Peregrine Worsthorne - Early Career in Journalism

Early Career in Journalism

Worsthorne entered the newspaper industry as a sub-editor on the Glasgow Herald in 1946, on a two-year training program for Oxbridge graduates. He then worked for The Times from 1948 on the Foreign Desk, again as a sub-editor in his first year there. During this time at one point he was called in to the office of the newspaper's editor William Casey, who then told him: "Dear Boy, The Times is a stable of hacks and a thoroughbred like you will never be at home here".

He became a correspondent in Washington (1950–52), where his admiration for Senator Joe McCarthy's pursuit of communist subversion in the United States government eventually led to a split with the more circumspect Times, and, in 1953, he joined the Daily Telegraph. Despite moving to a newspaper more suited to his politics, Worsthorne nevertheless left The Times with some regret, feeling that working for any other title in Fleet Street could only be anti-climactic, and that working conditions at The Telegraph were inferior to those at The Times, then based at Printing House Square. At this time he also contributed articles to the magazine Encounter (then covertly funded by the CIA).

In a November 1954 article discussing McCarthyism titled "America: Conscience or Shield?", he wrote that America's flaws were something the British would have to accept for their own benefit, because: "legend created an American god. The god has failed. But unlike the Communist god which, on closer examination, turned out to be a devil, the American god has just become human". More recently he favourably compared a post-war America which "put its faith in the " over a Britain dedicated to the "masses".