Word: reston
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Washington, nearly 800 newspapermen fill assignments on the all-important job of telling the U.S.-and the world-what is going on. Are they doing their jobs diligently and well? Last week, in the first William Allen White Foundation lecture at the University of Kansas, able, personable James Reston, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington reporter of the New York Times, said flatly that they are not. The Administration, said he, is deliberately withholding information which the public is entitled to, and the capital correspondents are not working hard enough to dredge...
...Said Reston: "An understanding between reporters and [Washington] officials on the obligations and rights of the reporter is imperative, but no such understanding exists today. Instead, responsible officials and responsible reporters . . . are now playing cops & robbers ... in Foggy Bottom*. . . The object of the cops seems to be to conceal information. The object of the robbers [should be] to disclose information . . . Both sides [wage] their own private little cold war [to] the detriment of the public...
Policy of Containment. In Correspondent Reston's book, the chief of police and chief withholder of information is Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Said Reston: "[His] attitude toward the reporters and his strategy ... is not unlike his attitude and strategy toward the Russians ... An aloof policy of containment . . . [He thinks] that the executive branch ... must have the right of uninterrupted private discussion and negotiation . . . even if it's about such things as the hydrogen bomb . . . While [Acheson] does not dislike reporters personally, he apparently thinks they are presumptuous, superficial, often selfish and indifferent to the public interest, irresponsible...
...Reston conceded that federal officials had their troubles, including the presence of official Soviet correspondents at their press conferences* and such domestic nuisances as "scoop artists, gossip mongers and saloon-rail journalists." But that had nothing to do with the case. "The people have to be adequately informed ... in spite of these problems, and the Government is not doing what it could to keep informing them...
Life & Death. The H-bomb was the most recent example. Said Reston: "President Truman was opposed to any public discussion of the bomb ... If he had his way ... he would merely have ordered the bomb built . . . with no announcement . . . The power of the executive to decide [such] issues in the secret stage of negotiations ... is growing all the time . . . Our skepticism will have to grow with it ... The reporter has to move into action much earlier in the development of policy . . ." Nor was such secrecy necessary. "In most cases the demand for total secrecy is [made] to assure the executive...