Back on the Growl

After four months of enforced hibernation, the press's surliest bear was back on the growl. From Tucson, where he holed up after Hearst's King Features syndicate fired him last summer for daring to attack the boss (he wrote that William Randolph Hearst Jr. was wanting in "character, ability or loyalty''), onetime Hearst Columnist Westbrook Pegler. 68, let it be known that he had found a new vent for his wrath. Beginning in February, said Pegler, he will write one political column a month for American Opinion--the house organ of the John Birch Society.

The Birchers. who hold, among other convictions, that former U.S. President Eisenhower was a "conscious" Communist "agent," regard Pegler as a major journalistic haul. "Mr. Pegler will not be restrained in any way." said American Opinion Managing Editor Scott Stanley Jr. And Columnist Pegler, who in his days of relative silence on the desert has found little better to do than dash off a piece on pugilism for Show magazine, bared his fangs in anticipation. "I'm not a member of the Birch Society," said he, "but I have seen nothing in their program or their policies to offend me." So saying, Columnist Pegler dispatched to his new employer an obituary on Eleanor Roosevelt. Said the man who long delighted in calling Mrs. Roosevelt "La Boca Grande" while she was alive: "I haven't changed my mind. The press eulogized her as the first lady of the world, but I think it's undignified and dishonest to call her that. I think she was a terrible quack."

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