Counter-Fire

Like newspapers, magazines seldom snipe at one another in print. But when Look ran a piece last Feb. 15 stating that President Roosevelt had been direly ill for several years before his death, it might have known that it was inviting a blast from the writing Roosevelts. Last week Look got the counterfire.

In Liberty, Elliott Roosevelt charged Look with "dirty journalism" for printing the "smear" as a factual report. Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, now editor of The Woman, said in her magazine that the Look piece was "glaringly erroneous." She thought it was "a direct attempt to besmirch the . . . memory" of her father.

Point by point they answered the article by Dr. Karl C. Wold, a St. Paul doctor who had written a book on the health of U.S. Presidents. Author Wold had said flatly that F.D.R. suffered a stroke as early as 1938, and had two other strokes before the attack that ended his life. In denying all this, Anna recalled that a few days after the date of one stroke described by Writer Wold, her father had gone fishing and had landed a 235-lb. shark.

Dr. Wold, said the Roosevelts, had never met F.D.R., nor had he consulted Admiral Ross T. Mclntire, the White House physician, who wrote Anna: "The article in Look magazine is so untruthful that comment is difficult . . . Dr. Wold has no basis for any of his statements."

Dr. Wold admitted that some of his information had come from Walter Trohan (TIME, Jan. 31), Washington bureau chief and topflight hatchetman of the Chicago Tribune. Under the Roosevelt barrage, Author Wold had retreated, according to Elliott, who quoted him as saying: "Much of the material in my book has been omitted, giving rise [in Look] to a completely false impression . . ."

Distorted or not, the Wold piece had snagged an extra 10,000 buyers for Look's Feb. 15 issue, and Look professed not to be worried. Editor Gardner Cowles said that Look had "checked the article thoroughly" before publication, "and we are going to stand on it now."

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