Gettysburg Refought

One of the few ground rules observed with equal fervor by editorial writers and politicians is that the Civil War is about as amenable to levity as motherhood. It was a reasonably calculated risk for President Eisenhower to call Confederate General Jeb Stuart a headline hunter, and for Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery to label Pickett's charge as ''monstrous." But when Ike and Monty jocularly agreed that Generals Lee and Meade should have been ''sacked'' for their blunders at Gettysburg (TIME, May 20). they committed themselves irrevocably to battle.

Southern editors raced to combat with rebel yells and a battery of 105-mm. inkpots. Companies of cartoonists fired from sniper positions at the top of editorial pages, while the columnists, of course, made up the fifth column. SOUTHERN BLOOD BOILS! screamed the Jackson, Miss. News. SACRILEGE! shouted Tennessee's Kingsport Times. "President Eisenhower," sputtered the Shelby, N.C. Star, "must have lost his mind/'

Toe to Heel. Following the maxim that offense is the best defense, the city-room Confederates aimed their heaviest salvos at Ike's and Monty's own military records. The Staunton, Va. News-Leader chided: "President Eisenhower may have forgotten his own Kasserine Pass defeat and the breakthrough in the Bulge; Marshal Montgomery his excruciating slowness in hitting the Germans after the initial Rhine crossings.'' Columnist Anthony Harrigan argued in South Carolina's Charleston News & Courier that Eisenhower was "not an actual battle leader [but] a sort of super military executive director." And on the theory that Lee and Meade should have equal time to reply to their critics, an editorial in the Scripps-Howard papers took the ghosts of Gettysburg's commanders on a jeep trip through the Ardennes to retrace Eisenhower-Montgomery strategy in the Battle of the Bulge. " 'An absolutely monstrous thing', said General Meade. 'I would have sacked them both,' said General Lee."

Some of the liveliest Gettysburgiana was turned up by city editors' efforts to find a local angle. Miami Herald reporters managed to extract opinions from a Robert E. Lee. a Colonel Guilford R. Montgomery, a Jack Mead and a Mrs. A. J. Eisenhower. Historian (Lincoln Finds a General) Kenneth P. Williams was traced to Bloomington. Ind. by the Atlanta Constitution, and allowed that "it would have been rather unjust to replace Lee for that one battle." Mrs. Robert E. Lee III, identified as "the widow of the Generals grandson," confided to the Washington Post and Times Herald that the Ike-Monty verdict was "disgusting."

Teapot Tempest. There were, in the South and elsewhere, editors who resisted the call to arms, pointing out instead that Ike's and Monty's hindsights on Gettys burg only reflect a verdict long accepted by the U.S. Army and most historians: it was Lee's worst-fought battle. Columnist Pie Dufour observed in the New Orleans States: "These armchair generals are on solid ground, believe it or not." And the Raleigh, N.C. News and Observer argued that Lee's own view of his performance at Gettysburg was at variance with the "Southern Oratory" used to defend it. This was reasonable, for Lee himself conceded afterwards: "It is I who have lost this fight." That, of course, opened up the question of why Lee failed. Most succinct of the answers was that of the Detroit Free Press: General Lee was incapacitated by a "dysentery spell."-

As the second battle of Gettysburg spread north and west at week's end, there was no prospect that it would be nearly as conclusive as the not altogether conclusive first one. That was the fun of the fight. It was, as North Carolina's Durham Herald noted, "one of those tempests in a teapot in which Americans delight to engage. It gives them a chance to argue without paving to decide, to debate without some vital result depending on the outcome."

*A plausible but otherwise unsubstantiated explanation advanced by Confederate Colonel W. W. Blackford in his vividly reported diary, War Years with Jeb Stuart.

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