Old White House Mood

It was the fall of 1969 and the White House staff had a problem. During one 30-day period, President Nixon had bombarded his aides with 21 separate memos on unfavorable press coverage of his Administration. His demands that subordinates somehow quell offending journalists and generate more pleasing reportage and commentary set off a frantic scramble. In a memo to H.R. Haldeman, Jeb Stuart Magruder complained that "this continual daily attempt to get the media" was "very unfruitful and wasteful of our time." Magruder had a better plan.

Magruder's memo was one of nine White House papers divulged last week by Republican Senator Lowell Weicker, an anti-Administration member of the Watergate committee. His purpose, he said, was to show the depths of the White House disdain for press freedom.

Magruder's contribution certainly did that (though some of the ploys, such as attempts to plant stories expressing the Administration line, are accepted public relations practice). Instead of making "shotgun" responses to news items, Magruder advocated pointing the "rifle" of Government agencies, as he put it, at newsmen's heads. He wanted the Administration to employ "the Antitrust Division [of the Justice Department] to investigate various media relating to antitrust violations." Just the "possible threat of antitrust violations," Magruder added, "would be effective in changing their views." The Internal Revenue Service also struck Magruder as a useful tool for controlling press coverage: "Just a threat of IRS investigation will probably turn their approach."

Raised Eyebrows. Other White House memos from 1969 to 1971 reveal the galvanic effect of critical items on the President's men. In the July 17, 1970, issue of LIFE, Chet Huntley, then about to retire from NBC, was quoted on Nixon: "The shallowness of the man overwhelms me; the fact that he is President frightens me." White House aides were apoplectic. Magruder wrote a memo recommending 18 separate "follow-ups" to the Huntley remark, including the planting of a column on news objectivity, the recruitment of a journalism-school dean to speak on press fairness as a serious problem and the production of a prime-time TV special intending to show how commentators can slant news through raised eyebrows. A memo to Magruder from Haldeman's chief assistant, Lawrence Higby, defined the Administration's interest in the Huntley case as a lever against all TV news broadcasting: "The point behind this whole thing is that we don't care about Huntley--he is going to leave anyway. What we are trying to do is to tear down the institution."

The favored means to that end was intimidation--Government, public or personal. In February 1970, Haldeman observed that the Administration had not sufficiently mobilized the Silent Majority "to pound the magazines and the networks." He advised Magruder: "Concentrate this on the few places that count, which would be NBC, TIME, Newsweek and LIFE, the New York Times and the Washington Post." Special Counsel Charles Colson wrote a swaggering--and probably overstated--memo to Haldeman claiming that TV network chiefs were "damned nervous and scared" during meetings he had held with them: "The harder I pressed them [CBS and NBC] the more accommodating, cordial and almost apologetic they became." Colson wanted to get the FCC to rule, once Republicans had a majority on the commission, that the televising of presidential speeches did not give opposition spokesmen a right to free TV time to reply. Though the White House tactics succeeded for a time in reducing the press' credibility, most of the specific attempts to suppress criticism failed over the long run.

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