Jim Acosta, senior White House correspondent for CNN, has acquired a certain renown lately for his habitual, and carefully staged, verbal confrontations in the White House press room with President Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer. You could make the argument that both Spicer and Acosta, in their respective positions, are probably in over their heads, and deserve one another. But while I’m content to refrain from making personnel recommendations to Spicer’s boss, there is an underlying fallacy in Acosta’s public posturing—generally supported by colleagues in the media—that ought to be clarified.
And that is this: While it may be annoying that Sean Spicer tends to spin rather than respond to inquiries, or turn off the TV cameras when a public briefing begins, or even that President Trump manifestly dislikes the political press corps, there is nothing especially new about any of this—and the media privileges and access that Acosta and his colleagues value are very recent in the history of press-presidential relations.
To begin with, it is axiomatic that presidents dislike, or at any rate distrust, the press. And how could it be otherwise? Politicians and reporters, for the most part, function at cross-purposes. The greatest secretary of state of the 20th century, Dean Acheson, was always guarded around journalists, even in private social settings, because (as he once explained) their devotion to getting the story always trumped personal friendship or national interest. Modern presidents who have been famously friendly with reporters—Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, or John F. Kennedy—instinctively knew that journalists are no less susceptible to flattery than statesmen, and both were fully capable of extraordinary pettiness when individual pressmen displeased them. Once, at an Oval Office press conference in 1942, FDR suggested, not entirely facetiously, that John O’Donnell of the New York Daily News should be awarded the (German) Iron Cross for his critical World War II reporting. Twenty years later, JFK ostentatiously canceled the White House subscriptions to the (liberal Republican and, alas, long since defunct) New York Herald Tribune.
Second, and more important, such venerable institutions as press conferences, daily televised briefings, a huge White House apparatus to respond to media inquiries, not to say the underlying principle that presidents are accountable to the press, are of very recent vintage. Even the West Wing press room where correspondents linger, and where Jim Acosta rises from his seat to challenge Sean Spicer, was constructed as recently as 1969—and by President Richard Nixon, of all commanders in chief—over Roosevelt’s old indoor swimming pool.
Until well into the 20th century, in fact, the Washington press corps was comparatively modest in size, and most “White House correspondents” covered everything in town. James Madison and Andrew Jackson, even Abraham Lincoln, might have complained privately about the scribblers of their time—and they did, in fractious terms—but none ever dealt with individual writers or felt obliged to respond publicly to any periodical. It was not until the Civil War that Congress appropriated funds for what we would now recognize as a (tiny) White House staff, and it was Lincoln who first deputized presidential secretaries—John Hay and John Nicolay, his future biographers—to deal with journalists.
Just a century ago, especially with Theodore Roosevelt’s tenure, the modern era began to take shape. Reporters tended to submit questions in writing, rather than ask them directly, and answers (from the White House staff) were usually furnished in writing as well. Calvin Coolidge met with the press in person, usually in the Oval Office, some 520 times in five-and-a-half years, but reporters were forbidden to quote the president directly, initiating the surviving practice of citing a “White House spokesman” or “senior official.”
Herbert Hoover was the first president to hire an assistant specifically assigned to deal with journalists; and while FDR, in his 12 years in office, held a staggering 998 press conferences, correspondents were herded into the Oval Office on command and, in line with custom, forbidden to quote Roosevelt directly. It was Dwight D. Eisenhower—probably at the behest of his press secretary, a shrewd ex-New York Times reporter named James Hagerty—who instituted regular, and occasionally televised, press conferences and ended the ban on direct quotation.
Since then, of course, the political success of presidents has depended, to some degree, on their skill at repartee and the sympathies of the press corps. Kennedy enjoyed the give-and-take of his “live” daytime press conferences in a State Department auditorium, where his easy charm and casual dismissal of critics (notably the elderly May Craig of the Portland [Maine] Press Herald) drew appreciative laughter. Nixon took a page from his hero Charles de Gaulle and shifted the meetings to prime time and a grandiose setting within the White House, where they remain. Lyndon Johnson favored certain journalists but was a mediocre performer, and it was during the LBJ years that his natural defensiveness and ponderous evasions—and of course, the Vietnam war—gave birth to press complaints about a “credibility gap.”
In the age of Barack Obama’s serial appearances on The View and hostile comedians at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, it is also worth noting that until the last few decades, presidents were almost never interviewed by individual journalists, on television or in print. The world inhabited by Jim Acosta and his preening colleagues, and the eminently baitable Sean Spicer, is not just a new world but practically the opposite of a comparatively recent past.
As always, and especially now, the press is the ocean in which politicians swim, and Spicer and his boss would probably benefit from the wisdom that it is easier, and shrewder, to seduce and manipulate than to antagonize the press. But in this, as in other instances, President Trump is his own worst enemy. That does not mean that Trump’s attitude toward the media is unusual, or even perilous to democracy. It’s just that presidents and the press tend to identify their own interests with the well-being of the nation, and always have.
Philip Terzian is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
