Thunder on the Right

In the midst of the fight over the Bricker amendment last week (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) came a brand-new proposal. It rejected Bricker's plan because it did not go to the "root of the problem," suggested instead an amendment to the Constitution that could force the President to resign from office if Congress disapproved (by a two-thirds majority) any agreement he signed with a foreign power. Then Congress would elect a new President. The suggestion might have been considered harebrained had it not come from the most widely syndicated political pundit in the U.S. The pundit: Columnist David Lawrence, 65, whose "Today in Washington." sold by the New York Herald Tribune to 257 U.S. newspapers, is the respected voice of right-wing Republicans. In Lawrence's mixture of news and opinion Eisenhower Republicans often find as little to agree with as do Fair Deal Democrats.

Tragic & Dynamic. Columnist Lawrence, who calls himself a "conservative liberal," is a man of deep, if contradictory, convictions. He has backed the Republican presidential candidate every year since he voted for Hoover in 1932 (on the ground that it was "dangerous to change parties in mid-Depression"); yet he is a devout Wilsonian ("Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom principles were the major philosophical stamp on my thought") and a registered Democrat in Fairfax County, Va., where he lives. He is a lifelong internationalist, a staunch supporter of the League of Nations and the U.N., has backed the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine; but he sometimes speaks with an accent that isolationists applaud. He also strongly backs Senator McCarthy, but has condemned McCarthy's "indefensible" slander of General Marshall.

This shifting political footwork makes him just as unpredictable in his view of the Republican Administration. Lawrence alternates between referring to President Eisenhower's "tragic plight" and hailing his economic proposals as the most "dynamic from an economic viewpoint [that have] ever been brought forth." His harshest words are for the "socalled liberals, New Deal writers, left-wingers" and Democrats who were "blind to the Communist menace."

"I Was Miserable." Dave Lawrence started out his career at 15 as a reporter on the Buffalo Express. The son of a poor Jewish tailor who immigrated from England, he earned his way through Princeton, where he fell under the influence of Princeton President Woodrow Wilson. He landed a job as the A.P.'s campus correspondent, later exposed the practice by which student-correspondents paid their predecessors $50 bribes to get recommended to the wire services. He struck up an acquaintance with former President Grover Cleveland and his wife, who lived near by, once thoughtfully told Mrs. Cleveland that he would always be glad to handle whatever news she had. Not long after, on June 24, 1908, a messenger came to him with a note from Mrs. Cleveland: "Grover Cleveland died at 8:40 a.m. today." Lawrence phoned in the beat, so impressed the A.P. that he got a job in the Washington bureau after his graduation in 1910.

He had a variety of assignments, in Washington, scoring several notable beats, and earned a reputation that he still has for being a tireless worker (in 38 years of writing his column, he has taken only one two-week vacation from writing, and then, says Lawrence, "I was miserable"). He left the A.P. to become a columnist (starting on the New York Evening Post), was almost alone among U.S. newsmen in predicting Wilson's second-term election over Hughes. In 1918, Lawrence married Ellanor Campbell Hayes (they now have three children). Eight years later, already a syndicated reporter (for his own Consolidated Press Association), he started the U.S. Daily, a newspaper that printed the texts of Government documents and official papers, later set up a Washington news and information service, the Bureau of National Affairs (sold to its 250 employees in 1946). In 1933 he converted his daily into a weekly, U.S. News.

At World War II's end, busy Dave Lawrence brought out a second magazine, World Report. It attracted few advertisers, so he combined both his weeklies into the weekly U.S. News & World Report. Lawrence, says one staffer, made the magazine a success when he "discovered the tape recorder." He recorded a talk with a Japanese editor, printed it in full in the magazine. Immediately, he sensed the popularity of the question & answer interview, made it the top feature of the magazine. (Lawrence carried the technique to an extreme when he returned from a European trip, printed 13 pages of his staff interviewing him.) He filled the weekly with colorful explanatory charts, diagrams and news that "you can use" aimed at businessmen, boosted its circulation from 350,000 to its present high of 613,459; he also turned nearly 40% of its stock over to the employees, and has provided for the whole magazine to go to the staff after his death.

The Plow. Lawrence now lets his staff run U.S. News & World Report, concentrates on his own weekly back-page editorial and his newspaper column. He works as much as 14 hours a day, spends most of his time plowing methodically through formidable piles of official docu ments, newspapers, magazines and books.

He does not smoke, drink or play cards, rarely attends a press conference, and works on the telephone as much as three hours a day.

The influence of his column is as difficult to measure as that of any other news paper columnist. But he is seriously read all over the capital as a bellwether of opinion on the far (but not fanatic) right.

Around the U.S., many right-wing Republicans read his column with Biblical devotion. But he carries little weight at the White House, where staffers say he is "not at all influential on the Administration." Fair Deal Democrats call him a "reactionary." Neither of these views bothers Lawrence. He is aligned, he says, with no party or group: "I write as I see it. My purpose is clarification and exposition."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.