Marlin Fitzwater, Call the Briefing! Reagan and Bush, Sam and Helen--A Decade with Presidents and the Press (New York: Times Books, 1995), 399 pp., $25.00.

If I had to choose the most perilous job in Washington, White House press secretary would be it. You have to serve two masters, the president and the press, who measure your performance by converse standards. A president wants you to reveal only the best news about him, if that, while the press corps wants you to be able to confirm, at a moment's notice, the worst. Self-immolation lurks behind your every utterance.

So it's saying something that Marlin Fitzwater was the most effective and well-liked press secretary since Pierre Salinger served John Kennedy. Fitzwater spent six years as spokesman for two presidents of markedly different public styles, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and lived to tell about them. This memoir helps explain his remarkable survival. The book resembles his own tenure as press secretary: It reveals enough for the reader to think he's getting something for his time, but not so much that Fitzwater is disloyal to his bosses.

Both of his bosses--presidents and press. Everyone seems to be blaming the media for something these days, but Fitzwater actually likes reporters, or at least most of them. Hence, this is not a book full of the fashionable, Naderite critique of reporters as celebrities. There is no lament about falling press standards or "sound bites'' or talk shows as ego trips. Fitzwater has a simple, traditional way of judging the press: He likes reporters who are straight with him, and who get it right. He has nice things to say about many reporters, even Sam Donaldson, whom he credits with being a hard-working pain.

For those who failed to meet those standards, Fitzwater can settle scores like a loan shark. He all but breaks the kneecaps of Andy Rosenthal, the reporter (and son of famous Timesman and columnist A.M. Rosenthal) who broke the non-story, in 1992, about George Bush's astonishment upon seeing a supermarket checkout scanner. That story became, during the 1992 presidential campaign, a metaphor for Bush's detachment from the lives of average Americans. But, as Fitzwater reports, Rosenthal never even saw the event himself. Bush had expressed his usual gee-whiz politeness at some genuinely new technology. Rosenthal took the account of the event from the media "pool'' and spun it into an exaggeration that made page one. "It was one of those stories where the truth never catches up with the lie", Fitzwater writes. The Times defended the story, and most of the media repeated it, with a laudable exception or two.

Fitzwater attributes the episode to Rosenthal's personal demons, but in doing this he misses a broader truth about modern media demons: Once a stereotype is formed about a public official, it is almost impossible to shake. In his 1922 book, Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann wrote about how the public mind is shaped by stereotypes. All the more so seventy-five years later in our age of instant, relentless information. Any episode, any anecdote, that fits into a prevailing media view will be magnified or ignored with that in mind. So if Dan Quayle misspells potato-e, it's news because it feeds the stereotype of Quayle as a lightweight. If Al Gore makes the same mistake, no one cares. The Bush checkout counter anecdote had legs because it fed a media consensus that he was out-of-touch.

Fitzwater also shows that many media big shots can't take a punch, at least not with any grace. One of Fitzwater's targets is Mike Wallace, the cbs and "60 Minutes'' star, whom he accuses of lying about an interview request and of general anti-conservative bias. The Fitzwater account is unflattering but less nasty than the average "60 Minutes'' skewering. Yet when Fitzwater was promoting his book in New York, Wallace tracked him down on the set of a tv show, haranguing him first by phone and then in person with a string of obscenities. Wallace demanded an apology until Fitzwater fled into the street without even doing the show--which, appropriately enough, was Comedy Central's "Politically Incorrect.''

The former Kansas farm boy is mostly sparing of the two presidents he served, even on matters of relatively minor embarrassment. He includes a long, and exulting, section on Mikhail Gorbachev's state visit to Washington in 1987. That summit sold itself as a public relations matter, but Fitzwater overlooks the real pr drama of that week: the personal Cold War between Nancy Reagan and Raisa Gorbachev. Since Fitzwater does report getting a cold-blooded call from Mrs. Reagan when she was ousting Donald Regan as chief of staff, perhaps he wants to stay on her good side even now.

The author is less generous to many of his administration colleagues, whose foibles he reveals. George Shultz, Reagan's second secretary of state, had a habit of "snorting like Ferdinand the Bull'' and threatening his resignation at regular intervals. Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger was so intent on protecting his own caboose during Iran-Contra that he browbeat Reagan into reversing himself on a small factual point. (Fitzwater thinks aides are supposed to take such hits for the boss.) And all-around Machiavell Dick Darman was a bully who liked to scream at his lessers.

Especially arresting is Fitzwater's account of how the two presidents fired three different chiefs of staff--Donald Regan, John Sununu, and Sam Skinner. News reports have focused on how all three men cried when they finally got the word. But the accounts provided here are much more interesting as a commentary on the fleeting nature of power in Washington. Presidents who must shed a friend as a political liability are as ruthless in the end, as they have to be. (It was the high-minded Gladstone, after all, who said that the first requisite for a prime minister was that he be "a good butcher.") But even if the entire world knows the axe is coming, the men whose necks are exposed are invariably surprised when it falls. Of course, the schadenfreude in the press corps at these beheadings is palpable. Anyone who is ever offered a top administration job should read these pages from Fitzwater before accepting.
The biggest disappointment in the book is that it includes nothing on the Panama incursion and Gulf War, which together consumed nearly half the Bush presidency. Fitzwater's excuse is that others will write about them. But this allows Fitzwater to avoid discussing the difficult matter of how freely a free press should be able to cover a war, or how and how often television pictures influence foreign-policy decisions. Fitzwater might have discussed how those pictures played in the premature ending of the Gulf War, our entry to Somalia, and the decision to stay out of Bosnia in the Bush years. Unlike some press secretaries, Fitzwater had the access to know what happened. Instead we get a breathless account of two summit meetings and some give-and-take with Gorbachev, who Fitzwater once called a "drugstore cowboy", to much silly Beltway consternation.

The haphazard influence of modern communications on policy is apparent in Fitzwater's account of the aborted coup against Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega in October 1989. Fitzwater records National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, on the phone to the Pentagon, showing that he knows less about the coup than the local CNN correspondent. "How about the bridge?'' Scowcroft asks. "CNN says the bridge is open.'' There then follows a hilarious, if disconcerting, exchange during which John Sununu recommends using U.S. troops to block a causeway, based not on what the Pentagon knows but on what CNN is reporting. Cooler heads than Sununu's--which means just about any head--prevailed.

It was another press leak--this one to the Wall Street Journal--that probably forced Bush's eventual decision to topple Noriega. The CIA station chief in Panama vented to the Journal that the United States had had contact with coup leaders, implying some American help, but had backed away at crunch time. Fitzwater had told the press the United States wasn't involved, because Scowcroft had told him it wasn't, apparently because he didn't know either. Fitzwater says the news was in the CIA's written daily briefing for Bush, but in "such an elliptical way" that no one at a senior level had noticed. But this would seem to understate the ineptitude or duplicity. Either Fitzwater's superiors lied to him about their knowledge, or else the CIA was free-lancing a little too freely. This is remarkable considering that Bush was both a former director of Central Intelligence and a president preoccupied with foreign matters. In any event, Fitzwater admits that he took the rap for lying to the press rather than reveal the president's ignorance of events. The press "had us on incompetence and lying, a deadly combination for a politician", Fitzwater admits. Bush later used an incident involving a U.S. soldier as a pretext for invading Panama, but making amends for the failed coup was a powerful motive.

The Panama episode shows that only a foolish administration thinks it can fool the public for long. The American government is so porous that the truth almost always emerges, especially when there is internal division or controversy. The Bush team was more disciplined than most but even it couldn't prevent leaks. Fitzwater records Bush's pique when David Hoffman of the Washington Post reported the story of his scheduling a first summit with Gorbachev a day before the official announcement, breaking a promise Bush had made to the Soviet leader. But the leak almost certainly came from James Baker's team at State, which was tight with Hoffman going back to the Reagan days. Bush should have screamed at Baker, not Hoffman.

A smart administration also brings its main press aide into the room where decisions are made. This makes it much easier to avoid getting caught in the kind of lies that damage credibility or promote a reputation for flip-flopping, ˆ la Panama. This doesn't mean a press secretary has to make everything public. In fact, one of Fitzwater's personal rules for dealing with the press is that, yes, "You can run and hide.'' Sometimes you just have to tell reporters you can't talk to them about a subject. This is an easier sell if you've built up credibility with reporters along the way.

Try as he might, Fitzwater never could persuade George Bush to like the press. More than any recent president, Bush courted reporters with invitations, late movies, private lunches. For Bush, all politics was personal, even press politics. So he felt stung when the same reporter he had feted the night before would tatoo him the next day. Fitzwater says he gave different advice. "'Treat them like professionals', I advised him, 'and they will be your friends. But treat them like friends and they will betray you every time.'" Fitzwater knows the first laws of press relations and foreign policy are the same: Know thy enemy.

Essay Types: Book Review