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The Other Winchells. The busiest of these unpaid, unsung legmen, as the Post tells it, are Pressagents Ed Weiner, Curt Weinberg and Irving Hoffman. Weiner is the columnist's "lobbyist, contact-man, straight-man-about-town"; Hoffman is a columnist for the Hollywood Reporter; Weinberg was Singer Josephine Baker's drum beater until the Stork Club incident, then Weinberg hastily dropped her. Also chased from the Winchell closet was another figure that few other ghosts even knew about: Herman Klurfeld, 35, who sticks close to his Long Island home and is paid a reported $250 a week by Winchell for writing his "schmaltz" columns, such as "Man Playing with Words" ("Central Park: This is an island of repose bounded by a stone-and-steel sea").
Reader & Thinker. "But of the men behind Winchell," the Post said, Ernest Cuneo "deservedly leads the list." A onetime Columbia University lineman, Cuneo is WW's "attorney . . . book-reader . . brain ... at a reported . . . $75,000 a year. [He] has undoubtedly offered the largest single contribution to his book of political knowledge and overheated opinion." Cuneo, friend of many of the early New Dealers, introduced Winchell into the inner circle of the New Deal, and, said the Post, guides most of Winchell's political opinions; lately, the Post implied, .there apparently has been something of a rift, because "Cuneo clings to his old New Deal associates [while] Winchell increasingly sounds . . . Republican." (Cuneo last year bought a large interest in N.A.N.A., a news-feature service.)
One way in which Winchell sounds increasingly Republican, said the Post, is that he has "embraced" Senator Joe McCarthy. "It was fear rather than conviction that persuaded him to make love to Senator McCarthy. He ran for cover when McCarthy opened fire on Drew Pearson, spurning all appeals that he come to Pearson's defense."
"WWrongos." Some of the most telling blows against Winchell were fashioned right out of his own columns. The Post found more than enough errors to run a daily box of Winchell "WWrongos" and his carefully disguised corrections. Example: " 'Irving Berlin, the poor songwriter, netted only $650,000 (after taxes) in 1946.'" Two days later Winchell ran the veiled retraction: " 'Irving Berlin says the report that he made $650,000 (after taxes) is bunk.'"
The Post also took a critical look at Winchell's relations with "the baddies" in the underworld. Commented the Post: " 'The baddies' have staked their newsboy pal to some pretty good beats," such as the surrender of Killer Lepke to Winchell on Aug. 24, 1939, and the murder of Mad Dog Coll. During the Kefauver hearings, Winchell ran a column of anecdotes in which he "remembered all sorts of things about Frank Costello—all nice," and followed it up later with an exclusive interview picturing him "as an authority on how to stamp out crime."