My Friends

Televised Presidential press conferences were a bad idea to start with. Now Kennedy is complaining that these weekly conferences do not give him a chance to argue his views on key issues and win enough support to move a sluggish Congress. In this he is correct. It is thus encouraging that he may supplement the weekly sessions with a series of fireside chats. With luck and some thought, the chats will replace the TV conferences altogether.

These programs have turned into spot question and answer sessions, where reporters sniff scraps of news, looking for scoops and boring the public in the process. Not only is it unwise, as so many have already said, for the President to appear live and give snap answers to impossibly knotty questions, but the hordes of reporters and the rapidity with which the topics change confuse even intelligent viewers. Surely Pierre Salinger can break the Administration's big stories and answer the usually petty questions reporters are asking. Kennedy is not needed for that. He is needed to explain why he wants the measures he is failing to push through Congress.

Kennedy's first four weeks have won him a disconcerting kind of popular respect. Gallup polls, whatever their worth, show him about as popular as Eisenhower after his first month in office. And, polls aside, one senses that the new President has won many who voted against him in November. Respect, though, is not support. Kennedy may be liked, but most people do not favor his programs. He is in danger of acquiring the same kind of deadly popular favor that Eisenhower had, and people are beginning to feel reassured that he will not change things much.

Fireside chats alone will not stir the country, but they will certainly do more than the TV press conferences. Faced with a decline of American influence abroad, the recession at home, and the necessity to knead a complacent Congress, Kennedy's only chance for carrying through any of his ambitious programs is persuasion. If he cannot or will not scare Americans into believing that the recession is a crisis, he can at least explain to them why some action is needed--which is more than the present TV format permits.