Truth or Consequences: Ex-Spokesmen Recall Both : Politics: The merits of lying were among the topics discussed by 10 presidential press secretaries during a forum at UCSD.

The question is one that inevitably confronts all White House press secretaries: What do you do, as NBC news commentator John Chancellor delicately put it Friday to 10 men who have held the job, when circumstances--be they national security or simply presidential preference--demand that you “shade the truth”?

“I lied,” shot back Jody Powell, former President Carter’s press secretary. “And worse than that, I don’t have any regrets about it.”

As was made clear at the opening session of a two-day symposium at UC San Diego that features an unprecedented gathering of White House press secretaries from six past administrations, Powell was not the only presidential spokesman who occasionally opted for loyalty to his boss over fidelity to the truth.

Blending colorful White House press room war stories with insightful theories forged from experience, the men, who served presidents from John Kennedy through Ronald Reagan, delighted a crowd of about 500 with recollections of the times they bent, if not broke, the truth and insider tales of their successful--and failed--attempts at image management. Moderated by Chancellor, the 2 1/2-hour program was broadcast in San Diego Friday night and is scheduled to be aired nationwide on public television this spring.

Each of the press secretaries conceded that the parameters of their high-visibility, high-pressure job were shaped largely by the personalities and policies of the presidents they served. Forced to mold with the clay at their disposal, the press secretaries, recognizing the futility of attempting a total remake of their bosses’ images, said they were instead guided daily by a more modest though no less significant public-relations goal: consistently accentuating the positive while trying to minimize the negative.

Often, those efforts had humorous overtones. For example, President Ford’s advisers, sensitive over his reputation for klutziness, permitted no photos of the President with the national turkey at Thanksgiving--”for obvious reasons,” his press secretary, Ron Nessen, wryly noted.

President Nixon’s aides received a lesson in the potential pitfalls of image shaping when they decided that photos of him strolling along the beach at San Clemente would help soften his rigid, imperial image. That plan, however, backfired when the resulting pictures showed Nixon walking in the sand in his black Bostonian shoes.

“That was our last attempt to deal with that situation,” Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler said, amid loud laughter.

Most of the former White House spokesmen acknowledged that they occasionally misled the press--and, consequently, the public--either intentionally or inadvertently. Frequently, such deceptions were spawned by national security considerations, as when Powell denied to a reporter that the Carter Administration was planning the ultimately unsuccessful “Desert One” rescue attempt of the Iranian hostages, even though he knew that such plans were in place.

George Reedy, one of Lyndon Johnson’s three White House spokesmen, pointed out that the Administration consistently denied having U.S. bases in Thailand during the Vietnam War--even though the bases’ existence was common knowledge in other countries.

“It was not a secret for anybody except the American people who footed the bill,” Reedy said.

Reagan spokesman Larry Speakes also misled reporters about another military operation--the planned invasion of Grenada--but only because he himself had been misled by a Reagan national security adviser, who told him that the idea was “preposterous.” The invasion occurred the day after Speakes passed along that denial to the press.

“That taught me that, if you ask, ‘Are we going to invade Grenada today?’ and they say, ‘No,’ don’t forget about tomorrow morning,” Speakes said.

On another occasion, however, Speakes was the architect of one of the best-known examples of deception by a presidential press secretary in recent history, when he admitted that he fabricated quotes that he attributed to Reagan when the President met Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for the first time. His motivation, Speakes explained, was his concern that Reagan, who, on the advice of his staff, sat silent while photographers snapped photos of the two leaders, might be eclipsed by Gorbachev’s expansive remarks to reporters. Hoping to capture the historic tenor of the summit, Speakes told reporters that Reagan had said, “The world rests easier because we’re meeting here today.”

“It retrospect, it was the wrong thing to do,” Speakes said, even while noting that speeches and comments written by others frequently are attributed to the President.

Prefers Honesty

Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger suggested that, rather than lie to the press, it is better to be honest and then, if necessary, appeal to reporters or editors to withhold information that could jeopardize lives or American policies.

He successfully used that approach, he said, shortly after Kennedy became President when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev privately offered to release several downed U.S. pilots--but made it clear that any premature publicity would kill the deal. When confronted by a reporter, Salinger confirmed the details--but won his assurance that the story would be held until the pilots were freed.

If national security defines one end point of the spectrum in the explanations for White House press secretarial deceptions, the other end is marked by what Nessen described simply as “silly reasons.” When Ford wanted to go to Florida primarily to play golf, for example, his aides had to “drum up a community meeting” as justification for the trip, Nessen said.

When the press begins to focus on such stories--usually inconsequential in substance, but deadly serious in terms of the public perceptions they foster or reinforce--that often is indicative of deeper problems surrounding a presidency, the press secretaries agreed.

Indeed, the consensus Friday was that, aso long as domestic pocketbook issues and world affairs are in good shape, presidents are less likely to encounter--and certainly are better equipped to weather--press sniping about bumping their heads on helicopter doors or the like. Stories about Reagan’s frequent factual inaccuracies at news conferences and hands-off management style became less common, they pointed out, when the recession that dominated his first several years in office receded.

However, when growing problems cause a president’s popularity to plummet, stories that could be shrugged off--or might not even be reported otherwise--begin to take hold, they said. Just as the Vietnam War eroded Johnson’s credibility and increasingly made him fodder for the nation’s stand-up comics, Watergate did the same for Nixon, while high inflation and the Iranian hostage dilemma undercut Carter’s support. Amid such distractions, it becomes more difficult for a president to refocus the nation’s attention on his agenda, they said.

“It’s hard to be selecting patterns for next year’s outfits when your pants are on fire,” Carter spokesman Powell said. Indeed, the now-familiar story about Carter allegedly being attacked by a “killer rabbit” in the late 1970s reinforced skepticism about a president who had been seen by many as a bit quirky from the start.

Human Elements

Much of Friday’s program was enlivened by the recitation of personal anecdotes that shed light on the human elements of being the spokesman for the most powerful office in the world--stories alternately told with the matter-of-fact casualness of the insider’s insider, or in a somewhat breathless now-it-can-be-told manner.

Salinger told of the time, for example, when he mentioned to Kennedy that the White House was receiving complaints from women because most photos of the First Couple showed the President walking in front of his wife. “Tell Jackie to walk faster,” was Kennedy’s solution.

James Brady, who was seriously wounded in the 1981 assassination attempt on Reagan, joked about how Henry Kissinger tried to persuade Reagan that a few minor constitutional adjustments could easily produce a monarchy in this country--with Kissinger as foreign minister.

Technological advancements that make instantaneous worldwide communication possible, coupled with a growing tendency to view the President as, in Chancellor’s words, “the be all and end all” of virtually all news, have confronted recent press secretaries with new challenges.

The incessant demands for the President’s response to any and all world events also is one of the primary differences between the presidential press secretaries’ job and that of a typical public-relations officer. Although the latter can carefully limit his client’s public comments, a White House press secretary does not have that luxury. Underlining that point, Chancellor noted that, when Pope John Paul II was shot, medical bulletins on his condition were released from the White House.

But the press, too, has contributed to the perception of the White House as a kind of worldwide information vortex, the press secretaries said. As Ford spokesman Nessen stressed, TV reporters are more likely to be videotaped in front of the White House than the Commerce Department.

“An explosion of journalism in this century has tipped the scales against the President,” Johnson spokesman Bill Moyers said.

High Marks for Bush

Most of the participants in Friday’s symposium gave high marks to President Bush’s relationship with the press. In particular, they credited him with, in Salinger’s words, “eliminating shouting journalism” by granting reporters dramatically greater access than they had to Reagan--whose contact with the press often was limited to reporters’ questions yelled over the noise of the rotor blades of the presidential helicopter.

In reviewing how the presidential press secretary’s job has evolved over the past three decades, most of the former White House spokesmen argued, if not for a greater policy role for the press secretary, at least for enhanced access to policy-making discussions. Some of the major public-relations disasters faced by each during his White House years stemmed from the absence of such access, they said.

Even Salinger, who had unlimited access to the Oval Office, said he learned of the Bay of Pigs invasion only three hours before it occurred. Jerald terHorst learned of Ford’s plan to pardon Nixon for any alleged Watergate-related crimes the night before that happened--and then only because he was given the ticklish job of telling reporters to be at the White House on a Sunday morning without telling them why.

Using the controversy over the Nixon pardon as a backdrop, moderator Chancellor asked the press secretaries how they reacted when they personally disagreed with the president. In terHorst’s case, he felt so adamantly opposed to the pardon that he resigned after only about one month on the job--earning him a place, he joked, in the Guinness Book of Records for the shortest term as White House press secretary.

Others, however, argued that their primary job is simply to accurately convey the President’s viewpoint, regardless of whether they concur with it. Their personal opinion, in fact, is of little consequence, several said.

“All of us have been asked . . . whether we agree with what the President has just done,” Nessen said. “My answer is, ‘Who cares?’ ”

But surely there must have been times, Chancellor prodded--glancing at Ziegler--when you went home at night and told your wives that “this president is a real dope and he’s going to get killed” if he doesn’t change his policies.

“Yeah, particularly in the last year and a half,” the former Nixon spokesman deadpanned. “On a regular basis.”