What Comes Naturally

"Is there any real foundation for all the talk about the Kennedy administration's 'lack of firmness'? The talk disturbs the President so much that he came within an ace of making his recent North Carolina speech a major answer to his critics. But is there anything to it but political hot air?''

This nagging query was made last week, not by a Kennedy critic, but by a Kennedy loyalist and personal friend, the New York Herald Tribune's Syndicated Columnist Joseph Alsop. Alsop's "yes, but" answer demonstrated the difficulty he had in answering his own question. He offered no evidence that criticism of the Kennedy Administration is widespread, but he did not hesitate to explain why such criticism should exist. The President's trouble, wrote Alsop, is that he gets too much advice: "With the most terrible choices being daily thrust upon him, Kennedy is daily beset by almost every possible viewpoint. As chief foreign-policymaker, he is the center of an immense, confusing, distracting but continuous churning. This is the true infirmity."

Fear & Firmness. Fact is that press criticism of the President has never been a sometime thing. It is one of the persistent realities of life in the loftiest and most vulnerable public office. In recent weeks, others besides Joe Alsop have indeed accused the President of wavering, indecision, and of failing to deliver on the glittering promise of strong leadership that surrounded the figure of Jack Kennedy early in office.

Fortnight ago, Erwin D. Canham, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, took the occasion of Kennedy's impending speaking tour of the West to assess the Administration. Canham found it wanting: "The Democratic critics a year ago called the Eisenhower forces a 'do-nothing administration.' They presented themselves as men of action--apostles of courage . . . Today, both in the United States and in the allied capitals, but even more in the hostile centers of world communism, the impression prevails that the Kennedy administration shrinks from the test when the test comes." Canham's conclusion: "The Kennedy administration has not established itself in the eyes of the world as a strong government, but as a weak government."

In Charleston, S.C., the News & Courier, a chronic Kennedy critic, politely applauded his scholarly speech at Chapel Hill (TIME, Oct. 20), then yielded to the same anxiety that troubles Erwin Canham: "Mr. Kennedy's trouble lies in translating high-sounding words and resolute statements into the actions of the administration he heads. It is our well-justified fear that the President is lacking in that quality which enables a man to live up to his own words. For all the firmness, the total body of his decisions as President is not such as to inspire national confidence."

"Affairs of state are being run loosely," wrote the New York Daily News's Washington Bureau Chief Ted Lewis. "It is no secret that the so-called 'Kennedy system' --actually no system at all but a hodgepodge of advisers--has made for presidential vacillation." But Lewis clung to a shred of hope: "Whether the President has muffed the ball in failing to make use of the leadership qualities with which he is endowed is still open to argument."

Louder & Larger. That seemed to be the point. A few dark editorial clouds above the presidential head do not necessarily add up to a storm. In recent weeks, the U.S. press as a whole has found more kind than harsh words for the President--although the cartoonists were finding the New Frontier a happy hunting ground (see cuts). The Hearst papers praised Kennedy's "firmness and determination" in his talks with Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko. In a series by its military writer, Dan Partner, the Denver Post felt that "positive leadership by the U.S.--especially its vow to fire atomic weapons if necessary to defend West Berlin--is slowly solidifying the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into a deterrent force demanding recognition by the Soviets." After auditing Kennedy's Sept. 25 speech before the United Nations, the Chicago Daily News editorialized: "The rule of law . . . found an eloquent champion in the President."

In such praise, as well as in raising doubts about the President's image as a man of action, the press was only doing what it has always done. Having recovered from the honeymoon rapture that attended Kennedy's first months in office (TIME, May 12), the pundits and the editorializers are merely re-exercising their prerogative of judging the President's every move.

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