Together Again

When Collier's published an unflattering full-length text portrait of Walter Winchell last year, Columnist Winchell angrily put the magazine at the head of his quip list. Collier's scathing verdict: "By most newspaper standards, Winchell is one of the worst [reporters in the U.S.]; his repeated mistakes would shame a $25-a-week cub. His egotism is so marked that only the rugged or the subservient can stay long in his company . . ."

With the shrill insistence of a dentist's drill, Winchell blasted back at Collier's, panning its articles, hinting that it was on the skids, and deriding its "dated-and-dead" editors. But last April, three weeks after Louis Ruppel took over the Collier's editorship from Walter Davenport (who had run the Winchell story), Winchell got a whiff of peace-pipe smoke. He promptly announced: "You can see the improvement already." (Actually, there had been no change; Collier's issues go to press five weeks in advance.)

Editor Ruppel took his pull at the pipe and dug into the cash register. Ruppel gave Winchell $12,500 (which he gave to the Damon Runyon cancer fund) for an article for Collier's--"the highest price," crowed Winchell, "they ever paid anybody for one article." Last week, Collier's (circ. 3,072,000) showed what it got for its whopping price. It published Winchell's "Blueprint for Disaster," a blustering, blistering attack on the new Department of Defense for "concealing one of the greatest scandals in American history." The "scandal" turned out to be stale stuff; it was the interservice strife which has been on the front pages of the daily press for months. But Collier's had its reward: never had anyone given a shriller account (". . .a collective dereliction of duty unmatched in the annals of any nation . . .") of the unseemly war in the Pentagon.

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