Remarks at the Annual
Convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors
The President. Thank you all, and let
me say a special thank you to your chairman, David Lawrence, and your
president, the distinguished editor of one of America's great newspapers,
Katherine Fanning. For just a minute there, I thought I was still at the
Gridiron. [Laughter]
When
he stood before this group almost 27 years ago, President Kennedy said that,
``The President of a great democracy such as ours and the editors of great
newspapers such as yours owe a common obligation to the people to present the
facts with candor and in perspective.'' Well, I certainly agree. Whether one is
working in the Oval Office or in the newsrooms of
Now,
not all Presidents have been that generous. I've told this story before, and if
you've heard it, I hope you'll just bear with me. That's the nice thing about
this job; you get to quote yourself shamelessly -- and if you don't, Larry Speakes will. [Laughter] But as you may know, historians
trace the Presidential press conference back to a Chief Executive who was quite
reticent with the press, John Quincy Adams. He didn't hold press conferences.
But it seems that every morning before dawn
But
I've always believed that the key to good press relations is tact, candor, and
seeing most things from the point of view of editors and reporters. Sort of
like Lyndon Johnson. [Laughter] There's a story about Johnson when he was Vice
President. He was coming off the Senate floor when he ran into a reporter for
the New York Times. Johnson grabbed him, shouted, ``You, I've been looking for
you,'' pulled him into his office, and began a long harangue about something or
other. About halfway through, he scribbled a note on a scrap of paper, buzzed
his secretary, and gave it to her. She was back in a minute with another note.
He glanced at it while he talked and then threw it away. And eventually the
reporter got out, but as he left the outer office, he saw the note that Johnson
had written lying on the secretary's desk. It said, ``Who's
this guy I'm talking to anyway?'' [Laughter]
Well,
I know who you are, and I'm not here to harangue. I'm going to keep my copy
crisp and clean -- who, what, where, when, why, and how, with no extra words.
And for my lead -- something that's at the top of the page in any election year
and certainly this one -- the economy. It's time to take a blue pencil to the
nonsense that some who are applying for my job are circulating about our
economy. We've heard about hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, the decline of
the middle class, and the deindustrialization of America -- and this is at a
time when our nation is in the longest peacetime expansion on record, is
creating hundreds of thousands of jobs each month, has a larger proportion of
the work force employed than ever before, has been seeing real personal and
family income climb ever since our expansion began, and is exporting more than
ever in our history.
So,
it's time to cross out the false charges and put in a little perspective. Yes,
there is something happening in
When
I got out of the movie business and first tried for public office, most of the
newspapers that covered my race for Governor ran on technology just one
generation removed from Gutenberg, the technology of the first industrial
revolution, linotypes and the rest. Today, less than a quarter century later,
you are reporting, editing, and publishing the news about the current
Presidential campaign with a technology that is light-years removed from
anything that preceded it. Computer stations to write, light pencils to edit, lap-top
word processors that let reporters file finished copy in seconds over the
phone, satellite hookups to shoot entire issues to remote printing plants --
these incredible transformations have opened vast new horizons to you and your
staffs. The result is that while, in what you might call the manufacturing end
of newspapers -- for example, printing and running presses -- employment is
about the same today as in 1960, in the service end, reporters and editors in
particular, employment has boomed. Newspapers now have almost half again as
many people on the job as 27 years ago, and pay is better.
Yes,
here is the real story about what's happening to our economy. Newspapers were
the first on the street with the speed-of-light technology of the computer age.
What you did in the sixties and seventies, the rest of American industry has
been doing in the seventies and eighties. And that doesn't mean that we're deindustrializing or becoming a hollow service economy or
that our paychecks are shrinking. It does mean that we're becoming much more
productive, and so we're spending more time, energy, and manpower on the
thought that goes into our products. The story behind the story is that's just
what we must do to grow and prosper and stay the world's leader.
You
know, all those fellows who talk about us becoming a nation that flips each
other's hamburgers and takes in each other's laundry -- they owe you who
represent what we're really becoming a retraction. If the retraction ever comes
-- and I'm not holding my breath -- it'll rank right up there with what must be
history's greatest retraction. I'm told it appeared years ago in one of our
newspapers -- I won't say which one. And talk about getting a story wrong, it
read, and I'm quoting now, ``Instead of being arrested, as we stated yesterday,
for kicking his wife down a flight of stairs and hurling a lighted kerosene
lamp after her, the Reverend James P. Wellman died, unmarried, 4 years ago.''
[Laughter]
Now,
I've talked a lot about technology and the economy, but there is a greater
truth that gives life and strength to technology in your industry and
throughout our economy, and that's freedom. Here in Washington, about a half
mile from the White House, stands a monument to one of the early fathers of
modern medical technology, an 18th century physician. It's a gray stone statue
of the man sitting in his chair in a pose of contemplation. Behind his head is
a mosaic of brilliant colors, as if these colors depicted the quality of his
thought. Technology, like literature, like journalism, flourishes in our land
because we have the freedom to bring the brilliant mosaics in our minds to
life. I'm talking here about the first amendment, although technology is not,
strictly speaking, a first amendment issue. But our freedom
of expression, of debate, of the unfettered airing of ideas is the great plain
on which our technological harvest grows.
There
is a titanic struggle in the world today. I've often characterized it as the
struggle between freedom and totalitarianism, but you could as easily call it
the struggle between the pen and the sword, between the first amendment of our
Constitution and article 6 of the Soviet Constitution -- that's the one that
places the party over the country. More and more, the tide of battle seems
clear, at least on one front. As
Soviet
leaders talk about glasnost. We in the West have taken this to mean a new
freedom of expression, a new flow of information and ideas, a response to the
pressures of a changing world. And yet, though some sharp criticism appears in
the Soviet press, we know other criticism is stifled. Some publicized prisoners
of conscience are released, but others remain in camps and wards. Some people
are allowed to demonstrate, but peaceful protests by Jewish women in
We
don't minimize the importance of what's happening in the U.S.S.R., and we hope
that the
Let
me suggest some first steps you might join me in, in encouraging the Soviet
leaders to take. Mr. Gorbachev and I addressed each other's people on
television. This was helpful. But now we should move even further and see the
The
struggle between the pen and the sword is worldwide, and despite the moral
force of freedom and the disadvantages of totalitarianism, the final outcome is
by no means certain. And wherever the battle is joined, you, willingly or
unwillingly, are in the field. During the period leading up to the cease-fire
negotiations in
I
don't often quote from Washington Post editorials. [Laughter] I won't say the
Post is aggressive, but the first thing I hear each morning is the paper
hitting the front door of the White House. Ben Bradlee
has it delivered by cruise missile. [Laughter] Yet after the Nicaraguan
cease-fire agreement, the Post observed that ``The
cease-fire accord has the superficial appearance of an agreement between
equals. But with the war, the Sandinistas were hurting badly, while with the
aid cutoff, the contras were collapsing.'' And the Post continued, ``It has
been argued by the anti-contra left that the Sandinistas could not reasonably
be expected to democratize while facing a mortal threat. It follows that, being
no longer under the gun, they can reasonably be expected to honor their pledges
to democratize.'' And the editors concluded, ``Those Americans who have
repeatedly urged others to `give peace a chance' now have an obligation to turn
their attention and their passion to ensuring democracy a chance.''
Well,
the Post is not alone in this view. Costa Rican President Arias has said that
``There can be no peace without democracy in
Last
week the opposition newspaper, La Prensa, had to stop
publishing for several days because it was denied newsprint, in direct
violation of the Central American peace agreement. La Prensa
is no friend of the Sandinistas. This January, its editor and publisher said
that ``In 8 years we have gone from Somoza to a
dictatorship that is even worse, with a Marxist-Leninist ideology.'' Well,
perhaps this denial of newsprint was a one-time thing. Perhaps it won't happen
again. We hope it's not a sign that the Sandinistas are starting, as we warned
they might, to revert to oppression now that pressure from the democratic
resistance is off.
What
a contrast between what's happened in
If
success comes in
The
question of democracy in
Now,
before I finish, let me turn to another matter of great concern. In the last
few weeks, we've seen cover stories, television specials, and front page
articles on the war against drugs. One frequent refrain has been, as the New
York Times this Sunday wrote: ``No administration has signed -- or spent more
money to stem the flow of drugs into this country. But we are losing ground.''
Well, let me offer a slightly different view. Yes, we've done more than ever before, and right now we're holding our own. We've stopped
But
to just take two of many signs of progress -- the number of drug users has
leveled off and may be dropping, and almost all high school seniors now say
it's wrong even to try cocaine -- these are big changes from just a few years
ago. We've gone after smugglers and dealers as never before. The big
international arrests of the last few weeks are just one result of this. And
we've enlisted the military. And let me say, if you want to see effective
leadership, take a look at Vice President Bush's role in this. While others talked
about leading the military into the fray against drugs, the Vice President has
led. And the result: Last year the Navy steamed some 2,600 ship days, while
military planes flew more than 16,000 hours in the fight against illicit drugs.
But in the end, this effort will be won not on foreign battlefields but on the homefront. When all of us insist that drug abuse is not only not for us but intolerable in family, friends,
neighbors, acquaintances -- anywhere by anybody -- then we'll win. We're not
there yet, but we're on our way.
Thank
you. God bless you.
Ms. Fanning. President Reagan has
agreed to take questions. I want to remind you that questions should be asked
only by ASNE members. Would you please come to a microphone, state your name
and the name of your paper, and I'll recognize you from here. I think I'll take
the prerogative of asking the first question, if I may, Mr. President.
Larry
M. Speakes
You
spoke eloquently of the free flow of information, and yet, as you referred in
jest, your former press spokesman, Larry Speakes, has
confessed that he manufactured quotes for you. Would you tell us, please, did
you approve of that process, and will you continue to allow that to happen in
your White House?
The President. I was not aware of that
and just learned it recently, as all the rest of you did, in the words in his
book. And I can tell you right now that I have no affection for these
kiss-and-tell books that are being written, and I find them entirely fiction.
President's Agenda
Q.
Jimmy Denley,
The President. Oh, my goodness. I
never know how to answer that question because, frankly, I'm just going for the
day-to-day battle here and haven't thought about how I'm going to be
remembered. I'll be pleased if they remember me at all. [Laughter] And I'm
going to continue pushing as hard as I can for some of the things, in these
last months, that are part of the economic reform and the things that we
brought about to see if they can't be planted permanently and not something
that will just go away when someone else comes in. And among those are things
like -- well, for example, I'm getting pretty soon -- they're sending me the
first budget I've ever had since I've been here. The law tells me I have to
submit a budget, and it always turned into a continuing resolution. And I think
that we do need a constitutional change. We need an amendment that will ban --
as
Soviet-U.S. Relations
Q.
Mr. President, Robert Morton,
The President. Well, I didn't exactly
say what has been quoted that I said there. I called attention to the fact, in
discussing this new leader -- you know, I was here several years before one of
them lived long enough for me to meet with him. [Laughter] And I called
attention to the fact that maybe there were some differences with some of the
things he was proposing, in that he was the first and only Russian leader to
this day who had never, in appearing before the Communist Congress, pledged
himself to carry on the Marxist idea of a one-world Communist state. Now, I
just called attention to that. As to whether it was an oversight or he didn't
think it was necessary or not, I don't know. But I thought it was something
that we should keep in the back of our minds when we were negotiating instead
of what we have faced over the years in previous Russian leaders. But I did not
ask us to accept that. As a matter of fact, I only know one little phrase in
Russian, and I've used it to where he's sick of it, and I love it. And that is:
Dovorey no provorey --
trust but verify.
President's Reading
Habits
Q.
Mr. President, I'm Tim Gallagher, from the Albuquerque Tribune, in
The President. Well, I begin with the
comics -- [laughter] -- a lifetime habit -- and then my next turn is to the
editorial pages. And I say that in the numbers because there are more than one
paper that come to breakfast with me. And I do as much as I can then before I
have to run for the office. And then it is true that I rifle through the
clippings they get because they bring those in also from papers that I don't
get -- from out of
Q.
Lou Urenick, from the
The President. We expect them to. And
I'm just sorry about the fact that evidently they misunderstand, as many of our
other people have -- our own citizens have misunderstood. The Geneva accords
that we've been negotiating on and picking back and forth at each other for a
long time -- we have finally reached an agreement, and there is nothing in that
agreement that is going to prevent us from supplying the Mujahidin
as long as they need it and as long as the Soviet Union continues to supply the
Afghan forces in their puppet government that they're leaving behind. So,
there's no restriction on us; the Mujahidin are going
to continue to have our help.
Race Relations
Q.
Ben Johnson,
The President. Well, I hope that race
will not be a part of this campaign in any way. And I'm sorry that in the
campaign that's going on with one candidate of the black race that it seems
that more attention is being paid to the difference in color than is being paid
to what he is actually saying. And I have to believe that a great many of us
would find ourselves in great disagreement with the policies that he is
proposing and that we would perhaps be more vocal about them if it wasn't for
concern that that be misinterpreted into some kind of a racial attack.
Contrary
to what some people say, the most frustrating thing that I have endured since I
have been here in the image making that goes on is that I have been portrayed
so often as, in some way, a racist and prejudiced in regard to racial matters.
And it's hard for me to take because I grew up in a family in which that was
considered the greatest sin -- prejudice and discrimination. And all my life --
back when I was a sports announcer and broadcasting major league baseball, I
was one of the little handful across the country that
continued to editorialize for the breaking of the ban and the allowing of
blacks into organized baseball. And it's carried on through my life.
And
as I say, I regret that this has become a factor. The candidates should all be
based on what are their policies and what is it that they would propose to do.
And I will be very frank with you: I find a great disagreement with some of the
things that are being proposed by Jesse Jackson. But I also find a great deal
of disagreement with his fellow candidates in that party, which is why I'd
suggest that everybody should vote Republican. [Laughter]
Q.
Thank you, sir.
Presidential Campaign
Q.
Mr. President, a little more on your political, unbiased opinions: I'd like to
ask you to assess the 1988 race, and where you see it going, and how will it
end?
The President. Oh, you've caught me in
a weak spot. When I was a sports announcer, I was superstitious about ever
talking about who was going to win the game or whether they would. And I
wouldn't even mention that the pitcher was pitching a no-hit ball game because
superstition has it that then you'll jinx him if you do. And to ask me to
predict what's going to happen here -- well, I think in the Republican Party,
of course, it has now narrowed down to one candidate. But even so, there's a
convention to be held. And on the other side, I don't know whether the
candidates now campaigning -- whether any one of them is going to wind up at the
convention with the nomination or whether there will be a brokered convention
or whether the Democratic Party will go afield
seeking to draft someone who has not been campaigning in the primaries. And I
just refuse to try and make a guess on this.
Q.
Mr. President, one of the senior administration officials was quoted last week
as saying that the contra war is over and that the resistance forces have been
effectively dismantled. Mr. President, do you agree with this? And also,
several years ago you said that your intention was to get the Sandinistas to
cry uncle. Have they gotten you to cry uncle instead?
The President. No, and if I find that
unnamed official, he may not be official. [Laughter] No, I don't believe it's
over. And I believe that -- with all my heart and soul -- that the pressure
that is being imposed on Nicaraguan citizens that are being called the contras,
who have taken up arms to try and bring about the continuation of the
revolution that had them in conflict with Somoza as a dictator and who was
denying democratic rights -- and they were succeeded by the Sandinistas, who
not only seized the government and took it over for themselves after the armed
revolution but violated the agreement of the revolutionaries to the Organization
of American States that they would install democracy as we know it, a
pluralistic democracy and so forth. But in doing so we forget there were other
revolutionaries that fought beside them, but who were not part of a longtime
organization. And so, they were ousted, some exiled, some imprisoned. And many
of those are now in what we call the contras. And I think we have an obligation
to support those people until -- call it crying uncle -- I meant that the
Sandinistas would permit the people of
Q.
What are you willing to do if they do not follow through with the democratic
reforms?
The President. What's that?
Q.
What action are you willing to take if they don't follow through with the
democratic reforms?
The President. Well, I think it would
be unwise of me to talk about any further things that might be done. Let them
go to sleep every night wondering what we'd do.
Banking Industry
Q.
Mr. President, I'm Tom Vale, of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Sir, do you feel
that the banking system of the
The President. I think it has some
troubles, yes, that have grown out of the -- well, some of the problems that
were left with us by double-digit inflation with loans and so forth. And we
know that, through the Government and the institutions that we have in
government to help, we're giving as much help as we can there. I don't think
that it is a problem that could suddenly bring disaster down upon us and end
this expansion and this economic growth that we're having. But we're going to
continue to try and help. And as I say, when you think back to the almost
sudden change from inflation to what we have now, that meant that there were a
lot of loans that were based on collateral that no longer has the value that it
did back in the inflationary era, and problems of that kind are bothering us.
Ms. Fanning. Thank you, Mr.
President. We really appreciate your coming and spending time with us today.
The President. Well, thank you.
Note:
The President spoke at