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Short Takes
The New York Times of the fifties was called "moderately conservative" by such papers as the Quincy, Massachusetts, Patriot-Ledger and "mildly liberal" by reporters I met years later. Still, tales of Communist perfidy at the Times were not unusual: in the late forties Arthur Krock, the profoundly conservative Washington bureau chief, complained steadily to Sulzberger about the "pinkos" being published in the Times Book Review. Krock kept writing Sulzberger to give examples:Henry Steele Commager had reviewed John Gunther's Inside U.S.A. and Robert Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins; John Kenneth Galbraith had written about a Twentieth Century Fund study of American resources; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., had reviewed a book by the Republican Harold Stassen. Krock's charges against his own paper were not quite as crude as those which filled the FBI's files, but the spirit was similar. Under the heading of cominfil into the "new york times" a 1955 memo referred to the Sunday editor Lester Markel as the "number one pro-Communist" on the paper; other memos reported that Louis Budenz had said that the music critic Olin Downes and the dance critic John Martin were Communists, a notion which would have dumbfounded their colleagues. Yet both critics were in the Security Index: the FBI's list of people who would be arrested and sent to detention camps if an "internal security emergency" occurred.
The FBI files contained material offered by a couple of informers on the Times and their "suspicions of Communist sympathies" on the part of members of the staff. It was noted that "against the orders of his superiors," a young man on the makeup desk "ordered a larger headline for the obituary notice of Mrs. Earl Browder, the wife of the former Communist party leader." A "strong pro-HISS attitude," a college friendship with "a campus Red," a group of printers "whispering among themselves," "suspicions [based] upon snatches of conversation . . . overheard at adjoining tables in the cafeteria" -- all were duly recorded and preserved in the files. In July 1953 Hoover was informed that fifty-two people who'd worked for the Times had been "subjects of security investigations."
