"Strange Reversal"

Seldom had Washington seen so bad a botch of an important story. The Associated Press started the trouble. It reported that the Administration was stepping up its request for congressional foreign-aid appropriations to "nearly $5 billion" in the next fiscal year. To that point, A.P. was right. Where the A.P. went wrong was in suggesting that this meant a big. trend-reversing boost in U.S. foreign-aid spending next year. In Washington fiscal parlance, an "appropriation," i.e., what Congress votes, is no synonym for an "expenditure" (what the Administration spends) in the same year. The A.P. muffed the fact that the backlog in foreign-aid funds had dwindled to the point where a much larger appropriation was needed to keep next year's spending at substantially this year's level. The A.P. story ran in papers across the U.S.

Confounding Confusion. But the paper that gave the story the most spectacular wrong play was the one that ordinarily takes the most virtuous pride in its accuracy as a handmaiden of history--the New York Times. After checking the A.P. story, Times Washington Correspondent Elie Abel wrote a dispatch that hovered at times on the brink of the right explanation, but managed to mislead Times readers as surely as it misled Times editors. Under a two-column head, the Times put his story in the coveted front-page turn (column eight) position: FOREIGN AID GOAL UP ALMOST 100% ; PUT AT 5 BILLION. The editors confounded the confusion even more: though Abel cautiously quoted Defense Department spokesmen as denying any change in foreign-aid policy, their headline called it an APPARENTLY SUDDEN POLICY REVERSAL.

In Washington, where the Times is read as the Gospel according to Matthew, the story threw Congressmen, foreign embassies and Administration officials into a tizzy. The Times, which also prides itself on the completeness of its coverage, dutifully covered the furor. Taking its loftiest tone, it added its own editorial-page demand that "this strange reversal" be "either denied or explained."

"Gobbledygook." Two days later explanations flowed all too eagerly from the Times itself, which had meantime caught up with the right story. On Page One. under the headline FUND REQUEST UP BUT AID SPENDING WILL HOLD STEADY, Washington Bureau Chief James ("Scotty") Reston spelled out the "misunderstanding" in more than a column: he put the blame on "Washington gobbledygook" and a confusion of signals between the White House and congressional leaders. For good measure, in the same paper the Times's other Washington big gun, Pundit Arthur Krock, devoted a full column on the editorial page to explaining why there had been NO SIGNIFICANT INCREASE IN FOREIGN AID.

Nothing that Reston and Krock wrote about the "confusion" contained the faintest hint that the Times had played any hand in it. The same day, at his press conference, Secretary of State Dulles nailed down the fact that the appropriation request would indeed be bigger, but that this meant only a 5% hike in actual foreign-aid spending and no change in policy. Primly smoothing its skirts as if nothing had happened--and Reston and Krock had not spoken--the Times headlined Correspondent Abel's straight-faced story: DULLES CONFIRMS PLAN TO INCREASE FOREIGN AID FUND.

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