Salinger v. the Press

With the resigned air of a man who has no defense but his cigar, Presidential Press Secretary Pierre Salinger puffed into Washington's Statler Hilton Hotel last week and faced a panel of critics from the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Subject for discussion: President Kennedy's press conference.

The sniping began almost before Salinger sat down. ''The presidential news conference today," said Peter Lisagor, Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Daily News, "is disorderly, disorganized, and hard on the lower back. With the television monsters all around, the reporters have become little more than props. One of our colleagues has compared the performance to making love in Carnegie Hall."

When Accuser Lisagor paused for breath, Max Freedman, capital correspondent for England's Manchester Guardian, tired from another flank. The conference format, said Freedman suavely, is rich in ''entrenched blunders," but thanks to Kennedy's rhetorical skill, "the structure of the English sentence is no longer left as a dishonored casualty." Freedman generously split the blame for the conference format's failure between the reportorial inquisitors--"the only class appointed without an examination to conduct cross-examination"--and President Kennedy, who is compelled to endure "the ultimate cruelty of thinking aloud under pressure."

Salinger maintained a stoic silence; the attacks were no more, and certainly no less, than the presidential press secretary had been handling all week. No sooner had the A.S.N.E. opened its annual convention than Salinger was served with a report from Eugene S. Pulliam, managing editor of the Indianapolis News and chairman of the society's Freedom of Information Committee. The report charged the President with reneging on a campaign promise to keep the public informed. "President Kennedy," noted Pulliam, "was on record in writing as believing in freedom of information. To date, neither he nor his Administration has completely lived up to his promise." Observed Pulliam: "We honestly feel that much information is being withheld, not for security reasons, but to protect individual mistakes."

Pulliam seemed mollified by Salinger's explanation, e.g., "The President has stated on several occasions that only information affecting the national security will be withheld. He . . . would welcome reports of any violations of that policy." But what the A.S.N.E. panelists got was limping generality. "We live in a different world." Salinger told them--a world in which the accredited presidential-press-conference contingent has swollen from 200 in Franklin D. Roosevelt's time to 1,000 today. Furthermore, said Salinger coldly, despite complaints, television is here to stay.

At week's end, the presidential press corps caught some lively fire themselves--and from an authoritative source. "You get some of the most silly, trivial questions at a presidential press conference," former Presidential Press Secretary James C. Hagerty told a group of Air Force officers in Manhattan. As he reminisced about his service in Washington, the American Broadcasting Company's new vice president for news recalled that "President Eisenhower went for seven straight weeks before receiving a question on Suez"--at a time when the 1956 Canal crisis was making headlines every week. What is more, said Hagerty, reporters are wrong in thinking that the conference belongs to them: "It belongs to the President. He can hold it in Madison Square Garden or a telephone booth." Added Pierre Salinger's predecessor: "Freedom of the press is a two-way street. I wish the American press had a little more responsibility to the American Government. All too often, our country is wrong unless proven right."

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