President & Press

Into the office of Franklin D. Roosevelt one day last week filed a hundred-odd Washington correspondents, for the President's usual bi-weekly press conference. As usual, the reporters fell into two groups: 1) those assigned exclusively to cover President Roosevelt's activities, 2) other correspondents and their newspaper friends. Members of the first group drifted toward the front of the room, as usual, and as usual the United Press's tremendous Fred Storm lowered himself into his special chair so that those in the rear could see past him. Franklin Roosevelt gripped a long cigaret holder in his jaw, as he almost always does.

But the President's jaw was set hard and Franklin Roosevelt did not grin at his interviewers. Most of the correspondents looked uncomfortable. The room was quiet as a church. The President broke the silence, made his announcement on neutrality. The questions asked him were terse and sober; his replies were concise. Not a word did Franklin Roosevelt say to Fred Storm, one of his favorite correspondents, about his leaving U. P. to work for Sam Goldwyn and Jimmy Roosevelt in Hollywood. When the conference was over the newspapermen filed out as quietly as they had entered, and everybody knew that, for a time at least, a new atmosphere existed between the President and the Press.

It would not have been in good taste for Franklin Roosevelt to mention Fred Storm's new job publicly, either to congratulate him or commiserate with him on leaving U. P. For only the day before, for the first time in history, a President of the U. S., in a written statement, had accused a press association of sending out a story that was "wholly false." The association was United Press. Facts in the case were these:

Two days before, Ronald G. Van Tine of the U. P. had been told by a Senator (whom he refused to name) that the President was "hopping mad" over the shelving of his Neutrality Bill, that Secretary Hull was urging him not to send a "forceful" message to Congress. The U. P.'s Grattan P. McGroarty had got similar news at the State Department. Correspondents Van Tine and McGroarty sent out a story, under Van Tine's signature, beginning: "President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Hull were reported in Administration quarters today to have disagreed on the language of a neutrality message the President plans to send to Congress." The Washington Times-Herald printed the story under an eight-column headline:

NEUTRALITY NOTE SPLITS F. D., HULL

Cold with anger, Franklin Roosevelt sat down and dictated a statement, denying that he and Cordell Hull had yet decided what to do next about neutrality, giving U. P. a piece of his mind. Excerpts:

"The headline is, of course, wholly false; so is the story. . . . The United Press has been guilty of a falsification of the actual facts. If called upon to give the source of the information, they will decline to give it. ... The fact remains that the story is contrary to every fact. ... I am calling this to the attention of the public because it represents a culmination of other false news stories to which the attention of the United Press has been called by me and by my office on previous occasions. . . . This latest episode . . . represents the limit of any decent person's patience. ..."

U. P.'s Washington bureau manager, Lyle C. Wilson, stuck by his reporters, although President Roosevelt called him in for a personal dressing-down. U. P. President Hugh Baillie waited until the President had given out his neutrality message, then issued a statement pointing out that the tone of the message checked with the U. P. story. Sharply he added: "The information contained in the story was obtained from Government officials at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. We regarded those sources as reliable and we regarded the information as news, and still so regard it."

Significance. No teapot tempest was this latest row between President and Press, but a crisis in a relationship that has been slowly but steadily losing love since the early days of 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was the hero of the Press and he esteemed the reporters who had been so good to him. Within a few months a tiny cloud appeared: the President did not like the slants of certain stories. At first he thought the headline writers were responsible, blamed the trouble on a technicality of newspaper editing. But before long, as more & more unfriendly material crept into the papers, he was blaming the publishers. The working newspapermen were still his friends.

Later Franklin Roosevelt began attacking the columnists, in off-the-record talks to editors. Below-the-belt personal attacks in a "confidential letter" put out by the McClure Newspaper Syndicate increased his bitterness, caused the correspondents themselves to rule all such confidential agencies out of White House Press conferences. Harold LeClair Ickes has ably carried on President Roosevelt's feud with the columnists.

Within the last year or so the President has included reporters, individually and collectively, in his more frequent and increasingly bitter attacks on the Press. He has frequently answered reporters' questions by saying: "It depends on what paper you work for." Last month he gave Lyle Wilson a mild dressing-down for a story in which Wilson intimated that the tax bill was a Presidential defeat. And early last week he bawled out the correspondents for their dope stories on the McNutt appointment. That had a good deal to do with the coolness of the second conference.

Although the blast at U. P. specifically exempted the rest of the Press, it is not at all certain that the Press will so regard it. In its higher brackets the Press has grown increasingly hostile to Franklin Roosevelt, and the Washington correspondents, heretofore individually friendly, have a clannish habit of closing their ranks when one of them is attacked. Because the longer and harder he works the more sensitive he gets, every U. S. President since and including Wilson has sooner or later broken with the working Press. Regardless of the provocation, President Roosevelt is too smart to stand for a rupture if he can help it, but he might provoke the correspondents into making it. If that happens, whether Franklin D. Roosevelt, with the radio at the command of his persuasive voice, can lose the Press in toto and keep the country with him from now through 1940, will be a momentous question to the nation and to the nation's Press.

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