The Press: The President & the Press

One day last week Harry Truman held a press conference. It lasted just five minutes: from 4:05 to 4:10 p.m. Between the time the President said all right, he was ready to start, until a bellwether newsman blurted the traditional “Thank you, Mr. President,” Harry Truman announced to the 223 reporters that he had appointed: 1) a new Supreme Court Justice; 2) a new Secretary of War; and 3) a man to dispose of the $90 billion of Surplus Property. He had also, he said, reorganized the Labor Department and accepted the resignation of Economic Stabilizer William H. Davis (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).

When Harry Truman had spoken this mouthful, the momentary silence was broken by the Detroit News’s Blair Moody. Said he: “Anything else, Mr. President?” Everybody laughed.

In his sixth month in office, everybody could see that Harry Truman’s way with the press was different from Franklin Roosevelt’s. Was it better? Most Washington reporters by now were used to the Truman style of brief, factual announcements. Most of them liked it, even if the news gushed forth without much background information, and never anything like the parables Franklin Roosevelt delighted to tell. A few newsmen, mostly the kind who do “think pieces” and need something to prime the pump, yearned for the artful skirmishes, the nods and becks and significant smiles, of the 45-minute-long Roosevelt conferences.

“I Don’t Know.” Harry Truman had said: “When I have some news I’ll tell you.” He seemed to have meant what he said. The Truman press conferences had settled down to brisk once-a-week affairs (Roosevelt usually met the press on Tuesdays and Fridays). Otherwise, there was not enough news around the White House to make a stick on Page 8. What the First Lady and her daughter did had become nobody’s business but their own.

Gone were the old days when Press Secretary Steve Early would fetch a presidential answer to a routine question (including “what did the President eat for breakfast?”). In Steve Early’s chair now was serious, sober, 59-year-old Charles Griffith Ross of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, who does not like to answer personal questions about his boss.

Ross holds his own daily conference with reporters and provides a list of the day’s appointments, bills and orders signed. Exasperated newsmen who try to pry out White House copy get the stock Ross answer: “I don’t know.” For this uncooperative attitude on “personality stuff” about the President newsmen blame Charlie Ross, not his boss.

One Sneeze, One Paragraph. The correspondents have something more to gripe about than the White House colorlessness. They are exceedingly jealous of any signs of presidential favoritism—and there have been some. On the President’s trip to Independence, fortnight ago, Harry Truman invited A.P.’s Tony Vaccaro and U.P.’s Merriman Smith to join in a poker game. The I.N.S. reporter (a substitute) was left out, presumably because the President did not know him very well. Also left out were specials like the New York Herald Tribune’s Washington chief, Bert Andrews, the Chicago Sun’s Tom Reynolds. They immediately conveyed their displeasure to the President, with as much sternness as the circumlocutions of White House courtesy permits.

It had never occurred to the President that he was offending anybody—he had only wanted to play poker with some cronies. Harry Truman of Independence, Mo. was still not used to the idea that everything the President does—even a sneeze or a snooze—is news.