Word: krock
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...Arthur Krock, 80, has been the courtly, if usually critical, dean of the Washington press corps for longer than most correspondents can remember. An active reporter from 1906 to his retirement two years ago, he has been closer, longer, to the power centers of U.S. politics than perhaps any other man, journalist or politician, living or dead. He mourned most of what he saw. In his memoirs, Sixty Years on the Firing Line, published this week by Funk & Wagnalls, Krock details the complicated reasons for his pessimistic views...
Spurious Liberalism. He was born to a genteel family in post-Civil War Kentucky. His mother, he recalls, "had been brought up, like all Southern girls of her class, to do nothing," and he himself was raised "in the shadow of the Lost Cause." Admits Krock: "I looked upon the Confederate veterans as my boyhood heroes." Thus, although he considers himself a "Democratic liberal," he has been increasingly horrified at "the men and events that have reshaped our political system for the worse in the name of a 'liberalism' both spurious of ancestry and destructive in practice...
...Krock laments the deterioration of the country's moral and political fiber, the inflation that destroys savings, the pressures toward "total integration" of blacks and whites, the introduction (by Kennedy and Johnson) of a "welfare state subsidized from Washington." He considers it an inexcusable sin that Kennedy and Johnson committed the U.S. to a land war in Asia. Above all, Krock bemoans the "transmutation" of U.S. democracy into a "judicial autocracy" in which the Supreme Court has assumed "overlordship of the government and all the people to fit the political philosophy of the current majority...
...some extent, Krock himself takes the blame for the Supreme Court's liberal outlook. It was he who suggested, in 1939, the appointment of Justice William O. Douglas, one of his closest Washington friends, who turned out to be one of the Court's most unyielding liberals...
...Kleist? When Krock joined The Times, in 1927, he was al ready a leading figure in American journalism. He had been shot at while covering Kentucky elections for the Associated Press in 1909, challenged to a duel for insulting a French newspaperman in Paris in 1918 ("Somehow, I managed to crawl out of that fix"). As assistant to Publisher Ralph Pulitzer on the old New York World, he was as signed to "ride herd on Herbert Swope," the paper's imperious editor, and to take over the editorial page when Walter Lippmann was away. It was, he says...