policy - The Black Vault

THE BDM CORPORATION
authorities in Washington to turn to early press reports for their
information. Confusion was rampant. BDM intervicw with Mr. Danial
Henken on 5 July 1979.
42. Jay Finegan, "Study Says Poor Reporting Distorted Vietnam War," Army
Times, August 1979.
43. Walter Bunge, Robert V. Hudson, and Chung Woo Shu, "Johnson's Information
Strategy for Vietnam: An Evaluatioio," Journalism Quarterly,
Autumn 1968, pp. 417-425.
The authors argue that Johnson could have made far better use of the
media resources at his disposal and could have mounted an effective
counteroffensive.
44. Kearns, p. 355.
45. Of dailics that endorsed a presidential candidate in the Nixon-Kennedy
campaign of 1960, 84 percent endorsed Nixon. When Nixon ran against
Hubert Humphrey in 1968, 80 percent endorsed Nixon. These endorsements
came not only from small town newspapers, but also from major metropolitan
journals. All of the dailies in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit,
Cleveland, and Philadelphia supported Nixon in 1968. Bagdikian,
pp. 145, 146.
46. "Reflections," New Yorker, October 1973, p. 122.
47. Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy (New York: Harper & Row), pp. 225-227.
48. In 1969, the first year of his presidency, Nixon held eleven news
conferences--in contrast with 1961, , which President Kennedy held
twenty, and 1964, in which President Johnson held twenty-seven. And
in 1970 Nixon held only three by mid-summer. But the number of other
appearances on television had increased dramatically. The amount of
prime time the White House was demanding from the networks for carefully
staged pres-idential eppearances and thG amount of air time
devoted to questioning the president had reached such desperate proportions
that some in the network management decided they ought to
take some sort of artiun to moderate the trend. The custom of allowing
the principal opposition party to present its rebuttal to presidential
pronouncements developed at this time.
"Annals of Television: Shaking the Tree," New Yorker, March 17, 1975,
p. 46.
S49. Erwin Knoll, "The President and the Press: Elimi• ring the Middle
Men," The Progressive, March, 1970. The effectiveness of the technique
was amply demonstrated on January 26, when Mr. Nixon took to
the airwaves to defend his veto of the $19.7 billion Labor-HEW appropriations
bill. A presidential press conference was scheduled for that
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