OCR Text |
Show I Truman's Press Confabs Lack Color of FDR's By BAUKIIAGE Sews Analyst and Commentator. WNU Service, 1.616 Eye Street, N. W., Washington, D. C. WASHINGTON. President Truman Tru-man held his 100th White House press and radio conference recently. He said he had enjoyed them all. The reporters, he said, had been lair; had reported the facts. Thank you, Mr. President. "How have I been?" he might have asked us, but didn't. On the way back from the White House that windy 100th day, some rev, r :1Ym of us discussed the question. That 100th conference was the first since his Florida trip which began when the Sacred Cow winged its way from the national na-tional airport, some 30 minutes after Mr. Truman left the chamber of the . house of representatives where he had de- thing that managed to get his ideas over and furnish us with the background back-ground we needed to interpret the daily happenings. We talked the 100th press conference confer-ence over, lamenting that nothing had come out of it which would clarify clar-ify the Greek-Turkish aid program. We regretted that President Truman hadn't injected a little more of himself him-self into the meeting. It would have been to the advantage of the news folk, the program itself, the people peo-ple who were trying to get support for it. Of course, there was reason for Mr. Truman's reticence. He hod been criticized early in his administration adminis-tration for answering some questions' ques-tions' too glibly. He had suffered from spontaneous replies. As a result re-sult he is now perhaps leaning a little too far backwards. The White House press and radio conference is a great institution. It provides a medium for bringing the people and their government nearer together than any other medium which exists, except perhaps the rarer rar-er "fireside chat." Nothing like it exists anywhere else in the world. But it is not an easy thing to handle. The correspondents are there to get every scintilla of news which they think will interest their readers and listeners. The President is there to reveal only what he thinks is his duty to release in the public good. And he is also there to present his Bide of all questions so that his administration ad-ministration appears In the best light. President Roosevelt was a past master at the art. He seldom refused re-fused to answer a question, for that just meant "no news." He preferred to feint and dodge in a manner that produced some kind of an answer an-swer which would suit his ends. President 'rruman has chosen to go into a clinch rather than feint or risk a wild haymaker. Here's Point for Better Roads Last year, some 34,677,000 tons of milk were hauled over rural roads on the journey to milk plants and dealers, according to a report from the Public Roads administration cited cit-ed by Charles M. Upham of the American Road Builders' association. associa-tion. Figures show the nation is using us-ing 13 billion pounds more of milk and various dairy products at pres- 1 Baukhage Mverod his hist0" ric message. Meanwhile, the new declaration of American policy had wakened thousands thou-sands and thousands of words, spoken spo-ken and printed in every nation and in almost every newspaper in the world. Diplomats, generals, statesmen, states-men, people big and little, had quaked or exulted. So we naturally looked for something very hot to write about as a result of our first White House conference thereafter. We didn't get it. We did hear former Ambassador to Poland Arthur Bliss Lane's blast against Communism; we found out that the President was a left-handed bowler (he had just been presented present-ed with a bowling alley); we were assured that he was concerned about rising prices; we listened to him express ex-press the hope that industry would see "the handwriting on the wall" and stop an upward spiral which would bring forth renewed wage demands; we asked for but got "no comment" on a number of bills "in the works' because the President won't talk about "pending legislation" legisla-tion" and he applied the same rule to the Greek-Turkish affair. We also were handed a good laugh out of comment on the famous faux pas made by Gael Sullivan, deputy chairman of the national Democratic Democrat-ic committee while the President nTT""""'!"" "WTS err ri ' i t - 1 Newspaper men and r a casters crowd eagerly about President Truman in one of his 100 p nilk DENT in- INGER" ON;Z t r oints of them pedestrians, were AiVJig" as the result 7,699 motor vehithat was away. Sullivan almost d ed "bi-partisan foreign polij writing to the Republican v) committee chairman and asl a Joint statement supporting man plan on Greek aid. " I I When somebody asked if ' was thinking of resigning th considerable gaiety. There were a number t m questions which elicited som stories but no screaming h-of h-of type that almost always aj after a Roosevelt news con' gy We wondered why. Lookifo ' over the hundred conference depend upon the h6. ij. ,ur their entire food supply. Almost 90 per cent of the nation's milk supply is transported by truck. Tank trucks have been used in the east for many years for milk transportation and a trend toward this type of haulage is growing in the West. Such haulage eliminates the use of milk cans and is quicker and more economical. "In all foods," Upham commented comment-ed in playing up the need for good roads, "transportation costs figure in the consumer's bill. Condition of the road over which milk is hauled is an important factor in transportation costs." A study of 90 milk collection routes in Maine showed that the routes averaged 55 miles, with two-fifths of the mileage being unimproved. Traveling by truck over the mud roads was impossible im-possible part of the year. It was estimated that if roads on these routes were entirely improved, the average cost of collection would be reduced two cents per hundredweight hundred-weight of milk and cream. Cash savings in collection costs for th 90 routes would total $8,800 yearly Mr. Truman, we agreed they hb-d been pretty good. But of late, we agreed, it required a bit of digging ' to get the news. Roosevelt usually gave 'us something which, even if it wasn't news, had a strong human interest appeal. Even if it were only a striking simile like the one Roosevelt Roose-velt used in connection with lerd-lease. lerd-lease. (You may remember, he said that if a neighbor's house was on fire, you naturally would lend him your hose if his weren't long enough, not only to help him save his home but also to keep your own from catching catch-ing fire. And you wouldn't demand payment for its use. After the fire was out the neighbor would give back the hose or pay for it with whatever he had to offer In return.) Even the anti-Roosevelt papers would have to report stories like that, whether they agreed with the idea behind them or not. And if Roosevelt hadn't any specific spe-cific comment on the important news of the day, he frequently would make use of a parable or give us a homily, which howed us how he was thinking on lhe subject, some- |