Appropriately, Flack Rhymes With Hack
You may have missed an important White House ritual last week: The ceremonial passing of the baton from retiring presidential press secretary Mike McCurry to newly appointed presidential press secretary Joe Lockhart. The received wisdom here is that McCurry, whom everyone seems to like, was getting out while the getting was good.
After his final briefing, McCurry stepped aside in a glow of approbation while Lockhart, seated by the wall, looked suitably uncomfortable.
As such rituals go, it was mildly stomach-turning. Mike McCurry may well be a swell fellow, with a wonderful wife and children, but his job has been to serve as Bill Clinton’s official prevaricator - a redundancy, perhaps? - and he has performed his duties uncommonly well.
He exchanged lively banter with the TV personalities, made self-deprecating jokes and was duly respectful to the dean of the White House press corps, UPI’s Helen Thomas.
McCurry served Bill Clinton supremely well; his value to the taxpayers, however, was problematical. For McCurry had also injured his credibility by deliberately isolating himself from any knowledge whatsoever of the Monica Lewinsky affair. To his credit, McCurry made no bones about adopting what might be called the Sgt. Schultz strategy on the matter. (Connoisseurs of television will recall the portly German guard in “Hogan’s Heroes” who, when prisoners tried to escape, would exclaim: “I hear nothing! I see nothing!”) On the single most important issue affecting his boss’s tenure, McCurry neither sought nor conveyed any pertinent information.
To be sure, President Clinton would probably have misled McCurry as readily as he lied to everyone else. And as McCurry explained, in his own defense, if he had discussed the matter in any detail with the president, he might have been subpoenaed to brief the grand jury.
Yet this did not stop McCurry from participating in White House spin control: attacking Kenneth Starr, impugning the motives of witnesses, protecting Clinton from legitimate inquiries about the scandal. He could dish it out but he wouldn’t take it.
And now, in unseemly fashion, McCurry joins the lecture tour. He has resigned from public service to earn millions telling funny stories about a subject he pointedly ignored when it was important. While on the public payroll, you couldn’t extract a syllable out of him about the president’s misadventures. Now, you pay to hear him tell us what he didn’t know.
There is nothing new in this. All recent presidential press secretaries have seen fit to profit from the experience in some way. Some gain corporate sinecures (Larry Speakes); others write their memoirs (Marlin Fitzwater); still others settle into the public relations business (Jody Powell). For some, association with the White House proves immensely profitable (Pierre Salinger); for others, it is a ticket to oracle status (George Reedy, Bill Moyers). An unfortunate few dissolve into comparative oblivion (Ron Ziegler, Dee Dee Myers, George Christian). The point is that service as a White House flack is the axis around which such careers revolve.
It wasn’t always so. Until well into this century, it was not considered necessary for the White House to employ press agents. Most information could be handled by the secretarial staff. And, the presidents either declined to be quoted directly in the press (the custom until Franklin Roosevelt) or were their own spokesmen. FDR and Harry Truman employed the first assistants described as press secretaries, but those jobs largely involved releasing statements and relaying inquiries to relevant officials.
It wasn’t until the advent of Dwight Eisenhower’s press secretary, James Hagerty, that the office became a rampart of political defense. Hagerty, whose dolorous manner masked a calculating mind, was a master at creating and exploiting public imagery.
It’s been downhill ever since. Beginning with John F. Kennedy, presidential press conferences became state occasions, complete with protocol and deference. And since Richard Nixon, the press secretary has served primarily as insulation against the media, fending off lines of inquiry, floating trial balloons, engaging in daily debate with reporters. The office of public affairs still issues statements and fields inquiries but the press secretary has been transformed into a rhetorical Secret Service agent, dodging bullets, blocking access, surrounding his boss with a bodyguard of lies.
Mike McCurry was merely the latest practitioner of a deadly art.