Presidential Papers, Doc#1889 Personal To Roy Wilson Howard, 6 June 1956. In The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower
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Doc #1890

Document #1889; June 6, 1956
To Roy Wilson Howard
Series: EM, AWF, Name Series ; Category: Personal
The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, Volume XVII - The Presidency: The Middle Way
Part X: Cracks in the Alliance; May 1956 to September 1956
Chapter 20: Confronting "great risks"

 

Dear Roy: Not only have I read your letter, I am sending it for study to two or three of my most experienced men in this field. After they have read it, I should like to make a date for them to come to see you. If you could spare a couple of hours, I should like you to present your side of the thing from beginning to end.1

Possibly the picture is exactly as you paint it, but I am sure that these people can give you one instance where inexcusably bad reporting on the part of a news service created consternation in Formosa--so much so that we had to issue a corrected statement as rapidly as possible.2

This is human--I am not complaining. I am merely trying to say that the picture cannot be totally black, just as it is most certainly not completely white.

Many thanks for all the trouble you took in writing.

With warm personal regard, As ever

P.S. Won't you please let me know whether you will be willing to see my boys?3

1 Scripps Howard President Roy Howard had answered the President's request for a detailed report on his assessment of the activities of the United States Information Agency (see no. 1838). Howard had criticized the USIA's dissemination of American news abroad. Compared to the three U.S. owned and operated news agencies, whose "reputation for honesty, integrity and freedom from government pressure and propaganda taint" was unchallenged, Howard said, the USIA was "not only a total loss, but is actually a liability insofar as its bumbling in the field of news dissemination is concerned. Its efforts are not only fantastically wasteful and hopelessly inept, but they constitute an actual menace . . . to the priceless reputation . . . of the three American press associations" (Howard to Eisenhower, June 2, 1956, AWF/N). Eisenhower would send a copy of Howard's letter to Secretary of State Dulles, USIA Director Theodore Streibert, and Press Secretary James Hagerty (see Whitman to Dulles, Streibert, and Hagerty, June 7, 1956, AWF/D).

2 We have been unable to identify this incident.

3 Howard would tell Presidential Assistant Bernard Shanley that he would make time to see anyone that the President chose. "I don't mind telling you personally, however, that I sure hope that one of them is not Mr. Streibert," he wrote. "I feel that my talking to that man about world news and its distribution would be just about as profitable as somebody talking to me about Aztec grammar" (Howard to Shanley, June 11, 1956, AWF/N, Howard Corr.; see also Jackson to Whitman, June 27, 1956, ibid.). Howard would meet with Eisenhower on October 10.

Bibliographic reference to this document:
Eisenhower, Dwight D. Personal To Roy Wilson Howard, 6 June 1956. In The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, ed. L. Galambos and D. van Ee, doc. 1889. World Wide Web facsimile by The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission of the print edition; Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/first-term/documents/1889.cfm

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