The Press: Quarantining the News

By any measure, it was the biggest story of the decade. A mighty U.S. fleet scoured the seas, its guns challenging Cuba-bound vessels of any flag. In the U.S., the nation waited anxiously for the latest development. And as the Cuban crisis unfolded, the news emerged only after careful and thorough screening by Washington. Not a single newsman was with the fleet in the first days of the blockade for an eyewitness story.

Patient & Cooperative. Short of actual war, no U.S. Administration had ever before buttoned up so tightly. The security measures went even beyond those customary in war. In 1918, in World War II, and in Korea as well, accredited U.S. correspondents sailed with the U.S. Navy, flew with U.S. bombers, crouched in foxholes with U.S. infantrymen. From the White House came a plea to newsmen to print nothing, to guess nothing, that might even remotely jeopardize national security.

Inevitably, the restrictions drew loud protests. “A White House official,” said the New York Times, “insisted that the White House request did not amount to the ‘voluntary censorship’ by which the press and radio were guided in World War II and the Korean war. Newspapermen who were in Washington during those two wars found it difficult to see where the difference lay.” The New York Herald Tribune’s Washington Correspondent David Wise accused President Kennedy of deliberate deception, and decided that this was worse than the crisis itself: “If the line between truth and falsehood should become permanently clouded, then the republic, in an effort to combat the perils without, faces an even greater danger within.” Editorialized the Los Angeles Times: “You can’t both con the press and count on it.”

But no one, least of all President Kennedy, was trying to con the press. His two chief press liaison officers were working overtime, by direct presidential order, to keep reporters thoroughly informed. Arthur Sylvester, 61, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and a former newsman himself (37 years on the Newark Evening News), had the experience to understand and soothe press corps complaints about Government news control. Patient and cooperative, Sylvester was holding three press conferences a day to see that newsmen got every bit of intelligence they were entitled to. Presidential Press Secretary Pierre Salinger rushed White House bulletins to the reporters as soon as he got the word. Cabinet members, White House aides. Pentagon brass—everyone who knew at least part of the picture—painted it in painstaking detail in background briefings.

Missiles & Mistakes. In such a hastily contrived news-screening system, mistakes were unavoidable. The first photographs of missile installations in Cuba were released not by Washington, but by the U.S. embassy in London—which distributed them to British papers. In New York, after a State Department briefing for Congressmen from the East Coast, Pennsylvania Representative James Van Zandt beat everybody else to the door, where he spilled the news to waiting reporters about the first high-seas interception of a Russian ship. Washington’s prompt confirmation of Van Zandt’s exclusive sparked a press rush toward Congressmen, many of whom were getting similar briefings.

But for all the goofs, for all the reportorial grumbling by the Washington press corps, the fact remained that the Cuban crisis was an unprecedented situation—even in the cold war. It demanded the most careful handling of information that might affect the nation’s security. Still moving cautiously, the Pentagon this week plans to allow pool reporters and photographers for the press, radio and television aboard blockade ships and on the ground at Guantanamo.