Neither Questions Nor Answers

By Hugh Sidey

Rarely has the weather been so spectacular. And the White House fringed by the freshly planted chrysanthemums is a beautiful island of tranquillity in downtown Washington.

But many of the men and women who came out of the President's news conference Friday night and walked through this scene carried with them a deep sense of despair.

They had witnessed a President who would not or could not answer questions fully, and they had seen reporters who could not or did not ask the right questions for a public that cries out more each day for some answers.

The East Room was like a bear pit with over 200 newsmen and women shrieking and roaring for attention, jostling each other as they leaped up and down signaling frantically for the President's attention, ignoring the previous questions and the incomplete answers to press their own divergent points.

Any appearance of a President produces some enlightenment. But the frustrations were as great as the satisfaction, and in the end the session degenerated into a display of insult and bitterness. It was all beamed out to a people that already is in anguish.

Nixon gave a long answer about why he had fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox: because Cox had refused to obey his orders. But he said not one word about why he had then totally reversed himself and had given up the tapes just as Cox had urged. No questioner then got the floor to say, "Wait a minute, Mr. President, what logic explains producing a governmental convulsion of this magnitude and then announcing amid the carnage that you agree after all?"

The President casually said in that same explanation that Elliot Richardson had approved of his "compromise" on the tapes that triggered all the trouble. At best that is a half-truth. A compromise is not a compromise without two parties agreeing, as Cox did not. Neither, in the end, did Richardson.

And what rationality explains giving up the tapes but clinging desperately to other documents on the basis of the theory of presidential confidentiality, which is already so shot full of holes? Nixon emphasized his desire to give a new prosecutor the "independence" that he needed to bring the Watergate episode to a conclusion, but then his next statement denied that very independence.

Further, we now have an acting Attorney General who says he will go to court for the necessary documents to pursue the investigation and a President who says he is not about to allow that. Why is it that in this Government nobody seems to know what anybody else is doing or what they should be doing?

Nixon called the stillborn confrontation with the Soviet Union early last Thursday the most serious episode since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The next day the Soviet Union said that was nonsense. What is it that prevents the President from giving the nation more details, details certainly known to the Russians? A day earlier Secretary of State Henry Kissinger explained that the order to alert American troops came after long deliberation in a National Security Council meeting at 3 a.m. The President said that he had given the order shortly after midnight. A small thing, perhaps, but why can't the Americans be told the complete story of these actions that jar their lives?

Perhaps Nixon would give out more if the East Room had not become an arena for posturing and verbal bloodletting: skepticism overwhelms reason, anger buries thoughtfulness. It is so big and its staging now so elaborate that it resembles something from Cecil B. DeMille and not a seminar for learning about the problems of the real world.

There ought to be a forum where lines of questioning could be pursued to exhaustion, and a time and place where Presidents and press could meet in a civilized fashion and talk to one another calmly and with respect, even if in deep disagreement. If we can't resolve this problem of communication, then we are going to fail in a lot of other things. The East Room press conference was another frightening display of the anger and frustration at loose in this divided nation and in its Government.

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