Friendly Enemies
HERMAN, GEORGE E.
WASHINGTON-U.S.A. By George E. Herman Friendly Enemies THE journalistic profession, in its infinite wisdom, has lately uncovered a new and abhorrent practice which, it claims, threatens the...
...Publishers have raised the battle cry...
...Having had several years experience in the White House, I was able to obtain from Hagerty the general outlines of what might freely be said on the air...
...And the Cuban crisis heightened all tensions...
...Hearing the President make fun of his "ask not what your country can do for you, ask rather what you can do for your country" distressed his followers in the press...
...But then why the explosion over news management now...
...And now the crimes of President Kennedy are well established...
...The man who promised to substitute harsh reality for the soothing syrup of the Eisenhower Administration, it now appears, has been tampering a little with reality himself...
...When an administration tries to put up a smoke screen, his task is to plow grimly through it and expose whatever the screen was designed to conceal from the public...
...Cuba presented a clear and present danger of war...
...Access to the President's close advisers is far freer than in the last Administration...
...The reporters, for their part, are far more partial to President Kennedy than they were to President Eisenhower...
...Similarly, when President Eisenhower appointed a commission to study a specific problem, there were sarcastic laughs about dilution of authority and government by commission...
...And Washington newsmen have begun an uneasy soul-searching which was long overdue...
...The management of news, in fact, is downright difficult to avoid in government...
...But it does illustrate the way the central control mechanism was utilized during the Eisenhower Administration...
...Much of it is reprinted verbatim...
...and the public espousal of managed news in the unfortunate statement by Assistant Defense Secretary Arthur Sylvester, whose assertion that a government has the right to lie to the press in times of grave national emergency would be silently accepted as self-evident had he never said it aloud...
...Much of the news is material which belongs in the public domain because it constitutes or reflects public policy formulated in the secret recesses of the Executive machinery...
...At the end of the first Kennedy session of Congress, Presidential aide Theodore Sorensen told newsmen that Kennedy's first one hundred days were three times as great as Franklin D. Roosevelt's...
...For example, at the National Press Club luncheons there used to be endless sour discussions of how President Eisenhower subjugated national defense and the opinions of his military chiefs of staff to the rulings of the budget makers...
...Certainly, President Kennedy's "cold," the fiction which brought him back to the White House during the Cuban crisis, was no worse a deception than the "stomach trouble" which President Eisenhower's aides already knew to be a heart attack...
...In general they consider journalists their friends—despite the constant, somewhat irritating desire of the newsmen to find out things they are not ready to reveal...
...The revolutionary crime is called "news management," it is practiced by the New Frontier gang, and its archcriminal is the President of the United States...
...he took them down, and read them back verbatim into the microphone when I asked the promised questions in the course of the interview...
...This, of course, was an extreme case and Hagerty certainly had never intended to dictate the very words to be used...
...By George E. Herman Friendly Enemies THE journalistic profession, in its infinite wisdom, has lately uncovered a new and abhorrent practice which, it claims, threatens the freedom of the press and the future of news reporting...
...I remember one occasion when I interviewed an important Presidential aide...
...the obvious pre-censorship in the State Department and Pentagon attempts to have a record kept of all conversations between newsmen and news sources...
...James Hagerty did his best to keep reporters from letting the public know that President Eisenhower had caught more than his legal limit of trout in a Colorado mountain stream...
...IT is disturbing for a good reporter to discover emotional partiality in himself...
...With the Kennedy Administration, a reporter does not call Pierre Salinger to get an appointment to interview McGeorge Bundy...
...One year after the inauguration, there was an uneasy sensation among newsmen even as they laughed at the President's own hilarious parody of his inaugural address at a party fund-raising dinner...
...Tempers rose at early news conferences when, during the steel-price crisis and the furor over Laos, President Kennedy spoke directly over the heads of newsmen to the television cameras...
...There is a vast mimeographed flood of such news, and it is handed to the reporter on a silver platter...
...Under President Eisenhower, News Secretary James Hagerty tightly controlled news sources...
...first maintained was only a weather research vehicle...
...Tension built up between emotional commitment to the President and intellectual doubts about him...
...The President will break away from his guests of state at an official party to chat with invited newsmen...
...Editors are alarmed...
...And so on, with the embarrassed silences becoming more and more embarrassing...
...Those reporters who found themselves emotionally repelled by the chilly streak they detected in Kennedy have been the least disturbed by the news-management fuss, although some of them have exploited the fuss for their own partisan purposes...
...The Sylvester statement and the dangerous precensorship moves in the State Department and Pentagon can be considered as the triggers which set off the news-management explosion...
...Stories leaked to newsmen through other, irregular routes are even more likely to have been designed to effect certain ends...
...Both men would consider such tactics insulting...
...The trouble is that so much Washington news must, for practical purposes, be given out rather than uncovered by enterprising newsmen...
...And it has troubled many to realize that Kennedy, the bright campaigner, the trumpeteer of the inaugural address, does the same kind of thing as Presidents who lacked his special luster...
...Several reasons present themselves: the President's long evasiveness on the strength of Soviet forces in Cuba...
...When an administration tries to shut off news sources, the reporter's job is to open them up again or find new ones...
...Hagerty had just released the EisenhowerNixon letters on Presidential succession and I told the aide I planned to ask him questions on the subject...
...Their uneasiness and their introspection appears to be directly proportionate to their prior, and possibly still continuing, emotional commitment to President Kennedy...
...His aides are articulate men with quick minds who enjoy fencing with reporters...
...It hit no great low point in either the Eisenhower or Kennedy Administrations, and it has risen to no great new peak today...
...the U-2 did not...
...I read these general outlines to the nervous aide...
...George E. Herman is the White House correspondent for CBS News...
...When the smoke clears away perhaps we will find a healthier state of affairs, with newsmen and officials confronting one another with new alertness, each side trying to protect its own interest and guess what sly gambit the other fellow is trying to conceal...
...the correct word, it turned out, was "withdrew...
...General Douglas MacArthur once fired a censor who permitted me to report that American troops had "retreated" under pressure...
...Jaws dropped in astonishment at this bald-faced substitution of quantity for originality and quality, but there was no hue and cry of "news management...
...Our museums contain castings of a monolith on which, 5,000 years ago, a Pharaoh published an account of his great victory in a battle which he had actually lost...
...The reporter, in short, is the natural enemy of the news source, or at least he should be...
...He said he would have to consult with Hagerty, who had authorized the interview for CBS radio...
...But today there is no real criticism of Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara's technique of selecting weapon systems on a cost-effectiveness basis...
...This is an Administration which likes newsmen...
...The disillusionment started early...
...yet there was almost no mention of news management...
...Since policy is formulated and published for a definite purpose, what could be more natural, or more efficient, than for a public official to phrase the announcement to his own best advantage...
...The reporter may be on the friendliest of terms with his news sources, but any time he lets down his guard of skepticism he is a sucker for the sharp right cross of news management...
...When he finds he has been out-maneuvered—that his news has been managed—he should clearly feel the fault is as much in himself for being taken in as it is in his natural opponent for scoring the points the reporter was supposed to score...
...Obviously, then, the duty of any competent reporter has always been to doubt everything, to triple-check everything, to hunt out the opposition inside or outside the government, and to try to lay before the public not only the statement or the leak but the probable reasons for it...
...In fact, that is part of the trouble...
...Of these reasons, the gradual growth of dissatisfaction and guiltridden disillusionment with the President served as a kind of emotional gunpowder...
...When President Kennedy appoints a commission, there is an embarrassed silence...
...Certainly, Kennedy had more right to mislead the Russians over Cuba than Eisenhower did to lie about the U-2 Plane (which the U.S...
...And the smoke screen is generally thickest in the State Department, the Defense Department and the White House...
...For the cold truth is that news management has always been with us...
...a growing feeling that President Kennedy's style and charm conceal more than they reveal...
...a smaller amount is examined, analyzed and digested on the basis of the handout plus other material...
Vol. 46 • April 1963 • No. 8
