The President and the Press

Last week President Kennedy extended his characteristic pleas for self-discipline and sacrifice for the national interest into the realm of public opinion. One gathers that his desire for greater newspaper concern with national security was prompted by the press's treatment of the Cuban affair. If so (and the ambiguity of his remarks is in itself a bad omen), Kennedy's speech was a defensively hypocritical one. Worse, it was an indication that this Administration is slowly sealing itself off from its potential critics.

Since he never specified just what sort of abuses he was talking about, Kennedy left the newspapers free to speculate that he was blaming the Cuban fiasco on their indiscretions. Actually, of course, the American press has accorded the government very handsome treatment on Cuba: since December, Fidel Castro has been charging the United States with attack preparations, the Russians were writing of our rebel training sites, and the French press has been discussing the impending invasion. The only group in the world ignorant of American government activities in Guatemala and Florida has been the American public, which was told that Castro's hoarse cries of invasion were the product of a deranged mind. With the possible exception of one or two New York Times dispatches, the American press voluntarily sold its readers the government's bill of goods on Cuba. Even the Hearstian exaggerations of the rebels' strength were undoubtedly just what the CIA and the rebels themselves wanted, for it was certainly in their interest to appear a greater threat to Castro than they really were.

The wider implications of what the President said are even more disturbing than his specific hypocrisies. He assumed that the Cold War has brought about a crisis in relations between the government and the press, that this crisis is in large part the press's fault, and that the greatest service newspapers can reader in the national interest is to restrict voluntarily their coverage of the Cold War. If anything, the Cuban affair demonstrates that the "crisis" is exactly the reverse of what Kennedy imagines it to be. It is that the American public is not being given enough information, and that there is need for hostile criticism of the Administration's activities.

Seeing Kennedy's applications of words like "crisis," "unity," "national interest," and "discipline," one appreciates how void of content so much of the New Frontier's rhetoric is, how open to interpretation dictated by circumstance. National interest would have been served better if the press had explained what was happening in Cuba--and if the government had not been so sure of its support. Kennedy is equating bipartisanship and achieving a united front with the formulation of foreign policy, an equation that did much to make the Eisenhower era such a blandly unroductive one. He does not see the danger in this country's consensus, its unwillingness to debate an issue like Cuba, its desire to let the Administration carry it forward, and never matter where forward is.