Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American

by Matthews, Chris

  Rule: To confound the competition, seize the ground behind them. Nothing spreads panic quicker than the dread realization that the enemy has penetrated your lines and is operating to your rear.

  As always, the military parallel remains a strong one. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli forces faked an Arab radio broadcast declaring that a key city on the road to Damascus had fallen. Hearing the phony news dispatch, frightened Syrian troops abandoned their pillboxes along the Golan Heights and began a madcap retreat.

  This is one case where some well-placed PR hardball literally did the job of a howitzer.

  14

  * * *

  Positioning

  I have just thought of something that is not part of my speech, and I am worried whether I should do it.

  —Ronald Reagan

  For President Bill Clinton, the 1994 elections were a rough slap in the face. His party lost control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954. The Clintons’ maladroit handling of the health care issue had cost Democrats a political preeminence it had taken them four decades to amass.

  But Clinton refused to die. Rather than join his fellow Democrats in defeat, he took adviser Dick Morris’s advice to “triangulate.” “Parroting the rhetoric of the congressional Democrats,” Morris explained, “would merely be sharing the storm cellar with them, waiting until the Republican twister passed safely by. Adopting the Republican agenda begged the question. The President needed to take a position that blended the best of each party’s position.”

  “Triangulation” worked. Clinton won reelection in 1996 even as the Republicans kept control of Congress. The only losers were the congressional Democrats that Clinton had cut loose to fend for themselves.

  In the parlance of politics Clinton’s maneuver is called positioning: A) decide where you want to be in relation to the voter. B) put yourself there. No one did this better than the man they called “The Great Communicator.”

  On the night of January 25, 1983, President Reagan arrived at the Capitol to deliver his annual State of the Union address. As usual, the Speaker’s office served as his holding room in the moments before he entered the House chamber. Shaking hands with the staff, he noticed Congressman Don Edwards in the room adjoining, scanning a text of the President’s remarks. “How did you get that, Don?” he asked his fellow Californian, and learned for the first time that bootlegged copies of his speech text had gotten to members of Congress.

  Armed with copies of the speech, Democrats on the House floor were indeed planning to bushwhack the President. They found a line in which that fiercest of Republicans seemed to admit for the first time it was the government’s responsibility to do something about the towering unemployment rate. For months, Reagan had argued for “staying the course”; high unemployment rates, he promised, would be driven down by the 1981 tax cuts. Yet in his prepared text there was a line that could easily be read otherwise: “We who are in government must take the lead in restoring the economy.”

  The Democrats had hatched a plan. As the President read the line, they rose in a standing ovation. For a moment Reagan seemed to be caught off guard. The message to the country was sharp and sound: they were cheering the President’s grudging admission that it was up to his Administration to do something.

  Reagan paused, waiting for the applause to abate, acknowledging the little tease from the Democratic back benches with a long, good-natured smile. Then, with perfect Jack Benny timing, came the haymaker: “And there all along I thought you were reading the papers.”

  The Democrats, thinking the President was referring harmlessly to the speech texts many of them had been following and sometimes annotating for response, erupted in laughter. They had failed to see the mischief. To the people back home in their living rooms, the barb was unmistakable: the legislators were just a pack of typical, feet-up-on-the-desk, newspaper-reading, cigar-chomping pols. Reagan had got his “studio audience” to provide a laugh track for the joke of which they themselves were the butt.

  A week later, he pulled a similar number, this time employing the White House press corps as his studio audience. In the midst of an afternoon press conference, his wife, Nancy, wheeled in a birthday cake. The President was seventy-two. As he cheerily began slicing pieces for all those assembled, ABC’s Sam Donaldson barked out, “But you understand we won’t sell out for a piece of cake. No deals.”

  Pause.

  “Oh,” the President said, looking directly at Sam, “you’ve sold out for less than that.” Donaldson’s colleagues roller-coastered with laughter. Finally someone had outzinged their smart-aleck colleague.

  There was another, unspoken message to those at home: the President was telling Washington reporters right to their faces that their coverage was tainted by special interests, that they were ready to be “bought”: an affirmation of what right-wing critics had been saying about Big Media for decades. Not only that, but he had got them to laugh at the truth of what he was saying. As he had done on the floor of Congress, he positioned himself not as a player in the Washington game but as a detached, observant critic of the not-so-reputable scene around him.

  Talent like this deserves to be recognized. We opened this study of practical politics watching the rise of the country’s most legendary retailer, Lyndon Johnson. We saw the “Johnson treatment” and how it made grown men into little tail-wagging cocker spaniels. Ronald Reagan deserves to be the other bookend in this narrative. As an aide to his prime adversary, House Speaker Tip O’Neill, I spent a great deal of time trying to plumb the “Great Communicator’s” depths, to answer that old question LBJ used to put to people, “How’d he get there?”

  The answer in this case is not that he spent hours meeting people one-to-one as the Great Retailer. No, Ronald Reagan is a man of the media: the Great Wholesaler.

  This is not meant as a criticism. My grandfather-in-law, Henry Stueck, was a lifelong salesman. His favorite maxim is, “There are only two professions: statesmanship and salesmanship.” With respect, I’d say there is only one—and Ronald Reagan mastered it. Other leaders taught us the Horatio Alger truism that you can be anything you want to be, go as far as you want to go. The Great Wholesaler taught us the video-age equivalent: you can position yourself anywhere you want to be.

  This is hardly meant as a criticism. It is the secret of this immensely successful man’s career. Where other politicians cannot wait to be seen as political professionals, the man from the West had a smarter ambition for the 1980s: to stay an outsider. The rule he taught was that anyone, individual or corporation, can establish a position at will. A new CEO can make himself “just another employee of the firm” or its aloof and commanding eminence. Avis can rent huge numbers of cars by saying “We’re No. 2” and thereby appeal to the underdog in all of us. Pepsi-Cola can call itself “the drink of the new generation”; Coke can position itself as an American “classic”; in both these cases, the soft-drink company is battling for a greater market share by positioning itself in an era marked by rapid cultural change.

  Ronald Reagan knows the same game. Far from being spontaneous, his status as a political outsider was the result of conscious strategy. He has positioned himself to increase his market share, not by trying to be “one of the boys” but by being part of the TV audience he cherishes.

  The first person to recognize this Reagan play was, not so surprisingly, the first to face him politically, former Governor Pat Brown of California, the first man Reagan ever beat for public office. “He is the self-appointed leader of ‘us,’ ” wrote Brown years after his 1966 defeat by Reagan, “and the enemy is always ‘them.’ ”

  Most of Reagan’s critics have failed to digest this. They knock him as a “B-movie actor,” ignoring not only the quality of his present performance, but his earlier career.

  Ronald Reagan did not take up a role when he entered politics; he simply continued to play the role he had played so many years in private life.

  Many people overlook the f
act that the “Great Communicator” earned his wide national fame not on the movie screen but on the television tube. People got to know him not at their neighborhood theaters but in their own living rooms. By the millions they grew used to him in a far more intimate role than that of actor. Rather than see him playing someone else, they saw him appear to play himself: “Your host, Ronald Reagan.”

  Reagan’s greatest luck is that his adversaries never caught on to this. When he was introducing his winning personality during the 1950s and the early 1960s, they were out hitting the chicken-dinner circuit. They never learned that Reagan succeeded not simply because he possesses winsome good looks, charm and wit, but because he used his natural gifts in the service of a very particular strategy. He knows exactly where he wants to stand in the public mind.

  During his eight years on the old General Electric Theater, Reagan enjoyed certain distinct professional advantages. The program’s other performers were at the mercy of the weekly dramatic material—it was an anthology series—but the star/host was not. He was no more responsible for the quality of the shows than he was for the quality of GE’s products. It was Reagan who ended each show with the famous sign-off, “Here at General Electric, progress is our most important product.” That “here” was located at some imaginary point between General Electric and your home. My strongest memory of GE Theater twenty-five years later is the image of the host and his wife, Nancy, sitting side by side in the spacious living room of their “totally electric home.” They looked a little bit better off, perhaps, than most of the audience, but they did not seem in any important way different from us. In fact, they personified what we wanted to be, or what we wanted to have.

  Reagan retained the same intermediary position in politics. His press conferences offer a clear illustration.

  For years we watched the Washington press corps grill Nixon, Ford or Carter. We saw our presidents sweat and grimace like the accused in a murder trial. Nixon, in particular, always looked as if he had just been hauled in from the lockup. From the beginning, Reagan was determined to make things different. He and his advisers never lost sight of the primary message sent in any presidential news conference: who the President is.

  First of all, he was likable, relaxed, still the host of his television show. He was not some loner who hid away in a White House back office. And to convey this message, he exploited some off-camera tools of the TV age.

  Did you ever wonder how Reagan at his press conferences always seemed to know the names of the reporters? It was as if he spent a lot of time hanging out with the boys. The truth was, he used the White House press corps to persuade the audience at home what a regular guy he was. No matter who the reporter, no matter how obscure the newspaper, the President always seemed to know “Joe” or “Bob” or “Ann” on a chummy, first-name basis.

  Those who were shaken by Reagan’s lack of attention to other matters—the Iran-contra hearings come to mind—may have been surprised. But where his predecessors spent the precious minutes before press conferences prepping themselves on government policy, foreign and domestic, Ronald Reagan had a seating chart, and before going on camera he checked a closed-circuit-television monitor scanning the Joes, Bobs and Anns. He was thus able to get a fix on the location of each reporter with whom he intended to exchange a few pleasantries or thrusts that evening. Having matched nicknames with faces, and faces with seats, he was ready to go on the air.

  Reagan’s system wasn’t foolproof. At a press conference in early 1984, the President looked down into the audience and called out, “Pat!” The intended target, Patrick McGrath of the Metromedia network, said later that at first he couldn’t believe the friendly diminutive was addressed to him. He had no reason to assume that the President knew his name, especially since he was quite clearly looking at the row just behind, but after a moment of uncertainty McGrath stood and asked his question.

  Let’s face it. There is no way in the world that a reporter, blinded with the prime-time national TV camera, is going to try anything “tricky” at such a moment. With the boys back in the newsroom hooting and stomping, the man in the spotlight is not about to kill the fun. Besides, after a guy gets called on—by nickname, no less!—by the President of the United States, his job becomes a tad more secure than it was a few seconds before.

  At one press conference, the President even went so far as to introduce three new members of the White House press corps family. For a moment it was like watching a TV quizmaster welcome a couple of new guests to the show.

  But the preparations for press conferences pale before the state-of-the-art technology used when Ronald Reagan gave a televised speech to Congress on TV.

  Speaker Tip O’Neill received a letter once from a lady upset about the dangers posed by the President’s apparent determination to give forty-five-minute speeches without notes. What would happen, she worried, if the President were to make a mistake on a matter of grave international importance?

  But of course there was nothing remotely impromptu about such addresses. Whenever Reagan addressed Congress, the House had to recess an hour and a half early to give White House communications aides time to rig up the President’s remarkable TelePrompTers. Unlike previous presidents, Reagan had his two prompter screens arrayed very wide apart. This allowed him to pivot from one to the other, giving the appearance of addressing the entire chamber while keeping the prompters themselves safely out of camera range. The public at home saw only a man giving a polished oration, addressing both sides of the audience. The President, debonair in his contact lenses, gave no indication that he was reading. In fact, the prompters, set intentionally high, helped him appear more youthful by keeping his eyes wider open.

  Only rarely, in an occasional wide shot, did we see the two glass plates. But on our home television screens they looked like bulletproof security shields.

  The President took his TelePrompTer with him wherever he went, but it would be a mistake to ascribe the Great Communicator’s skills to technology alone. He was, first of all, a skilled and professional performer who did not skimp on rehearsal time, spending vital hours at the front of the White House family movie theater mastering his material. By the time he delivered his speeches, his command was so great that TV viewers could not even see the pupils of his eyes pause on the TelePrompTer screen; his rotation was so smooth that it looked to all appearances as if his eyes were locked on his audience, not on the words being projected on the glass.

  Above all, he never forgot that he himself, not “supply-side economics” or “strategic defense,” was the most important product. Backstage monitors were there to help him appear more “regular” and less regal. The space-age TelePrompting and those contacts of his made him more personal in his broadcasts.

  When Reagan used such techniques, he was positioning himself with enormous science, establishing himself in the public mind not as an aloof head of government but as the man next door. Every action was designed to make him appear close to the people and distant from the government. Where his predecessors identified themselves with the attainment of government power, Reagan posed as a visiting citizen. Announcing for reelection, he referred to the presidency rather distantly as “the office I now hold.” When he went on vacation, he made no bones about it.

  Visualize the competing lifestyles of the two most recent presidents from California. When Richard Nixon went home, he held court at “the Western White House.” In other words, he brought the office with him. Remember the pictures we saw of Nixon in California: a solitary man walking the beaches of San Clemente, head bowed with the burdens of high office, wearing black wing-tipped shoes. When Ronald Reagan went home, he went to the “ranch,” wore plaid shirt, jeans and boots, and rode around in a Jeep. We spotted him, through a telescopic lens, on his way to clear brush or repair a fence. Tucked back in those mountains, he made no pretense of being a chief executive on leave: there was an engaging quality of playing hooky from the job. Yet Reagan was the man who had sought great
office for more than two decades, the man who presided over the largest bureaucracy in American history.

  Pundits have spent years trying to figure out how Ronald Reagan escaped responsibility for the government’s problems and mistakes. The simple answer is that he refused to be seen as part of that government. He rejected it the way some organisms reject foreign tissue. Ronald Reagan did not rise to the presidency, he redefined it. He made it not the job of running the government—those chores were left to dispensable figures such as Alexander Haig or Margaret Heckler or Don Regan—but simply the job of being Ronald Reagan.

  He was, of course, by no means the first American politician to engage in a bit of political positioning: he simply refined the technique. George McGovern won the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination largely because he positioned himself ideologically, making it clear that he stood to the left of every other candidate on the issue of Vietnam. This position gave him the troops to wage a successful campaign against the party’s more prominent leaders, which unfortunately made it easy for Richard Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew to claim the political center a few months later.

  In the same way, Senator Gary Hart jumped to an early if brief lead in 1984 by positioning himself as the breezy candidate of “new ideas,” the representative of a new generation of Democrat. Wearing a plaid shirt, jeans and boots—shades of Reagan?—he engaged in a little “photo opportunity” in which he threw an ax at a tree stump. The real target was the gray, entrenched “insiders” of the Democratic Party establishment. He used his L. L. Bean image as a direct shot at Walter Mondale, the lawyerly Brooks Brothers candidate. The former VP himself admitted that he came off as rather “official.”