Cops & Robbers

In Washington, nearly 800 newspapermen fill assignments on the all-important job of telling the U.S.--and the world--what is going on. Are they doing their jobs diligently and well? Last week, in the first William Allen White Foundation lecture at the University of Kansas, able, personable James Reston, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington reporter of the New York Times, said flatly that they are not. The Administration, said he, is deliberately withholding information which the public is entitled to, and the capital correspondents are not working hard enough to dredge it up.

Said Reston: "An understanding between reporters and [Washington] officials on the obligations and rights of the reporter is imperative, but no such understanding exists today. Instead, responsible officials and responsible reporters . . . are now playing cops & robbers ... in Foggy Bottom*. . . The object of the cops seems to be to conceal information. The object of the robbers [should be] to disclose information . . . Both sides [wage] their own private little cold war [to] the detriment of the public."

Policy of Containment. In Correspondent Reston's book, the chief of police and chief withholder of information is Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Said Reston: "[His] attitude toward the reporters and his strategy ... is not unlike his attitude and strategy toward the Russians ... An aloof policy of containment . . . [He thinks] that the executive branch ... must have the right of uninterrupted private discussion and negotiation . . . even if it's about such things as the hydrogen bomb . . . While [Acheson] does not dislike reporters personally, he apparently thinks they are presumptuous, superficial, often selfish and indifferent to the public interest, irresponsible . . . much too distrustful and skeptical of officials, and far too interested in being first . . . rather than being right . . ."

Reston conceded that federal officials had their troubles, including the presence of official Soviet correspondents at their press conferences* and such domestic nuisances as "scoop artists, gossip mongers and saloon-rail journalists." But that had nothing to do with the case. "The people have to be adequately informed ... in spite of these problems, and the Government is not doing what it could to keep informing them . . ."

Life & Death. The H-bomb was the most recent example. Said Reston: "President Truman was opposed to any public discussion of the bomb ... If he had his way ... he would merely have ordered the bomb built . . . with no announcement . . . The power of the executive to decide [such] issues in the secret stage of negotiations ... is growing all the time . . . Our skepticism will have to grow with it ... The reporter has to move into action much earlier in the development of policy . . ." Nor was such secrecy necessary. "In most cases the demand for total secrecy is [made] to assure the executive [branch] of an advantageous position [in presenting] its case in Congress."

The grave fault with that method, said "Scotty" Reston, is that the negotiations are completed before the public knows about them, so that the "critic in the press . . . has to upset a whole series of applecarts if he wants to make any major change in the policy." What is needed, Reston said, is a working arrangement by which Government officials can tell responsible reporters the broad lines of their policy beforehand so that there can be "some objective discussion of the facts in public."

Failing this, it is up to reporters to get the news anyway. If the late great William Allen White of the Emporia Gazette could attend a Washington press conference nowadays, concluded Reston, "I think ... he would feel . . . that [reporters] had become a little too courteous . . . He'd want to know why there was just a handful of the large corps of Washington reporters probing into these life & death questions of atomic energy, the organization of the armed services, the conduct of our foreign policy ... I imagine he would tell us that officials in Washington or Emporia had always sought to hide as much information as possible, especially when they didn't quite know where they were going . . . He knew that we have at least our share of chumps and scoundrels in the newspaper business . . . but he was less afraid of our scoundrels than their scoundrels . . ."

* A low area along the Potomac River flat, site of the State Department building, the Pan-American Union, many U.S. Government office buildings.

* Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, last week refused to answer a reporter's question about the H-bomb's "ultimate cost." Said McMahon: "We have in this room a representative of a news agency [Tass] that transmits every word of what I say to the Soviet Union . . . I'm tired of making it any easier for them than I have to."

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