Bad Timing

Time magazine has built up an unfortunate reputation for innuendo--which is reinforced in the cover story this week. While the editors pat the New York Times' veteran Arthur Krock atop the head for being "the only ranking political pundit who is not yet wearing his campaign button on his lapel," they use a supposed profile of Sen. Kennedy to slip in several political low blows.

The piece on Kennedy is a masterful, last-ditch attempt to play on the accumulated stated and unstated prejudices of the American electorate. Coming in the same issue as Time's critique of partisan columnists, it is doubly distasteful, Kennedy is portrayed as a vacillating politician getting by on looks: "There was, in fact, very little in the Kennedy message to make the crowds bust the barricades, to explain the ecstasy of teenagers or the wild urge of the throngs to touch him." The tired age question is dredged up again: "Like Ike, who is 27 years his senior..."

The article takes care to point out that, "Unlike many of his generation (Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, for example)," Kennedy was "untouched by the Depression." His decision to enter politics, Time says, was little more than a caprice. He is quoted as saying, "I was at loose ends at the time. It seemed the logical thing to do." In the House of Representatives, the article continues, 'Much of his time was spent in pursuit of pretty girls and higher elective office...."

And there is an attempt to turn Kennedy's Catholicism against him. Kennedy sought foreign policy advice from Adlai Stevenson and Chester Bowles, the article says; "he did not fear that the right-wing objections to their policies would rub off on him, benefiting from his church's militant line in dealing with the Communists."

In a Presidential campaign, the presentation of such material as fact, to a large portion of the electorate, by a journal that has seemingly espoused impartiality in the press, seems a violation of journalistic ethics. It is not a sin to be against Kennedy, but sublimal innuendo is not a legitimate weapon. Certainly no Republican of stature would want aid such as that which Time has tried to give.