The Press: Climate: Chilly

Into the green-carpeted Petroleum Club lounge of the Northern Hotel in Billings, Mont. last week popped the Republican candidate for U.S. President. Then, with the group of newsmen accompanying him on the campaign trail, Richard M. Nixon opened the kind of informal press conference (no direct quotation allowed) that was once a standard Nixon campaign instrument. Although they had been complaining bitterly about the rarity of such occasions in recent months, most of the traveling newsmen largely ignored the visitor, leaving the Vice President to get along with local reporters.

The episode sharply illustrates the 1960 relations between Nixon and his press followers. Four years ago, when Nixon was stumping for President Eisenhower’s and his own reelection, the press corps flew in the same plane, mixed in easy camaraderie with a Nixon who regularly emerged, sometimes in pajamas, for bantering strolls down the aisle. Background conferences were common; at them the Vice President frequently confided headline-making information that the newsmen could use without identifying the source.

Regard for Reporters. Now there is a chilly reserve between the two sides, each suspicious of the other. Most reporters now fly in a separate plane or planes; the four pool reporters admitted to the Nixon plane on rotation are carefully partitioned from the candidate, who keeps almost entirely to his quarters in the rear. “Nixon’s people seem to feel the reporters are a conspiratorial group,” says the Baltimore Sun’s Phil Potter. Nixon’s press secretary, Herbert G. Klein, denying that there is any real hostility, admits that “you don’t talk to the press people without some regard to what you say,” and some members of Nixon’s staff think hostile reporters go over every line of Nixon’s speeches looking for examples of the “old Nixon.”

Herb Klein is generally well liked by newsmen, who applaud the smooth efficiency with which he runs things—right down to making sure that reporters’ luggage is delivered to their hotel rooms. But he does little to dispel their growing bitterness. Klein is well aware that reporters in both camps are predominantly Democratic (and their publishers predominantly Republican). The ratio is 2 to 1 for Kennedy, according to one informal straw vote aboard the Nixon press plane. But most reporters insist they know how to separate their own convictions from their reporting, and say that Nixon’s assistants are too ready to find real or imagined injury. In Springfield, Mo., after Reporter Potter asked what Klein considered a deliberately needling question, Klein sent an angry protest to Potter’s publisher. Klein was also disturbed by a magazine article over the wardrobes of the candidates’ wives: he thought the caption, “Pat v. Jackie,” should have read “Jackie v. Pat.”

Candor for Reporters. The new mood had its origin last May when a column by New York Times Washington Bureau Chief James Reston challenged the honesty of the Nixon “background conferences,” which let Nixon say things anonymously that he would be most reluctant to say in public, e.g., criticism of U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Benson. Angry, Nixon suspended the background sessions, and the Nixon camp took on the wary formality that still prevails.

Things are much different in the Kennedy camp. Kennedy’s staff goes out of its way to accommodate newsmen, and occasionally, with engaging candor, admits Kennedy’s flubs, bad platform performances and sometimes skimpy crowds. The candidate puts in numerous informal appearances, with demonstrations of comradeship (“Taking good care of you?”).

Just how much the difference between the two camps actually affects campaign coverage remains a question. Relatively little of the animosity toward Nixon has spilled over into the news columns. Kennedy and his staff have no reason to complain. Speaking for the boss, one Kennedy aide said last week: “We’ve gotten the best treatment in the press of any Democratic candidate in history.”