Speaking Out of Turn

What a wondrous place the White House seems to have been over the past seven years--a veritable sound-and-light show of illusion and doublespeak. Fantasy and reality, we now hear, became inseparable in the minds of the resident wizards. Words were transmogrified into mumbo jumbo, and phrases formed in one person’s mind over here magically emerged from another’s mouth over there.

Until now, one of the grandest of illusions occurred in the mind of former press spokesman Larry Speakes, a man of much ego who repeated time and again that he never lied to the press and the public. In his forthcoming kiss-and-tell book, Speakes seeks to defend his “reputation for the truth.” One of the delights of inhabiting the kingdom of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is that one gets to define his own terms, and chants them so often he actually comes to believe them.

At the same time, Speakes reveals that on occasion, apparently when President Reagan was at a loss for words, the spokesman just made up quotations and attributed them to the Great Communicator. One such instance followed the first meeting between the President and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1985. Speakes said he was afraid that Gorbachev’s nifty phrases would get the better press play. So he manufactured a statesmanlike comment and told the press that was what the President had said to Gorbachev during the meeting. The President, of course, said no such thing.

The other occasion cited by Speakes was in 1983 after a Soviet fighter plane shot down a Korean passenger jet. During a meeting with Secretary of State George Shultz and other officials “the President had almost nothing to say.” That would never do, of course. So Speakes took some of Shultz’s comments and told the press they were Reagan’s. As he explained in the book: “My decision to put Shultz’s words in Reagan’s mouth played well and neither of them complained.” The fictitious comments ascribed to the Gorbachev meeting also “played well.” Fortunately for Speakes, not to mention the President of the United States, the Soviets did not blow the whistle on him.

Speakes’ revelations confirm what many suspected: The White House press office was not concerned with truth or ethics so long as the Reagan line “played well.” And Speakes’ defense of his actions reaches new highs in arrogance and presumption: He claimed he had gotten to know the President so well he could think like him, and thus speak for him.

Speakes’ disclosure of the unspeakable makes one wonder what other fantasies are sprinkled through the history of the last seven years.