Authors: Hedrick Smith
It would be many months before the country would realize that the stinging criticism of the first lady had become muted. Her public
standing changed, with stories appearing about her antidrug campaign and her bringing home two deathly sick children from a trip to Korea. By Reagan’s second inauguration, she rivaled the president in popularity. In fact, a
New York Times
/CBS News poll in January 1985 found her public approval rating was seventy-one percent compared to his sixty-two percent.
Time
magazine did a cover story on “Nancy Reagan’s Growing Role” in policy and appointments. NBC followed up with an hour-long special on Mrs. Reagan “at the peak of her power and the peak of her popularity.” Plenty of work and press agentry went into such flattering coverage, but the world beyond the beltway never knew what had propelled Nancy Reagan’s image turnaround.
The Video Presidency
No presidency has been more image conscious or image driven than that of Ronald Reagan. During the Reagan era, Washington began calling itself “Hollywood East,” exulting in celebrity politics. As the nation’s first chief executive with a long show-business background, Reagan exploited his acting skills to the fullest. His choreographers played to those strengths as they staged his presidency. Reagan never seemed more at home as president than when performing: standing before an audience or landing on a former battlefield in Normandy or Korea to personify the nation’s strength and determination. Reagan has loved the role of president, especially the ceremonial role, and he has played to the emotions of his countrymen in an almost-endless string of televised performances. For millions, the Reagan years became a political home movie.
Quite obviously, image making or political public relations was not invented by Reagan, though it reached new peaks of sophistication in the Reagan era. Theatrics are in the blood of most politicians. Fred Dutton, a well-known Washington lawyer and political strategist, told me of arriving at John F. Kennedy’s home in Georgetown one morning to discuss a White House job, after Kennedy’s election in 1960 but before his inauguration. From the hallway, Dutton could see Kennedy sitting alone in another room—wearing a bowler, smoking a cigar, holding a glass of brandy, and listening to recorded speeches by Winston Churchill—obviously imagining his own oratory.
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Probably the first President to grasp the power of modern public relations was Teddy Roosevelt, who originated regular press conferences and coined the memorable metaphor that the presidency is a “bully pulpit” for preaching to the nation. Roosevelt understood the
hypnotic pull of the camera. During the Spanish-American War in 1898, he took along two movie cameramen who filmed his Rough Riders as they charged up Cuba’s San Juan Hill. Actually, Roosevelt’s biographer, Edmund Morris, recounts this “charge” was less a heroic dash to the ridge top than a bloody slaughter of the American troops, ambushed by Spanish riflemen while painfully seizing the terrain.
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But the movie newsreels—turning news into entertainment—dramatized Roosevelt’s heroics and launched a political legend.
Newsreels also helped make Franklin Roosevelt larger than life, but radio was his medium. FDR used radio vividly to evoke the miseries of the “little people” and to offer them hope amidst the economic holocaust of the Depression. His fireside chats deliberately eschewed silver oratory. They were compassionate conversations with a mass audience, FDR’s easy, confident voice an immediate presence to millions of plain people. His folksy anecdotes invited listeners to conjure reality in the theater of the mind. Like Reagan, Franklin Roosevelt was a master at simplifying, at brushing aside the complexity of the nation’s problems. He exulted in his own dramatic talents, once telling Orson Welles, “There are only two great actors in America—you are the other one.”
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Television came of age politically in 1952. Political lieutenants of Dwight Eisenhower used it to wrest control of the Republican National Convention from Senator Robert A. Taft, the favorite of party regulars. They televised charges of convention chicanery by Taft’s forces, helping Ike get nominated. That fall, Eisenhower became the first presidential candidate to use political ads on TV, to publicize not only his views but his famous grin and common touch. Ike’s success set a pattern; television became the springboard for political outsiders to beat established politicans: Jack Kennedy in 1960, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan in 1980. Experienced inside operators such as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Walter Mondale got to the top through orthodox organization politics. Image-game politics was the province of the upstarts.
Once in office, all modern presidents have enlisted the power of the tube to try to increase their bargaining leverage with Congress; they “go public” to sell their policies by demonstrating that public opinion is with them. Richard Nixon used prime-time television so often to promote his Vietnam policies that the Federal Communications Commission finally insisted that, under the “fairness doctrine,” TV networks had to give Nixon’s critics time to respond.
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Jimmy Carter delivered four nationally televised addresses on the nation’s energy crisis and was ready to do a fifth when his pollster, Patrick Caddell,
persuaded him another TV pitch on energy would not work. But no president has used television more than Reagan to promote his personal popularity as well as his policies, and then to use his popularity as a club with Congress to pass his programs. In Reagan’s hands, the presidency became the terrain of the permanent campaign.
Television is particularly well suited to presidents such as Reagan, Kennedy, and Eisenhower who sell mood, confidence, and image as much as the substance of policy. Television’s compelling power is its immediacy. TV gives viewers a direct experience of political leaders and gives politicians direct access to the living rooms of the electorate. This immediacy fuels the politics of emotions, gut reactions, and impressions rather than the politics of logic, facts, and reason; it emphasizes personality rather than issues.
“Radio, and then television, drew our attention away from issues and caused us to focus on the more personal qualities of the politician, his ability to speak, and his style of presentation,” wrote Tony Schwartz, a political consultant and disciple of the media scholar Marshall McLuhan. “Today, in judging [politicians], voters do not look for political labels. They look for what they consider to be good character: qualities such as conviction, compassion, steadiness, the willingness to work hard.”
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On television, politics becomes seen and presented as cinema: a series of narrative episodes about political personalities, not an abstract running debate on policy. To the mass audience, issues are secondary. The mass audience focuses on the hero, with whom it identifies unless he does something so outrageous that it falls out of sympathy with him. Television feels driven to dramatize the news, to give it plot, theme, and continuity in order to make it comprehensible to a mass audience. Television needs action and drama. It needs to boil down complexities. It needs identifiable characters. Hence the focus on personality, preferably one personality.
In this simplified world, Congress is too brawling and diverse to follow easily, because it deals openly with the complexity of issues, whereas the White House deals with most complexities in private. The result is that comparatively speaking, Congress is undercovered and the president overcovered—and the imbalance has grown in the decade from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, when the actual power of Congress has grown. In an essay on “The Case of Our Disappearing Congress,” two political scientists, Norman Ornstein and Michael Robinson of the American Enterprise Institute, found that network TV news gave Congress only half as much coverage in 1985 as it did in 1975.
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In what amounts to the running soap opera of politics, television needs a leading man, and the president fits the bill. As Austin Ranney, a political scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, observed, the public can follow the news only when the confusing tumble of daily developments becomes episodes in an ongoing story.
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The presidency becomes a TV serial; the president, his family, his aides and cohorts become recognizable characters in the play—known and familiar, heroes and villains. Special episodes draw attention: “Ronald Reagan Goes to Peking,” “Nancy Reagan Says No to Drugs,” “Ollie North Sells Arms to Khomeini.”
In the story line from day to day, the plot becomes binary: How is the hero faring: up or down, winning or losing? This is the John Wayne syndrome described earlier, politics treated as a western shoot-out, our sheriff versus the bad guys. The story becomes, Did Reagan’s budget pass, or was he defeated; not, Did the deficit get solved? Was the summit a success or failure for Reagan; not, Are we closer to real security? American political reporting, preoccupied with winning and losing, also focuses on the fate of the main protagonist (the president, the challenger, the front-runner) and not on whether issues are being joined or problems resolved.
Reagan’s approach is ideal for the television age. His political actions are cinematic. Both he and his political choreographers have played to the public’s need for a clear plot line. The Reagan team recognized that the public and Congress can focus on only one major development or one major story at a time. In the presidential TV serial, each episode replaces the last one; most are almost instantly forgotten. Each sequence of events is treated like a minidrama, with beginning, middle, and end. When reporter Nicholas Daniloff was seized in Moscow, his drama became the central national concern, but when he was allowed to leave the Soviet Union, that show was over and forgotten, replaced first by the Iceland summit and then by the 1986 congressional election. When American Marines were shot at and bombed in Lebanon in late 1983, the nation shared their daily ordeal, but when the Marines were pulled out in February 1984, that show was over. Never mind the long-run policy consequences in the Middle East; never mind the wisdom of swapping a Soviet spy for Daniloff. The episodes were over; on to the next episode. For an incumbent president, this is a brilliant strategy. Problems do not accumulate, and that makes a president such as Reagan seem invincible: the Teflon image.
Television also breeds a box-office mentality in politics. The network evening news shows follow the ratings. Substance matters, but the
bottom line is not how much information was imparted, but how big the audience was. In a world of audience ratings, “talking heads” discussing issues pose a risk that viewers will flip the button to another channel. Networks build audiences, and hence build coverage, around the strongest video coverage they can get. Live coverage is by far the most compelling, and the video managers of all presidents labor incessantly to create media events that the networks will find irresistible for live coverage. There is a symbiotic, as well as adversarial, relationship between network producers and White House video strategists, each side wanting a video drama that attracts and holds the largest audience.
With that mentality, White House political strategists are sometimes guided by what is good box office rather than by what is good long-run policy. Symbolism over substance.
That image game was played by Jimmy Carter’s first team: Press Secretary Jody Powell, media adviser Gerald Rafshoon, and pollster Patrick Caddell. They saw Carter’s inaugural walk down Pennsylvania Avenue was good box office. The Camp David summit with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was both good policy and good box office. Carter’s political problem was that it was extremely hard to sustain his Camp David peacemaking; it bogged down. Reagan, sensing bad box office in the tangled diplomacy of the Middle East, kept clear of personal involvement. For Carter, the Iranian hostage crisis was bad box office that he could not shake, for instead of playing it down publicly, he wrapped the fate of his presidency in the fate of the hostages and lost the gamble. Their freedom came too late to save him. Reagan did the opposite on Lebanon; after the terrible killings of the American Marines, he simply walked away from the episode. Eventually, Reagan got trapped by his own hostage crisis with Iran. His claims of ignorance, the attempted cover-ups, the official lying to Congress all fed that angry plot line. But until then, Reagan’s politics escaped a destructive box-office image. Jody Powell, speaking before Reagan’s Iranian debacle, rated the Reagan team as better than Carter’s team in staging the president.
“The Reagan people had earlier White House experience and they had a much clearer strategy in terms of presidential image,” Powell said one autumn afternoon, relaxing in his backyard. “Mike Deaver was better at it than I was, and Reagan is much more amenable to and more easily persuaded to public relations than Carter was. Carter would rather spend the next hour on the ifs, ands, or buts of the decision he had to make, than on the selling of the decision.”
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What made Reagan’s image-game politics distinctive were not only
the president’s formidable personal talents and salesman’s instincts, but the conscious decision of his strategists
to make television the organizing framework
for the president, to an unprecedented degree. Their philosophy was reflected in a passage by Theodore White, reverently quoted to me by Pat Buchanan, the conservative columnist recruited for the second-term Reagan White House. White had declared that “power in America today is control of the means of communication.”
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Substantive policymakers such as Budget Director David Stockman and former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, derided the public relations obsession of the Reagan White House. Haig repeatedly complained that the president’s public relations managers ran policy. Knowing how much White House effort went into influencing ABC, CBS, and NBC, Stockman bitterly complained that “reality for the boys”—Reagan’s monicker for his political strategists—“came at six o’clock” with the nightly news shows.