Power Game (72 page)

“I can’t think of a single meeting I was at for more than an hour when someone didn’t say, ‘How will this play in the media?’ ” confessed Lee Atwater, a senior White House political strategist. “Cabinet officers got run out of office because the White House couldn’t manage the story in the media. You got it all the time. Major decisions were influenced by the media.”
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Reagan’s highly skilled first-term team played the image game unabashedly. These political strategists saw a direct linkage between the president’s image, his reputation, his standing in the polls, his seduction of the media—and his leverage with Congress and his success at governing. They had learned a lesson from seeing Jimmy Carter, sinking in the polls, paralyzed with Congress. They elevated the image game to primary importance, honing its rules and strategies. They demonstrated that the smoke-filled back rooms in modern American politics are not for cutting deals but for plotting image strategy for TV. They sold more than policies; they sold the presidency.

Media Jujitsu: Controlling the Stage

Quite obviously, the television networks (and the press in general) have power—however disorganized—to play havoc with the agenda games of presidents by crystallizing issues that the White House would rather ignore. As Reagan took office, many conservatives felt that the media had gained the upper hand. It does not require my rehearsing the battering given Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon over Watergate to make the point. And Jimmy Carter was
bloodied by the networks’ relentless count of “America Held Hostage” in Iran for 444 days. Lloyd Cutler, Carter’s White House counsel, argued in
Foreign Policy
magazine that the deadline of “the TV doomsday clock” pressured Carter and his advisers into mishandling other issues: overreacting to the Soviet brigade in Cuba in 1979 and hastily instituting a grain embargo against Moscow after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Cutler bemoaned the power of the media: “Whatever urgent but less televised problem may be on the White House agenda on any given morning, it is often put aside to consider and respond to the latest TV news bombshell in time for the next broadcast.”
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Reagan too felt the pressure of events magnified in the press. Graphic television reporting of massacres in Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut in 1982 propelled Reagan to send in American Marines to help keep peace. Equally graphic portrayals of the bombings against the Marines later built political pressures on him to withdraw them in 1984. In 1985, the daily bombardment of televised reports from South Africa galvanized Congress and helped compel Reagan to agree to limited economic sanctions against South Africa. In early 1986, dramatic television reporting of vote fraud in the Philippines helped make Reagan abandon Ferdinand Marcos.

On a more personal plane, blunt coverage of Reagan’s refusal on May 22, 1986, to take part in the “Hands Across America” demonstration shamed him into participating. NBC’s report pointed out that this was an example of the private voluntary effort for the poor that the president had advocated and that its organizers had offered to run the line of outstretched arms through his front yard. The next day, Reagan told NBC’s Chris Wallace that seeing NBC’s broadcast had changed his mind.
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As the Reagan team took over the White House in 1981, it saw battling the press as political jujitsu. The trick in jujitsu is to take your adversary’s force and turn it to your own advantage by clever maneuver. In media strategy, the goal is to use the power of television to enhance the president’s power, not to let it break him. The most basic rule of the image game is to control the stage, according to David Gergen, Reagan’s first White House communications director. Rather than let the press fix the news priorities and batter the president, Gergen said, the White House intended to set not only the political agenda for Congress but also the television agenda for the networks.

“We wanted to control what people saw, to the extent that we could,” Gergen explained. “We wanted to shape it and not let television
shape it. After all, in the minds of many people, what television did for the 1986 Democratic convention [showing police battling rioters] cost them the election. You had to figure out how to [control] it on your own. I mean, large aspects, the public aspects, of government have become staged, television-staged, and there is a real question who is going to control the stage. Is it going to be the networks or the people who work for the candidate or for the president?”
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Ironically, given the disaster of Watergate, the Nixon presidency provided the Reagan team with its textbook for managing the press and some of its top public relations experts: David Gergen, a former Nixon speechwriter; William Henkel, an advance man skilled in staging photogenic presidential trips; Ron Walker, a specialist in running political conventions; and Pat Buchanan, a communications expert. Reagan’s California media handlers were the other stream of talent—Mike Deaver, Dick Wirthlin, and Stuart Spencer. Although Wirthlin never joined the White House staff, as Reagan’s $1-million-a-year pollster-strategist (paid by the Republican party) he sat in weekly strategy meetings; his findings often guided the others. Spencer, a brilliant intuitive strategist close to Reagan, also gave advice from the outside. Deaver was the chief video manager inside the White House.

Two things are striking about this group: First, none was the press secretary, meaning all were freed from the consuming chore of press briefings to plot and manage image strategy, and second, almost all had a background in marketing: Henkel for Merrill Lynch, Deaver with his own public relations firm, Wirthlin and Spencer for rich corporate clients, Gergen as former editor of
Public Opinion
magazine.

The Nixonian gospel was brought into the Reagan camp by Gergen. Candid, compulsive, fast-talking, and a towering six foot five (at Yale, he had been nicknamed “The Giraffe”), Gergen was the author of Reagan’s most telling line in his 1980 campaign debate with Carter: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Gergen had watched the Democratic convention disaster of 1968 and seen George McGovern miss a national TV audience in 1972 by delivering his acceptance speech after midnight. And in 1972, Gergen had been put in charge of scripting the Republican convention to prevent such snafus. The technique is revealing:

“We had an advance script, even down to the applause lines worked into the script, so we could run it on a disciplined basis,” Gergen recalled. “We figured that the importance of the convention was for show, for the people back home, and you had to run it like a TV production. So you were very conscious of the television values in
scripting it. And we developed what we called the alternative script. We had a series of key figures we thought were good copy: good for television or interesting visually. And if you had somebody on the podium you thought was not terribly interesting, and we knew the networks would only carry for maybe three out of fifteen minutes [and then switch to their own reporting], we’d go to the networks in advance and say, ‘We have John Connally, the Treasury secretary, in a holding room. He’s going to be coming onto the floor in just a few minutes. Would you be interested in interviewing him?’ The networks would love that. Or when Nixon moved somewhere [outside the hall], his movements were timed to coincide with events in the hall that were not very interesting. One night he went out to Sammy Davis, Jr., and there was a picture of him hugging Sammy Davis.”
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In short, the game was to get television to follow the Nixon script and not to do its own slant on events. The Nixon people knew that reality to millions of viewers across the country was not what happened in the hall—but what happened on their television sets. What didn’t happen on TV, even if it later appeared in print, was more dimly perceived.

In its image-game strategy, the Reagan White House operated by a similar P.R. script built around the “story line of the day.” The imperative is to pick the main public relations message each day and frame it just the way White House strategists want it to appear in the short bites on the evening television news, in headlines, and in the lead paragraph of news-agency stories. The president does many things each day, and only a portion of his actions are made public. Getting the proper bit on TV requires organizing the public portions of the president’s day—the portions that will be filmed or reported—to dramatize the story line or central message. Otherwise the press and TV apply their news judgment, their filter. The trick for White House video managers is to get their story line through the press filter in its purest form. Nothing is left to chance. The public may think it is witnessing spontaneous remarks or actions, but the Reagan White House rule was that no matter how spontaneous a presidential utterance might appear, it was to be scripted in advance. As an actor used to making things look ad-libbed, Reagan was ideal for “scripted spontaneity.” But the basic tactic came from Nixon.

“We had a rule in the Nixon operation,” Gergen explained, “that before any public event was put on his schedule, you had to know what the headline out of that event was going to be, what the picture was going to be, and what the lead paragraph would be. You had to think
of it in those terms, and if you couldn’t justify it, it didn’t go on the [president’s] schedule. So you learned to think that a president communicates through the media, through the press, and not directly. One of Nixon’s rules about television was that it was very important that the White House determine what the line coming out from the president was and not let the networks determine that, not let New York edit you. You had to learn how to do the editing yourself.

“So that when Nixon went out to make a statement in the White House briefing room, he insisted that he be given one hundred words [a ‘tight’ TV news bite]. And we had to count ’em. We had to put up in the corner of the page how many words were on this paper. You couldn’t go over one hundred. He would go out and deliver one hundred words, and he’d walk out. Because he knew that they had to use about one hundred words. They had to use what he wanted to say. And if you gave them five hundred words, they would select part of it and determine what the point of his statement was. It was a very rigorous system.”

The Nixon method was quickly adopted by the Reagan White House. At their eight-fifteen morning strategy meeting, Jim Baker, Ed Meese, and Mike Deaver would decide on the day’s story line; they would pass the word to Gergen and press spokesman Larry Speakes. The broad lines of the Reagan presidency are familiar: The president wants less government, more money for defense, military aid for Nicaraguan rebels; the president will veto the congressional budget (though he has rarely done so); the president will accept a tax increase only “as a last resort” (though he signed tax increases three years in a row).

Those are the big themes, but day in and day out, White House imagemakers fine-tune them, or they labor to deflect embarrassing stories. Often the official story line is directed at shaping how reporters cast White House stories. For example, when the White House was putting together the Reagan antidrug package in September 1986, Larry Speakes scolded reporters for highlighting mandatory drug testing for about one million federal employes. The mandatory tests had stirred up a hornet’s nest. Speakes wanted testing played down as “just one part of a six-part package,” to reduce public resistance to Reagan’s plan.

Sometimes the story line surfaces almost casually, belying its careful plotting. My colleague, Steven Weisman of
The New York Times
, uncovered one such episode in September 1984, after Walter Mondale upstaged President Reagan by announcing that he would meet with then–Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. (In nearly four years,
Reagan had not yet met any top Soviet official.) Reagan’s top White House staff considered the story-line options: Should the president suggest that Mondale was meddling in affairs of state? Should criticism be leaked by some official anonymously? They wanted to knock Mondale, without looking petty. They decided on the line that the president had “no problem” with the Gromyko-Mondale meeting. It was a two-edged tactic: to show that Reagan was above partisan pettiness, but to implant a kernel of doubt about the propriety of Mondale’s move by injecting the notion of a “problem.” When reporters asked the expected question, Speakes replied offhandedly, “We don’t have any problems with it.” Later, President Reagan himself was asked and replied: “I have no problem with that at all.”
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The echoes were hardly as casual as they were made to sound.

Putting Spin on the Story Line

Setting the story line is the easy part; selling it and protecting it are much harder, especially when the president is prone to trip over carefully crafted media strategies with a loose tongue, as Reagan often did. Three things can trash the White House story line: hotter, competitive news from elsewhere; independent-minded White House reporters who refuse to buy the White House slant on presidential news; and self-inflicted wounds—the administration’s own snafus.

Far more than earlier administrations, the Reagan White House sought to impose tight discipline on other agencies. It did not want the Transportation Department taking a softer line on the air traffic controllers’ strike than the president took; or the Commerce Department slashing at Japanese trade practices when Reagan was privately wooing Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. The sheer sprawling reach of the federal octopus makes controlling its tentacles hard. The aggressive, fragmented Washington press corps poses a challenge to centralized control.

Reporting in Washington is largely organized on a “beat system” (like a policeman’s patrol beat), because reporters must specialize in specific policy fields, or individual agencies, to keep abreast of developments. Usually, networks, newspapers, or news agencies assign one or two reporters to each of the main beats: the White House, Pentagon, State Department, Congress, Labor Department, Federal Reserve Board, and so on. All agencies have policy axes to grind, often at White House expense, and they feed the word to their beat reporters. At budget time, for example, the Pentagon will leak word of some new
Soviet missile test or naval deployment, to justify a bigger budget. The Department of Health and Human Services will privately provide reporters a blueprint for a catastrophic health insurance plan to try to force President Reagan to endorse it.