The Wars of Watergate (33 page)

The manner of news manipulation attempted by the Administration pointedly recognized the media’s vulnerabilities in laziness and the lack of resources to probe for deeper meanings to events. Haldeman instructed his aides that every presidential statement should be accompanied with a summary. He was blunt as to the purpose: “We will get better coverage if we write the press’ story for them, and … we should always do this rather than leave it up to them to find the salient points in our release.” Years later, Haldeman blamed the press for “an obsession” with covering every aspect of White House affairs, which in turn caused the President and his staff to respond in detail, thus making it appear that the White House was “obsessed with getting all this out.” Original sin was in the eye of the beholder.
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Dealing with television involved the more rewarding prize, and the easier task. First, government regulation complicated relations between the Administration and the television industry. Spiro Agnew’s famous Des Moines assault on the media only made the implicit threat of oppressive regulation more explicit. Second, the Administration could focus its efforts more with
television than with newspapers, as it could negotiate directly with the few important network executives.

After the
New York Times
commented on his “bitter” response to the Senate’s rejection of his nomination of G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court, Nixon told Haldeman that he had received scores of letters from people who had seen him on television and did not think that he appeared at all bitter. “This had led RN to the conclusion,” the President told Haldeman, to have all future press conferences televised. Nixon thought “the TV guys will like it and the press guys will shape up a little better.” He recognized that television reporters must be more restrained, tied as they were to the image they displayed on the screen.

In this particular instance, the President was anxious to make public certain facts of his travel costs. He thought that it would be best to give the story exclusively to one of the network reporters. “Obviously, a major television coverage would be more important than having it appear in some column or even on a wire service,” he told Haldeman. Nixon respected television. When the President directed the staff to monitor such entertainment programs as that of the Smothers brothers, he noted that this was a far more important activity than sponsoring letter-writing campaigns in newspapers. Nixon had confidence in using television; his effectiveness was “remarkable,” a Haldeman aide reported, in words that again probably came from the President himself.
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The presidential press conference has come to be the most visible point of public contact between presidents and the media. It is often said that this is the closest American approximation to the British parliamentary practice of periodically questioning government ministers. The comparison pales. The British system is institutionalized and works on a regular basis, operating between assumed equals in status, if not quite in power. All questioners are members of Parliament, standing in deference to their monarch but not to the Prime Minister. The questioners stand forth openly as political opponents, with the opportunity to coordinate and focus a series of questions designed to secure political advantage for themselves. Above all, parliamentary examination is a vital component of ministerial accountability. Presidential press conferences simply have lacked those qualities of tradition and institutionalization.

Presidents have met the press in a variety of ways. Theodore Roosevelt occasionally talked to a reporter or groups of reporters, sometimes with a public design, other times on a social basis. Woodrow Wilson conducted the first regular press conferences and inaugurated conferences as fairly routine White House functions. Wilson knew the importance of cultivating working reporters. At his first press conference, in March 1913, he told a group of
them: “I feel that a large part of the success of public affairs depends on newspapermen—not so much on the editorial writers, because we can live down what they say, as upon the news writers because the news is the atmosphere of public affairs.” Wilson told the reporters that their duty was to inform Washington officials of what the country was thinking and not to emphasize what Washington was thinking. Wilson’s initial optimism with regard to press relations molded a pattern for his successors. “I sent for you,” he told the reporters, “to ask that you go into partnership with me, that you lend me your assistance as nobody else can.” Bring the “freight of opinion into Washington,” he said, and we will “try and make true gold here that will go out from Washington.” It was a noble beginning, but the transcripts reveal little substantive information being exchanged in Wilson’s press conferences.
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Wilson requested that the press not quote him directly, fearing that he might make a momentary error of fact or grammar. His immediate successors, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, held irregular conferences distinguished by the requirement that reporters submit written questions in advance. That practice, like much else in the presidency, changed with Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.

Roosevelt, like Wilson, believed that if he made page one, the editorial pages were of minor consequence. FDR’s first press conferences in 1933 (fashioned after those he had held as Governor of New York) marked a new stage in presidential relations with the press, one in which the President personally assumed control to manage the news flow. FDR largely succeeded, through a combination of charm, guile, cajolery, and flattery. He was, a recent biographer noted, “a picture of ease and confidence.” Without television to convey a visual image of himself, the President nevertheless portrayed himself to the press—and hence to the public—as “unprecedentedly frank, open, cordial, personal.”

More than any of his predecessors, Roosevelt recognized and realized the potency of the press conference as a forum for projecting the image he desired. Like his predecessors, Roosevelt met casually with individual reporters or small groups to suggest a story—either to press something that interested him or to send up a “trial balloon.”
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FDR made the mold, and the working press was his for the next twelve years.

President Truman held both scheduled and impromptu sessions with the press, though hardly the number conducted by FDR. In the Truman Administration, reporters accompanied the President on his early morning walks along Pennsylvania Avenue, questioning and conversing with him to gain morsels of information. But like FDR, Truman punctuated many of his answers with pithy “no comments,” as well as friendly and unfriendly banter. The press long had been accustomed to numerous restraints during the Roosevelt presidency, particularly deferring to the President’s privacy (rarely
describing his serious physical handicap) and to the need for wartime secrecy. During a few early vacation trips with Truman, however, the press thought it important to report that he played poker and drank bourbon, signalling a new era in media concerns. Truman responded heatedly when reporters attacked his family. He once jabbed his finger into a reporter’s abdomen, cursed, and called him a liar for reporting that the President’s wife and daughter had returned from Missouri in a private railroad car. In fact, they had paid for a compartment and waited in turn for the diner. The reporter apologized. Truman regarded the media as hostile and adversarial; furthermore, he rarely used his relations with the press to sell or publicize his Administration’s ideas and programs.
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Dwight Eisenhower, like Roosevelt with radio, adapted well to the new technology of television. The President allowed the new medium to record his press conferences. Eisenhower was experienced in accommodating the media and turning them to his advantage. In his first press conference, he praised the role of reporters and went out of his way to thank them for their past kindnesses. Eisenhower held 193 press conferences in his eight years in office, far more than any other president, before or since. Sophisticated audiences often responded contemptuously to the President’s jumbled syntax, his rambling, “often inappropriate or impossibly confusing answers,” and his confessions of “I don’t know.” But his style was effective, and the press conferences contributed to Eisenhower’s continuing extraordinary popularity. Eisenhower cultivated good relations with reporters, regularly inviting them to cook-outs during his vacations, playing golf with them, and treating them as “quasi members of his staff.” Occasionally, he might betray some anger or annoyance at a particular incident involving the press, but he never permitted or fostered open antagonism.
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John F. Kennedy went one step beyond Eisenhower when he established the live television press conference. Handsome, witty, informed, articulate, Kennedy, like Roosevelt, had found his natural forum. Television favors glamour, and for many Americans Kennedy rivaled the appeal and allure generally associated with popular entertainers. Victorious by less than 1 percent of the popular vote in 1960, the President saw his approval ratings steadily rise in the next three years, largely as a result of the captivating image he projected. The President carefully prepared for his press conferences. His command of detail, his witty observations, his occasional playful self-mockery, hardly were spontaneous. When reporters asked him to respond to the Supreme Court decision forbidding officially prescribed prayers in public schools, the President coolly remarked that he welcomed the decision. With calculated wit, he expressed the hope that Americans now would pray more at home and in the churches, places more appropriate than public schools. The press conference had moved a long way from the casual treatment of Wilson’s early days.

Reporters liked Kennedy and generally respected his privacy. Still, he proved as thin-skinned as his predecessors when criticized. He once ordered a newspaper subscription canceled after the paper published hostile articles, and his staff regularly berated reporters who printed leaks. When the Defense Department press officer talked imprudently about the government’s right to “manage news,” and its “inherent right to lie” to save itself if faced with nuclear disaster, for example, he aroused inevitable protests. Nevertheless, press and President understood each other in the Kennedy years. Asked in 1962 what he thought of the press, JFK responded typically: “Well, I am reading it more and enjoying it less [laughter] … but I have not complained, nor do I plan to make any complaint.… I think they are doing their task, as a critical branch … and I am attempting to do mine.”
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By the 1960s, the Age of McLuhan had arrived: style rivaled substance—as Lyndon Johnson painfully learned. For Kennedy, a podium and microphone were natural appendages, and he treated his live press conferences as part of a day’s ordinary work. President Johnson, by contrast, seemed only awkward, ill at ease, out of place, and, on the whole, unhappy with press conferences. Close observers of Johnson always emphasized his effectiveness in individual or small-group settings; the formal address or the probing eye of the television camera made him appear wooden, even contrived, thus raising questions of credibility. Perhaps he tried too hard to appear sincere. Certainly, the Kennedy image dogged Johnson throughout his presidency. The metaphor of the “credibility gap” eventually developed a life of its own. And with that, Johnson’s relations with the media fell on hard times.

Richard Nixon, as always, inherited much from Kennedy and Johnson—in this case a variety of precedents and attitudes governing the relationship between the President and the media. Whatever the precedents, personal predisposition was paramount. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Kennedy all realized the usefulness of press, television, and radio, but they also appeared to have a genuine fondness and respect for reporters and the media. Too much had happened in Richard Nixon’s public life before 1969 for him to share those feelings. No doubt, a good part of the media responded in like fashion. Nixon, as should be clear, was not the first president to perceive a hostile press, but perhaps no other president saw hostility more clearly and consistently, or chose to combat it so passionately.

Nixon’s attitude toward the press was demonstrated first in his shunning it. The President averaged less than seven press conferences a year. Kennedy and Johnson averaged twenty-two and twenty-six, respectively; Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter—perhaps reflecting a new wariness—averaged sixteen and fifteen.

Press conferences are not as spontaneous as they seem. The live televised proceedings dictate careful preparation on the part of the President, including briefings and even rehearsals. Good staff work usually ensures that there
are no surprises. The likely questions are obvious and generally are confined to issues of the moment. Nixon complained to Haldeman that the staff received too much credit for his answers. He wanted it understood that the President’s responses were his alone. He demanded more recognition for his role and less for the staff. “If we cannot find staff people who are willing to work on that basis, I, of course, will have to do more work myself, which would be self-defeating,” he complained. Yet Nixon could graciously thank staffers for their help in preparing him.
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Given their numbers and differences, reporters at press conferences have no opportunity for coherent questioning. Thus control of the event usually belongs to the President. His problem is to guard against the infrequent slip of the tongue, the inadvertent remark. Nevertheless, control can on occasion slip from his hands: witness Nixon’s experience on June 1, 1971. A reporter raised a question regarding alleged civil liberties violations surrounding the mass police arrests of the May Day antiwar demonstrators that year. (Charges already had been dropped against more than two thousand arrested individuals.) Nixon’s reply focused on the danger of the demonstrations to the government, ignoring the civil liberties question. What followed was unusual, as one reporter after another rose to bore in on the same issue, pressing hard on the question of improper police tactics. Nixon evaded them, finally finding a “safe” reporter who invariably strayed from the pack to ask irrelevant, obscure questions. She did not disappoint him in this case, dropping the dangerous line of questioning to inquire about a surplus of telephone poles in Vietnam. The President, visibly relieved as the press conference quickly returned to its familiar anarchy, nevertheless realized the danger. He did not hold another televised press conference for nearly thirteen months.
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