The Coral Gables Times

Thursday, November 15, 1962, page 4 (of 64)

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THE CORAL GABLES TIMES

Established Jan. 15, 1926 Second Class Postage Paid at Miami, Fla. Published at 364 Sevilla Ave., Coral Gables 34, Fla. JOHN T. WATTERS | President ROLFE NEILL | Editor & Publisher Subscriptions: $4.20 year by mail anywhere in the U.S.A.

Next, Mr. Tinder

We note approvingly that the City Commission is looking with a more practiced eye at contracts with City concessionaires. The Times carried an item a couple weeks back on how the new food concession contract at the Youth Center doubles the amount of revenue due to the City. The amount is small in this instance but the principle is as large as ever. We now look with interest to see what will unfold between the City and the pro at Biltmore Golf Course, William Tinder. We printed stories earlier suggesting that Mr. Tinder made about $25,000 last year. We also suggested this was too much. The contract is being revised this month. Until recently the City actually didn't know what Mr. Tinder made and may not have known yet unless prodded by interested private parties. However, we predict when the City's figures are made public shortly they will show substantially what this newspaper has already shown. Secondly, we hope the Commission will act accordingly and bring the earnings down to where they should be, in the neighborhood of $15,000 annually.

Richard M. Nixon, R.I.P.

Most of the people who ever covered Richard Nixon, including the editor of this newspaper, are agreed that the man was much more magnetic personally than on television. Take him away from face-to-face encounter, and something valuable gets left out. However, we don't think that Mr. Nixon's televised farewell press conference in Los Angeles last week was anything but the real Mr. Nixon. We're not buying this bunk about the strain of the campaign etc. Strain, sure, but what Dick Nixon said was what he felt, down deep in the gut of his consciousness: He doesn't like reporters because he thinks they don't like him. That it should be said, and said so savagely, indicates only that the wear of the campaign lulled the Nixon defense. Granted that there was some truth in his remarks, but "some" - and precious little - is the only measure with which you can mete it. It was The New York Times' Scotty Reston who answered the defeated Mr. Nixon best, in our opinion. Said that journalist in part: What was most obvious about Nixon, particularly to the press, those recorders of the obvious, was his preoccupation with the machinery of politics. Everything seemed to be contrived, even the appearance of naturalness. He attacked planning but planned everything. He seemed bold and elaborately objective in public, but in private seemed less composed, even uneasy and disturbingly introspective. This was the root of his trouble with the reporters: not that they were refusing to report what he said but that they were insisting on reporting all the rest of the picture: not only the words but the techniques, not only the public posture but the private posture, not only the lines of the play but the elaborate stage directions. No public figure of our time has ever studied the reporters so much or understood them so little. He thought the reporter should merely be a transmission belt for what he said, not of why he said it. Like the cigaret man, he insisted that "it's what's up front that counts," while the reporter, constantly haunted by the feeling that he might deceive the reader merely by reporting the carefully-rehearsed lines in the play, insisted on recording what was going on backstage. Nixon always resented this. He never seemed to understand the difference between news and truth. To him what he said was "news" and should be left there...

Why, Governor Bryant?

Will somebody please explain why Governor Bryant thought it necessary to call a special session of the legislature to handle reapportionment? We've a regular session coming up early in 1963. At that time we could do the job with deliberation and with less expense. The current special session has no value as far as we can see. It puts a premium on time when time is most needed for a suitable plan to be evolved.

'FAREWELL' PRESS CONFERENCE Nixon's Knockout Punch For Press

Good morning, gentlemen. Now that Mr. (Herbert G.) Klein (Mr. Nixon's press secretary) has made his statement, and now that all members of the press are so delighted that I have lost, I'd like to make a statement of my own. I appreciate the press coverage. I think each of you covered it the way you saw it. You had to write it in the way according to your belief of how it would go. I want to say a word on that respect that may surprise you. I don't believe publishers should tell reporters to write one way or another. I want them all to be free. I don't believe the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) should reach its long arm out to California when one lonely voice is raised for me; a whole lot of voices are raised for somebody else. Who picked them to silence one and not the other? I think the free press is very important. That one point I knew was going to come up in questions. I knew one of you was going to ask it. I have no complaints about press coverage. I will never complain about it. I think each of you were writing it as you believed and I want that always to be the case in America... I am proud of the fact that I defended my opponent's patriotism. You gentlemen didn't report it, but I am proud that I did that. I am proud also that I defended the fact that he was a man of good motive, a man that I disagreed with very strongly, but a man of good motives. I want that - for once, gentlemen - I would appreciate if you would write what I say, in that respect. I think it's very important that you write it - in the lead - in the lead. Now I don't mean by that, incidentally, all of you. There's one reporter here who has religiously, when he was covering me - and incidentally, this is no reflection on the others, because some of you, you know, weren't bothered - he's the only reporter on the (Los Angeles) Times that fits this thing, who wrote every word that I said. He wrote it fairly. He wrote it objectively. I don't mean that others didn't have a right to do it differently. But Carl, despite whatever feelings he had, felt that he had an obligation to report the facts as he saw them. I am saying these things about the press because I understood that that was one of the things you were particularly interested in. There'll be no questions at this point on that score. I'll be glad to answer other questions... One last thing. At the outset, I said a couple of things with regard to the press that I noticed some of you looked a little irritated about. And my philosophy with regard to the press has really never gotten through. And I want to get it through. This cannot be said for any other American political figure today, I guess. Never in my 16 years of campaigning have I complained to a publisher, to an editor, about the coverage of a reporter. I believe a reporter has got a right to write it as he feels. I believe if a reporter believes that one man ought to win rather than the other, whether it's on television or radio or the like, he ought to say so. I will say to the reporter sometimes that I think well, look, I wish you'd give (See NIXON, page 6)

EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS by Rolfe Neill

Foxholes When Gerald Haley, the minister of education at First Methodist Church here, told me this week that before the war he'd intended to go into public education I asked him if there were some war experience which changed his mind. The Rev. Mr. Haley, whose quietness has a firm, inspiration quality about it, said yes, there had been. He was a medical aidman in a company of 128 men, only three of whom were around at the war's end. "I spent a couple of years thinking about that. I figured that many men with more talent than I didn't come back. I thought I should try to make whatever contribution I could." He changed his plans to the ministry. * * * 60-Second Review Interest can't help but be generated when a newspaper with the verve of The San Francisco Chronicle has an anthology of its reporting put together "The San Francisco Chronicle Reader," McGraw-Hill, edited by William Hogan and William German). It's a disappointing piece of work, proving perhaps that many news accounts lose their impact when removed from the timeliness of the event itself. The authors intended to choose otherwise, of course. However, I think that largely they failed. And, who, I wonder, reading this book in 1970 will know that Pierre Salinger was the ex-Presidential millionaire's press secretary? The Chronicle reader doesn't say so. The book, supposed to be timeless, is already dated. To be sure there is some good reading in it. Especially I liked an inside-Alcatraz news story and a feature series on the San Francisco beatniks. For the most part, however, this newsprint could have been sent along with the other fish wrappers of yesterday. * * * Yessir, It Is From Ford Moran, 1217 El Rado St.: "This is probably the most unusual collection you ever made. Enclosed envelope and stamps are to prevent your losing the profit on the transaction." Yessir, Mr. Moran, I reckon it is. The gentleman sent back a business reply envelope plus the extra postage we'd used to remind him of a small overdue classified bill. A man of humor is always esteemed in these offices. * * * Left Out Mrs. George R. Simmons of 751 Davis Rd. is a delightful lady whose husband retired from R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. in Winston-Salem, N. C., to the Gables some years ago. Of the many comments we had on our Progress Edition last week, Mrs. Simmons was rightfully wondering, "Where's Fairchild Tropical Gardens?" She is a devoted member there and only the other day when she had the gate watch she counted visitors from eight states, Argentina and Canada. A lover of flowers and plants, Mrs. Davis is head of the committee at University Baptist Church which each Sunday attends to fresh beauty in the baptistry and sanctuary vases. Truly, Fairchild is one of the wonders of Coral Gables. Her call reminded me that it's been sometime since I visited that remarkable garden myself and I tucked away a vacant-day reminder to do so again.

MAILBOX

EDITOR: Congratulations on your special supplement. This really looks good and we hope you will have opportunity and need to do more of them. I guess we also couldn't help but be impressed by your use of our "Welcome to Coral Gables" sign. If merchants and other Gables local advertisers would only pick up this entrance post device and use it regularly, I am sure it would pay dividends for us all. KARL BISHOPRIC President Bishopric, Green, Fielden * EDITOR: This morning as I read the special supplement in the Progress Edition I noticed that the listing of the Coral Gables churches was incomplete. The Lutheran Church is represented here by two congregations - St. James Church at 110 Phoneta Ave. and St. Mark's Church at Bird and LeJeune Road. I do not know the membership at St. James, but the membership of St. Mark's is 600. The Lutheran Church is the oldest and largest of the Protestant Communions in the world, and is third in size among the Protestant groups in the United States. RALPH B. BERGSTRESSER Pastor (Editor's note: Unfortunately, the story in our Progress Edition did not run in its entirety, eliminating a couple of our 15 churches.) * EDITOR: Have just read a letter printed in your latest edition. It was written by a Mr. Gerard Pucel. He mentioned that he'd be most willing to make comparisons between the U.S. Constitution and the U.N. Charter. In light of the fact there is much ignorance concerning these documents, I for one would appreciate the enlight-enment. ARTHUR BLOOM