Press & President

"John F. Kennedy is floundering in a sea of troubles," wrote New York Times's Washington Columnist Arthur Krock. "He has reflected the uncertainty of what to do about it that Hamlet expressed in the famous mixed metaphor of the soliloquy. It is this shifting of tactics and moderation that has encouraged some of his opponents to believe they can retire him from the presidency after one term."

Absolutely Wrong. Strong criticism of the President has echoed through the daily press throughout the past month. His economy report evoked sneers: "Many words, little substance," said the Dallas Times Herald. His elevation of Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg to the U.S. Supreme Court, while greeted with approval in most quarters, outraged the Memphis Commercial Appeal ("a cynical payoff") and scared Columnist David Lawrence ("What a shiver of apprehension passes through the country").

As for his inability to ram his legislative program through a stubborn Congress, New York Herald Tribune Columnist Roscoe Drummond summed up: "There is no doubt in my mind that Senator Kennedy was absolutely sincere in telling the American people in the 1960 campaign that if they would elect a Democratic President and give leadership to a Democratic Congress, all would go well. And he was absolutely wrong."

What's Cooking? The principal attacks on the President came after his do-nothing-now statement on a Soviet-armed Cuba. "APPEASEMENT," cried the Oklahoma City Daily Oklahoman. Wrote Columnist Henry J. Taylor: "If the steel companies could evoke wrath from Mr. Kennedy, why cannot Cuba? It is high time the American people forced a better policy than 'Let the dust settle/ "

"The American position is one of indecision, if not fearfulness," said the Omaha World-Herald. "It is one thing to proceed carefully," wrote Robert Spivack in the Herald Tribune. "It is something else to proceed 'cautiously' while the enemy is proceeding boldly." Denver's Rocky Mountain News insisted that "something has got to be done about Cuba and it had better be soon." Arthur Krock proposed naval patrols, David Lawrence called for 1) a total blockade and 2) severance of diplomatic relations with Russia. Such actions, he conceded, "could lead to some fighting." The New York Daily News railed at presidential ignorance: "President Kennedy says he has no knowledge that Soviet Russia has recently sent some troops into Castro Cuba. Cuber, as the President sometimes calls it, is only 90 miles off Florider--oops. Florida. If the Kennedy Administration doesn't know what goes on in Cuba, one wonders how much, or how little, it knows about what's cooking in the rest of the world." Much of this criticism came from normally Republican and conservative papers, who had previously on occasion expressed admiration for the young President. But even Kennedy's close friend, Columnist Joseph Alsop, touring around Europe, was now disturbed by the symptoms of irresolution. Bristling at Khrushchev's ursine threats to visiting U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall ("It is no laughing matter when Khrushchev flatly informs a member of the U.S. Cabinet that he is going to take Berlin . . . and that the U.S. will do nothing about it in the end"), Alsop called for action. "Perhaps the time has come to get angry," he wrote. "Perhaps it would have been better to throw back in Premier Khrushchev's face the recent outrageous note about Cuba and Berlin as 'unacceptable and non-received.' "

This, of course, has not been done. And at Kennedy's press conference last week, the punch and incisiveness lay, not in the presidential answers, but in reporters' questions (see box).

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