White House Veterans Swap President Stories

When the Iran-Contra affair began darkening the Reagan Administration’s horizon, Reagan’s advisers hoped to calm the political storm by stealing a page from one of the most famous presidential mea culpas in recent history: John Kennedy’s apology for the Bay of Pigs debacle.

As recounted by Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes Saturday at the closing session of a two-day symposium at UC San Diego featuring 10 former White House spokesmen, Reagan’s aides hoped to duplicate the manner in which Kennedy had effectively defused the 1961 controversy by firmly and immediately shouldering the blame for the botched Cuban invasion.

A quick check of the historical record, however, convinced the Reagan team that what had been a brilliant strategy in 1961 would be a dismal failure a quarter century later--a difference owing less to distinctions between the two episodes than to the evolution of a markedly more adversarial relationship between the press and the White House.

With Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger filling in details, Speakes recalled how Kennedy had accepted responsibility for the Bay of Pigs, but refused to answer questions about the specifics of the incident on the grounds that it was “not in the national interest.” Indicative of the general comity in press-presidential relations of the period, reporters placidly accepted that explanation--and Kennedy’s popularity subsequently soared.

In the intervening years, however, Vietnam and Watergate had introduced what Ron Nessen, former President Ford’s press secretary, termed “a flowering of contempt” to that relationship. Well aware of reporters’ lessened deference toward the president, Speakes said he quickly realized that Kennedy’s public-relations approach to the Bay of Pigs “just wouldn’t fly” for Reagan and Iran-Contra.

“We attempted to convince the President to say, ‘I take full responsibility,’ ” Speakes said. “But we knew that in this day and age . . . we would have never been able to say, ‘It’s not in the national interest to talk any more about it.’ We couldn’t have gotten away with what Kennedy was able to do 30 years before.”

Although Reagan’s aides also treated Watergate as an example not to be emulated, in the end, their approach to Iran-Contra was an ineffectual--and, to some extent, inadvertent--amalgam of the Kennedy and Nixon administrations’ approaches to crisis management. Having failed to quell the controversy with a forceful, early apology, Reagan suffered through a protracted and politically debilitating debate that left him obviously less muddied than Richard Nixon, but also considerably less clean than Kennedy.

Speakes’ explanation of Reagan’s handling of that political contretemps was one of dozens of insightful, often humorous recitations of how presidents faced crises, large and small, as recalled by the 10 men who served as their primary White House spokesmen.

During Saturday’s three-hour wrap-up of the unprecedented gathering of press secretaries from six past administrations, stretching from Kennedy through Reagan, the former spokesmen discussed their successes and failures at image management with about a dozen professors, journalists and former White House officials.

While conceding that the lessons of 1961 must be reevaluated in light of the dramatic changes in how the press now covers the president, Salinger argued that Kennedy’s unflinching willingness to accept blame for a major failure remains a valid prototype for responses to controversy.

“If in the first two or three days of the Watergate story, Richard Nixon had gone on television and said, ‘I made a stupid mistake’ . . . and he fired a couple of people, Watergate would have never happened,” Salinger said. “It would have been a thing that would have gone away if had accepted the responsibility for it.”

Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler, however, dismissed that theory as overly simplistic, arguing that Watergate was “far more complex” than the break-in at the Democratic national headquarters. Nixon’s response to the burgeoning controversy that ultimately cost him his office, Ziegler said, was influenced by the lingering impact of earlier or continuing woes such as the Pentagon Papers case and Vietnam--in particular, by the considerable enmity that had developed between Nixon and the press because of those matters.

A plethora of insider anecdotes from the former press secretaries not only revealed how so-called “spin control” sometimes is beyond the public-relations capabilities of even the most powerful office in the world, but also yielded glimpses into presidential personalities certain to fascinate armchair psychologists.

Lyndon Johnson, for example, insisted on personally approving any statement issued on behalf of the White House and was infuriated by premature leaks of administration actions, sometimes changing planned appointments because of them, said Bill Moyers, one of his three White House spokesmen.

Once, Johnson, angered by a news story in which a U.S. senator had been mildly critical of him and searching for a proper reprisal, seized on Moyers’ suggestion that his press secretary publicly label the senator “obstreperous.” When the presidential rejoinder did not play well in the media, a furious Johnson demanded of Moyers: “ Who called him obstreperous?”

“ You did!” a startled Moyers replied. To which Johnson shouted: “I can’t even spell the goddamn word!”

One of the more intriguing challenges that faced each of them, the press secretaries said, involved knowing when to take the president at his word and when to ignore a presidential command, often issued in the heat of the moment. Or, to frame the dilemma another way: What should a press secretary do when the president has a dumb idea?

“We’ve all faced situations when you need to interpret the president,” admitted Jody Powell, press secretary to former President Carter.

The consensus among the former spokesmen is that the best approach is to delay public action on such occasions, stalling in the hope that the president’s anger will pass or his better judgment will return. For example, when Johnson instructed Moyers to fire a top aide and inform a prominent newspaper columnist of the dismissal, Moyers did neither. Later, when Johnson asked him what he had done, Moyers simply said neither man had been home when he tried to call--and never heard about the matter again.

The press secretaries also discussed how television’s growing influence has affected internal White House planning aimed at shaping news coverage.

As recently as the Johnson Administration, White House press secretaries--and presidents themselves--crafted their public statements with an eye toward print rather than broadcast media, viewing newspapers as more influential.

Even so, the major reason that Kennedy decided to become the first president to hold live televised news conferences, Salinger explained, was to “jump over the press and go directly to the people.”

Over time, presidents who once asked, “What’s the lead of this speech?” began to ask, “Where’s the sound bite?” Reflective of television’s gradual ascendancy as the means by which most Americans get their news about the president, that trend also illustrates how television’s own coverage of the White House has changed in the past several decades, the press secretaries said.

Through the early 1970s, presidential remarks on network television drew an average “sound bite” of 45 seconds, UC San Diego professor Daniel Hallin said during Saturday’s conference. By 1988, however, that figure had dropped to less than nine seconds.

The public-relations and speech-writing lessons inherent in that shift, the press secretaries concurred, seem clear: Today, if a president wants to transmit his thoughts directly to the American public, he better do so via short, snappy lines easily adaptable to those time constraints and journalistic realities.

Nevertheless, while “sound bite” is a relatively new term, the political behavior underlying it perhaps is not, some of the press secretaries concluded. Indeed, as Moyers pointed out, “Give me liberty or give me death!” is as good of a sound bite as any heard today--and better than most.