Duck and Dodge
Transcript
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Between the naming of a Supreme Court nominee and more bombings in London, reporters still found time to hector White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. On Thursday the Washington Post reported that it had obtained a classified State Department memo; one paragraph marked S for secret, identified CIA official Valerie Plame, called Valerie Wilson in the memo, as the wife of former-Ambassador Joseph Wilson. The CIA classifies as "secret" the names of officers whose identities are covert. Therefore, say unnamed officials quoted in the Post, anyone who read the memo should have been aware that the information was classified. So then, did White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove what he was doing when he outed Plame to reporters? Inquiring minds in the briefing room wanted to know.
REPORTER: So did the White House, in fact, know about her through this memo or not?
SCOTT McCLELLAN: Thank you for wanting to proceed ahead with the investigation from this room, but I think that the appropriate place for that to happen is through those who are overseeing the investigation. The President directed us to cooperate fully, and that's exactly what we have been doing and continue to do.
REPORTER: But you don't deny that attorneys for Rove and others in the White House are speaking about these matters, creating a lot of these questions. [OVERTALK]
SCOTT McCLELLAN: As I said--
REPORTER: --you can't speak for--
SCOTT McCLELLAN: As I said, we're not getting into talking about an ongoing investigation. That's what the President indicated as well.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Some White House press secretaries, like the Clinton administration's Mike McCurry, managed to stay on the media's good side by trying for candor, and even showing a little remorse when he learned that he'd unwittingly lied about the President's relationship with Monica Lewinsky. But mostly, a spokesman's lot is not a happy one. Senate historian Donald Ritchie is here to tell us how unhappy. Donald, welcome back.
DONALD RITCHIE: I'm glad to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So the press secretary holds a senior White House position, just below the level of Cabinet members. And the press secretary serves at the pleasure of the President. But who is the press secretary really supposed to work for, the President, or the press, or the people of the United States?
DONALD RITCHIE: Everybody in the White House works for the President. And the press secretary works for the President. There was once a President back in the 19th century who was asked if he wouldn't appoint a press secretary, well the equivalent, who would be good to the reporters. And he said I have a feel that I'd like to have somebody be good to me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
DONALD RITCHIE: And I think every President has felt that way. Press secretaries, of course, want to get the word out, but no question about it, the press secretary serves the President.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so, does that mean a press secretary ought to be expected to lie, if it's necessary to defend their President? And do they?
DONALD RITCHIE: Well, there have been situations in which press secretaries have had to lie for purposes of national security, for instance. So when President Kennedy had to get back to Washington during the Cuban missile crisis, he suddenly became ill and got a cold, and so they used that as a cover story. But press secretaries, for the most part, don't like to say something that's not true because they can, of course, get caught up on that issue, and they can--it--their words could be thrown back at them.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It isn't only national security that may impel a press secretary to lie, isn't that true?
DONALD RITCHIE: There are a lot of reasons why you can't tell the story in a straight manner. But actually, in many cases, the press secretary doesn't know exactly what's going on. And the story that they get is the story they present to the public. Gerald Ford, for instance, in his first month in office, had a former newspaper reporter who was his press secretary, didn't tell him at all about what he was going to do about Richard Nixon's pardon. The press secretary had been saying he wasn't going to pardon Nixon, when he did pardon Nixon, the press secretary resigned because he'd been in a position of telling the press, his colleagues, something that was untrue.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Steve Early is considered to be the first press secretary who served under FDR, but Roosevelt gave almost two press conferences a week. He spoke for himself, for the most part.
DONALD RITCHIE: Yes. Oh, Roosevelt was a master of the press conference. And presidents before Roosevelt had not allowed themselves to be quoted. Roosevelt called all these reporters, over 100 reporters would come trooping into the Oval Office. And they could ask him questions about anything. Now, he might now answer. You know, he really had just manipulated them in a marvelous way. And so, he was his own press secretary in that respect. But Steve Early, who is a former reporter, really helped to orchestrate all of this. There's a thousand things, other than just running a press conference, that a press secretary does. Steve Early is listed as one of the best in the business.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Is it fair to invoke the old cliche, "TV changed everything" because James Hagerty was the press secretary to handle a television president, and that was Eisenhower. But TV then wasn't live.
DONALD RITCHIE: That's right. And it was because of Hagerty. Hagerty wanted television in there. He thought that the President should be able to speak directly to the public. The trouble was that Eisenhower wasn't a particularly articulate President.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: There was a famous flap over the downing of the U-2 plane.
DONALD RITCHIE: Yes, this is one of the instances in which a press secretary was caught in a lie, and it was a lie for national security purposes. They had agreed in advance that if a U-2 plane went down they would say that it was a weather plane. And they assumed that the plane would have crashed and that the pilot would have been killed and that they could use that as a cover story. And Hagerty was aware of that. A lot of people in the Administration were aware of that. When the U-2 plane crashed, it was just before the President was going to go to a Summit with the Soviet leader. It was a very sensitive period. And so they brought out this weather plane, NASA weather plane story. Unfortunately for them, the pilot had survived the crash, Francis Gary Powers. And the Soviets brought him out and, in fact, were able to prove that he was working for the CIA. And a lot of reporters in Washington were absolutely astonished that the President and his press secretary, who they had trusted, would have lied flatly to them about this. And it's one of the beginnings of a great deal of skepticism in the press corps about what presidents were telling them.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, Kennedy's press secretary during the first period of live TV was Pierre Salinger. Obviously, Kennedy himself was enormously telegenic.
DONALD RITCHIE: Yes. Salinger was the sort of short dumpy man who had a real problem of an administration that was very athletic. At one point they sent him out on a 50-mile hike, which Kennedy was promoting. He didn't quite make the 50 miles in the process. But Kennedy, as you say, was a master of the press. He had been a reporter himself in the 1940's. He liked reporters. He gossiped with them all the time. He leaked to them all the time. And so, you know, a press secretary to John Kennedy really was a second wheel to some degree.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And then you enter the Johnson Administration. You have Bill Moyers, who remained a TV presence for a very long time. But before that, you had a guy named George Reedy.
DONALD RITCHIE: That's right, poor press secretaries under Lyndon Johnson; they suffered, there were many of them. Johnson thought that he was a master of the press. He overwhelmed the press. He sort of smothered them. He compromised them, and he made them step back, instead of embracing him in the long run. And he never was happy with any of his press secretaries. And he ran through them. George Reedy was a great loyalist but was too nice to the press, as far as Johnson was concerned. Bill Moyers came in, was also a very good press secretary, but not good enough for Johnson. Then George Christianson came in.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
REPORTER: So Johnson wanted people to love him, and that was the problem. He just didn't want them to question anything he was doing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So if the press secretary is the most public face of the Administration, other than the President, is that why Nixon's press secretary Ron Ziegler seemed to grow horns and a tail after a while?
DONALD RITCHIE: Yes. That was an unfortunate job to have, to be Richard Nixon's press secretary because Richard Nixon really hated the press. He was very removed from things with his press secretary, and Ziegler was also out of the loop on a lot of issues, to his advantage. He is one of the top people in the administration who didn't go to jail eventually. There's a famous instance where Ziegler was standing talking to Nixon, and Nixon told him to go out and tell the press something, and then turned around and shoved him. And actually, the shove was caught on camera. And so, you get this sense of Ziegler as sort of being the tool of his president, rather than a sort of an equal in any way.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And yet, Ziegler enters history just as Nixon did, with a quote of his own. I mean, how many press secretaries actually have a quote that lives through the decades?
RON ZIEGLER: This is the operative statement, the way to assess the previous comments is to assess it on the basis that they were made on the information available at that time. The President refers to the fact that there is new material. Therefore, this is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.
DONALD RITCHIE: There, that was dealing with the Watergate scandal, and he was referring to the Washington Post and to Woodward and Bernstein and their reporting, which he had dismissed steadily as fiction and fantasy. And, in fact, when the tapes were revealed, it turned out that the Washington Post was right on target in their investigations. And he said, therefore, that his previous statements were inoperative. And that's an interesting word as well. [LAUGHTER] I mean, that press secretaries, one of their ways of doing is, is to come up with a word or a phrase or something like that, that says something in a negative way but in a positive sound. And it was quite an interesting word to say that "everything I said before this was untrue."
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] So let's talk about the man of the hour now, Scott McClellan.
SCOTT McCLELLAN: Well, there is an investigation that continues. And I think the President has made it clear that we're not going to pre-judge the outcome of that investigation.
REPORTER: We already have the truth--
SCOTT McCLELLAN: We're not going to pre-judge the outcome of the investigation.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think he's serving the President well?
DONALD RITCHIE: I think he's presenting the information that the Administration wants to come out. In that sense, he's a good reflection of his administration.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right. Thank you very much.
DONALD RITCHIE: Oh, it's my pleasure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Donald Ritchie is the author of several books, including Reporting from Washington, the History of the Washington Press Corps. He's been an associate historian of the U.S. Senate since the Ford Administration.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Between the naming of a Supreme Court nominee and more bombings in London, reporters still found time to hector White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. On Thursday the Washington Post reported that it had obtained a classified State Department memo; one paragraph marked S for secret, identified CIA official Valerie Plame, called Valerie Wilson in the memo, as the wife of former-Ambassador Joseph Wilson. The CIA classifies as "secret" the names of officers whose identities are covert. Therefore, say unnamed officials quoted in the Post, anyone who read the memo should have been aware that the information was classified. So then, did White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove what he was doing when he outed Plame to reporters? Inquiring minds in the briefing room wanted to know.
REPORTER: So did the White House, in fact, know about her through this memo or not?
SCOTT McCLELLAN: Thank you for wanting to proceed ahead with the investigation from this room, but I think that the appropriate place for that to happen is through those who are overseeing the investigation. The President directed us to cooperate fully, and that's exactly what we have been doing and continue to do.
REPORTER: But you don't deny that attorneys for Rove and others in the White House are speaking about these matters, creating a lot of these questions. [OVERTALK]
SCOTT McCLELLAN: As I said--
REPORTER: --you can't speak for--
SCOTT McCLELLAN: As I said, we're not getting into talking about an ongoing investigation. That's what the President indicated as well.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Some White House press secretaries, like the Clinton administration's Mike McCurry, managed to stay on the media's good side by trying for candor, and even showing a little remorse when he learned that he'd unwittingly lied about the President's relationship with Monica Lewinsky. But mostly, a spokesman's lot is not a happy one. Senate historian Donald Ritchie is here to tell us how unhappy. Donald, welcome back.
DONALD RITCHIE: I'm glad to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So the press secretary holds a senior White House position, just below the level of Cabinet members. And the press secretary serves at the pleasure of the President. But who is the press secretary really supposed to work for, the President, or the press, or the people of the United States?
DONALD RITCHIE: Everybody in the White House works for the President. And the press secretary works for the President. There was once a President back in the 19th century who was asked if he wouldn't appoint a press secretary, well the equivalent, who would be good to the reporters. And he said I have a feel that I'd like to have somebody be good to me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
DONALD RITCHIE: And I think every President has felt that way. Press secretaries, of course, want to get the word out, but no question about it, the press secretary serves the President.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so, does that mean a press secretary ought to be expected to lie, if it's necessary to defend their President? And do they?
DONALD RITCHIE: Well, there have been situations in which press secretaries have had to lie for purposes of national security, for instance. So when President Kennedy had to get back to Washington during the Cuban missile crisis, he suddenly became ill and got a cold, and so they used that as a cover story. But press secretaries, for the most part, don't like to say something that's not true because they can, of course, get caught up on that issue, and they can--it--their words could be thrown back at them.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It isn't only national security that may impel a press secretary to lie, isn't that true?
DONALD RITCHIE: There are a lot of reasons why you can't tell the story in a straight manner. But actually, in many cases, the press secretary doesn't know exactly what's going on. And the story that they get is the story they present to the public. Gerald Ford, for instance, in his first month in office, had a former newspaper reporter who was his press secretary, didn't tell him at all about what he was going to do about Richard Nixon's pardon. The press secretary had been saying he wasn't going to pardon Nixon, when he did pardon Nixon, the press secretary resigned because he'd been in a position of telling the press, his colleagues, something that was untrue.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Steve Early is considered to be the first press secretary who served under FDR, but Roosevelt gave almost two press conferences a week. He spoke for himself, for the most part.
DONALD RITCHIE: Yes. Oh, Roosevelt was a master of the press conference. And presidents before Roosevelt had not allowed themselves to be quoted. Roosevelt called all these reporters, over 100 reporters would come trooping into the Oval Office. And they could ask him questions about anything. Now, he might now answer. You know, he really had just manipulated them in a marvelous way. And so, he was his own press secretary in that respect. But Steve Early, who is a former reporter, really helped to orchestrate all of this. There's a thousand things, other than just running a press conference, that a press secretary does. Steve Early is listed as one of the best in the business.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Is it fair to invoke the old cliche, "TV changed everything" because James Hagerty was the press secretary to handle a television president, and that was Eisenhower. But TV then wasn't live.
DONALD RITCHIE: That's right. And it was because of Hagerty. Hagerty wanted television in there. He thought that the President should be able to speak directly to the public. The trouble was that Eisenhower wasn't a particularly articulate President.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: There was a famous flap over the downing of the U-2 plane.
DONALD RITCHIE: Yes, this is one of the instances in which a press secretary was caught in a lie, and it was a lie for national security purposes. They had agreed in advance that if a U-2 plane went down they would say that it was a weather plane. And they assumed that the plane would have crashed and that the pilot would have been killed and that they could use that as a cover story. And Hagerty was aware of that. A lot of people in the Administration were aware of that. When the U-2 plane crashed, it was just before the President was going to go to a Summit with the Soviet leader. It was a very sensitive period. And so they brought out this weather plane, NASA weather plane story. Unfortunately for them, the pilot had survived the crash, Francis Gary Powers. And the Soviets brought him out and, in fact, were able to prove that he was working for the CIA. And a lot of reporters in Washington were absolutely astonished that the President and his press secretary, who they had trusted, would have lied flatly to them about this. And it's one of the beginnings of a great deal of skepticism in the press corps about what presidents were telling them.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, Kennedy's press secretary during the first period of live TV was Pierre Salinger. Obviously, Kennedy himself was enormously telegenic.
DONALD RITCHIE: Yes. Salinger was the sort of short dumpy man who had a real problem of an administration that was very athletic. At one point they sent him out on a 50-mile hike, which Kennedy was promoting. He didn't quite make the 50 miles in the process. But Kennedy, as you say, was a master of the press. He had been a reporter himself in the 1940's. He liked reporters. He gossiped with them all the time. He leaked to them all the time. And so, you know, a press secretary to John Kennedy really was a second wheel to some degree.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And then you enter the Johnson Administration. You have Bill Moyers, who remained a TV presence for a very long time. But before that, you had a guy named George Reedy.
DONALD RITCHIE: That's right, poor press secretaries under Lyndon Johnson; they suffered, there were many of them. Johnson thought that he was a master of the press. He overwhelmed the press. He sort of smothered them. He compromised them, and he made them step back, instead of embracing him in the long run. And he never was happy with any of his press secretaries. And he ran through them. George Reedy was a great loyalist but was too nice to the press, as far as Johnson was concerned. Bill Moyers came in, was also a very good press secretary, but not good enough for Johnson. Then George Christianson came in.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
REPORTER: So Johnson wanted people to love him, and that was the problem. He just didn't want them to question anything he was doing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So if the press secretary is the most public face of the Administration, other than the President, is that why Nixon's press secretary Ron Ziegler seemed to grow horns and a tail after a while?
DONALD RITCHIE: Yes. That was an unfortunate job to have, to be Richard Nixon's press secretary because Richard Nixon really hated the press. He was very removed from things with his press secretary, and Ziegler was also out of the loop on a lot of issues, to his advantage. He is one of the top people in the administration who didn't go to jail eventually. There's a famous instance where Ziegler was standing talking to Nixon, and Nixon told him to go out and tell the press something, and then turned around and shoved him. And actually, the shove was caught on camera. And so, you get this sense of Ziegler as sort of being the tool of his president, rather than a sort of an equal in any way.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And yet, Ziegler enters history just as Nixon did, with a quote of his own. I mean, how many press secretaries actually have a quote that lives through the decades?
RON ZIEGLER: This is the operative statement, the way to assess the previous comments is to assess it on the basis that they were made on the information available at that time. The President refers to the fact that there is new material. Therefore, this is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.
DONALD RITCHIE: There, that was dealing with the Watergate scandal, and he was referring to the Washington Post and to Woodward and Bernstein and their reporting, which he had dismissed steadily as fiction and fantasy. And, in fact, when the tapes were revealed, it turned out that the Washington Post was right on target in their investigations. And he said, therefore, that his previous statements were inoperative. And that's an interesting word as well. [LAUGHTER] I mean, that press secretaries, one of their ways of doing is, is to come up with a word or a phrase or something like that, that says something in a negative way but in a positive sound. And it was quite an interesting word to say that "everything I said before this was untrue."
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] So let's talk about the man of the hour now, Scott McClellan.
SCOTT McCLELLAN: Well, there is an investigation that continues. And I think the President has made it clear that we're not going to pre-judge the outcome of that investigation.
REPORTER: We already have the truth--
SCOTT McCLELLAN: We're not going to pre-judge the outcome of the investigation.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think he's serving the President well?
DONALD RITCHIE: I think he's presenting the information that the Administration wants to come out. In that sense, he's a good reflection of his administration.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right. Thank you very much.
DONALD RITCHIE: Oh, it's my pleasure.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Donald Ritchie is the author of several books, including Reporting from Washington, the History of the Washington Press Corps. He's been an associate historian of the U.S. Senate since the Ford Administration.
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