The Press: Top-Level Dispute

No newspaper in the world has more distinguished byliners than the massive New York Times. With its 50 foreign correspondents alone, there can be and sometimes are differences in interpretation of the same situation to be spotted by the close reader. Last week readers close and casual were enjoying a dispute of higher visibility between two top Timesmen. The debaters: Pundit Arthur Krock, 71, and his longtime friend and colleague James ("Scotty") Reston, 48, chief of the Times's Washington bureau.

The two men have differed in the past, e.g., Reston was generally a defender of onetime Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Krock a critic. But Krock thought so highly of his younger colleague in 1953 that he moved aside as the Times's Washington bureau chief so that Reston could have the job, thereby thwarted the Washington Post and Times Herald's hopes of landing Scotty as editor. Their recent differences seem more pointed and more specific. Though Krock never mentions Reston by name in his critiques, there can be no doubt of his target. Items: ¶ Last week Reston cited in glowing terms the "serious and thoughtful" commencement address of Yale President Whitney Griswold, who said that "we have had enough of the pious cant that says the Sputniks were a good thing because they will wake us up. This is worse than making a virtue of necessity. It is making a virtue of disaster." Next day

Krock shrugged off Griswold's speech as unclear, pointedly reversed Reston-Griswold's own rhetoric to declare that "disaster can at least be invested with the virtue of awakening the sleeper to his peril." ¶When Reston said De Gaulle's ascension to power in France so threatened the U.S.'s European policy that "even the modest gains of the past are now in jeopardy," Krock clucked that this sort of "anxious disapproval" was being expressed "largely by some currently displaced foreign policy-makers of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations," tartly added that "these American 'liberals' " apparently prefer chaos to De Gaulle. ¶ "Remarkable" was Reston's word for a commencement address by Adlai E. Stevenson, which called for a committee of experts to work out a long-range economic recovery program for the free world. Said Krock: "The files already are bulging with a dozen such formulations by 'committees of experts.' "

This skirmishing between old and esteemed staffers delights the Times, which requires neither man to conform to any policy, including its own editorials. Says Reston: "Two guys looking at a story are bound to see it in different ways. Why not print both views? I think this is the proper expression of journalism."