Announcer A:
Today and every day the American people must make decisions on which their whole survival may depend. To make sound decisions the people must be informed. For this they depend on the nation's free press. How well is the nation's press doing its essential job? The people have a right to know the truth. They have a responsibility to ask. The right to question.
Kimball:
The public has a right to know, but the practical question is this: How much is the public entitled to know? Not everything. We respect, or we ought to respect, individual rights of privacy. In fact you and I might want to respect privacy a little more than some newspaper men in places like Hollywood and New York. We believe in secrecy of the ballot, secrecy in the jury room, secrecy about the most serious aspects of our military defenses.
But the other side of the coin is that government like ours leans heavily on a well-informed and intelligent public. Free government and free information are synonymous. And there is a breed of public official around – in our smallest towns as well as our biggest government agencies – that likes to operate behind closed doors. How do we open those doors? Mr. Louis Lyons, that's a question for you and your guests on this program.
Louis:
Our guests are two nationally known names in journalism, a pair of midwest newspapermen. One, the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting last year, is the
Washington correspondent of the Cowles publications, the Des Moines Register and Tribune, the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, and
Look magazine, Mr. Clark Mollenhoff.
Announcer B:
Mr. Mollenhoff says, and I quote: "Our federal administration is practicing a doctrine of secrecy which carries in it seeds of dictatorship. The press must destroy this doctrine of secrecy before it can be used to wreck our system of free government."
Louis:
Our other guest is the Chief of the Washington Bureau of the Knight Newspapers, the Chicago Daily News, the Detroit Free Press, the Miami Herald, the
Charlotte Observer, and the
Akron Beacon-Journal, Mr. Edwin Lahey.
Announcer B:
Mr. Lahey has said, quote: "A good reporter is a natural enemy of the public official. The reporter tries to get the news; the bureaucrat tries to conceal it."
Louis:
Secrecy in government – a challenge to reporters. And two reporters who are trying to do something about it. We'll talk to them in just a moment.
Announcer A:
The Press and the People.
As moderator from Harvard University, the winner of the Peabody Award for television and radio journalism and the Lauterbach Award for outstanding contribution in the field of civil liberties, Mr. Louis Lyons.
Louis:
Mr. Mollenhoff, you are quoted as taking a very serious view of the extent of government secrecy. Will you explain this and tell us, too, what the press is trying to do about it?
Mollenhoff:
Well, Mr. Lyons, the press is doing a lot about many problems, but it isn't doing enough about some of the major problems, mainly because I don't believe members of the press don't realize the full problem in executive department secrecy today. Now my statement that there is a threat of dictatorship is not just my own opinion on this. Senator Hennings of
Missouri has stated this in some official reports from his committee. Representative Moss has also stated it in reports from his committee.
And I think it is significant that a Republican, George Meader of Michigan, has also made this charge relative to precedents set down by this administration. In brief, it merely is that the executive department is taking the position that it has a right to tell the press and public and Congress just what they want to, and that there is no right, even on the part of Congress, to find out how laws are being administered, how money is being spent.
Louis:
Thank you, we want to ask you more about that. And Mr. Lahey, you have been quoted as saying the public official and the reporter are natural enemies. Well, what about this?
Lahey:
Well Mr. Lyons, my statement without qualification sounds a little pretentious. Some of my best friends are public payrollers. But I do think there is, in government officials, they have a presumptuousness that shows in a proprietary attitude toward their jobs, in which they think papa knows best, and which puts them in a position of always needing some exposure in the public interest. On the other hand, public officials might take the same position about the press being their natural enemy of them, because their lives are harried by needle-nose reporters, I'm sure. As a matter of fact...
Louis:
A needle-nose reporter is the kind of reporter who gets the news?
Lahey:
That's right. I remember an old buddy in
Chicago years ago who came to an untimely end,
Big Tim Murphy, a labor racketeer. He never liked reporters, and be used to say – give any punk $25 a week and a pencil and no man's reputation is safe.
Louis:
Do you find City Hall very different from
Washington in respect to public officials, their attitude toward the press?
Lahey:
Basically not, except that the pressure of the press can be applied better in City Hall than in
Washington.
Washington is just too big to cope with. You can put heat on in the City Hall that is diffused in
Washington.
Kimball:
Mr. Mollenhoff, can you be specific about some of these stories that the public doesn't get out of
Washington?
Mollenhoff:
Well, there's the situation of Sherman Adams, Goldfine – actually, Sherman Adams' influence with many of the regulatory agencies and around in other agencies of government. This has taken place over the period of the last four or five years, and Mr. Sherman Adams took the position that he is, he has been covered by some executive secrecy, that his acts were somehow the acts of the President, and that even when he was contacting an agency for his friend Goldfine that these were outside the scope of what a reporter should find out about, outside the scope of what Congressional committees can find out about. And on this score, I think that the Congressional committees are really one of our best safeguards of democracy. I don't agree with what they do on many occasions, but if they can use their subpoena power to get into these agencies we can usually get the material and put it out to the public.
Lahey:
Well wait a minute. Mr. Mollinhoff, before you start making executive agencies the bad guys and the Congressmen the good guys in this drama, let me point out that you have a very tough time finding out from either Congressmen or the executive agencies what Congressional wives or dependents have been carried for free on European trips and how much counterpart funds is taken from the US Embassy in Paris and spent cabaret-ing. You'll never find a Congressman to tell you that.
Mollenhoff:
Well, Mr. Lahey, I happen to agree with you on the problem of getting information from Congress in a few ways, but I think from our standpoint that we have to be on the side of Congress.
Louis:
Because they are on your side in this, you mean?
Mollenhoff:
Because they happen to be on our side, and because they are bipartisan.
Louis:
I'm thinking of the committee of Congressman Moss that's been trying to break down secrecy – how far have they got with this?
Mollenhoff:
Well the Moss committee has really merely made the record, and they've made a very substantial record. They have pointed out that this doctrine of executive secrecy has absolutely no foundation in law, it has no foundation in any court decisions. And yet here is a philosophy of secrecy that is being foisted off on the public by President Eisenhower personally and by Attorney General Brownell and now Rogers.
And the press up to this point has not exhibited the fear that it should for this, because if our laws, passed by Congress, from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue down to the other end, administer them as they please, spend the money as they please, you have executive dictatorship. And there's no kidding about it.
Lahey:
Has the Moss committee ever told the Panama Canal Company to make public the names of the free-loading Congressmen who go on the Panama Canal liners every year, for a twelve-day tropical cruise?
Mollenhoff:
I'm not going to be put in a position, Mr. Lahey, of defending everything that the Moss committee or any other committee does. I will say this: The Moss committee has moved against executive secrecy and as far as the Moss committee is concerned, it has had an open operation.
Now I agree with you completely on these
Panama junkets. I think this should be on the line. But I think every newspaper in this country should be raising a fuss, not only about Congress and the
Panama junkets; but about executive secrecy, too. Somehow executive secrecy has failed to catch the imagination. You can talk about junkets, and people can understand this, but the executive secrecy is a real, basic threat to our democracy, and few people understand it, even when there's no law supporting it.
Louis:
Mr. Lahey, you have been digging out news from government agencies for a long time. Where do you find the toughest spots? What are some of the things you have to work hardest on?
Lahey:
Well, the toughest spots, I would say, are the largest ones. Defense, for example, is such a big organization. They spend, they're responsible for ten per cent of our whole national output, over in that Pentagon. There are so many bureaus that you never heard about that they can give you the run-around without actually imposing censorship.
Louis:
Seems to me, last time I saw you, you were worrying about trying to get the facts on our foreign military assistance.
Lahey:
This will go on forever. The Defense Department says that they don't object, for example, to a country-by-country breakdown of foreign military assistance. So you call the State Department. They say that they cannot give a country-by-country figure for military assistance.
So you say, "Well, who said you can't?" Then you go from one payroller to another to find out who made the administrative determination that this would not be revealed to the public. And I defy anybody to finally put somebody in a corner who will say, "I made the determination." You just cannot find it. There are ten thousand people you have to talk to and you finally get worn down. It's like getting bitten to death by a duck, to find out a thing like that.
Louis:
Well, Mr. Mollenhoff, both of you gentlemen get around all over
Washington. Now what about press conferences as channels of information? The President's press conference, for instance. How much use is that to you?
Mollenhoff:
Well, I think that the Presidential press conference is very beneficial. It's the only point where you can call to the President's attention frequently things that are going wrong in administration and at least find out whether he will take a position or not.
Lahey:
Do you know what he says at a press conference?
Mollenhoff:
Well, I don't always know what he says.
Lahey:
I get an inferiority complex there.
Louis:
Some of us know what Mr. Mohhcnhoff has said at some. I think of the Ladejinsky case.
Mollenhoff:
Well that represents, Mr. Lyons...
Louis:
I think you might almost have said as the Duke of Wellington has said of Waterloo, that "It was a near thing, and if I hadn't been there, it might not have come out that way."
Mollenhoff:
Well, Mr. Lyons, that demonstrates in a respect the necessity of having a Presidential press conference.
Louis:
I think you brought the case up in three different press conferences before the Department of Agriculture conceded that their security system was all wet and that Mr. Ladejinsky was all right.
Mollenhoff:
And that was a matter of, the press conference was the court of final appeal. I tried to get this thing settled on lower levels – the Secretary of Agriculture, the Justice Department. When you can get no solution to a problem and no responsible officials to do what they should do on their own volition, then you have to bring it up with the President. And if he is concerned enough about this – not always because he is interested in right and wrong, sometimes just because it presents the kind of problem he wants to get out from under – then, at that point, you can get some kind of solution.
Lahey:
Let's not be so self-righteous. Ladejinsky turned out to be...
Louis:
Well, Mr. Lahey, Mr. Mollenhoff, both of you gentlemen get around...
Mollenhoff:
Well, Mr. Lahey, I would think that all of us would judge each of these things on the merits. Mr. Ladejinsky was judged to be a security risk for the Agriculture Department. He was not. This was a wrong decision and it was straightened out, and it should have been straightened out.
Now later on, later on Mr. Ladejinsky became involved in a conflict of interest. He fell victim to capitalism rather than communism, and I would say that each of these cases should be judged on their merit. Because Mr. Ladejinsky was involved in a case involving conflict of interest, he should not have been thrown out of the government as a security risk. That, on that case we were right.
Kimball:
Mr. Mollenhoff, I wish you'd bring this discussion back a little bit to the question of government in the press. Now you've outlined things that the press isn't getting in
Washington. Has our government now become more powerful than our press? Why can't we do something about these things?
Mollenhoff:
Well, this government is so complex that we have to rely on Congressional committees to get information for us, to assign skilled staff members to go into these things. Now they won't do what we want them to do. They may not take the approach that we want. And yet they represent the power to subpoena records.
And I know that as a reporter, once in a while I can do the job of digging myself, but, half the time, the reason the agency gives me the information is because they're afraid that I'm just the kind of a fellow who who'll go up there and take my problem to a Congressional committee and they'll end up with a subpoena next week. And I know my weaknesses, my limitations as well as my strengths as an investigative reporter.
Louis:
Well, we've been talking about the power of the government. And now the power of the press is suggested. There's certainly a lot of power back of some Mollenhoff and Lahey stories. Mr. Lahey, you've had a lot of experience with all the devices and techniques in
Washington. Tell us about some of them. We hear some complaints by correspondents that this government tries to manage the news with background dinners and that sort of thing.
Lahey:
Well, that's one of my favorite topics if you have an hour and a half, Mr. Lyons.
Washington is so vast that substitutes are found for getting information. One of them is the institution called the background dinner and the background luncheon. It's a wonderful device for impressing your home office that you know a lot of big guys. You put $20 on your expense account for having dinner with the Secretary of the Treasury.
This impresses the city editor pretty good, and he never thinks to ask you what did you get for your $20. And here's what you get for your $20: either a boring couple of hours listening to what the man wants to tell you, and in some cases you get victimized by these off-the-record dinners because the conditions of them are one, condition number one is that you cannot attribute any information that you get to the man who gives it to you.
And it has happened many times in
Washington that the reporters at such a dinner have been very viciously and cruelly victimized. The latest example that I know and I don't want to kick a man when he's down, but Sherman Adams did the latest and shabbiest stunt along that line, when he told a group at a background dinner that if Harold Stassen didn't leave quietly he'd be carried out.
That's one, the main purpose of that statement was to knock down Stassen's chance of winning the Republican nomination in
Pennsylvania. Now that statement appeared in newspapers all over this country without attribution of one official saying that another official on the White House staff would be fired if he didn't quit.
Sherman Adams to this day has never acknowledged that statement. I took it to the White Rouse and asked Jim Hagerty to ask him to acknowledge it. And all I got out of it was this report from Hagerty that Sherman Adams said he didn't remember making the second part of the statement, which was that Stassen would be heaved out. This happens about once or twice a year on these background dinners, and it's a pretty vicious system of planting news.
Louis:
Well Mr. Mollenboff, you've got a long reputation since you're
Des Moines courthouse days as a can-opener kind of reporter. How different is it in
Washington from
Des Moines? And what is it that it takes?
Mollenhoff:
Well, it represents the same kind of a basic problem, Louis. Every government official will try to put out his handout. Now there wasn't such a thing as an actual handout in
Des Moines, Iowa, but they did the same thing. They give you their side of the story and it's our obligation under those circumstances to go in and find the other side.
And now, it doesn't make any difference whether it is the State Department, the Internal Revenue Service, Justice Department. If we rely on what they put out in their handout, we're going to be peddling a phony bill of goods, because they are going to put the best possible blush on it possible.
What we have to do is to take what they give us, inquire into it, dig into it, and it is at this point that we must have direct access to the departments. The press officers in
Washington too often become the sole funnel of information out of the department. And I know in the Justice Department this has been true over the years. Now there's been some relaxation of that under Luther Huston recently, but you couldn't talk to an assistant or to the Attorney General; you talked to the press officer. And he would tell you what the situation was. There was no access to direct sources.
Louis:
Well, Mr. Lahey, I'm thinking of the qualifications for a reporter to do this kind of aggressive reporting it takes. I remember when you were a Nieman Fellow I asked you why you were spending your time studying accounting. I think you said, so you could figure out the fish hooks in a municipal budget. How does that work with you in this tough
Washington problems of budgets and taxes and foreign aid?
Lahey:
I'm glad you asked that question, senator, because...I wanted to say Mr. Mollenhoff is on the suppression kick, that's important. But you can, too much concern about that can make you overlook another very grave problem of reporting
Washington. And that's the ability of synthesizing and personalizing these vast problems that just by the very nature of our society and our government are too big to handle.
Louis:
You mean dramatize them so the reader can get them?
Lahey:
Inflation is one of the grand nicks to the danger of war, inflation in this country is one of the greatest problems we have. The worth of the pension systems in this country has been expropriated 50 or 60 per cent in the last fifteen years by the process of inflation. This affects about every worker, which is about 15 or 20 million affected by pension systems being devalued through inflation. Now, just personalizing that and bringing home to a man who is going to feel the full effect of it when he is 65 and discovers that his pension cannot keep him in
Florida as he had hoped it would...
Louis:
You mean that some stories are pretty complicated for the reader to follow?
Lahey:
Just because of the magnitude of them. It's like trying to simplify astrophysics.
Kimball:
Mr. Lahey, when Mr. James Reston of The New York Times was on this program, he said that the public didn't have the stomach for all the facts that came out of
Washington, that most of the stories were too complicated for the public. Do you agree with that?
Lahey:
That's true, and that states my question in a different way, that the problem of the newspaperman in
Washington – and a most difficult one – is to take these complicated modem problems like the Cold War and inflation and the flow of all the conflicting forces in the world and try to simplify them. Most of us write for people who move their lips when they read. We are not all egghead papers. We have to compress a vast problem into six or seven hundred words.
Louis:
And you're known as the taskmaster of that. Well, let me ask Mr. Mollenhoff, Ed, whether, to what extent do the conventions of what's news get in the way of the reporting we might get? Does the reporter feel he has to wait for what he calls a news peg or news break?
Mollenhoff:
Well I don't think that we have to wait for it, but the reason is there's too much of a tendency to wait for the news break. There are many excellent stories that do just the job that Mr. Lahey was speaking about, in dramatizing the basic problem that may be buried in hearings, that may be buried in one hearing or a dozen hearings, but they don't get out in the proper way because the day that the story broke originally, something else overshadowed it. A big story like the sending up of a satellite might have overshadowed a very important dramatic event. And I say, we should go back under those circumstances and recap on this.
Louis:
Well, let me ask both of you gentlemen. You work for great newspapers, and for more than one newspaper. To what extent do the people who run the newspaper – the publishers and the editors – encourage and stimulate men to do the kind of digging work for which you are both noted? How much of this goes on?
Mollenhoff:
As far as I'm concerned, I have pretty much freedom in where I want to go and what I want to cover. I know that in some smaller bureaus there are problems
Washington in that frequently they have only one or two correspondents, and they'll want one correspondent to cover the White House and have a by-line for prestige purposes and somebody else to be fifteen minutes ahead on routine news. And under these circumstances the reporter cannot do a digging job. And I think in that way. they stand in the way of good reporting.
Louis:
Well Ed, what would you say as to what you see of newspaper work in terms of your own standards and judgments of what you'd like to see done in
Washington?
Lahey:
Well, I don't have any sharp criticism, understanding the difficulty of it. Things happen too fast in our age. It's hard to adjust yourself to a big event that is gone tomorrow before you have time to interpret it. Now the reporter might decide that this is worth interpretation for tomorrow and maybe he's knocked out of the box by another big story. It's a day-by-day difficulty.
Louis:
Something else is on the front page and washed out yesterday's [inaudible]...
Lahey:
Yes, yes, it's a question of space. Critics of the newspaper, of whom there are approximately 175 million in this country, always forget the basic fact that the newspaper is a business institution, and the freedom of the press is founded on the necessity of being solvent. There's no more important objective to a newspaper than being solvent.
Louis:
I thought you were going to say – and I think you might well say that the newspaper's job, that is, the reporter's job, is an impossible job with all the complexities, let alone secrecy and censorship.
Lahey:
That is right. At any given moment, in a local room, a state capital bureau, or a
Washington bureau or a foreign bureau, any given moment of any given day there is more to do than it is humanly possible to do. I have never had a day in
Washington when that was not true.
Mollenhoff:
...a strategic story; you've got to be selective and strike for the jugular as I've heard you say.
Mollenhoff:
Mr. Lahey, this though, I don't think we should present this as an impossible job. We can never tell everything that's going on in government. But we can point up the basic problems, and it's this problem of regulatory agencies. Most of us were aware of this problem in some degree or another over a period of the last four or five years.
But it took the Goldfine-Adams case to dramatize this in a way that people all over the country could understand that it is not right for someone sitting in the White House – whether it is Sherman Adams or in a lower echelon – to reach out into the regulatory agencies, quasi-judicial bodies, and determine what happens.
Lahey:
Keeping in mind, old boy, at all times that you cannot bore the reader for very long and stay in business.
Mollenhoff:
Well, I say you don't have to bore them. I say we hit the basic point, we dramatize it and then we can leave it.
Kimball:
Mr. Mollenhoff, I'd like to ask you this wrap-up question. You've spoked out, you've spoken about barriers created by government and the difficulties of covering
Washington. Now what is the real problem here? Is it secrecy or is it lack of enterprise by the press?
Mollenhoff:
It represents a little bit of both. Too...there are too few reporters who will dig into things; there are too few who are actually free to dig into things. In addition to this, those who do dig into things frequently find themselves in a position where it is a back-breaking task to go from door to door in an agency to get a story. And investigative reporting is the most tiring thing that there is.
Louis:
Thank you very much, gentlemen. Well, one answer to official secrecy is aggressive reporting. Perhaps it's the only one. When any department of government can veil with secrecy anything it wants to hide, then we must rely on the can-opener capacities of our Ed Laheys and Clark Mollenhoffs. The public interest depends on the vigor and the shrewdness and the courage and the independence of such men. Of course there are never enough such men in any business.
But we have hundreds of correspondents in
Washington. And this brings us to the question whether the press is organized to do all the digging that we, the public, need. If the problem of the press is government secrecy, then why parade a regiment of correspondents at every formal press conference and unleash only a handful to explore the thickets where the news may be hidden?
We certainly need more than a handful for this toughest job. And if the government is going to act to the press like Batista, maybe the press should take a leaf from Castro's guerrilla tactics. Well, the kind of news that our Mollenhoffs and Laheys dig for is nothing trivial. From
Teapot Dome down to the Teamsters' corruption of public officials, the initiative of exposure has repeatedly come from hard-digging reporters.
Without their penetrating reporting, the press could easily lapse into nothing much but an official gazette for what officials were willing to publish. An open society is certainly the only free society, and it will only be secure to us if the press is in hands the people can trust – that is, those who leave the Laheys and the Mollenhoffs to follow their leads, who will publish their findings, and who will deploy enough reporters of such capacities to do the whole job. Only such a press certainly is adequate as the guardian of our liberties. So until next week at this time on The Press and the People, this is Louis Lyons.