J.F.K. & the Conference

Last week, as he had on six previous occasions, John F. Kennedy displayed near-flawless skills at a press conference.

He arrived well briefed on questions he was likely to be asked. He adroitly parried embarrassing queries, and he projected an image as a crisp and incisive leader. Indeed, most veteran Washington newsmen agree that in his press conference techniques Kennedy has never had a presidential equal. Yet among those same newsmen, there is an increasing sense of dissatisfaction.

Part of the problem lies in the changed press conference format. In Franklin Roosevelt's day, the press conference, held in the President's own office, amounted to an informal chat with a handful of regular White House reporters. Harry Truman held his conferences in an Old State Department conference room; yet they remained generally breezy affairs.

Dwight Eisenhower relaxed the ground rules, permitting his conferences to be taped for television as well as radio and authorizing the use of direct quotations.

Jack Kennedy's conferences are full-scale productions, held in a vast new auditorium and often televised live.

Riots for Recognition. The Kennedy conferences generally draw upwards of 300 newsmen--and the result is confusion.

As viewed on the nation's TV screens, the reporters' clamor for presidential recognition sometimes seems riotous. Some of the newsmen are plainly overcome by the possibilities for personal publicity in the televised conference. Says the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's sobersided Raymond P.

Brandt: "I'm afraid that a few of us are hams." A star performer is Sarah McClendon, who represents a group of small dailies from Texas to New Hampshire, and whose convoluted questions seldom fail to draw laughs. Asked she last week: "Mr. President, sir. What do you think of the Air Force and other branches of Government organizing these sidebar corporations and using taxpayers' money to circumvent the civil service and pay large scientists and others? Isn't this sort of incongruous with the call for volunteers for your Peace Corps?" Understandably, Kennedy's answer amounted to a courteous ahem.

Such has been the reaction to the press conferences that United Press International's Merriman Smith recently took public notice of heavy mail complaining about press-conference newsmen being rowdy, disrespectful and unkempt. Smith's defense: The fault really lies with the "shotgun mikes," which "have to sweep over a wide--and noisy--section of reporters before settling on the one recognized by the President." Last week, New York Times Washington Bureau Chief James Reston, with whimsical tone but considerable feeling, divided the blame between the President and the press. "The President," wrote Reston, "is the chief spokesman and newsmaker. He is releasing not only important news of the White House, but, as a device to limit the questioning, secondary news of the departments as well. Accordingly, he is attracting at every conference many more reporters than Eisenhower's norm." As one solution, Reston suggested briefer questions: "It wouldn't hurt if the reporters learned from Kennedy the arts of brevity and precisions of speech. Many of them are now following the example of the old lady who said, 'How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?' " But Reston had an even better tongue-in-cheek idea for reducing the crush: "Ban all reporters from the New York Times, or if that is too radical, cut the Times down to ten reporters."

False Conception. Other critics have questioned the merits of televised press conferences. "By accommodating television," wrote Robert J. Donovan, Washington bureau chief of the New York Herald Tribune, "Mr. Kennedy has robbed the presidential press conference of much of its best flavor. The intimacy between the President and the reporter has been diluted by distance. The President may find in the long run that television may not be such a good idea after all. Accessibility of the President is fine, but the presidency must not become commonplace." Televising the conference, said New York Post Capital Correspondent William V. Shannon, is "like televising a locker room after a World Series game. Superficially, nothing has changed. But the spontaneity is gone; 180 million people have suddenly become players in the game."

Senior Political Pundit Walter Lippmann found even graver cause for complaint: "The President makes announcements and the correspondents ask him questions in order to get stories, perhaps even scoops. That is, I believe, a basically false conception of why it is worthwhile to have the President submit himself to questions from the press. The real use of the presidential press conference is to enable the President to explain his policies and, if necessary, to compel him to explain them." In this respect, added Columnist Lippmann, the Kennedy conference format has been a failure: "President Kennedy, with all his political genius, is not yet in full effective communication with the people."

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