His Own Mouthpiece
GLASS, ANDREW J.
His Own Mouthpiece Speaking Out: Inside the Reagan White House By Larry Speakes with Robert Pack Scribner's. 322 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Andrew J. Glass Washington bureau chief, Cox...
...The downside for Speakes has been his having to surrender a $400,000-a-year limousine-powered job at Merrill Lynch, as senior vice president for communications...
...The Fitzwater who delivered the flam is, of course, the man who not long afterward rustled his seemingly boundless moral skirts in a tumultuous froufrou of indignation while stomping upon the Presidential quotes fabricated by Larry Speakes, his predecessor on the same White House podium...
...In fairness, Bruce Drake, a former White House reporter for the New York Daily News, notes that it takes two to playthese games...
...Well, you know how it is, Fitzwater replied, people leave all the time...
...First off, as they say down at the courthouse, Fitzwater not only lied, he knowingly lied...
...Perhaps it reminds him of his years in Hollywood, where publicity agents make up quotes and even whole biographies for their actorclients...
...One suspects he viewed the revelation that he made up quotes for the President as an inconsequential admission...
...It's unfair, though, to pin all the blame on the President...
...Reviewed by Andrew J. Glass Washington bureau chief, Cox Newspapers After several high-ranking Justice Department officials recently quit in disgust over the ethical stink that continues to surround Attorney General Edwin Meese III, Ronald Reagan's longtime pal, reporters asked Marlin Fitzwater, the President's spokesman, to discuss what was going on...
...Declares Speakes: "[Reagan] had tremendous instincts for saying the right thing at the right time...
...Still, his book does underscore how the place works...
...Thus, an evident purpose of Speakes' trifling book is to settle scores with a long list of officials, columnists and reporters who, for one reason or another, had provoked him...
...Nor should we target Nancy, a former actress (her real name, as Speakes unblushingly notes, is Anne Frances Robbins Davis) who has told fibs about such things as her age (she's older) and a pimple (really skin cancer) on her husband's nose...
...The sole pull toward truth—and it isn't much of one —is the risk of being caught lying and the attendant fear of ruin...
...Back in 1981, at the dawning of Aquarius, Speakes had told Marty Schräm, then with the Washington Post, that Reagan did little more at his press conferences than spout back the canned answers Speakes & Associates had dutifully pumped into him...
...He lost the right to practice the only trade he knows—shaping an illusion that can be passed off as reality...
...That is its unintended virtue...
...Whether by design or error, Speaking Out, an egocentric account of lifein the Reagan White House by a former Presidential spokesman, as told to his own spokesman, arrived at my desk a fat fortnight before the big brouhaha broke...
...I read over Speakes' confession of made-up quotes with no more of a reaction than one might have when ingesting a third helping of unflavored yogurt...
...Seven years later, Speakes alludes in passing to what he calls Schram's "devastatingly accurate" account...
...An equally incensed Reagan told the nation's newspaper editors that he was profoundly offended by the "fiction" former aides of his had written about him...
...Yet what is more so is that the mild perfidy of this hapless messenger has all but eclipsed the hollowness of the underlying message...
...It is, in fact, widely regarded as the normal state of affairs...
...He couldn't do that, even if he wanted to, because until Regan took a shine to him quite late in the show, he wasn't much of a White House player...
...To further pursue the point, one look at the pained expression on Fitzwater's flushed face could have told y ou that he knew you knew he was lying...
...The flap over the phony quotes that followed the publication of Speaking Out soon brought its author to the f orefront of the TV interview shows, boosting sales of his books...
...He miscalculated—it provided a convenient hook for his enemies to skewer him...
...Despite the trouble it has caused him, Reagan seems reasonably content with that approach to governance and quite prepared to pursue it through his remaining months in office...
...But this sort of fast-stepping fandango is regular fare within our cheap dance halls of power...
...Regan has zoomed to the top of the literary notoriety charts chiefly by revealing more about the manipulations of Nancy Reagan in guiding White House affairs than even the reviled Speakes had told us...
...Following a cardinal rule of Washington journalism, Speakes wasn't mentioned in the 1981 story, although, he now says, his "fingerprints" were all over it...
...In dealing with any policy issue, the strategy is to forge a "line" and to stick by it...
...The cases of individuals such as Larry Speakes and Don Regan prove, however, that in Washington's peculiar culture at least, only the most fit do manage to hang on...
...Here, typically, is the lesson Speakes drew from that unhappy experience with a member of the White House press corps: " [I] never again spoke to reporters about the preparation of the President for press conferences...
...Donald Regan, the former White House chief of staff and another Merrill Lynch alumnus, has now supplanted Speakes as the top smooch-and-tell figure to come out of this rococco Administration...
...Damned outrage," Fitzwater trumpeted...
...Indeed, it is apparent throughout nearly the whole of Speaking Out that official Washington operates under a scenario mentality...
...Second, many reporters who worked the story in the White House press room—as people go, a savvy bunch —knew he was lying...
...What else is new...
...That is ironic enough...
...If there is a cruel streak in Ronald Reagan, it emerges through his innate belief in core Darwinian principles...
...Speakes, it would appear, had mightily offended Fitzwater's delicate sensibilities because he asked an aide to make up some innocuous stuff about the world breathing easier and told reporters, falsely, that Reagan had improbably whispered this creation into Soviet Party chief Mikhail S. Gorbachev's ear during their 1985 summit encounter in Geneva...
...To compensate themselves for their psychological loss, Regan and Speakes sought solace in the principle, "Don't get mad when you can get even—and make money too...
...Merrill Lynch had hired Speakes not only to make up quotes for the corporate hierarchy, much as he had done in the White House, but also to keep the lines open to his pals in Washington...
...In computer jargon, it is the default condition for the operating system...
...For Speakes, a good ol' boy from Mississippi who used to park his four-wheel-drive pickup truck at the White House every day, the necessity to abruptly clean out his fancy Manhattan desk must have been devastating...
...Nonetheless, newspapers invariably printed them...
...No one for a moment believed that those words—as spoken by Speakes—had in fact sprung spontaneously from Reagan's head...
...In dumping his larder of gossip-laden insider-type anecdotes, Speakes doesn't reveal much about the true texture of the Reagan years...
...It was just such a climate that bred the disastrous Iran-contra business...
...Overtheyears, Speakes routinely read to reporters strings of Presidential quotes reflecting a dazzling grasp of detail—a grasp that never informed Reagan's performances in any ad hoc situation...
Vol. 71 • May 1988 • No. 9
