West Winging It

by Pat Cunnane

  The regular White House TV reporters with whom I dealt when I first started as a wrangler were, for the most part, a gifted, driven bunch. Some of them would hit it big in just a few years: Chuck Todd became host of the vaunted Meet the Press, which my dad sits down to watch every Sunday and considers a “religious experience”; Jake Tapper was the breakout star of the 2016 election cycle; Savannah Guthrie went on to Today show fame; and Norah O’Donnell became cohost of CBS This Morning and a contributor to 60 Minutes. Chuck, I remember, would pressure Jay and Josh about the press digs: mainly, he thought that the press should be allowed to dine at Ike’s on the first floor of the EEOB, an unassuming office cafeteria named for President Eisenhower. It would be much easier than the press having to leave campus and go through security all over again, just to grab lunch. We never had a great retort. Our denial didn’t make a ton of sense. Maybe it would have been the right thing to do.

  Chuck and Jake, Savannah and Norah, aside, many TV reporters were and are rewarded for asking the same question that their peer has just asked, solely so there’s footage of them asking it for their respective nightly news or cable outlet. It does nothing to further the debate or probe deeper for answers.

  It can become an echo chamber; the questions can become the story. As one Lower Press staffer once put it bluntly to one of our favorite reporters: “You are self-fulfilling, vacuous whores.”IV

  One TV reporter, a well-meaning, talented woman named Mandy, always needed just “two seconds.” Two seconds from Jay or two seconds from Josh. Two seconds from anybody. Didn’t matter what the topic was—Syria, the Affordable Care Act, gun violence—two seconds was all it would take, which was all the time cable news allowed for substance or policy reporting anyway, so it worked out.

  In many ways, Mandy was cable news come to life. Breathless and quick, she was a walking headline ticker. When something was breaking in the news, she was often the first to breeze through our walkway into Upper Press, assuming, of course, that nobody had two seconds to spare in Lower Press.

  She was usually followed closely behind by other members of the proven, traditional organizations that claim seats in the first few rows of the Press Briefing Room: the Associated Press, the Times, the Post, the Journal, the Chicago Tribune, and NBC News, for instance.

  One evening, as the president was said to be pondering a military strike across the world, and we were waiting on word from our friends in the National Security Council for an update, my bosses were standing around in Upper Press, discussing the state of play: How would we roll out the decision to the press one way or the other? Who would we give the story to first? Should we do a background briefing? What were the talking points?

  All good questions, but it was getting late, and I hadn’t had a Mountain Dew in hours. I noticed the time: I had only one minute before it would be too late. The White House Navy Mess is a one-window pickup spot, run by the US Navy, that offers breakfast, lunch, and dinner—and of course, its famous chicken fingers and waffle fries. Staffers dialed from their desks—it was the one number nobody ever forgot—and placed orders. It was also where you could pick up snacks and coffee as well as soda, which was the only product we were allowed free of charge. I took full advantage, doing the Dew like it was a part of my job. But on this evening, I knew any second the man behind the counter would erect the wooden plank, concealing the mess’s pickup window like it was never there. Closing time.

  As I dashed down the hall to the steps to the West Wing basement toward the mess, I stopped dead in my tracks.

  “Hello, Johnny.”

  There he was: a well-respected reporter from one of the aforementioned front-row outlets. He was loitering, slinking slowly back and forth by the top of the steps down to the basement. He had been listening in on my bosses from just beyond the hall, out of sight. He was startled as I came upon him, like I had walked in on him with his pants down. It was a breach, and he knew it. Scurrying to effect some semblance of normality, he pointed and smiled at a jumbo blowup of Obama hanging on the wall, like he had just stopped briefly to admire Pete Souza’s latest work.

  “You looking for anybody?” I asked suspiciously.

  With that, he continued on to Upper Press. I took a detour down to Lower Press, where I found Marie.

  “How long ago did Johnny pass through here?” I asked.

  “Awhile, why?”

  Johnny’s actions forced a new policy. We instituted an unofficial yet crucial piece of protocol in Upper Press that Velz was in the unique position to execute. His seat aimed him directly down the hallway, so he was the first to spot approaching reporters. To alert the rest of us, he took to yelling the names of incoming reporters, greeting them loudly enough that, if need be, our sensitive conversations were hushed, our bosses’ doors were quickly shut, and our close-hold (meaning not to be shared) desktop documents were minimized.

  Whenever anybody from Politico headed up, Velz lost all sense of shame: “Politico’s in the house, everybody! Hide the secrets!” he would yell good-naturedly, usually to self-deprecating appreciation from the reporter. Politico’s assigned seat is toward the middle of the Briefing Room, near the Hill’s spot. Both of these outlets were founded to focus more on the day-to-day politics of Washington—mirroring the direction of cable news—than on policy. Sometimes more style than substance, the Hill newspaper and website was famous for its “50 Most Beautiful People” edition, one of those important projects I was tasked with spearheading for the White House.

  Politico, the Hill, and others like them provided yet another perspective with which our press secretaries needed to contend. If, on its better days, the first row focused on substance, then there were these middle-row reporters ready to pick up the slack and pose questions that were purely political. To be fair, these outlets have recently stepped up their investigative and policy reporting in important, impressive ways, evolving slowly away from who’s-up-who’s-down reporting.

  And beyond them, on the periphery of the room, without assigned seats, there were the hanger-outers; the usually-lovable oddballs who took up residence in the Briefing Room for no ostensible reason other than to be around.

  There was a lovely older woman who had covered the White House for nearly fifty years. She liked to remind us that she was probably going to die soon, often visiting Upper Press before or after the briefing with a box of chocolates for the press secretary, who was usually in briefing prep or briefing wrap-up. “I just wanted to thank him for calling on me,” she would say, handing me the box to pass along. Before ambling back down the ramp to the Briefing Room and then up the driveway, she often asked, “You’ll come to my funeral, won’t you?” Some thought her family needed to step in; she wasn’t doing well and was in no shape to schlep through security and into the White House, where she would rarely get in a question. She struggled to walk, and her voice was softening. She was battling Parkinson’s disease.

  Truth is, the White House was important to her, and being in the thick of things was probably the best thing for her spirits. We appreciated what she was doing and why she was there. But that didn’t make her comments about her upcoming funeral any less uncomfortable.

  There were less sympathetic characters, too, elbowing their way to the margins of the forty-nine-seat Briefing Room. Christine had a hair-trigger temper. She was prone to paranoia, and wrote often of conspiracy theories and completely unfounded gossip about the staff. She once accused Velz of practicing “voodoo” against her. She was litigious, too. (I’ve changed her name, obviously.) Claiming discrimination, threatening to sue the White House and individual staffers—once for what she claimed was tainted tuna fish from the vending machine. Eventually the Secret Service stepped in. We didn’t see much more of Christine after that.

  There was Rickie the friendly part-time Uber driver and part-time political observer with a hard-to-find blog who occasionally fell asleep—snoring disruptively—during the briefings.

  And then there was Goyal. Much has been
made of the Briefing Room’s resident Indian reporter without a paper for which to report. I knew him mostly as the friendly man who dropped by Lower and Upper Press at least weekly with a plastic bag of inexplicably warm fruit and dented canned goods. It was a sweet gesture, even if the presentation left a bit to be desired. Sometimes the bag had to go right into the trash; more bait for Bo and Sunny to sift through. More often, somebody would grab the bag before walking home, ready to hand it off to the nearest homeless person. I liked to take the bananas home for smoothies.

  Goyal made real waves throughout the West Wing when he brought a life-size, creepily lifelike bust of Mahatma Gandhi to my desk as a gift for the president. This was not something we could throw in the trash. It looked much too real, like it had been pulled from the costume department of a movie set.

  I called Brian, the director of operations, to come over—I wasn’t going to be the one to walk this over to the Oval Office—but he was tied up, so we hid Mahatma behind the door to Katie Beirne Fallon’s office. Katie, one of my many bosses, was at a meeting. She was the deputy communications director at the time, just before taking over as the director of legislative affairs, the White House’s chief liaison to Capitol Hill.

  Emails began pouring back in, and we forgot about the little guy for a few hours until Katie returned from her marathon of meetings. She closed the door behind her. Then we heard a shriek as she blasted through her office door in terror.

  Eventually Gandhi made his way throughout the West Wing, left on bosses’ desks by assistants looking for playful revenge and in office corners to shock unsuspecting staffers. He even made it to the Resolute desk, where the president eyed him skeptically, a glare Pete Souza caught for posterity and turned into a jumbo that hung in the West Wing. Goyal was escorted to the basement of the West Wing to see the photo and appreciate the impression he had made.

  The bust wasn’t the first time that Goyal had made his mark. It was said that press secretaries from previous administrations, when they needed to veer away from a problematic line of questions, would call on Goyal, who would, without fail, ask about the US-India relationship, sidelining whatever the rest of the room wanted to discuss. It was a creative form of filibustering that our press secretaries sometimes indulged. You never knew what you were going to get from the folks on the outskirts.

  Goyal once asked Josh if the president was celebrating International Yoga Day. Josh, never one to sidestep a dad joke, leveled one of his best groaners:

  “I think that question’s a bit of a stretch.”

  As soon as Josh entered Upper Press, trailed by his deputies and assistants, all still laughing off the dad-joke-ness of it all, I accused him of planting the question to get in his punch line. He denies it, and I’m inclined to believe him. That room will ask anything.

  • • •

  A year earlier, as Jay Carney, Josh’s predecessor, wrapped up his daily briefing, someone asked, “Jay, is there a red fox running loose on the White House grounds?”

  That was my fault.

  As I grew out of wrangling, I took on a kind of utility player role. I had started some writing, was taking on message- and event-planning responsibilities, and, every once in a while, I was tasked with “story management.” That’s what we called it when someone oversaw a specific issue or upcoming story. Bobby managed stories related to homeland security. Matt managed stories about education and other domestic issues. Amy was in charge of the economy.

  I got stories about White House varmints.

  The Wall Street Journal’s Carol Lee,V a White House regular, is an example of a reporter whose work sometimes caused us trouble, but who was a gifted reporter and a congenial person. We occasionally disliked her stories, but it never interfered with her working relationship with the White House staff. When I was a media monitor, I remember there was a hubbub over one of Carol’s upcoming pieces. My bosses asked me to compile her latest twenty stories, to help prepare for her pending article and to get a sense of just how bad it would be. Still, we knew it was part of a reporter’s job, and we did our best—though we often failed—not to take it personally. That’s the way it was with many of the talented White House beat reporters: part of the natural, healthy tension.

  In early 2014 Carol had an idea for a less controversial piece.

  There was a fox that was said to be sleuthing about the White House in the evenings, darting between the shadows, startling staffers exiting late at night.

  Carol wanted to do a deep dive on the sneaky fox, and her editors were interested. Josh quickly looped me in to the email. I was just the man for the job, he claimed. It was the first—and most successful—story I would ever deal with.

  Managing a story involves seeing it through, beginning with getting a sense from the reporter of the direction and tone of the piece. Did the story need shaping on our end, or was it best left alone? To shape a story is to engage with it. You can do that on a number of levels. White House officials can speak to the reporter “on background,” meaning that the content of what they’re saying can be reported on but not quoted. What’s more, the source is not to be named and instead referred to as an agreed-upon alias such as “a senior administration official” or “a source close to the matter.”

  Then there are on-the-record interviews in which the content of the discussion, including quotes, is free game, and sources are to be identified by their real names.VI These become more complicated when the source is not accustomed to dealing with the press or when the source is high level.

  While the fox story didn’t need much shaping, we decided to engage because lighthearted White House content, without infringing on the president’s time, can be hard to come by. We ran with Carol’s idea. We would provide on-the-record sit-downs for the fox piece, but they would be straightforward, with folks like Dale, whose unofficial role of minding Bo and Sunny was eclipsed only by his official job as caretaker of the White House grounds.

  Carol had a sense that this story could be big. She asked for more sources and additional quotes. For a week, I went around asking everybody I came across if they had seen the fox, and if so, whether they would be willing to go on the record about it. I even took it to Brian in the Outer Oval Office.

  “Do you mind asking the president if he’s seen a fox running around his lawn?”

  It was exactly the kind of question I would be tasked with asking the Outer Oval. Pointless, but part of my job. I didn’t get an immediate answer, but Carol told me that the story was getting juicier—it had front-page potential—what with the wordplay possibilities and unorthodox nature of the thing. She told me the fox was going to get the special treatment: its own stipple portrait, the dot drawings for which the Wall Street Journal was famous.

  I pushed Brian to ask the boss and eventually got an answer.

  “I can confirm for you that the president has seen the fox, Carol.”

  It was the talk of the town the morning the exposé ran. Despite the frivolous nature of the story, I was riding high, collecting accolades for a job well done. My first story—okay, it was Carol’s story—was on the front page. Blogs picked up the piece throughout the day. And that evening, the piece de resistance: the nightly news, the staple of American newscasts, was considering running with the fox story.

  However, it turned out to be a busy news day. After all, the health care red team had been building to this day for months. They were working on Obamacare open enrollment, one of the president’s top priorities. The health care exchanges had closed at the end of the prior month, and the numbers were just coming in. The news was good: our goal had been to sign up seven million Americans, but eight million had signed up for quality, affordable health insurance, many for the first time!

  Good Obamacare news was even harder to come by than lighthearted White House fare. This was a major, and somewhat unexpected, win. A banner news day for the White House Communications Office.

  Unfortunately, there’s not a ton of space on the evening news, and
both pieces didn’t fit.

  Which do you think made the cut?

  The media monitor sent out the nightly news clips. Congratulations started to pour in. Jesse from the red team wrote: “We just learned that 8 million Americans signed up for health care for the first time in history, but it got bumped from the news for the White House fox. But, congrats to Pat.”

  • • •

  It’s easy to criticize the nightly news for bumping crucial Obamacare news—information that affects people’s lives—for a silly story about a fox. But, the truth is, very often they’re just giving the people what they want. That’s not to say that there aren’t some very broken things about the media, but their actions are driven largely by readers, viewers, consumers.

  People don’t want to read about policy. They want to read about people. It’s part of why politics is so peculiar, too—why the personality of the candidate often trumps his or her ideas. We knew that, of course, which is why we went to great lengths to engage real people in the debate of the day and to “reach people where they are”—one of our mantras—whether that’s on YouTube or a comedy show with Jerry Seinfeld. News media executives knew the same as we did, and that’s where politics and media meet.

  But there is also an important disconnect between the way the media as a whole is set up and the way government works. It’s something President Obama often discussed. He would tell us, in good times and in bad, that the federal government is akin to an aircraft carrier at sea: it takes a long time to alter its course; turning around is difficult. Change—for better or worse—he would say, takes time.

  Sure, history zigs and zags, but currents run deep, and ramifications, like ripples radiating from the engines of an aircraft carrier, can take a long time to hit.

  That’s a notion fundamentally at odds with the way the political media report now, in an age when who’s up and who’s down is determined by the end of every day, and when Twitter’s hot takes decide the same thing by the minute. Although cable news has nothing but time to fill, reporters, anchors, and network executives all act as if they are running out of it. They rush. POTUS, on the other hand, understood that winners and losers are determined over months—decades, even—not minutes or days. That, to him, was a more appropriate, if impractical, measure of progress.