Cold War in Washington

For weeks, the Washington press corps has been sniping at the President from every possible angle. "What is happening," complained the New York Herald Tribune's Roscoe Drummond, "is that Mr. Johnson is in the process of destroying the presidential press conference as Washington correspondents have known it for 32 years." Wrote New York Times Associate Editor James Reston: "He has not yet found time to clarify his foreign policies or the proper forum in which to articulate them, and this is hurting his Administration both at home and abroad." Lamented New York Daily News Columnist Ted Lewis: "The most marked difference between the Johnson Administration and others in our lifetime is the lack of trustworthy news leaks as to what is in the works at the presidential level." On Manhattan's TV Channel 13, Columnist Rowland Evans demanded: "Whose purpose is served by this curious shying away from the press?" Evans' answer: "The only conceivable beneficiary is the President himself."

Memories of J.F.K. Some columnists are not only peppering the President for his wayward press relations; they are also slicing up the heretics in their own camp who have had the temerity to say a kind word for Johnson. "The President was clearly the direct source of descriptions of his irritation with a 'too demanding press' by two syndicated columnists," wrote the New York Times's Arthur Krock, acidly referring to Fellow Columnists William S. White and Marquis Childs. Their words, said Krock, "are words with the bark on, affixed with the brand L.B.J." It was an odd complaint from a man who has had many an exclusive Presidential interview in the past.

Johnson's hapless press secretary, George Reedy, has also been a handy target. In the Washington Post, Columnist George Dixon went so far as to speculate that the "President has Reedy's office bugged and eavesdrops on all news briefings."

Johnson's press troubles have burgeoned until they have become a major news story in themselves. Gone is much of the easy informality of the early days of his Administration when Johnson met and joshed with reporters, invited them and their families to a picnic on the White House lawn. Though he still calls reporters in for occasional off-the-cuff conferences, Johnson's affair with the press as a whole has temporarily soured. Reporters have begun to reminisce nostalgically about the Eisenhower and Kennedy years when press conferences were regularly scheduled well ahead of time and there were no rude surprises, no unventilated rooms with not enough chairs to go around. It would almost seem they have already forgotten how much they grumbled about Ike's scrambled syntax and Kennedy's agility at ducking embarrassing questions.

The memory of Kennedy's skill at projecting the image of a man on top of his job became sharpest after Johnson's latest press conference. Wrote Reston: "Nobody was satisfied--not the diplomats in Washington who wanted to know about Viet Nam and the Atlantic Alliance; not the President himself, who is still trying to get over his recent illness; and not the reporters, most of whom felt Mr. Johnson was imprecise and evasive." New York Herald Tribune Correspondent Douglas Kiker put it bluntly: "It is apparent that press conferences have become both a chore and a bore to the President."

Furious at Leaks. After that reaction, Johnson was not about to rush into an other press conference. Now, in private, he mimics his needlers in the press corps, denounces them as "crybabies," "bellyachers" and worse. He has given up his walking press conferences, he says, because reporters are reluctant to separate the seat of their pants from their chairs.

The President makes no secret of the fact that he is furious at leaks of any kind; because of them, he has postponed appointments, even changed programs. Members of his staff, sworn to silence on pain of presidential wrath, know better than to be seen chatting with a newsman. The press feud has culminated, noted Columnist Joe Alsop, in an "almost hysterical secretiveness which the Johnson Administration has been carrying to extremes quite unimagined in any previous American Government."

The Name of the Game. Yet so petulant have many Washington newsmen become that David Lawrence, no ardent Johnson admirer himself, has taken the trouble to point out that the press has no God-given right to "cross-examine the Chief Executive," and that "it is not the obligation of the President to enlighten the press promptly on every subject of importance." Like all Presidents before him, Johnson makes his own press rules and he is not likely to change them because of criticism. Despite the complaints that Johnson favors select reporters, it remains a fact that almost any reputable journalist can see the President on a few days' notice.

Reporting, not ranting at the President, is the name of the game, wrote Hearst's National Editor Frank Conniff last week. "We happen to think the White House news staffers are perfectly capable of covering their beat, most of them being first-class newspapermen. And if they can't or aren't, it's the fault of the editors who sent them there, not of a President, who really shouldn't be expected to understand the complicated psyche of a newspaperman."

Clearly, there are as many ways for a President to transmit news to the press as there are ways for a reporter to dig out his stories.

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