Grand Old Man

He was a courtly, imposing figure, given to Olympian judgments. A longtime associate characterized him as "something of a grandee." Nearly everyone called him Mr. Krock. During 66 years as a journalist, Arthur Krock was the confidant--and quite often the prickly conscience--of the select and powerful in Washington. The mighty talked to him trustingly as a friend or warily as a critic, but almost always they talked.

A working day for Krock might include conversations with Cabinet officers, lunch at the Metropolitan Club, then an interview with the newsmaker of the day. On occasion that happened to be the President. Because of Krock's integrity as a reporter and his power as the New York Times's chief man in Washington for 20 years, he had the confidence and antipathy at various times of such diverse Presidents as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, in 1935 and 1938, and was nominated for a third, which would have been a record for a journalist. But he refused it because he was then a member of the Pulitzer advisory board.

Along with Walter Lippmann and David Lawrence, Krock helped perfect the form of the serious political column. Lippmann offered the perspective of history; Lawrence offered polemics; Krock encompassed both. He usually began his syndicated column "In the Nation" with a recitation of what some political leader had told him and then vented his opinions about it--generally conservative. Though he wrote in a ponderous style, his comments invariably commanded the attention of political leaders. "He had a lot of clout where it counted. He sure as hell wasn't for the subway trade," remembers Fellow Columnist William S. White. "He had enormous influence among the movers and shakers in Washington."

A bookkeeper's son from Glasgow, Ky., Krock attended Princeton briefly, then began his journalistic career on the Louisville Herald and became Washington correspondent for the Louisville Times in 1910. He went to Paris with Woodrow Wilson, won a citation from the French government for his coverage of the Versailles peace conference, and returned to become the editorial manager at age 29 of both the Louisville Times and Courier-Journal. In 1927 he joined the New York Times, and five years later became that newspaper's Washington bureau chief.

Krock turned the bureau into a fiefdom. He demanded that correspondents develop their own expertise ("You've got to know as much about the subject as the men who make the news") and at the same time defended them against querulous editors in New York. Though he might not agree with one of his reporters' interpretation of a story, he seldom tried to impose his own viewpoint.

In 1953, Krock moved aside as the Times's bureau chief. Though he was then 67, he admitted that he had "planned this move for a much later time." But he did it so that James Reston could move into the chiefs job instead of taking one of the several high posts offered to him by competitors. Krock continued writing his column until he retired from the Times in 1966. He turned out three books of memoirs, but even in them, he allowed little of his personal life to intrude.

Despite his stern public demeanor, he was a devoted husband. His wife has been an invalid, and his great hope was that he would survive her so that he could take care of her. That was not to be. Last week, at the age of 87, Arthur Krock died of cancer.

In his last official column, Krock displayed both his orotund prose and his historical perspective. "The volume, complexity and menaces of the unresolved problems of humanity may not be accurately termed unexampled when submitted to history's test of relativity, though in the shadow of nuclear war they seem to be." He ended with the wry comment: "Better to depart with the words of the character in the TV thriller: 'All right, officer, I'll go quietly.' "

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.