The Press: Don’t Swallow Everything

In the shabby George Washington Inn, where California Democrat John Moss’s House Information subcommittee began looking into the Kennedy Administration’s news policy last week, the talk kept coming back to the same subject: the stumbling tongue of Pentagon Press Secretary Arthur Sylvester. And Sylvester was a sitting duck for the eleven publishers, broadcasters and reporters who turned up to testify. What riled the witnesses particularly was Sylvester’s statement about last October’s Cuba crisis that the Government has the “right, if necessary, to lie to save itself when it’s going up into a nuclear war.”

That is “a philosophy of totalitarianism utterly foreign to our American precepts,” argued Lee Hills, executive editor of the five-paper Knight chain. Said Publisher Gene Robb of the Albany (N.Y.) Times-Union: “A government can successfully lie no more than once to its people. Thereafter, everything it says and does becomes suspect.” Roughest of all was the Des Moines Register’s Clark Mollenhoff, who suggested that veteran Newsman Sylvester, 61 (37 years with the Newark News), ought to resign.

All but one of the witnesses failed to mention the fact that, managed news or not, the stories in Washington are still there for the digging. In advance of Sylvester’s rebuttal this week, New York Times Washington Bureau Chief James Reston did him the favor of shifting part of the blame to the working press. The Kennedys may “have conned a few reporters into being more sympathetic than good skeptical reporters should,” said Reston, but that is mostly the reporters’ fault.

It is all very well for newsmen to enjoy fine French food at the White House.

Reston might have added, but they are under no compulsion to swallow everything that goes along with it.