Kennedy (56 page)

T
HE GAP BETWEEN
public opinion and the public interest, which had been the theme of
Why England Slept
and
Profiles in Courage
, became a theme of John Kennedy’s campaign, Inaugural and first State of the Union Message in what he regarded as an age of dangerous complacency. He recognized his obligation to “lead, inform, correct and sometimes even ignore constituent opinion, if we are to exercise fully that judgment for which we were elected.” And no problem of the Presidency concerned him more than that of public communication—educating, persuading and mobilizing that opinion through continued use of the political machinery, continued traveling and speaking and, above all, continued attention to the mass media: radio, television and the press.

John Kennedy knew the newspaper profession as few politicians knew it. He had served two brief stints as a working reporter.
¹
He often considered purchasing a newspaper once he left public life. He discussed with a reporter how the low quality of most typography could be improved. He numbered several Washington newsmen among his closest friends. He mingled with them informally and formally, socially and professionally, and enjoyed both joking with them and talking seriously with them, just
as he did with fellow politicians. His wife was a former newspaperwoman for the old Washington
Times Herald
, and his father had passed on to him a flair for public relations and some painful lessons of experience. Many of John Kennedy’s good friends in the journalism fraternity, in fact, had been his father’s harshest critics, and many of his father’s newspaper friends became the President’s harshest critics.

During his long quest for the Presidency, Kennedy had been helped by his unusual accessibility to reporters. He knowingly timed his major campaign releases to meet their
A.M.
and
P.M.
deadlines, sometimes evaluated a speech draft as if he were writing the headlines, and subjected himself to more interviews, press conferences, “backgrounders” and assorted other news gatherings than his opponents in both parties combined. Political reporters were impressed by his candid and never exaggerated review of the potential delegate and electoral count. In the White House Pierre Salinger was superb, but Kennedy was his own best Presidential press secretary. His activities, aims, announcements and family dominated the news, and exclusive interviews with the President, once a rare event in journalism, took place almost daily.

Yet there remained a curious dichotomy in his attitude toward the press. He regarded newsmen as his natural friends and newspapers as his natural enemies. He was more concerned about a news column read by thousands than a newscast viewed by millions. He both assisted and resented the press corps as they dogged his every footstep. He had an inexhaustible capacity to take displeasure from what he read, particularly in the first half of his term, and an equally inexhaustible capacity to keep on reading more than anyone else in Washington. He always expected certain writers and publications to be inconsistent and inaccurate, but was always indignant when they were. While he fortunately grew insensitive to old critics, he remained unfortunately too sensitive to new ones. He could find and fret over one paragraph of criticism deep in ten paragraphs of praise. He dispensed few favors to his journalistic friends, but ardently wooed his journalistic foes. He had an abhorrence of public relations gimmicks, but was always acutely aware of what impression he was making.

Few, if any, Presidents could have been more objective about their own faults or objected more to seeing them in print. Few, if any, Presidents could have been so utterly frank and realistic in their private conversations with reporters and so uncommonly candid in public—but few, on the other hand, could have been so skillful in evading or even misleading the press whenever secrecy was required. Finally, few, if any, Presidents could have been more accessible and less guarded with individual reporters and editors—or more outraged when anyone else “leaked” a story.

If there is a logical inconsistency in these attitudes, it stems from similar inconsistencies in political life. The President knew that the fairness, if not the favoritism, of the reporters covering his campaign had helped to elect him—but he also knew that the overwhelming proportion of editors and publishers had been out to defeat him. He valued the role of the press in calling his shortcomings to his attention—but that did not make him enjoy it any more than any proud man.

This was not simply a matter of “image.” The public and posterity would judge him and his program on the basis of the “news,” and, he felt, more on the basis of the written than the spoken word. He needed to know, therefore, what was being written and how he could make it, if not more favorable, at least more objective and accurate.

At the heart of it all was an attitude he had expressed to me as Senator when complimenting me on my friendships with Massachusetts reporters. “Always remember,” he had added, “that their interests and ours ultimately conflict.” From 1957 through 1960 through 1963, John Kennedy’s tide of favorable publicity, only some of which he stimulated, helped build his popularity. Certainly it irritated his opponents. But gradually the conflict to which he referred, which had nothing to do with partisan loyalties or charges of a “one-party press,” grew clearer to both of us, particularly in the White House:

• As President, in order to promote his program and his re-election, he was required to use the newspapers and other media, and the newsmen resisted and resented the feeling of being used. “He wants us as a cheering squad,” complained one reporter. Indeed he did.

• As President he sought to control the timing of his announcements with a view to obtaining maximum effectiveness. His best interests, even on many nonsecurity matters, often required at least temporary secrecy, either to protect proposals that were still in the discussion stage, and too weak to face public fire, or to give a helpful element of surprise and initiative to his actions. But the best interests of the news media, even on many security matters, required penetration of that secrecy. They had to publish something every day or week, regardless of whether it was speculative, premature or wholly invented.

• As President he preferred to correct his errors before they were exposed—the press preferred to expose them before they could be corrected. “We’re looking for flaws,” was the way one White House reporter summed up his role, “and we’ll find them. There are flaws in anybody.” When the newspapers erred, however, as they sometimes did, Presidential corrections or even press retractions rarely had the impact of the original story.

• As President he wanted as much privacy as possible for his personal family life, but these were subjects on which the press wanted
as much publicity as possible, and his attractive, photogenic family and his own good looks had led to much of his favorable publicity in the pre-Presidential days.

• As President his progress in many areas was often characterized by small, dull or complex steps, but newspaper headlines in the same areas more often dwelt on the simple, the sensational and the controversial. Good news, when printed, would reflect more favorably on a President—but “bad news is news,” he said ruefully, “and good news is not news, so [the American people] get an impression always that the United States is not doing its part.” The press was far more interested in finding out, for example, who in the government or among our allies had disagreed with the President than who had agreed. Criticism and dissent invariably made bigger and better headlines and columns than praise; and two and one-half million honest civil servants were not nearly so newsworthy as one sinner.

• As President, finally, he preferred to decide for himself which were the major issues requiring decision and when, but newspaper stories could blow up minor, premature, past or even nonexistent subjects into issues in the national mind. Kennedy never doubted the accuracy of Oscar Wilde’s observation: “In America the President reigns for four years, but Journalism governs forever.”

All these differences of perspective posed a conflict of interest, and, with a greater degree of tolerance each year, the President philosophically made up his mind to accept it. “I think that they are doing their task, as a critical branch,” he smilingly said of the press one day, “and I am attempting to do mine; and we are going to live together—for a period—and then go our separate ways.”

The President shrugged off many but by no means all critical stories with a favorite phrase: “They have to write something.” Those who wrote in 1961 that he was enamored with power, he noted, were writing in 1962 that he was preoccupied with its limitations. Those who wrote in 1962 that he was not spending his popularity were writing in 1963 that he had taken on too many fights. The reporter who purported to discover “Kennedy’s Grand Strategy” for an article in 1962 wrote another article, in the same magazine one year later, entitled “The Collapse of Kennedy’s Grand Design.”

Moreover, he never lost sight of the invaluable assistance to him of a free and critical press. While Mr. Khrushchev’s “totalitarian system has many advantages as far as being able to move in secret,” he said,

Nor would Kennedy take up Eisenhower’s earlier advice that it is better not to read the newspapers. “I am reading more and enjoying it less,” he told one press conference, parodying a popular slogan. “I talk to myself about it,” he said (and at times he would also talk back to his TV set), “but I don’t plan to issue any general [indictment] of the press.” It is not surprising that Kennedy was more disappointed by unjust errors or abuse in the columns of those newsmen or newspapers he considered fair or friendly than of those he had long since dismissed as hopelessly unfriendly. He rarely saw the latter—although he never gave up trying with some, such as
Time
—and he rarely made comments to them on their stories. With the many newsmen he knew well, however, he felt free to praise stories he liked and to criticize those he disliked. Particularly in his first eighteen months in the White House, his chastisements of newsmen for stories he felt were unfair or inaccurate (chastisements which he often conducted secondhand through directions to his staff, in one of our less pleasant assignments) unfortunately led to charges that he was not only oversensitive to unfavorable stories, which he was, but also attempting to intimidate their authors’ thinking, which he was not. Contrary to reports, there were no threats to secure an offending reporter’s dismissal or deny him access to the White House (though no doubt we talked more freely and frequently to our friends).

The President in time also became more philosophical about a reporter’s role in securing unauthorized information. It takes two to “leak” a secret, and he blamed the premature or unauthorized publication of official information on the source, not the reporter, sometimes even requesting an FBI or informal investigation to find out who in government had violated security regulations.
²
When one high official with close friends in the press was resigning, the President told me he was tempted to tell this man, as he took his farewell, the name of his still undisclosed successor, but the wrong name, simply to see if it turned up in certain columns or newscasts.

He was a good source himself with his candid, private interviews, and he paid little attention to the complaint from opposition papers, who had been more favored in the White House under Eisenhower, that Kennedy was discriminating in favor of his friends. But his general rule was to say comparatively little to a newsman in confidence, even “off the record,” that he could not afford to have published. Occasionally, in fact, he would confide “secrets” to a newsman, in the gravest of tones, with the full knowledge that this was the best way to get them published. Midweek
before his announcement of the Cuban quarantine, when complete secrecy was essential to our security, he, Bob and I marveled aloud one night that not a word had gone to the press from any of the participants in our conferences—“Except,” I added with a straight face, “for your talk with Joe Alsop.” He started to launch into a vehement denial before realizing we were joking, and laughed as heartily as we did.

Occasionally one of his journalistic friends—not Joe Alsop—would take what the President thought was improper advantage of his familiarity with life at the Kennedys’. His refusal to end his long-standing personal ties with these newsmen also caused some resentment among their competitors. But when mistakenly charged with authorizing, encouraging or providing the erroneous information in a Bartlett-Stewart Alsop article on the Cuban missile crisis, the President, unwilling either to repudiate his friends or to cause more damage by specifying where they erred, was equally unwilling to take responsibility for what his friends wrote. “I am responsible for many things under the Constitution,” he said, “but not for what they write. That’s their responsibility and that is the way we will continue it.” He meant that very seriously, he said to me later. “I’ve never told Bartlett what to write, so I can’t start telling him what not to write.”

He could never stay angry at either friends or strangers in the newspaper profession, because both their virtues and their vices were so familiar to him. Like most of his aides, they tried—but not always successfully—to separate fact from fiction and to discount personal prejudices in meeting their professional responsibilities.

Time and again he remarked on how sensitive his journalistic critics were to criticism. One of his favorite examples in the pre-Presidential days involved one of his favorite friends, Charlie Bartlett. “I got another Bartlettism today,” the Senator would remark, referring to the fact that his pal invariably brought him bad news. I had learned during that period to combine bad news with good, or with a word on how to make it good, but Charlie seemed always to have just heard only something gloomy. Finally the Senator told Charlie one day that, in conversation with a group of reporters (wholly fictitious), he had heard them say that Bartlett was regarded in the press gallery as a high-hat ever since he won the Pulitzer Prize. “He absolutely collapsed,” the Senator laughed later. “They all think we should take it, but they’re angry if anyone says a bad word about them.” In 1962, the target of editorial attacks about “too many Kennedys,” he wondered what some of these same newspapers would say if he pointed out publicly the nepotism with which they were run.