Flies With Honey

Looking back on the 56 years I spent in broadcast news, I have had the opportunity and frankly, the honor to interview or cover some very distinguished leaders. Sometimes it was one-on-one with former Presidents Ford, Carter, Clinton, and both Bushes. President Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and even his longtime nemesis, Yasser Arafat.

Oh, sometimes the coverage was at a big press conference like this one with Israeli President Shimon Perez and Secretary of State Warren Christopher...

And sometimes it was more personal...

My wife was born in Georgia and insisted on coming to watch that one. But one thing I noticed is that even if it's a controversial public figure like Robert McNamara or Henry Kissinger, men and women who put themselves in the public eye also realize, for the most part, that with that come some tough questions at times.

Some don't, of course. Oliver North hung up during a phone interview when he didn't like the questions, as did Abbie Hoffman when the conversation turned to drugs. Hoffman actually threw down his mic and walked out of the studio. It happens.

But as far as Presidents go, the modern era of Press Secretaries and regular press conferences really began under President Eisenhower. His press guy was a former reporter for the New York Times named James Hagerty.

Hagerty set the tone. He was open, honest and being a former reporter himself, knew these folks had a job to do. And that job sometimes meant asking difficult questions, as when Ike suffered a heart attack and the Cold War world was on the edge of its collective seat.

It continued with JFK's press guy Pierre Salinger and again, the relationship remained fairly genial. Events like the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis success demanded a bit of tap dancing but by and large, relations were respectful.

Our memories of Bill Moyers, Lyndon Johnson's press secretary, come mainly from his time as a genial and beloved journalist. But during the Vietnam War, his defense of LBJ's policies grew tough and combative. He later said he regretted his criticisms of reporters like Morley Safer and Peter Arnett and felt he often simply went too far defending policies that, in retrospect, were impossible for anyone to defend.

One funny story he later recounted, and was included in the film "All the President's Men," was when the Managing Editor at the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, had approved a story based on a tip that LBJ was going to fire J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI. Moyers said the President read it, got angry and then called a press conference to announce Hoover was appointed for life. Moyers said LBJ then leaned over and whispered to him, "Tell your friend Ben Bradlee, 'fuck you.'"

But Vietnam and later Watergate ushered in a new and adversarial era in presidential/press relations. Perhaps no event encapsulated that better than an exchange between President Nixon and CBS White House correspondent Dan Rather at the height of the Watergate scandal.

The exchange occurred during a press conference at the National Association of Broadcasters in Houston. The moment was a hallmark of the tense, adversarial relationship between the Nixon administration and the press during the Watergate investigation.

If you look up the definition of "forced smile," I think that shot of Nixon at the end will suffice.

Ron Nessen, a former network reporter, and Jody Powell, a former campaign aide, served Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

The title of Nessen's book about his time there says it all, "It Sure Looks Different from the Inside." And probably, other than the oil embargo, the toughest part of the chain-smoking Powell's term was keeping himself from firing one up at the podium.

But relations had soured a lot during Reagan, Clinton, and Bush's terms. By the time Barack Obama was elected, the press itself was splintering into partisan news outlets and it showed. Despite President Obama's deliberate attempts to keep it positive, like this moment celebrating the 90th birthday of the legendary reporter Helen Thomas...

...you couldn't miss the changes in tone that had taken place. And by the time President Trump was elected for the first time, outright hostility was the order of the day.

And now, every answer must be preceded by an insult, not only from the President but his Press Secretary Karoline Levitt. Ask yourself, though, who thinks this is a good idea?

If there are negative stories written about the administration, I would posit that this is not the way to deal with them. Both sides in this are human beings and the temptation is to respond in kind, though all our training in the news business is to keep your opinion out of the matter. That may be why some have asked why reporters don't respond, snap back at the petty insults. Partly it's because they do want the answer, and secondly, it doesn't look good or respectful.

But indulge me with a video of a President who was a master with reporters. Granted, it was a different time, but humor and a genial approach can work wonders. OK, he no doubt went back to the Oval Office and swore a blue streak about this journalist or that. But in public, this is what you got...

Even when you don't want to give a particularly expansive answer, insults aren't the way to handle things. But in the modern age of social media, that kind of nastiness is par for the course, I suppose. But it's one thing to get it from some bozo on Instagram and another from the leader of the free world.

It may not be apparent these days, but there is a difference, or should be.