On the Road With Air Clinton
Hume, Brit
On the Road With Air Clinton Who's running this airline? by Brit Hume Somewhere Over Europe T he chartered 747 carrying the White House press corps heads for Bonn following the end of the G-7...
...But they seem confounded by the adversarial quality of the news coverage they get...
...The president will still have him at his side as he tours an American military cemetery in Italy, where Dole was injured in World War II...
...In Bonn, for the first time on this trip, indeed for the first time in recent memory, the White House has put the press filing center—the combined media workspace and briefing room—in the same hotel where the press is staying...
...But it's hard to see how such an approach helps Mr...
...They seem well able to deal with the roughing up they get from the political opposition...
...Bob Dole can humiliate Mr...
...Secretary of Education Richard Riley has told his staff to always check, upon receiving orders from the White House, to determine the age of the person giving them...
...I don't suppose there's any public figure that's ever been subject to any more violent personal attacks than I have, at least in modern times," he said on June 24...
...The sense of persecution may help explain the low priority assigned to accommodating journalists...
...This Clinton trip to Latvia, Poland, and the Naples summit has already seen a marathon series of such briefings, delivered at all hours of the day and night, with minimum notice and a seeming maximum effort to interrupt journalists just as their deadlines approached...
...A board the 747, the NSC official drones on about the visit to Germany...
...Clinton over his economic stimulus package and lead the charge against him on Whitewater...
...news organizations that cover them every day to stage a briefing for the benefit of the foreign press...
...A sheepish Gearan called ABC minutes later to say that, well,there had been two after all...
...He rhapsodized about how significant it was that crowds of Latvians had turned out to watch the Clintons come and go, and how impressive that more than 30,000 had crammed a central square in Riga to hear him speak...
...Thus the White House has managed to annoy the major U.S...
...Journalists obviously don't slant stories based on their creature comforts, but since the press pays for all of its accommodations—the rooms, the filing centers, the buses, the air charters—there is no reason not to provide what they need...
...You can hardly blame them for not liking it, but it's been this way for years...
...T here is a deeper problem, though, than the callowness of the staff...
...But after the Clinton White House fired the veteran travel office staff to make room for its own team, all that changed...
...The American Spectator September 1994 19 p ersonally, the Clinton travel staff are pleasant and well-meaning people who are doing their best...
...18 The American Spectator September 1994 Reporters listened to Lake and Gergen for a while, then gradually withdrew to their desks...
...by Brit Hume Somewhere Over Europe T he chartered 747 carrying the White House press corps heads for Bonn following the end of the G-7 Economic Summit in Naples...
...One of their young aides, riding with the press through Rome in June, was asked how he liked the city...
...It is the president and first lady's profound contempt of the press...
...Less than a half-hour later, ABC News aired a report in which an eyewitness described in detail seeing the two helicopters flying off together...
...They must be up hours ahead of the president to make baggage calls and get through security sweeps...
...This is the sixth economic summit I have covered over two administrations, and such puffery has been part of the final day at every one...
...New updates have been slid under doors, in the middle of the night, including earlier morning start times...
...One of the reasons cited for the firings was that the old travel office staff was too "pro-press," an accusation the newcomers are in no danger of facing...
...The daily press schedule put out by the White House is often only an approximate guide to what happens, and is so often changed that reporters can't ever be sure that the version they have is the last one...
...Clinton generate the kind of coverage he plainly wants...
...No detail, it seems, is small enough to escape the new travel staff's ineptitude...
...It was nice, he said, but added, "the statues seem a little worn...
...Both Mr...
...The new staff has brought an era of second-rate hotels, filing centers blocks or even miles away, and charter flights, especially in the U.S., aboard a motley array of airlines notable for mechanical breakdowns and cold food...
...Gearan should have known immediately when the Pentagon, or whoever, denied it, that something was wrong...
...They had work to do...
...On this trip, for example, the White House press credentials were laminated first, with the names written on them in ink afterward...
...On this trip, though, the great Clinton spin machine started early...
...She has learned a lot in a short time about the federal government, Congress, and the Washington press corps...
...The Los Angeles Times man polishes his final G-7 piece—his California deadline won't come until after we get to Bonn...
...The White House had been approached that day by Frank Murray of the Washington Times, who had been told by a Marine Corps official that two helicopters had been involved...
...Brit Hume is the ABC News chief White House correspondent...
...She is cheerful, patient, and possessed of a good sense of humor...
...After a day, most were blank or nearly so: the ink had simply rubbed off...
...One would think Bill Clinton, of all people, would remember "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today...
...There is some good news for the traveling regulars tonight, however...
...Vershbow is sufficiently obscure that his name would mean nothing to the reading and viewing public anyway...
...This is sometimes an objectionable ground rule, but not in this case...
...It turned out that McLarty's departure, his replacement by Leon Panetta, and the shift of David Gergen to the State Department had been worked out in meetings that weekend at Camp David...
...On June 27, the Monday when chief of staff Mack McLarty resigned, Myers had told reporters the president had no visitors that weekend at Camp David...
...The advance men who composed most of the old travel office had been doing it for years and their experience was an asset the Clinton White House inherited but was too obtuse or arrogant to recognize...
...But a small gaggle of mostly foreign reporters has gathered around the NSC official to extract what they can from a person who on a normal day in Washington would almost certainly not return their phone calls...
...On the president's Moscow trip in January, one exasperated TV producer suggested a visit to the "Tomb of the Unknown Schedule...
...This used to be standard procedure...
...On the day when reporters discovered that the misbegotten staff golf outing aboard a presidential helicopter had involved not one of the white-topped Marine choppers, but two, Gearan summoned reporters to his office at six in the evening...
...It turned out that 1.2 million invitations had been delivered by the Latvian government to virtually every household in the land...
...This means he can be quoted only as "a senior official...
...Reporters put in extremely long hours on these foreign trips...
...Gearan had also been told by other reporters that eyewitnesses reported seeing two...
...After fifty years of Soviet-style socialism, Latvia hardly seems a place where many people go sailing on Wednesday afternoon, or head for their country places...
...The newcomers are now busily reinventing the wheel, and furthering the Clinton White House's considerable reputation for incompetence in the process...
...This is absurd, of course...
...Sleeping journalists of course did not get the word...
...Aboard Air Force One on the way to Warsaw after Mr...
...Nobody had thought to tell the press secretary...
...They must be anticipated and planned for...
...He wasn't kidding...
...Previous White Houses have recognized the benefit of making press accommodations as convenient as possible: tired journalists tend to be in a foul mood, which may be reflected, however marginally, in their coverage...
...The Wall Street Journal correspondent dozes...
...Press secretary Dee Dee Myers is a likable woman with an almost perfect temperament for the job...
...There are problems no travel agent or tour director would ever face...
...and Mrs...
...Clinton seem to understand that it is the job of the political opposition to oppose...
...But it is almost impossible to learn enough in eighteen months to be an effective spokesman for a branch of government with which one has had no previous experience...
...But no seasoned press officer should have let that happen...
...The problem is that moving hundreds of journalists to far-flung foreign destinations and getting them in and out of heavily guarded venues is not an easy thing...
...Clinton's first stop in Latvia, the White House summoned reporters for an on-the-record session with Secretary of State Christopher...
...The military, it seemed, had misled him earlier...
...Much the same applies to the press office...
...They then stay up late to complete their stories long after the day's events are over...
...The new staff has brought an era of second-rate hotels, filing centers blocks or even miles away, and charter flights, especially in the U.S., aboard a motley array of airlines notable for mechanical breakdowns and cold food...
...Access to such officials as Lake and Gergen can be useful, but the kind of information they dispense on such occasions is almost all blather about how engaged the president was in the summit proceedings, how much the final communiqué reflected his thinking, and how gratified he was by it all...
...Having to shuttle back and forth between hotels adds hours to each day...
...There they found David Gergen huddled with one small group of reporters, while across the room, behind a partition, National Security Adviser Tony Lake met with another...
...The weary company of journalists has settled into seats, grateful for a chance to sleep or eat...
...Her problems are deepened by frequent lack of access to the president and to information she needs...
...But he was apparently too eager to believe—and repeat—the denial, a classic mistake...
...Why, you may ask, can't the press simply get by on its own, flying commercial and booking its own hotel rooms...
...n 20 The American Spectator September 1994...
...But a second-tier National Security Council official named Sandy Vershbow has commandeered the public address microphone and is "briefing" the captive audience "on background...
...No detail, it seems, is small enough to escape the new travel staff's ineptitude...
...Palms must sometimes be greased...
...The answer is that the president's schedule compresses events so tightly that the only way to get reporters to them all is for the White House to do the planning...
...The reporters from the New York Times and Washington Post are reading...
...The air fills with such phrases as "expanding cooperation," "creating an integrated security system in Europe," "turning a page in the post-Cold War period," and "a more equal burden-sharing becoming the order of the day...
...The announcement of this briefing was greeted with hoots of disbelief and protest from traveling White House regulars...
...That brought a round of loud guffaws, and the phrase has become part of the White House press lexicon...
...The hapless Christopher apparently didn't know that, but he certainly should have known better than to say of the Latvians, "In summertime, on a day as nice as this, people will be out in their boats and out in the country...
...The wonder is that the president seems to think he's been singled out...
...At one point earlier this day, just as everyone was scrambling to get his last G-7 summit stories filed before the flight to Bonn, reporters were summoned to the White House press office at the rear of the ancient gymnasium that served as the press filing center in Naples...
...This came just after the State Department's Nicholas Burns had briefed the entire press corps at some length on the president's meetings with Russian President Yeltsin...
...He told them unequivocally that there had been no second helicopter...
...Those around Myers and Gearan are, for the most part, less experienced than they...
...Theoretically this benefits everybody, since it allows the press to do its job and the president to be covered as he does his...
...Communications Director Mark Gearan is nearly as likable as Myers, but faces similar problems being taken seriously...
Vol. 27 • September 1994 • No. 9
