Clear Picture

It was only two days before the Polish elections--elections so long and carefully rigged that the actual casting of the ballots was anti-climactic (TIME, Jan. 13). That day, Manhattan's tabloid PM made a promise: to "attempt to cut through the charges and countercharges that have surrounded the election campaign, and present ... a clear picture of what's going on." The reporter who got the assignment had left the U.S. only the day before. The correspondent: PM's flim-flamboyant ex-editor Ralph Ingersoll, whose politics are left of leftish PM's.

In Warsaw Correspondent Ingersoll took a flying trip around the city as the Poles voted, then cabled PM: "This is to say that the picture of wholly fraudulent, rigged elections given Americans before the fact is at best a misrepresentation of a complicated political situation and at worst malicious repetition of malicious untruths."

Next day, already a much riper observer, Ingersoll shared with PM's readers "an interim conclusion . . . both sides are guilty of exaggeration, oversimplification and intense partisanship."

Seventy-two hours later, Ingersoll wrote off as a "lunatic fringe" those Poles who did not believe that "Poland's foreign policy must be practically identical with Russia's, and Poland's Government must be acceptable as well to Russia." A seasoned Polish observer of six days' standing, Correspondent Ingersoll concluded that it was "a highly complicated situation which cannot easily be analyzed in brief news dispatches." That didn't stop him from trying. Everybody damns the Government's secret police for "excesses and almost all agree that it is presently unpopular with most of the people," he wrote, and "there is no question at all but that they [the Communists] carry the most weight in the Government." But it was "gross oversimplification" to call Poland either a police state or a Communist state. Said Ingersoll mysteriously: Poland's Government is a "new kind of state."

At week's end, U.S. Embassy observers said that the Poles regarded their election with "cynicism, hopelessness, fear and abject submission." But Observer Ingersoll thus wound up his mission to Warsaw: "There was what we would call gross unfairness in the campaign [but] alleged outright fraud in the counting is not substantiated . . . the way to get them to hold Marquis of Queensbury elections here is to applaud them for what they are doing so courageously and well. . . . And if this be lecturing my countrymen, let them make the most of it."

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