Advantage: Mr. President

Last week's hour-long "Conversation with the President" over nationwide network television was a public relations triumph for Richard Nixon. The President was pleased with the result--and little wonder. The "conversation" format gives him a number of built-in advantages, enabling him to get to the public without being badly scarred by his questioners. Instead of an interview, it is a chance to present presidential views to an audience of 55 million.

To be sure, the "conversation" provided some news and a few insights: renewed emphasis on welfare reform, predictions of an expansionary budget, a candid admission that rerunning the San Jose "hostility" tape on Election Eve was a "mistake" (see THE NATION). But follow-up questions were few, and the four questioners--NBC's John Chancellor, CBS's Eric Sevareid, ABC's Howard K. Smith and Nancy Dickerson of Public Broadcasting--failed, for example, to pin down the President on how he planned to achieve economic expansion without inflation.

Give and Take. Both the medium and the format impose limitations. The "conversation" label implies give-and-take among equals, an obvious impossibility in this case. "A quick-minded President," admits Sevareid, "is pretty well in the driver's seat during these transactions, no matter how they're arranged. He can give about as much as he wants to give, and take about as much as he wants to take. There is no magical method or question that will get President Nixon to say something he does not want to say."

Time, tradition and television itself are other factors working for the President and against journalists seeking to draw him out. A live, unedited hour is simply too short to accommodate four questioners, each competing for a fair share of the time. Important follow-up questions are often left unasked, and anyone attempting to dominate the hour earns resentment from his colleagues. Discomfiting questions, no matter how well-intentioned, are ruled out by customary courtesy to the President. Besides, no one wants to look as if he were hectoring the Chief of State.

Different Forms. "The Chief of State is like the flag," says ABC's Smith. "You have to be deferential. The head of Government is nothing but a politician, and you can be rough and relentless with him. We combine the two in one person--the President--and suffer all the psychological stresses usual when you adopt two contradictory attitudes." Smith prefers the British system: "You bow and scrape to the monarch, but you raise hell with the Prime Minister."

Televised conferences present much the same problems and, even without cameras, they are too diffuse to permit concentrated questioning along a single line. A press conference is a "setup too easily dominated by the President," according to George Reedy, who served as Lyndon Johnson's press secretary.

Aware of his advantages, Nixon shrewdly sought to depict the program as a confrontation by noting that, if the correspondents pulled any punches, "all our listeners and viewers would say, 'These people are being soft on Nixon.' " He readily agreed to hold another "conversation" in about six months. The Administration has also let it be known that it would not mind having newspaper and magazine correspondents hold such a TV conversation. But when print journalists do not get satisfactory answers to questions, they tend to ask them over again in different forms--some of them tough --until they get answers or understand why there are none. Obviously, this technique would not work within the time limits of TV.

A better solution from the standpoint of both President and press was proposed in a Wall Street Journal editorial last week: "Let three or four [print correspondents] interview the President, embargo the interviews until the transcripts can be released to other correspondents, encourage the Administration to supplement the transcripts if it thinks any distortion may have resulted, and let the public read about it the next morning, or for that matter hear about it on the evening news."

Even this is only a partial answer to the problem of understanding the President. The whole answer must be a combination of approaches: TV "conversations," to convey the feelings and views of the President on his own terms; press conferences, for answers to specific questions; and closed-door interviews with newspaper and magazine reporters, for insights into presidential philosophy and thinking.

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