Brownout in Washington

To Washington newsmen, one of the important stories last week concerned the press itself. The story: the increasing restrictions on news. Wrote U.P. Washington Bureau Chief Lyle Wilson: "The 'brownout' of news by the Eisenhower Administration [has] reached a new high . . . Washington reporters are becoming increasingly alarmed [over the] withholding of the public's urgent business from the public." The brownout, wrote Wilson, often concerns news that has nothing to do with defense, e.g., a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare conference to discuss distribution of the Salk vaccine was closed to newsmen.

Other reporters--and their bosses--joined the protest against the brownout, centering their fire on the restrictions on news imposed by Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson under his new information policy (TIME, April 18). At the annual Manhattan meeting of the American Newspaper Publishers Association (see above) Richard W. Slocum, Association president and executive vice president of the Philadelphia Bulletin, called upon Wilson to change his ways. Said Slocum: "We shall hope that our well-intentioned Secretary of Defense will quickly see the error in his recent resort to censorship."

No Error? But Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson was not conceding there was any "error" in his order. Last week at his own press conference, he explained again that the order was aimed only at "technical information [which will] give our enemies advantages they do not already have." Wilson pleaded with reporters for a chance to see how the order would work out, then announced a reorganization of his department that was not encouraging to the press.

Wilson centralized his information offices under the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. For the new job, he named R. Karl Honaman (on leave from Bell Telephone), who had gone to Washington six months ago to boss the Commerce Department's new Office of Strategic Information. There, he was primarily a censor, had set up a system for classifying technical information that reporters had once had access to. Thus, for the top information job at Defense, reporters were dismayed that Wilson had picked a man whose chief experience had been in withholding information rather than in giving it out.

No Trade. Next day, reporters made their complaints straight to President Eisenhower at his press conference. Three separate times, reporters rose to ask Ike about the new news brownout. Ike accepted responsibility for the tightening of security. Said he: "For some two years and three months I have been plagued by inexplicable . . . leaks in this Government." Some of the information, said Ike, "is the kind . . . that foreign intelligence systems spend thousands and thousands of dollars to get . . ."

What about a Republican Policy Committee's pamphlet on "National Defense Under the Republican Administration," with detailed information on new weapons, which was cleared by the Defense Department? Ike replied that printing and releasing it publicly was obviously a "blunder." Then he defined what he thought the Government's information policy should be. Said the President: "Everything ought to be given out that helps the public of the United States to profit from past mistakes, to make decisions of the moment . . . But . . . it doesn't help any of us to make a decision merely to know that a plane can fly 802 miles instead of 208. That is a secret we should not be giving out. And that is the kind of tiling I am talking about, and that only, I assure you."

For the most part, Washington reporters accepted Ike's assurances; they had no quarrel with the broad outlines of security that he had sketched out. But in Charlie Wilson's administrative order they saw a different problem. At the Pentagon, the brownout had already made even routine information difficult to get. Newsmen did not think that "time," as Charlie Wilson suggested, would work out the troubles. They felt that the troubles were inherent in the terms of the new policy, which used security as an excuse to withhold news.

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