The Press: Editor's Note

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Editor Frank Grimes of the Abilene (Texas) Reporter-News is one Westerner who lets neither Washington datelines nor syndicated columnists bluff him out of an editor's job of thinking for himself. Grimes flavors his editorial page with six canned pundits, but never hesitates to strike up an argument in his own editorial column if he thinks a columnist is sour. Last week he had words for both Walter Lippmann and George Sokolsky.

Lippmann made him mad with a piece on the United Nations resolution condemning Communist China as an aggressor in Korea. "The vote,"wrote Lippmann, "is in fact a serious defeat for this country on the main issue. The issue was Asia . . . We see [by the vote] that we have . . . no important supporters in Asia ... It would have been a great deal smarter . . . not to force a showdown . . ."

Countered Grimes: "He says the issue was Asia; we say it was moral, which is an issue much more vital than Asia . . . We can never pretend to occupy the same exalted and immaculate ivory tower Walter Lippmann inhabits ... but we do not believe you can ignore moral issues or put principle under the heel of expedience and get away with it."

When Sokolsky's column came in two days later, attacking Eisenhower's report on Europe, Grimes burned at the column's headline: SALESMAN IKE. Grimes changed it to CRITICIZES IKE'S FINDINGS, then teed off on Sokolsky: "We hate to see a great patriot, who is trying to execute a great commission, accused of trying to sell the American people a bill of goods . . . Mr. Sokolsky is an opinionated person, and from external appearances he hasn't changed his mind in the last thirty years ... To an unregenerate isolationist, this is Truman's war, and Eisenhower is either so simple or so unprincipled that he would undertake the task of selling it to the American people. How warped can you get? . . ."