Excerpts of the President's News Conference

I had a short talk with Mr. Steed, Wickham Steed, the editor of the London Review of Reviews when he was here. I didn't have a chance to go into much of the development of the suggestion that he is making relative to some position that should be announced by the United States as to what it might do in certain contingencies, so I have never come to any definite conclusion about it. I told him I thought it could be assumed that our main desire was to keep out of controversies that affected other nations. But of course on the other hand our country assumes to have certain rights, commercial intercourse, and so on, that our people might not like to have interfered with. Where the line would be drawn between those two possibly conflicting sentiments, it would be hard to say. So that I haven't developed his proposal sufficiently to come to any final determination about it. It is a very interesting proposal. Mr. Steed seemed to be a particularly well informed and very brilliant man.

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I have here a communication from one of the important newspapers of the country making a suggestion which I will pass on to the members of the conference for whatever they may think it worth. It is in relation to a book which has been published, entitled The American Policy in Nicaragua, by Colonel Henry L. Stimson, former Secretary of War. I think that was first published in periodical form. Now I understand it has been gathered together in book form. It wasn't very long. I think there were three articles. Colonel Stimson submitted them to me and I looked them over with a great deal of interest and notified him I didn't want to make any suggestions regarding any changes in them. I merely state that, so you will know that I had some knowledge about it. The suggestion is that it would probably be helpful to the correspondents here in Washington in discussing the Nicaraguan subject if they would read that book. This editor thinks very highly of it and thinks that work would be helpful to the other mem-bers of the profession.