Mr. Krock Retires

Everywhere he looked, the prospect was far from pleasing. "The unresolved problems of humanity," wrote New York Times Political Columnist Arthur Krock, "are as grave as any that burdened man before." In the U.S. in particular, things were in parlous shape. The Government, Krock complained, was endorsing "an evangelistic concept of world stewardship"; it had "discarded the most fundamental teaching of the foremost American military analysts by assuming the burden of a ground war between Asians in Asia." At home, the Constitution was being eroded by "the swollen powers of the President" and the "judge-made legislation" of the Supreme Court. The Great Society had become "both kith and kin" to the total welfare state.

Thus last week, after 39 years on the Times, Arthur Krock, at 78, turned in a kind of personal State of the Union message and announced his retirement. Time was when he planned to stay on the job until he died. Now he felt fatigue. "I don't write as well or as clearly or as concisely as I did," said the man whose influence extended far beyond the Times's circulation. "There has crept in a sense of futility because of the transgressions of politicians." It was, Krock told a fellow reporter, "as good a time as any to stop."

The Real Rewards. The youngster from Glasgow, Ky., who dropped out of Princeton in his freshman year for lack of funds broke into journalism in 1907 as a cub reporter for the Louisville Herald. He covered his first beat on horseback, became a Washington correspondent for the Louisville Times just three years later. In 1915 he was home again in Louisville as editorial director of both the Times and its sister paper, the Courier-Journal.

He still considered himself primarily a commentator and reporter. Leaving his desk work to others, he went to Paris to cover the Versailles Peace Conference and earned a Legion of Honor with his dispatches. Then, in 1923, he left Louisville for New York and got a job as editorial writer for Frank Cobb's World. In 1927, just when Walter Lippmann took over as editor of the World, Krock moved to the Times as a member of its editorial board.

Five years later, the Times sent Krock back to Washington to run its bureau and begin his column, "In the Nation." There, week after week, he devoted himself to what he calls the real reward of journalism--"perceiving in a news event the hidden factors that are really the important roots of the action." In his search for those hidden factors, he made intensive use of his telephone and his legs. He was always, he said, "more concerned with the reportorial quality of what he wrote than with any punditry." He scorned the official handout, preferring to find out for himself. And as a result, he piled up an impressive catalogue of scoops. In 1933 he was the first to report that the U.S. was going off the gold standard; that same year, he broke the news about the formation of the NRA. He won Pulitzer prizes for exclusive interviews with Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. Even after he was replaced by James Reston as bureau chief in 1953, the probing columnist stayed on the job. "I didn't retreat," he says. "I withdrew to a previously prepared position."

"Naked Ambition." From that new position, says the courtly Kentuckian who is still Mr. Krock to most Timesmen, many things seem to have changed for the worse. He deplores the powerful unions that have helped to kill some papers, and he dislikes the trend toward specialization among reporters. Not that some of the specialists are not superb, but where is "the old general-assignment man with the cold objectivity in questioning officials?" Today's reporters, says Krock, "frame questions on an argumentative basis instead of primarily to elicit information."

As for his own paper, the Times, Krock says that "its emphasis on the news has changed. It has become a very liberal paper, in the modern concept of liberalism. I'll not look in it for my kind of stuff any more." What he will be missing in the Times, Krock explains, is his own brand of Wilsonian liberal ism. "That has now become conservative, and to some, almost reactionary."

More than the definition of liberal ism, as Krock sees it, has changed in the U.S. President Johnson, in particular, has changed. "I didn't see any of the Great Society compulsory stuff in his days as a young Congressman." Today, says Krock, Johnson is a "sly and devious man." From the reporter's point of view, Harry Truman was the great President--"absolutely candid, not a bone of secrecy in his body and scarcely one of reticence."

Few contemporary politicians rate such marks. Bobby Kennedy concerns him because "a driving ambition like that alarms me. It feeds on itself. You get a glimpse of naked ambition that could take him in a direction even he does not perceive." As for Republicans who ought to be mounting a forceful opposition to the Administration: "They are cowardly and confused."

A tart, witty man in his speech, Krock rarely let such acerbity get into his columns. His criticism was almost always based on stern but high principles. He was also an inveterate writer of incisive letters to the editor. In one answer to a two-column attack by Harold Ickes, he skewered his opponent as a man "who has painted a word portrait of me in his own image. This tendency is familiar to psychiatrists."

Careless Reporting. For all his complaints, Krock has no intention of retiring from his longtime job of watching the world around him with a critical eye. He turned down all offers to organize farewell parties; he will keep his office in the Times bureau. And there he plans to continue with his two-finger typing. What he will produce, he says, is uncertain. For one thing, he has not made up his mind whether it is proper for him to write his memoirs. Besides, "I'm lazy as hell and have been all my life. I'm mentally indolent"--an observation that is one of the few bits of careless reporting ever done by Arthur Krock.

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