The Press: After the Battle

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"We never saw anything like it," said the Wall Street Journal, still in deep shock. "One of the country's steel companies announced it was going to try to get more money for its product. And promptly all hell busted loose. Mr. Kennedy had his victory. The President himself said all the people of the United States should be gratified. Around him there was joy unrestrained at this proof positive of how naked political power, ruthlessly used, could smash any private citizen who got in its way. If we had not seen it with our eyes and heard it with our own ears, we would not have been able to believe that in America it actually happened."

But it had happened. President Kennedy had slugged it out with steel and won. As the dust of battle lifted like smoke from an open-hearth furnace, the nation's press last week assigned itself the task of reckoning the casualties, the cost and, most importantly, the meaning of the fight.

Tragic Blunder. Many papers and columnists shared the Wall Street Journal's incredulous despair. "A warning to all Americans," editorialized the 86-year-old Nashville Banner, "that the day of Free Enterprise is drawing to a close. Khrushchev could be right when he said: 'Your grandchildren will live under Socialism.' "

In Los Angeles the conservative Times (circ.548,702) saw in Kennedy's fighting mood "a reincarnation on an undreamed of scale of Mussolini's corporate state."