IF PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SECRETARY Mike McCurry seems calm these days, it may be because he has seen it all before. Seventeen years ago this month, McCurry’s first boss, Sen. Harrison “Pete” Williams, a four-term Democrat from New Jersey, went on trial for his role in the Abscam scandal. Months before, Williams had been recorded telling an undercover FBI agent that he would help steer federal defense contracts to a titanium mine in Virginia in return for $ 12.6 million and a cut of future profits. Williams vigorously denied that he had been seeking a bribe, but the FBI tapes produced at trial were devastating. At one point, Williams can be heard telling the agent that it will be his “great pleasure” to “talk to the President of the United States about [the defense contracts] and in a personal way get him as enthusiastic and excited.”
When the tapes became public, many predicted Williams would resign in embarrassment. Instead, he was defiant. Citing his high approval ratings back home, Williams and his staff did their best to pretend nothing had happened, even floated rumors that Williams might soon run for governor of New Jersey. Meanwhile, Williams’s supporters, led by his steely, ambitious wife, mounted an attack defense on behalf of their man — an “American Dreyfus,” they called him. Mike McCurry, who by that point had been Williams’s press secretary for almost five years, led the charge, accusing the prosecution of waging an illegal, out-of-control political vendetta against the senator. ” The government framed him,” insisted McCurry at the time. “The government created the crime and tried to create the evidence.”
McCurry’s explanation got a sympathetic hearing from professional conspiracist Lyndon LaRouche, who promptly produced a half-hour documentary in defense of Sen. Williams. (The senator later expressed “profound gratitude” for LaRouche’s support.) Jurors, however, didn’t buy it. Williams was convicted on all nine counts brought against him, including bribery and conspiracy. A Senate Ethics Committee inquiry followed, during which a sleeker Robert Bennett, acting as committee counsel, grilled Williams mercilessly. (Bennett was nasty even then: “You are a United States senator, right?” he growled at Williams. “Is that an unfair question?”)
Williams’s guilt was never seriously in doubt, and he went on to spend two years in prison. Yet it was not until months after Williams was convicted — and close to a year after his role in Abscam was revealed — that Mike McCurry resigned as press secretary. Though he had come to believe that Williams was unfit to be a senator, McCurry later explained, he couldn’t bring himself to leave his boss in the middle of a scandal.
As it turns out, his association with Williams did McCurry little harm. (Not that he bragged about it: One version of his resume, provided to reporters in 1995 when he took his job at the White House, makes no mention of his five years in Williams’s office.) In 1981, McCurry went to work as a spokesman for Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Communications jobs with various other Democratic senators followed, as well as stints with the DNC, a lobbying firm, Bob Kerrey’s 1992 presidential campaign, and the State Department. By the time the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted, McCurry had reached the pinnacle of political flackdom.
A press secretary has at least three constituencies, and after coming to the White House, McCurry came close to satisfying all of them: Regarded as believable by the public, he was simultaneously well-liked by the press and considered indispensable by the politician he worked for. Had he resigned two months ago, McCurry would have been remembered as perhaps the most successful presidential press secretary ever. The problem is, McCurry didn’t resign, nor does he seem likely to. If he continues to work for the Clinton administration, Mike McCurry may be remembered as something else entirely.
McCurry, who has three small children, had long planned to leave the White House this year for higher-paying, less-demanding work. Last summer, with departure in mind, McCurry gave a number of candid interviews to Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz for Kurtz’s book on the White House’s public- relations efforts. The book, Spin Cycle, was scheduled to come out this spring, by which time McCurry assumed he’d be well on his way to a new life in corporate communications. In January, however, Kurtz’s publisher accelerated the book’s release to take advantage of the Lewinsky affair. Spin Cycle appeared in bookstores last week, and McCurry — who by that point had announced he was not resigning after all — had to apologize to his boss for some of the things he was quoted as saying. (In one much-reprinted passage from the book, McCurry makes a crude off-the-record joke to reporters about the presidents girlfriends.) It was a humiliating episode, but McCurry believed he had no choice but to stay at the White House. “I don’t want to look like a rat leaving a ship that hit an iceberg,” he says. “I’m not going to do anything that’s going to be interpreted as any lack of faith in the public representation that the president has made.”
The president’s “public representation” of his role in the Monica Lewinsky scandal has of course been conspicuously limited, and from the beginning McCurry has pointedly refused to add to it. During his first post-Lewinsky press briefing, McCurry was asked if he knew what sort of relationship the president did have with his intern. “I’ve not questioned him directly on this matter and don’t intend to,” McCurry replied. And, by all accounts, he hasn’t. Says someone who knows McCurry well: “When [the subject] does come up, Clinton doesn’t even say anything to him. He just waves his hand: ‘You know what to say.'” Every working day for the past eight weeks, McCurry has responded to Lewinsky questions with the verbal equivalent of a waved hand. ” I’m not in the loop,” he explains when reporters ask, sometimes a dozen times in a single briefing. “I don’t know.”
A press secretary who won’t answer questions about the most important political news story in recent memory is doing a disservice to at least two of his constituencies, the public and the press. Ordinarily, such stonewalling would create profound resentment in the White House press corps. Yet most reporters still regard McCurry with affection. When it was announced in January that ABC was reassigning Sam Donaldson to the White House beat, there was much speculation among correspondents about how McCurry would handle himself at briefings against the famously combative Donaldson. “All of us were rooting for Mike,” says one White House print reporter.
How did McCurry manage to produce the astonishing — perhaps unprecedented – – spectacle of White House reporters rooting for a stonewalling administration mouthpiece? Partly because he arrived in the wake of an unpopular predecessor, Dee Dee Myers. “She was horrible,” remembers one correspondent, speaking for many of his colleagues. “She liked Clinton too much to help him. It was like talking to an 8-year-old. And she hated reporters. Now she’s married to one. And she’s become a commentator. Washington is just too weird.” McCurry, by contrast, was much less hostile to the press, and infinitely better informed, particularly on matters pertaining to foreign policy. He increased the number of daily news briefings, called reporters back, often at home, and generally gave straight answers to questions, both on and off the record. Plus, he was witty. Covering the White House can be a crushingly dull job, and just about everyone in the press corps appreciated McCurry’s often amusing commentary from the podium.
Only the naive, however, took McCurry at face value. Beneath his wry coating, McCurry has always been deeply political, a man whose closest allies in the White House were serious operatives like George Stephanopoulos and Harold Ickes. “Mike McCurry is the single most political person I’ve ever met in my life,” says Ann Compton, who has covered the White House for ABC since 1974. “Every word out of his mouth is weighed for what it may mean down the road.” McCurry’s background comments to reporters frequently sounded more significant than they actually were. “He never actually gives you anything,” says a journalist who likes him regardless. A colleague who has worked closely with McCurry at the White House takes an even more cynical view: ” He’s done a good job making reporters feel important. But it’s all jive.”
Jive or not, early in the Lewinsky scandal, McCurry’s carefully cultivated (and mostly deserved) reputation for candor began to show signs of fraying. In January, McCurry explained to reporters that Clinton’s denial of his affair with Gennifer Flowers, as well as the president’s admission under oath to a sexual encounter with her, were somehow both true. During the following weeks, McCurry continued to stonewall, referring even the simplest questions about the president’s role in the scandal to lawyers who had no intention of answering them, and mocking reporters who dared to press him for more information. Meanwhile, McCurry, who claimed to want nothing to do with the Lewinsky story, repeatedly attacked the independent counsel from the podium. By February, McCurry himself seemed to doubt the veracity of what he was saying. “Maybe there’ll end up being a simple, innocent explanation” to the Lewinsky story, he told the Chicago Tribune in an unguarded moment. “I don’t think so, because I think we would have offered that up already.” Despite his doubts, McCurry mounted the podium each day and defended the administration’s position. “It’s painful to watch,” says Compton.
It’s sure to get more painful. Why doesn’t McCurry resign before the taint from the Lewinsky scandal becomes indelible? “His belief is that it would probably be poor form to leave now,” says John Buckley, Bob Dole’s communications director in the 1996 presidential campaign and an old friend of McCurry’s. “If there is a pause or a lull in the bombing of the president, he could probably more comfortably walk out the door. As soon as there is a graceful time to leave, I hope and pray and rub the belly of my Buddha that he’ll be able to get out of there.”
A cease-fire is not likely. And so McCurry finds himself in an untenable position: As a press secretary, he must be relatively forthcoming, and yet at this point if he were to be truly forthcoming, he might topple the president. Unsure of how to proceed, McCurry retreats first into spin, and then into ignorance. Reached at his office long after dinnertime, McCurry begins by explaining how the Lewinsky scandal has actually been a good thing for the Clinton administration. “We’re doing an awful lot of stuff that people aren’t paying attention to,” he says. “Conservatives can’t get the foam out of their mouths because of this scandal, and they miss all the other efforts that the administration is making to enhance its agenda.”
It sounds like a stealthy ploy indeed, and it would be interesting to know what the Clinton agenda is these days, but McCurry doesn’t elaborate. Instead, he moves to his stock profession of faith in his boss: “The president has said basically only two things: He said he did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, and he said he did not suggest that anyone should do anything but tell the truth. I believe both of those things, and I believe both of those things will be borne out over time.”
Fair enough. But what about all the other questions: What was Lewinsky doing in the Oval Office? What was Vernon Jordan’s role? Why the Walt Whitman poems? McCurry has spent the last 13 consecutive hours in scandal management. He sounds tired. “Every American wants to know the truth at the end of the day, and so do I,” he says. “But I don’t want to be encumbered with a lot of ephemeral information, which is not worth passing on.”
Sure. But you’re a smart guy. What do you think? Don’t you ever wake up in the middle of the night and wonder about all the unanswered questions? Don’t you want to know? “God, no. No,” he says, suddenly sounding very awake. “No, I really don’t want to know. I don’t know whether that’s escapism or whether it’s just because knowing the truth means that you have a certain professional obligation to get out there and do your job every day.” He pauses, trying to put it into words. “Knowing the truth means that you have to tell the truth.”
Tucker Carlson is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
