Restriction

Last week President Coolidge added a new restriction to correspondents' reports of their semiweekly White House conferences. When, as often happens, questions asked at these conferences are not answered, the fact of their having been asked may no longer be mentioned. An unanswered question must be considered as unasked. Silence equals annihilation.

Correspondents traced the new ruling to last fortnight's flurry over the President's rumored signing, in 1912, of an anti-third term petition directed against Theodore Roosevelt (TIME, May 23). In view of President Coolidge's possible 1928 presidential candidacy, his signing of a No-Third-Term petition (if he did sign one) would indeed have been a "bloody invention" returned to plague the inventor. Seeking official confirmation or denial, most of the Washington correspondents referred to the rumor in their conference questions. When the petition subject was wholly ignored, newspapers reported that the White House had failed to deny the signing. In anti-Administration circles, this failure was exploited as confirmation of the story. Thus embarrassment was not avoided by silence.

Anti-Coolidge correspondents and newspapers vigorously flayed the new conference muzzle. Said the vehemently Democratic New York World:

"These conferences are thus reduced to occasions when the President secretly tells an obedient press what he would like to have printed about himself. . . are now little more than the personal publicity machine of Calvin Coolidge. . . . For a modest and a timid man Mr. Coolidge has a quite extraordinary fondness for the privileges of an autocrat. . . ."

At the White House silence continued concerning the No-Third-Term petition.