Rare Compliment

If all the Western correspondents kicked out of Iron Curtain countries on trumped-up charges of "false reporting" were laid end to end, the line might reach from Washington back to Moscow. Last week another free-world newsman got the boot --but with a rare compliment. Brusquely ordered to leave Poland was A. (for Abraham) M. (for Michael) Rosenthal, 37, the New York Times''s resident staffer in Warsaw. The Communist Polish government did not even pretend that Rosenthal had been misreporting. Rather, it accused him of having "probed too deeply into the affairs concerning the Communist Party and its leadership."

Arriving in Warsaw in June 1958, quiet, spectacled Abe Rosenthal faithfully reported the effects of the Wladyslaw Gomulka regime's relaxation of the Stalinist-type controls that had long choked Poland's political, economic and cultural growth. But when, beginning with a food crisis in October, Gomulka began tightening the economic screws again, Rosenthal reported that trend with equal accuracy. Filing stories that the heavily censored Polish press dared not print, Rosenthal disclosed that the Soviet Union was sending meat to Poland to meet the food shortage. He wrote a complete account of the denunciation by the Soviet Ambassador to Poland of the Polish press for its admiration of Western literature, films and art. He described in detail both the chilly welcome given to visiting Premier Nikita Khrushchev in July and the tumultuous greeting awarded U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon a week later. A fortnight ago, Rosenthal described Polish Communist Party Leader Gomulka as a "moody, irascible" man whose "leadership has created rifts that could grow." The immediate cause for last week's expulsion appeared to be a story that the Polish government, getting even tougher, had brought a former Stalinist from diplomatic exile for a high army post.

When told that he had been expelled, Rosenthal, a Timesman since 1944 and former New Delhi correspondent, protested he had written facts, not rumor. A Polish official gave him the true explanation of his ouster: "Everything in Poland is rumor until it is officially announced and published."

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