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.14
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.”15 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.16
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.17
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.”18
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 th
e 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.19
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.20
By that time, Nixon already had attempted to evade any hostility in the forum. Claiming Roosevelt and Eisenhower as precedents, he told his staff in June 1969 that he would stop “calling on those who are trying to give us the hook.” He ordered Ehrlichman to compile information on those reporters who are “out to get us and which ones are either neutral or friends.” He told Ehrlichman to ignore the objections of Klein and Ziegler. “This is my decision and I intend to follow it up.” Angered by increasing criticism from prominent columnists, he directed Klein to: “1. Get some tough letters to these guys from subscribers. 2. Be sure they are cut off.”21 Nixon’s ideas were as petty and petulant as Kennedy’s cancellation of a newspaper subscription, but in Nixon’s case, the behavior was not an isolated episode. Indeed, those impulses fueled a considered policy of harassment, intimidation, and confrontation.
America and its presidents had changed vastly from a half-century earlier. Perhaps few changes were more dramatic and telling than those in the relationship between presidents and the press. Calvin Coolidge, known for his silence, actually was quite talkative off the record. He had a kindly, warm attitude toward the press and once apologized because reporters “had to” spend summer vacations with him. On one occasion, Coolidge went to elaborate lengths to congratulate the newspapermen for their “constant correctness” in reporting his views; he was amazed that “very seldom … any error creeps in.” Coolidge also noted that they had been “very helpful to the country in coming to a comprehension of what the Government is trying to do, how it is trying to function, what efforts it is making to benefit the condition of the people.”22 Richard Nixon never was known to invoke Calvin Coolidge as any kind of media role model.
In October 1969, Nixon pushed Haldeman for “that hard list” of media workers that would allow the Administration to concentrate on friends. Get the list, he told Haldeman, and then “get in Klein, Buchanan and Ziegler and give them their marching orders.” Three months later, the President told Haldeman he wanted to give Medals of Freedom to “outstanding people” in the press, including—“hold your hat,” Nixon said—Walter Lippmann. Nixon thought the move would have a “great effect” and wanted the idea checked “with the PR types.” By January 1971, a Haldeman aide had developed a “friendlies list” of over eighty men and women in the media, ranging across the political spectrum from William Buckley to Sam Donaldson.
Most Nixon memoranda on the subject of the press, by contrast, focused on what he called “activity in the counterattack field.” He wanted to keep abreast of editorial and columnists’ comments, “so that I know what we must do to counteract whatever effect they may be having on public opinion.” He was convinced that “a solid majority” of 60–65 percent of the press corps began “with a strong negative attitude toward RN.” While occasionally they “will throw us a bone[,] their whole objective in life is to bring us down.” Being less antagonistic in response only encouraged them, Nixon believed, continuing an established refrain that intimidation brought positive results. The object was to force hostile reporters to show “fairness” in order to maintain their credibility.
Johnson had mistakenly “slobber[ed] over them with the hope that [he] could ‘win’ them. It just can’t be done.” Indeed, Nixon was proud of the fact that he had not allowed the press to filter his ideas to the public. “This is a remarkable achievement,” an aide said—undoubtedly quoting the President himself.
By March 1970, the time had come for the Administration’s “all-out, slam-bang” attack on his enemies in the news media. “Now I want this done,” Nixon told Haldeman. “I want a game plan on my desk. I will give you until Wednesday in order to have it—Wednesday afternoon which I usually reserve to myself is a very good time to discuss this. A game plan to do something about this.”
The President’s anger focused in a particularly vicious manner in November that year, when Haldeman, at Nixon’s direction, called J. Edgar Hoover and asked for “a rundown on the homosexuals known and suspected” in the Washington press corps. Hoover confirmed he had the material and noted that he would not need to make any specific investigation. The Director sent the files to the White House.23
Just as Nixon delegated duties in his press wars, so, too, did Haldeman. The best-known “game plan” that emerged was the brainchild of Haldeman’s primary aide in the early days, Jeb Stuart Magruder. Magruder was thirty-five, young and restless, eager and ambitious. He had come to the White House more through chance than design. A Korean War veteran and a graduate of Williams College, Magruder had had a mixed career as an IBM employee, a paper-products salesman, and a management consultant, and had held junior-executive posts with supermarkets and department stores. Interspersed with these jobs, he participated in political campaigns as a Republican volunteer, first in Illinois for Nixon in 1960 and then for Goldwater in 1964, as well as in some local races. In 1968, Magruder worked for Bob Finch in Nixon’s California campaign, but he soon realized that Finch was passé in the Nixon camp and that power really rested with Mitchell and Haldeman. After the election, Finch offered Magruder a place in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, but the young man thought the job a dead end, and by then he had little respect for Finch. Magruder undoubtedly knew that something bigger could be had. He had caught Haldeman’s eye, thanks to a mutual friend who worked in public relations. In August 1969, Haldeman and Magruder met in San Clemente, an
d Haldeman had his man. It was a perfect match: Magruder was pliant, reliable, and obedient. In time, Haldeman dispatched Magruder to Herb Klein as the “Deputy” in the White House Office of Communications, and fatefully, in 1972 he became Mitchell’s “Deputy” at the Committee to Re-elect the President. Klein was my “nominal boss,” but Haldeman was his “real boss,” Magruder acknowledged.
In late fall 1969, the dutiful Magruder received Haldeman’s distillation of Nixon’s marching orders guiding the Administration’s retaliation against the media, and he responded with a plan calculated to appeal to every Nixon prejudice. In his “Rifle and Shotgun” memo of October 17, 1969, Magruder urged that the Administration stop “shotgunning” its critics with disorganized calls and protests; instead, he proposed a more precise “rifle” approach. For example, he suggested that newly installed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Dean Burch should monitor the networks’ fairness; that the Justice Department’s Anti-Trust Division should investigate the networks (“the possible threat of antitrust action I think would be effective in changing their views”), that the IRS should be used against the networks and reporters (“a threat of an IRS investigation will probably turn their approach”); that the Administration should play favorites with the media; and that the Republican National Committee should organize a campaign of protest letters to the news media. There was hardly an original thought to the memo. Incredibly, Magruder later claimed that his “memo was a failure because it suggested that Richard Nixon change his attitude toward the press, and that, as I came to realize, was not to be.”24 In fact, the “Rifle and Shotgun” memo was pure Nixon; the President could not have written it better himself. And Magruder underestimated his effort, for it soon bore fruit.
The Wars of Watergate Page 26
