the President and the Press:Eliminating the Middlemen
Knoll, Erwin
the President and the Press: Eliminating the Middlemen by ERWIN KNOLL Lyndon B. Johnson, who came to regard the press as perhaps the most onerous burden of his ill-starred Presidency, often...
...With the rarest of exceptions, reporters had no private audiences with Mr...
...The White House was furious about McGinniss's book, but it apparently harbors no hard feelings against Ailes...
...When Ike and JFK held regular press conferences," says Stuart Loory of The Los Angeles Times, "every bureaucrat in town knew that if he tried to hold back information, an embarrassing question might be raised at the President's press conference...
...Giving a hostile press as little as possible to chew on, he goes on television to tell his story directly to the people...
...A year and a day later, on January 30, 1970, Nixon held his ninth news conference since entering the White House...
...many members of the 'writing press' believe the networks have been cowed...
...The President has held two such sessions—both devoted to his nominees for the Supreme Court—but they were impromptu affairs attended only by the White House "regulars," who lack the specialized knowledge possessed by reporters covering other beats...
...He may just be helping them eliminate themselves...
...Even Lyndon Johnson never went that far—at least on the record...
...And so perhaps it is unfair to say that President Nixon is trying to eliminate the middlemen...
...But another reporter grumbles that Klein "just throws us bones...
...Instead, Klein's duties seem to fall into three broad categories—to supply a measure of coordination to the Government's huge public relations apparatus...
...The people, I am convinced, are for you but the press is killing you...
...The President's recognition of questioners at his press conferences is not as random and haphazard as it may appear on television...
...White House kickbacks to reporters and editors about unfavorable stories have been relatively few, compared to the highly sensitive Johnson and Kennedy Administrations, but they are not unheard of...
...One can only speculate on the amount of research that was required before the President could casually disclose on January 30 (in response to a question about Judge G. Harrold Carswell) that he had just happened to be reading "a very interesting biography of Ralph McGill," the late Southern liberal editor, and had found that McGill wrote a column in 1940 "in which he came out unalterably against ir .egration of education in Southern schools...
...I realized I had to take my case to the people and convince them of my honesty and integrity...
...I am not afraid of them—just as the press is not afraid of me...
...Mitchell and back to Vietnam again...
...He might say the Paris peace talks aren't getting anywhere, but that certainly isn't news...
...With access to the President severely limited, the two or three dozen White House "regulars" in the press corps must rely heavily on the twice-a-day briefings conducted by Press Secretary Ziegler, a personable thirty-year-old former advertising man who handled the Disneyland account in the Los Angeles office of J. Walter Thompson before joining the Nixon campaign in 1968...
...That the "credibility gap" has faded as an issue is testimony more to the Administration's deftness at public relations than to its candor...
...Most of these addresses-—and particularly the President's televised speech on Vietnam last November 3—have been judged by the White House and by independent observers as resounding public relations triumphs...
...In several instances he addressed them by name twice—once when he recognized them and a second time when he began his answer...
...At the White House, one correspondent says, Henry A. Kissinger, the President's assistant for national security affairs, serves as "a kind of super-press secretary for foreign policy matters...
...John Pierson, the White House correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, wrote recently that "reporters who cover the President are unhappy and frustrated, and sometimes both feelings do, in fact, give way to hostility...
...Television has turned the press corps into a bunch of prima donnas," says James Deakin of the Post-Dispatch...
...Columnist Robert Novak says, "There's no doubt Mr...
...they "have to live with the President" and his staff, and the life is easier when relations are not strained by critical reporting...
...Richard M. Nixon has long shared his predecessor's apprehension and antipathy toward reporters...
...If I considered that the press and the public needs more information than I am giving through press conferences, I will have more...
...But when they get on their feet, most newsmen are loath to be nasty to the President of the United States before an audience of sixty million...
...Recently, however, some White House aides have passed the word that the President "may start seeing reporters informally from time to time—just to get acquainted...
...Nixon calls news conferences "right at a time when the public has a lot of questions that should be answered by the President of the United States...
...For most of his daily news, the President relies on a comprehensive summary prepared each morning by Pat Buchanan, one of his speech writers...
...He's psyched the press...
...A decade later, in his famous book, Six Crises, Nixon recalled the advice he received from his political mentor, Murray Chotiner (who has just recently joined the White House staff as a special counsel to the President) : "What we have to do is get you before the biggest possible audience so that you can talk over the heads of the press to the people...
...when he left office a year ago, he had held 125...
...A solo appearance on TV not only provides the President with an immense audience but also with "the freedom to present his case without risking the subtle corrective process of emendation and evaluation that usually occurs when Presidential rhetoric is transmitted through someone else's typewriter," Robert B. Semple Jr., the White House correspondent of The New York Times, pointed out last month...
...Since entering the White House more than a year ago, Nixon has uttered not an unkind word about the press—he has left that chore to his Vice President— but has mounted a systematic effort to eliminate the middlemen, or at least to reduce their role...
...Aides say he is more self-confident now, and has reduced the cramming time to about a day...
...I have also made three television addresses in prime time...
...John F. Kennedy, who brought masterful showmanship but minimal information to his news conferences, held nineteen in his first year and fifty-eight in his 1,000 days...
...Some correspondents say that while they have been immune to the Agnew onslaught, their editors seem to have succumbed...
...In so doing he can wield enormous power over the public mind, for only he commands instant access to the national TV audience at his own request...
...By comparison, Mr...
...Inevitably, these are self-serving sessions, at which the Administration's policy line—or at least Kissinger's—is expounded without fear that his remarks will be directly quoted or attributed...
...No correspondent told me that he felt intimidated by Vice President Agnew's attacks on the news media, but many members of the "writing press" believe the networks have been cowed...
...Ziegler has also announced that the press office will start releasing a daily schedule of the President's conferences with members of the White House staff-—a move that one correspondent sees as a sign that "they're starting to get sensitive to questions about what the President really does—how he spends his time...
...That's an old story anyway...
...The result, predictably, has been a spate of flattering editorials by flattered editors...
...After Mr...
...Billed in advance as an "open Administration" that would restore the lines of information that were destroyed in the Johnson years, the Nixon regime has proven to be as skillful as Johnson's in the arts of secrecy and dissimulation...
...Correspondents disagree about whether the President's personal distance is a good thing or bad...
...The first of these functions—-coordination of Government information activities—is carried on behind the scenes, and about all that can be said about it is that it isn't easy, particularly in an Administration whose spokesmen tend to reflect views that range all the way from slightly right of center to extremely right of center...
...The audience, which may have amounted to fifty million, responded to the President's brief, heavily political speech and to the dramatic flourish with which he signed the veto message right there on camera...
...Along with the imposing title conferred on him last year, Klein, a former editor of the San Diego Union who has been a friend of Nixon since 1946, was handed an imposing assignment—"to eliminate any possibility of a credibility gap...
...It dates back to the first great crisis of his political career—the disclosure during his 1952 Vice Presidential campaign that he had been the beneficiary of a $20,000 "slush fund" maintained by California businessmen...
...About a half dozen times in his first year in office he has preempted prime television time to address the people...
...Kissinger never speaks to reporters on a for-attribution basis, but he holds frequent "backgrounders" with individuals and groups of correspondents...
...Some correspondents suggest the simple expedient of having a reporter remain on his feet after he poses a question to the President, so that he can immediately follow up on an incomplete or unsatisfactory answer...
...Oh, I think far from it," says Stuart H. Loory, the White House correspondent of The Los Angeles Times...
...John Osborne, who covers the White House for The New Republic, wrote recently: "I know, from observation rather than hearsay, exactly one personal thing about Mr...
...Klein's work as door-opener is appreciated by many correspondents...
...That's still true," Lisagor says...
...In his State of the Union address last week, the President also talked a good deal about pollution as one of the major issues of the '70s, but said he's planning several special messages to Congress on that, which he naturally would not reveal tonight...
...I've been covering Nixon since he was Vice President, and over the years I've gotten to know him less and less and less...
...Nixon has already told Congress he'll soon deliver them a special report on foreign affairs...
...It worked wonders...
...Kissinger appears to enjoy his role as faceless spokesman and has no desire to share it...
...Nixon's televised press conferences, they merrily rehearse the nasty questions they're going to throw at him," John Pierson wrote in The Wall Street Journal...
...On some occasions, all 8,000 of the nation's weekly newspapers have received these packages...
...Last year, the President spent as much as two days boning up on these memoranda in advance of a news conference...
...According to Semple, "a private survey conducted by the White House staff estimated that 55,000 telegrams arrived on Capitol Hill after the speech, largely supporting the President...
...Even the infrequency of complaints is construed by some correspondents as evidence that "they don't really give a damn about what we write, so long as they get their message across on the tube...
...the Nixon regime has proven to be as skillful as Johnson's in the arts of secrecy and dissimulation...
...He does not hold "skull sessions," as President Kennedy did, in which aides fired at him a series of expectable questions...
...About 300 newsmen attend the average scheduled White House press conference—281 were in attendance January 30, along with forty members of the White House staff—but the three rows of seats immediately in front of the President and the first two rows on either side of him are reserved for the White House "regulars" and allotted according to a seating chart maintained by Press Secretary Ziegler...
...At three successive news conferences—on September 26, December 8, and January 30—he was asked about American military activity in Laos, and on each occasion he was able to give an unchallenged answer that stood in blatant opposition to documented facts...
...Dwight D. Eisenhower, beset by illnesses and less than enchanted with the press corps, allowed the schedule to slip, but nonetheless managed 200 press conferences in his eight years in office...
...The diminished frequency of Presidential news conferences has, itself, reduced their usefulness...
...Nixon is running a TV campaign for the election of a Republican Congress this year, and his own reelection in 1972, by the shrewd and skillful use of the White House's exclusive access to the networks...
...If he has failed to realize that lofty goal, he has also fallen short of fulfilling some of the more ominous predictions that were made when his job was announced: he has not become an "information czar" for the Administration, single-handedly directing the flow of news...
...An immense amount of staff time goes into preparing the President to meet the press...
...When someone in the Administration refuses to give me information to which I'm entitled, I lodge a complaint with Herb, and three times out of five that solves the problem...
...the Presidential news conference now produces less information for the American people than ever before...
...Johnson was omnipresent to the White House press corps...
...Since the press cannot invariably be relied upon to play this passive role, the President does his own dumping from the television screen...
...It goes back to I960 and the charge that Nixon lost to Kennedy because the press did him in...
...Take tonight, for instance...
...Despite the softballs, the President devotes a lot of time to batting practice...
...Despite their world-weary cynicism, few correspondents are totally impervious to the flattery of being addressed by name on nationwide television by the President of the United States...
...In the early years of his Presidency, particularly, he ate and swam and went to the bathroom with reporters, took them on frantic drives around the LBJ ranch and on exhausting walks around the White House lawn, talked to them aboard Air Force One and often called them into his Oval Office...
...In line with his preference for solitary work, Nixon requests from members of his staff memos containing likely questions and detailed suggested answers...
...If it does nothing else, it certainly enhances their standing with editors back home...
...There's a new sensitivity, a new protectiveness," one told me, and I heard of instances when news stories have been edited to delete passages that might be deemed "unfriendly" to the President...
...Nixon does not detest the thought of looking at newspapers, as President Eisenhower did, but he does not see them as regularly as did President Johnson or President Kennedy, who once complained that he was "reading more but enjoying it less...
...The President, in other words, will be the judge of whether the public "needs more information...
...He dyes his hair...
...It seems to us very clear that Mr...
...Reporters come away with the suspicion that they've done little to inform the people and a lot to make Mr...
...A somewhat different theory was advanced on the morning of the President's January 30 news conference by Robert Pier-point, who broadcast this comment on the CBS Radio "World News Roundup": "The President has developed a rather uncanny knack for scheduling his infrequent news conferences at just about the time there really isn't any expectable news...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, "but the nagging suspicion persists that when you get below the surface, there isn't any substance that they have to give...
...Nixon is an aloof and distant figure who, as his White House aides keep pointing out, values his privacy...
...He replied: "I try to have press conferences when I think there is public interest -—not just a press interest or my interest, but the public interest in having them—and also to use various devices...
...What really happens in the White House— in the whole Government—has less and less to do with what the press is permitted to observe...
...On the evening of January 30, another told me, "Once again we didn't lay a glove on him...
...Louis Post-Dispatch February 1, 1970 ERWIN KNOLL is the Washington editor of The Progressive...
...It goes back to the 1962 press conference when he told the reporters, 'You won't have Nixon to kick around any more.' There's a defensiveness now that just doesn't leave room for searching reporting...
...To a remarkable extent he has succeeded...
...The "regulars" labor under another handicap...
...Even his absurd claim on December 8 that "the Marines alone this year have built over 250,000 churches, pagodas, and temples for the people of Vietnam"—which the White House later retracted as a slip of the tongue—was broadcast to the millions without eliciting a further question from the press...
...As reporters gather for Mr...
...Recounting the preparations for what was to become his celebrated "Checkers" speech, Nixon wrote: "My only hope to win rested with millions of people I would never meet, sitting in groups of two or three or four in their living rooms, watching and listening to me on television...
...Others suggest the scheduling in advance of occasional news conferences confined to a single topic, to allow uninterrupted development of information in depth...
...Lyndon B. Johnson held thirty-three news conferences in his first year, although the rate was later to decline...
...Nixon look good...
...Nixon has decided to short-circuit them...
...A Presidential press conference was scheduled for that date, but it was postponed to give Mr...
...Thanks to television and to skillful White House timing, the Presidential news conference now has a greater audience than ever before...
...Such views are not unanimously held by members of the White House press corps, but they are reasonably representative...
...Nonetheless, many reporters regard these contacts with Kissinger as valuable—not because they produce hard information (they don't) but because they afford a glimpse at the considerations guiding American policy...
...In interviewing correspondents for this article, I encountered several whose candor increased after they were assured that I would respect their request for anonymity...
...In the latter instance, some correspondents for morning papers were forced to miss first-edition deadlines, and in both cases reporters had to write under deadline pressures that allowed little opportunity for searching analysis or interpretation...
...Under no circumstances, therefore, could I tell the press in advance what I was goirig to say or what my decision would be...
...Like all of Nixon's television appearances, the veto broadcast followed intensive preparations...
...At his eighth news conference six weeks earlier, the President was asked why he met with the press so infrequently...
...The order was rescinded after the press—which had found NSC staff members a productive source of information—learned of it and lodged protests, but the contacts have not been resumed...
...In Deakin's view—and it is widely shared—the questions reporters put to the President at a news conference "are getting softer and softer...
...As for information about the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Russians or the Middle East, Mr...
...They aren't trying to put the President on the spot— they're just jockeying for position on the tube...
...Nixon and his aides, ever image-conscious, now believe the stress on Presidential privacy may have been carried too far...
...According to Herb Klein, Mr...
...Peter Lisagor, the Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Daily News, finds the Nixon Administration "more open in some respects"-—he has obtained access to some members of the Cabinet—"but at the White House itself people are less accessible and, more important, less knowledgeable than in previous Administrations...
...There are signs, in any event, that Mr...
...to act as chief propagandist to the hinterlands press, and to serve as an intermediary between inquiring reporters and tight-lipped officials...
...Nixon that I didn't know after following him around the country in his 1968 campaign...
...Nixon took to the airwaves to defend his veto of the $19.7 billion Labor-HEW appropriations bill...
...Appraisals of the Government information flow in the past year have ranged from a finding by the American Society of Newspaper Editors that "some dents have been made in news barriers at the Federal Government level" to a finding by Ralph Nader's "raiders," after a survey of Government agencies, that the Freedom of Information Act, which supposedly has guaranteed access to non-security information since 1967, "has been regressively forged into a shield against citizen access...
...The veto, of course, was sustained...
...They get few clues, they say, to what the President is really thinking and doing...
...The last-minute release of Presidential texts was a common practice in the Johnson Administration...
...This was the case with the State of the Union message on January 22 and with the Labor-HEW veto speech a few days later...
...Immediately after assuming his White House job, he ordered the thirty members of his National Security Council staff to shun all substantive contacts with reporters...
...The survey also estimated that Congressional mail, which had been running ten to one against the President's position, soon started running five to one in his favor...
...For the first time, newspaper editors, editorial writers, and broadcasters across the country are regularly receiving direct communications from the White House, including Presidential texts and other official documents...
...Is This What Agnew Is Up To...
...The result, he was convinced—and remains convinced— was a "credibility gap" created not by the President but by the press...
...So he would not want to upstage himself on that...
...The real problem, I suspect, is less with the press conference than with the press...
...Different people will have different terms for the Presidential practice of presenting on television a version of the facts quite at variance with that which seeps out in other media, but it must be agreed that Mr...
...The effectiveness of the technique was amply demonstrated on January 26, when Mr...
...You get nothing of substance out of the White House," says James Deak-in, who covers the President for the St...
...Chotiner, Nixon went on to remember in Six Crises, "pointed up hard realities as far as press coverage in general is concerned...
...Kissinger appears to enjoy his role as faceless spokesman and has no desire to share it...
...The reason, Pierson suggested, is the reporters' conviction that "Mr...
...If Mr...
...I welcome the opportunity to have them...
...The White House vigorously denied Osborne's "one personal thing...
...It's another way of getting the simple message across to the silent majority without letting anyone explain that it isn't that simple," one correspondent told me...
...But this is the President who wants to be judged by his deeds, not his words...
...A return to the weekly press conference would be a great help to the American people in judging how their Administration is representing them...
...Nixon's news conference last December 8, one correspondent commented, "We didn't lay a glove on him...
...Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who introduced the White House press conference in its present form, held two meetings a week with reporters before World War II and one a week during the war...
...Agnew did scare the dickens out of people in TV...
...On the night of the big broadcast, therefore, reporters were barred from the studio and given no advance text of the Nixon speech...
...Most of the reporters covering the Nixon White House today regard these few paragraphs from his 1962 book as a remarkably accurate forecast of the techniques that were to be followed in the Nixon Presidential campaign of 1968—and in the Presidency...
...He may be willing to talk about inflation, which he is against, and holding down Federal spending, which he is for...
...Others contend that an important dimension is missing now from White House coverage...
...It has been described as a unique and invaluable American political institution—this nation's counterpart of the question hour in the British House of Commons...
...Anyone who read Joe McGinniss's illuminating book, The Selling of the President 1968, will recall Ailes' memorable description of Nixon as "a funny looking guy [who] looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, 'I want to be President.' I mean this is how he strikes some people...
...Nixon does seem to be making it a practice...
...Almost always, the President can choose to be questioned by a familiar—if not friendly—face...
...This hit-and-run process leaves little room for follow-up, except by sheer happenstance, and lets the President get away with murder of the facts...
...And so I made up my mind that until after this broadcast, my only releases to the press would be for the purpose of building up the audience which would be tuning in...
...The big story now is not the speech itself but the public reaction to it and on that one we can't help but win...
...Sure, you can get to talk to somebody after you gripe to Herb, but you still don't get any information...
...the President and the Press: Eliminating the Middlemen by ERWIN KNOLL Lyndon B. Johnson, who came to regard the press as perhaps the most onerous burden of his ill-starred Presidency, often referred to the White House correspondents as "goddamned middlemen" who intruded needlessly between the President and the public...
...I had a conference in Guam...
...Richard M. Nixon would hold a news conference "every week or two," his Director of Communications announced on January 29, 1969...
...It works," one of them says...
...An open Administration...
...Mr...
...But relations between Pierson and the White House press office were chilled for several weeks, and at least one Presidential aide, apparently offended by the article, refused to talk to Pierson...
...An immense amount of staff time goes into preparing the President to meet the press...
...In recent weeks, the President has personally arranged to get The New York Times a fill-in on the process that went into the making of his November 3 Vietnam speech, and White House Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler gave a similar rundown to the Associated Press on the preparation of the State of the Union address...
...Often they are accompanied by letters from Klein calling attention of editors to the materials "because of their importance...
...Back in the mid-1950s, Lisagor wrote that trying to analyze Nixon was like picking up a wet watermelon seed...
...As you know, I have had conferences in my office...
...Nixon's getting a free ride...
...Nixon has never been pressed at a news conference to explain the contradictions inherent in "Vietnamiza-tion," or to relate how his pre-Pres-idential conviction that "victory" in Vietnam was indispensable became transmuted into today's "quest for peace...
...The three-set television console and the wire service tickers that graced the Oval Office during the Johnson Administration and frequently claimed the President's attention have been moved across the street to the Executive Office Building suite of Herbert G. Klein, who presides over a twelve-man staff in the new post created for him by the President—Director of Communications for the Executive Branch...
...Thanks, too, to television and to skillful White House timing, the Presidential news conference now produces less information for the American people than ever before...
...As propagandist to the hinterlands press, Klein has added a new dimension to Nixon's efforts to eliminate the middlemen in the Washington press corps...
...But Klein says he avoids "any idea of a propaganda job," and simply wants to "set more information out" to opinion-makers who might have missed the full facts...
...It's a production now, a show, for entertainment value...
...In this respect and many others, says Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News, "Nixon is out-Johnsoning Johnson...
...This time I was determined to tell my story directly to the people rather than to funnel it to them through press accounts...
...The time requested by the White House was nine p.m., which—on a Monday evening—allowed the President to fall heir to the large nationwide audience of the "Laugh-In" show...
...The President, James Reston wrote in The New York Times last year, would like the press to serve as "a kind of inanimate transmission belt" that relays to the public "anything he wants to dump on it...
...Reporters temperamentally and traditionally are skeptical, and perhaps justifiably so, whenever the personal honesty of a public official is questioned...
...Nixon during his first year, although Newsweek columnist Stewart Alsop had a chat with the President, and Nicholas Thimmesch of Newsday was granted a session that was confined to a searching exploration of the President's interest in football...
...On January 30 he called by name half of the eighteen reporters who questioned him...
...I determined as the plane took me to Los Angeles that I must do nothing which might reduce the size of that audience...
...Broadcast analyses of Nixon's recent television appearances have been markedly restrained...
...Ziegler was stung by Pierson's article, and complained about it to the President, who laughed it off...
...Nixon a chance to make his case without the unwelcome intrusion of reporters' questions...
...Some believe it keeps them—and the public —from being unduly preoccupied with Presidential trivia...
...Harry S. Truman maintained the one-a-week schedule and held more than 300 news conferences during his Administration...
...The format itself leaves much to be desired—random questioning that jumps abruptly from Vietnam to inflation to racism to politics to the Middle East to Biafra to arms control to Mrs...
...In the traditional—and proper—adversary relationship between the President and press, the ultimate weapon for both sides is the Presidential news conference...
...His briefings tend to be confined to routine releases and announcements, and in reply to questions he rarely ventures beyond what is already public knowledge...
...Going "directly to the people"—preferably by way of a carefully staged television spectacular—has long been a favorite Nixon tactic...
...So the press pitches up a series of softballs and the President knocks each one out of the park...
...The press, Johnson complained, reported what he did not want reported, distorted what it reported in the guise of "interpretation," and ignored what he wanted publicized...
...More is wrong with the press conference, of course, than can be accounted for by the presence of the television cameras...
...The President's speechwriters were mobilized and Roger Ailes, the television producer who directed Nixon's televised campaign shows in 1968, was summoned to the White House for a quick consultation...
...It started long before Agnew," another correspondent said...
...Reflecting the lessons Nixon drew from his 1952 experience with the "Checkers" speech—and contributing to the disgruntlement of White House correspondents—is the recent White House practice of withholding advance texts of Presidential speeches until just before delivery...
...In one important aspect, however, President Nixon has broken sharply with his predecessor's press relations practices...
...We're really kind of an antiquated operation," says a seasoned veteran of the Washington press corps...
...The medium doesn't lend itself to hair shirts and iconoclasts...
...Unfortunately, it is an institution in qualitative and quantitative decline...
...He quoted one correspondent as commenting, "Ron is programmed to do nothing...
...It just makes you wonder: Is that what the Agnew attack on the networks was all about...
...It is hard enough to get information under the best of circumstances, and few reporters enjoy the prospect of dealing constantly with unfriendly sources...
...Nixon is asked about the war in Vietnam, he can answer that he has already announced his troop withdrawal schedule for as far ahead as April...
...When it was over, Nixon's press secretary, Jim Bas-sett, told him: "What the reporters think about the content of the speech is not important now...
...Ziegler is tight with the facts, reporters feel, because his boss wants him that way," Pierson wrote in The Wall Street Journal last December 29...
...At the two Departments that were, after the White House, most directly involved in the creation of President Johnson's "credibility gap"—Defense and State— reporters agree that nothing has really changed...
...They've used the rhetoric about an open Administration to conceal the fact that in most important respects it's at least as closed as Lyndon Johnson's and perhaps much more so...
...Ziegler is well liked by most of the correspondents, but they generally rate his performance on the job as poor...
Vol. 34 • March 1970 • No. 3
