Foot-in-Mouth Disease

On one thing, White House correspondents were agreed: under Harry Truman's administration, the presidential press conferences had become a mess. The fumbles, the off-the-cuff, foot-in-mouth answers had made news all right--but of a kind that needlessly and repeatedly embarrassed the U.S., if not its President.

Last week the New York Herald Tribune's Columnist Walter Lippmann braved the wrath of his fellow newsmen by advising Harry Truman to pull in his horns and his feet.

"As now conducted," he wrote, "[presidential press conferences] are as unsatisfactory as they are dangerous. . . . [Truman's] system is bound to produce the results it so frequently does produce: not information and understanding but confusion and consternation throughout the world." The public has to know what the Government is doing, said Lippmann, but "the President cannot supply that information offhand . . . especially when there will always be some more interested in heckling him than in reporting him."

R: Put It in Writing. "The remedy is to make it a rule that on matters of high policy, touching foreign affairs, the armed forces, Government finance, questions should be submitted in writing, and answered when the President has had time to have prepared a considered reply.

"There may be some who will say that Mr. Truman cannot do this without confessing that he is less able to cope with the press than was President Roosevelt. But in fact he is less able. . . . [Besides] Roosevelt's conduct of press conferences became, as time went on, more a form of personal recreation than a means of public education. . . . More and more they degenerated into persiflage by means of which the President, who was nearly always the victor, would win for himself a few more days of freedom from the inquisitiveness of the press."

The only real objection to delayed answers, Lippmann supposed, was that they "would be ghost-written and would, therefore, conceal from the public the quality of the man who is President." Said Lippmann hopefully: "there would remain the whole field of domestic politics and internal policy. ..."

The question was, said Lippmann, whether "the fine flower of a free press can be enjoyed only in these catch-as-catch-can interviews, with their uninformed and uninforming answers to unprepared and unconsidered questions. ..."

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