The Paper Everyone's Talking About

The delivery truck pulled up to the White House, and Driver William Shaw got out with the ten free daily copies of the New York Herald Tribune that are allotted to the White House tenant. But before Shaw had a chance to drive off, a White House messenger appeared, ripped the wrapper off the bundle and tossed all ten Tribs back into the truck. "What'll I do with them?" asked Shaw. "I don't care what you do with them," said the White House man coldly, "but I don't want them around here."

Thus last week, an irate Tribune reader named John Fitzgerald Kennedy served public notice that he no longer wanted the Trib--not even for free. Around the corner from the White House, at the Card and Gift Town Shop, Newsdealer Bernard Gorlen had already got the word. The White House called to cancel its subscription to the 23 daily and 13 Sunday Tribunes that Gorlen has been delivering since Inauguration Day. What was bothering the President, Gorlen wondered. For the rest of the week, all he had to do was to read the papers--any paper--to find out.

"Light Reading." By far the best source on the subject was Presidential Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, who not only helps pick the boss's reading matter but shares Kennedy's feelings about the Tribune. Salinger was so eager to talk about the cancellation that he began dropping broad hints all over--although no one caught them at first but CBS and the Washington Post. Then, as reporters began pressing him for an explanation, Salinger put out several--each one contradicting the one before. After all, said Salinger, the boss "can read just so many papers. We get five New York newspapers now,* and that gives us quite a spread of opinion. In fact, the people around here have been reading the Herald Tribune less and less." Was the President sore at the Trib? Well, no, said Salinger. Then he noticed that no one seemed to believe him.

The President was sore at the Trib, all right, said Salinger, but that had nothing to do with it: "If we were to cancel subscriptions to all the papers who were opposed to the Administration, it would be kind of light reading around here." Well then, he was asked, why did Kennedy blow his top? "I think the culmination came," Salinger went on, "with the disclosure that the Herald Tribune completely ignored the stockpiling investigation." He was referring to a leftover Eisenhower Administration scandal, in which a copper company got a $6,000,000 windfall. Salinger was wrong, argued Trib Reporter David Wise. The Trib had indeed missed early editions with the story, but finally carried it--in the second section on page 32. Humphed Salinger: "If we're interested in history we'll start buying history books."

Dust & Dirt. By presidential taste, the Republican Tribune rarely makes pleasant reading these days. While other papers, as if anxious to give Kennedy the benefit of all possible doubt, waited for the dust in Pecos to settle a bit before jumping onto the Billie Sol Estes story, the Trib not only stirred dust but dished dirt. Eight days before the New York Times, for example, saw fit to move the developments in Pecos onto Page One, the Trib's frontpage headlines screamed: TEXAS SCANDAL REACHES FAR.

The Trib let Kennedy have it on a variety of other scores. After Salinger's return from a tour of Russia, the paper front-paged a caustic cartoon that showed the secretary reporting to his boss: "Mr. Khrushchev said he liked your style in the steel crisis" (see cut). The Trib also carried a Page One editorial arraigning the President as the cause of the market decline. Back in the business section, Financial Editor Donald Rogers not only blamed the slump on Kennedy, but called him an "antibusiness" schemer.

For all that, the President's abrupt cancellation filled the Tribune's editors with what sounded very much like dismay. "We are distressed," it editorialized, after hearing the news. "We would hope that the President has not canceled because of hard reporting by our greatly respected staff or because of the critical nature of our editorial page . . . We hope the President will instruct his assistants to renew the White House subscriptions. And soon." If not, added the Trib later, it would limp along with its other Washington subscribers--notably the U.S. Information Agency (94 copies), the State Department (20), Secretary of State Rusk and the Attorney General (one each).

Petulant Purge. By then, the whole affair was beginning to look more than a little silly. It got even sillier. With straight-faced pride, the Tribune announced that 43 persons had offered to pay for gift subscriptions to the White House. Reporter Wise, presumably under orders, handed Salinger a contraband copy of the Tribune. But Salinger set it aside unopened, to defend the boss's right not to read any paper he likes. "The First Amendment to the Constitution grants the right of the press to print what it wants," said Salinger solemnly, "and the right of readers to choose what they want to read, and I'm sure that includes the President."

What the President wanted to read instead of the Tribune, it turned out, was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Notified that the White House wanted 22 copies delivered every day, the Post-Dispatch, a liberal paper whose sentiments closely approximate Kennedy's own, splashed the good word all over its news pages, but otherwise said nothing at all.

Other voices began to be heard. To New York Times Washington Bureau Chief James Reston, a Kennedy supporter, it seemed particularly ridiculous that the President should bother to pop off at any segment of a press that has generally been more than kind. ("Never in recent American history has such a humiliating blunder as Cuba been passed over so lightly.") In the New York Daily News, Capital Columnist Ted Lewis urged Kennedy admirers to forgive Kennedy's "petulant purge." Said Lewis: "The man in the White House is overburdened. His problems frustrate him, for none of the big ones has an easy solution. So he has a right to blow off steam once in a while."

Out in Seattle to make a speech, Tribune Publisher and Owner John Hay Whitney, former U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, accepted his paper's fall from grace with more good humor than his editors had. As a result, he was alert enough to sneak in a plug for a paper that has been vastly improved under his aegis. "To ascribe as a reason [for the cancellation] that the President has time to read just so many newspapers," said Whitney, "just doesn't jibe with the fact that on the Eastern seaboard the Tribune is the paper everyone is talking about." The Trib's Paris columnist, Art Buchwald, took it nicely from there. Reporting that he had a letter from a little girl in Washington whose three-year-old friend Caroline told her there was no New York Herald Tribune, Buchwald wrote a jolly "Yes, Virginia" reply sprinkled with needles: "Not believe in the Herald Tribune? It's like saying you don't believe in Billie Sol Estes or Pecos, Texas."

He was fast but not fast enough, discreet but not discreet enough. He had served four Presidents, mastered Churchill's stutter and Eisenhower's wayward syntax, but the new tempo of the White House was not his, and last week Official Stenographer Jack Romagna was unceremoniously fired. The sacking left correspondents morosely pondering a final, unanswered question: Was Romagna's fatal mistake marking the transcript of a presidential telephone talk "From the White House swimming pool"?

*The Daily News, Times, Post, Journal-American, Wall Street Journal.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.