Word: krock
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Five years later, the Times sent Krock back to Washington to run its bureau and begin his column, "In the Nation." There, week after week, he devoted himself to what he calls the real reward of journalism-"perceiving in a news event the hidden factors that are really the important roots of the action." In his search for those hidden factors, he made intensive use of his telephone and his legs. He was always, he said, "more concerned with the reportorial quality of what he wrote than with any punditry." He scorned the official handout, preferring to find...
...Naked Ambition." From that new position, says the courtly Kentuckian who is still Mr. Krock to most Timesmen, many things seem to have changed for the worse. He deplores the powerful unions that have helped to kill some papers, and he dislikes the trend toward specialization among reporters. Not that some of the specialists are not superb, but where is "the old general-assignment man with the cold objectivity in questioning officials?" Today's reporters, says Krock, "frame questions on an argumentative basis instead of primarily to elicit information...
...paper, the Times, Krock says that "its emphasis on the news has changed. It has become a very liberal paper, in the modern concept of liberalism. I'll not look in it for my kind of stuff any more." What he will be missing in the Times, Krock explains, is his own brand of Wilsonian liberal ism. "That has now become conservative, and to some, almost reactionary...
More than the definition of liberal ism, as Krock sees it, has changed in the U.S. President Johnson, in particular, has changed. "I didn't see any of the Great Society compulsory stuff in his days as a young Congressman." Today, says Krock, Johnson is a "sly and devious man." From the reporter's point of view, Harry Truman was the great President-"absolutely candid, not a bone of secrecy in his body and scarcely one of reticence...
...tart, witty man in his speech, Krock rarely let such acerbity get into his columns. His criticism was almost always based on stern but high principles. He was also an inveterate writer of incisive letters to the editor. In one answer to a two-column attack by Harold Ickes, he skewered his opponent as a man "who has painted a word portrait of me in his own image. This tendency is familiar to psychiatrists...