November/December 2000 | Contents

THE WORST JOB IN WASHINGTON

WHO SPEAKS FOR THE PRESIDENT? THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY FROM CLEVELAND TO CLINTON
By Dale W. Nelson

REVIEWED BY BILL MONROE

Millions of red-blooded American boys and girls grow up wanting to be president. But red-blooded American journalists do not grow up wanting to be presidential press secretary. With the exception of Marlin Fitzwater.

Fitzwater, the press mediator for Bush and Reagan, was smitten as a boy with an exhibit he saw in the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas -- a huge blowup of Jim Hagerty sitting on the steps of a Colorado cottage with President Eisenhower. It was obvious to Fitzwater that the press secretary is the man who vacations with the president.

Alas, the press secretary seldom gets to sit around with his wife, let alone the president. Quite the contrary. The general indifference of journalists to the White House spokesman role speaks well of their prudence and common sense.

Take Charlie Ross, for example. In 1931, as Washington bureau chief of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he wrote, "My advice to all presidents is not to put up a newspaper man to meet the press. Choose a politician."

Ross also wrote that "A newspaper man ought to be that and nothing else. . . . Newspaper men turned public officials try to be both, and they rarely succeed. Sooner or later, they will have the 'chief' on their backs for giving out too much information, or the newspaper men on their backs for giving out too little."

Fourteen years after he uttered that wisdom the press secretary job fell on Charlie Ross out of a clear blue sky. When Franklin Roosevelt suffered a fatal stroke, Ross's old schoolmate, Harry Truman, had suddenly become president. Truman immediately asked Ross to join him in the White House.

Ross not only had a dim view of the press aide's job but he was enjoying working in Washington for his publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. He was also making three times what he would receive in the White House. Against the better judgment of his wife, Ross accepted the Truman offer. "This man," he told Florence Ross, "needs help."

Five years later, as he was about to repeat into a network microphone part of a White House briefing he had just given reporters, Ross slumped over sideways. Frank Bourgholtzer of NBC at first thought it was a joke, Ross demonstrating dramatically how tired he was. But Charlie Ross was dead of a heart attack.

Truman chose Joseph Short of the Baltimore Sun to succeed Ross. Some two years later Short proceeded to die of a heart ailment. "I feel as if I killed them," said the stunned president.

According to the thorough and convincing research of W. Dale Nelson, a former White House reporter for The Associated Press, speaking for presidents can not only be dangerous to your health -- it can also be dangerous to your reputation, your leisure time, your sleep, your marriage, your familyhood, and your peace of mind.

Who Speaks for the President?, now available in paperback as well as hardcover, makes it clear that the ill-fated Charlie Ross knew what he was talking about. The book starts right out with the basic, implacable problem in the triangulation of president, press, and press secretary. This story, we're told, circulated in Washington in 1897:

As Grover Cleveland prepared to enter the White House for his second term, a Washington journalist offered him some advice on the selection of a new private secretary.

"We were hoping," the president-elect's caller said, "that you will appoint a man who will be good to us newspaper men."

"I had a notion," said Cleveland, "of appointing a man who would be good to me."

There they are, the two sides pulling the press secretary in opposite directions. On one side, Washington reporters, identifying their interests with the national interest and righteously urging appointment of a fox to guard the informational chicken coop. On the other side, the president, hoping, somewhat plaintively, that his own appointee might pay some attention to his own political requirements. And between these grindstones, the hapless press secretary, being buffeted toward the inevitable climax in which he or she is seen, sometimes by both sides, as an incompetent and a scumbag.

In the classical ending to this story the president fires you and the press says good riddance.

To begin with, the author notes, few presidents are fond of reporters. Lyndon Johnson called them "spies." Woodrow Wilson called them "contemptible spies." Nixon considered them part of his opposition. Roosevelt and Kennedy were convivial with journalists in public but excoriated them in private.

Some presidents give their press secretaries total access to White House meetings and events. Others keep them in the dark. Some press secretaries enjoy a brief honeymoon, implicitly trusted by the president and the press. But then comes a crisis, a gaffe, a misjudgment, not to mention unexpected snags, such as rivalries inside the White House staff. A White House observer penned a classic description of the reptilian bureaucrat, in this case a Herbert Hoover aide who quietly undermined Hoover's confidence in his press secretary: "unobtrusive as a fleeting shadow and as smooth."

Nelson has written a book full of whirling crises, good stories, and a spectrum of personalities. Here is George Reedy, Lyndon Johnson's pipe-smoking philosopher-spokesman. Pierre Salinger, in the words of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., "entertaining the press with jocular daily briefings." Larry Speakes putting out "quotes" for Ronald Reagan that Reagan has never seen. And Jody Powell falsely denying knowledge of the ill-fated Iran hostage-rescue mission -- a lie sanctioned in retrospect as a life-and-death necessity by the man who was deceived, the Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Nelson.

But, for all of its Oval Office dramatics, the book does not quite equal the sum of its parts. It is, for better and for worse, an Associated Press sort of undertaking. (Declaration of conscience here: I'm a former Unipresser.)

Who Speaks . . .? has the feel of impeccable research and reliability. (Although Barbara Gamarekian of the JFK White House may deplore the transposition that delivers her name as Garamekian, I would not be surprised if that turned out to be the only mistake in the book.) The writing is straight, no frills. Nelson is a published poet, but he does not squander any poetry on presidents or press secretaries.

The book goes "from Cleveland to Clinton," as advertised, but no farther than a few days into Clinton's second term. We do not get to struggle with Talking Head Mike McCurry through the mire of Monica and impeachment. We do not get to visit Clinton's lame duckery with Joe Lockhart.

While all fifteen chapters add to the lore of press secretaries, their lives and times, Nelson does not connect up the chapters to drive home any themes or theories or prescriptions for the future. It seems to occur to him, however, that his chapters are not speaking to each other. So, on the last page, trying to tie things together, he comes up with a parting thought reminiscent of a White House TV reporter out on the South Lawn trying to add a bit of weight to a forty-second stand-upper: "As the White House and its press contingent geared up for a new century, however, one thing remained unchanged. In the end, it was the president who spoke for the president." Ah so.

But enough of this nitpicking. Good AP reporting is readable stuff when you have a slice of journalistic history like this to deal with.

The book is sprinkled with surprises and an occasional shocker. Did you know that "Silent Cal" Coolidge held 520 press conferences? That Lyndon Johnson offered reporters a deal: he would help them become "big men" if they would look the other way when he ventured "into a strange bedroom"? That Helen Thomas called it an "act of war" when the brand-new Clinton White House cut off reporters' access to the press secretary?

There's even a patch of hilarity here and there.

Presidents are constantly trying to get their views across to the nation without having to be responsible for them. President Clinton, for example, once briefed reporters on the basis that his remarks could be attributed only to "the highest authority." That more or less gave readers the option of mentally assigning the material to God or, on the earthly level, the president. "The highest authority" talked about Russia, about the books he was reading, even about his daughter Chelsea's dating. Somehow word got out that this was coming from the local deity in the White House. The "highest authority" dodge had to be scrapped.

If Clinton's pressman had read Dale Nelson's book before this incident, the whole embarrassment might have been avoided. In the 1920s, before there was a designated White House spokesman, President Coolidge regularly let himself be quoted as a "White House spokesman." But the cover quickly wore thin. One correspondent wrote that the "mythical spokesman for the president" seemed to show up in the papers on the mornings after presidential news conferences. And Raymond Clapper, writing in Editor & Publisher, went so far as to provide a physical description of the spokesman: "a thin, sandy-haired, small-mouthed, solemn little Vermonter."

Coolidge abandoned the "spokesman" device. But this only resulted in new heights of awkwardness, such as: "Those in a position to know the mind of the president revealed today . . . ."

At this point, it would seem, Raymond Clapper gave up the chase. Otherwise, he would certainly have noted in Editor & Publisher that "'those in a position to know the mind of the president' are a thin, small-mouthed, solemn little Vermonter."

Bill Monroe is a former newspaperman and moderator of NBC's Meet the Press.