Presidential Spokesmen Tell All : White House: Press secretaries from six administrations recall how they tampered with images--and the truth.

The question confronts all White House press secretaries: What do you do when circumstances--be they national security or simply presidential preference--demand that you “shade the truth?”

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

At the opening session of a two-day symposium at UC San Diego, an unprecedented gathering of White House press secretaries from six past administrations made clear that Powell was not alone in occasionally opting for loyalty to his boss over fidelity to the truth.

The press secretaries, who served Presidents from John F. Kennedy through Ronald Reagan, delighted a crowd of about 500 with recollections of the times they bent, if not broke with, the truth in their attempts at image management.

Moderated by NBC news commentator John Chancellor, the 2 1/2-hour program was broadcast in San Diego on Friday night and is scheduled to be aired nationwide on public television this spring.

Each of the press secretaries conceded that his high-visibility, high-pressure job was shaped largely by the personalities and policies of the Presidents they served. Recognizing the futility of attempting a total remake of their President’s image, they were guided by a more modest goal: consistently accentuating the positive while trying to minimize the negative.

Often, those efforts had humorous overtones. For example, President Richard M. 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, despite being aware that such plans were proceeding.

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 day after Speakes passed along that denial to the press, the invasion occurred.

“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.

Friday’s program was enlivened by recitations of anecdotes that shed light on the human elements of being the spokesman for the Oval Office.

Kennedy Press Secretary Pierre Salinger told of the time the White House received 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.

Most of the former White House spokesmen argued for greater access to policy-making discussions. Some of the major public relations disasters they faced stemmed from the absence of such access, they said.

Salinger, for example, said he learned of the Bay of Pigs invasion only three hours before it occurred. Jerald terHorst learned of President Gerald R. Ford’s plan to pardon Nixon for any alleged Watergate-related crimes the night before that happened.

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 Nixon pardon that he resigned after about one month on the job--earning him a place in the Guinness Book of Records for the shortest term as White House press secretary.

Others, however, argued that their primary job was simply to convey the President’s viewpoint, regardless of whether they concur with it.

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