No Self Censorship

Seated in his White House rocking chair, John F. Kennedy faced a delegation of top U.S. newsmen. The eight visitors* were not exactly hostile, but they were not exactly friendly either. Just two weeks before, in an ill-conceived speech, the President had charged them with a sin and told them how to correct it. In its anxiety to report everything, Kennedy had said, the press sometimes spilled national secrets; perhaps U.S. newspapers need some form of self-censorship to suppress news endangering the national interest. Unimpressed, the editors and publishers had trooped to Washington to try to find out exactly what the President wanted them to do--and why.

The details of the 70-minute discussion last week remained a secret between the President and his guests. But the Dallas Times Herald's Executive Editor Felix R. McKnight, acting as group spokesman, made it clear that Kennedy has not yet been forgiven his inappropriate lecture on the cold war responsibilities of the press. Kennedy's visitors saw no present or future need for censorship, short of "a declaration of a national emergency, or something like that." Added McKnight: "There was no agreement today."

Doctored News. There is not likely ever to be agreement. In the first wave of response to his speech, the President was widely criticized for merely restating an abiding press problem without offering any new solution. Since then, the press has made clear that it not only deplores Washington's incorrigible tendency to conceal (see cut), but questions Kennedy's right to criticize the press's equally incorrigible tendency to reveal.

"It is unfortunate," wrote the New York Times's James Reston, "that President Kennedy chose to raise this problem of a free press in a cold war immediately after the Cuban episode. The trouble with the press during the Cuban crisis was not that it said too much, but that it said too little."

What's more, said Reston, what some newspapers reported was deliberately doctored by the U.S. Government: "When the landings started, American reporters in Miami were told that this was an 'invasion' of around 5,000 men--this for the purpose of creating the impression among the Cuban people that they should rise up to support a sizable invasion force." Concluded Reston dryly: "It is one thing to ask the press not to publish information about specific landings or weapons, and another to encourage the press to publish information known by the Government to be false."

No Lies. The same day, Reston's indictment was heartily seconded by a Times editorial: "A democracy--our democracy--cannot be lied to. This is one of the factors that make it more precious, more delicate, more difficult and yet essentially stronger than any other form of government in the world." Other publications, notably Christian Century Magazine, wondered aloud whether the President's criticism of the press did not debase a cardinal tenet of democracy. Said Christian Century: "His appeal demonstrated too little faith on his own part in the strength of truth and too great confidence in the capacity of the foes of democracy to win by use of the big lie."

Sometime Newsman Jack Kennedy might agree that for all its faults, the U.S. press has demonstrated over the years far better judgment than the U.S. Government in determining what the U.S. people should be told. As the London Times said more than a century ago: "The first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation. The duty of the journalist is to present to his readers not such things as statecraft would wish them to know but the truth as near as he can attain it."

* Lee Hills, executive editor of the Miami Herald; Associated Press President Benjamin M. McKelway; United Press International President Frank H. Bartholomew; Publisher D. Tennant Bryan of the Richmond, Va., Times-Dispatch and News-Leader; Turner Catledge, managing editor of the New York Times; Mark Ferree, business manager of Scripps-Howard Newspapers; Publisher Irwin Maier of the Milwaukee Journal; and Felix R. McKnight, executive editor of the Dallas Times Herald.

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