The Press: Unmistakable Terms

The renewed cold-war freeze and the heat of a U.S. presidential-election campaign have brought newspaper pundits back to life. Last week three of the most articulate stated their views in unmistakable terms (see below). The New York Times's economic specialist, Edwin L. Dale Jr., 36, now in the paper's Paris bureau after five years in Washington, chided his fellow intellectuals for their consistently conformist view of free world, and especially American, "failure." James Reston, the Times's Washington bureau chief, could contain his pent-up disdain for President Eisenhower no longer and dashed off a classic column of political satire. And Syndicated Columnist Joseph Alsop donned sackcloth in public and did penance for the venial sin of optimism.