Named to Replace Speakes : Marlin Fitzwater Will Be White House Spokesman

WASHINGTON — President Reagan on Monday named a replacement for Larry Speakes, the chief spokesman for the White House. He gave the job to Marlin Fitzwater, who served as deputy presidential press secretary before his most recent job as press secretary to Vice President George Bush.

“It’s obvious that the President wanted an anchorman type--thin, with a lot of hair,” said the red-nosed, cigar-smoking Fitzwater, who is distinctly not thin and quite bald.

Fitzwater, 44, will take over when Speakes leaves the White House Feb. 2 to become a vice president for communications of Merrill Lynch & Co., the Wall Street investment firm.

The new spokesman will be “assistant to the President for press relations,” a top-ranking job that pays $77,400 a year. The position of presidential press secretary will remain with James S. Brady, who was gravely wounded in the assassination attempt on Reagan on March 30, 1981.

Fitzwater, a 20-year veteran of government public-affairs jobs, has served in every administration since Lyndon B. Johnson’s. He rose to the post of deputy assistant secretary for public affairs at the Treasury Department from 1981 to 1983, where he attracted the attention of then-Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan, now White House chief of staff.

Government Background

Fitzwater entered government service working for the Appalachian Regional Commission, was a speech writer for Transportation Secretary John A. Volpe from 1970 to 1972, then worked in the public affairs office of the Environmental Protection Agency until 1981.

Before entering government, he held a variety of newspaper jobs in Kansas, his home state, where he was graduated from Kansas State University.

Speakes, praising his successor, said that “he knows the White House. He knows the staff. I think he’s a man that can step right into the job and do it very, very effectively.”

In a statement read by Speakes, Reagan said that Fitzwater’s government service has “earned him the respect of the press and of the public.”

The new White House spokesman also has a reputation among White House reporters for being unflappable and self-effacing.