Colonel McCormick Rides Again

The Chicago Tribune seemed like its old self again last week: Colonel Robert McCormick was accused of treason.

In an editorial on the death, in the Philippines, of an ex-Tribune employe, the Tribune remarked that Private Richard Graff had not gone "roaring up and down the country shouting for blood," and that "it is time that those who willed the war were driven from their hiding places and sent to the front where they can share some of the agony they have created." In Congress, Illinois Representative Raymond S. McKeough, the Kelly-Nash machine candidate for the Senate, hotly read the editorial in full, commented: ". . . I challenge Colonel McCormick's patriotism, and I say that that language, at this time, makes him subject, at least to thinking people, as being guilty of treason, and I so charge him."

The Colonel's brief fling as a patriotic supporter of the Administration's war effort was definitely over. Once again he was out in front as the President's fiercest critic. One month after the Tribune's Pearl Harbor pledge to let bygones be bygones for unity's sake, it announced abruptly that, if its isolationist ideas had been followed, "the nation would have been spared much of the bitter news of recent days." Colonel Knox's rival News fished up a few Tribune pearls from pre-Pearl Harbor days:

(March 2, 1941): ". . . There has been no menace in word or act by any of the enemies our alarmists see on the horizon.

(March 16): "Japan already has her hands full against China. . . ."

(Oct. 27): ". . . What vital interests of the United States can Japan threaten? She cannot attack us. That is a military impossibility. Even our base at Hawaii is beyond the effective striking power of her fleet."

The Tribune only roared the louder: "The isolationists were not heeded. The attempt to put the blame for Pearl Harbor on them is an attempt to cover up for the men whose dereliction caused that disaster." The News slugged back with a cartoon.

When the Roberts Report came out, the Tribune commented thus: "Secretary Knox was no less responsible for the catastrophe than was Admiral Kimmel. . . . His continued presence in the Secretary's office is a most disturbing evidence that Washington is not devoted, with singleness of purpose, to winning the war."

By last week a regular reader of the Tribune could see with half an eye that Colonel McCormick's blood pressure was going up fast. Four days before the "treason" editorial appeared, the Tribune ran this head on Democratic Chairman Edward J. Flynn's demand for a Democratic Congress: A SCHEME TO WRECK THE REPUBLIC.

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