Strictly Personal

"A bastard swindler," wrote Editor Charles A. Dana of the New York Sun, describing his political enemy, Editor Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World. "A mendacious blackguard," Pulitzer fired back, "a mortgaged, broken-down calumniator, an unmitigated scoundrel."

Such personal journalism, once as much a part of American life as the horse car, had almost died in the U.S. press--but not quite. Last week, it was back with a roar as Columnist Westbrook Pegler and Free-Lance Writer Quentin Reynolds clawed one another over the remains of gentle, quixotic Heywood Broun, their onetime drinking and poker crony.

Rattled Bones. Reynolds had started it. Reviewing Dale Kramer's Heywood Broun: A Biographical Portrait for the New York Herald Tribune, he attributed Broun's death in 1939 to wounded grief over an attack by Pegler,* his Connecticut neighbor. Reynolds quoted Broun as saying: "Peg calls me a liar! Why does he do that?" Continued Reynolds: "For two days he brooded over what Peg had written . . . [He] refused to stay in bed although he had a temperature of 101. He could talk of nothing but Peg's attack . . . The doctor told him to relax: he'd be all right if he could get some sleep. But he couldn't relax. He couldn't sleep. And he died."

Last week, in taking on Reynolds, Pegler, always ready to paw over the good interred with any man's bones, gave Broun's own a few more ghoulish rattles. "Broun," wrote he, "was a notorious liar ... a voluptuary and ... a sneak ... a dirty fighter . . . [He] shunned the company of his equals . . . because he couldn't fool them ... So he cultivated a personal cult of four-flushers like Reynolds . . ."

Bruised Shins. Pegler, who did a stint in the U.S. Navy in World War I but saw no part of World War II, then went on to question the personal courage of War Correspondent Reynolds, who covered the London blitz, the Dieppe raid, the North African campaign and the Salerno invasion. "Like Broun," wrote Pegler, "Reynolds was sloppy and ran to fat, but the fact was not to be established until we got the war which he had been howling for, that his protuberant belly was filled with something else than guts . . . Reynolds was largely an absentee war correspondent. He covered the ghastly Dieppe raid from a battleship and, when the invasion of Normandy was made, relieving the pressure on his Russian friends, he was safe in the U.S., cleaning up ... Though he was a giant and a bachelor, he let several million kids about 18 years old do the fighting." Furthermore, bellowed Pegler, Reynolds was once a practicing nudist, and furthermore, on the way to Broun's funeral he proposed marriage to Mrs. Broun.

For two days after the blast Reynolds brooded in silence. Then he decided to attack Peg in a sensitive spot, his pocketbook. This week he announced that he had instructed his lawyer to file a $500,000 libel suit against Peg's "false and obscene charges." For Pegler it might turn out to be one more proof that, in recent years, he has been letting his spleen overrun his journalist's judgment. He has already publicly apologized for implying that International Latex's President Abram Spanel was a fellow traveler (TIME, Nov. 14). He is also defending himself in a $500,000 libel suit by Fellow Columnist Drew Pearson because he blamed Pearson's attacks for the suicide of ex-Defense Secretary James V. Forrestal.

"Heal This Gentle Child"

To the Memphis Commercial Appeal last week, ten-year-eld Betty Lou Marbury of Brownsville, Tenn. wrote a letter whose childish scrawl and simple message quickly caught the editor's eye--and heart: "I am now undergoing X-ray treatments at the Babtist Hospital in Memphis for an infection of my right hand. My doctor says he fears that he will have to amputate my hand to stop the infection. I want those who may read this letter ... to pray that I may not have to lose my hand and that I may soon completely recover. I believe the Lord will answer their prayers."

Betty Lou explained that when her brother Earl was close to death with a ruptured appendix, she had knelt with her parents to pray for his life. "I prayed, we all prayed," she said, "and Earl got well." Perhaps, she thought, prayer would do the same for her; if there were any charges, "let my father . . . know."

The Commercial Appeal not only asked its readers to pray that Betty Lou's malignant bone infection could be cured without surgery. It led the prayers itself: "0 Lord, who helped the leper and raised up Lazarus from the dead, heal, too, and protect this, believing gentle child--Amen!" As for the charges, "they were prepaid, long ago and far away, on the hill called Calvary." By nightfall, Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Memphis had appealed for special prayers for Betty Lou. From all over the U.S. came letters, telegrams, and telephone calls from others who had joined Betty Lou in prayer.

*Pegler, smarting over Broun's description of him as "light heavyweight champion of the upperdog," had accused Broun of sympathizing with Soviet censorship, seeking to control the U.S. press through the Newspaper Guild, which he had organized.

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