The Presidency and The Media
Robert Dallek
Presidential Historian
Boston University
Robert Dallek went to Boston University’s History Department in 1996, after three decades at UCLA and a year as a visiting professor at Oxford. He has published books on Franklin Roosevelt and American foreign policy, on Ronald Reagan and on Lyndon Johnson. He is also the author of “Hail to the Chief: The Making and Unmaking of American Presidents” and is currently at work on a biography of John F. Kennedy, to be published in 2003.
What I thought I would do is to raise three questions with you: First, what has been the relationship between the media and America’s presidents through our history? Secondly, how has this changed, which I think it has dramatically since the 1960s? And third, how do relations between the media and the president now affect the office?
So first off, traditional relationship. I think clearly it’s been quite adversarial. The role of the press has been very much to sort of get on the president’s case. Presidents have never liked it. George Washington complained at the end of his term that he had been subjected to unmerited censures of the vilest kind through the press. Thomas Jefferson complained that no one serving in that office can leave the White House with their reputation intact that they brought into the presidency.
Another role has been in ferreting out corruption. Indeed, I think this has been something that through our history has been maybe the most intense focus of the press in going after presidents. You go back to the Grant administration, the Credit Mobile scandal, the whiskey ring, the corruption in the War and the Treasury Departments, all became standard fare in the newspapers of the day.
Nixon and Watergate. Clinton and Whitewater. It’s something which is a constant I think in American presidential politics in its relations with the media. Now that’s just one side, though, of the traditional relationship. There has also been through our history, at least down to the 1960s, I think a kind of grudging respect that the press has shown presidents. There’s been a substantial degree of deference. First off, about their health.
In 1919, Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke. Go back and read the stories in the major media of the time. They take the White House line, which was: yes, the president had suffered a stroke. He’s recovering. He’s in charge. He’s governing. This was utter nonsense. Wilson could not function effectively, but the press showed him considerable deference.
Franklin Roosevelt. The press never took photographs to show that FDR had suffered from polio; that he was immobilized.
What a difference. Mayor Giuliani has prostate cancer. This is the headline this morning. Now if this were 50 years ago, the press, I don’t think, ever would have touched that.
The mood has changed dramatically about what you reveal about presidents. Dare I say it? Sex. People in the press had suspicions about Eisenhower and his driver in North Africa. Lyndon Johnson had a hideaway office in the Senate when he was the majority leader known as the nooky room. The press never reported on that. It was out of bounds. So health, sex, the press didn’t talk about it.
So I guess the question one needs to ask, the second question I’m posing is: why and how did this change? What happened to change this?
What happened was the 1960s and, first of all, Vietnam. What the press found out was that President Lyndon Johnson was lying through his teeth about Vietnam. In the summer of 1965 when Johnson escalated the war by sending 100,000 combat troops into Vietnam, he didn’t go on television and say, ‘My fellow Americans, we’re going to shed blood in Vietnam. We’re going to lose lives.’
Instead, he announced the escalation at a press conference. And at the same press conference he announced that Abe Fortas was being appointed as associate justice of the Supreme Court, and Johnson also announced that day that one of his daughters was pregnant. The whole point of the exercise was to mute what he was doing in relation to Vietnam.
Then in January 1966 he agrees with his Joint Chiefs of Staff that they needed to put another 120,000 troops into Vietnam, and I have the memo in which he says to them, ‘I’ll announce this 10,000 troops a month.’ He wasn’t going to go to the country and say, 120,000. I’ll announce it 10,000 a month …
Of course, the press got onto this. And remember, what you began to have is the credibility gap, the famous credibility gap. How do you know when Lyndon Johnson is telling the truth? He pulls his earlobe, rubs his chin, he’s telling the truth. When he begins to move his lips you know he’s lying.
[Laughter.]Johnson didn’t think it was funny.
In addition to Johnson and Vietnam, you have Chappaquiddick in 1969 and Watergate.
Then you had the Church Committee, 1974-’75, the intelligence committee that revealed to the country secret government assassination plots, wiretapping by the FBI, listening devices in Martin Luther King’s motel and hotel rooms, the toppling of Mossadeq in Iran, the toppling of the Arbenz government in Guatemala. One revelation after another, which left the press feeling we’ve had the wool pulled over our eyes.
There’s also, of course, been the rise of a fiercely competitive media. There’s also the fact that you have the end of the Cold War. You don’t have the sense of national security threat any more to the degree that you did in the 1960s and even in the ’70s.
So what is the consequence of all of this? The fact that the press is disturbed by all these revelations. The consequence has been that presidents no longer enjoy the kind of privacy, the kind of insularity, the kind of protection one might say, that they used to have from scrutiny by the media. The revelations about Clinton and Monica. It’s inconceivable to me that you would have had the kind of graphic descriptions on television, in the press, 30, 40, 50 years ago. There was a kind of deference toward the White House.
There’s a big issue here. An issue that concerns me greatly as a presidential historian that I’d like to put before you as my last point. How effective can presidents be any more as leaders of our country? To rule, to lead, to govern, you’ve got to have a degree, I think, of illusion. In a mass democracy, you cannot see and hear everything about a president.
So the question I would pose at the end of this little talk I’ve given you is, can we get the genie back in the bottle? How can presidents really be effective any more if every other day you’re going to report their sex lives and about their health? Now on their health count, I really do believe we are entitled to know as much about their health as we possibly can. Their sex lives I think is another matter. It’s between them and their wives. I don’t mean that they have multiple wives, but anyway…
[Laughter.]I think the issue is that we’ve got to find a way in this country to reclaim a kind of deference for the president, and I see one path to this end. I think we will do very, very well if in the very near future we elect a woman as president of the United States because there is a certain illusion in the mass public that women will be more restrained. They’re not going to have affairs the way men do, and whether this is true or not is sort of irrelevant. But the public, I think, will see a kind of recreation of moral authority. And a president has got to have moral authority if they’re going to govern effectively.
So I think if you can get a woman in the White House and she’s effective and she’s successful, it will reestablish a degree of deference, which I think is valuable to have in our society if you’re going to have effective leadership and governance.
So I’ll conclude by saying, I think all of you in the media confront a very serious issue. How do you do your job, which is to probe and explore and reveal? And yet at the same time balance this against the needs of the country and its interest in having an effective president and effective presidential leadership?