We were not surprised to read in Susan Baer's story (Today section, Dec. 26) that Newt Gingrich's favorite newspaper columnist is Frank R. Kent. His "The Great Game of Politics" jTC column, which began on the front page of The Sun in 1923, espoused a very conservative message in its later years.
Kent invented the Washington column as it is known today. He analyzed the political process -- the "game" -- in addition to the policies and programs politicians promoted. (He did it, by the way, from Baltimore, not Washington. His colleague H. L. Mencken also preferred to cover the nation's capital from here -- as did Woodrow Wilson in his scholarly analysis of Congress.)
Kent started out as a liberal when The Sun was very split between Wilsonian liberalism and the satirical conservatism (some would say nihilism) of Mencken. But by the advent of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal policies, Kent and Mencken were singing from the same page of the anti-liberal choir book.
Susan Baer also points out that Mr. Gingrich, in his college lecture that is soon to be a book, cites Mencken as his least favorite journalist. He calls Mencken "a miserable mean person. . . [who] despised people." He says not enough journalists today write with Kent's "understanding," and too many write with Mencken's "anti-politics" scorn. He even blames Mencken for Common Cause! Can you imagine what Mencken would do to those do-gooders? Can you imagine what he would do to Newt Gingrich?
We can. We are not sure what Kent would do to him. He would have favored his conservatism, but he would have demanded he play the great game as an honest conservative before he placed Mr. Gingrich in the company of his friend Herbert Hoover.
At any rate, we are glad to have Messrs. Kent and Mencken put before the public this way. We may be prejudiced, but we believe they were two of the great political commentators of the century. One made sense of politics; one made fun of it. Both are admirable callings in a democracy. Some old-timers tell us that, Mr. Gingrich to the contrary, Kent and Mencken both liked politicians, Mencken probably more than Kent.