Since he entered the White House, little love has been lost between Franklin Roosevelt and that journalistic triumvirate of New Deal nay-sayers—Frank Richardson Kent, Mark Sullivan & David Lawrence. Smarting under the President's smiling sarcasms as sorely as the President smarts under the unsympathetic reports they write about his Administration, Columnists Kent, Sullivan & Lawrence now fail to appear at White House Press conferences or maintain a dignified silence when Mr. Roosevelt talks to reporters. Not until last week, however, was a public issue made of the breach between President and press critics.
Herbert Hoover used to go behind the backs of editors and reporters to complain to their publishers when news treatment did not suit him. Franklin Roosevelt is known to have achieved better results by approaching the news writers and editors behind their publishers' backs. Fortnight ago he entertained junketing members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors at the White House. There was exciting, off-the-record talks by Harry Hopkins and John Edgar Hoover and, when his turn came, the President told his charmed audience that he wished the nation's news could be presented without "color."* And by "color" Mr. Roosevelt clearly meant the frank unfriendliness to be found in the writings of the three journalisits who have earned his personal displeasure.
To David Lawrence this was an unwarranted Presidential whack on a spot already raw from a merciless blow of the Democratic National Committee's canny old Pressagent Charles Michelson, Picking up a Republican handout which recommended, among others, the columns of Lawrence & Co., Pressagent Michelson, in the Democratic Committee's frankly partisan weekly letter, baldly remarked early in April that "the Republican National Committee has formally taken over the Three Musketeers of anti-Administration, Frank Kent, Mark Sullivan and David Lawrence."*
Regarding Michelson's observation as tantamount to an accusation that he and his colleagues had been bribed by Republican money, Mr. Lawrence needed only the additional stimulus of the President's off-the-road remarks to the visiting editors to unlimber his guns in retaliation. Last week in 146 newspapers Pundit Lawrence indignantly declared:
"President Roosevelt personally has set in motion a campaign to discredit, if possible, the effectiveness of those Washington correspondents who write articles critical of his Administration. . . . The direct connection between the public attack made by the Democratic National Committee on various Washington correspondents and the President's conversations in private is no longer a secret and in the public interest ought not to be. ... If writers who are conscientiously trying to write their impressions of what is happening in Washington are to be made the objects of a punitive campaign because they happen to disagree, this, too, ought to be fully disclosed so that the first signs of a real dictatorship may be recorded and so that the restraints being put upon the freedom of the press may be known to the reading public."