RAGPICKER

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80B01676R002600080038-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 14, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 22, 2002
• Sequence Number: 38
• Publication Date: November 30, 1951
• Content Type: NSPR

Rag 2`1ed rase 2003/01/29 : CIA-RDP80BO167602600080038-7
Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, an WASHINGTON POST 30 NOVEMBER 1951
intelligence officer unbeloved by the Ko-
rean war correspondents, has taken out
after his critics with a verbal shillelagh in
the pages of the current Cosmopolitan mag-
azine. His prose style shows a fondness
for alliteration, a nice feeling for epithets
and a strong tendency toward MacArthurian
inversions. Moreover, he is catholic in his
distastes. The list of newspapermen he
ticks off is long-and, in our humble judg-
ment, highly honorable: Hal Boyle and
Homer Bigart, Christopher Rand and Han-
son Baldwin, Drew Pearson and Joseph
Alsop. "Careless chroniclers," he calls
them with a careless rhetorical flourish,
"ragpickers of modern literature, roughly
between belles-lettres and the police blot-
ter." Rather good, don't you think-that
is; for an intelligence officer?
'General Willoughby has prejudices con-
cerning certain publications as well. Time,
Newsweek and U. S. News & World Report
all appear to have been guilty of "brazen
juggling of figures and the inferential, if
not calculated, deception of the public."
The sweep of his denigration makes it seem
almost as though everyone had been out
of step but Willoughby. But the sugges-
tion that Willoughby might be mistaken,
or might have been mistaken at any stage
of the Korean campaign, is unthinkable.
Did he not advise General MacArthur, and
did not General MacArthur follow his ad-
vice? To attribute error to the subor-
dinate would be,. then, to attribute error
to the chief. And this would be to take
part in what General MacArthur, in a
foreword to General Willoughby's Cosmo-
politan article, calls "one of the most scan..
dalous propaganda efforts to pervert the
truth in recent times."
Well, no doubt it did General Willoughby
a lot of good to get all this invective off his
chest. Whether it helped to raise his repu??
tation from the depths into which the rag.
pickers had plunged it, and whether it will
serve to restore General MacArthur to his
now somewhat pockmarked pedestal, is not
so clear. General Willoughby thinks that
the "atmosphere of tension, uneasiness and
distrust between Tokyo and Washington"
created by the correspondents was "the
major cause of the MacArthur-Truman
split." For our own part,?we are inclined
to think that the major cause of the split
was an incurable tendency on the part of
the Far East commander and his intelli-
gence officer to refer to this relationship
as "MacArthur-Truman." instead of Trumar..-
MacArthur. They never understood the
STATINTL
imporA rb'v F'0' lease' 2003/01/29 : CIA-RDP80B01676R002600080038-7
 STATINTL Approved For Release 2003/01/29 : CIA-RDP80BO1676R002600080038-7
Approved For Release 2003/01/29 : CIA-RDP80BO1676R002600080038-7