Ghost Story

While testifying before the Ervin committee last summer, Jeb Stuart Magruder mentioned that the Committee for the Re-Election of the President had paid $20,000 to Author-Columnist Victor Lasky in 1972. Amid the Watergate quakes, this disclosure hardly caused a tremor, but it did rattle Lauren Soth, editorial-page editor of the Des Moines Register and Tribune. He alerted the National Conference of Editorial Writers that the 100 papers subscribing to Lasky's weekly column (syndicated by the North American Newspaper Alliance) had been uninformed about Lasky's financial connection with C.R.P.

The N.C.E.W. decided that Lasky had "abused his position as an editorial-page columnist" and that his syndicate was culpable for condoning the arrangement once it became known. The National News Council,-- asked to look into the case by the editors' group, upheld both charges on June 25. But Lasky, 56, a pugnacious conservative and veteran Kennedy baiter (JFK: The Man and the Myth), is not taking the News Council verdict passively. "I get a total of $30 a week from North American for my column," he fumes. "For that I should go on welfare." Lasky explains that Republican friends were looking for a writer to do columns and speeches for Martha Mitchell at the beginning of 1972.

"Finally someone said, 'Why don't you take it?' " Lasky closed the deal, and the writer worked from March to July 1972, ghosting gags, speeches and magazine articles for Martha. "I did lousy stand-up jokes for Mrs. Mitchell to tell on herself," Lasky says now. "Next thing I know, a bunch of self-appointed busy bodies descends on me."

Lasky insists that his labors for Martha had nothing to do with his column, which is merely a minor sideline for him. "Nobody gave me orders or told me what to write." N.A.N.A. Executive Editor Sid Goldberg defends Lasky: "You know, in the nature of being a ghostwriter, you don't advertise what you are doing." Both men feel that a fee from C.R.P. looks more sinister now than it did when Lasky picked it up.

* A 15-member panel established last year by the Twentieth Century Fund to monitor press fairness and accuracy.

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