News-Manageme & From the Small Town to the White House
Wicker, Tom
News-Manageme & From the Small Town to the White House by Tom Wicker I: The Sandhill Citizen, The Robesonian, and The Winston-Sdem Journal, Monday was “court day” in Moore County, North...
...On the other hand, suppose for his own political or diplomatic reasons a President would rather not talk about aid to Africa...
...He gave me no chance to follow up, and in any case I was too startled by the brevity of his answer and perhaps not well-enough informed on the matter to have challenged it...
...Mobb’s charges against Taylor Chemical was my first encounter with a so-called “whistle-blower”-one who speaks out against fraud or deception or graft or hazard that might not otherwise be detected...
...On the other hand, Presidents are adept at not recognizing anyone they dislike, desire to punish, or from whom they’ve learned to expect embarrassing or difficult questionswhich is why, for example., the aggressive Clark Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register appeared to some viewers of the last few Nixon news conferences to be about ready to attack Nixon physically...
...President, would you comment, please, on reports that your policy on aid levels, particularly with regard to Africa, may be undergoing study and revision...
...For perhaps an hour, the group would discuss recent developments in the news, imminent prospects, whatever seemed most of public interest at the moment...
...Their press aides spend hours listing every conceivable subject that might be raised by temerarious reporters and devising answers most advantageous to the President...
...A Eig fund drive produced a splendid new library building with the latest audiovisual equipment...
...That place, of course, is on the press itself...
...A quarter of a century later, my lead is graven on my memory: “The long arm of the Federal Bureau of Investigation reached down into Pine Bluff last Tuesday to arrest a long-sought bank robber hiding out in a tourist court...
...When a competitor folded elsewhere in Moore County, Clifton Blue took over its name-the Sandhill Citizen --and second-class mailing permit...
...I threw up the first time I saw the blood flowing around a knife handle sticking out of a man’s stomach, but never again...
...I said I would ask my own questions, and I was never again solicited during that administration...
...He would usually begin such an affair with one or more long and rambling announcements that his press secretary might as easily have made...
...All the world’s grief channels itself toward the newsroom, and no one can hope to cope without some kind of emotional shield...
...Let me just say about these four men: They were serving their country...
...That was the one kind of response we did not then expect from a President of the United States...
...As I say, their work was volunteer...
...The Power Structure Those were mostly good years, full of variety and growth...
...The conclusion was foregone-divorce granted, with a fine crack of the gavel...
...Anything Under the Sun The fact is that presidential news conferences-particularly on televisionare far more nearly instruments by which Presidents manage the news in their favor than by which reporters extract from them information the public might not otherwise get...
...I once was approached by a Kenne d y administration official-not Salinger-and told that if I asked the President about a civil-rights development in the South, I would “get a good answer...
...On one side of me sat Eddie Folliard, the venerable and humorous White House correspondent for The Washington Post: on the other side was Don Irwin, White House reporter for the New York Herald Tribune...
...and when I dragged myself into the Citizen office about noon the next day, I had a visitor-a worn-out looking woman with a ZaSu Pitts voice, but whose once-haggard eyes were blazing, whose fluttering hands were clenched into fists, aiid whose graying hair-I suddenly saw at range closer than that of the witness standwas that of a woman not too many years older than I, who not too long before probably had been considered a peach by the boys in her high-school class...
...On November 6 there had been state and congressional elections in which, after unusually extensive campaigning by Kennedy, the Democrats had done marginally better than expected...
...If the oversized Mollenhoff, long known to Nixon as a relentless questioner, hadn’t roared and leaped around as much as he did, obviously grabbing the attention of the television audience, Nixon could and probably would have simply ignored him...
...So, in a more modest way, was the Sandhill Citizen...
...Farther along the front row, on either side of my central seat, a White House shorthand reporter and correspondents for Time, Newsweek, the three television networks, the two wire services, and several other leading news organizations occupied assigned seats...
...On the other hand, Winston-Salem was not a city to question itself too deeply, and the Journal reflected that quality, too...
...none of them pushed Kennedy significantly further than his opening statement...
...As early as December 1948 Dr...
...Mayor Marshall Kurfees, a colorful character who had surprised the city by winning election several terms back, then surprised it further by being a pretty good mayor, supposedly had been told that he was not to run again by the power structurewhich, in the home city of the R.J...
...A compliant reporter, willing to do a favor for the press secretary in return for some imagined future news break or leak, would be told to ask the President a particular question...
...They involved one party futilely chasing the other with an ax...
...In Aberdeen, as a consequence, he soon got a reputation as something of a zealot, a man who rocked the boat and who had given the town and one of its industries a bad name...
...Kennedy’s newsconference style cast him as the keen young executive of the computer generation, the cool, businesslike manager of the national enterprise-a pacesetter for a generation that believed in living well, looking sharp, and knowing all the answers...
...The rest of the auditorium-its size reduced by half because of screens erected across its middle-was filled with members of the Washington press seated on a first-come, first-served basis...
...On first arrival at the courthouse in the morning, I checked with the register of deeds, the clerk of court, the sheriff, and other officials for suits newly filed, big property transfers, scan d a 1 o u s foreclosures, heinous crimes, and the like...
...After the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled out segregated schools, Winston-Sqlem was one of the first cities in the South to admit a black student to one of its high schools-naturally, the R.J...
...and a number of Times reporters-some volunteers, some Reston had specifically asked for in anticipation of subjects he thought likely to arise...
...Finally he said he had dispatched a team headed by W: Averell Harriman to New Delhi to assess India’s military-assistance needs in its border warfare with Communist China...
...He had not met the press since September 13, more than two months earlier, except for a special news conference on September 26 with business editors, when questions about the economy alone had been allowed...
...I came back with a story that showed my respondents fairly heavily opposed to the new hospital (the organized opposition insisted the old one could be renovated at less expense...
...Taking questions from an audience of editors and publishers, Kennedy once appalled Salinger by first calling on Vermont Royster, then the editor of the anti-Kennedy Wall Street Journal...
...Overby, Vermont Avenue, Southern Pines, aggravated assault, continued to Superior Court”) and sent it back to the Citizen ’s ev er-c 1 a cking linotype machine (in a small shop in the days before offset printing, it was mandatory to keep “the machine” running, both to make the thing pay and to keep the lead pot from “freezing...
...My career in provincial journalismfrom 1949 to 1960-soon impressed on me the rudiments of what became my First Law of Journalism, that a newspaper inevitably reflects the character of its community...
...Actually, my lowest priority was to collect and “write-up” such news as there was-the discovery, for instance of the first beaver dam in anybody’s memory on a local creek...
...News Notes from Upper Yadkin” had more readers, and that only appeared in the mail edition...
...Accurate though my story had been, and based on a public record, it had nevertheless exploited human unhappiness for the amusement or titillation of others...
...Kennedy looked at me-six feet away and slightly beneath his elevated lectern-as if he thought I might be crazy...
...I wrote a book column for the Sunday paper and thought it raised the tone of things...
...The news conference came to an end, as usual, with Memman Smith of United Press International, then the senior White House correspondent, shouting “Thank you, Mr...
...Five of the first seven questions derived directly from the missile crisis...
...Salinger later asked...
...Working late justified sleeping late...
...It would look too much like editorializing‘in the news columns, he told me with his usual apologetic air...
...And if it is true, 20 why did you order this action...
...Among hundreds of clamoring reporters, only a few can be recognized, not necessarily the boldest or most thoughtful...
...But another 22 reporter directly in front of the plant thought he was being recognized and spoke first...
...there weren’t many books in it, but they came later...
...There was no doubt in my mind that if my respondents had favored the hospital, Worth would not long have worried about editorializing in the news columns...
...His first base was the town of Vass, North Carolina...
...We owned our special nighttime world, and disdained all others...
...Seeing that, I saw too that I had not only done her an injury but missed the story I should have written...
...he might possibly force an answer, because any President put in such a position probably would rather make his own case, however weak, than have a possibly hostile member of a House subcommittee leaking his version of events...
...A French reporter, Paul Guihard, and a bystander were killed, in one of the biggest pitched battles ever waged between the American government and a group of its citizens...
...Eyes Blazing On Thursday, putting on my editor’s hat, I wrote a two-column head for my court story and scheduled it for page one, above the foldtop play in the Citizen, as in any other newspaper...
...after Kennedy had answered a final question with the judgment: “I think this is a very climactic period...
...Taking no chances, the White House had recruited two plants on the same question-maybe more, for all I know...
...When we were walking from the East Room along the long corridor to the State Dining Room, my wife almost fainted when Kennedy himself came up beside her, grinning, and took her arm...
...Wireservice repoi-ters and those with immediate newspaper or broadcast deadlines sprinted for the bank of telephones in a corridor outside the State Department auditorium...
...That was Monday...
...One night, long before my city hall assignment, some major development took place in the Korean War...
...But the President had used the handy excuse that he was then campaigning hard for the election of Democrats to Congress...
...but they are often limited in their scope and ambitions...
...The President opened on November 20 with the statement that Khrushchev had agreed further to withdraw all Soviet IL-28 bombers from Cuba...
...After long and solemn deliberations around Reston’s desk on January 15, 1962, I was entrusted with a question for President Kennedy that perhaps ten Times reporters had honed to what we thought was a fine point...
...On October 28, after a period of the greatest world tension since the dawning of the atomic age, Kennedy had been able to announce the Soviets’ agreement to withdrawal of the missiles...
...The Sandhill Citizen was the singlehanded creation of H. Clifton Blue, an unlettered but shrewd Tarheel who began publishing it as The Captain in 1932 on a foot-powered press that could print only two letter-sized pages at a time...
...But Worth had a point...
...Mobbs, it later developed, had hit upon one of the first indications that DDT and other insecticides might be harmful to human beings...
...But no new candidate-only a lot of possibles-emerged...
...Clearly, he wag not going to be drawn beyond his carefully...
...Bill Hoyt, a wise and gentle man with a good business brain, was the publisher of the Journal and the Sentinel...
...I did attack a pothole on a downtown street once, but after that Clif took to calling Preston Blue (a distant relation of Clif‘s, as all Blues in that area were), on Thursday night to ask, “Did Tom write anything controversial this week...
...When the power structure proposed a bond issue for a new hospital, the Journal explored the plan thoroughly, reporting its flaws as well as its advantages, but supported the proposal editorially...
...More important, on October 22, Kennedy had informed a startled American people of the installation of offensive missile sites by the Soviet Union in Cuba...
...I began to realize then that the rigid 16 standards of the Journal and the high quality of our staff in those years hadn’t happened by accident...
...I saw my movies and did my reading in the afternoon...
...Afghanistanism Close proximity to his or her readers can sometimes impose a degree of humility on young reportersnot easy, when youth has a forum...
...that set out, he said, “the position of the government on the matter...
...and when I got off in the small hours, the empty city belonged to me and my few colleagues of the late trick...
...Usually less than 25 questions can be asked and answered in a 30-minute session...
...He had described his part of the bargain not as a pledge of any kind to Castro but as assuring “peace in the Caribbean” -but only, of course, if Castro stayed on his good behavior...
...Just six weeks before, on the night of September 30, 1962, 1 7 days after his last news conference, Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had used federal marshals and 20,000 federal troops to force the registration of James MLredith, a black, at the previously segregated University of Mississippi...
...In contrast, of the other Presidents I frequently saw at news conferences, Eisenhower conveyed the impression of calm, fatherly competence, Main Street common sense, and soldier’s steel...
...With our wives, we thought nothing of beginning a bridge game at 3:OO a.m...
...The Journal supported that decision...
...And, indeed, Kennedy rattled off a “good answer” -very good for him...
...Most reporters considered the delay deliberate on his part, both to avoid the possibility of some diplomatic provocation to Moscow and so that Kennedy could take the most political advantage of continuing developments in Cuba, the Soviet Union, and the United States...
...and I have never again felt so set apart from workaday mortals or so dominant in my own environment...
...So no one asked Kennedy, for ex ample : “Mr...
...They also tend to be part of, or at least cooperative with, the community power structure...
...so does the skill in phrasemaking and turning questions to his own advantage without which he could not have been elected President...
...So as soon as he recognized me later that day, I arose-feeling the cameras aim flatteringly at me-and demanded in my sternest voice: “Mr...
...Any question of even remote relevance to his activities will evoke an answer carefully planned and rehearsed to serve the President’s purposes to the greatest extent possible...
...I had made the woman in my office something less than what she was-a human being possessed, despite her misfortunes, of real dignity...
...What type will you use when the war’s over...
...After my apprenticeship on the Sandhill Citizen, for example, I moved about 50 miles east to become a general reporter, later the telegraph editor, of the afternoon daily Robesonian (circulation about 7,000), published in Lumberton, Robeson County, North Carolina...
...I was admiring this display between editions when Bill Hoyt came in on some late errand and looked over my shoulder...
...Violence, crime, accidents, acts of God, death, corruption, fate-all these are the stock in trade of the newsroom (no news in good news and vice versa), and 1 have known few newspaper people who didn’t develop either calloused attitudes or a sort of protective armor...
...From the news conference forum, the President had forcefully taken the initiative against his critics, waiting until he could use the relatively unimportant withdrawal of the IL-28s to cast the Caribbean agreement in his own terms asimplicitlyan American triumph for which he had had to give up little in return...
...His interest had been piqued by the death from unexplained convulsions of a three-year-old Aberdeen girl...
...Rigid Standards “Terrific,” he said, pointing at my cherished banner...
...01978 Tom Wicke conditioning...
...One divorce case-that of a white couple-had a particular impact on me, although I scarcely recall its details...
...The rest of us began drifting out, talking over what had been said, what “the lead” was...
...many of them are bankers, industrialists, heavy advertisers, country club members, and golfing partners with those who own and manage the newsIt s hard to be independent, much less “crusading,” in such circumstances...
...This is one of the besetting sins of j our n a 1 ism -sensationalism at the expense of the dignity and truth of the common human experience...
...President, is it true that the State Department has informed the appropriations subcommittee in the House that no further aid beyond what’s in the pipeline should go to Uganda...
...Only one question was asked, in fact, about the mission to India, and only one about the just-completed national elections...
...In 10 1949 I doubt if I even tried...
...Questioning began, predictably, with Cuba and even more expectably on what Frank Cormier of the Associated Press called Kennedy’s “noinvasion pledge...
...No minutes of our planning meetings were kept, and I don’t remember if we actually listed a question about the Mississip i incident and element of journalism and modem life-what I call “dai1iness”-intervened...
...without wives, we shoveled a lot of money (for us) around the poker table...
...I’m always terrified,” Neva said...
...Avuncular Denials By the time of my encounter with the outraged divorcee, I was not a complete stranger to controversy...
...Especially in a small city, this kind of off-hours routine can be exhilarating...
...unlike most newspapers in the South at the time, its reporting and editorial comment provided a pillar of common sense and rationality...
...The spectators scattered around the courtroom, the press-another reporter and I-at its privileged table, even occasionally Judge McKeithen, rocked with laughter...
...And, in fact, the remoter the relevance, the better, as a quick answer then displays for the television audience the catholicity of the great man’s knowledge...
...Even his nomadic syntax was familiar and reassuring, like that of a Rotary Club treasurer...
...Moral: in writing about politics, the possibilities matter as much as the supposedly known facts, which often are not facts at all...
...By the time a President steps before the press, there is almost no chance to surprise him or trap him, and none at all to force him to answer what he does not want to answer...
...Not infrequently, a good question is asked so loosely or ineptly as to produce a useless answer, on which a President can then righteously stand, by referring further questioners back to it...
...Just before the bond election, Worth Bacon, the managing editor, sent me out to do a man-in-the-street poll...
...I have never forgotten that questionand I still can’t answer it...
...No matter-they opted for change and compliance, rather than bitterness and resistance...
...But I was too inexperienced to know how to follow up, or even that I should...
...and we dropped much cash on the football parlay sheets to the Greek Boy, our local oddsmaker, a man who avoided the sun as a cat does water...
...So Kennedy had waited until he could announce the Soviets’ withdrawal of the IL-28s before he met the press, and had seized the moment to cushion the announcement that he was lifting the naval quarantine-an act sure to arouse the hawks...
...not even the kind of careful preparation that was then the practice of the Washington bureau of the Times had prevented a signal failure...
...And his treatment in Aberdeen illustrates as well as anything the frequent necessity for whistle-blowers to hide their identitiesto become “anonymous sources” protected by a reporter from the vengeance of their superiors or neighbors or competitors or peers...
...There is almost never any real continuity of subject matter from one reporter to the next, for the human reason that most reporters come q-med with a fixed idea of what they want to ask, and insist on asking it-although the previous answer well may 'have opened a far more useful line of inquiry...
...It was segregated still, and in the summer months sweltered in the harsh dry heat of the North Carolina Sandhills in the days before universal air Tom Wicker is associate editor of The New York Times...
...He leapt to his feet at the proper moment and Kennedy pointed in his direction...
...he asked...
...My own failure to do so gives ironic point to an exchange between Kennedy and my wife at a White House dinner...
...Kennedy laughed out loud...
...I worked at night for the morning Journal-going in for duty at 5:OO p.m., eating “lunch” about 1 1 :00 p.m., getting off at 2:OO a.m...
...It did provide solid news coverage of community affairs, brilliant feature writing and photography, sensible editorial comment, ample national and world news, and a high degree of literacy and accuracy...
...I had conducted it honestly, if unscientifically...
...if the public didn’t come through, the major businesses made up the difference...
...Close at Hand On the other hand, in small cities and towns, where the overwhelming majority of American newspapers are published, circulating to millions more readers than The New York Times or The Washington Post ever reach, newspaper publishers and editors have difficulty looking at their communities objectively and serving them dispassionately...
...Then-turning 180 degrees to another subject-he announced the issuance of an executive order designed to prevent racial discrimination in housing-two full years after he had promised in his 1960 campaign to sign such an order...
...no one doubted it was the withdrawal of the IL-28s and the lifting of the quarantine...
...It was my job that spring to cover the power structure’s search for a new mayor, suitably pliable to work with...
...By the time I came along in 1949 the Citizen was one of three more or less prospering weeklies in Moore County, not counting the Outlook, which catered to rich Yankees wintering in Pinehurst...
...Why’d you call on him first...
...Obviously he had chosen the missile-crisis news conference to “downplay” this long-awaited, controversial announcement...
...That courtroom was rank with the enduring follies and foibles of mankind...
...I happened to be “in the slot” as telegraph editor (no line of work has more pervasive jargon than news), and I ordered out 72-point type (an inch high) for a “banner”-a headline across the top of all eight front-page columns...
...The other questions would be asked as various Times reporters gained recognition...
...to protect workers who were bagging this mixture, the dust from it was blown by a large fan out of the plant-and allowed to go freely into the atmosphere...
...In 1936 Blue moved the Citizen down the road to Aberdeen, which not only boasted U.S...
...There was an active arts center, many lecture and music series, a good symphony orchestra (I got in a season as music critic, cribbing shamelessly frorii\ record jackets...
...But at the news conference that followed I was not surprised to hear the question asked, just as it had been suggested that I ask it...
...There was a business office up front, presided over by a young woman of post-high-school age, who took subscriptions, classifieds, and “personals” over the counter or from the phone, kept the books, and sent out the bills...
...This textile giant not only had a vast new plant on the outskirts of Aberdeen (beyond city taxes) but also one in a neighboring community that had been known as Hemp-until the city fathers gratefully changed its name to Robbins...
...We went to press routinely that night, got the mail copies to the post office in the nick of time, and went off for a few late beers...
...Dean Acheson, the hawkish former Democratic Secretary of State, was making little secret of his belief that Kennedy should have ordered air strikes on the missile sites...
...Before the troops arrived to disperse an unruly white mob and put an end to a rock-throwing, shotgun, and tear-gas battle between the mob and the marshals, more than a third of the 160 marshals were injured, 28 by gunfire...
...On Thursday nights, when the Citizen went to press, I ran the Omaha folder -a neat trick, flipping square sheets of newsprint crackling with static electricity precisely into the thing’s snapping jaws, so that four pages, printed on each side, could be mechanically folded and cut into an eight-page newspaper...
...Wicker,” she said without preamble, “why did you think you had the right to make fun out of me in your paper...
...I kicked myself for weeks, because if I’d thought there was even a possibility that Kurfees would run again, I could have offered him more circulation for an exclusive in the morning Journal...
...The cigarette-cancer connection got short shrift in our newsroom...
...Very Nearly Rah-Rah Winston-Salem was a wealthy city, strongly oriented to business, and its leading families had put down strong cultural and economic roots therethe Reynolds Building was then the tallest in the state...
...It was the first time we had been invited to such an affair and we were naturally excited...
...That my story reported public sentiment, however unrepresentative and uninformed, against a new hospital might indeed 18 have been damaging at the polls to its proponents...
...Reynolds Tobacco Company, Hanes Hosiery, the Wachovia Bank and Goody’s Headache Powder, was some structure...
...And reading some of the more lurid journals, I’ve often thought t h a t sensationalism and gossip columns tend to be techniques employed mostly by big-circulation publications for an anonymous audience...
...What might also have been expected, and probably was in the White House, was that only one question dealt with the hbusing proclamationan act Kennedy had said in his campaign he could effect “with the stroke of a pen” but which, for political reasons, he had not taken during the first two years of his administration...
...The mayor acquiesced tamely enough, some said owing to promises from on high...
...Sometimes, of course, the best-laid plans of mice and men-and reporters can be found to fit both categoriesgo awry...
...And Hoyt had known how to go about it...
...To the plant’s astonishment, the reporter who had mistakenly seized the floor asked exactly the economics question Kennedy had wanted, and, of course, got the planned answer...
...For $37.50 a week, I could even call myself editor...
...Out of this session would come a sort of priority list of questions that the group wanted put to Eisenhower, later Kennedy, with the White House correspondent to ask the most important from his privileged seat...
...I did not fully realize then what I believe now- that objective journalism almost always favors Establishment positions and exists not least to avoid offense to them...
...I have been fortunate to have worked mostly for publishers and editors who sought to avoid that sin-not always successfully...
...But it provided a generous education in human nature, lawyers’ tricks, oratory, and the law itself-in roughly that order...
...Reynolds High School...
...President...
...That not only said something to me about proportion and news values...
...The story plaintively related from the witness stand by the complainant, a w6m-out woman with a ZaSu Pitts voice, haggard eyes, and hair just beginning to go gray, was the human comedy at its most ribald and perverseMoore County transported to Chaucer’s time and The Canterbury Tales...
...in journalism...
...A.C...
...This doesn’t necessarily mean that respectable and useful newspapers can’t be published in small cities and towns...
...That afternoon, I hawked the Citizen’s ad space, probably to no better effect than usual...
...Wally Carroll, by this time the bureau’s news editor...
...It’s true that the style and manners of a President often convey more than they intend-the false preachiness of Lyndon Johnson, the shifty desperation of Richard Nixon under Watergate pressures (and, even earlier, his air of being always under iron and calculated self-control...
...I remember thinking I had not bargained for such awful moments when I had landed my first reporter’s job a few months before...
...No,” he said crisply-not another word-and pointed at someone else for the next question...
...We never had any trouble finding bottled spirits, even with the legal purveyors home asleep...
...All Too Eager If most Presidents easily turn news conferences to their own advantagealthough toward the end, Nixon was in just too much trouble to manage it-reporters sometimes seem all too eager to help them, and not just by accepting planted questions (which few do...
...Later I hastened to the c o u r troom where County Judge Leland McKeithen dispensed evenhanded justice, or something as close to it as anything I’ve seen since...
...I am too,” he said, but even then I knew better...
...The city’s United Fund drive was annually successful...
...News-Manageme & From the Small Town to the White House by Tom Wicker I: The Sandhill Citizen, The Robesonian, and - The Winston-Sdem Journal, Monday was “court day” in Moore County, North Carolina, in 1949, and I regularly spent it at the county seat, Carthage, as correspondent for the Sandhill Citizen, of Aberdeen, North Carolina (population 1,603...
...On investigation, he learned that Taylor was mixing DDT, sulphur, and lindane into a crop-dusting compound...
...he and Salinger knew so much attention would be centered on the dramatic confrontation with Khrushchev that little if any questioning would be devoted to Kennedy’s long delay on the housing order, or its effect-which later proved limited...
...But Hoyt and the owher of the papers, Gordon Gray-one of the Reynolds Tobacco Company heirs and at that time a high official in the Eisenhower administration -wanted a quality newspaper to serve WinstonSalem well...
...and playing until the sun was well up...
...or if someone else asked one of our questions, it could, of course, be passed over for the next subject on the Times’ list...
...Most were able and respected, but only those of us in the assigned seats down front could be all but assured that Kennedy would recognize us-the so-called “regulars,” who represented the major news organizations at the White House...
...Scattered through the crowd of reporters -over whose shoulders peered the ubiquitous television and newsreel cameras-were numerous other New York Times reporters, including James Reston, the Washington bureau chief and by anyone’s measure the most prestigious and respected reporter in Washington...
...They varied widely in their knowledgeif any-of the issue...
...Soft’ With Khrushchev There have been few better examples of a President’s using a news conference to manage the news...
...Yet none of the questions that might have arisen, let alone those that ought to have been asked, had been put forward in the first news conference the President had had since the bloody night of September 30, 51 days earlier...
...One reporter J know saw nothing pernicious in this practice and agreed to ask Kennedy a question on an economics issue...
...Community spirit was very nearly rah-rah...
...and it occurred to him that material in the air from the Taylor plant might have been in some way involved...
...Mr...
...Kennedy's news conference of November 20, 1962, was highly unusual, and an air of tension and excitement pervaded the State Department auditorium as Kennedy strode across the stage to his lectern...
...The Tough Crust We knew the all-night barbecue joints and the best places for breakfast...
...Such stories themselves could be cut, rewritten, buried, or thrown away...
...By the time I applied for a job on the Journal, it was the most widely admired paper in North Carolina, at least among journalists...
...I also picked up in Winston-Salem something of the newspaperman’s tough crust, under which it’s possible -sometimes, anyway-to find shelter from the assaults of the life around you...
...On the other hand, Meredith’s entry into the University of Mississippi, a temple of segregation, was one of the great symbolic triumphs of the civil-rights struggles of the sixties...
...I designed the typographical layout for these ads, usually wrote the copy, and laid out each page, more or less...
...feel like when you see your husband on TV standing up to question the President...
...However that may be, there can be but one place to fix the responsibility for an astonishing failure to question Kennedy about the Mississippi drama...
...By 1951 I was working as a copy editor and weekend telegraph editor in what I thought of as the Big Time-the Winston-Salem (North Carolina) Journal (circulation about 75,000...
...The JournaZ did not often cut against the grain of the power structure, of which it was in fact a part, nor turn over many local rocks to see what might be underneath...
...Elaborate preparation makes error at a news conference unlikely and assures that most of what a President says is only what he wants to say...
...But by November 20, he had not yet met with the press to discvkg any of his actions during the Cuban crisis...
...No doubt a lbt of Americans, however, and not just in the South, thought in 1962 that the administration was moving too far and too fast to force integration...
...The result is that at almost every presidential news conference too many subjects are raised and too little is said about any one of them...
...President, can you say whether the four Americans who died in the Bay of Pigs invasion were employees of the government or the CIA...
...only the most tactically and semantically pointed inquiry is likely to compel him or her into a definite answer, if he or she doesn’t want to give onewhich is usually the case...
...This hardly encouraged me to view the press as a watchdog of liberty and justice...
...My home town was near Aberdeen, my father worked for the familiar Seaboard Air Line, and I was willing to work cheap and counted myself worth every cent Clif Blue could pay me, if not much more...
...I was not long out of the University of North Carolina with an A.B...
...President, are American troops now in combat in Vietnam...
...The Planted Question Another device Johnson and Kennedy used-as no doubt other Presidents have and will-was the planted question...
...I recall no discussion of some important questions that had not been asked that day, nor of the answers to them that might have been given...
...Besides, I left Aberdeen for greener pastures soon after my story appeared...
...Each question would be planned, not only in its substance but for the actual phrasing that would most likely elicit a useful answer...
...Mq’ survey was entirely unscientific, consisting of 25 or 30 people stopped at random on the street-and at that in a section of town where low-income people were most likely to be found shopping...
...Republicans were arguing that in return for the removal of the missiles, Kennedy had given the Castro regime in Cuba “immunity” against invasion, a price they apparently considered too high...
...Local ownership like that of Gordon Gray, in such a city, was bound to result in a newspaper of high quality-which in turn got impressive support from local advertisers...
...No doubt Kennedy was just as happy no one raised the subject...
...If he were making public some appointment to office, he might have the sheepish appointee on hand to be displayed coast-to-coast...
...and it’s altogether likely that even without the missile crisis intervening, the camy Salinger would have kept Kennedy out of the State 26 Department auditorium for a long time after the Ole Miss battle...
...But when I came back to Winston-Salem after a brief stint as Washington correspondent and was assigned the Journal’s best beat-city hall-in 1959, I jumped at the chance, particularly because it was a city election year...
...Nor was I long in perceiving that once a month, without any solicitation, a full-page ad arrived in the mail from the headquarters of Robbins Mills...
...I went to work just as good householders were coming home...
...Similarly, of course, Presidents seldom fail to recognize those they consider friendly or whose known views are favorable...
...The very first news story I ever wrote to earn a living seemed to me to be right out of Ben Hecht...
...worded description: “peace in the Caribbean...
...The little bastard was the only one whose name I knew,’’ Kennedy confessed...
...Royster, short and feisty, fulfilled Salinger’s apprehension with the kind of acerbic question for which he was well known...
...I was then considerably more interested in books than in politics or public affairs, and I still am...
...we regularly dropped by the hospital emergency room and the police station to chat with the few other night people...
...I slept late when everyone else was struggling out of bed to punch the time clock...
...As Times bureau chief through most of the Eisenhower administration and all of Kennedy’s, Reston had mad2 a ritual of An hour or so before each Eisenhower or Kennedy news conference, Reston would call in his White House correspondent...
...The Kennedy brothers-it could be seen in hindsight-had over-estimated the reliability of the Idississippi state police, failed to arm, equip, and organize the marshals adequately, misjudged Governor Ross R. Barnett’s willingness to compromise and had waited too long, allowing the situation in Mississippi to become inflamed before acting forcefully...
...Commercial boosterism is more often the rule, especially since publishers usually have a heavy economic stake in their communities...
...With a young man’s arrqgance, I shouted something about “cowardice” and stalked out of the newsroom-a loser not for the last time in an encounter with objective journalism...
...The President immediately took shelter from that loaded phrase behind his opening statement...
...In the six weeks after the battle at Ole Miss, the onrush of events in a world of omnipresent communications had pushed the battle too far into the past for it to retain significant presence in the minds of journalists preoccupied with the world’s narrow escape from nuclear war and whose attention had been focused on the missile crisis by the President’s opening statement...
...Highway One but two railroads-what was then the Seaboard h r Line, and the Aberdeen & Rockfish, a feeder road to nearby Fort Bragg-and therefore, in the late thirties, a success story just about to happen...
...or later...
...In short, he concluded, “the record of recent weeks shows real progress, and we are hopeful that further progress can be made...
...So it proved...
...In that case, the question-which is of the type reporters call “softballs,” because they are so easy for politicians to knock over the fence-may well have been “planted” by the White House in order to elicit a prepared answer...
...The ads extolled free enterprise and the right to work, but so far as I ever saw, the Citizen did not have to run “puff” copy to qualify for this monthly windfall...
...Not many editors and reporters would be callous or unseeing enough to engage in them if they had to face the victims the next morning over a battered desk in an office not much bigger than a closet...
...To say to a President at a news conference, for example-“Mr...
...Clif Blue himself supplied the foot power...
...I also wrote editorials, but on Clif Blue’s instructions they were mostly about the virtues of cornbread and pot likker, or the pleasing record of the local girls’ basketball team...
...I respected his character and management ability, but I assumed the professiohal skills of the newsroom were out of his line...
...the President then would be sure to recognize that reporter...
...I witnessed court actions involving murders, manslaughters, crimes of property too numerous to define, vagrancies, seductions, desertions, auto offenses of every variety, bitterly disputed wills, breaches of promise and peace, recoveries of damage, alienations of affection, assaults, rapes, batteries, break-ins, reckless endangerments, ad infinitum...
...But Worth himself had asked for the survey...
...and they are seldom controversial and almost never adversarial about important community institutions...
...It seemed natural enough to me in the South of the 1940s that most defendants, and most victims, were black...
...If a reporter, believing the subject nevertheless to be of legitimate public interest, framed the following question-“Mr...
...Presidents have unlimited numbers of experts and staff assistants to brief them on anything under the sun...
...Mobbs had published in the Journal of the American Medical Association an account of how he had subjected rabbits to lindane dust and they had died-showing evidence of tissue change similar to that found in the dead child...
...That was not his fault so much as that of the city he worked in and the tradition of journalism in which he had been trained...
...but when we had a professional readership survey, my column’s score was something like 1.3...
...A Splendid Smell The Citizen was quartered in a one-story cinder-block building on a street connecting U.S...
...Like the woman in my office, the readers are close at hand...
...The next day, armed with copious notes, I turned out a humorous account of the divorce case for my long lead over the agate type that summed up the other court cases (“Lonzo McNair, Star Route, Carthage, failure to observe stop sign, costs of court...
...On the other hand, I never noticed criticism of Robbins Mills creeping into our columns, either...
...the missile crisis dominated the halfhour, and mostly in the favorable terms in which Kennedy had cast it in his opening statement...
...For the next 20 years, Robert Mobbs was one of a small band of American crusaders against insecticides like DDT...
...The names of leading citizens and companies could somehow fail to appear in disagreeable stories...
...later, we would not have been so naive...
...The use in local papers of extensive wire-service copy on state, national, and world stones is a widespread custom irreverently known to newspapermen as “Afghanistanism” (who can check up on or take offense from news of Afghanistan...
...then I laboriously copied down births, deaths, and marriages of note...
...As White House correspondent for The New York Times, I was in a privileged seat in the first row, directly in front of the lectern hung with the presidential seal...
...What’s it...
...What’s more, Whitman had had the foresight to get a pledge from Kurfees that if he did run, he’d break the story in the Sentinel...
...Using the inspired slogan, “Put the Jam on the Lower Shelf where the Little Man Can Reach It,” Kurfees won another term...
...The latter process was of considerable importance, because any skillful politician can evade almost any question...
...he brought in good people-like Wallace Carroll, the executive editor, and Leon Dure before him-and gave them the leeway and support to do good work...
...It was, we learned later, a lie-unless troops are “in combat” only when they fight by companies and battalions and not when they are acting as “advisers” in combat...
...I reserved most of the afternoon for peddling ads-another of my dutiesto the Carthage merchants, in keen competition with the county seat weekly, the Moore County News...
...One with Aberdeen’s downtown business section...
...Twenty years later I know that that single editorial stand by a newspaper I loved persuaded me finally that a man might spend his life honorably and perhaps even usefully in the American press...
...If I had known that, I would have spared a man I liked some unjustifiably harsh words...
...and the White House would have prepared, of course, an answer that was highly useful to the administration, the more so for appearing spontaneous...
...Looking more anxious than usual, Worth finally decided not to run my story...
...Lyndon Johnson, who could dominate any room merely by walking into it, and whose vivid personality and salty speech may have been unique in presidential history-at least since Andrew Jackson-either couldn’t or feared to convey his personal force in television news conferences...
...I I : The NewYorkTimes At 6:OO p.m., November 20, 1962, President John F. Kennedy’s 45th news conference opened in the State Department auditorium...
...As much as ten minutes of a half-hour news conference might be used in this fashion, and if the opening announcements had been of sufficient substance, questions concerning them might require most of the rest of the time...
...A local doctor, Robert F. Mobbs, had volunteered to me that the small Taylor Chemical Company plant (also just outside the town limits) was producing a fallout of dust that was dangerous to workers and families living nearby...
...So a wily reporter might ask the question that way even if he had no such “leak” from the subcommit tee...
...We were expert practitioners at The Robesonian, but in my tenure as telegraph editor, I at least tried to bear down heavily on North Carolina news-especially as I conceived us to be in “competition” primarily with the state capital daily, the News and Observer...
...For a while, as Sunday feature editor, I also was book editor, fleecing gullible New York publishers for innumerable volumes to which the Journal could give but cursory review...
...Biding his time like any good pro, the mayor had waited for the right moment to preempt &he fieldwhich was exactly-what’%itman, an old hgnd at the game, had expected him to do...
...All told, ten of the 17 questioners at the November 20 news conference asked him something about Cuba, Castro, Khmshchev, the missiles, or related circumstances-a show of interest that was only to be expected...
...By that device alone, Johnson often managed to shape more than half of a news conference to his liking...
...Feeling “ostracized,” in 1954 he moved back to his native Massachusetts, where he now practices in Wilmington-and where on June 14, 1972, he got the news that the federal government finally had banned DDT...
...Mobb’s charges, along with the avuncular denials of the plant management...
...This article is from his new book, On Press, to be published in March by The Viking Press...
...I had no real sense, in 1949, of the volatility and importance of the environmental and industrial safety issues, and I incautiously reported Dr...
...And for the first time in my youthful career, I suffered a shattering “beat” by a rival...
...But if the Journal, faithfully reflecting a community run benevolently from the top, could be somewhat less than inquisitive and somewhat more than cooperative on some community affairs, it could and did reflect the best in the community, too...
...The basic reason was that it reflected the character of its community, even though in its limitations as well as in its strengths...
...Already, in both parties, after the first flush of “victory” and relief in the 24 easing of the missile crisis, critics were saying that Kennedy had been too “soft” during the confrontation with Khrushchev...
...That was the carefully stated preface to Kennedy’s own announcement that he was therefore lifting the naval quarantine he had ordered on October 22...
...Gene Whitman, the city hall man for the hated Twin City Sentinel, our afternoon paper, scooped me by a mile on the sensational story that Marshall Kurfees would run again after all...
...The Captain had never had such a permit, for the good reason that its publisher had never had the $100 application fee...
...Other than engaging in mildly lascivious repartee with the counter girl-tame stuff by today’s standards -my job was mainly to sell ads to anyone who’d buy, at 40 cents per column inch, $60 the full page...
...For example, here is how effectively Kennedy once evaded a rather pointed question on a subject then of considerable embarrassment to him: “Q...
...he appeared frequently before congressional and scientific committees and government agencies, mostly to no avail...
...The flight that cost them their lives was a volunteer flight and that while, because of the nature of their work, it has not been a matter of public record, as it might be in the case of soldiers or sailors, I can say that they were serving their country...
...is to hand him, and deferentially at that, a license to filibuster for three minutes, at the end of which probably much that is self-serving but little that is informative will have been said-unless, of course, that particular President has just been waiting for some such opening to announce for political and diplomatic effect that he is curtailing aid to Africa because, say, some African governments have been flouting American interests in the United Nations...
...We could have been putting out a paper full of boiler plate and Afghanistanism with a third of the staff and care, and the balance sheet probably would have looked better at the board meetings...
...In nearly apocalyptic tones, he had announced a naval quarantine against any further military shipments, and demanded that Chairman Khrushchev remove the Soviet missiles already in Cuba...
...Of course, there had been ample time between that night and October 19, when Kennedy had been alerted to the missile crisis, for a news conference at which the events at Ole Miss surely would have been central...
...There was a littered editorial office that I took over from Clif Blue, and the shop was out back-one linotype, one flatbed press, two job presses, one Omaha folder, a mail labeling device that sometimes worked, and a splendid smell of ink and hot lead...
...President, if you had it to do over, would you have handled Governor Barnett differently in the Ole Miss crisis...
...And he cautiously confirmed that if offensive weapons were kept out of Cuba and that island was not used “for the export of aggressive Communist purposes, there will be peace in the Caribbean...
...Kennedy could not entirely evade it, we were sure...
...That action resulted from the decision of community leaders who, whatever their racial views, did not want their cherished city torn apart, and who no doubt hoped to “contain” desegregation at the lowest level of demand from the black community...
...With time out for Korean War service, 1 worked for the Journal through most of the fifties, taking a turn as sports editor, another as Sunday features editor, a year as Washington correspondent, covering city hall for a while, then writing editorials-a copious education in journalism during which I may have learned something about life...
...Marshall Kurfees, rumor had it, had got a little too big for his political britches...
Vol. 9 • January 1978 • No. 11
