The Virtues of Talking Back

Flying to Southeast Asia in 1961 on one of his first foreign-policy assignments from President Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson was nervous and irritable. He vented his sensitivities on staffers, particularly on Carl T. Rowan, the press adviser the State Department had assigned to accompany him. Several times Johnson berated Rowan in front of newsmen. Several times Rowan talked right back.

In a somewhat less public scrap, Rowan took exception to a sentence in a joint communique that Johnson was to propose to India's Prime Minister Nehru. Warned Rowan: "It's condescending and Nehru won't like it." Johnson forcefully disagreed. But sure enough, Nehru threw the paper on the floor when he read the offending line. Later, Johnson said to Rowan: "You were right. Just keep getting up when I knock you down." Then in obvious reference to the fact that Rowan is a Negro, Johnson added: "But I guess I needn't tell you that--you're used to getting kicked around."

Out of that trip, and even out of their argument, Johnson and Rowan developed a mutual respect. And so last week, Johnson appointed Rowan, 38, to be director of the U.S. Information Agency--an appointment that is likely to please Negro voters this fall. He will succeed Edward R. Murrow, 55, who resigned to recuperate from an operation for lung cancer.

Why Expose Dunghills? A charming man when he chooses to be, Rowan was born of impoverished parents in McMinnville, Tenn., left home in 1942 for college and became, at 19, one of the first Negroes to earn a Navy commission. After getting a master's degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota, he was hired by the Minneapolis Tribune as a copyreader, finally argued his way into a reporting job. The Tribune sent Rowan--long before racial strife was top news--into the South to see how much things had progressed for the Negro since Rowan was a boy. Rowan found that not much had changed. With typical pungency, he wrote: "You do not expose racial hatred and social and economic injustices any more than you expose a fresh dunghill; you tell Americans that it exists and wait until the wind blows in their direction." Rowan's reporting, at home and abroad, won national awards; he wrote four books, became a popular lecturer, earned some $40,000 a year. But he left all that in 1961 for an $18,000-a-year State Department job.

The "Right to Know." At State, Rowan continued to speak out. At the height of a furor over management of news by Government officials, Rowan urged newsmen to keep "responsible pressure" on those bureaucrats who are "scared to death of the press." But at the same time, said Rowan, too many newsmen are "scoop conscious" and "far more concerned about their reputations than about how well informed the American public is." When the House Subcommittee on Government Information criticized Rowan as "an official with an admitted distrust for the people's right to know," Rowan called the committee report "maliciously misleading," and added: "The public indeed has a right to know--in this case a right to know more of the truth than this subcommittee saw fit to give."

After his appointment last March as U.S. Ambassador to Finland, Rowan fascinated the Finns with his outspoken talk about U.S. racial problems. And on racial matters, Rowan is understandably militant. "No people I can recall in history ever got their freedom on a silver platter," he says. "The Negro is no exception. There's a latent decency in the American conscience. But it takes this militancy to arouse it."

The fact that his new job will make him the most influential Negro in the U.S. Government impresses Rowan--up to a point. "That the President would ask me--a Negro--to take on a job of this magnitude is another mark of the increasing greatness of this country. But I expect to be the director of this agency, and not a Negro director."

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