The Press: Row at the New Republic

From the moment that Gilbert Harrison, owner of the New Republic for 20 years, sold his magazine last March, there was talk around its Washington, D.C., offices of inevitable changes and trouble to come. The buyer of the 60-year-old liberal weekly, once edited by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, was Martin Peretz, a wealthy social studies lecturer at Harvard, who paid $380,000 for the magazine.

The expectation of trouble stemmed directly from Harrison's arrangement to stay on as editor for three years. The prickly Harrison—and the equally prickly Peretz—quickly parted company over Harrison's heavy...

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