THE ROOTS OF PRESS-GOVERNMENT ANTAGONISMS:
NEWSPAPERS AND THE EARLY COLD WAR, 1945-1953
by
David R. Davies, Ph.D.
Assistant professor of journalism
University of Southern Mississippi
2803 Williamsburg Road
Hattiesburg, MS 39402
601-266-4258 work
601-261-3489 home
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Submitted to the 1998 paper competition
of the History Division,
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
THE ROOTS OF PRESS-GOVERNMENT ANTAGONISMS:
NEWSPAPERS AND THE EARLY COLD WAR, 1945-1953
Newspapers' relationship with government and government officials seemed to
crack in the early 1950s, challenging press practices on several fronts.
National security concerns rooted in the Cold War accelerated a trend toward
greater secrecy in government, igniting a "freedom of information" (FOI)
movement in professional associations to fight the growing secrecy at both
federal and local levels. Journalists' relationships with government officials
began to suffer as the result of this anti-secrecy fight.
The press-government antagonisms of the early Cold War years were significant
as a precursor of even greater distrust between reporters and government
officials in the 1960s and 1970s. While historians have tended to focus on these
later press-government conflicts, journalists' battles of the late 1940s and
early 1950s are equally important. It was here, in the earliest postwar years,
that newspaper-government relations began what was to be a long, steady
deterioration.
Through World War II, newspapers' relationship with government had been
characterized more by trust than by disharmony. Press censorship was entirely
voluntary and overseen by the Press Division of the Office of Censorship, itself
staffed with newspapermen on leave from their jobs. In complying with government
requests to withhold information, journalists prided themselves on their
contributions to the war effort. As the New York Times' Raymond Daniell once put
it, "There isn't any story in the world that is good enough to justify risking
the life of a single American soldier."[1] Voluntary censorship worked, believed
Theodore F. Koop, one of the self-described "blue pencil boys" in the Press
Division, because editors were willing "to lean over backwards when security was
involved."[2] Office of Censorship director Byron Price, closing his bureau at
war's end, told President Truman that the censorship program was "a heartening
example of democracy at work."[3]
The experiences of the Associated Press' Edward Kennedy and the New York Times'
William L. Laurence at the close of the war demonstrate the degree of
newspaper-government cooperation. His fellow war correspondents were outraged
when Kennedy, on May 7, 1945, filed an exclusive story from Paris announcing the
end of the war in Europe. Kennedy had broken his promise to military authorities
to withhold the information until a government-approved release time. More than
fifty correspondents signed a letter describing his action as the "most
disgraceful, deliberate, and unethical double cross in the history of
journalism."[4] Laurence, by contrast, worked on a secret, four-month assignment
for the government preparing articles about the invention and deployment of the
atomic bomb. His articles were withheld until after the bombs were dropped in
Japan, when his carefully censored articles were published in the Times and
elsewhere. Laurence considered the opportunity to work in secret for the
government to be a high honor for both him and his newspaper.[5]
Such press willingness to cooperate with the government--and press outrage at
breaches of this relationship--did not preclude, of course, criticism of
government officials, either before or after the war. Robust criticism by
American newspapers of both the New Deal and the Fair Deal characterized many
newspapers; a perusal of the Chicago Tribune or any of the William Randolph
Hearst newspapers in this period provides ample evidence. But central to a
newspaper's relationship with government officials was an understanding that the
government's security aims, especially in wartime, deserved journalistic
support. For their part, journalists expected easy access to newsmakers and to
information. Such access was relatively easy even in wartime, but reporters and
editors began to concern themselves with overcoming government obstacles to news
as the United States emerged from World War II.[6]
At first, these obstacles were centered in the international arena.
Journalists, through their trade associations, threw themselves into an effort
to incorporate free press guarantees into postwar charters of the United
Nations. The goal was to thwart the growth of totalitarianism by spreading
democracy through an international free exchange of information, and the
establishment of the United Nations seemed to provide an opportunity to lower
the many barriers to a free press worldwide. Publishers wanted foreign
correspondents to have easy access to news in foreign countries, unrestricted by
any foreign censorship. "It is something of a shock," said International News
Service general manager Seymour Berkson in 1946, "to realize that, of the
fifty-four countries which are members of the United Nations, only a minority of
those very countries have the same principles of freedom of information which we
recognize and abide by in the United States."[7] The American Society of
Newspaper Editors (ASNE), the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME), and
Sigma Delta Chi (now the Society of Professional Journalists) each organized
Freedom of Information committees to deal with world press issues and to lobby
the United Nations.
But journalists' efforts to further world freedom of information were
frustrated from the beginning. In 1945, three editors representing ASNE toured
the world to survey press freedoms and were disappointed at their findings. The
three presented a 40,000-word report to President Harry S. Truman, concluding
that "facts are going to have as hard a time as ever getting around after the
war."[8] ASNE editors also took part in U.N. freedom of information conferences,
but the promising treaties and proposals that emerged from the sessions later
stalled.[9] At an international conference on freedom of the press held in 1948
in Geneva, Switzerland, for example, fifty national governments approved drafts
of treaties to protect the worldwide flow of news, but the treaties were
whittled away later before the U.N. General Assembly. The Soviet Union was a
particular opponent of the U.N. efforts, and the drive for world freedom of
information withered as the Cold War accelerated.[10]
At the same time international proposals for freedom of information faded,
press barriers seemed to rise at home. "FoI's spiritual sire was a noble
experiment called World Freedom of Information," recalled James S. Pope,
executive editor of the Louisville, Ky., newspapers and an ASNE activist in FOI
efforts, in 1958. "The leaders [of the FOI movement] were the first to see . . .
that it was not possible to liberate information across the world until we had
mastered the art in our own nation, our own States and cities."[11] In the early
postwar years, government secrecy seemed to rise on all fronts. Journalists
believed the federal government's increased emphasis on secrecy was rooted in
the tense state of postwar international affairs, the increasing influence of
the military in Washington, and the technological revolution in high-tech
weaponry. Security measures had taken root in World War II only to expand in the
postwar years as Cold War tensions escalated.[12] J. Russell Wiggins of the
Washington Post, chairman of APME's freedom of information committee in the
early 1950s, blamed several other factors as well. Wiggins believed that the
overall growth of government had increased secretiveness, particularly as power
had increased in the 1930s and 1940s in the executive branch, with its numerous
administrative agencies and bureaucracies.[13]
In the late 1940s, the greatest domestic freedom of information questions
concerned military security surrounding atomic secrets and the development of
new weapons for the military. New York Times correspondent Hanson W. Baldwin
complained to ASNE editors in 1948 of what he called a "velvet curtain." The
curtain consisted, he said, of military restrictions that kept reporters from
getting information, even information already known to the American public or to
the Soviet Union. Military officials had tried to suppress, for example, news
articles about the building of a new missile center in El Centro, Calif., and
the development of new missiles. In one instance FBI agents had questioned the
publishers of Aviation Week about its articles on the development of a
supersonic plane, even though the plane was based on a Russian prototype. "In
many cases we don't give the potential enemy credit for brains and we deny to
the American people what is known to foreigners," Baldwin said.[14]
Baldwin was typical of journalists who believed that military withholding of
information in peacetime was unnecessary and should be resisted. National
security could be protected, he said, not by military censorship but by
responsible journalists, just as in wartime. Newspapers could continue to guard
national security, Baldwin believed, because responsible editors "will pause and
ask before they publish technical stories dealing with military facts, `Is it in
the national interest to publish this?'"[15] The 1948 convention of ASNE editors
adopted resolutions urging press-government cooperation in the publication of
news about military weapons but opposing all censorship.[16]
But while journalists were inclined to cooperate with government officials not
to divulge vital military information, they vehemently opposed any government
secrecy in nonmilitary matters. The secrecy in nonmilitary matters also showed a
marked increased in the postwar years, journalists believed. "Most federal
agencies are showing exceptional zeal in creating rules, regulations,
directives, classifications and policies which serve to hide, color or channel
news," Pope said in 1951.[17]
An early and significant example of this phenomenon occurred in 1947, when the
national Security Advisory Board released model security regulations to be used
by federal agencies in their compliance with the president's federal loyalty
program. The regulations, adopted first by the Veterans Administration,
instructed officials to withhold any information that "would be prejudicial to
the interests or prestige of the nation, any governmental activity or any
individual, or would cause administration embarrassment or
difficulty."[18] Journalists reacted with outrage. The Minneapolis Tribune
dismissed the order as an "unprecedented attempt to bottle up news and
information at the source."[19] The ASNE board of directors urged repeal, saying
the directive would "place even the ordinary affairs of federal civilian
agencies beyond public scrutiny." Truman responded that he had not heard of the
regulations and would not approve them as written.[20] The regulations were
revised to eliminate official embarrassment as a cause for withholding
information. But they did establish a uniform classification system for
security-related documents kept by the military: "top secret," "secret,"
"confidential," and "restricted."
The ASNE World Freedom of Information Committee had expressed concerns about
domestic secrecy from its founding in 1948. "It seems to me our responsibility
lies in the domestic field as well as the international field," committee
chairman Basil L. "Stuffy" Walters wrote to fellow committee members in 1948. "I
have noted a growing tendency of some officials in some of the smallest
governmental units, as well as the largest, to forget that they are servants of
the people and to act instead as though the taxpayers were their servants."
Walters, executive editor of Knight Newspapers, instructed three committee
members to keep track of domestic secrecy problems and to help any editors
around the country facing difficulty.[21] By 1950, with international freedom of
information efforts stumbling and domestic secrecy on the rise, the committee
dropped the "world" from its title to reflect its changing mission.[22]
Journalists grew steadily more alarmed about the domestic secrecy problems
through 1950 and 1951, believed Pope, the successor to Walters as ASNE's FOI
chairman. After Pope enumerated secrecy difficulties at the 1950 ASNE meeting,
he received 200 requests for copies of his talk from journalists around the
country. "It was as if everybody suddenly had waked up to the dangers we had
been far too busy to see," Pope said in 1951. Pope, echoing other journalists,
maintained that the denial of information was an issue touching on the very
essence of press freedom, since freedom of the press was worthless if public
officials withheld journalists' source material.[23]
The litany of withheld information investigated by journalism groups in 1950
and 1951 alone was long indeed. The federal Board of Reserve was holding secret
meetings. The Department of State was withholding a large volume of material
from reporters. The U.S. military forbade photographers from taking pictures of
airplane crashes on civilian property. At the local level, a school board in
Torrington, Conn., closed its sessions and its minutes to the public. Pawtucket,
R.I., officials refused to release tax abatement records. The governor of
Arizona was declining to release public reports.[24] "As FoI groped for a
stance, a game plan," Pope later recalled of these early years, "the custodians
of public business were romping over the field."[25]
Litigation by newspapers to force open records and meetings increased
substantially. Harold Cross, the media lawyer hired by ASNE to survey the
growing secrecy and suggest how newspapers should respond, noted this trend in a
report to the association in 1951. "The last five years brought more newspaper
lawsuits to open records than any previous twenty-five years," Cross said. For
most of his thirty-five years in newspaper law Cross said he had encountered few
cases involving access to information. "Now scarcely a week goes by without a
new refusal," he said.[26]
Cross had been hired by ASNE in 1951 to survey the state of freedom of
information law at both national and state levels. The project eventually
expanded into a book-length work intended to serve both as a guide and a
casebook for editors in their freedom of information battles. The book, The
Public's Right to Know, was published in 1953. Cross was the FOI movement's most
prominent spokesman and legal specialist until his death in 1959.[27]
While journalists on the FOI committees could often pry loose withheld
information through protests, publicity, or lawsuits, they often encountered
government arrogance that appalled them. When the U.S. Board of Parole flatly
refused to supply records requested by the Louisville Courier-Journal, the ASNE
committee intervened and the records were released, but under protest. "In the
future," the Parole Board chairman haughtily explained, "desired information
will be supplied if, in our opinion, such information would be compatible with
the welfare of society."[28] When, in what Pope called "a particularly horrible
crime," the Alcohol Tax Unit in Albany, N.Y., accused local bars of watering
down their liquor, tax officials reached a settlement but refused to release
details.[29] "This settlement is of concern only to the proprietor of the tavern
and to the ATU," one tax official said. Officials ultimately relented, and, to
journalists' relief, the names of the offending bars were made public.[30]
For journalists, the stakes in fighting government secrecy were high,
justifying the harsh rhetoric of an all-out war. Secretive government officials
were "a well-entrenched enemy," declared Pope. "Certainly there is a vital
connection," he said, "between growing scandals in government and the growing
concealment of information."[31]
Journalists cast government public relations officials as conniving bureaucrats,
using press releases, government directives, secret meetings and off-the-record
conferences to further their bosses' public image. "I have never heard of a
single government press agent who ever issued a news handout that was critical
of his political boss," said V.M. Newton, Jr., of the Tampa Tribune in 1951.
"Every line written by a government press agent is designed to reflect glory
upon his government agency and to prolong the political life of his boss,
regardless of whether it is the truth, half truth or no truth."[32] The twin
problems of public relations and concealed information, Washington reporter
Clark Mollenhoff said in 1954, served to throttle democracy.[33]
The relationship between government and journalists was changing. Just as a
government grown larger and more complex had forced changes in newswriting, it
also forced changes in how reporters dealt with sources. David Lawrence, a
newspaper columnist and publisher of U.S. News & World Report, said in 1950 that
while the number of Washington correspondents had multiplied since he had first
moved to Washington four decades earlier, the government had grown even faster,
and it was much more difficult to cover capital news. Journalists now found
themselves dealing more and more with intermediaries--public relations
people--and thus more subject to manipulation. "This Government of ours has
grown so big," Lawrence said, "that it is easy for our newspapers to take the
mimeographed handouts and give digests of them on their front pages, as we do
every day." The result, Lawrence believed, was that much government propaganda
was getting into the newspaper.[34]
This government public relations created resentment at the same time it helped
journalists cover a complex government. Some Washington correspondents said that
government handouts had made reporters lazy--victims of "handoutitis"--and more
reliant upon official government pronouncements for news.[35] Others complained
that public relations offices created a "paper curtain" between reporters and
sources, a familiar barrier newly ominous as secrecy increased.[36] Still, many
journalists agreed that modern institutions had become so large and complex they
would be impossible to cover without the help of public relations people. "The
good the press gets from handouts far outweighs the potential evil opponents of
handouts talk about," said Ben Cole, the Indianapolis Star's bureau chief, in
1951.[37] Philip W. Porter of the Cleveland Plain Dealer told an ASNE panel the
same year that press agents are "in the same category as women--they are often
puzzling and amazing, but we couldn't get along without them."[38]
Press agents were ubiquitous in both state and federal governments. A 1951
report by Editor & Publisher found 700 press agents in state government and
2,400 in the federal government, the latter considered a conservative
estimate.[39] A 1949 federal study, much more liberal in whom it counted as a
public relations worker, put the number at 45,000, at a cost of $74.8 million a
year.[40]
A low point of press-government relations in the early 1950s was the imposition
by President Truman of a new executive order providing for a classification
system of government information. The order, Executive Order 10290, was released
September 24, 1951, for use by forty-five government agencies to classify
information into categories of top secret, secret, classified, and confidential,
the same categories already used by the military but now to be used by approved
civilian agencies.[41] Truman said many civilian departments needed the power to
classify information because they, too, often handled sensitive government
documents. Information must be protected, he said, that might otherwise be
published by the news media and provide assistance to the Communist enemies in
the Cold War. Truman cited a report compiled by the Central Intelligence Agency
that found that "90 percent of all our top secret information had been published
in either the daily newspapers or in the slick magazines."[42]
Truman's order met immediate criticism from journalists. His press conference
of October 4, 1951, was devoted entirely to a defense of the order, and the
White House issued a memorandum explaining that the directive did not amount to
censorship.[43] The APME, which was holding its annual convention when the order
was released, denounced it as "a dangerous instrument of news suppression." The
APME said the order was unnecessarily vague and lacked an appeal process. Truman
met with a delegation of APME editors to discuss their concerns on October 17,
but neither side budged in their position on the order.[44]
Editor & Publisher editorialized that the security order amounted to "the most
drastic peacetime censorship ever attempted in this country." Even in wartime,
civilian agencies had not been given such power to suppress news, the magazine's
editors warned. "The Washington news arena, already noted for numerous incidents
of suppression and censorship, is now facing the imposition of an all-inclusive
security measure which will make possible almost a complete blackout of
important news from the nation's capitol."[45] The delegates to the Sigma Delta
Chi convention in 1951 passed a resolution opposing the directive, saying the
order "duplicates in the name of national security the practices of totalitarian
states."[46] A New York Times editorial said the order was unnecessarily vague
and would invite abuse.[47]
Truman instituted an appeal process to address reporters' complaints, but the
order remained unchanged until Eisenhower took office.[48] Eisenhower's attorney
general, Herbert Brownell Jr., announced before APME editors in 1953 that the
order was being revised to limit classification power to seventeen agencies. The
"restricted" category was eliminated, leaving only "top secret," "secret," and
"confidential," and authority to classify information was given only to the
chief administrative officers of each of the seventeen agencies. Brownell said
Truman's order had been "repressive and applied the military formula to a lot of
things entirely outside the scope of national defense." The order had also led
to overclassification. "We actually have buildings full of classified
documents," Brownell said.[49]
Journalists were divided over the Eisenhower order. J. Russell Wiggins of the
Washington Post said the revised order had remedied the shortcomings in Truman's
directive and was probably the best compromise newspaper editors could hope for
in such insecure times. "I doubt that any administration ever will wholly
abandon the system of classifying security matters, in the present state of the
world," Wiggins said.[50] Other editors said the order demonstrated that
Eisenhower had accepted Truman's precedent to withhold government information.
"It is not a `milestone,'" Indianapolis Star editor Jameson G. Campaigne
complained of the order. "It is a `millstone' around the necks of the editors of
the nation."[51]
The Truman and Eisenhower security orders had one advantage, that of
contributing to a greater public awareness of the press' freedom of information
campaign. "Millions have read and heard of freedom of information for the first
time," James S. Pope said in 1952. The Milwaukee Journal had printed a
fourteen-part series on news suppression by Wisconsin officials. Also in
1951-1952, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Detroit Free Press, the Associated
Press, and the Scripps-Howard news service had each published articles or series
on government withholding of information. The Los Angeles News had printed a
yearlong series of reports on school boards that operated in secrecy.[52]
The early postwar years, then, were the beginning of what would be a long, slow
deterioration in government-press relations. This relationship had begun to
deteriorate in the late 1940s as increasing government secrecy in the Cold War
required journalists to lobby for nonmilitary public information that previously
had been accessible to them. Then, Truman and Eisenhower's security orders
further widened the breach between press and government. This fissure was
evident but not great; journalists remained respectful of government's security
interests in military information. But the seeds were sown for even greater
distrust in the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s.
[1] Quoted in Theodore F. Koop, "Censors Saved Lives," Quill, July-August 1945,
9.
[2] Ibid. The considerable extent of press-government cooperation during World
War II is documented in Koop's book, Weapon of Silence (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1946).
[3] Byron Price report to Harry S. Truman, quoted in James L. Butler, "Price
Closes Book on War Censorship," Editor & Publisher, 22 December 1945, 72.
[4] Quoted in "Kennedy of AP Scoops Whole World But Writers Call Him Double
Crosser," Newsweek, 14 May 1945, 80. Kennedy was disaccredited by the military
authorities, shipped home, and later forced to resign from the AP. Kennedy
claimed that public announcement of the armistice in Germany had negated the
necessity for honoring the government's release time. General Dwight D.
Eisenhower later reviewed his case, found that through several misunderstandings
Kennedy was not to blame, and reaccredited him. See Edward Kennedy, "I'd Do It
Again," Atlantic, August 1948, 36-41.
[5] Meyer Berger, The Story of the New York Times, 1851-1951 (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1951), 514; S.J. Monchak, "Laurence Relates His Role on Atomic
Bomb Project," Editor & Publisher, 22 September 1945, 9, 60. For Berger's
account of Laurence's experiences, see pp. 510-523. After his bomb assignment,
which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1946, Laurence was known in the Times newsroom
as "Atomic Bill."
[6] See George Kennedy, "Advocates of Openness: The Freedom of Information
Movement," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Missouri, 1978. Kennedy's thesis,
which focuses on national anti-secrecy efforts and especially the development of
the federal sunshine law, is the only comprehensive account of the domestic
freedom of information movement. For Kennedy's account of the movement's early
years, see Chapter 1, pp. 16-62.
[7] Quoted in "Notable Talks: Free Press Theme of Convention," Quill,
November-December 1946, 5. A thorough contemporaneous account of U.S.
publishers' efforts on behalf of world freedom of information is Gilbert W.
Stewart, Jr., "World Threat to Free Press," Quill, July 1951, 5-7, 20-21.
[8] ASNE report to Truman, quoted in "The Well Traveled Skeptics," Time, 25 June
1945, 62.
[9] Stewart, "World Threat to Free Press," 7.
[10] "Report on Freedom of Information," Quill, January 1951, 12; Herbert
Brucker, Freedom of Information (1949; reprint ed., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 1981), 210-211; ASNE Proceedings, 1951, 189. The authoritative account of
the international freedom of information movement is Margaret A. Blanchard's
Exporting the First Amendment: The Press-Government Crusade of 1945-1952 (New
York: Longman, 1986). For Blanchard's description of the decline of the world
movement and the rise of domestic secrecy concerns, see pp. 373-378. A useful
synopsis of Blanchard's book is found in her article "The Business of a Free
Press," Gannett Center Journal 4 (Fall 1990): 17-29.
[11] James S. Pope, "Freedom of Information: A Ten-Year-Old Prodigy," Speeches:
First Annual Freedom of Information Conference, December 11-12, 1958 (Columbia,
Mo.: Freedom of Information Center, School of Journalism, University of
Missouri, 1960), 1.
[12] For journalists' assessment of the roots of the secrecy problem, see Hanson
W. Baldwin, "`Secrets' Arouse Foes of Censorship," New York Times, 16 November
1947, E4. Baldwin reported that "numerous restrictive incidents encountered by
the press in the coverage of news . . . have stirred up a hornets' nest."
[13] Associated Press Managing Editors Red Book (New York: Associated Press,
1952), 26. Hereafter cited as APME Red Book. The Red Book, published first in
1948, is the published proceedings of the yearly meeting of the APME.
[14] ASNE Proceedings, 1948, 191-196.
[15] Ibid., 197.
[16] Ibid., 296-297.
[17] ASNE Proceedings, 1951, 174.
[18] Quoted in undated letter from N.R. Howard, ASNE president, to Truman, in
minutes of the American Society of Newspaper Editors board of directors, October
25-26, 1947, American Society of Newspaper Editors headquarters, Reston,
Virginia. Hereafter cited as "ASNE minutes."
[19] Quoted in "Gag Rule Protest By ASNE Board Widely Acclaimed," Bulletin of
the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1 December 1947, 4, which contains a
roundup of negative press reaction to the order. Hereafter cited as ASNE
Bulletin.
[20] Both the ASNE board and Truman are quoted in ASNE minutes, October 25-26,
1947. To ASNE's protest, Truman replied, "I never heard of the program to which
you refer and I am very sure that such a program could not possibly go into
effect without my approval."
[21] Walters letter to the World Freedom of Information Committee, quoted in
"Walters Demands Publicity Spotlight on Public Servants," ASNE Bulletin, 1
October 1948, 1.
[22] ASNE Proceedings, 1951, 12-13.
[23] James S. Pope, "U.S. Press is Free to Print the News But Too Often is Not
Free to Gather It," Quill, July 1951, 9.
[24] Ibid., 9, 21. The FOI committees were successful in getting much of the
information released in these cases. ASNE's protest against the military's
withholding of information about plane crashes resulted in one of its
significant early successes when the policy was revised in 1952. See Pope,
"Freedom of Information," 2.
[25] James S. Pope, "On the Domestic Front," in Alice Fox Pitts, Read All About
It! 50 Years of ASNE (Reston, Va.: American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1974),
186. Pitts' book, ASNE's official history, includes many useful, lengthy
recollections from ASNE members about the postwar era. A more recent, scholarly
history of the organization is Paul Alfred Pratte, Gods Within the Machine: A
History of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1923-1993 (Westport,
Conn.: Praeger, 1995). For Pratte's account of ASNE's early FOI struggles in the
1950s, see pp. 85-100.
[26] ASNE Proceedings, 1951, 181.
[27] James S. Pope, "Harold L. Cross: Arch Foe of Secrecy," in Speeches: Second
Annual Freedom of Information Conference, November 5-6, 1959 (Columbia, Mo.:
Freedom of Information Center, School of Journalism, University of Missouri,
1960), 38-42; Harold L. Cross, The People's Right to Know (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1953).
[28] Quoted in Pope, "On the Domestic Front," 187. Emphasis in the original.
[29] ASNE Proceedings, 1951, 174.
[30] Quoted in Pope, "On the Domestic Front," 187.
[31] Pope, "U.S. Press is Free to Print the News," 9, 22.
[32] ASNE Proceedings, 1951, 59.
[33] Clark Mollenhoff, "Follow Through--That is the Newspaper Answer to Secrecy
in Government, Says a Crusading Correspondent," Nieman Reports, January 1954, 3.
[34] ASNE Proceedings, 1950, 167.
[35] Ibid., 183-185. "The handout," declared Walter Trohan, the Chicago
Tribune's Washington correspondent, "is a great destroyer of reportorial
initiative in this town." For a biting critique of lazy correspondents in the
nation's capital, see "Washington's Armchair Correspondents," Harper's, February
1949, 49-52.
[36] Jerry Walker, "Editors Would Rip Curtain That Shields New York Officials,"
Editor & Publisher, 21 October 1950, 5.
[37] Quoted in Robert Early, "Handouts Are Helpful to Press, ME Insists," Editor
& Publisher, 9 June 1951, 22. Indianapolis Star editors estimated that the
elimination of government handouts would force the newspaper to increase by
six-fold its four-person Washington staff.
[38] ASNE Proceedings, 1951, 68.
[39] Erwin Knoll, "43 States Employ 700 to Publicize Governments," Editor &
Publisher, 7 April 1951, 13. The federal statistics quoted by the magazine were
compiled in 1949 by the federal Budget Bureau.
[40] "Report on Freedom of Information," Quill, January 1952, 18. The rapid
growth in the number of government press agents had begun in the 1930s with the
rise of the New Deal and was accompanied by rising press and Congressional
concerns about news management. See Dick Fitzpatrick, "Measuring Government
Publicity: Volume of Press Releases," Journalism Quarterly 26 (1949): 45-50.
[41] "U.S. Adds Controls on Security Data," New York Times, 26 September 1951,
17; W.H. Lawrence, "President Accuses Press of Revealing Vital War Secrets," New
York Times, 5 October 1951, 1, 12.
[42] Truman memorandum to the secretary of defense, 24 September 1951, quoted in
Herbert Lee Williams, The Newspaperman's President: Harry S. Truman (Chicago:
Nelson Hall, 1984), 113-114. Truman said he was particularly upset that Fortune
magazine had recently published maps showing the location of the United States'
atomic energy plants. (Truman press conference, 4 October 1951, quoted in ibid.,
118.)
[43] "Text of Truman Security Statement and Transcript of Discussion," New York
Times, 5 October 1951, 12.
[44] APME Red Book, 1951, 224-226, 231-231. The APME refused to suggest changes
in the order on the grounds that the order was a barrier to news. Truman accused
the editors of being critical but not constructive. (Herbert F. Corn to Truman,
4 December 1951; Truman to Corn, 17 December 1951, both quoted in "Letter to Mr.
Corn," Editor and Publisher, 22 December 1951, 9, 47. Corn was the APME
president in 1951.)
[45] "Blackout," Editor & Publisher, 29 September 1951, 38.
[46] Resolution passed by Sigma Delta Chi delegates, quoted in George A.
Brandenburg, "Sigma Delta Chi Opposes Secrecy Rule," Editor & Publisher, 24
November 1951, 12.
[47] "Classifying Information," New York Times, 28 September 1951, 30.
[48] "Security Committee," Editor & Publisher, 19 January 1952, 34.
[49] APME Red Book, 1953, 175-176.
[50] J. Russell Wiggins, "No Compromise of Principle," ASNE Bulletin, 1 February
1954, 4.
[51] Jameson G. Campaigne, "Milestone or Millstone," ibid., 3.
[52] ASNE Proceedings, 1952, 96-100, 104.
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