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Counterattack? The Post does not minimize the power of Winchell as columnist and Sunday radioracle. And the paper, which has boosted circulation by 35,000 (to 425,000) by the series, expects a counterattack soon, perhaps on Wechsler, an anti-Communist who was once a college Red. Says Jimmy Wechsler: "I hear Winchell's legmen are already working on my WWrongos."
But at week's end, Winchell had not let out a peep. Only note taken of the series was in Hearst's New York Mirror, his home base. Across Page One it ran the headline: THERE IS ONLY ONE WALTER WINCHELL. In this strange quiet, Publisher Schiff* raised her own voice, in her weekend Post column.
"I must admit that I had grown quite fond of Walter over the years," she wrote. "My maternal instinct, perhaps." As late as a year ago she had talked to him about switching his column from Hearst to the Post. But "now my sympathy for Winchell is a thing of the past . . . Maybe this series . . . will bring him to his senses, and he will cease his evil, vindictive campaigns against individuals who have displeased him."
* Her ex-husband, Ted Thackrey, onetime Post editor and now editor and publisher of the Redlined New York Compass, tried last week to get into the Post's act. The Compass picked up an attack on Winchell, recently run in a Manhattan monthly tabloid called Exposé, and billed it as "The Original Expose" on Winchell.