The Price of Freedom?

One night last week, William Raphael McCabe, 63, a fighting editor of the old school, left his farm outside Joliet (Ill.) and headed his car for the city. It was press night for the 21st anniversary issue of his tabloid weekly Spectator--the last issue before the Illinois Republican primary. Stocky Editor McCabe, a onetime Republican state's attorney and opponent of Governor Dwight Green's machine, was a candidate for ward committeeman.

On a lonely road, another car crowded him to a stop. Two masked men got out, reached in from both sides, and beat McCabe with spiked lead pipes. Two hours later a motorist found him unconscious in a ditch. He had a broken arm, broken legs, a fractured kneecap, deep gashes all over his body.

Next day the Spectator carried a half-page picture of its brutally beaten editor and the charge that "political intrigue" was behind the attack. McCabe had reason to think so. Since he bought the Spectator twelve years ago to fight the state G.O.P. machine, he had been beaten by a bailiff who resented an editorial, beaten again when he demanded an audit of county records, and had his windows smashed after making a speech against slot machines.

The rest of the Midwest press took sides. To the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the case was a dastardly attack on the freedom of the press. Marshall Field's Chicago Sun-Times sympathized with McCabe as a "rebel" against Governor Green's machine. The Chicago Tribune, the governor's most potent ally, ran one brief account and then dropped the story. Hearst's Herald-American saw the attack as "an outgrowth of a gang war for control of Will County's jukebox and gambling riches." Editor McCabe's competitor, the daily Joliet Herald-News, suggested that the motive was simply robbery (the thugs took $40 from McCabe but left his expensive watch).

Alfred F. Schupp, head of Illinois' G.O.P. county chairmen, and McCabe's election opponent, deplored the attack. Said he: it was "regrettable, despicable and deplorable."

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