Kennedy (57 page)

His White House and other aides were also directly accessible to the press. In addition we found it necessary, in order to answer the President’s inquiries intelligently, to read a number of newspapers and
read them early. JFK—as he persuaded the headline writers to call him, not to imitate FDR but to avoid the youthful “Jack”—read (actually, in about half of these, skimmed) all the Washington newspapers
(Post, Star, News)
, most of the New York newspapers
(Times, News, Wall Street Journal
, at one time the
Herald Tribune
and frequently most of the others), the Baltimore
Sun
, the Boston
Globe
and
Herald
, the Miami
Herald
, the Chicago
Sun-Times
, the Chicago
Tribune
, the Philadelphia
Inquirer
and the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch.
When he had time, he read the sports page as well as the front page, social news as well as financial news, and gossip columnists as well as political columnists. He liked the political cartoonists—Herblock, he remarked, was “very gentle” with him—and he enjoyed the humor and “inside dope” columns, at times using privately but never maliciously nicknames he had read in those columns such as “Nose McCone” and “By George McBundy.”

His magazine reading was equally omnivorous, covering at least sixteen periodicals ranging from the
New Republic
to
Sports Illustrated
, from
The New Yorker
to
Look.
He read several British newspapers and journals as well, and regarded
Le Monde
in Paris as one of the world’s finest. But he did not read everything. He almost never read
U.S. News & World Report
, for example, on the grounds that it had little news and less to report. Yet he read
Time
and
Newsweek
faithfully, and felt their condensed hindsight often influenced their readers more than daily newspaper stories. He had his disagreements with
Newsweek
, particularly on the inaccuracies in its political gossip column in the front, but
Time
was a source of special despair. For, unlike
U.S. News & World Report
, it was well written. Unlike the Chicago
Tribune
, it gave an impression of objectivity. And unlike its White House correspondent, Hugh Sidey, unlike its sister publication
Life
, and unlike what he regarded to be its general pre-1961 attitude toward his efforts, it was in John Kennedy’s opinion consistently slanted, unfair and inaccurate in its treatment of his Presidency, highly readable but highly misleading.

Nothing pleased him more than
Time’s
embarrassed confession that its story about a Michigan tennis coach being secretly flown to Cape Cod for the Kennedys was wholly wrong; or the magazine’s confirmation of his suspicion that, of two Annigoni portraits, it was
Time
and not the artist who selected the cover showing an unrecognizable Kennedy with his tie and one eye askew; or the opportunity a press conference question gave him to call a
Time
article (or the
Fortune
article from which it was condensed) “the most inaccurate of all the articles that have appeared on Cuba.”
³

As a perpetual optimist, however, he continued to believe that fair and friendly stories filed by Sidey—whom the President continually befriended, chastised and sought to enlighten—were being rewritten in a hostile and one-sided fashion without the knowledge of
Time
chief Henry Luce, an old friend of the Kennedy family. On several occasions he saw Luce to call misleading omissions or conclusions to his attention, and he asked me to have prepared for two of these sessions two documents which he thought were greatly interesting. One, after continuous
Time
harping on the size of the Budget, was an estimate by the Postmaster General that the various Luce publications paid in postage less than 40 percent of the cost of their mail handling, resulting in a subsidy to Luce publications from the taxpayers of some $20 million a year. The other was a study of
Time’s
treatment of Eisenhower’s first year as compared with Kennedy’s. The study, several weeks in preparation by an admittedly sympathetic researcher, amassed considerable evidence to show that, by the use of loaded adjectives, clever picture captions and a careful selection of quotations out of context

The increasing tendency of the once-respected New York
Herald Tribune
to adopt a similarly oversimplified and smart-alecky style in place of straight factual reporting led to the President’s public cancellation of the White House subscriptions to that newspaper. When the
Herald Tribune
, after a series of speculative front-page stories implying Democratic complicity with Billie Sol Estes, then seemed uninterested in covering the costly and possibly corrupt errors exposed in the administration of the National Stockpiles under Eisenhower, the President decided to call attention to this contrast by his dramatic cancellation.

But the
Herald Tribune
cancellation was a mistake. He liked many of its feature writers (and his wife wanted to smuggle in its fashion column). More importantly, the greater-than-foreseen publicity accorded this act led to the assumption that he wanted to read only friendly words when he actually read hostile writers and newspapers every day. He once told me, for example, that we should all quit reading columnist Arthur Krock on the grounds that his old friend’s attacks were a waste of time to read. But at breakfast the very next morning he asked me about Krock’s latest jab.

The openly Republican editorials of the
Herald Tribune
, in fact, were
regarded by the President as more balanced on most subjects than those of the
New York Times
, which had endorsed him and most of his policies. He thought the
Times
one of the most influential newspapers in the nation, less guilty of bias and sensationalism in its news stories than any other publication. He had read it regularly since his days in Choate, which may be one reason why he worried more over its editorials than those of a dozen more widely distributed newspapers combined. But he could not understand how its editors could agree with 90 percent of his program and still write what at times seemed to him 90 percent unfavorable editorials. “I’m convinced,” he said after calling me early one morning about a particularly snide piece, “that they keep in stock a canned editorial on our ‘lack of leadership’ and run it every few weeks with little change.”

The purpose of these calls to me and other associates, which were frequent and stimulated by more than editorials in the Times, was varied. Occasionally he wanted action in response to a criticism or information about its validity. Sometimes he simply wanted me to list the factual errors in a specific piece or have someone write a letter to the editor. Usually he wanted to share his indignation with a staff member or friend and listen to us join in it. (Once he called Pierre Salinger on a
Time
issue which Pierre agreed was particularly atrocious, which pleased the President greatly until he learned Pierre was complaining most about
Time’s
article on Salinger, not Kennedy.) In short, these calls—like the calls to the reporters, which gradually became rarer—were simply his way of giving vent to the frustrations of “living on the bull’s-eye,” as he described it, and by doing so, he could more easily forget the barbs and get back to work.

He never tried to use his position to intimidate a reporter’s thinking, to secure his dismissal, to withhold news privileges from opposition papers, to require the publication or suppression of timely stories, to falsify facts deliberately as a means of covering up errors, to blanket as “secret” or “private” any matters that deserved to be known or to shift the blame for his errors to others. He was careful not to change the date or method of economic data releases, such as the monthly unemployment figures, preferring to let both good news and bad news come from the departments at the regularly scheduled times. While he would, on the rarest of occasions, arrange for “planted” questions at a press conference, he preferred that his television and other interviews not be staged in advance.

If these practices, in which he did
not
engage, are the elements
of news management, as I had assumed, then the Kennedy administration stands not guilty of that offense. If, on the other hand, those who are concerned about this label wish to apply it to the following eight practices, as apparently some do, then it is true that at least we tried.

1. It is true that Kennedy believed that the government, as distinguished from the nation, should speak with one voice; and that he not only insisted on clearing speeches but on particularly sensitive matters—after the steel and Cuban missile crises, for example—requested (in vain) that all participants refer reporters’ inquiries to the White House.

2. It is true that he sought out not only the company but the counsel of newsmen, as individuals and in groups, both reporters and their bosses, dispensing as many informal views in private—both for the record and off the record—as he gave formal statements in public. He did not see how his accessibility to so many reporters could be classified by Arthur Krock as being more “cynical” than Roosevelt’s or Truman’s, who gave exclusive interviews only to Arthur Krock. He took pains to address all the Washington press banquets—where he was often at his funniest off the record—and he broke all precedents in his attentions to editors and reporters in the White House. But he was seldom indignant if one day’s guest was the next day’s critic. Some of his newspaper guests at luncheons or in his office did in fact change their views because they found him more moderate than they had assumed and both articulate and reasonable in explaining his burdens.

3. It is true that he informed his friends in the press corps of stories they had written which he liked and stories which he disliked, through phone calls, notes and staff relays. As a Senator he had gone even further, writing a letter of thanks in response to every friendly editorial-and answering many of the critical ones. A Portland, Maine, editor told me his publisher had suggested to him when he was hired, “Any time you think no one in Washington is reading you, put in a good word about Senator Kennedy, and you’ll get a letter the next week.”

4. It is true that he believed the press had responsibilities as well as rights—including the responsibility to get the facts straight, to consider the national interest and to save their bias for the editorial columns—and he did not hesitate to remind those who he thought had failed to meet their responsibilities.

5. It is true that he sought to get his story across to the public, to emphasize his accomplishments instead of his setbacks, to clarify and justify his actions, to stress good news to offset the bad and to time his announcements for maximum effect.

6. It is true that he permitted photographers and cameramen to intrude
into his office and home, with an eye on both current publicity and future history—but never at the cost of his essential dignity and privacy. (“My predecessor did not object, as I do,” he told a dinner of publishers, “to pictures of one’s golfing skill in action. But neither, on the other hand, did he ever bean a Secret Service man.”) He gave up trying to keep reporters away from his church, although he never specified in advance which Mass he would attend. As a Senator he had been far more sensitive, and as a result more secretive, on stories about his money and health, until he decided secrecy was causing stories far worse than the truth. He had also been far more sensitive about stories on his sister Rosemary, until the whole family decided that a more matter-of-fact attitude better served the fight against mental retardation.

7. It is true that he permitted full press coverage of all U.S. space shots, despite the accompanying chaos and the notoriety given to failures. “In a free society,” he said,

8. Finally, it is true that he sought to prevent the publication of information harmful to the security of the United States and, in a few instances, requested newspapers to hold off printing stories their reporters had uncovered lest premature disclosure upset careful planning.

But it was by no means an administration zealous to suppress information. Both Kennedy and Salinger expended considerable effort in persuading the departments to use their “Top Secret” and “Executive Privilege” stamps less frequently. It was thus unfair and unfortunate that much of the so-called “news management” controversy stemmed from two incidents incorrectly interpreted as proof of the administration’s devotion to secrecy.

After the Bay of Pigs, the President, in an address to the nation’s publishers, asked them to “recognize the nature of our country’s peril…which knows no precedent in history,” to consider whether “the interest of the national security” should be weighed as well as news value, and to recognize that