It's Friday, Jan. 28, 2022, the day of the week when I pass along a quotation meant to be inspirational or enlightening. Today's pearls come from the appropriately named Larry Speakes, who served as chief White House spokesman during the Reagan administration.
The context is the contentious relations between presidents and the reporters who cover them. RCP White House correspondent Philip Wegmann and Peter Doocy of Fox News aren't the first reporters to get under a president's skin, as they did recently. And they won't be the last, especially with Joe Biden in the Oval Office. Biden, who holds very few press conferences, is particularly prickly with the press (though he has a ways to go to match his predecessor on this front). Perhaps he needs more practice.
Every White House correspondent (and every student of the presidency) knows that this comes with the territory. George Condon of National Journal has written one of his characteristically smart and deeply reported stories detailing numerous inharmonious exchanges between reporters and presidents. In the Washington Examiner, columnist Tevi Troy evaluates the effectiveness of barking at reporters. Not to give away his story, but Tevi suggests that it doesn't always backfire on the chief executive.
Although he was the face of the administration and sat in the large West Wing office reserved for the press secretary, for most of his time in the White House Larry Speakes' title was deputy press secretary. This wasn't a slight to Speakes. It was out of respect for James Brady, his former boss who was disabled after being grievously wounded in the March 30, 1981, attempt on President Reagan's life.
Once upon a time, presidents and big-deal politicians tapped prominent journalists to be their mouthpieces. Over time, this tradition faded away. Modern political flacks cut their teeth on partisan campaigns, not in newsrooms, and the question of divided loyalty -- between the press and their boss -- is never in doubt.
In this sense, Larry Speakes was a transition figure. In college, he'd majored in journalism and subsequently worked for a couple of years in the news business in his native Mississippi. Speakes then went into politics. He was hired by a conservative Democrat, Sen. James Eastland, joined the Nixon White House, and worked on the 1980 Reagan campaign. Although he wasn't personally close to Ronald or Nancy Reagan, when Jim Brady was incapacitated, Speakes inherited the job of representing the administration to the American people with the media as the go-between.
As White House spokesman, Speakes had his fans and his detractors. But on the subject of press-politician relations, he'd seen both sides. On his desk, easily visible to the reporters who came into his office, was a sign: "You don't tell us how to stage the news and we don't tell you how to cover it."
Asked about this idea in October 1984 by New York Times correspondent Steven Weisman, Speakes replied: "I know we are always accused of controlling the message. Well, any White House is going to want to control the way it communicates. That's been around as long as White Houses have been around. We're just always going to have this adversarial relationship."
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.