The Press: Zaslavsky v. Baldwin

Hardly a 1944 week passes that Moscow does not shoot a diatribe U.S.-ward. The big blasts usually engage Pravda's old (64), red-faced, always-angry David Iosifovitch Zaslavsky (among his targets: Wendell Willkie, William Randolph Hearst). Last week Triggerman Zaslavsky turned his howitzer on the New York Times''s big gun of military reportage and analysis, Hanson Weightman Baldwin. Comrade Zaslavsky called him "Admiral of an Ink Pool."*

In a documented indictment (citing Baldwin's columns), Zaslavsky charged the foremost U.S. newspaper military expert (which he dislikes to be called) with disbelieving Soviet information, falling for Nazi misinformation. The major Zaslavsky counts: 1) prediction in 1941 of the Red Army's quick defeat; 2) assurance in September, 1942, of the Wehrmacht's victory without doubt; 3) assertions at 1944's start that Russian triumphs were due to the German necessity for great reserves in the west; 4) most recently, assertion that the Germans would hold Odessa, while Red Army columns were even then closing in.

Hanson Baldwin's line at this week's start: "The great retreat in Southern Russia—one of the greatest in history—seems to be coming to an end."

Mr. Wallace's "Intolerance"

The polite New York Times this week found it necessary to engage in the impolite business of kicking a guest in the seat of his convictions. The guest was the Vice President of the U.S.

Invited by the Times to write an article denning an "American Fascist," Henry Agard Wallace in five columns of its Sunday Magazine loosed a steaming storm of generalities that boiled down to two favorite Wallace targets: 1) international trade cartels; 2) business monopolies. The demagogues and stooges who "poison the channels of public information," wrote Mr. Wallace, are mere fronts for those who "in case of conflict put money and power ahead of human beings." By that definition he judged there are "undoubtedly several million" U.S. Fascists and "there are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful."

In the same edition with the Vice President's article was a skilled job of editorial surgery upon it. The Times's editorialist found Mr. Wallace approaching the "very intolerance that he condemns. . . . The Vice President of the U.S. ought not to indulge in merely abusive epithets."