When I labored at the New Republic, some 35 years ago, the TRB column was written by an amusing man named Richard Strout, who had arrived in Washington in 1920 to write for the Christian Science Monitor, had been moonlighting as TRB since 1943, and had three abiding pet peeves.
One was his belief that a parliamentary system was demonstrably preferable to presidential government; another was his conviction that the United States desperately needed a British/Canadian-style national health service; and the third was his indignation at the declining number of presidential press conferences.
In four terms as chief executive, he would remind readers periodically, Franklin D. Roosevelt had conducted an impressive 998 press conferences, while it had been weeks, even months, since Nixon/Ford/Carter had met with reporters! The implication was that the public was denied essential insight into presidential thinking.
I had some opportunities in those days to test Strout’s thesis, and came away from the White House press room with the (lifelong) conviction that there is no less rewarding enterprise than asking questions of a president or his press secretary.
For whatever reason, press secretaries are determined to deflect all inquiries to their boss’s advantage: Admissions of error or indecision or ambiguity are strictly forbidden, and even catastrophe is packaged in bright paper with a pink bow. And presidential press conferences are just as bad. President Obama, for instance, calls on correspondents from a short list of favorites, who ask questions which (to all appearances) might be prearranged as well. This strikes me as a procedure more suitable for journalists who covered Mussolini in his heyday, but the tough-as-nails White House press corps seems content. I can’t imagine what Richard Strout would think.
Yet, even in 1975, I perceived that Strout’s comparisons with FDR made little sense. If you repair to the transcripts of those 998 press conferences–all available in the volumes of Roosevelt’s presidential papers–you will discover a vanished world. Reporters were summoned en masse into the Oval Office, no recordings or newsreels, and both questions and answers were off the record.
Roosevelt tended to joke with his questioners, and sometimes deflected inquiries with repartee or pointed anecdotes. But he was also, by modern standards, startlingly candid, and a smart journalist really could discern what the president was thinking about a particular issue.
Somewhere along the line–I would guess with the introduction of television under Eisenhower, and the Kennedy/Johnson use of TV “prime time”–the nature of the beast evolved. By the Nixon era presidential press conferences were not only small-caliber ceremonies of state–with Marine guards, East Room splendor, and a complicated etiquette for asking questions–but parliamentary-style showdowns between a hostile press corps and defensive commander in chief.
There were other factors as well: The enhanced social status of newspapermen had inflated their sense of themselves as a fourth branch of government, and the Woodward-Bern-stein school of journalism locked reporters into perpetual combat with presidents, Republicans especially.
Add to this the preening nature of TV correspondents, the human instinct to perform onstage, and the Ruritanian character of the modern executive mansion–picture Bill Clinton striding down a red-carpeted-and-chandeliered corridor to meet the press–and you have a comic-opera institution that has long since lost whatever utility it once had.
As I say, those rare occasions when I traipsed over to the White House struck me, even in the fullness of youth, as a waste of time. Press secretaries, and especially assistant press secretaries, were usually determined to say as little as possible, and presidents’ responses were entirely predictable. I remember once entertaining a female colleague by anticipating, sotto voce, every phrase uttered by Jimmy Carter in response to some hapless inquiry.
The only constant, then and now, was the baleful presence of Helen Thomas. She was not yet the chronological dean of the White House press corps, but even in the early 1970s, there was a sense that she had been hanging around too long, clinging to her sinecure with a swiftly declining wire service (UPI).
Age and a deluge of honorary degrees have given Helen Thomas the confidence to hector presidents. But my everlasting memory of her is the wintry night a fun-loving GI stole a helicopter from Fort Myer and landed it on the White House lawn. I assumed alcohol was to blame; Helen announced that this was the first stage of the Pentagon coup to keep Richard Nixon in office.
PHILIP TERZIAN
