Kennedy: The Classic Biography (60 page)

His own extensive reading, and his participation in every level of government, was his best preparation. On most of the questions which Salinger or I read off, he simply nodded for the next one, a signal that he felt confident he could handle that subject. On others, he asked questions of those present or directed that more information be obtained. His answers were never written out or practiced—he simply wanted to feel comfortable with each possible subject. Our discussions frequently produced humorous answers, which were usually too barbed for his serious consideration but which at times I could detect him deliberating as he listened to an actual question at the conference. “It is dangerous to have them in the back of my head,” he once told me, and he predicted from the tone of our discussion one morning that the press conference that evening would become “The 6 O’clock Comedy Hour.”

In actuality his own humorous responses, nearly all of them spontaneous, were both funnier and more appropriate than any we suggested. He poked fun at many subjects, but particularly his Republican detractors. Refusing to comment on various charges by Nixon and Goldwater, he expressed “sympathy” for the “problems” they were encountering. Told about a Republican resolution that he was a failure, he observed drily, “I am sure it was passed unanimously.” Asked if he had any judgment on a series of Republican leadership seminars, he wondered aloud who could be supplying them with leadership—“But I’m sure they’ll have a varied program.” Equally often he laughed at himself. Told that the appearance of a Band-Aid on his finger would surely cause inquiries from viewing editors, he explained, “I cut my finger when I was cutting bread—unbelievable as it may sound.”

At times, on more serious matters, he would threaten during the breakfast to speak some harsh truth or opinion that caused shudders in the Department of State. “If I followed your advice on every topic which you want me to avoid answering,” he said one morning, “I would stand up there with nothing to say.” Later, when it was suggested that he might be asked about a recent stream of astonishing remarks former President Truman had volunteered on such subjects as taxes and racial intermarriage, President Kennedy observed, “Compared with Truman’s advisers, you fellows don’t have any problems.”

Often Bundy, Salinger and I spent most of the hours between the breakfast and the conference, usually held at 4
P.M.
, securing additional information or working on his opening statements, which also had been reviewed at breakfast. The President preferred to have from one to three opening statements or announcements of importance for each news conference, not to take time away from the questions but to provide some focus for them, and to make use of this rare opportunity and sizable audience. Pending bills in particular were pushed in this form rather than in a long speech. During a sensitive world crisis an opening statement of policy might also be used to ward off further questions on that subject.

From 3:00 to 3:40
P.M.
we usually met with him once more as he dressed in his bedroom, reviewing last-minute changes and developments. Then he would hurry out with Salinger, muttering once again that he felt doubtful and defenseless about the whole thing.

Regular press conferences—and, equally important, the preparation for them—had many values. “It’s like preparing for a final exam twice a month,” the President commented. These sessions kept him, and his staff, on top of everything going on in the government, in the press and in the public mind, instead of concentrating on a few crises. They enabled him to fix a deadline for the announcement of various projects. They gave him an opportunity to articulate the administration’s policy for everyone in the administration, and I always detected a greater sense of direction and pride throughout the Executive Branch following a particularly good press conference. They provided him with a low-key excuse to speak directly to Congress and to foreign governments. They enabled him to dominate the front pages, for which Congress and the Republicans were competing.
⁴

Above all, the televised press conferences provided a direct communication with the voters which no newspaper could alter by interpretation or omission. “We couldn’t survive without TV,” remarked the President one evening, as he watched a rebroadcast of that day’s conference.

For these reasons, after abandoning the idea of weekly news conferences in the crisis-filled year of 1961, he finally decided, partly as a matter of self-discipline, to subject himself to regularly scheduled news conferences at intervals of one to three weeks even when he felt there was insufficient news to supply them. Even then he took some delight when a trip, a holiday or the substitution of other press activities led to a longer interval, and during the Cuban, Berlin and race relations crises he did not hesitate to avoid news conferences for seven- or nine-week stretches. Nevertheless, in thirty-four months in the White House, he held sixty-three formal televised news conferences in Washington as well as numerous other special Presidential question-and-answer sessions. No one of these was either called, or canceled once called, because of any sudden emergency.

On very few occasions Kennedy received advance word, usually through Salinger, that a particular question would be asked, and on even fewer occasions, no more than a dozen in three years, he arranged to plant a pertinent question in advance. While his own preparations were designed to anticipate as many questions as possible, the twenty to twenty-five questions raised in each conference invariably included at least one not remotely foreseen in the several dozen topics we had reviewed. Nor did he attempt to select only friendly reporters in singling out one of the many on their feet after each answer. He often seemed to point more to his right than to his left, but this had no hidden ideological significance.

Many of those with whom he was most friendly asked unfriendly questions, to which he never objected. He preferred hard, controversial questions to soft, generalized queries. The sharper the question, the more sharply he felt he could answer. He listened patiently to long statements concealed as questions and engaged in no direct debate with reporters. Often he was champing to give his answer before the question was completed.

At no time did he lose his dignity, his temper or his control of the situation. He made a few misstatements of fact but no major blunders. His answers were almost always brief. Some of the best were no more than a sentence or even a word. Would he comment on the possibilities of a neutron bomb? “No.” Was he certain the Soviets really put two men in orbit? “Yes.”

Questions asked by female correspondents invariably provided an element of entertainment, if not information. He knew that May Craig’s questions were more likely to be puzzling than weighty, but he always shared the television viewers’ curiosity about what her question would be, and he always called on her. One lady reporter provoked a rare show of anger by using a question to brand two State Department employees as “well-known security risks.” The President responded immediately that he was familiar with both men, their records and their assignments, which he believed they could carry out “without detriment to the interests of the United States, and I hope without detriment to their characters by your question.” But he continued to call on this reporter at every conference. “I’d like to pass her by,” he once confided, “but something always draws me to recognize her.”

1
When, as President, he became a member of the National Press Club, its bulletin board solemnly pronounced: “John F. Kennedy, a former newspaperman now in politics, was approved for membership.” The President at a news conference summed it up more casually: “A lot of journalists have bad luck.”

2
His general experience, particularly with the State Department and Pentagon, was that those who knew didn’t tell and those who told didn’t know.

3
He regarded the author of that particular article as particularly biased and hostile, and upon learning that he had secured a sensitive Pentagon post for his temporary active duty in the Air Force, the President wasted no time in changing his orders—“preferably out in some desert,” he told the White House Air Force aide.

4
A comparative survey by Professor Elmer Cornwell has shown that the Kennedy press conferences generated far more newspaper stories, not only in the number of articles but in total space, than those of any of his predecessors. In a single year, Kennedy in his conferences produced more news than Roosevelt had meeting the press three or four times as often.

CHAPTER XIII
THE PUBLIC

B
UT THE PRESIDENT
would not rely on the press conferences alone to inform the American people. Every working day Kennedy filled the news with statements, releases, proclamations, memoranda, public letters, messages and reports to the Congress and remarks to small groups in the White House. Every time he signed a bill, presented a medal, toasted a prime minister, swore in an official, lamented a death or approved a commemorative stamp, he spoke with a larger audience in mind. The press received twice as many White House news releases each year as had ever been true before.

Salinger held two press briefings every day. Comprehensive background briefings were inaugurated to explain every Presidential message to the Congress. A few special news sessions were held by the President at Cape Cod and Palm Beach. He was the author of several magazine articles, on subjects ranging from the arts to physical fitness, and the subject of cover stories in every kind of magazine.

Kennedy also initiated a series of White House luncheons with editors and publishers, mostly on a state-by-state basis (although one friendly get-together was limited to prominent newspapers which had opposed him in 1960). Well briefed in advance on their names, views and state’s problems, he talked informally, confidentially and extremely frankly about their interests and his. Wary news executives suspicious of being taken in by his charm went away impressed by his competence. “You ought to talk to the people this way,” said one publisher. To which the President replied, “What do you think I’m doing right now?”

During his Christmas holiday in Palm Beach, both in 1961 and 1962, he invited the two dozen or so regular White House correspondents accompanying him to a free-wheeling three-to-four-hour “backgrounder” in his home on the year behind and the year ahead, dividing each session into domestic and foreign affairs discussions. Year-end “think pieces” (which would have been written anyway, he reasoned) were in this way better informed of views attributable to “the highest authority” or “sources close to the administration.” Although these phrases deceived no one in the know, it made for a freer and fuller exchange than would have been true of a regular press conference or a larger background group in Washington. The State Department also sponsored regular background briefings for editors at which the President spoke off the record. He also made frequent public addresses, usually followed by question-and-answer sessions, to various organizations of editors, publishers, business publications, inter-American press executives and cartoonists.

TELEVISION

But his greatest weapon, he said more than once, was television. In addition to his televised press conferences and major speeches, the President frequently issued short statements on television from the White House and frequently granted special television interviews. The most successful of these was the unprecedented interview conducted by the three White House correspondents for the major networks, carried by all three to a vast audience in December, 1962. The President did not influence the choice of either questioners or questions. Relaxed in his White House rocker, with no crowd of reporters and with the cameras concealed, he spoke with astonishing candor—almost as if he thought it was a private interview—about his views of the office, his problems and prospects. Receiving a tremendously favorable response, he planned to make such an appearance an annual affair, and scheduled a repeat performance for December 17, 1963, the anniversary of the first.

The President, along with his office, his family and the White House, also became the focal point of numerous television (and illustrated magazine and newspaper) presentations which took the public behind the scenes. Reporters and cameramen stayed with the President in the course of his duties to record “a typical day at the White House,” “the actual conduct of Presidential business” or “how a decision is made.” These were not simulated conferences of the types staged in the previous administration. The reporters or cameramen were simply there when one of us walked into the President’s office for a wholly unrehearsed meeting.

At times some of his associates were less comfortable than he with a camera crew observing their deliberations, and at times we found it necessary to make somewhat oblique references to sensitive subjects. Some critics worried that the presence of cameramen or reporters might interfere with the natural flow of business. But the President never permitted their presence when it might do so.

Kennedy wearied of hearing how much more often Roosevelt had used the “fireside chat,” and he discovered with much satisfaction that the faulty memory of its advocates had greatly exaggerated its frequency. The largest number of “fireside chats” FDR ever made in one year was a total of four in his first year, at the depth of the depression and the height of his influence. He made only four more during the rest of his entire first term, and throughout his whole tenure averaged fewer speeches from his office than Kennedy.

The danger which limited both men was not too much “exposure,” as commonly assumed, but too little selectivity. “The public psychology,” wrote Roosevelt, expressing sentiments which Kennedy shared, “cannot…be attuned for long periods of time to a constant repetition of the highest note in the scale.”