End of a White House Friendship

The biggest press news in Washington last week was that the "White House gang" -- the little group of reporters whose beat is covering the President -- was hopping mad at Franklin Roosevelt. Most of them felt that the President had played them for suckers and they were no happier when other newsmen rubbed it in.

For eight and a half years they have given him loyalty and admiration interrupted by only a few brief peeves. Long ago most of their editors and publishers began to feel that the President was less than all-knowing, all-wise and beneficent. Other Washington newsmen were conscious of his fallibility. But the White House gang who saw him oftenest usually stood up for him, until last week when they were madder than they had been since the days of the Hoover Administration. No one thing had made them sore. Their anger had built up for some time.

Then came the run-around that the President gave them when he met Churchill. That sharpened their feeling that the President had played them for suckers. Subsequent White House press conferences did not lessen that feeling. More than ever they became aware that he was patronizing them and answering bona fide questions with irritable wisecracks. He no longer took them into his confidence, no longer bothered to explain why he would not talk -- merely shut them off. So they asked Secretary Steve Early to intercede.

The only noticeable result of Steve Early's intercession followed two weekends ago. Speaking to his neighbors at Hyde Park and broadcasting to the world, Franklin Roosevelt intimated that the reason the U.S. press had been scooped on his meeting with Churchill was that he was giving his press boys a "rest" at a hotel in Swampscott "where there was good golf and boating and everything else."

They were there, as their expense accounts showed, but otherwise it was an unkind and entirely unwarranted dig. Perhaps the White House gang would forget it in time, but they were powerfully disillusioned. Last week most of them felt that it was the end of a beautiful friendship. If so, it betokened more than that: the beginning of a new era in White House press relations.

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