PRESIDENTS AND THE PRESS

...The value of official printing was made clear by Duff Green, who, after finally bowing out as Administration editor, reported that he had "bade defiance" to President Jackson, "well knowing that I would, in consequence, lose the printing of Congress and the Departments, then worth $50,000 per annum...

...The other two, who said that they opposed the action, never got past the switchboard...

...It was nonetheless clear that Nixon's fury did not spring from the gubernatorial contest alone...

...It is the responsibility of the media to insist, no matter what the Administration says, on the public's right to know...

...Agnew are misrepresented in the columns of The New York Times, but he has been refusing to be questioned on the record by editors of The Times and most other major newspapers ever since the very beginning of the campaign...

...Nixon had proved before—notably in going through intensive interviews with Earl Mazo of the New York Herald Tribune and Stewart Alsop of the Saturday Evening Post—that he could present himself winningly to searching examination...

...Write or wire whether you think I should stay on the ticket or get off...

...When, on November 3, 1969, Mr...

...Andrew Jackson used the party press so adroitly that one noted historian holds that President Jackson actually ruled the country by means of newspapers, especially the Globe, which was edited by Francis P. Blair...

...When he evaded a question it was done frankly...

...A popular government without popular information is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both...

...He was stunningly effective on radio—those full, confident tones that John Dos Passos called "the patroon voice, the headmaster's admonishing voice, the bedside doctor's voice that spoke to each man and to all of us...

...He established the National Gazette, which immediately became the loudest anti-Federalist voice and the most incisive critic of President Washington...

...On days when there is no news, they will poke around darkened rooms, look under the carpet, or start staring at the west wall and adding two and two in news stories...

...Left to develop its communications policies without the interference of questioning journalists, this Administration reached new heights of ingenuity...

...At the end of the third ballot—but before the totals were announced—it was clear that Lincoln was still three and one-half votes short of the nomination...

...Yet both these concepts, so hallowed in theory, are much dishonored in practice, as a study of how our Presidents, from George Washington to Richard Nixon, have used, misused, and abused the press demonstrates...

...In the end, President Nixon must try to bring himself to remember the meaning of the theory of press freedom...

...And that would be democracy at its best...

...If editors demanded a Presidential story a day, it follows that reporters will be found to satisfy them one way or another...

...Although there were few Fireside Chats, they were memorable events with great public impact: four in 1933, two in 1934, one in 1935, one in 1936...

...Nixon has substituted his own process of communication, one that White House staffers term "going over their heads to the people...

...That and the fact that the correspondents were weary after battling Lyndon Johnson may explain why journalists did so little to expose Mr...

...It was found and turned over to Washington...

...When that sort of thing happens, the White House is in trouble...

...How far Mr...

...His first year, 1969, was the high point, with twelve...

...No," Hagerty replied...

...Nixon had decided that he would not face the reporters, who were gathered downstairs at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles awaiting a concession statement...

...He owed political debts to many a publisher, having used the press from the beginning of his political career...

...You won't have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference...

...Mr...

...It calls for fleshing out a man, highlighting the color and flavor of a personality who is in quest of the nation's highest office, and this is a practice that works to the advantage of any personable candidate...

...In the words of one correspondent, "Kennedy glittered—he positively glittered—up on that platform...

...The center of information was the White House, and there the policy was the precise reverse of censorship...

...President Kennedy was slender, handsome, magnetic, with a quick mind and an articulate tongue...

...An impromptu quickie, with the reporters summoned to the President's desk once every ninety days, and a duly scheduled gathering once a year are, indeed, often worse than nothing...

...Nor does he favor analyses of his statements...

...he was lashing the correspondents for what he considered hostile treatment throughout his career in public life: "And as I leave the press, all I can say is this: For sixteen years, ever since the Hiss case, you've had a lot of fun—a lot of fun—that you've had an opportunity to attack me and I think I've given as good as I've taken...

...It became obvious quite early in this Administration that the President preferred making prepared statements on nationwide television that allowed no questioning...

...They all but ignored him until his victories in the Presidential primaries demanded that he be given the attention due a major candidate...

...Hagerty prevented this by seeing to it that there was rarely a newsless day...

...The veto and a statement from the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy—establishing the office was itself an ominous sign—opposing "taking the taxpayers' money and using it to express controversial points of view which are going to be opposite of the points of view of many citizens," combine to make it likely that public broadcasting will be docile...

...men, I am sorry to find that some one member of this body has been so careless of the secrets of the convention as to drop in the state house a copy of their proceedings, which by accident was picked up and delivered to me this morning...

...The Nixon Administration has developed more fundamental methods of controlling news and opinion: • A snowstorm of subpoenas issued to reporters by the Department of Justice in recent years...

...the President sat in a cushioned rocking chair at the head of two semicircular couches...

...It quickly reached a circulation of 4,000 as a semi-weekly...

...He inherited from Franklin Roosevelt a large public relations apparatus, and doubled its size...

...also those of Indiana and New Jersey...

...the salary, indeed, is very low, being but two hundred and fifty dollars a year...

...The free press was established not for its own ends but to serve the people...

...When the media refuse to be cowed —and cowed they often are—by attacks from the White House, but instead dig out the facts of the Administration's policies and performance, and present them to the people, the people will be able to make informed judgments at the ballot box...

...The executive branch under President Truman had 3,632 employes working in the "Information" and "Editorial" civil service classifications, plus an unknown number cloaked under other titles...

...Two weeks after he became President, twenty-five of the regular White House correspondents went to the office of Press Secretary Pierre Salinger for what had been announced as a routine briefing...

...Nixon said repeatedly during the 1968 campaign: "It's time we once again had an open Administration—open to ideas from the people and open in its communications with the people—an Administration of open doors, open eyes, and open minds...

...Nixon's helpers will go is suggested by an event that occurred after the President sent U.S...

...The great value for Mr...

...Medill coaxed an Ohioan: "If you throw Ohio to Lincoln, Salmon Chase can have anything he wants...

...But this did not mean that President Nixon would communicate through press conferences...

...The powers of the Presidency, especially in the realm of foreign policy, have grown so vast that more than ever before in the nation's history the Chief Executive can determine the lives and fate of Americans, and possibly of mankind everywhere...

...FDR also gained from the contrast with his immediate predecessors, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, both of whom had met the Washington correspondents regularly, but in a stuffy atmosphere, and had culled from questions submitted in writing those they wanted to answer...

...With their livelihood and potentially even their lives at stake, there should be no argument whatever that the people have a sovereign right to know what the President and the Government are doing and planning and thinking...

...Nixon made their work difficult and negated a source of his own strength...

...He is now complaining publicly about how he and Mr...

...See here," he said to Medill, "you boys got me up a peg too high...

...So is the notion that a free press is the best means for getting the truth about their government and its leaders to the people...

...Nixon and his entourage toward the journalists who accompanied them may have symbolized the worst mistake of the campaign...

...By the end of President Eisenhower's first four years, the Civil Service Commission was listing 6,878 "Information and Editorial Employes...

...But in 1958, when a reporter disclosed that eighty per cent of the State Department's mail was opposed to having the United States defend Quemoy and Matsu against the Chinese Communists, Vice President Nixon denounced the official who had released the information...

...He was ideally equipped for the mass conferences staged in the State Department auditorium—an auditorium so large that, to give the impression of a packed house, the television cameras were placed not at the rear but at the halfway point, with the correspondents crowded in between the cameras and the President...

...troops into Cambodia...

...James Madison The concept that democracy is doomed without an informed citizenry is as old as the republic...

...Did that general bomb North Vietnam without authorization, or did he not...

...TR, who both courted and commanded the reporters, was called by one of them "the master press agent of all time...

...Another plus for him was that the intimate atmosphere of small conferences discourages embarrassing questions directed to the host...

...The practice has taken different forms with the changing nature of the press, the addition of radio and then television, and the varying personalities and national objectives of the Presidents...

...It was a curious scene to be played by a political figure who had once admitted that he keeps his true emotions in tight control by wearing a facade in time of stress...

...As the Republican National Convention approached, the Administration decided to stop its attacks on the media, perhaps because everything seemed to be going so well for the Republicans that there was no point in disturbing the status quo...

...As Max Frankel of The New York Times has written, when press conferences are held so seldom "great events and enormous issues are ignored...

...A coordinated attack on the media by Administration officials that only began with Vice President Ag-new's animus...

...Wallace submitted to questions by CBS, but Mr...

...His books include "The Opinionmakers" and "The Adversaries: Politics and the Press...

...Nixon said that there were no American "combat troops" in Laos, Wicker pointed out that this is true only if one considers "combat troops" to be those who fight on the ground: "There are Air Force pilots who drop bombs, and plenty of CIA agents and Army personnel who organize, train, accompany, and support native armies...

...The period from Lincoln's death to the beginning of the Twentieth Century was atomized, with so many centers of press power scattered over the country that no President could hope to master the press for long...

...Two reporters who announced that they wanted to cast votes favorable to the President's action were switched immediately to someone who announced "White House...

...Nixon changed his convictions as easily as he changed his clothes...

...the correspondents sat on the couches, sipping coffee and asking occasional questions to further the rambling flow of President Johnson's conversation...

...It was during the Washington Administration that officialdom developed the most effective method of news management, the party press...

...Federal office-holders who made more than $1,000 a year were expected to subscribe to his Globe...

...Too little has been made of FDR's press conference style, and perhaps too much of his "Fireside Chats...

...With the single exception of 1964, when many publishers could not swallow Barry Goldwater, and the Democratic nominee received more endorsements than the Republican, newspapers have since 1932 consistently endorsed the Republican over the Democrat by a margin of about three papers to one...

...Leo Rosten has described FDR's first conference, in which the correspondents gathered around the President's desk: "His answers were swift, positive, illuminating...

...the President was usually conciliatory...

...He seemed to ignore the carelessness then, but as the meeting was adjourning for the day, he stated grimly: "GentleWilliam L. Rivers, professor of communication at Stanford, has had wide experience as a Washington correspondent, editorial writer, editor, columnist, and radio and television news analyst...

...The President would give information to Robert J. Walker, a special adviser in the Department of the Treasury, and Walker would pass it on to Greeley "for the use or guidance of the Tribune...

...One day, a delegate to the convention mislaid his copy of the proposals...

...satellite was released not from the launching site but from Augusta, Georgia, where President Eisenhower was vacationing...

...The satellite did not orbit...

...Greeley was often critical...

...President Harry Truman also favored the highly personal approach, but with a difference: Reporter: Could you tell us anything about your conference with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury...

...As a New York Times editorial pointed out, the onslaught went far beyond the traditional letting off steam that characterizes official reaction to criticism and is "consciously intended to disparage the press and to undermine public confidence in its fairness and integrity...

...Eisenhower came from White House Press Secretary James Hagerty, who made shrewd decisions about which stories should involve the President...

...And his refusal to debate Mr...

...Later, the itch for a newspaper that would speak for him led Jefferson to woo Freneau by letter again: "The clerkship for foreign languages in my office is vacant...

...These are points that should be pondered by John Ehrlichman, the Presidential assistant who recently complained that the President "doesn't get very good questions at a press conference, frankly...

...How about the Vice Presidency —won't that do...

...Ironically, all this has obscured the way most reporters have treated George McGovern...

...When Horace Greeley made his try for the Presidency, he met such fierce opposition from his fellow journalists that he said later he was sometimes uncertain whether he was running for the Presidency or the penitentiary...

...How long will the era of good feeling last...

...Moreover, the reporting of a Presidential campaign is not limited to fashioning news stories from speech notes...

...He persuaded other party leaders to hold the nominating convention in Chicago in 1860, then took over the pivotal arrangements himself...

...Lincoln listened civilly to several editors who tried to persuade him that their papers should be his official journal...

...Thus, George Washington could proclaim ringingly, "Sir, concealment is a species of misinformation," and yet preside unprotestingly over a Constitutional Convention held in secret...

...It was altogether characteristic of his shrewd approach to shaping opinion through the press...

...Freneau declined the first offer...

...Lamenting the rejection, Jefferson revealed in a letter to James Madison how much favoritism he was ready to bestow on an editor who would echo Jefferson's own views: "I should have given him the perusal of all my letters of foreign intelligence & all foreign newspapers...

...He goes in there for a half hour and gets a lot of flabby and fairly dumb questions and it doesn't really elucidate very much...

...While a member of President Washington's Cabinet, Thomas Jefferson led the opposition to Alexander Hamilton's Federalists, who had already established the Gazette of the United States at the new capital in Philadelphia...

...Nixon stepped down from the platform, he muttered to Klein, "I gave it to those goddam bastards right where they deserved it...

...Moreover, the few editorial endorsements that have already appeared make it clear that publishers will back President Nixon in their customary way, one that led Adlai Stevenson to complain about a "one-party press in a two-party country...

...It was the meanest trick I ever did in my life," Medill confessed later, with satisfaction...

...one-year funding helps to keep public broadcasting in line...

...Then, fed by Federal printing contracts, it became a daily...

...Medill was adamant: "Now it is the Presidency or nothing...

...New York was for Seward...

...Medill met him then, and over the years came to regard him as a great man...

...Eager to develop a rival editorial voice for anti-Federalism, Jefferson tried to enlist Philip Freneau, a talented journalist who had become famous as "the Poet of the Revolution...

...Nixon was harsh about the coverage of the gubernatorial race, beginning with, "Now that all the members of the press are so delighted that I have lost," ending with a plea that the mass media "put one lonely reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate says now and then...

...The contrast was striking...

...During the same period in which he was appealing to the people over the radio exactly eight times, he was reaching them through press conferences with the correspondents 340 times...

...Too many newspapers have defaulted on this responsibility, which may explain why public esteem of the press, as well as of government, has fallen so low...

...Mr...

...Nixon's manipulation of his 1968 campaign...

...Johnson of his spur-of-the-moment press conferences was that he faced only the regular White House correspondents, avoiding questions from the specialists who cover the rest of Washington—specialists who do not have a vested interest in remaining on good terms with the President...

...The effect of forcing a reporter to reveal his sources is to dry them up...

...He was thoroughly at ease...

...In practice, he wants no such thing...

...The reporter seeking to make up for lost time, or having lost the habit of direct and decisive interrogation, winds up lobbing puff balls or pomposities, or both in one pitch...

...It is not just the event that is lapsing, but a whole process of communication and, indeed, government...

...For example, the news of the first successful U.S...

...The sinecure lured Freneau...

...Robert Semple of The New York Times answered, "Probably as long as it has utility...

...As Norman Mailer has remarked about Nixon's triumphant return in 1968, "America is the land which worships the Great Comeback...

...In more than three and a half years as President, he has held only thirty-two conferences, fewer than one a month—and they are becoming more infrequent...

...The kind of press conference President Johnson preferred was apparent from the first...

...Humphrey on television is merely One more incident in a long campaign of packaged broadcasts...

...Mr...

...How Richard Nixon managed this was explained during the campaign by James Reston, one of the few journalists who made clear what was happening: "His television performances are masterpieces of contrived candor...

...When the "Nixon Fund" was disclosed, the climax of his "Checkers speech" appeal over the air waves to stay on the 1952 Republican ticket with General Eisenhower ran: "Let them [the members of the Republican National Committee] decide whether my position on the ticket will help or hurt...

...He was deepest in debt to Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune...

...If he faces no risk of an embarrassing question, then his staff and the vast bureaucracy of the Federal Government need never really bring to him its most embarrassing dossiers of policy or performance...

...Truman: No, it's none of your business...

...Lyndon Johnson, whose political acumen sometimes curbed his ego, knew better than to match himself against the fresh memory of President Kennedy's performances...

...When he stated proudly that the U.S...

...Nixon as well, might also ponder another point Frankel has made about the in-frequency of press conferences: "Without them, a President avoids not only public examination on some difficult issues but even the private briefings by which he prepares himself for the worst...

...It may have been the worst reported campaign in recent history...

...Instead, Press Secretary Herbert Klein was to read the statement while the defeated candidate left the hotel...

...Nixon decided he would avoid them when he was running for President in 1960 against John F. Kennedy...

...Nixon made a new decision...

...If there was no news, he made a little...

...And I am going to ask you to help them decide...

...By avoiding the reporters, Mr...

...Between Pennsylvania and New York were placed the Lincoln delegates from Illinois...

...Medill and the Chicago Tribune were safely for Lincoln throughout his Presidency, but Lincoln had to work for the support of the other powerful publishers...

...There were nine in 1971—compared to an annual average of thirty by other Presidents during the twenty-five years preceding the Nixon Presidency...

...Nixon made a television speech on Vietnam that was followed by full-dress analyses on all three commercial television networks, it is significant that Vice President Agnew's first attack on the news media came ten days later...

...Even as Klein was reading the concession, Nixon pushed his way to the platform, his face working...

...It was a highly informal conference...

...Acutely aware that the correspondents were chiefly responsible for the nickname "Tricky Dick," Mr...

...It sprang from impulse...

...Their relationship dated back to 1854, when Lincoln appeared personally at the office of the Tribune to pay four dollars for a subscription...

...Richard Nixon kept his own feelings about the 1960 campaign restricted to a small circle of friends for two years (although his belief that partisan journalism had cost him the election was reported by Fletcher Knebel in The Minneapolis Tribune...

...Then, the day after he was defeated as the Republican candidate for governor of California in 1962, Nixon's fury burst forth...

...Ohio switched four votes from Seward to Lincoln, and the nomination was in hand...

...When John F. Kennedy took over in 1961, correspondents wandered through the White House offices in such numbers that they created a traffic problem...

...Two events of 1860 marked the formal funeral of the party press...

...At the other end of the hall, so far away that the voices of the Seward orators could scarcely be heard, was placed Pennsylvania (the most important doubtful state...

...Nixon sent tapes of replies made in his carefully prepared broadcasts...

...President Nixon's veto of two-year funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting...

...I must entreat gentlemen to be more careful, lest our transactions get into the News Papers and disturb the public response by premature speculation...

...Marines had built in Vietnam in one year "over 250,000 churches, pagodas, and temples," it was left to New York Times columnist Tom Wicker to report that the actual figures were 117 churches and 251 schools...

...So bitter was the reaction from the nation's campuses that the Administration decided to counter it by inviting the opinions of anyone who wanted to call the White House...

...But this overall conclusion emerges: Every President pays lip-service to the notion that a free press is necessary to inform free people, then tries to see to it that the people are given the information that he would like them to have...

...He was especially sensitive to the criticism of the greatest editor of the day, Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune...

...He showed an impressive understanding of public problems and administrative methods...

...For more than a year—from June 1, 1971, to June 22, 1972—the President held no formally announced conference—the kind that allows correspondents to prepare questions in advance and allows time to arrange radio and television coverage...

...Put it this way: In theory, each President wants a free press...

...When Mr...

...When the debates with Stephen Douglas made Lincoln famous, Medill circulated through Congress a ringing letter endorsing Lincoln for President...

...It followed that the New York delegates were seated at one end of the vast hall, with no state for a neighbor that was not hopelessly for Seward...

...Since his nomination and the Eagleton mess, he has received little that anyone could describe as a good press...

...The effect of that is to make official statements the principal—sometimes exclusive—fount of informa' tion...

...Does that seem too harsh a judgment...

...President Lincoln refused to adopt an Administration organ because he saw that the Washington papers were impotent and because he realized that tying himself to one newspaper would restrict his dealings with others...

...For the next seventeen minutes he alternately frowned and smiled grimly while indulging himself in a monologue so heavy with venom, courage, self-pity, and distortion that Klein was stunned...

...but it also gives so little to do as not to interfere with any other office one may chuse...

...The abrasive attitude of Mr...

...Richard Nixon is certainly not a man, like President Kennedy, to develop an open White House policy for journalists...

...Many who watched him during the early high points of his career, which included, in 1950, a successful campaign for the Senate during which his opponent was smeared as a Communist sympathizer, were unable to forget his tactics and his opportunism...

...Nixon's relationships with much of the Washington press corps were abrasive almost from the beginning...

...the publication of all proclamations & other public notices within my department, & the printing of all laws...

...He pushed his candidate so relentlessly in the Tribune that Lincoln himself was disturbed...

...Nixon's penchant for misstatement and half-truth...

...He seems to be telling everything with an air of reckless sincerity, but nearly always in a controlled situation, with the questioners carefully chosen, the questions solicited from whole states or regions, but carefully screened...

...Modern news management began with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who no doubt had learned much from his cousin Theodore about orchestrating relations with the Washington correspondents...

...Carl Green-berg was the only Times reporter "who wrote every word I said," Nixon charged...

...I've seen him many times come off one of those things and go back in and say, 'Isn't it extraordinary how poor the quality of the questions is?' " Ehrlichman, and Mr...

...Nixon attacked The Los Angeles Times by name...

...No wonder he wanted live television...

...The danger for the process of democratic government when the President's words are not open to adequate challenge is illustrated by Mr...

...Presidential domestic policies also play a decisive role in the life of the nation because the President shares the power to determine whether a man has a job or not, the quality of education a child receives, who gets health care and who does not, the price of homes and the price of bread, and even, in the last analysis, the quality of the water we drink and the air we breathe...

...Then he rejected all offers...

...Medill himself sat with old friends in the Ohio delegation and tried to win them for Lincoln...

...The Army announced the failure...

...He had exact information at his fingertips...

...Russell Baker, the perceptive "Observer" columnist of The New York Times, commented: "Hagerty's enduring contribution to the White House was his demonstration of how to exploit the weakness of the American newsgathering system for the promotion of his boss...

...There is also no record of spontaneous Presidential reaction to the parade of issues, no chance to measure his changes of view or mood, and no chance to remind him of what he said or did a year ago...

...It is the people who suffer when freedom is limited...

...When Mr...

...Humphrey and Mr...

...On the way out, however, Mr...

...Early one morning United Press International (UPI) reporters in New York made four calls to the special White House number that had been established to record the votes for or against...

...Not since FDR had Washington correspondents been given so full a view of the President and the Presidency—they were invited to feel with President Kennedy the crushing responsibility, and to be enveloped in the aura, of the greatest center of leadership in the Western world...

...The Government Printing Office was established, all but destroying the printing-contract patronage that fed so many Washington newspapers— and President-elect Lincoln arrived in the capital...

...At the end, the correspondents applauded spontaneously, for the first time in Presidential history...

...If this is true, no one could have predicted it during his early period in national politics...

...In the first six months of 1972, there were only four...

...A correspondent who had grown wise in the ways of the press secretary then asked whether the White House would release the news if the satellite failed...

...Later, when White House reporters asked where they could learn whether an Army satellite that had been fired that morning had gone into orbit successfully, Hagerty answered, "If it is in orbit, we will have an announcement...

...He distributed all the available spectator seats to Lincoln's supporters, then manipulated the delegate seating so that those who favored William H. Seward could not affect the vote of the undecided...

...There is reason to believe, however, that Mr...

...For a time, the New York publisher had a secret inside line to the White House...

...He was informal, communicative, gay...

...As one of the founders of the Republican Party, born at Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854, and the publisher of its strongest newspaper, Medill was in a unique position to promote Lincoln...

...The value of this policy springs from the fact that a stark view of the Presidency is overwhelming...

...Navy mess attendants served coffee...

...It was carried right up to the last day...

...John F. Kennedy's information policies were complicated—and sometimes contradictory...

...Long-term funding allows a degree of independence...

...Nixon is the most astute news manager in the history of the Presidency...

...Many correspondents agreed with the latter idea and thought, at the same time, that Mr...

...He called the official a saboteur and ridiculed the notion that important issues should be decided "on the basis of what random letters say the people will support in the light of the minimum and often misleading information available to them...

...President Dwight Eisenhower doubled that...

...If Harry Truman was often as forthright as a slap in the face, he was never obtuse about the power of publicity...

...But the real thrust of the publicity under Mr...

...Suddenly they found themselves ushered into the President's office...