Reporter Roosevelt

Almost without fail each Tuesday and Friday since March 8, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt has received reporters in his large oval White House office, his Hyde Park study or his Warm Springs cottage. Seldom does anything exciting come of these meetings, for reporters realize that it is not cricket to harry the President of the U. S. with too-pointed questions, and Franklin Roosevelt knows full well how to shut down on such questions with a frown or a laugh. But because the President's responses may not be quoted directly (without his special permission), the secret minutes of those meetings have a certain fascination for the public. Last week the President released a few of the stenographic records, and retaliated on the many reporters who have told the public how he handles the press, by telling how it mishandles him.

Published this week in Liberty are excerpts from President Roosevelt's forthcoming five-volume State papers (TIME, Feb. 21). Reporters, most of whom during the first few years of his regime were wholehearted admirers of him (although they are now more critical), he still thinks of as his friends. He wrote: ". . . In spite of ... editorial opposition, which apparently has been unable to exercise adequate influence upon public opinion in the United States, the great majority of newspaper correspondents who cover the White House are personally friendly to the Administration, and in general approve its objects, most of its methods, and the legislation adopted to accomplish its goal. I know that a number of the newspaper correspondents who write so-called 'unfriendly' articles are not personally opposed to the things they write about."

So that these reporters would not feel piqued by his printing the words in Liberty which they had not been allowed to print, day before Liberty appeared he released the transcripts of 16 press conferences (out of the 337 held in the 1933-37 term), presumably picked as the best expression of Rooseveltian philosophy. Of all those released, the "horse-and-buggy" conference, held three days after NRA was invalidated by the Supreme Court, was most famous:

The President: What is the news?

Q. [A. P.'s] Francis Stephenson: That's what we want.

The President: Have you any questions to ask?

Q.: What did you do yesterday outside of seeing Mr. Richberg?

The President: I saw lots of people. I telephoned to a lot more, and I am continuing to do it.

Q.: Do you care to comment any on the NRA?

The President: Well, Steve, if you insist. That's an awful thing to put up to a fellow at this hour of the morning just out of bed. Suppose we make this background and take some time because it is an awfully big subject to cover, and it is just possible that one or two of you may not have read the whole 28 or 29 pages of the Supreme Court decision.

[Here followed an unusual 6,000-word Presidential elegy on death of the NRA.]

. . . You see the implications of the decision. That is why I say it is one of the most important decisions ever rendered in this country. And the issue is not going to be a partisan issue for a minute. The issue is going to be whether we go one way or the other. Don't call it right or left; that is just first-year high school language, just about. It is not right or left--it is a question for national decision on a very important problem of Government. We are the only nation in the world that has not solved that problem. We thought we were solving it, and now it has been thrown right straight in our faces. We have been relegated to the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce.

Q. Mr. Stephenson: Can we use the direct quotation on that horse-and-buggy stage?

The President: I think so.

Secretary Early: Just the phrase.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.