Authors: Hedrick Smith
The Reagan team was expert, moreover, at distancing the president from bad news. In any White House, the president announces good news and others—preferably other agencies—handle bad news. That’s how the power game is played. Frequently, Reagan has appeared suddenly in the pressroom for “mini” briefings with bright economic news to announce and quickly ducked out, leaving aides to handle tough questions. In September 1986, Reagan personally announced the Soviet
release of American reporter Nicholas Daniloff and left it to Shultz to break the bad news that in an undeclared swap, Gennady Zakharov, a Soviet accused of spying, had been let go by the United States.
But the most valuable defensive gambit for negative news is dumping it on Friday afternoon after four
P.M
. That gives the networks little time to work the story, and it relegates the news to Saturday newspapers, which are lightly read. It also increases chances the story will die over the weekend. Late release means that the first stories have an administration spin because reporters lack time to get balancing comment. Moreover, the main editorials and columns for the Sunday papers have usually been written by Friday afternoon. So odds are good that the bad news will not get heavy weekend comment and will look stale by Monday.
At times, the strategy has been extremely successful. In 1984, the White House picked March 30—after the president had flown off to his California ranch and the White House press plane was landing in Santa Barbara—to dump the news that American Marines were being pulled out of Lebanon. For all Reagan’s grand declarations about the importance of the Marines to the entire American position in the Middle East, their withdrawal merited only a brief printed statement from the press office, handed to reporters late afternoon Pacific time. It was too late for Eastern prime-time network news; comment was light. By clever press agentry, Reagan limited the political scar.
It does not always work that way. In January 1982, the Reagan administration picked a Friday afternoon to disclose that it was filing a Supreme Court brief to stop denying tax-exempt status to private segregated schools and colleges. And in 1983, it picked a Friday in March to disclose a presidential executive order imposing lifetime secrecy agreements on more than 200,000 government officials. Burying these actions did not prevent such a hullabaloo that the administration had to reverse both actions. In 1986, the White House tried to bury the news of President Reagan’s veto of sanctions against South Africa by releasing it at 7:58
P.M
., Friday, September 26. The tactic backfired. Congressional Democrats anticipated the veto and staged demonstrations, and CBS anchor Dan Rather reported that Reagan was trying to duck news coverage of his veto.
Oddly for a politician who projects ease in public, Reagan’s most defensive arena has been the press conference. Ever since Teddy Roosevelt first called in reporters, most presidents have welcomed the chance to put down criticism or convey some policy message at press conferences. Franklin Roosevelt was a master of the medium. Kennedy,
with his wit and fluency, exulted in the intellectual sparring. Johnson loomed over the press like a titanic presence, reigning by force of personality. Nixon and Carter held reporters at bay by dogged command of the issues.
But for Reagan, who has trouble with details and even some essentials of policy, a press conference is an obstacle course, a minefield to be gingerly negotiated. His aides held their breath every time he met the press. They viewed each encounter as a bad gamble. “The problem is you’re playing roulette at a press conference,” one top Reagan lieutenant lamented to me. “With Reagan, he’s either right on or he’s off, way off. There’s no middle ground.”
Striding to the podium, Reagan projects vigor, poise, and command, but his strategy is one of avoidance. He promised press conferences once a month but never came close; he has lagged far behind other presidents except for Nixon. Franklin Roosevelt had an average of 6.9 news conferences a month, Harry Truman 3.4, Dwight Eisenhower 2, John Kennedy 1.9, Lyndon Johnson 2.2, Richard Nixon 0.5, Gerald Ford 1.3, Jimmy Carter 1.2, and Reagan 0.5, through 1987. Behind the scenes, Mike Deaver always had to break Reagan’s tension by passing him some irreverent little note just before his entrance. Once, Deaver told me, he scribbled: “The answer to question No. 1 is no answer. The answer to question No. 2 is no answer. The answer to question No. 3 is no answer.” It was meant as a joke, but it told a deeper truth: Reagan’s tactic was to avoid direct answers.
To reduce the risks, Reagan’s handlers ran him through major dress rehearsals for each press conference and interview. Nixon, Ford, and Carter used to get briefing books two or three days in advance, defining policy and anticipating questions, but Reagan’s prepping was more rigorous. After boning up, Reagan would spend whole afternoons doing dry runs in the White House family theater with his staff. Two panels of aides would fire questions, one on domestic topics and the other on national security issues. Senior aides would critique Reagan’s answers, suggesting where precision or vagueness would serve him better.
In his first term, Reagan was constantly coached to soften his rhetoric on Central America. In one early 1984 rehearsal, Reagan defended CIA Director William Casey for the Agency’s mining of Nicaraguan harbors, but his staff talked him into fuzzing that answer in public. Because of controversy over Reagan’s statements that Social Security did not affect the deficit, David Stockman would give Reagan a memo before every press conference reminding him that Social Security was part of the unified budget and therefore affected the deficit. “The
president would listen—God, I heard it seven or eight times,” one aide said. “Our concern was that it wasn’t accurate and
The Washington Post
would write an editorial that the president didn’t understand, in an accounting sense. But the president knew what was important to him politically. His answer was a political dodge, a hedge. No matter how they would prepare him, he’d give the same answer: that it didn’t affect the deficit.”
Sometimes, he would fool his staff. “Reagan treated the pre-briefs [rehearsals] as a chance for a stand-up comic routine, and then the staff was never quite sure whether he was going to use what he said in the real press conference,” one official told me.
One such case—with real backlash—occurred in October 1983, during Senate debate of a national holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr. Senator Jesse Helms opposed it, arguing that King’s associations “strongly suggest that King harbored a strong sympathy for the Communist Party and its goals.” Helms called on the FBI to open its “raw files” on King, sealed until the year 2027. Civil rights leaders were furious and Senate Republican leaders wanted to get rid of the issue.
During a press conference rehearsal, one aide asked Reagan, “Do you think Martin Luther King was a Communist?”
“Well, we’ll know in thirty-five years, won’t we?” Reagan shot back.
Everyone laughed, assuming it was a gag. But when Reagan repeated the gag line at the press conference, his aides were stunned. The implication that Reagan shared Helms’s suspicions caused Reagan such political embarrassment that he had to apologize to Coretta King.
Rehearsals did not stop blunders. Reagan would describe Syrian air-defense missiles as “offensive weapons” and mix up well-known United Nations resolutions on the Middle East. On occasion, he confused different Supreme Court decisions affecting major administration policies and freshly issued just a day or two before. He would respond to questions about conventional arms negotiations with answers on nuclear arms talks. In early 1982, he claimed there were a million more Americans at work than when he took office, when in fact there were 100,000 fewer. On other occasions, he has created doubts whether he was revoking the 1979 arms treaty (requiring clarifications by his spokesman) and asserted that he did not want his 1985 tax plan to increase the corporate tax burden (when that is precisely what it did). In June 1987, Reagan seemed out of touch with his own policy. He told reporters that there “could still be some lowering of the value” of the American dollar—touching off frantic denials from other top officials—because
this was the opposite of what the administration wanted to happen.
Access Control and the Grenada Blackout
It is remarkable that Reagan’s flow of bloopers has not been more costly politically. To limit the risk of his disrupting the story line, his political handlers imposed tight restrictions on press access to Reagan. For example, President Carter had made it a practice on Friday afternoons to take reporters’ questions just before helicoptering to Camp David for the weekend. Reagan tried that initially, but after some flubs, his staff cut the time down and later had the helicopter pilot turn on the motors to drown out questions. That gave Reagan’s imagemakers what they wanted: a television picture of the Reagans and a wave from the president, but no risky dialogue.
Within the White House, access to Reagan was cut. For years, a small pool of reporters would accompany cameramen into the Oval Office for “a photo opportunity,” to see the president meet foreign leaders, congressional delegations, and various groups. That gave reporters a chance to ask about breaking news. In that setting, Reagan would talk off the cuff, often to the dismay of his handlers. In late 1981, Larry Speakes issued an edict: “Look, no more questions in the photo ops. If you feel you can’t abide by it, you don’t have to go in.” According to Sam Donaldson of ABC, the TV correspondents replied: “Then no cameras. You don’t want us in there, we’re not going to send our cameras.”
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The White House, always angling for camera coverage, backed down; but in early 1982, Deaver laid down the law to network bureau chiefs, imposing what became known as the “Deaver rule”: no questions in photo ops. The networks tried holding out their cameras, but after ten days, White House hardball prevailed.
Those strict guidelines marked a significant change. They created distance between regular White House reporters and the president. “I’ve covered city hall and the state house, I’ve covered Capitol Hill, and one of the things that’s most useful, most important, and also most stimulating about the job is your engagement with the main player, not just the staff,” remarked NBC’s Chris Wallace. “In Boston, you’d sit around in the mayor’s office with him late in the afternoon or go off to dinner and engage with him. You had a sense of who the man is, what he’s thinking, what’s his mood now. We don’t have any of that with Ronald Reagan. There is no intellectual engagement at all.”
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“I never see Reagan very much in relation to the times I saw Carter,”
echoed Donaldson. “I would see Jimmy Carter almost every working day of his presidency. With Reagan, cameras always get in. It’s reporters they don’t want there.”
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The Reagan team’s arm’s-length strategy—shutting out reporters—reached a climax with the American invasion of Grenada on October 25, 1983. The administration barred print, radio, and television reporters during the early days of the operation, breaking military precedent and rejecting a long tradition of front-line press coverage dating back to the Civil War. Reporters had gone into combat with American troops in the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon in 1956, and more than twenty Caribbean expeditions.
But what was fresh in mind to Reagan’s imagemakers was the British handling of the Falklands Islands War in 1982. The Thatcher government had barred live broadcasting from the Royal Navy’s task force. Still photographs of burning British warships were blocked by censors. Television films had to be shipped to London by boat or plane, a process that took weeks; the war was nearly over before the British people saw scenes of their warships being blown up or heard emotional interviews with survivors. The aim of the news blackout was quite clear: Prime Minister Thatcher and her cabinet colleagues asserted that it would have been hard to sustain popular support if the British public had been exposed to nightly TV coverage.
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On Grenada, the White House and Pentagon said they had refused to let American reporters on the beaches out of concern for their safety, though they let French and Latin American reporters cover the combat. When American newsmen tried to get to Grenada on commercial boats, American military planes threatened to fire on them. Four American reporters were held on a Navy ship for several days, forbidden to transmit stories, while the Pentagon set up its own news service, distributing reports with serious omissions and inaccuracies. The administration seemed to want a news monopoly until it could shape public attitudes.
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In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the government’s press muzzling played well in the country. Defense Secretary Weinberger defended the exclusion of reporters as a sound “operational order” by the military task force commander, to keep out all noncombatants to help assure the operation’s success. Secretary of State Shultz declared that the press had been barred from Grenada because “reporters are always against us, and so they’re always seeking to report something that’s going to screw things up.” It was an echo of former Secretary
of State Dean Rusk’s famous challenge to reporters during the Vietnam War: “Which side are you on?”
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Early public reaction backed the news blackout.
But as more information emerged—disclosing the American dead and wounded, the difficulties the huge American force had in quelling a small force of Cuban defenders, the bombing of a hospital, communications foul-ups, and other military blunders—public attitudes shifted. By early December 1983, pollster Louis Harris found that a 65–32 percent majority felt the administration had been wrong not to let reporters accompany troops into Grenada. A similar majority said that excluding reporters might tempt the military to “cover up mistakes or lives lost.”
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Even the administration’s line shifted. Antagonism between the White House and the Washington press corps was white hot. The White House had compounded the initial blunder of excluding the American press by actual deception about the invasion—Larry Speakes had unwittingly lied to reporters the night before the invasion, denying an attack was imminent.