(FORTUNE Magazine) – Herewith our report on the Claude Pepper obituaries, or at least five of the big ones, all graded on a scale of 1 to 10. We proffer the grades as a public service or something, after deciding that Pepper presented uniquely difficult challenges to your average media death reporter. Being a basically decent fellow and a true-blue liberal besides, he was of course guaranteed to get rave reviews from the media obit folks. But there were complications. How, in 1989, do you handle a decent fellow who actually met Joseph Stalin (in September 1945) and tried to tell the American people he was terrific, who enthusiastically bought Henry Wallace's pro-Soviet foreign policy, and who thought the Cold War was Harry Truman's fault? How do you handle the hilarious story, which every reporter loved to retell, about George Smathers's demagogically defeating Pepper by telling uneducated Floridians that Claude was a ''shameless extrovert'' who had once ''practiced celibacy,'' the only thing wrong with the story being that it was all fiction? And what in the world do you do with Claude's late-in-life conversion to hard-line anti- Communism (when he found himself representing a heavily Cuban district in Miami)? Hard to find the handle, eh? Our scores, from bottom to top: -- The AP obit rates a mere 3. It pretended that Claude lost his Senate seat because of ''the Communist scare of the era,'' mysteriously claims that he ''sized up Joseph Stalin'' without mentioning that the size-up was favorable, and says nothing at all about his support for the contras and the Angolan anti-Communist rebels. -- The Washington Post gets a 4. It encourages you to take seriously the celibacy story, says nothing about Pepper's recent anti-Communism, and while mentioning his accolade for Stalin, still leaves you thinking that he was unfairly redbaited. -- The Los Angeles Times effort receives a 5. The obit correctly notes that Pepper met Stalin and called him ''a man Americans can trust'' but omits Claude's broader foreign-policy perspective at the time and pretends his defeat by Smathers was all the result of McCarthyism. -- The UPI gets a solid 8. It had the Wallaceite phase and the Smathers campaign down pat but never did mention the late hard-line phase of Claude's life. -- The New York Times gets a (gasp!) 10. It had all our concerns addressed properly, including even Pepper's switch to senior-citizen anti-Communism, which proves, like our score, that anything is possible.