Bloody Triangle

At a Washington party, the New York Times's Pundit Arthur Krock got a tongue-in-cheek proposition from his good friends, Columnists Joseph & Stewart Alsop. Why shouldn't they team up in a "bloody triangle of journalism," each turn out one column a week? That way, they could get away with less work. Next day Timesman Krock sat down at his typewriter and, showing an unsuspected gift for satire, knocked out a column, sent it off to the Alsops. Stewart Alsop thought so much of it that last week he had it framed and hung on the wall. The first half was a parody on the Alsops' country-club-voice-of-doom style and their long battle against ex-Defense Secretary Louis Johnson. The column's title: JOHNSON IS A LIAR BUT ON THE OTHER HAND . . . Wrote Krock:

" 'We were just chewing the fat,' remarked the able, indispensable Secretary of the Air Force to White House reporters a short time ago as he left the presence of Mr. Truman. In the absence of your correspondents on other business, there was none in that gathering to reply, 'Ah, Mr. Secretary, but how about the muscle of national defense which your superior, . . . Johnson, has cut away with the fat, in sparing the aorta and the gonads?'

"The nation lies defenseless, a Gulliver in Lilliput with Harry Truman as the second most Lilliputian of them all and Johnson a midget among them. We have only four combat airplanes, two tanks (one being Johnson himself), five six-star generals and a converted armored yawl, once the property of Josephus Daniels.

"Perhaps the stark horror of these facts can be better impressed on the gulled public by noting that the combat airplanes are Kaiser-Frazer 2's, the tanks were used to water Jefferson's horse on Inaugural Day, 1801, and the generals are not used to water in any form."

Having paid his respects to the Alsops, Columnist Krock ended the column with a burlesque of his own on-the-other-hand style, suitably dressed with historical allusions and rhetorical rickrack.

"So all this may be argued, however, Johnson himself has elements of greatness and is possibly the only truthful man in this Administration. Born at Roanoke, or it might have been Lynchburg, he rose rapidly when the town was besieged by Ben Butler and went to West Virginia, which did not then exist as a state. Having saved the Union, he then proceeded, as Assistant Secretary of War in 1939, to save it again. So that his selection as our second Secretary of Defense was hailed as enthusiastically as mournfully it would be farewelled.

"Your correspondents will have more to report on this interesting situation the next time their column gets by the makeup editors of our string of clients, which stretches from here to there and stretches credulity much further."

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