One-Party Press?

At the $100-a-plate Democratic dinner in Washington (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), Harry Truman staked out his favorite whipping boy, "the one-party press." "There has been no parallel in our history," said Truman, "to the cloak of protection thrown about this Administration by so much of the press . . . Never in the peacetime history of this nation has there been such a vast volume of persistent publicity to praise and extol an Administration." This week, on the day after the speech, the New York Times's Washington Bureau Chief James B. Reston angrily set Harry Truman straight: "Mr. Truman should have a talk with John Foster Dulles some time, if he can disentangle that gentleman from Mr. Corsi or get him out from under those Yalta papers. Or he should talk to Secretary of Defense Wilson. For while the editorial pages have been, as usual, partial to the Republican Administration, and some criticisms leveled at the Cabinet might very well have been aimed at the President, the surprising thing about the last two years in Washington is that the Washington reporters . . . have consistently been ahead of the Democratic leaders and politicians in digging out the facts and criticizing the contradictions and mistakes of this Administration. "Seldom in contemporary history has an opposition party been so slow or so ineffective in its criticism of major policies as the Democrats in the last two years. They have been very much to the fore in criticizing the Dixon-Yates power contract, the President's association with Bobby Jones, the Administration's farm program, the trapping of squirrels on the White House lawn and Mr. Eisenhower's churchgoing, but on the big issues [of] civil liberties and peace and war, their tardiness and timidity have been remarkable. "It has been the press and not the leaders of the Democratic Party who have drawn the attention of the country to the sloganeering of the Administration in the field of foreign policy: to the President's 'unleashing' of Chiang Kaishek, to Mr. Dulles' policies of 'massive retaliation,' 'liberation,' 'positive loyalty,' 'agonizing reappraisal' and 'united action.' It was the press that was pointing to the effects of Senator McCarthy's tactics on the Administration's authority . . . "Have Walter Lippmann, or Joseph Alsop, who write for a syndicate owned by a Republican newspaper, commented on this Administration's foreign policy with 'tender solicitude'? Has the New York Times or the New York Herald Tribune or the Washington Post and Times Herald, all of whom supported the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, shown any 'devotion' to this Administration's program on the big questions of 'loyalty' at home or war in the Formosa Strait? "If the country has what the Democrats call a one-party press, the Republicans have been cheated, for they have not even been able to count on the unfailing support of David Lawrence, and in Westbrook Pegler's book Eisenhower has almost (but not quite) replaced Roosevelt as the leading villain."

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