A Party for Peg

Small as the assemblage was, the candlelit room was smaller yet, and some of the guests wound up forced to sip their cocktails in the ladies' room. But nobody seemed to mind, for the conversation was lively, the filet mignon was good, and the guest of honor was unusually convivial. The occasion was a testimonial dinner in Manhattan last week for terrible-tempered Westbrook Pegler.

The affair was organized by a pair of ideologues who chew one another up in print but are friends anyway--Murray Kempton, onetime New York Post columnist who now ventilates his views in the left-wing New Republic, and William F. Buckley Jr.. editor of the right-wing National Review. After King Features Syndicate sacked Pegler last summer for calling Boss William Randolph Hearst Jr. a "spoiled brat," the two set up the dinner and invited some of the irascible columnist's friends and former colleagues "to tell Peg that we like him."

Having once fumed and fulminated in 200 newspapers, Pegler, now 68, has failed to line up any papers at all since Hearst dropped him, and his only regular platform is Candyman Robert Welch's American Opinion magazine, monthly bark of the John Birch Society. But if Pegler has lost his outlets, he has lost none of his gift for invective and his rogues' gallery is as crowded as ever. Nelson Rockefeller, he told an interviewer last week, is an "arrogant, dangerous man." Bobby Kennedy is a "mean little jerk who never earned a thing in his life." As for Bobby's brother, "I am selective about my friends. If Kennedy comes to town tomorrow, I'm getting the hell out of here."

To Pegler, the fact that nobody wants his column suggests only that the press itself is failing. "I don't know what's wrong with the papers any more. I think the newspapers of this country are in menopause." A few papers have sounded him out, he claimed, but they wanted too much of the take--half. "I'm no country boy, coming in here for the first time," said Pegler. "I'm a ballplayer already." With no place to play.

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