WHITE HOUSE SYNTAX PROBLEM

Dwight Eisenhower was the first President to allow verbatim quotation of his press conferences, and got an eight-year kidding for his sprawling syntax. Now it turns out that John Kennedy can also forget just where and how a sentence got started. In fact, it is a little hard to guess which President said what:*

1) "In answer to your first question, the reason I am answering it with some question is the 'ties' at the present time, as you know, that East Germans and West Germans negotiate with regard to trade. So we have to decide--and those negotiations may continue and we will have a clearer idea of what form they will take if we get into a negotiation."

2) "At least this was my whole attitude toward disarmament, still is, and this inspection is only one of the fringe subjects--I mean the nuclear tests--the fringe subjects on the whole field of disarmament. So, I think there has been no basic difference, except to this extent: that if we could go so far in setting up these reciprocal intelligence--not intelligence, inspectional--systems, that underneath the so-called threshold we could certainly have a continuation of a moratorium that would permit opportunity for a joint or coordinated study and program for permanent elimination of those tests."

3) "I have not had an official or exhaustive poll made of this thing, but my mail shows that; except for a number of people come in and they have a particular excise tax, but it is always applying to the particular business in which they are engaged. That seems to be a favorite point in the correspondence that comes to me, but I notice this: it's that particular tax, and they want to show how we can keep all the others off the books."

4) "We're talking about $2 billion a year which we are now, I think that we--I'm hopeful that we can use our productive power well in this field. But I think the question of the balance and I think that [the Presidential Assistant] and [the Secretary of Agriculture] in my judgment will be in balance by the time they go before the Congress."

The speaker 1) Kennedy, Nov. 29, 1961 2) Eisenhower, March 30, 1960: 3) Eisenhower, April 9, 1958. 4) Kennedy, Jan. 15, 1962.

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