Mr. Krock Retires

Everywhere he looked, the prospect was far from pleasing. "The unresolved problems of humanity," wrote New York Times Political Columnist Arthur Krock, "are as grave as any that burdened man before." In the U.S. in particular, things were in parlous shape. The Government, Krock complained, was endorsing "an evangelistic concept of world stewardship"; it had "discarded the most fundamental teaching of the foremost American military analysts by assuming the burden of a ground war between Asians in Asia." At home, the Constitution was being eroded by "the swollen powers of the President" and the "judge-made legislation" of the Supreme Court. The Great Society had become "both kith and kin" to the total welfare state.

Thus last week, after 39 years on the Times, Arthur Krock, at 78, turned in a kind of personal State of the Union message and announced his retirement. Time was when he planned to stay on the job until he died. Now he felt fatigue. "I don't write as well or as clearly or as concisely as I did," said the man whose influence extended far beyond the Times's circulation. "There has crept in a sense of futility because of the transgressions of politicians." It was, Krock told a fellow reporter, "as good a time as any to stop."

The Real Rewards. The youngster from Glasgow, Ky., who dropped out of Princeton in his freshman year for lack of funds broke into journalism in 1907 as a cub reporter for the Louisville Herald. He covered his first beat on horseback, became a Washington correspondent for the Louisville Times just three years later. In 1915 he was home again in Louisville as editorial director of both the Times and its sister paper, the Courier-Journal.

He still considered himself primarily a commentator and reporter. Leaving his desk work to others, he went to Paris to cover the Versailles Peace Conference and earned a Legion of Honor with his dispatches. Then, in 1923, he left Louisville for New York and got a job as editorial writer for Frank Cobb's World. In 1927, just when Walter Lippmann took over as editor of the World, Krock moved to the Times as a member of its editorial board.

Five years later, the Times sent Krock back to Washington to run its bureau and begin his column, "In the Nation." There, week after week, he devoted himself to what he calls the real reward of journalism—"perceiving in a news event the hidden factors that are really the important roots of the action." In his search for those hidden factors, he made intensive use of his telephone and his legs. He was always, he said, "more concerned with the reportorial quality of what he wrote than with any punditry." He scorned the official handout, preferring to find out for himself. And as a result, he piled up an impressive catalogue of scoops. In 1933 he was the first to report that the U.S. was going off the gold standard; that same year, he broke the news about the formation of the NRA. He won Pulitzer prizes for exclusive interviews with Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. Even after he was replaced by James Reston as bureau chief in 1953, the probing columnist stayed on the job. "I didn't retreat," he says. "I withdrew to a previously prepared position."

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