John F. Kennedy, Arthur Krock, and Cold War News Management

John F. Kennedy’s presidency is often remembered as a high-water mark of relations between the White House and the press. Kennedy’s smooth news conferences, his friendships with influential scribes such as Ben Bradlee, and his grasp (born of his own brief newspaper career) of the journalists’ work all suggest a relationship of collaboration, not antagonism. But the veneer of amicability masked a troubling contentiousness. Under Dwight Eisenhower, reporters had chafed at heightened Cold War secrecy, and to resent Ike’s use of television in the service of image-making. Although Kennedy assuaged some of these anxieties, the continuation of what New York Times columnist James Reston dubbed “news management” –intensive White House efforts to regulate what appeared in the news media – continued apace.

During the Kennedy administration, Arthur Krock of the Times and a longtime Kennedy family ally morphed from friend to foe. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the ensuing assertion by a Pentagon flack of a governmental “right to lie” in a nuclear crisis, Krock became a scourge of the administration’s press relations, serving up his summa of Kennedy-bashing in a March 1963 Fortune magazine article, “Mr. Kennedy's Management of News,” commissioned at 3,000 words but, owing to Krock's zeal, submitted at twice the length. In this, Krock gave voice to a growing trend. The House Subcommittee on Government Information investigated news management, and a group of newspaper representatives compiled a list of offenses committed during the missile crisis, cautioning that the government not “look upon news of what the government is doing not as an honest report of what has happened, but as a means to some desired end.” With Kennedy's assassination, these incidents were forgotten, but in them lay the seeds of the credibility gap that, under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, would open wide.