Eyewitness to History : A Select Photographic Fraternity Has Helped Develop the Aura, Awe Surrounding the American Presidency

The historian-as-flatterer staked out a point of view on a bright Maine morning.

David Valdez slowly twisted his camera’s lens, focusing on the President. He saw every tick, every emotion yet recorded a selective moment.

On this warm summer day, when George Bush was managing a diplomatic crisis in the Middle East--and his vacation--Valdez, the President’s personal photographer, faithfully trailed after him. On the golf course, at business meetings, and during a fishing expedition on the rough seas, Valdez shot almost 250 frames.

It is from so many mundane moments that myths are made. For while the public only gets a glimpse of Valdez’s work, what he and his predecessors have photographed has shaped the world’s perception of the now mythical modern American presidency.

Like the 16th-Century painter who elevated his royal patron through portraiture, Valdez, with his camera, seeks to capture a unique view of one of the most important men in the world. The President swings a golf club. Click. The President gazes off with a concerned squint. Click. The President smiles at his son. Click. The President smiles, he twists, he nods. Click. Click. Click.

But of the 250 frames Valdez will shoot this day, only two will be released to the news media immediately. The rest will be filed for history to consider.

He doesn’t shoot everything.

On this day, he didn’t photograph the President getting a relaxing pounding from a masseur. And he stayed for only a few moments of a 45-minute national security briefing.

“Sometimes you give up something to get something,” he said, explaining a philosophy that has carried him through seven years with Bush. “They don’t always want me there and it is by instinct that I walk away.”

The news photographers who work in the White House have nice things to say about Valdez. But, while they envy his access to what is important and what is revealing and what is interesting, they don’t like the trade-offs, such as his lack of total control over his work. “We’ll never see what he gets,” one veteran photographer said, as he watched Valdez climb into the fourth golf cart behind the President. “They don’t release the good stuff.”

Still, picture a dream photographer’s job and Valdez has it.

It may seem enviable, he said, but it is not so simple. He must fill as many roles as there are back roads to Bush’s sprawling compound at Walker’s Point.

“I go in and approach every day as a historian,” Valdez said. He spoke slowly, for it is rare for the discreet observer to be asked for his observations. “At the same time, I can become a photojournalist or an ad man. I switch into those roles as they come into play.”

For close to 30 years, every President has given one, hand-picked photographer a chance to record history from the inside, leaving a rich pictorial record of the American presidency. Even Jimmy Carter, who disdained the position saying it smacked of an “imperial” office-holder, allowed a few staff photographers to shoot around him.

But much of the work of this select group is stashed in presidential libraries, which have filed hundreds of thousands of negatives that historians have yet to interpret. The men who chronicled the events talk about these collections as if they are treasures: They contain mystery and new information; they reveal the discomfiting mixture of public events and private emotions surrounding the President.

But no presidential photographer, thus far, has plumbed the images he shot for a public showing. Michael Evans, Ronald Reagan’s photographer, tried to explain why he thinks he will wait 10, 15 or more years before reviewing the 37,000 rolls of film he took in four years at the White House: “I guess there’s a kind of loyalty that sets in after so many years. No matter how you felt when you left, you left with the idea of the importance of the office, and even when you’ve seen beyond the myths of the presidency, they live on inside you.”

David Hume Kennerly, Gerald Ford’s personal photographer, wrote a book, an autobiography, not a pictorial work or the typical kiss-and-tell.

“I felt I was in a privileged position,” Kennerly said of his time as a presidential photographer. “It was a matter of integrity not to talk. But I think you’ll find most photographers like that. They’re too busy taking it all in.”

It is 7 a.m. and Bush and his son George have teed off at the first hole of the Cape Arundel Country Club. The news photographers were left in the dew as Valdez sped off in the golfing caravan.

At the second hole, Valdez stayed close enough to hear Bush’s banter with his son but far enough away so that he had to use a long lens.

“The odd thing is I’m not much of a security risk,” Valdez said. “I tend not to listen. What was going through my mind is ‘Look at the light. Is that guy in my way? I hope I don’t knock something off a table.’ ”

The President and his son played with great zeal; Valdez’s eyes wandered across the course strewn with sea gull feathers. He hung back with the President’s personal aide, the other person who spends more time with Bush than his wife does. Valdez played a little bumper cart as they cruised the course.

The 41-year-old photographer, who learned to use a camera in the Army, has been chasing Bush around golf courses for seven years. He had been working for a business publication when he heard Bush, then the vice president, needed a personal photographer. He applied and was hired a week later. “If I had a hook it was that I am from Texas,” said Valdez, who is paid $62,000 a year.

Since then, he has photographed Bush in every continent except Australia, and he observed, “The images of him are basically the same.”

But maybe on this August day, with the world in crisis, maybe today Bush will look different?

“Nope,” said Valdez, who insists he reads the President’s emotions as well as anybody. “Maybe he’ll look a little tired. But, really, with George Bush, you don’t get dramatic swings. What you see is what you get: a man looking relaxed and in control.”

(Over the years, Valdez and the First Lady have developed their own, relaxed way of working. She doesn’t like being photographed wearing glasses, so when he starts shooting, she takes them off. When she has had enough, she puts them back on, and “that’s kind of signal to me” to stop, he said.)

Today, Valdez was after perhaps one good father-son shot for the files. He got it at the ninth hole. It was a picture also shot by press photographers during one of three “photo ops (opportunities)” Bush offered this day.

The White House released just two of Valdez’s 250 shots, which were grudgingly accepted by newspapers, magazines and other media because they illustrated events from which news photographers had been barred.

Today, Valdez’s pictures were standard fare: of Bush in his living room talking about civil rights legislation with Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan; of the Chief Executive fishing.

There is no White House photo lab in Maine, so Valdez depended on the Associated Press to process his film. Valdez and an AP editor dickered over which image the White House would release of the Sullivan meeting. The AP editor wanted a tight shot of Bush and Sullivan; Valdez offered a group shot. After a call to the White House press office, Valdez came up with a compromise: How about just Bush, Sullivan and Office of Personnel Management Director Connie Newman, one of the few black women in Bush’s Administration?

The AP editor agreed but instantly cropped out Newman and sent out her concept on the wire.

“Now, I’m the adman,” Valdez said, as he again maneuvered this resort town’s back roads to bring the approved print, with Newman, to White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater.

“Perfect,” Fitzwater declared, after Valdez handed it to him. “That’s it!”

The next day several papers, including The New York Times, ran the shot of Bush, his hands splayed while talking to Sullivan. He looked relaxed but presidential.

“The media,” he said, “has its agenda and we have ours.”

One afternoon during the first year of his presidency, Lyndon B. Johnson perused a pile of pictures of himself and bellowed across the Oval Office: “Damn it, why can’t they make good pictures of me like they did of Kennedy?”

That afternoon, the bearish President with the legendary ego hired Yoichi (Oke) Okamoto to be the first personal photographer to a President.

LBJ “had a hard-set notions as to what made a good photograph of him . . . “ George Tames, the former New York Timesman and the 71-year-old dean of the White House photography corps, wrote in his memoirs, which are to be published this fall. The President insisted that Okamoto and others only take pictures from his left side. He barked when he didn’t like them and balked when unflattering shots appeared in print.

“So obsessed was LBJ with photographs of himself that almost daily, until the end of his term of office, he edited all White House pictures that were to be released,” Tames wrote. “And woe to anyone who acted without his authorization!”

Despite that, Okamoto, who died in 1985, managed to cover the Johnson presidency with an artistic eye and in a photojournalistic fashion, for which Johnson fired him at least once. Okamoto captured some of the most ungainly and glorious moments of the Johnson presidency. Yet only recently were about 120 pictures of 600,000 images in the archives put together to illustrate a book by Harry Middleton.

“The mix (of) a Shakespearean character like Johnson and an able photographer like Oke who knew how to blend into the scenery,” said Cornell Capra, director of the International Center of Photography, “left a unique history.”

History will note that Richard M. Nixon disliked being photographed and kept his personal photographer at a distance.

In contrast, Gerald R. Ford developed a close relationship with his personal shooter, David Hume Kennerly, who fast became the best-known of the modern presidential photographers. Although Ford’s presidency lasted less than 2 1/2 years, the young, brash, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer became a Washington celebrity.

“I was 27,” he explained. “I had a beard in a Republican administration. I was extremely close to the family. . . . “ He also was rumored to have dated the President’s daughter; the Washington Post’s all-important Style section did not one but two profiles of him. “But none of that was as important,” Kennerly added, “as the access.”

Ah, the mystique of access. . . .

Being a presidential photographer is “like sitting on God’s left arm,” said Capra, who covered the Kennedy years for Life.

Tames, almost dreamily, observed that the existence is watching “history in the making. And the personal photographer is next to the man in power and some of it rubs off.”

Kennerly was accorded remarkable Presidential access. In fact, the night after Ford learned he would be President, he talked alone, late into the night, not with his closest political allies but with then-friend Kennerly. Why? “It was an unlikely priority I suppose, but he was feeling it was at least one thing he could deal with,” Kennerly recalled.

He, in his day, he became renowned for dropping policy ideas on the President while taking his picture in an important meeting. “I was there seven days a week, before and after he went upstairs to the family quarters.”

Kennerly’s favorite pictures of Ford were taken his first week in office: The President in the Oval Office on the phone, a foot on the desk, empty bookshelves behind him; the President in plaid suit and golf hat leaving his Alexandria home with papers under arm. Betty Ford stands in the doorway waving goodby. The all-American husband going off to work--at the White House.

Kennerly saw his boss as possessing an uncomplicated, “down to earth” but distinctly presidential face. But when Ford left office, his popular image was that of a bumbler, always catching himself from a fall.

“I couldn’t control my subject,” said Kennerly, now a Los Angeles-based free-lance photographer and movie producer who remains close to the Fords.

Kennerly remembered watching the President tumble down the steps in Salzburg: “I had one hand held out to catch him, and one to the camera on my eye.”

If Kennerly was like a son to Ford, Michael Evans said he was like a nephew to Reagan. Yet Evans still isn’t sure he ever caught the President without his “game face.”

“Even in front of me, his personal photographer, he was the consummate pro,” Evans said. “He knew history would remember every photo if I didn’t.”

The White House mostly was a calm place where emotion and heat never showed in his viewfinder, Evans said.

There were exceptions, such as the day Secretary of State George Schultz came to the White House to tell the President how many Americans were killed in a Korean airliner crash, and the time Reagan almost came to blows with then-House Speaker Tip O’Neill over social programs.

“They were in front of the fireplace in the Oval Office and I was snapping, snapping, thinking, ‘Ooooooooh someone is going to take a shot at the other’ and I was imagining these two big guys rolling around on the floor. What a picture!”

Later, Evans showed Reagan a print of the dramatic scene and the President liked it so much he asked for a copy. Mike Deaver, Reagan’s deputy chief of staff, known for his skill in manipulating media images, had warned Evans against showing the picture to anybody else.

Deaver was incensed when a television network ran a copy of it, Evans said, recalling: “I told Deaver, ‘Listen the only print I made I gave to the President of the United States and I can’t account for what he did with it.’ ” Apparently Reagan sent a copy to O’Neill, who gave it out. “Ronald Reagan was so physically self-confident,” Evans said, “he didn’t mind the shot.”

Unlike Kennerly and Valdez, Evans refused to get involved in what photographs were released to the news media. The one time he did, he got in trouble.

Shortly after Reagan was sworn in, there was a 70th birthday party for him in the White House. It was Hollywood in Washington; Evans, a seasoned Time magazine photographer before coming to the White House, says he felt like an awe-struck kid at the movies, shooting film icons with the President. Before the party, Evans had asked Reagan’s handlers if they wanted to be awakened early to review photographs for release to the news magazines. They said not to bother them, he could do it.

“I released a terrific picture of Nancy dancing with Frank Sinatra and the President trying to cut in,” Evans recalled. “It was a warm and funny picture and larger than life.”

But the next morning, Deaver and then-chief of staff James Baker III, were furious. “It was like a bomb went off in my ear,” Evans said, explaining the President’s men felt that the picture had underscored Reagan’s friendship with Sinatra, who long had been dogged with questions about his alleged ties to some unsavory associates.

Unlike Bush, who lets Valdez into his recreational moments but doesn’t particularly want to be bothered when he does the business of the presidency, Reagan was uninhibited in the office but didn’t want Evans around after work.

“Quite frankly, catching them at home was sort of boring,” Evans said of life with Ronald and Nancy Reagan. “Two elderly people with TV trays on the couch just doesn’t generate the same excitement as having kids around the way the Bushes do.”

Evans recalled a time when Reagan demonstrated to Bush, his vice president, how “not to pay attention to the camera. When George came in the room, he would almost invariably say hello to me. Reagan, on the other hand, would not. It wasn’t rudeness, it’s just that he knew how to be aware of the camera and ignore it. But George would feel this need to relate to me as a human being. Now when I see pictures of him, I see the difference even clearer in the two men: George isn’t Hollywood. He understands as a practicing politician he has to demonstrate a sense of style yet he has to work at it. And when he gets unstuck is when he tries too hard.”

George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev took a stroll alone one mild Saturday at Camp David during the four-day superpower summit in May.

For photographers, the potential of the moment was ripe, for it recalled a strong image that many closely identify with the spirit of Camp David: a picture of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev walking, talking, their bald heads leaned together.

Hopeful of finding similar success, the personal photographers with Bush and Gorbachev shot their walk from in front, then cut through the woods to get them from the side. Still, Valdez said, “You can have an image in mind, but you don’t always get it. You can want something to look a certain way or to happen but it doesn’t happen. Something else always happens.”

On this occasion, it occurred later--at the horseshoe pit, where Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, took a break; Valdez went along. He, in fact, demonstrated to the Soviet leader how to throw a shoe. Later, when the two world leaders were playing and Gorbachev made a ringer, Valdez got his Camp David shot.

It was not released until almost two weeks later.

“We had to be sensitive to Gorbachev’s political problems at home and to show him playing might not have been good,” Valdez said, but added quickly, “to get two world leaders alone enjoying themselves is unusual. It was a remarkable shot.”