Memorandum of Conversation with Secretary of State Dean Acheson and the Officers of the State Department Press Association

192 DECLASSIFIED E. O. 11652, Sec. 3(E) and 5(D) or (E) CONFIDENTIAL 632 Dept. of State letter, Aug 2,1973 7-23-15 Be ML He : NARS Date 4.2076 5. July 12,1949 = MEMORANDUM OF CONVERSATION This afternoon I had a visit from the Officers of the State Department Press Association shown on the attached list. They took up with me the following points: 1) They requested that the Assistant Secretaries be informed that in the normal case whenever there is current news of interest in the field of one of the Assistant Secretaries, he should make himself available to attend the noon press conference and be interview on the record. I said that I had understood from con- versations with Mr. Webb that, in teneral, this was being done and that I knew that Mr. Thorp, Mr. Allen and Mr. Peurifoy at least had made themselves available. I pointed out that some regard must be had for the other duties of the Assistant Secretaries who could not at a moment's notice drop what they were doing and attend a press conference. They said that in the past six weeks they thought only one Assistant Secretary had attended these noon briefings. I told them that I would take the matter up again with Mr. Webb and try to work out a satisfactory result. 2) They referred again to what they called the "high level leak"; that is, having an officer of the Department at a: high level who would be able to discuss with the press in so far as anyone could the Department's attitude on important policy questions. In this regard they suggested that such a man should have had, if possible, experience as a newspaper working man who would understand their problems. I said to them that, as they knew, I approved of this general idea which had been carried out at the San Francisco Conference and which Mr. Bohlen had been doing so far as time permitted in the past two years. I pointed out that to take an operating newspaper man would be of doubtful practicality because he would not start off with knowledge of Department atti- tudes and policies and it would be very difficult to have a man who had no other duties participating in these high level matters. They said that the professional diplomat, they feared, would start out with the impulse not to give information, but to avoid giving it. I doubted whether this had been the case with Mr. Bohlen and said that we would do the best we could with the matter, but their sug- gestion seemed to me somewhat unrealistic. CONFIDENTIAL