Mr. John Gunther—it says—is the world’s foremost political reporter, a truly great journalist. His latest Inside job only raises the question, what is a great journalist? Whatever the answer may be, it probably has something to do with a reporter’s ability to bring his readers some kind of exceptionally penetrating insight into the nature of the political or social reality he writes about If these standards have any relevance at all, an agonizing reappraisal of Mr. Gunther is going to be in order one of these days. Of course, it is an achievement of sorts that he can undertake a staggering job of travel, interviews, and compilation of facts and figures and then, with a little judicious omission here and special emphasis there, come up with just the same dismally predictable old Liberal sop that could have been cooked up right in his own study.
Mr. Gunther’s new book, like its predecessors, is a thorough and wide-ranging piece of work, and here and there a sound idea rears its head, e.g., his warning against the snares of “peaceful coexistence.” But everywhere the dead hand of leftist orthodoxy shows through awkwardly; for instance, in his frequent reliance on tired-out bogey-words like “feudal” and “reactionary.” People Mr. Gunther makes a point of not liking are feudal and reactionary, not to say feudal reactionaries: conservative Catholic Church circles, south Italian peasants, prewar Hungarian landowners, the old French officer corps. Dangerous characters of that ilk.
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