THE WEEK

“I think it ought to be clear now,” writes Harry Truman, “. . . that the Communist rulers . . . are more concerned with keeping themselves in power than . . . with the peace of the world. . . .” Mind you, “now”; and who could write an entire book that would say more, in retrospect, about the foreign policy of the Truman Administration?

The news that John Hay Whitney, U.S. Ambassador in London, has “invested”—not yet, we are assured, become a stockholder but “invested”—in the New York Herald Tribune bodes no good for that newspaper, for the Republican Party, or for the nation. No good for the nation, because any influence that accrues to Mr. Whitney as a result of his “investment” will only strengthen the hand of the New Republicanism, of which he is notoriously a moneybags. Not for the Republican Party, because many people will continue to regard the Tribune, despite its Leftward drift, as a legitimate spokesman for the more conservative of our two great parties. And not —assuming it wants to become a better newspaper than it has been in recent years—for the Tribune, as witness its having published, on the morrow of the Whitney announcement, a cowardly and gratuitous editorial attack on the memory of Joseph R. McCarthy.

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“I think it ought to be clear now,” writes Harry Truman, “. . . that the Communist rulers . . . are more concerned with keeping themselves in power than . . . with the peace of the world. . . .” Mind you, “now”; and who could write an entire book that would say more, in retrospect, about the foreign policy of the Truman Administration?

The news that John Hay Whitney, U.S. Ambassador in London, has “invested”—not yet, we are assured, become a stockholder but “invested”—in the New York Herald Tribune bodes no good for that newspaper, for the Republican Party, or for the nation. No good for the nation, because any influence that accrues to Mr. Whitney as a result of his “investment” will only strengthen the hand of the New Republicanism, of which he is notoriously a moneybags. Not for the Republican Party, because many people will continue to regard the Tribune, despite its Leftward drift, as a legitimate spokesman for the more conservative of our two great parties. And not —assuming it wants to become a better newspaper than it has been in recent years—for the Tribune, as witness its having published, on the morrow of the Whitney announcement, a cowardly and gratuitous editorial attack on the memory of Joseph R. McCarthy.