Tarradiddle & Truth

When Editor Michael Straight of the New Republic picked up his telephone in Washington one morning last week, London was on the wire. His caller was his old friend Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman and Nation. Editor Martin was in a high huff about a "rather dirty trick," to wit, the liberal New Republic, which had long seen eye to eye with the New Statesman, had turned on Fellow-Liberal Martin in a most unpleasant manner.

The attack on the New Statesman was written by Richard Strout, Washington correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, and briefly U.S. correspondent for the New Statesman during a period when, as he said, he was "unfamiliar with its prejudices." Wrote Strout: "There is something uncanny in the way New Statesman dispatches from all over the world . . . converge ultimately on the faults of the U.S. . . . Doubts arise sometimes as to whether the New Statesman is not merely following the party line. This hardly seems possible, yet the evidence is baffling."

War & Peace. The evidence, said Strout, included Martin's favorite contention that the U.S. is trying to bring on World War III; that General MacArthur disobeyed United Nations directives when he crossed the 38th parallel in Korea. Martin bad also stated that Red China had been promised that MacArthur would not cross the parallel. Said Strout: there is no evidence that either of these statements is true. In truth, Strout added this week, the New Statesman itself "has encouraged the spread of the war by enlisting sympathy for the Chinese aggressors."

Strout's crudest cut was a repetition of the charge (TIME, Feb. 26), that Martin was really Britain's Bertie McCormick. "Different as the publishers are in some respects," wrote Strout, "they share a furious self-rectitude, a fine ability to raise everybody's blood-pressure and a loathing for American foreign policy."

Last week Martin followed up his telephone call to Straight with a signed rebuttal in the New Statesman and a 1900-word cable to the New Republic denouncing Strout's "tarradiddle." Martin was obviously not a Communist because he had been "frequently . . . denounced by the Soviets as various kinds of a Fascist beast," he wrote. And hadn't the New Statesman been denied a correspondent in Moscow? As for MacArthur, said Martin in his best non sequitur fashion, hadn't Americans criticized Britain's Colonel Blimps? Furthermore, "American generals ... don't disguise their view that we [in Britain] may be expendable."

Next Enemy. Martin dropped one admission that helped explain the New Statesman's line: "Today the center of capitalist power has moved from London to Washington, and Socialists' criticism must also move from London to Washington." In short, for left-wingers of Martin's stripe, with capitalism on the run in England, the next enemy is not Communism but capitalism in the U.S.

That was too much for Mike Straight. In this week's New Republic he took direct issue with his old friend. It was not a case of British liberalism v. American liberalism, he wrote. "We believe [the] struggle is between dictatorship of the Soviet brand and democracy." He stood on the line of democracy. Where stood the New Statesman? Straight noted that New Statesman pundit G. D. H. Cole had recently said that he would take "the Soviet world" in any showdown between the U.S. and Russia. Asked Straight: "Is this the editorial policy of the New Statesman? Presumably, it is . . ."

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