Opinion: Those Outside Our Family

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Ike's convention speech was drawing respectful applause, but he had not really set his inflammable audience afire. Suddenly he found the match. "Let us particularly scorn the divisive efforts of those outside our family," he said, "including sensation-seeking columnists and commentators . . ." The delegates did not let him finish his sentence. They leaped off their chairs, shook their fists at the glass television booths high above, jeered newsmen in the aisles on the convention floor.

On the rostrum, Eisenhower seemed astonished at the reaction to his statement. When he could be heard, he added, "because, my friends, I assure you that these are people who couldn't care less about the good of our party." The crowd roared anew. Ike later explained that he had penciled the remark into his speech almost as an afterthought to express his "resentment" at journalists who "write think pieces and ascribe motives to others when they don't know what they are talking about." Ike was irritated weeks ago by a New York Herald Tribune column by Roscoe Drummond, who interpreted a Trib-solicited Eisenhower statement as meaning that the former President was hard set against Goldwater's nomination. More recently Ike seethed at press criticism over his insistence on staying neutral in the G.O.P. presidential race.

But Ike's pique did not nearly explain the emotional scene in the Cow Palace. That scene's significance lay in the far-reaching fact that in many areas of the U.S. a latent suspicion that the press is sometimes unfair has hardened into a belief that, especially in matters of politics, it is partisan and untrustworthy. To almost all Goldwater's admirers, the press represents the "Eastern establishment" that is out to get Barry. They think primarily of press, radio and television and its influential New York-Washington base; newsmen are viewed as liberals who distort Goldwater's views and conspire against him. During Goldwater's pre-convention campaign, reporters often met hostile airport crowds, with Goldwater partisans glaring at them and demanding: "Why don't you tell the truth about Barry?"

The dislike and suspicion of the press that was displayed in the Cow Palace is by no means entirely unjustified. Segments of the press have sometimes sounded as extremist as any Goldwater extremist. Thus Drew Pearson began a column last week with the observation: "The smell of fascism has been in the air at this convention." Joe Alsop, who opined last March that "no serious Republican politician, even of the most Neanderthal type, any longer takes Goldwater seriously," now declared it a "fact" that "many Goldwater enthusiasts are genuine fanatics, like the majority of his delegates."