“Of the sensibility of the President to the calumnies against his Administration with which the press abounded, and of their new direction against him personally, his correspondence furnishes but few evidences,” Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in his biography of George Washington. One piece of evidence was a letter to a friend, which the President wrote during the summer of his fifth year in office, complaining that the calumnies were “diabolical” and were motivated by a desire “to impede the measures of [the] government generally but more especially to destroy the confidence which it is necessary the people should place (until they have unequivocal proof of demerit) in their public servants.” Although Washington felt, as he wrote in the same letter, that the “arrows of malevolence” aimed at him were “outrages on common decency,” he apparently made no public complaint about them. Nor did he see how they could be stopped by official action, because, he continued, “it is difficult to prescribe bounds to their effect.” Washington’s successor, John Adams, was not hampered by the same circumspect regard for the democratic proprieties, and he let his Federalist supporters in Congress push through the Sedition Act of 1798, which had the effect of making published criticism by the opposition a federal crime, punishable by imprisonment. Public resentment against this law was a cause of Adams’ forced retirement from the Presidency after a single term, and Thomas Jefferson’s strong opposition to the law, which was deliberately allowed to expire in 1801, was a cause of his election to succeed Adams. Despite Jefferson’s service to the principle of a free press, few of its members were inhibited by gratitude to him, and halfway through his first term he wrote to a correspondent in France, “Our newspapers, for the most part, present only the caricatures of disaffected minds. Indeed, the abuses of the freedom of the press here have been carried to a length never before known or borne by any civilized nation. ”Even so, he was content to trust that the people’s common sense would prescribe bounds to the effect of the press, and a year and a half later, in a letter to a friend in Virginia, he remarked on the vindication of his attitude over the intervening months: “The firmness with which the people have withstood the late abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false, and to form a correct judgment between them.” Though the press made virulent and scurrilous attacks on Jefferson’s conduct as President and on his morals as a man, he retained his conviction that the press’s contribution to democracy was essential to its survival and must not be tampered with, whatever the provocation. Seven years after he left the White House, he wrote, ‘Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.”
Each “strong” President since that time has also been vigorously criticized and viciously maligned by the press. Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln were portrayed by contemporary newspapers as backwoods yokels, clever schemers, and evil tyrants. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson suffered widespread attacks both on their policies and on their characters. Franklin Roosevelt was subjected to an unparalleled ten-year campaign of abuse and vilification by a great majority of the nation’s newspapers and magazines. Harry Truman was held up to ridicule and contempt by the press through most of his time in the White House. John Kennedy felt that he was dealt with unfairly by the press—mainly by some of the leading metropolitan newspapers in the East and by the news magazines. And Lyndon Johnson believed that the entire press was so nostalgic for Kennedy and so dominated by snobbish Easterners that it was incapable of appreciating his own accomplishments, or even of treating him decently. All these Presidents resented the attacks on them, despised the press for willfully distorting the truth as they saw it, and felt that the press often had grievously harmful effects on the nation. Still, they knew that nothing could be done to prescribe bounds to the press, because its freedom was guaranteed by the Constitution in order to give the people some independent means of learning what their government was doing, and because it would be impossible to assert what was fair and what was unfair without asserting a dictatorial power over the press.
Probably no other President has been as widely supported by the press and has then as bitterly and publicly criticized that institution as Richard Nixon. In 1960, Nixon was endorsed over Kennedy by seventy-eight per cent of the country’s newspapers that took a position on the election; in 1968, Nixon got eighty per cent of whatever editorial support was expressed; and in 1972 he got ninety-three per cent. (Like Kennedy, Nixon has probably meant to criticize certain powerful Eastern newspapers that he feels have not been sympathetic to him, but, unlike Kennedy, he has publicly and repeatedly attacked “the press” and “the media,” without naming the newspapers and columnists and network commentators he feels have been unfair, and so has left the impression in the public mind that the press as a whole cannot be trusted.) And President Nixon was also treated with uncommon charity by the press after he took office. This country’s reporters observe the odd tradition of providing a new President with a “honeymoon”—that is, leaving him largely free of press criticism for a few months after he is inaugurated, regardless of the damage done to the people’s right and need to know what the government is up to. Ordinarily, the journalistic honeymoon is three or four months long, but President Nixon’s honeymoon in 1969 ran for nearly nine months. As a result, very little was said by the press about some of the most important actions that the Nixon Administration took during the period—actions that showed the course it would follow. Among these were the Administration’s payoff for the success of the Southern strategy used in the campaign, and the consequent sharp reversal of the government’s efforts to help black people help themselves; the Administration’s covert attempts to undermine some of the basic safeguards against official oppression of the people and usurpation of their rights; and the Administration’s resort to deceit in carrying out its un-Constitutional war policy in Vietnam.
Rising public opposition to the war brought the initial acts of government repression—first, the prosecution of the radical leaders of the anti-war movement who had been the victims of the police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago the year before, and then the coördinated effort to intimidate the press into silence as soon as it belatedly began speaking out. The nationwide protest against the war held in mid-October of 1969—the Vietnam Moratorium—was a huge success in terms of the number of people who participated. Although the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees citizens the right to assemble and “petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” Vice-President Agnew, some days after all those citizens asserted this right, attacked them in a public address as “merchants of hate” and “parasites of passion,” and said that the nation could “afford to separate them from our society—with no more regret than we should feel over discarding rotten apples from a barrel.” From a man in such a high post, this statement could mean only that if citizens did not voluntarily stop criticizing the Administration, it might stop them, either by official sanctions or by vigilante action. Agnew’s threat and a constant flow of warnings from the Administration—delivered through the press—that violence was inevitable at another large anti-war demonstration, to be held in Washington a month later, were obviously part of a calculated attempt to frighten people out of going to the nation’s capital to exercise their rights of free assembly and free speech in petitioning the government for redress of their grievance against the war. This attempt failed; in Washington, at least ten times as many people attended the second demonstration—almost all of them peaceably. However, the principal aim of the anti-war movement was to increase the numbers of participants in future protests against the war by showing potential demonstrators around the country how many of their fellow-citizens were already willing to make their views known, and, as matters developed, that aim was defeated by the Administration. A day and a half before the November demonstration, Agnew made another speech, this time attacking the television networks, which he said were controlled by an “unelected elite.” The suggestion was that that part of the press should be controlled by elected public officials, and while this was, of course, deeply undemocratic, it was nowhere near as undemocratic or as alarming as his statement that “it is time that the networks were made more responsive to the views of the nation and more responsible to the people they serve.” Shortly afterward, Herb Klein, speaking as the Administration’s Director of Communications, told some reporters who were interviewing him that if newsmen didn’t control themselves the government would have to step in. There were howls of outrage from the press about these threats of official censorship, yet the threats worked. All three of the national television networks broadcast Agnew’s speech live, but a day and a half later, when close to half a million people gathered in Washington—the largest collection of citizens ever to gather there—C.B.S. and A.B.C. didn’t even have live cameras on hand to record the event, and N.B.C. presented only five minutes of live coverage. Although the Administration had been unable to stop hundreds of thousands of citizens from expressing their views, it had, by virtually suppressing television coverage and thereby eliminating the television reports that most Americans rely on for information, rendered the citizens’ demonstration almost as ineffective as if it had not taken place.
By the start of the 1972 Presidential campaign, a very large part of the press had been silenced by covert and overt threats from the Administration—chiefly by Agnew’s attacks and by the Justice Department’s prosecution of reporters who refused to act as government agents and informers by revealing their confidential sources to prosecutors, judges, and juries. During the campaign, the nation’s press said almost nothing about Mr. Nixon’s first-term record, and concentrated instead on Senator McGovern’s hapless conduct. And after the Watergate break-in only fourteen of the twenty-two hundred members of the Washington press corps made an effort to investigate and report it to any adequate extent, even though it was obviously one of the greatest political scandals in the history of the Republic. James Reston wrote, “The main charge against the press in general, though not against the few newspapers that exposed the deceptions of Vietnam and Watergate, is not that the press was too aggressive but that it was too timid or lenient or lazy.”
It was recently reported that the President now believes the press is “out to get him.” Considering the overwhelming failure of the press as a whole to tell the public what has been going on in Washington, it is difficult to comprehend the reasons for Mr. Nixon’s complaint. In his last couple of press conferences, he implied that he understood reporters’ current preoccupation with the Watergate case, but he made it clear at the same time that he resented and regretted it. Because the events of Watergate have eaten away at the roots of our political system, political reporters who did not dwell on it would be acting as scandalously in a journalistic sense as the President’s aides and associates have acted in a political sense. What, then, does the President actually object to? Part of the answer may be found in an exchange that took place during a recent Washington press conference. When Mr. Nixon was asked by a television correspondent if he considered the reported loss of public confidence in his leadership a problem, he replied that it was a problem, and went on, “It’s rather difficult to have the President of the United States . . . by innuendo, by leak, by, frankly, leers and sneers of commentators—which is their perfect right—attacked in every way without having some of that confidence being worn away.” That is, the public doubt about the President’s ability and honesty has not been raised by the proved and confessed crimes committed in his name and on his authority or by his failure, even now, to answer the vital questions about what has happened; rather, the doubt has been created by the press as it has attempted to inform the people about the way their government has acted, and may still be acting. As for innuendo, Mr. Nixon’s campaign for the Presidency and much of what he has done as President have been based largely on innuendo. For example, the Southern strategy and the slogan “law and order” were racism by innuendo; his appeal to the “silent majority” support on the war made the point by innuendo that his detractors were somehow unpatriotic; his creation of the busing issue rested on the suggestion by innuendo that white children would suffer irreparable harm if they came into contact with black children; his attacks on Congress and the courts were claims by innuendo that the separation-of-powers doctrine applied only to the Executive; and his repeated aspersions against the press have suggested by innuendo that an essential American institution is engaged in a conspiracy to destroy him. As for the matter of leaks to the press, Mr. Nixon, like other Presidents, has used leaks for his own purposes; his objection to leaks applies only when others use his own methods against him. For instance, in August he angrily condemned leaks to the press about the possible indictment of Vice-President Agnew, but a couple of weeks later he did nothing to stop or repudiate White House leaks to the effect that Agnew was about to resign. Moreover, in the Watergate case most of what has been leaked, from the outset, has merely made public some information that the Administration had suppressed and the people had every right to possess. Finally, Mr. Nixon’s contention that he has suffered a loss of public confidence because of the “leers and sneers of commentators” on television raises the question: Who are those commentators? His charge appears to be wholly without basis, for the leading commentators have been overly, even culpably, cautious in their observations on the President; in fact, since Agnew attacked them in 1969 there hasn’t been so much as an arched eyebrow in the lot.
In his press conference, Mr. Nixon went on to describe the way in which public confidence in him might one day be restored—by his “not allowing his own confidence to be destroyed,” by his taking “foreign-policy initiative,” by his making progress “on the domestic front,” and, most important, by the public’s watching “what the President does.” Action, not words, would bring back the people’s confidence, he suggested, and he concluded, “What the President says will not restore it. And what you ladies and gentlemen say will certainly not restore it.” Again, the innuendo was that the press—not Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Stans, Dean, Magruder, Liddy, McCord, Hunt, Kalmbach, Ulasewicz, Strachan, Colson, Krogh, or Young, and, above all, not the President—was responsible for the current condition of the Presidency. Ultimately, Mr. Nixon’s denial of responsibility means that he still refuses to recognize that the national goals he envisions cannot be attained until the Watergate issue—his creation, whatever the press has done—is fully resolved. Nor, of course, does the President recognize that it cannot be fully resolved until he stops attacking those in the press and in Congress who are trying to find out and clean up what happened, so that it won’t happen again, and starts helping them.
It is widely believed that Mr. Nixon came to detest the press because of the way it treated him in his 1960 race for the Presidency and in his 1962 race for the governorship of California. But in “The Making of the President 1960” Theodore H. White says Mr. Nixon was convinced long before his 1960 nomination that the press was conspiring against him. Perhaps he resented the press for labelling as McCarthyesque his tactics as a candidate for the House, as a representative, as a senator, and as Vice-President. While his resentment over that news coverage may not be justified, it is understandable; he has always wanted the right to use with impunity any tactics he chose. Historically, there was little reason for him to fear opposition from the press when he ran for the Presidency; in nearly half the Presidential elections in which the press has played an active part, the candidates who were most widely opposed by it won. When President Franklin Roosevelt chafed under the vicious attacks of a particular newspaper, the veteran journalist William Allen White told him, “Forget it. That is the way they make their money and that is the way they want to run their paper. It cannot hurt you, and it gives them some comfort.” Similarly, today’s press cannot hurt Mr. Nixon by manifestations of bias or dislike without some damaging facts to back them up—for as President he has far greater access to the public mind and far greater effect on it than the press has, and he has immeasurably more power than all the reporters, publishers, broadcasters, and network executives in the country put together. What is more, he must know it.
Since President Nixon’s Administration constantly did things in secret that would have been unacceptable to the public if they had been done in the open, there was always a danger that the press might discover and reveal what was going on. That is, the press was potentially Mr. Nixon’s enemy—far more than the courts or Congress, because only the press could dig out and tell the story (whatever help reporters might get from the courts or Congress) in a way that would arouse the people to demand an accounting. And since the news coverage of Mr. Nixon’s pre-Presidential career had shown him that he was not widely trusted by newsmen, the threat they posed must have seemed to him at times very close to being actual enmity. Then, when the Watergate disclosures actually carried out the threat, the enemy was suddenly at the White House door. Finally, since the Administration has volunteered very little information about what it did that was unethical or illegal, the press is bound to wonder if there is more to be uncovered and revealed. The possibility that more unsavory conduct will be brought out makes the press a continuing threat to and a continuing enemy of the President. It is sometimes claimed that anyone who achieves such a lofty position is bound to end up seeing himself not just as the people’s representative but as their embodiment, and to consider any attack on him an attack on them. Certainly President Nixon has often conveyed the impression that he feels this way. But the press is equally bound to view itself as the protector of the people’s interests, and so, ultimately, to identify itself with the people, too. That leaves the President and the press at loggerheads, which is exactly where they should be. Ideally, the press provides the check that keeps the branches of the government in the kind of balance they cannot maintain alone—the unique and irreplaceable check of public scrutiny.
Aside from Mr. Nixon’s efforts to reduce world tensions and to establish some measure of arms control, almost everything that he has done or tried to do as President has reflected the deepest desire of the country’s most reactionary elements: to reverse forty years of government efforts to create a more equitable society, and substitute a more authoritarian system. The anti-democratic forces—as distinguished from the country’s political moderates, both Republican and Democratic—that President Nixon has come to align himself with and, finally, to represent have long detested the press, partly because by their lights it expresses more detestable viewpoints than acceptable ones, and partly because the ultimate aims of these forces are so radical that an overwhelming majority of the public would be bound to reject them out of hand if they were widely publicized and widely understood. It is inevitable that in a democracy anti-democratic forces prefer to work m darkness. A free press is their natural enemy, because sooner or later, one way or another, it may tell people what is going on. Such things as the multiple crimes of Watergate, the secret bombing of Cambodia, the President’s lying to the people about that bombing, the Pentagon’s lying to Congress about it, and the Administration’s efforts to dismiss criticism of these events as attempts to “get” the President illustrate both the anti-democratic philosophy in action at the highest level and its inability to withstand public scrutiny. Although the anti-democratic forces have achieved one of their most cherished goals—control of the White House—they cannot abuse that control as long as the press is even half awake and as long as it’s free. Accordingly, it is no surprise that freedom of the press is today under the most severe attack since John Adams’ Administration.
The current attack on the press did not begin with Mr. Nixon. In fact, reactionary elements have been trying to undermine the press—and particularly the public’s confidence in it—for at least fifteen years. This effort seems to have begun during the late nineteen-fifties, as some Southern whites began to realize how they looked to citizens elsewhere in the nation when jeering crowds of adults tried to stop a few black children from entering a white public school in Little Rock; when blacks engaging in sit-ins and freedom rides were brutally beaten and then dragged off to jail to be beaten some more; when a demented mob of twenty-five hundred whites gathered at the University of Mississippi to prevent James Meredith from defiling its white halls; when Safety Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor turned fire hoses and police dogs on the thousands of followers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as they tried to desegregate Birmingham; when mounted Alabama troopers rode into throngs of unresisting black men, women, and children and clubbed hundreds to the ground during a voter-registration drive in Selma. Northern outrage over these episodes led to Southern anger that was finally turned against those who told the nation what was happening down South, and reporters and cameramen were stoned, beaten, and driven out of town after town and city after city. Though such episodes were later reënacted in the North, the players there were mostly ordinary citizens, and they were not, as in the Southern outbursts, led or abetted by officials who were supposed to obey and enforce the law.
Racism has always been a dominant feature of the reactionary movement in the United States; for instance, the coalition between reactionary Southern Democrats and reactionary Northern Republicans, which has had a strong influence on Congress for so many years, has been held together in part by racist bonds. But racism did not dominate either major political party in modern times until 1964, when Barry Goldwater took over the Republican Party. At its Presidential nominating Convention in San Francisco that year, there were two themes that drove the delegates wild with approval—racism and anti-Communism (To a large extent, the anti-Communist fervor was also racist, because it was directed mainly at yellow Communists in Southeast Asia.) The two greatest ovations of the Convention took place when Mississippi voted unanimously for Goldwater and when he delivered the astonishingly despotic statement “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” There was a third ovation when former President Dwight Eisenhower brought the assemblage roaring to its feet as he belabored what he called “the sensation-seeking colyumnists.” The press had at last become a full-fledged enemy—not because it was liberal (as the reactionary forces claimed) and not because it was biassed and vicious (as it certainly was at times) but because it reported facts as it saw them and interpreted them in a manner that was at variance with the view that reactionaries had of them. Since the mid-sixties, the war against the press has had the same character and the same purpose as the wars against the Warren Court, the civil-rights movement, the anti-war movement, busing, social-welfare programs, and the democratic spirit in general. Still, none of these other wars can bring victory for the people who wish to cast aside our Constitution and radically change our two-hundred-year-old system of government unless they first succeed in turning the public against the press. That alone could create a public mood in which government control of the press would be acceptable in this country. The current furor over whether Agnew’s resignation is necessary because he has been irreparably—and unjustly—damaged by press speculation may be the latest step in the attempt to turn the public against the press.
If the right of the press to speak freely ends, so will every person’s right to speak, for freedom of the press is essentially freedom of speech in print. And if these freedoms are lost, the people will have no way to learn what their government is doing—except from its self-serving reports to them through an official “press”—and no way to object to its doing as it pleases. That fundamental change in our political system would make “the consent of the governed” a mockery and representative government an illusion, and before long American democracy would vanish. ♦