The Press: New Kind of Statesmanship

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Of England's weekly journals of opinion, the New Statesman is beyond much doubt the best written, best edited, most successful—and most maddening. It is read round the world, has particular standing among Asian intellectuals, including India's Prime Minister Nehru, who is apt to agonize over the mildest New Statesman rebuke. In Britain, it is relished or reviled with equal fervor. Wrote Irish Author Sean O'Faolain: "It is the British bible of every washed-up Liberal, soured Conservative, lapsed Catholic, half-baked grammar-school intellectual, and every other unhappy misfit, pink and pacifist, whose sole prophylactic against despair, if not suicide, is a weekly injection of Kingsley Martin's Bottled Bellyache."

Basil Kingsley Martin has been stirring such steam-heated passion since he became the Statesman's editor in 1931. He made it Britain's leading organ of dissent, with a circulation of 80,038—nearly twice that of its competitor, the Spectator (42,453). Now, after an uncharacteristically mild valedictory ("Thirty years at an office desk seems long enough"), Kingsley Martin, 63, is taking a new title—editorial director—and a new assignment as the Statesman's roving foreign correspondent. His chosen successor as editor: Assistant Editor John Freeman, 45.

Zigzag Intellectual. Following in Martin's wake may take some doing. A brilliant but zigzag intellectual with the tonsure and the look of a nonconformist cleric (his father was just that), Martin came to the Statesman determined to kindle a blaze: "I thought I was the sort of editor who would destroy the paper within six months but would make my message clear." He succeeded in doing neither.

Martin's convictions had the habit of ringing like gongs; he refused to shoulder arms in World War I, for example, not on religious but on personal grounds (he later served with an ambulance unit in France). His pacifism sometimes sounded like appeasement at nearly any price. The Statesman was the first publication in Great Britain to advocate ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler. Early in World War II, the New Statesman hinted at a negotiated peace. It questioned the legality of U.S. intervention in Korea, editorialized: "The Communist offensive in Korea has given American imperialism just the opportunity it deserved." Recently, one of its top editors could write of the "remarkably endearing and encouraging revolution" that delivered Cuba to Fidel Castro.