A Year At The Circus

by Jon Sopel

  The astonishing attrition rate brought an interesting change in man management from the President. He dispensed with the whole business of actually appointing successors who would have to go through the cumbersome confirmation process, as part of Congressional oversight. He just appointed cabinet ministers on an ‘acting’ basis. There was another calculation in this. Once a cabinet member has been approved by Congress, they have a degree of independence. They have the approval of lawmakers. They don’t just have their job thanks to the patronage of the president. But this way? In an acting capacity? All fealty is then owed to the President – and displease him and you are gone.

  The other exceptional thing about all this is that in any other administration a cabinet that had suffered so many casualties and calamities, resignations and rebuffs, where so many people had crossed a line, or been incompetent, or committed such a collective mass of ethical transgressions, or all of the above, it would have all but brought down a president. But in today’s Washington, it seems, a senior member of the administration getting into trouble is almost a second order event. Most Americans, I suspect, would barely remember the names of these characters because they came and went so quickly. And with a president who never lets the limelight move away from him, these people who enter the administration with such high hopes never had the opportunity to imprint themselves on the American consciousness. And so another cabinet member goes. Shrug. Another scandal erupts. Whatever. Another private plane is leased. And?

  These things are passing with barely a flicker, in a world where the new normal seems to change so fast. And as for the man who promised to come and sort out the drainage problem in the swamp? Well, the swamp looks more swampy than it’s ever been.

  Chapter 4

  The Briefing Room

  If you stand in Lafayette Park, opposite the White House, and look straight at the elegant building in front of you – the tall imposing mansion bit on the left is the East Wing. And then look to the right, and it is the lower rise West Wing, with an immaculately turned out Marine Corps guard on duty whenever the president is in his office. Linking the two is a single-storey building. That is where the Briefing Room is found, along with the offices of a number of the more junior communications people working for the president.

  From the Oval Office to the Briefing Room is around 27 steps. I should quickly add that they are 27 steps President Trump has never taken to answer questions from reporters. Unlike his predecessors, who would frequently come to brief, he has only once come onto ‘our territory’ in the White House. A deliberate statement? Almost certainly. We come to him. He doesn’t come to us. This is a president who obsesses about his press coverage, like few others. He is not the first to feel that he gets a raw deal, but few in history have had such a burning sense of injustice about media coverage as Donald Trump. With a Democratic Party unsure of what it stands for, and unclear about what it wants to be in Trump’s America, he sees the media as the enemy. Indeed, it is a good deal more acrimonious than that. Twenty-seven paces from the Oval to the Briefing Room. But a million miles apart in so many other respects.

  The Briefing Room as it has now evolved was opened by George W. Bush in 2007, and is named after James S. Brady, the press secretary under Ronald Reagan, who was shot and paralysed in the assassination attempt on the President’s life in 1981. There is a series of windowless offices and booths in the basement, with a lively population of rodents (cue whatever rat joke you like), and a grotty kitchen – though it has a very smart coffee machine provided by the actor Tom Hanks, who recognised how exhausting it was going to be covering this President and sent it as a present to the White House Correspondents’ Association. The room itself is seven rows of blue seats, seven across. Seats are strictly allocated – TV networks and news agencies at the front. Important newspapers and cable news channels after that. Until you get to the back row, where you will find the Guardian and the BBC. Actually, we have to share our seat with a new online, pro-Trump cable channel – it is not an arrangement where we get one buttock each on the seat. We get alternate days. But seeing as the briefing has become a thing of obsolescence under this administration it really doesn’t matter.

  Just how seismic and epic the change would be with the transition from the 44th to the 45th president became apparent on the first full day the new administration was in office. So let’s start at the very beginning.

  President Trump’s inauguration would take place on 20 January 2017. A Friday. A helicopter flew the Obamas away from the Capitol after the ceremony, and the Trump team moved in later that day. On the Saturday the President went to the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, where he made a highly political speech, which seemed to suggest he was yet to make the transition from campaigning to governing. And it gave a clue also of what was to come in his relationship with the media. In his speech to the nation’s intelligence community, he said that the suggestion that he had been critical of the intelligence services over which he now presided had been more fake news, a confection got up by journalists. Presumably he’d forgotten his tweet from a few days earlier when he blamed the spies for leaking information about him, and in reference to their behaviour asked, ‘Are we living in Nazi Germany?’ He must have thought these intelligence officers weren’t – well – terribly intelligent.

  But let’s leave that to one side – that was small beer. I had gone to the White House to do a live report on the President’s first full day in office, with my assessment of how it had gone. Outside the Briefing Room, a sign had been put up saying there would be a press conference in a couple of hours’ time. Briefings on a Saturday evening just don’t happen. Or when they do, they are to announce that something of global significance has just happened. So, I called the office and said I wouldn’t be coming back, but would wait until the briefing.

  There weren’t that many people in the room when Sean Spicer, the President’s first press secretary, came to the podium. The networks don’t have that much news on Saturday evenings, and the schedule tends to be overtaken by college football – a huge thing in America. And a lot of people were home seeing their families for the first time in ages after the hectic build-up to the inauguration.

  At the end of the Obama era the daily press briefings were being conducted by Josh Earnest. He is smart, charming, clean cut, with college boy good looks, very polite and extremely articulate. And his briefings could be slightly interminable. Not dull, that would be the wrong description. But sometimes, befitting his name, a little earnest. He would allow the different TV correspondents to repeat more or less the same questions that had already been asked, so that on the evening newscast the NBC correspondent, say, could be seen asking the key question to the press secretary, instead of – and heaven forbid – having to rely on the question the person from ABC had asked. For the most part it was all quite convivial. He respected the press; the press respected him.

  No longer. Sean Spicer came into the Briefing Room that evening like an angry swarm of hornets. Josh Earnest he isn’t. Slightly thicker set and shorter, with suits that initially looked a size too small, but later seemed a size too big – and he’d often look rather sweaty under the TV lights. What now unfolded was less a briefing, more a rant. He would take no questions. This was a conversation in which only one person would speak. Him. And it was to berate sections of the media for their ‘deliberately false reporting’. What had riled the President – and you felt that Spicer was merely reading out the newly installed President’s words – was the suggestion that Obama had had more people than he did at his first inauguration. And so Spicer laid it out unequivocally: ‘This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration – period – both in person and around the globe.’

  The whole thing lasted barely five minutes. But it clearly indicated we were in a new age with the White House – and it would be a new and challenging era for reporting. The facts were quite simple to determine. You just compared and contrasted the two photographs taken from the W
ashington Monument at the time when the inaugural addresses were being delivered on the steps of the Capitol. And what those two photographs showed was that the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration … had come to see Obama. Period.

  But Donald Trump wouldn’t have it. Even though there was a brilliant attacking defence that he could have made – that his supporters were less well off, were too busy eking out a living to put a meal on the table for their kids and weren’t the well-heeled, educated, liberal middle classes who lived around Washington and who could afford the luxury of taking the day off – the message from the President was that his staff had to continue to maintain this falsehood. Attack. Attack. Attack. And no one does that better than Kellyanne Conway, senior advisor to the President, who would go on television the next day to deny that she was propagating a lie. No, heaven forefend, Spicer was using ‘alternative facts’, she told the bemused interviewer. In other words: a falsehood.

  Our challenge as journalists was how to report this. I think a very short time ago we would have fallen into an easy and lazy template: the White House says this, the Democrats say that – only time will tell who’s proved to be right. Jon Sopel. BBC News. Washington. But in this context that seemed mealy-mouthed and inadequate. This new era was going to call for a new style of reporting: aggressive impartiality. If one person says 2+2=4, but someone else says 2+2=6, we can’t just say, ‘Time will tell who is right.’ So, after refreshingly little discussion from my senior colleagues in the BBC, we just called it. We said what the White House had claimed about the numbers attending the inauguration wasn’t true.

  Across Washington and around the world, media organisations were wrestling with the same issue: How far to go? When is it appropriate to say that the President has been untruthful? When is it correct to say he misspoke? When do you cut through all the flannel, and just simply say he is lying? It wouldn’t be the last skirmish. Some of them became a lot bloodier.

  All 45 presidents who have occupied the White House from George Washington onwards have felt at various times a burning resentment about the press, even if then they didn’t have to deal with the relentlessness of the 24/7 news cycle. The symptoms then were identical to those felt today – that they are not getting a fair shake; that policies are wilfully misrepresented; their words are taken out of context; their enemies are given a so much easier ride. And you can go back to the age of the founding fathers and find that even Thomas Jefferson was mithering about his press coverage. In 1807 he wrote to a newspaper complaining: ‘Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle of falsehood and error.’

  And journalists could play rough. When John Quincy Adams went swimming in the nude in the Potomac River, it’s reported that Washington’s first woman reporter stole his clothes and would not give them back until the President answered her questions. More recently, Lyndon B. Johnson famously (and somewhat ruefully) said, ‘If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read, “President Can’t Swim”.’

  Reporters dedicated to covering the White House beat was something that only really started in the twentieth century. Until then the focus had been on covering Congress – where the laws were made. And if the president happened to be on Capitol Hill, that is when you would cover him. Other presidents had had a haphazard relationship with the press, but it really started to formalise with Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had a knack, a theatrical gift, if you like, for shaping the news and getting it covered in the way that he wanted. He cultivated reporters. And, unimaginable today, Roosevelt loved to take trips across the nation, disappearing for weeks at a time. Sometimes he would go off into the American wilderness and be incommunicado. Other times he would set off on the burgeoning network of railways and would take reporters with him. And with the growth of the newspaper industry, and increased literacy … Roosevelt saw a new way to get his message across, with intimate, off-the-record briefings. David Greenberg, the author of Republic of Spin, tells how he would gather in his office a handful of his favourite reporters. They were at times derisively called the ‘fair haired’.

  A barber would be giving him a ‘wet shave’, and he’d be lecturing the newsmen about politics, policy and gossip, as they struggled to get a question in. One of the great muckraking reporters of the day was a man called Lincoln Steffans. And he would wait until the straight-edged razor skimmed Roosevelt’s lower lip, and he would then try to fire off his questions. If Roosevelt became animated in trying to answer him, the barber would say, ‘Steady, Mr President.’

  Today there are millions of people following Donald Trump on Twitter, and it’s been remarked that here perhaps for the first time is a president who is able to communicate directly with the electorate without it being mediated by the media. But that is to ignore America’s post-recession and wartime leader, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a distant cousin of Teddy), and his ‘fireside chats’.

  From March 1933 to June 1944, Roosevelt addressed the American people in about thirty speeches broadcast via radio. In this pre-television age, some 90 per cent of Americans had a ‘radio set’. He spoke on a variety of topics covering everything from banking to unemployment, to fighting fascism in Europe. Millions of people found comfort and renewed confidence in these speeches, which became known as the ‘fireside chats’. The name stuck, even though FDR was nowhere near a fireplace as he was delivering them. The phrase seemed to evoke perfectly the comforting intent behind Roosevelt’s words; the informal, conversational tone was no accident. Roosevelt took care to use the simplest possible language, concrete examples, easy to grasp analogies, so as to be clearly understood by the largest number of Americans.

  In 1934, the second year of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term, the West Wing was completely redesigned and the press room rebuilt. It had desks, typewriters and telephone links to telegraph companies. Areas were set aside for correspondents to play cards and chess in between filing their stories. It was at this time that a wealthy benefactor paid for an indoor swimming pool to be built where the Briefing Room is today, so that FDR, who had contracted polio in the 1920s, would be able to exercise in private.

  After the Second World War, news organisations were dedicating more and more staff to cover the White House beat, and moving resources away from Congress. The television age had arrived, and the president, whoever he was – and however comfortable/uncomfortable he was in front of the camera – had to learn to live with this intrusive lens on his doings.

  By 1950, the then president Harry Truman had a problem. There were simply too many reporters, too many TV cameras and all the attendant paraphernalia, too many foreign reporters, to hold news conferences in his office. One writer noted that on the days when the press would gather, the Oval Office resembled a Times Square subway platform during rush hour.

  So Truman decided that the fourth estate had to be moved. He plumped for the Indian Treaty Room, in what is now called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the imposing office block just next door to the White House, occupying the corner plot on 17th and Pennsylvania Avenue.

  By the 1960s, the press room in the EEOB was badly in need of repair, but it would take about a decade for the White House to get round to doing anything about it. Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, meantime, were enjoying the pool. Kennedy, who suffered from a chronic back complaint, relaxed there to ease the pain. His entourage, his assistants irrespective of rank, were invited to join him as he exercised at lunchtime.

  With LBJ it was a different story. LBJ was an intimidating figure to say the very least, but Town & Country magazine noted in a January 2017 article that his staff ‘would find any credible excuse to scatter whenever LBJ expressed a desire to take a swim, for not only would he swim in and lounge around in the pool completely naked, but he would insist that others do the same. In a scene that is most unsettling to imagine, he once cajoled the preacher Billy
Graham to join him in one of his skinny-dipping sessions. (They prayed together in the water.)’

  It is not without irony that the person who drained the pool and set in train the creation of the Briefing Room on top of it was Richard Nixon – his preferred method of relaxation was bowling, not swimming. It was ironic, because the only person who has had a more toxic and dysfunctional relationship than Donald Trump with the media is Nixon. And when you read some of the things that Nixon did, you start to think that maybe Donald Trump is a bit of a pussycat. But it is worth spending a little time looking at Nixon’s relationship with the media – because so much of it is a prelude to what has happened since Donald Trump moved into the White House. It is as though the 45th president has picked up the baton from the 37th. The echoes of history are unmistakable.

  Nixon had a famously antagonistic relationship with the media that went back to his days in Congress. Convinced that the media had contributed to his narrow loss to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election (he was badly worsted in the first of the televised debates when he appeared sweaty and with a five o’clock shadow against the suave, handsome and supremely telegenic JFK), and having lost a 1962 election for governor in California, Nixon opened a notorious news conference with this statement of pure self-pity. ‘Now that all the members of the press are so delighted that I have lost, I’d like to make a statement of my own.’ He then launched into a rambling assault on the media. On another occasion he said to the journalists, ‘Don’t get the impression I’m angry. You can only be angry with those you respect …’

  Yes, he was thin-skinned, but what set him off was his belief that on major questions of policy, a liberal/left media was out to sabotage his efforts. At the time the biggest question tearing at America’s fabric was the Vietnam War, and he was busy trying to sell a policy that was the ‘Vietnamisation’ of the conflict – in other words the training up of South Vietnamese forces to take on the Vietcong. So, Richard Nixon took to doing what his predecessor LBJ had done – using the televised address to speak to the American people. Frequently.