July 12, 1949
MEMORANDUM OF CONVERSATION
This afternoon I had a visit from the Officers of the State Department Press Association shown on the attached list. They took up with me the following points:
1. They requested that the Assistant Secretaries be informed that in the normal case whenever there is current news of interest in the field of one of the Assistant Secretaries, he should make himself available to attend the noon press conference and be interviewed on the record. I said that I had understood from conversations with Mr. Webb that, in general, this was being done and that I knew that Mr. Thorp, Mr. Allen and Mr. Peurifoy at l4east had made themselves available. I pointed out that some regard must be had for the other duties of the Assistant Secretaries who could not at a moment's notice drop what they were doing and attend a press conference. They said that in the past six weeks they thought only one Assistant Secretary had attended these noon briefings. I told them that I would take the matter up again with Mr. Webb and try to work out a satisfactory result.
2. They referred again to what they called the "high level leak"; that is, having an officer of the Department at a high level who would be able to discuss with the press in so far as anyone could the Department's attitude on important policy questions. In this regard they suggested that such a man should have had, if possible, experience as a newspaper working man who would understand their problems. I said to them that, as they knew, I approved of this general idea which had been carried out at the San Francisco conference and which Mr. Bohlen had been doing so far as time permitted in the past two years. I pointed out that to take an operating newspaper man would be of doubtful practicality because he would not start off with knowledge of Department attitudes and policies and it would be very difficult to have a man who had no other duties participating in these high level matters. They said that the professional diplomat, they feared, would start out with the impulse not give information, but to avoid giving it. I doubted whether this had been the case with Mr. Bohlen and said that we would do the best we could with the matter, but their suggestion seemed to me somewhat unrealistic.
3. They then raised again the question of their having access to desk officers and asked me to send out a circular directing all desk officers to confer freely with newspaper men. I said flatly that I would not do this because I could not have such uncontrolled access by the press to junior officers. In the first place, it was not fair to the junior officers. If they were instructed to see the press, they would have to do so and with the utmost good faith they might say things which were quite contrary to matters which I had in mind and which they did not know about. This was sure to cause trouble and I must turn down that request flatly. In arguing with me on this matter they raised two quite different points. The first was that on many occasions something would happen abroad and their newspapers would ask them to get the State Department reaction. It was impossible for them to be in touch with Mr. Webb or me and, therefore, they could not get the requested reaction. I pointed out that this was the very thing which I did not want them to get: that is, a reaction from a desk officer which by definition had not been considered at the policy level, and stated that their own argument only underlined the undesirability of what they asked. They then said that this illustration was unfortunate, which I agreed. They then turned to their second point. They said that on many occasions when they were writing fact articles about trade with this or that country or such things as the British dollar crisis, they wanted to get facts. Some of these they could get from the Department of Commerce or from works of reference, but in the interest of speed they wanted to go to the working officer of the Department who had the facts. Here they were met by two difficulties. One was that in many cases the information was over- classified and could not be given out; the other was that the desk officers would not talk with them. In respect to this I said that it was quite impossible to give desk officers the responsibility to declassify material; that I would speak to Mr. Webb about the problem of over-classification, which was a separate problem. In so far as getting factual material, it might be possible to work through Mr. McDermott's office some way of making this available to them, but I was not going to use this as an opening wedge by which they could start out talking with desk officers about factual information and slide into policy questions. In other words, my view still stood that there could not be general access to desk officers, even though as a matter of words the conversation was said to be restricted to matters of fact. I said that I would ask Mr. Webb to consider this problem.
4. The fourth point was brought up by Mr. Ward, who said that there was a great deal of material sent in to the Department from the various missions abroad, such as daily or weekly summaries of the Soviet press sent from Moscow. Mr. Ward, thought, and it seemed to me with some justice, that it was wrong to classify this material as secret and that it should be made available to members of the press who would like to see it. Mr. Ward spoke also of certain items which appeared on the daily economic or daily political summary which should be made available. In other words, he thought there was a great deal of information in the Department which it would be in the interest both of the Department and of the public to make available and which, instead of being used, was merely filed away. I said that I would have this investigated since I was in favor of giving them all information which could properly be made available.
Would Mr. Webb give me his views on the foregoing?
D.A.
S:DA:DHM