"I wish I could add a fond remembrance" (Jane Mayer on Reagan press sec'y Larry Speakes)

"I wish I could add a fond remembrance of Larry Speakes . . . . There have been plenty of accolades, and I'm sure there will be more. But it's worth a note about how Speakes treated reporters who strayed from the company line."

-- Jane Mayer, in a newyorker.com "News Desk" post,
"Crossing Larry Speakes"

by Ken

Is there such a thing as a good White House press secretary? In this day and age, maybe the interests of an administration and the media have diverged to the point that there can't be. You can think of the administration as either "just trying to get our story out" or running a propaganda machine, and either way it comes up against reporters who actually for the most part do let the administration get its story out and play a quite willing part in its propaganda machine and even so can't allow the administration to just have its way.

At the same time both sides understand, at least on some level, that an administration has an obligation to provide information to the American people, and this entails an obligation to provide information to the press. During the "Chimpy the Prez" Bush regime, whoever did the searching came up with a series of life forms for the job whom one would like to think would have come up "inconclusive" if they had been genetically tested for membership in the human race. By that standard, the Obama press secretaries can't help but be an improvement, but not all that much.

In her post on the late Larry Speakes, Jane Mayer, after saying, "I wish I could add a fond remembrance" of the guy ("who died Friday at the age of seventy-four, in his home state of Mississippi, after suffering from Alzheimer's disease") notes that he "served as Reagan's press secretary for several of the years when I covered the White House for the Wall Street Journal," then tells us something interesting about the White House at that time.

Every White House has its own approach to the press and, in many ways, the Reagan White House was far more accommodating than the Obama White House is, but that was because Reagan's successive chiefs of staff, including James Baker, Donald Regan, Howard Baker, and Ken Duberstein, all understood that they would get better coverage if they met regularly with reporters for background briefings, which they did, sometimes weekly.

But then there was Speakes, who --

reveled in cutting off access at the slightest infraction, leaning in to the microphone at the podium in the press room, in front of the curtain bearing the Presidential seal and, with a reddened face and a southern drawl, declaring to whatever reporter had challenged him too aggressively, "You are out of business."

He wasn't kidding about this.

Which, not surprisingly, brings to Jane's mind a story.

At one point, in an effort to document the elaborate and expensive staging of Reagan White House imagery, I convinced the Wall Street Journal to send me to the island of Grenada a week before the President was due to arrive to celebrate the glorious first anniversary of the U.S. rescue of American medical students from local Marxist forces on the tiny spice island. My boss in the Journal's Washington bureau at first sniffed at the proposed assignment and said, "I smell suntan lotion on this one." But those were the days of nearly unlimited news budgets, and he indulged me. Soon after I flew to Grenada, I watched as a seemingly endless procession of huge military cargo planes landed on the tiny island's airstrip, disgorging not just the usual Presidential limousines and ambulances but also equipment for paving the island's roads, for building bleachers and viewing stands, and piles and piles of American flags. By the time the President arrived, the island had been transformed into a Hollywood-worthy backdrop for television-news consumption, at serious public expense.

When the story ran on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, Speakes was not amused. It was my turn to be told, "You are out of business!" My friends in the press corps kindly gathered up furniture and supplies from the rabbit-warren-like back room of the press area -- a desk, a chair, an inbox and an outbox, along with an assortment of pens and other junk -- placed them on the White House lawn, appended price tags, and held a "going-out-of-business sale" for me.

The merriment faded soon, however, when every appointment I had made to interview White House officials thereafter was mysteriously cancelled. I couldn't reach anyone in the building on the phone. I couldn't even get the Presidential travel schedule, which the newspaper needed to plan its coverage. My bosses were exasperated, not with Speakes, but with me, for having so little juice.

Eventually, Jane notes,

Speakes turned his ire on others. He particularly liked to pick on Lester Kinsolving, an annoyingly aggressive reporter for the conservative outlet WorldNetDaily, and Ben Taylor, a reporter for the Boston Globe whose Brahmin approach provided a perfect foil for a Mississippi good ole' boy like Speakes.

Then Jane delivers her kicker:

"The daily pettiness of it all, however, and the bullying, with its clear message that independent reporting would be punished, helped set the abysmally low standard that continues today for White House relations with the press."

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