown before—on the weekly’s pages. Using his owner’s prerogative, he ran an editorial suggesting as an “option” the use of invasion to guard U.S. oil interests in the Middle East, and started to bring in fresh contributors, like Humorist Woody Allen.

Ego Trip. Dissension grew steadily, and last month Foreign Editor Stanley Karnow resigned in a new dispute with Peretz. Literary Editor Doris Grumbach plans to leave this month. Executive Editor Walter Pincus, who had lost to Peretz in an attempt to buy the journal, is now disconsolate and will quit soon. Says Pincus of Peretz: “He’s unprofessional, a guy on an ego trip who doesn’t know where he wants to go.”

The current housecleaning seems to have ended. Peretz claims that the magazine is doing well and has been in the black for the last three months—the longest consecutive run in years. He distrusts the world of professional Washington journalism, and his aim now, he says, is to draft more writers from academia. “I’m still feeling my way,” he says about his somewhat shaken attempt to renew the New Republic.