Memoirs of a Mourner

His furled umbrella and powerful cigar are familiar to every newsman in Washington. He is a regular participant in the lunchtime poker-dice games at the bar of the Metropolitan Club. His counsel has been sought--or pointedly ignored--by every President since William Howard Taft. Woodrow Wilson often talked out his problems with him during the Paris peace talks that ended World War I.F.D.R. once regarded him as a "Hoover agent," twice tried unsuccessfully to get him fired. Both Jack and Bobby Kennedy submitted the manuscripts of their first books to him for critical comment. To his secretary, Laura Waltz, his ponderous prose is "notoriously bad." To his former colleagues at the New York Times, he is "Mr. Krock." Says Washington Bureau Chief Tom Wicker, "I wouldn't dream of calling him Arthur."

Arthur Krock, 80, has been the courtly, if usually critical, dean of the Washington press corps for longer than most correspondents can remember. An active reporter from 1906 to his retirement two years ago, he has been closer, longer, to the power centers of U.S. politics than perhaps any other man, journalist or politician, living or dead. He mourned most of what he saw. In his memoirs, Sixty Years on the Firing Line, published this week by Funk & Wagnalls, Krock details the complicated reasons for his pessimistic views.

Spurious Liberalism. He was born to a genteel family in post-Civil War Kentucky. His mother, he recalls, "had been brought up, like all Southern girls of her class, to do nothing," and he himself was raised "in the shadow of the Lost Cause." Admits Krock: "I looked upon the Confederate veterans as my boyhood heroes." Thus, although he considers himself a "Democratic liberal," he has been increasingly horrified at "the men and events that have reshaped our political system for the worse in the name of a 'liberalism' both spurious of ancestry and destructive in practice."

His observations are not particularly new. If Wilson had been less unbending, he believes, he might have persuaded the Senate to go along with the League of Nations and thereby perhaps have averted World War II. He blames Coolidge, rather than Hoover, for the Great Depression, and accuses Roosevelt's New Deal--which he at first supported--of making the Depression worse instead of better. The confrontation between Russia and the U.S. that has dominated the past two decades would never have taken place, he believes, had not F.D.R. been naive about the Kremlin's intentions to "dominate the world."

Krock laments the deterioration of the country's moral and political fiber, the inflation that destroys savings, the pressures toward "total integration" of blacks and whites, the introduction (by Kennedy and Johnson) of a "welfare state subsidized from Washington." He considers it an inexcusable sin that Kennedy and Johnson committed the U.S. to a land war in Asia. Above all, Krock bemoans the "transmutation" of U.S. democracy into a "judicial autocracy" in which the Supreme Court has assumed "overlordship of the government and all the people to fit the political philosophy of the current majority."

To some extent, Krock himself takes the blame for the Supreme Court's liberal outlook. It was he who suggested, in 1939, the appointment of Justice William O. Douglas, one of his closest Washington friends, who turned out to be one of the Court's most unyielding liberals.

Who Was Kleist? When Krock joined The Times, in 1927, he was al ready a leading figure in American journalism. He had been shot at while covering Kentucky elections for the Associated Press in 1909, challenged to a duel for insulting a French newspaperman in Paris in 1918 ("Somehow, I managed to crawl out of that fix"). As assistant to Publisher Ralph Pulitzer on the old New York World, he was as signed to "ride herd on Herbert Swope," the paper's imperious editor, and to take over the editorial page when Walter Lippmann was away. It was, he says, an impossible job, but he cherishes his years at The World more than any others in his long career. He found constant stimulation in working with such World staffers as Heywood Broun, Maxwell Anderson and Franklin P. Adams. "Never," he writes, "was a more fascinating and gifted company assembled" by any newspaper anywhere. Nor, perhaps, was a more inveterately awful group of punsters ever assembled. During a discussion of German poets, for example, Krock recalls that Swope asked his editors, "Who was Kleist?" Adams' immediate reply: "The Chinese Messiah."

On the Times, he found life more serious. He also found his conservative beliefs frequently at odds with the paper's editorial liberalism. Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, he recalls, once wrote him a letter taking him to task for having "answered its editorials in my columns." In this era of growing national conservatism, however, much of what Krock says will find a receptive audience.

More receptive, perhaps, than even Krock would welcome. The nation is, as he describes it, quite obviously torn and tormented by the problems of an age more complex than man has ever known. Yet not even Krock is convinced that his rumblings of impending doom should be taken full strength. With the innate humor he seldom displayed in 60 years of portentous prose, he recalls in his memoirs the advice once offered him by Franklin D. Roosevelt: "Cheer up, Arthur. Things have seldom been as bad as you said they were."

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