The President and the Press

"Look," D. H. Lawrence titled a collection of poetry after World War I, "we have come through." The subsiding of the Cuban crisis, along with America's apparent victory, has clearly created a feeling of relief here and throughout the country. Yet in fact the victory was nothing save a bright moment in our "long twilight struggle." The questions it raised, then, had best be examined before they are forgotten.

One of the most important questions is the press's attitude toward the Soviet military build-up, an attitude which reflects the way it has handled this nation's relations with Cuba for the past few years. The press failed to make the public aware of what the Russians were doing in Cuba until the President's speech. It has never carried full reports of Castro's policies on his island.

Instead, the press has evidently felt itself bound to the President's will. It has accepted without question the President's set of priorities, and the language in which he discusses them. Whenever he has taken a "tough line" on foreign policy, the press's praise has been virtually unanimous.

The way in which the information on the Soviet build-up was released had two obvious effects. On the one hand, it did not allow for the hysterical shouting about "immediate invasion" that would have occurred otherwise; On the other hand, it prevented people outside government circles from constructing policy alternatives for themselves.

This method of handling the invasion was obviously what the President had in mind when he asked a conference of newspaper publishers, shortly after the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, to impose "voluntary censorship." On the President's terms, of course, censorship is an attractive idea. For it can be argued that in a political situation as hazardous as this one, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing"; and that serious difficulties can be created when a public, which does not understand a particular situation or its relationship to the more general problems, starts urging the President to take dangerously radical steps, such as an invasion or a complete backdown.

One trouble with this attitude is that it assumes the infallibility of a few experts who, once fed the proper information, will mechanically arrive at the correct decision 100 per cent of the time. Another problem with the attitude is that it runs counter to most notions of democracy. Sealing the public off from the facts on which the government bases its decisions must necessarily create an atmosphere of public sluggishness, and an automatic assumption that the leader's decisions are unfailingly correct.

Of course, it is not up to the President to interpret "voluntary censorship." He can only enforce his will if Congress legislates compulsory censorship, or if he absolutely refuses to give any member of the press sensitive information--and threatens reporters with more serious reprisals if they look elsewhere for their facts. Consequently it is still up to individual reporters and publishers to decide how they will interpret voluntary censorship: what should and what should not be published.

It is impossible to believe that the press's silence in the days and weeks before the invasion reflected its ignorance of the facts. Certainly an ambitious editor could have armed himself with Senator Keating's speech made a week before the crisis thus and attempted to tell his readers whether the Senator had reason when he asserted that there were some offensive missile bases on the island. By the same token, some of the reporters that are closest to the Administration could have taken some of the hints and rumors that floated around the Capitol during the week before the blockade, and transformed them into concrete news stories. And if publishers were wary of attributing certain attitudes to the President or his advisors, they could at least have run information on the Soviet build-up either in speculative columns or as hints placed somewhere in the midst of longer articles; which is more or less what the New York Times did before the Bay of Pigs invasion.

In the months prior to the blockade, very few newspapers discussed anything that was going on inside Cuba, either good or bad. No one, for example, has even a rough idea of how many schools Castro has built in the last year; or alternatively of the extent of his secret police apparatus. There is nowhere one can go to find out. This lack of information about Cuba has constantly made United States policies toward that country difficult to judge; and during the past week, combined with the suddenness of information about the Soviet military build-up, it rendered public opinion utterly irrelevant.

Yet informed public opinion is one of the essential things that a democracy must continue to strive for. By withholding information about the Soviet build-up, about the United States reaction, and about the scope of Castro's internal policy, the press displayed a lack of confidence in its readers, and made of government policy something sacrosanct. When the press and the public failed to ask whether the Administration could have adopted different tactics toward the imposing of the blockade--or whether it might have displayed a different attitude towards the Castro regime in general--the President became, for a week at least, our infallible leader.