Ex-Reagan Aide Talks of Meeting the Press

Former White House spokesman Larry Speakes had some advice Wednesday for his successor, Marlin Fitzwater:

“You don’t have to explain what you don’t say.”

“That stood me in good stead,” Speakes said at a press conference before delivering the keynote speech for Communications Week at Cal State Fullerton.

Speakes, who conducted about 2,000 press briefings in his six years with President Reagan, said Fitzwater so far “has done a good job in keeping the press room temperature down.” That was not always so with Speakes, whose level of antagonism with the press had reached a fever pitch by the time he left in January to become vice president of communications for the Wall Street investment firm of Merrill, Lynch & Co.

Speakes said reporters frequently approached presidential press conferences with an “I gotcha” mentality and “try to get the President to say what he really doesn’t want to say.”

He mentioned in particular the press conference after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, which Reagan had watched on television along with the rest of the nation.

“It was an emotional time,” Speakes said. “The President was emotional. But the questions were along the line of, ‘Are you sorry you sent a teacher into space?’ ‘Do you think it was Soviet sabotage?’ ‘How do you think the parents felt watching?’ Those types of questions.” He said he received mail criticizing the press at that conference.

“I think it’s high time we restore some dignity and sanity to the press conference,” Speakes said.

Speakes added that the presidential press conference in its present form has “outlived its usefulness and is really theater.”

“They’re scripted,” he said. “The reporters ask questions of the President that they write out in advance, and the President gives answers that he’s rehearsed with his staff in advance.”

Speakes, who was paid $10,000 for his speech Wednesday, said he makes about three speeches a month for Merrill, Lynch. He got a laugh when he told the students that the most frequently asked question is, “What is Sam Donaldson really like?” Donaldson is the ABC-TV White House correspondent with whom he frequently jousted.

“Old Sam is Sam,” Speakes said. “We call him shoot-from-the-lip Sam. . . . Sam is boisterous. He’s loud. He shouts. He’s irreverent. But he’s a doggone good reporter.”

Seemingly in response to cracks about him by Donaldson in his recent book, “Hold It, Mr. President,” Speakes implied that things may have calmed down a little too much at the White House since he left.

“Sam Donaldson grabbed me at a Washington party a couple of weeks ago and said the briefings are boring,” Speakes said. “I said, ‘Well, I guess you’ve got to get somebody in there to stir them up a little bit.’ ”