THE WAYWARD PRESSMAN,

By A. J. Liebling '24. Doubleday & Cos., Inc., 284 pp.,$2.95.

Two things that make A. J. Liebling one of the finest reporters in the country are (1) his innate scepticism concerning what people say their motives are and what they really are (or to put it another way with Machiavelli, also a good reporter, he sees men as they are and not as they ought to be), and (2) his long apprenticeship as a newspaperman. He had written literally thousands of pieces for various newspapers before he became a writer and foreign correspondent for The New Yorker.

He learned ab initio "not to believe everything I read in the papers." In his reminiscence about his days at Dartmouth he speaks of John M. Mecklin as the one professor who meant anything to him. It was from Mecklin, when he described the Pittsburgh steel strike of 1919, that Liebling learned, "the press in particular became utterly untrustworthy and that the old New York World (defunct, alas, since 1931) "was the only one that told the truth about the strike."

A Hearst newspaper executive speaking with the knowledge of years of newspaper work said to Liebling, "the public is interested in just three things: blood, money, and sex." Today, Liebling avers, he reads domestic news "in the light of what I had learned between Professor Mecklin's speech and the Hearst executive's dictum about the three things people really cared about."

Of the 284 pages 146 have been printed before, all but 11 of which, in the New Yorker. The 11 appeared in the DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE for March 1947. The remaining 138 pages are here printed for the first time and are largely autobiographical.

This book ought to be used as a textbook in all journalism courses in the American college; it ought to be required reading for the Great Issues Course at Dartmouth; and I wish all literate Americans could read it. I believe it is a book of far-reaching importance.