Ickes Joins the Enemy

The columnist's stock in trade is falsification and vilification. He is journalism's Public Enemy No. 1, and if the American press is to improve itself, it must get rid of him. -- Harold Le Clair Ickes, April 11, 1939.

Last week, Harold Ickes, who has done his share of vilification, became a columnist.

For one furious fortnight, Ickes played hard to get. The line formed at the left, with Marshall Field's Chicago Sun. Field opened bidding at $500 a week; Ickes didn't even widen a nostril. Bidding soared to $900 a week, to $1,000.

Then Ickes summoned the winner, 37-year-old President Robert M. Hall of the New York Post Syndicate. He had had bigger offers, said Honest Harold, but money wasn't everything (Ickes has a comfortable inheritance from his wealthy first wife). Then he scratched his name to a three-year agreement to fill three columns a week with Ickesian snips & snails. Price: about $50,000 a year. On the crowded Post, he would be Columnist No. 37.

During the signing ceremony Hall said brightly to newsmen that he himself had thought up a title for the column: something like "The Old Curmudgeon Speaks." Ickes pursed his lips, snapped that he hadn't had time to think about a title.

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