10.
12
Friday, September 23, 1977
University Dally Kansan
Adversary role essential
--and press over the Lance affair is "poisonous." But what would they have had done? Write about the role of the American intelligence in a softball game.
From nage one
WE KNOW from experience that a vigorous, competent and dedicated free press is never going to - have an easy time investigating the lops of popular government newspapers; have the power of government to defend itself. And when it becomes difficult, almost impossible, to penetrate the secrecy with which some governments have surrounded them, they must be or have been bound to be created if an investigative newspaper insists on doing a proper job.
"For those inside the White House, it is a 'we and they' situation with top administration officials' making no attempt to hide their antagonism toward the press, their desire to keep the press from finding out anything it can and an almost fanatical mood that the press and those in the White House are enemies.
Who created the tension over Watergate—Nixon or the Washington Post? And who created the tension over Bert Lance, Carter or the newspapers that investigated his carer after a Senate committee failed to do so? I think the answer is obvious. Try as he might, Nixon could not cover Watergate. And try as he might, Carter could not forestall a third Senate committee inquiry into Lance's affairs.
DOLPH C. SIMONS JR., who was in Washington at the time for Lawrence Journal-World, wrote with deep insight into the resultant position—an author of *The adversary system really works*. This was his view:
"Those who follow this line of reasoning think it is the press' fault that Lance is now having trouble . . . It doesn't matter that Lance may have run his bank in a matter that Lance did not, rather, it is wrong for the press to have reported it."
JAMES RESTON of the New York Times has copulated the atmosphere between White House
I do not mean to equate the positions of the Nixon and Carter administrations. Nixon had to face up to impeachment charges and was forced out of office. Carter's fault, like that of his immediate Democratic predecessor in the White House, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was to persist stubbornly in a course of conduct and policy that eventually proved damaging to the credibility of his administration.
The one factor that is common to all three administrations, however, is the contagion of secrecy in government—and I am well aware that President Carter has been in office only eight months and could change course. I do hope he will, for the country's sake.
For in most instances with which I am familiar, it is the denial of access to meetings, to public records, to accountable public officials and to documents wrongly written by the press. It was a difficult tension between press and government. It did not occur in the cases of Ed May and Bill Sherman because government, in both instances, was receptive to reforms and improvements suggested by the Commission and necessary investigation. There was no cover-up.
NOW I AM not so unrealistic as to suggest that we should propose greater cooperation between government agencies and investigation teams going to happen. It would be against human nature. In my own career as an active reporter, I can remember just one instance in which the chairman of a legislative or Congressional committee refused to comply, and yet, it is clear enough that if there was more cooperation between public officials and
Let me demonstrate for you what happens in the current administration, which came into office pledged to a policy of open government, when a question is raised—a question that is both bothering and inconvenient.
the press there would be a lot less tension with resultant public benefit.
IN AN ARTICLE for the New Republic on January 22, 1977, Jim Hoge, editor of the Chicago Sun-Times and Daily News, wrote that although the incoming President, Jimmy Carter, had inveighed against secrecy in government, he has "also favored laws to prevent a large fraction of classified material harmful to national security."
I was working on a book about that particular subject at the time and asked Jim for his source, which he readily identified as a story in the Atlanta Constitution which he thought had been published on Monday. I was told that the source was asked and asked whether the view attributed to Gov. Carter that was the view still held by President Carter.
There were, of course, a lot more things going on at the White House and the President was just starting to come under closer scrutiny by the press. My letter was dated May 10, 1977. After a lot of back and forth, the White House press office informed me that someone had read the Atlanta Constitution for May 28, 1971 and there was no article about Carter's views on the press. So the question went unanswered.
SO I FINALLY asked Bill Fields of the Atlanta Constitution for the piece and he came back within a few days with an article by Bill Shipp, political editor of the Constitution, which started on page 1 on July 9, 1971 and was headed：“Carter Favors ‘Secrets’ Law.” In it, the then Governor Carter was quoted as said:
saying he thought "direct quotations from classified materials should be prohibited by law."
So, four months after I asked my question, I still had no answer and I had to trouble a newspaper for the article in question when the White House Press Office said it couldn't be found. I think I am entitled to have a response. But I am not in administration"^2 And I think a lot of reporters in Washington would want to ask the same question.
SO LET US place responsibility for the adversary relationship between press and government where it properly belongs in most cases—with the government at various levels. And do not think for one moment that, merely by proclaiming this self-evident truth, things will change.
The only way for a democratic society to defend itself properly against abuses is to encourage and support the press in its efforts to scrutinize the workings of government, which is—to me, at least—the most important part of the job of a free press. And it is this that makes it so difficult to ought to do more investigation. If there was more public support for their efforts, and if there was less hostility by government, I am sure this would happen.
THE PRESS does have a right to more public backing than it often receives. But usually, as we have seen in the book, public support manifests itself after an incarnation of the paper has been vindicated. If not every paper wants to take a colossal gamble, as the Washington Post did with its Watergate investigation, that is
But a lot of good work can be done by smaller napers with limited staffs if they have the will to
tackle a tough job with a show of initiative and independent-minded reporting.
department-hired. The Hutchinson News did it with its successful campaign, taking about reapportionment of the KU Klux Klan Legislature. So did the weekly Sun Newspapers of Oranha with their exposure of the finances of Boys Town. The Lufkin News in Texas investigated the death of a local Marine recruit and forced reforms in the recruiting and training practices of the Marine Corps. In North Carolina, the Winston-Salem Journal & Sentinel stopped mining company from destroying one of the most scenic parts of the state. The Riverside Press court was defrauding an Indian tribe of its lands. And a couple of North Carolina weeks, the Tabor City Tribune and the Whiteville Reporter, took on the KU Klux Klan in their own territory, which isn't supposed to be healthy.
ALL THESE investigations won Pulitzer Prizes and I could list a lot more.
Do not expect, however, that such accomplishments will ever make us popular. There never has been a time in the history of the American press to have held up a newspaper. Harris's newspaper after its first day of publication, when newspapers were beloved and we must not expect it. Nevertheless, we have a job to do if this democratic society of ours is to survive and, regardless of how perceived by our adversaries, we must get on with it.
The responsibility of the American press is to deliver the news and to safeguard the public interest. It was never more important than it is today. This is our responsibility as a necessary work. And we have a right to be proud of it.
'Young Bill's' career ...
From page one
that I'll skip; to England on a former destroyer to represent the North American Newspaper Alliance and Reader's Digest in a bid to maintain its leading editor for the Reader's Digest, 1942.
And the civic/community things:
chairman of the Republican County Committee, Lyon County, Ohio; president and member of board of overseers, Harvard University, 1950-65; a director of the American Civil Liberties Union; member of Claremont Club and other organizations.
All of that, the factual listings. His first book was a novel, "What People said," published in 1938. He co-authored "Zero Hour," wrote "Queens Dare Dividely." "Report on the Russians," "Report on the Germans," "Report on the Honey," "Bernard Baruch," "Report on the Asians," "The Little Toy Dog," "Back Down the Ridge."
THE LAST OF these was about the war in Korea. His "Lost Boundaries" became a famous motion picture, about a black family that "passed" into white society.
But there were two books that especially moved the World War II generation, and like me you may remember not only the books but the movie versions: Robert Young and little Margaret O'Brien in "Journey for Margaret," now a re-stand on calendar with his brother Monroe. John Wayne in John Ford's line "They Were Expendable."
Each had the humanity that marked the war correspondence of W. L. White. From "Journey for Margaret" I've extracted a story of a young girl, a British under fire, and how Bill White found a war orphan, and adopted her, a little girl who had been through the horrors of war so much herself that she had great difficulty overthe overtures of this strange man:
"Margaret doesn't want to sit on my lap in the taxi. She is resigned to the trip, but not to me. People turn around to look twice, as we were an odd pair—me in our old trench coat stained with trench dress and a streaked white with salt water, a tin hat bouncing up and down on my left buttock, My Lacca and my boots —but now from my neck—my down sleeping bag and inflatable rubber mattress done up in a roll in the ruckacks on my back (there are no porters) and in my right paw the tiny mittens from a little girl in red leggings I took off.
"IN THE RAILWAY carriage, I start to sit down beside her.
"Don't sit there!" she orders.
"So I start to sit down opposite
"Not there! I get up, 'Over there,' and she waves me to the far seat on the other side of the train. Anything to keep the peace. I just feel very cool, cowed and blackmailed.
"What the hell are you, White? A man, or a soft punching bag for hysterical women of all ages? Who's running this show, anyway? Very firmly I move over.
"What do I care what you like? If you go out, it go over to the other side yourself?"
"I don't like you near me," shouts Margaret.
"She gets up to see if I really mean it. She moves down to the far seat, her eyes never leaving my face. She stares at me, perplexed, but thinking hard, trying to figure out this revolution. I look out of the window. It's not English countryside, green even in winter.
"WE STOP AT a station. It can't quite yet be our station."
"Maybe I can ask someone on the plat-form. As I step out a sudden scream of fright stabs me. Margarret comes running toward me. her eaves wide with terror.
"I pick her up. What's the matter, daunting? Did you think I was going to leave you?"
"Daddy won't ever leave you, not ever.
'Now let's sit down here and look out of the window.' The gray clouds hang low as we pull out of the little station. But she can't look. She is fighting hard, but the little chest is heavening. As asumer as a summer shower,
tears gush from the black eyes. She buries her head in the collar of my trench coat.
"That's all right, I say, patting her back softly. 'Go ahead and cry.'
"She nods solemnly.
"Margaret," of course, is "Barbara," White's daugher.
"THEY WERE Expendable" was a story told to White in Rhode Island by members of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrion 3, four men, who sailed from Rhode Island to be sailed for the Philippines in 1941. He said in his foreword: "I have been wandering in and out of wars since 1939, and many times before have I seen the sad young men come ashore." The vessel, steel and the steel of falling walls still in their ears, come out to the fat, well-fed cities behind the lines, where the complacent white men of the coast proclaim those people whose headlines proclaim every skirmish as a magnificent victory.
"And through those plump cities the sad young men back from battle wander as strangers in a strange land, talking a grim language of realism which the smug citizenry doesn't understand, trying to tell of a trawdy which few enjoy hearing."
W. L. WHITE wanted to tell their story. He told it in "They Were Expendable." His writings were greatly praised, though what he said about the Russians, for example, angered some people who wanted to be told only pleasant things about our wartime ally. In "Land of Milk and Honey," published in 1948, he told us that to many American Indians, but that for many Russians the land was the United States, and his story was that of Vasilik Kotov, who opted for the milk and honey that was America.
White was making his national reputation as a war correspondent in the last years of William Allen White. In 1968 he told us about leaving Emporia, about the fact that the Whites had "one strong hereditary trait; in my knowledge none of us has made any attempt to follow in his father's footsteps." His father told him about the advantage of being a cowboy, but the son went east, after a time at the University of Kansas, and studied at Harvard, and became a cosmopolitan figure, a man of the West as well as the Midwest.
- ROM HIS WHO'S Who listings I dropped temporarily the fact that at Christmastime, 1939, he broadcast from the Mannheimer line in Finland, and that he won the first prize of the National Headliners Club for the year's best European broadcast. Kathrine White sent us 'h it a message of thanking Edward R. and Janet Murrow, and we offer the voice of W. L. White, with the short-wave interruptions so characteristic of '39 and '40.*
SOMEONE ELSE was there on the Gazette in those days, to be quoted in the "Album," our own Del Brinkman, fresh from his hometown of Olpe. He writes that "If William Allen White typified life in middle America in the early 1900's, William L. White typified the changing America. If William Allen typified the changing of the times, then was William L. White.
William Allen White had died in 1944; W. L. White became editor and publisher of the Emporia Gazette. In the Gazette's "Album of Memories" many talk about him. John L. White, who worked one of the young reporters who worked on the Gazette, writes about the influence of "Ted McDaniel and Gene Lowther, Beatrice Jice and Bernard Kelly, and David Roberts." He adds that he got that special feeling that Gazette people enjoy, the feeling that journalism is a noble calling, from such people. "But more memorably, I visited Young Bill, and in a very special way from Sailor - Mrs. White and Mrs. White."
often invited to be a trustee of the William Allen White Foundation here at KU, but he turned down all the offers, writing former Dean Burton W. Marvin in that that a sack (or any other relative) has no space around a memorial foundation."
"He was a brilliant man. I admired him from a distance, but even from that distance, he had great influence on me. There was an air of quality about Bill White. His writing was excellent. He used the English language as it should be used."
1415 ALSO meant that he turned down repeated offers to come to KU to talk on William Allen White Day, but in 1688, when we had the big White Centennial affair here he finally yielded. I can still hear him, there in the Union Ballroom, and feel that special air that pervaded the place that February 12.
He talked mainly about his father, how the family had kidded that great man: "Would the Sage of Emporia care to pass the potatoes?" "Hadn't the Voice of Main Street maybe better button his fly?" He told about the pretentious people who talked about "Bill White," not knowing that WAW was "Will" to his close friends.
W. L. White: he was a Kanaas editor, but
retained to trade on the reputation of his
father, William B. White.
He talked of his boyhood, of life at home, his father hearing Pablo Castaas play the cello on the phonograph, of the elder White's disdain of sports, of WAW's incredible appetite and of his marvelous ability at white competition and of his marvelous mother, of the campaign against the Klu Klux Klan in 1924, of the circumstances surrounding Z-"To an Anxious Friend" editorial.
THEN, ON JULY 26, 1973, W. L. White, who had forecast his own death in that talk, also died of cancer. The editorial writers turn out in force. The Hutchinson News wrote of him as a newspaperman, Kansas newspaperman, CBS broadcaster, author, magazine writer, and even Republican politician. He was not only the one he preferred, and the distinction that will be given him by his friends, most of whom are newspapermen and women too." The writer said that "Young Bill" White really never left Emporia. Wherever he roamed, his writing came back to The Gazette. Wherever he was, his staff searched him out for decisions, or waited for his guidance in the newspaper's operation.
"... Kansas will remember him, fondly and proudly, as a native son who embraced Kansas with the affection of a father for an errant son, who both scolded and loved us, and who dug deep roots into the Kansas soil."
"HE WAS A fountain of knowledge. He knew about a lot of things—language, books, music, food, liquor, history, politics, art, type and photography. Whenever he found 'bright' young people, Mr. White began to whet their mental appetites."
Most affecting, for me, was the series Ray Call wrote for the Gazette, write knowing that the boss would not approve of such a book. Here are some vignettes from that series:
About his days at KU and Harvard: he was a "m most irregular student—but he did things," his wife says. 'He was editor of the Lampoon; he wrote two plays and both got to Broadway. . . His classmates still chuckle about a dinner party at Loche Ober's in honor of an appendix (present in its bottle) he'd just lost.'
"The boss was a super story-teller. Most of all, his stories were true, and concerned people he knew before and after they became famous." Call mentioned Eric Severead, John Do Passes, Richard Nixon, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Hercule Hoover.
ABOUT THE W. L. White monocle: not an affectation, but acquired after he had lost his tent pair of $50 eyeglasses in the men's room on a Santa Fe train. "It is inaccurate to say the monocle was not in any way an affectation. The truth is, he used it for show once in a while—not in wearing the monocle but in getting it from his eye. He would wear a monocle or he by lifting his eyebrow to let the monocle fail freely to his chest."
"... his word was good. If he agreed to
come, they would go away later.
His promised we were always kept
But he did not believe that retired people and poor folks should have to pay taxes for a course so that golfers would have a place to play."
"His one last fling was the 1972 Republican National Convention at Miami Beach. . . One evening he and an Ms White had been talking about the convention and watched the convention on television."
Mr. White had no objection to golf courses (although he thought the game was too much). But as I read in a newspaper,
Nor is Kansas journalism, I might add.
William Lindsay White; we are honored to
add his name today to our Newspaper
Editors Hall of Fame.
Ray Call concluded: "The memories abound. They seem even more vivid this Christmas. The holiday just isn't the same without him."
**PLUS:** THE TOY cap pistol White once used when moderating a political program on television; the Plain English Handbook he gave during a short course in grammar for the staff; the framed front page of the Gazette for November 25, 1963; the Catholic burial service for John Kennedy in Latham; the public English translation under license; the milk machine in the library, ordered installed by the boss; the wood-burning fireplace in the front office; peppermint canes on the Christmas tree for passing children.
Kansan editor is award finalist
Jerry Seib, Hays senior, has been named one of five journalism students nationwide selected as Barney Kligore Award Competition finalists. He will receive a Kligore award centennial prize and a scholarship of the Society of the Professional Journalists. Sigma Delta Chi, in Detroit.
The national award competition is designed to recognize journalism excellence in student members of the society. The award is named for the author, president of the Wall Street Journal and honorary national president of the society.
Seib is editor of the University Daily Kansan and has worked for the Dallas bureau of the Wall Street Journal, the Salina Journal and the Phillips County Review. He will be a Sears congressional intern in D.C., during the spring semester.
Cheryl Angel Patterson, a senior at California State University at Fulerton, was named the 1977 winner of the $2,500 Kilogre award. Other finalists were from Indiana, California State-Fresno and Pennsylvania State universities.
Registration Sept. 23 & 26 at Kansas Union Blood Mobile on Campus: Wescoe Hall September 27, 28, 29 Robinson Gym 10:30 a.m.to 4:30 p.m. 10 a.m.-3 p.m. KANSAS UNION BALLROOM
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