Authors: Hedrick Smith
“I thought it was the single toughest piece I had ever done on Reagan,” Stahl said, recalling her apprehension about the White House reaction. “The piece aired, and my phone rang. It was a senior White House official and I thought, ‘I keep telling people that they’ve never yelled at me, but here it comes.’
“And the voice said, ‘Great piece.’
“I said, ‘What?’
“And he said,
‘Great piece!’
“I said, ‘Did you listen to what I said?’
“He said, ‘Lesley, when you’re showing four and a half minutes of great pictures of Ronald Reagan, no one listens to what you say. Don’t you know that the pictures are overriding your message because they conflict with your message? The public sees those pictures and they block your message. They didn’t even hear what you said. So, in our minds, it was a four-and-a-half-minute free ad for the Ronald Reagan campaign for reelection.’
“I sat here numb. I began to feel dumb ’cause I’d covered him four years and I hadn’t figured it out. Somebody had to explain it to me. Well, none of us had figured it out. I called the executive producer of the
Evening News
[Lane Venardos], and he went dead on the phone. And he said, ‘Oh, my God.’
“None of us had figured that out. All of us were proud of that piece ’cause we thought we had done a good, tough job, and then”—She broke into laughter. “
They
loved it. They really did love it.”
25
The Vicar of Visuals
Mike Deaver, the self-styled “vicar of visuals,” was the impresario of Reagan’s visual choreography. A slim, creative, nervous, hands-in-the-pockets Californian who helped pay his way through college playing the piano, Deaver created Reagan’s most memorable video images. Over the years Deaver had developed an unerring intuition for what event, what backdrop, what lighting would best convey Reagan and his message visually. He knew Reagan as a film director knows his leading man. His skills were inseparable from Reagan’s political success.
Deaver was meticulous about the backdrops and settings for fashioning the proper Reagan image. He not only bathed Reagan in symbols of national pride and patriotism but set Reagan in flattering lights. Deaver disliked the plain beige curtains drawn behind Reagan’s desk when he addressed the nation from the Oval Office. He felt Reagan’s face faded into that backdrop. He decided to open the curtains, and he spent $20,000 on backlighting the window from the garden outside. “It made the president look ten years younger with nice, natural lighting and the green behind him or the snowstorm in the winter,” Deaver said.
27
In staging Reagan, Deaver spared no effort. At the 1984 Republican convention, I went to the podium several hours before the opening.
Carpenters were still hammering signs among an ocean of empty seats. On the podium, two men in suit jackets were crouching over a chair, one clicking close-ups of its arms, legs, and back with a thirty-five-millimeter camera. They were so absorbed that I startled them by asking why they were photographing a chair.
“Because we designed it,” said the older man, David Clark, a designer for Imero Fiorentino Associates of New York and Hollywood. “We designed the entire podium.”
“So why take pictures of the chair?”
“We’re taking pictures of everything,” Clark explained. “We’ve taken about four thousand pictures—the chair, the lectern, parts of the podium, the television camera platform. We know every piece of wood, and why it’s here.”
“What’s special about the chair and the podium?” I asked.
“The whole effect.” He gestured around. “Look, there are no square angles anywhere. Look at the chair: round top, curved legs. Look at edge of the podium: no sharp corners. They’re all rounded. Look at the lectern: curves everywhere. Look at the colors: They’re all earth tones—brown, beige, nothing jarring.”
“What’s the reason?” I asked.
“Those are the tones that [convention manager] Ron Walker and Mike Deaver wanted,” Clark said. “It will help the president stand out.”
“But I thought that to make somebody stand out, you did it with bright colors,” I suggested. “At the Democratic convention, Gerry Ferraro wore an all-white suit—very dramatic against a blue background and all the red bunting. Red, white, and blue.”
“We designed that podium, too,” Clark said. “There are two ways to attract attention: either by making the podium the most lively point in the hall—the hottest, brightest spot, or by making it the most restful spot. In this hall, there’ll be a lot of noise and activity, and so the calmest, most restful place will be the podium and at the center, the speaker. The eye comes to rest there. Earth tones and rounded shapes are peaceful.”
The aura of calmness and confidence was the key. Deaver wanted Reagan to come across as a soothing, reassuring presence—to help lay to rest concerns about his troubled relations with Moscow and the mounting
contra
war in Central America. The podium backdrop conveyed a subliminal message of peaceableness.
To assure a stream of positive visual images emanating from Reagan, Deaver patented what he called the “visual press release.” During the
deep recession of 1982–83, when Reagan was accused of lacking compassion for the growing ranks of unemployed, Deaver had him photographed at events for unemployed dock workers or for people being retrained for new jobs. When the economy began to heal, Deaver would not let Reagan go into the pressroom to announce a statistical rise in new housing starts. Instead, Deaver flew Reagan—and the entire White House press corps—to a Fort Worth housing project to make that announcement against the backdrop of construction workers and a newly framed house. The idea, Deaver said, was to drive home the message to TV viewers that the economy was turning up.
Or, anticipating worries about Reagan’s age in the 1984 campaign, Deaver and William Sitman arranged for Reagan to arm-wrestle weight lifter Dan Lurie, publisher of
Muscle Training Illustrated
. A White House photographer snapped a setup shot of Reagan pinning Lurie’s biceps to his desk, and Deaver put it out to the press, counting on front-page play. David Gergen arranged a similar picture layout of Reagan pumping barbells for
Parade
magazine. Antidotes to fears about a seventy-four-year-old president.
Deep down, Deaver’s goal was to become the de facto executive producer of the TV network news shows by crafting the administration’s story for the networks. Because television producers like “news that wiggles” [news with action], Deaver developed the technique of theme campaigning—putting Reagan on the move. For two months in 1983, Deaver took Reagan on the road for a public relations blitz on education, an issue Reagan had largely ignored. Deaver scored a stunning success, changing the public’s perception and attitudes toward Reagan’s policy position,
without Reagan’s changing his policy
.
The effort was a direct steal from election campaign tactics. It was triggered by
A Nation at Risk
, the report of an eighteen-member national commission that denounced the poor quality of American public education.
27
That report, issued in April 1983, was potentially devastating to Reagan politically because of his budget cutbacks in federal aid to primary and secondary schools. Dick Wirthlin had already flagged education as a danger issue for Reagan’s reelection campaign. By tapping Wirthlin’s poll analysis and using Deaver’s theme campaigning, Reagan reversed the nation’s negative assessment of him on education.
In mid-March, Wirthlin’s polls had shown the public disapproved of Reagan’s handling of education by 48–42 percent. The education report was going to make Reagan look worse—unless he rapidly put his spin on the report. “The commission was saying schools are in horrible
shape,” David Gergen recalled. “But it also said, here are some things that can be done that don’t involve a lot of money. Our point was to let Reagan ride with the report, not have it ride over him. So Deaver whipped up a schedule of events.”
28
Deaver felt that so far the story-line strategy had been too “rifle shot,” targeting one issue at a time and moving on quickly. Deaver knew it was impossible to shift public attitudes with a single-shot approach. “You’ve got to hammer and hammer and hammer and hammer on a theme, testing all the time [with polls] to see if you’re getting movement on it,” Deaver asserted to me. “If you’re getting movement, stay with it.”
29
His image-game tactics leaned heavily on polling, used the way soap and cosmetic companies work mass marketing. In Reagan’s presidency by polling, Wirthlin’s firm, Decision Making Information, Inc., would “pretest” public attitudes before Reagan went barnstorming on issues; in this case, public attitudes on education. To keep from being overrun by the education report, the White House needed a quick fix on public attitudes. Wirthlin’s firm (which has 250 telephone links for rapid polling) can do national polls on hot issues within twenty-four hours. Frequently, this speed put the Reagan operation far ahead of Congress, the television networks, or Democratic rivals in figuring out the best political line with the public.
On education, Wirthlin’s pretesting told Reagan what buttons to push in the public psyche. It helped design positive points for Reagan to emphasize and negative points for him to avoid. Wirthlin found favorable public responses to some ideas in the report that fit Reagan’s philosophy: tougher educational standards, more school discipline, emphasis on basic courses, and teacher accountability. By highlighting these proposals, Reagan could align himself with the report and side-track obvious pressures for more federal funding for education.
“We tested and found where the hot buttons were,” Wirthlin told me. “We couldn’t beat them [the critics] on the issue of money.
We had to change the terms of the debate
.”
30
That was the essence of Deaver’s theme campaigning and the key to changing Reagan’s public image on education. Walter Mondale quickly called for an $11 billion program of federal aid to fund university research in math and the sciences, help for disadvantaged children, more student scholarships, loans, and grants. But Reagan, using his pretested line, blamed “misguided policymakers” in Washington for school problems and called on parents to push for tougher standards, better teachers, and local control. He made a whirlwind tour, attracting
TV coverage and newspaper headlines. Deaver’s orchestration of events was intended to show that Reagan cared about education and was taking positions that people supported.
Reagan flew to South Orange, New Jersey, and called for merit pay for teachers. In Hopkins, Minnesota, he said the older generation bore responsibility for school problems. In Shawnee, Kansas, he blamed the disruptive effect of court-ordered desegregation. In Farragut, Tennessee, he lunched with home economics teachers, sat in a senior English class, and then declared that American schools have become “too easy” because of the “abandonment of compulsory courses.” In Albuquerque, he had the temerity to warn that “education must never become a political football” and called for competency tests as well as merit pay for teachers. In Los Angeles, he accused a teachers’ union, the National Education Association, of “brainwashing American schoolchildren.”
Reagan never promised to change his education policy, and yet public attitudes changed in Reagan’s favor. First, his high profile persuaded people he was concerned about education—a vital personal issue to millions of voters and one where Reagan had previously seemed uncaring. Second, his barnstorming surfaced some latent approval of conservative Republican views. A
Newsweek
poll in mid-June found that eighty percent of the public still favored more spending on public education, but ninety percent also wanted tougher curriculums and competency testing for teachers, and about eighty percent agreed with Reagan on merit pay.
31
Also, attitudes changed toward Reagan personally. The public disapproval he faced in March had switched by late June to 52–41 percent approval of his handling of education policy. The shift had occurred merely by his seizing the stage and shrewdly marketing his story line.
“That’s what it comes down to—we are marketing,” commented Bill Henkel, who staged Reagan’s cross-country travels. “We are trying to mold public opinion by marketing strategies. That’s what communications is all about. I’ve always had a fascination with trying to close a sale or make a sale, and that’s what I’m doing with public opinion: creating events that convey a message. Many of our little playlets, or presidential events, have a relationship to the advertising business.”
32
When NBC’s Chris Wallace told Deaver that reporters were contrasting Reagan’s spoken concern about education with his cuts in the education budget, Deaver shrugged him off “You can say whatever you want,” Deaver retorted, “but the viewer sees Ronald Reagan out there
in a classroom talking to teachers and kids, and what he takes from that is the impression that Ronald Reagan is concerned about education.”
33
The Storybook Presidency
Reagan’s video managers created a storybook presidency, using the pageantry of presidential travel to hook the networks and captivate the popular imagination. They projected Reagan as the living symbol of nationhood. And there was a payoff for policy: The more Reagan wrapped himself in the flag, the harder it became for mere mortal politicians to challenge him, the more impossible he was to defeat come reelection, the more worthy he seemed of trust and latitude on policy.
Jimmy Carter had purposely deflated the pomp of the White House, but the Reagan team understood the prime value of the ceremonial presidency. Reagan has his common touch: his humor, his mistakes, and his quirks. But Reagan eschewed Carter’s practice of carrying his own luggage. He reinstated “Hail to the Chief,” which Carter had abolished. Reagan relished the royal side of the presidency. He is the master of the grand entry: the confident manly stride down the red-carpeted hallway for a press conference or helicopters moving him up the Mall in formation toward a floodlit Congress on triumphant return from a Geneva summit. He loves flapping flags, honor guards, anthems, ruffles and flourishes. He enjoys playing the role of commander in chief.