Who's Loony?

The Washington Times-Heraid's vitriolic, red-haired Publisher Cissie Patterson, 61, who publishes the biggest but not the best paper in the capital, has had insanity on her mind recently. Last week she spread her thoughts across eight columns, under the heading CRAZY--CRAZY LIKE FOXES. They added up to some of the most vicious personal slander since the days when all journalism was yellow.

She had once visited an insane asylum, she wrote, and "for a while we had fun cataloguing the better-known 'liberals' according to the various types" she had seen there. Examples:

P: "Henry Wallace . . . crystal-gazing crackpot. ... A harmless kind of a nut.

P:Walter Winchell: Hard to tell just what's biting this middle-aged ex-chorus boy. False shame of his race . . . may be at the root of it all. Anyhow ... he suffers from a chronic state of wild excitement, venom and perpetual motion of the jaw. . . .

P:"Poor puppet-king Marshall Field rightly belongs in the 'harmless' ward, too . . trailing his dirty sheet behind him."

As Cissie's scurrilities go, these were mere warmups. The worst she saved for her ex-son-in-law Washington Columnist Drew Pearson, whom she mortally hates. Wrote Cissie: "Ah, Drew, rose-sniffing, child-loving, child-cheater, sentimental Drew. . . . Vicious and. . . ." (Eleven more lines, reflecting on Mr. Pearson's personal habits, have been deleted by TIME. To publish them might put TIME into court for disseminating a libel.)

A minute later, Mrs. Patterson was talking about Winchell, Pearson "and other Quislings [who] . . .manage to get paid big money for their treachery." Their crime, as Cissie saw it: "This filthy work of plotting, planning, sneaking, lying, spying, cheating, stealing, smearing, in the mere HOPE of one day overthrowing our American form of government." Cissie's final medical diagnosis: the "liberals" were "crazy all right, but . . . crazy like foxes" and sometimes there was "a fine method in their madness."

The more she thought about it, the bloodthirstier her language became: "Yes, they're nutty all right, these 'liberals'--for they can't see further ahead than the first frenzied days of plunder, murder, fire, rape and prancing about with pale, fresh-cut human heads on bloody pikes . . . besotted in their lust for blood and carnage and dollars. . . ."

Said ex-son-in-law Drew Pearson, in his Sunday night broadcast: "The British have organized a society for protection against mothers-in-law, but what we really need in this country is an organization for protection against ex-mothers-in-law. I would like to be a charter member." Said Winchell, on his program two hours later: "Very special bulletin! The craziest woman in Washington, D.C. is not yet confined at St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the insane. She is, however, expected any edition."

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