The Making of a Potemkin President : Reagan’s ‘Quotes’ Follow Tradition We’ve Tolerated Too Long

“There is much that divides us, but I believe the world breathes easier because we are talking here together.” It is one of those historic presidential utterances that former White House press secretary Larry Speakes now confesses he simply made up in order to tell the world what Ronald Reagan said to Mikhail Gorbachev at their 1985 summit in Geneva.

There is at least one sense in which the contrived quotation may turn out to be apt after all. We should all be breathing a little less easy at this bald revelation of yet another fraud in the nation’s highest office, at how much divides the American people from their own President.

The Speakes sensation represents far more, of course, than the eager embroidery of a Washington briefer.

It would be absurd to believe, to begin with, that President Reagan and his senior aides first learned of the inventions only this week in press accounts of Speakes’ memoirs. A large, elaborate White House and departmental bureaucracy is devoted to instantly informing the President and his Cabinet officers how their words played from Geneva to the Great Plains. Obviously, Reagan knew at the summit three years ago that his press secretary was being his ventriloquist. And both the President and Secretary of State George P. Shultz knew the truth when Speakes put Shultz’s words into Reagan’s mouth in the tense days after the 1983 Soviet shoot-down of a Korean Airlines 747. “Neither of them complained,” Speakes remembers the episode, and the President’s complaint this week about being in the dark on Quotegate is one more prevarication for reasons of state.

Nor should we be impressed by the unctuous outrage of past White House press secretaries and some Washington reporters.

Speakes talks movingly about the “bond of understanding” between a press secretary and his President. But that same kind of bond has long since ceased to exist between U.S. Presidents and their public. In a sense, the Speakes fiction is only the most naked and blatant example of the manipulation, packaging and image-mongering that traces a long tradition in the American presidency.

We now see Franklin Roosevelt’s posturing and concealment of illness as a kind of public-relations genius. Harry Truman needed no manufactured quotes, though the polite expurgations of his record by aides and journalists could be equally dishonest. Dwight Eisenhower so despised politicians and disdained the press that he feigned his own rambling syntax, preferring an image of confusion to having to give straight answers. John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson brought to the Oval Office habits of secrecy and deception cultivated over personal and political lifetimes, and aides to both--like Speakes for Reagan--loyally purveyed the product, sometimes inventing not just sentences but a whole persona.

Richard Nixon followed with his own long career erected on ceaseless editing and refurbishing of image, he and his men often fabricating what other politicians said or did as well as his own record. And Jimmy Carter, we remember fleetingly, assembled the old Kennedy and Johnson junior varsity to burnish his “outsider” presidency.

Now Ronald Reagan stands before us as the most complete Potemkin President, perhaps the ultimate substitution of appearance for reality, facade for substance. Yet we must not pretend that he or poor Larry Speakes invented the practice of public-relations politics along with those breathless quotes.

The point is that, in the end, there is no real moral or political distinction between the small lies and the large, the false quotes and the false policies. All sprang from an abiding mistrust, fear and contempt of the public, a deep-seated refusal and inability to conduct the truly open and honest government on which a democracy depends.

Speakes will now pass into somewhat unsavory memory but the larger process that he symbolizes will remain--the Presidents and Cabinet officers who silently countenanced his lies as part of the game, and not least the press, who after Geneva or the 747 shoot-down were so ready to be fed catchy quotes instead of probing for the genuine story.

No doubt Speakes broke face with history, but so too does a journalism that accepts as reality far too much of Washington’s post-fabricated briefings and handouts.

“My PR man’s license,” the press secretary called it. But would we feel any better if we knew that the President had read and cleared what bureaucrats other than Speakes had written in Reagan’s name? The real scandal in either case is that Ronald Reagan himself said nothing meaningful when the 747 was shot down, that the President of the United States could not muster his own pithy reply to Gorbachev at Geneva.

Deploring Larry Speakes will not rescue us from that frightening shallowness in our leadership any more than it will stop the relentless packaging of the presidency. But the consolation of democracy is that at least some beginning of an answer is at hand. In 1988 we have the chance to demand a new government, and to select a leader who will not need inventing.