A Dangerous Time for the Press and the Presidency
At the dawn of a turbulent era in American history, an inexperienced but media-savvy President, early in his first term, was obsessing about negative press.
John F. Kennedy, who had grown accustomed to compliant coverage, was running up against the limits of his power to control the public narrative when neither the world nor the press would read from his script. Halfway around the globe, a small band of foreign correspondents were undercutting the White House with stories that showed the United States becoming more deeply involved (and less successfully) than the government acknowledged in what would become the Vietnam War.
Relations between the Saigon press corps and the United States Embassy had deteriorated into "a mutual standoff of cold fury and hot shouts––Liar! Traitor! Scoundrel! Fool!––with an American foreign policy teetering precariously in the void between," wrote William Prochnau in Once Upon a Distant War, an under-appreciated account of fraught relations between the government and the press.
At his wit's end one day in 1962, Kennedy dialed up his long-time friend James Reston, the legendary columnist and Washington Bureau Chief with an urgent request, in the interest of national security: fire war reporter David Halberstam. Reston declined. Halberstam persevered, the war proving every bit the disaster he had foreseen. And even the President eventually lamented, upon reading the Times one morning, "why can I get this stuff from Halberstam when I can't get it from my own people?"
