by Ted Sorensen
At the heart of it all was an attitude he had expressed to me as Senator when complimenting me on my friendships with Massachusetts reporters. “Always remember,” he had added, “that their interests and ours ultimately conflict.” From 1957 through 1960 through 1963, John Kennedy’s tide of favorable publicity, only some of which he stimulated, helped build his popularity. Certainly it irritated his opponents. But gradually the conflict to which he referred, which had nothing to do with partisan loyalties or charges of a “one-party press,” grew clearer to both of us, particularly in the White House:
• As President, in order to promote his program and his re-election, he was required to use the newspapers and other media, and the newsmen resisted and resented the feeling of being used. “He wants us as a cheering squad,” complained one reporter. Indeed he did.
• As President he sought to control the timing of his announcements with a view to obtaining maximum effectiveness. His best interests, even on many nonsecurity matters, often required at least temporary secrecy, either to protect proposals that were still in the discussion stage, and too weak to face public fire, or to give a helpful element of surprise and initiative to his actions. But the best interests of the news media, even on many security matters, required penetration of that secrecy. They had to publish something every day or week, regardless of whether it was speculative, premature or wholly invented.
• As President he preferred to correct his errors before they were exposed—the press preferred to expose them before they could be corrected. “We’re looking for flaws,” was the way one White House reporter summed up his role, “and we’ll find them. There are flaws in anybody.” When the newspapers erred, however, as they sometimes did, Presidential corrections or even press retractions rarely had the impact of the original story.
• As President he wanted as much privacy as possible for his personal family life, but these were subjects on which the press wanted as much publicity as possible, and his attractive, photogenic family and his own good looks had led to much of his favorable publicity in the pre-Presidential days.
• As President his progress in many areas was often characterized by small, dull or complex steps, but newspaper headlines in the same areas more often dwelt on the simple, the sensational and the controversial. Good news, when printed, would reflect more favorably on a President—but “bad news is news,” he said ruefully, “and good news is not news, so [the American people] get an impression always that the United States is not doing its part.” The press was far more interested in finding out, for example, who in the government or among our allies had disagreed with the President than who had agreed. Criticism and dissent invariably made bigger and better headlines and columns than praise; and two and one-half million honest civil servants were not nearly so newsworthy as one sinner.
• As President, finally, he preferred to decide for himself which were the major issues requiring decision and when, but newspaper stories could blow up minor, premature, past or even nonexistent subjects into issues in the national mind. Kennedy never doubted the accuracy of Oscar Wilde’s observation: “In America the President reigns for four years, but Journalism governs forever.”
All these differences of perspective posed a conflict of interest, and, with a greater degree of tolerance each year, the President philosophically made up his mind to accept it. “I think that they are doing their task, as a critical branch,” he smilingly said of the press one day, “and I am attempting to do mine; and we are going to live together—for a period—and then go our separate ways.”
The President shrugged off many but by no means all critical stories with a favorite phrase: “They have to write something.” Those who wrote in 1961 that he was enamored with power, he noted, were writing in 1962 that he was preoccupied with its limitations. Those who wrote in 1962 that he was not spending his popularity were writing in 1963 that he had taken on too many fights. The reporter who purported to discover “Kennedy’s Grand Strategy” for an article in 1962 wrote another article, in the same magazine one year later, entitled “The Collapse of Kennedy’s Grand Design.”
Moreover, he never lost sight of the invaluable assistance to him of a free and critical press. While Mr. Khrushchev’s “totalitarian system has many advantages as far as being able to move in secret,” he said,
… there is a terrific disadvantage in not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily…. Even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn’t write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn’t any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.
Nor would Kennedy take up Eisenhower’s earlier advice that it is better not to read the newspapers. “I am reading more and enjoying it less,” he told one press conference, parodying a popular slogan. “I talk to myself about it,” he said (and at times he would also talk back to his TV set), “but I don’t plan to issue any general [indictment] of the press.” It is not surprising that Kennedy was more disappointed by unjust errors or abuse in the columns of those newsmen or newspapers he considered fair or friendly than of those he had long since dismissed as hopelessly unfriendly. He rarely saw the latter—although he never gave up trying with some, such as Time—and he rarely made comments to them on their stories. With the many newsmen he knew well, however, he felt free to praise stories he liked and to criticize those he disliked. Particularly in his first eighteen months in the White House, his chastisements of newsmen for stories he felt were unfair or inaccurate (chastisements which he often conducted secondhand through directions to his staff, in one of our less pleasant assignments) unfortunately led to charges that he was not only oversensitive to unfavorable stories, which he was, but also attempting to intimidate their authors’ thinking, which he was not. Contrary to reports, there were no threats to secure an offending reporter’s dismissal or deny him access to the White House (though no doubt we talked more freely and frequently to our friends).
The President in time also became more philosophical about a reporter’s role in securing unauthorized information. It takes two to “leak” a secret, and he blamed the premature or unauthorized publication of official information on the source, not the reporter, sometimes even requesting an FBI or informal investigation to find out who in government had violated security regulations.2 When one high official with close friends in the press was resigning, the President told me he was tempted to tell this man, as he took his farewell, the name of his still undisclosed successor, but the wrong name, simply to see if it turned up in certain columns or newscasts.
He was a good source himself with his candid, private interviews, and he paid little attention to the complaint from opposition papers, who had been more favored in the White House under Eisenhower, that Kennedy was discriminating in favor of his friends. But his general rule was to say comparatively little to a newsman in confidence, even “off the record,” that he could not afford to have published. Occasionally, in fact, he would confide “secrets” to a newsman, in the gravest of tones, with the full knowledge that this was the best way to get them published. Midweek before his announcement of the Cuban quarantine, when complete secrecy was essential to our security, he, Bob and I marveled aloud one night that not a word had gone to the press from any of the participants in our conferences—“Except,” I added with a straight face, “for your talk with Joe Alsop.” He started to launch into a vehement denial before realizing we were joking, and laughed as heartily as we did.
Occasionally one of his journalistic friends—not Joe Alsop—would take what the President thought was improper advantage of his familiarity with life at the Kennedys’. His refusal to end his long-standing personal ties with these newsmen also caused some resentment among their competitors. But when mistakenly charged with authorizing, encouraging or providing the erroneous information in a Bartlett-Stewart Alsop article on the Cuban missile crisis, the President, unwilling either to repudiate his friends or to cause
more damage by specifying where they erred, was equally unwilling to take responsibility for what his friends wrote. “I am responsible for many things under the Constitution,” he said, “but not for what they write. That’s their responsibility and that is the way we will continue it.” He meant that very seriously, he said to me later. “I’ve never told Bartlett what to write, so I can’t start telling him what not to write.”
He could never stay angry at either friends or strangers in the newspaper profession, because both their virtues and their vices were so familiar to him. Like most of his aides, they tried—but not always successfully—to separate fact from fiction and to discount personal prejudices in meeting their professional responsibilities.
Time and again he remarked on how sensitive his journalistic critics were to criticism. One of his favorite examples in the pre-Presidential days involved one of his favorite friends, Charlie Bartlett. “I got another Bartlettism today,” the Senator would remark, referring to the fact that his pal invariably brought him bad news. I had learned during that period to combine bad news with good, or with a word on how to make it good, but Charlie seemed always to have just heard only something gloomy. Finally the Senator told Charlie one day that, in conversation with a group of reporters (wholly fictitious), he had heard them say that Bartlett was regarded in the press gallery as a high-hat ever since he won the Pulitzer Prize. “He absolutely collapsed,” the Senator laughed later. “They all think we should take it, but they’re angry if anyone says a bad word about them.” In 1962, the target of editorial attacks about “too many Kennedys,” he wondered what some of these same newspapers would say if he pointed out publicly the nepotism with which they were run.
His White House and other aides were also directly accessible to the press. In addition we found it necessary, in order to answer the President’s inquiries intelligently, to read a number of newspapers and read them early. JFK—as he persuaded the headline writers to call him, not to imitate FDR but to avoid the youthful “Jack”—read (actually, in about half of these, skimmed) all the Washington newspapers (Post, Star, News), most of the New York newspapers (Times, News, Wall Street Journal, at one time the Herald Tribune and frequently most of the others), the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Globe and Herald, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. When he had time, he read the sports page as well as the front page, social news as well as financial news, and gossip columnists as well as political columnists. He liked the political cartoonists—Herblock, he remarked, was “very gentle” with him—and he enjoyed the humor and “inside dope” columns, at times using privately but never maliciously nicknames he had read in those columns such as “Nose McCone” and “By George McBundy.”
His magazine reading was equally omnivorous, covering at least sixteen periodicals ranging from the New Republic to Sports Illustrated, from The New Yorker to Look. He read several British newspapers and journals as well, and regarded Le Monde in Paris as one of the world’s finest. But he did not read everything. He almost never read U.S. News & World Report, for example, on the grounds that it had little news and less to report. Yet he read Time and Newsweek faithfully, and felt their condensed hindsight often influenced their readers more than daily newspaper stories. He had his disagreements with Newsweek, particularly on the inaccuracies in its political gossip column in the front, but Time was a source of special despair. For, unlike U.S. News & World Report, it was well written. Unlike the Chicago Tribune, it gave an impression of objectivity. And unlike its White House correspondent, Hugh Sidey, unlike its sister publication Life, and unlike what he regarded to be its general pre-1961 attitude toward his efforts, it was in John Kennedy’s opinion consistently slanted, unfair and inaccurate in its treatment of his Presidency, highly readable but highly misleading.
Nothing pleased him more than Time’s embarrassed confession that its story about a Michigan tennis coach being secretly flown to Cape Cod for the Kennedys was wholly wrong; or the magazine’s confirmation of his suspicion that, of two Annigoni portraits, it was Time and not the artist who selected the cover showing an unrecognizable Kennedy with his tie and one eye askew; or the opportunity a press conference question gave him to call a Time article (or the Fortune article from which it was condensed) “the most inaccurate of all the articles that have appeared on Cuba.”3
As a perpetual optimist, however, he continued to believe that fair and friendly stories filed by Sidey—whom the President continually befriended, chastised and sought to enlighten—were being rewritten in a hostile and one-sided fashion without the knowledge of Time chief Henry Luce, an old friend of the Kennedy family. On several occasions he saw Luce to call misleading omissions or conclusions to his attention, and he asked me to have prepared for two of these sessions two documents which he thought were greatly interesting. One, after continuous Time harping on the size of the Budget, was an estimate by the Postmaster General that the various Luce publications paid in postage less than 40 percent of the cost of their mail handling, resulting in a subsidy to Luce publications from the taxpayers of some $20 million a year. The other was a study of Time’s treatment of Eisenhower’s first year as compared with Kennedy’s. The study, several weeks in preparation by an admittedly sympathetic researcher, amassed considerable evidence to show that, by the use of loaded adjectives, clever picture captions and a careful selection of quotations out of context
the two Administrations are put in very different lights…. The Eisenhower Administration was given every benefit of the doubt…in general it was dealt with in only glowing terms and heroic prose—but the Kennedy Administration, in contrast, was nary given a chance and criticism was never spared…. Sympathy is offered to one side, ridicule to the other.
The increasing tendency of the once-respected New York Herald Tribune to adopt a similarly oversimplified and smart-alecky style in place of straight factual reporting led to the President’s public cancellation of the White House subscriptions to that newspaper. When the Herald Tribune, after a series of speculative front-page stories implying Democratic complicity with Billie Sol Estes, then seemed uninterested in covering the costly and possibly corrupt errors exposed in the administration of the National Stockpiles under Eisenhower, the President decided to call attention to this contrast by his dramatic cancellation.
But the Herald Tribune cancellation was a mistake. He liked many of its feature writers (and his wife wanted to smuggle in its fashion column). More importantly, the greater-than-foreseen publicity accorded this act led to the assumption that he wanted to read only friendly words when he actually read hostile writers and newspapers every day. He once told me, for example, that we should all quit reading columnist Arthur Krock on the grounds that his old friend’s attacks were a waste of time to read. But at breakfast the very next morning he asked me about Krock’s latest jab.
The openly Republican editorials of the Herald Tribune, in fact, were regarded by the President as more balanced on most subjects than those of the New York Times, which had endorsed him and most of his policies. He thought the Times one of the most influential newspapers in the nation, less guilty of bias and sensationalism in its news stories than any other publication. He had read it regularly since his days in Choate, which may be one reason why he worried more over its editorials than those of a dozen more widely distributed newspapers combined. But he could not understand how its editors could agree with 90 percent of his program and still write what at times seemed to him 90 percent unfavorable editorials. “I’m convinced,” he said after calling me early one morning about a particularly snide piece, “that they keep in stock a canned editorial on our ‘lack of leadership’ and run it every few weeks with little change.”
The purpose of these calls to me and other associates, which were frequent and stimulated by more than editorials in the Times, was varied. Occasionally he wanted action in response to a criticism or information about its validity. Sometimes he
simply wanted me to list the factual errors in a specific piece or have someone write a letter to the editor. Usually he wanted to share his indignation with a staff member or friend and listen to us join in it. (Once he called Pierre Salinger on a Time issue which Pierre agreed was particularly atrocious, which pleased the President greatly until he learned Pierre was complaining most about Time’s article on Salinger, not Kennedy.) In short, these calls—like the calls to the reporters, which gradually became rarer—were simply his way of giving vent to the frustrations of “living on the bull’s-eye,” as he described it, and by doing so, he could more easily forget the barbs and get back to work.
MANAGED NEWS
He never tried to use his position to intimidate a reporter’s thinking, to secure his dismissal, to withhold news privileges from opposition papers, to require the publication or suppression of timely stories, to falsify facts deliberately as a means of covering up errors, to blanket as “secret” or “private” any matters that deserved to be known or to shift the blame for his errors to others. He was careful not to change the date or method of economic data releases, such as the monthly unemployment figures, preferring to let both good news and bad news come from the departments at the regularly scheduled times. While he would, on the rarest of occasions, arrange for “planted” questions at a press conference, he preferred that his television and other interviews not be staged in advance.
If these practices, in which he did not engage, are the elements of news management, as I had assumed, then the Kennedy administration stands not guilty of that offense. If, on the other hand, those who are concerned about this label wish to apply it to the following eight practices, as apparently some do, then it is true that at least we tried.