87. Memorandum From the Director of the United States Information Agency (Murrow) to President Kennedy1
SUBJECT
- Foreign policy on secondary roads . . . casual conversations in Virginia, Western North Carolina, Tennessee and Missouri with assorted truck drivers, motel operators, farm equipment salesmen, farmers, service station operators, and others . . . a personal unscientific poll by a one-time reporter
There is more interest in the stock market and in the weather than in Berlin or Viet-Nam. Louis Seltzer2 was right when he said the people have abdicated when it comes to foreign policy . . . it’s too complex. They would like to have an opinion but they are content to “leave it to the people in Washington.” They think those people are doing a pretty fair job. There is no tension, no criticism. I heard not a single comment on resumption of nuclear testing. Confidence in the President’s judgment is high. “He must be working right hard, hasn’t ‘fleshened up’ since he took over,” was the comment of a North Carolina mountain woman. There is a very slight hangover from Cuba: “He didn’t follow through on that one, but that won’t happen again . . . He certainly looked them in the eye over Berlin.”
I formed the impression that these people will follow wherever you lead them . . . that they have given up trying to understand and don’t even have the desire to try. The emotional belligerence of all defeated people is in evidence in this area.
The tobacco crop looks good. There have been “gully-washin” rains, and not many people “looking for work,” so they are content to leave the foreign business to you. And though I rode my favorite theme, that maybe you should tell them more of what their country is trying to do, explain why we do what we do, no one asserted that you had failed in this fashion. (Could it be that I was wrong in our last conversation on this subject?) I do not know, but I am shaken.
Here are one or two quotations to give you the flavor of the past four days—
[Page 233]Carl Sandburg3 at Flat Rock, North Carolina: “I would like to hear more great quotations from the White House . . . Jefferson, Adams and the rest . . . but the President’s speeches cause men to ponnnder and that is worthwhile.”
A comment on your daughter from a woman selling cider in a small valley in Tennessee: “Her face is bright as new money is.” That’s pure Elizabethan.
Finally, and perhaps of importance in a conversation after dinner at a motel in Roaring Gap, North Carolina (and that’s just about the buckle of the Bible Belt) an ancient said: “That young man done settled one thing. There ain’t no Catholic issue in this country no more. Come sixty-four, nobody’s likely to remember what he is.”
COMMENT: These have been the broad generalizations of an old reporter . . . It is good to get out from behind that wall of Washington and listen to the authentic voice of this land.
The people stand very steady in their shoes. I wish that some method could be found for Americans serving abroad to spend their home leaves getting to know their fellow countrymen who inhabit this generous and capacious land.
PERSONAL COMMENT: Casey4 and I have scrutinized motel signs with great care, and we have not—repeat not—observed a single one carrying the sign “Lolita slept here.”5
- Source: Kennedy Library, President’s Office Files, Departments and Agencies Series, Box 91, USIA 1/62–6/62. No classification marking. In a June 21 memorandum to the President, Murrow indicated that he was leaving for the West Coast on June 23 in order to make a speech in Seattle on July 6. (Ibid.) A June 30 note by Harris indicates that Murrow, on June 30, sent via airmail “in rough form” the content of the June 30 memorandum and that it was retyped in USIA and transmitted to the President. (Ibid.)↩
- Editor of The Cleveland Press.↩
- American poet and biographer of President Lincoln.↩
- Murrow’s son Charles Casey Murrow.↩
- Reference is to the title character in the 1955 novel Lolita by novelist Vladimir Nabokov.↩
- Printed from a copy that bears this typed signature.↩