This article was originally published by Albert Gore ‘69 when he was a senior at Harvard College. It was featured in the first-ever issue of the Harvard Political Review: Spring, 1969. The article is based on his senior thesis, published the same year, “The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency, 1947-1969”
When television makes its way into a Presidential institution, it creates problems that have to be faced and solved, often leading to the evolution of new procedures which in themselves create change. The adaptation often comes only after a great deal of time and trouble, but it does inevitably come.
The press conference has been chosen to demonstrate the problems of changing for two reasons: first, it has evolved into the most critical institution for relations with the communications media where the transition from newsprint has been sharply felt; second, the press conference, more than any other White House institution, was ideally suited for television. It was exactly a half-hour long so it fit neatly into the established time grid; it was by nature an impromptu, informal exchange of ideas, firmly establishing the President as the central figure in every area the questions touched upon; and the onstage audience reporters, curious yet respectful, was easy for the viewer to identify with — thereby encouraging attention to the President’s every word.
The major problem that arose with the initial decision to televise the press conference in 1955 was how to deal with any mistakes the President might make. On television, the President would no longer be able to retract and clarify them; they would instantly become part of the record. In a sense, this is a manifestation of the continuing struggle between the Presidents’ apprehension toward informality and television’s demand for it. This controversy was never in the spotlight, but in 1955-56, it was much discussed within Eisenhower’s administration. It did not pass completely unnoticed in the press; James Reston wrote, “What everybody does not know, is just how far this habit of casual or inaccurate official talk, inflated by the modern techniques of mass communications, has added to the political confusion and cynicism of our time.” The problem is vitally important in that, unless it had been faced and resolved by Eisenhower, his successor would never have been able to continue the evolution and televise his press conferences live.
It was out of concession to the fear of mistakes that James Hagerty, Eisenhower’s press secretary, decided to review and edit the films before they were released. This fear, however, was never realized. On the contrary, after television entered the conference, there were fewer mistakes than ever before. The reason for this is probably that the President’s attitude toward the conference was changed. Before the advent of television, the President was much less guarded in his statements.He had the prerogative of giving background and of going off the record completely. If he made a mistake, he could often correct it before it got into print; and if a mistake was printed, it was still attributed to a “White House spokesman,” or some such euphemism. Consequently the President was often not as careful or well-prepared as he might have been, and as a result, he sometimes got into trouble.
One example is President Truman’s famous answer to a question in 1951 about the use of atomic weapons in Korea. He replied “the use of the atom bomb was “always under consideration.”” The result was a worldwide controversy. Prime Minister Atlee immediately flew to Washington “for consultation”.
There are other less significant examples, such as Truman’s “red herring” reference to Communists in government, but it is clear that a member of Truman’s administration is correct in saying that “the ability to check mistakes gave a reassurance that was more apparent than real.” In other words, the introduction of television forced the President to have a proper regard for the import of his words. In 1943, Charles Beard wrote that the President,
“…should make his public utterances under a sense of responsibility as grave as the occasion which elicits them…I believe no President should be encouraged or forced to speak offhand on any grave question of national policy. I would have every President…mature his convictions for public declaration, express them carefully, weigh his words, under the sense of responsibility that ought always to be attached to his position as executive head of our nation.”
The press conference was never really considered a “grave occasion”, yet when television was admitted, the President became conscious that all of America and much of the world could watch and hear his views just as he expressed them. Consequently, he was forced to “weigh his words”, and “express them carefully.” President Eisenhower often took refuge in his famous “nomadic syntax”, as Tom Wicker called it, but the important thing is that he made no significant mistakes. Hagerty never once had to delete a passage where Eisenhower was in error. On one occasion in fact, Hagerty used the film as proof that the transcript was in error. (In response to question about a proposal by Chairman Khrushchev, Eisenhower had said, “I think it’s crazy.” The reporters thought he said, “I think he’s crazy.”)
By the time Eisenhower was elected to a second term, Hagerty’s review of the films had become very perfunctory, and by the end of the administration, it was no more than a formality.
As a result of the President’s new attitude toward the press conference, the pre-conference briefing was expanding into what has become a White House institution. Because the President could not “weigh his words” adequately during the two-second interval between question and response, he was forced to do it before the conference began. This “briefing” has steadily increased in time and in the amount of material covered until it is now a kind of self-lubricating deadline that familiarizes the President with a vast amount of detail that he otherwise might never have dealt with. It is a means of keeping in touch with low levels of bureaucracy at a time when the executive branch is constantly expanding. It has also become a deadline for all the various branches of the executive departments; at frequent intervals, they must organize their thoughts, review and rationalize what they are doing.
The briefing was begun by Charlie Ross during President Truman’s administration, after the President made a few “embarrassing bobbles.” But it was never very efficient. Ross would gather material on likely questions, then with other members of his staff, he would meet with Truman for a half-hour to an hour before the conference began. The chief value of these sessions lay in Ross’ ability to fire sharp, pointed questions at Truman. When Roger Tubby took over after Ross’ death in 1951, he wasn’t able to take the necessary tone and the sessions lost much of their effectiveness.
The real institutionalization of the pre-conference briefing came with Hagerty. He systematized it, and made it an efficient tool, by keeping track of everything that went on between conferences. More importantly, he developed the practice of drawing suggester quotations from the various departments. This was the beginning of the real usefulness of the sessions: Eisenhower hinted at the developing use of the pre-conference briefing in a 1956 conference when he was asked what value the press conference had: “… it does a lot of things for me personally. For one thing, at least once a week I have to take half an hour to review in my own mind what has happened during the week, so that I don’t make errors, just through complete inadvertence and failure to look them [the facts] up.”
When Pierre Salinger took over, the process became even more important. Much more time was devoted to gathering information and more people were involved. However, Salinger’s most important refinement was within the executive departments: in most cases, experienced reporter were mde department press secretaries. As a consequence, the pre-conference preparation was extended throughout the executive branch. In a slightly different context, Theodore Sorenson spoke of how a television appearance creates a deadline within the administration: as soon as the time and topic were announced, “the departments were concerned … however laggard they may have been up to then, will make certain that their views are crystallized and forcefully represented.
When President Johnson took office, the pre-conference briefing remained essentially as it was under Kennedy, with only a few changes. Much has been written about Salinger’s procedures but nothing about Moyer’s, so perhaps it would be useful to describe it here.
Two days before a press conference was to be held, Moyers called every department to request a list of expected questions and suggested answers. The departments then went to work and by 3pm the next afternoon, they each sent the prepared material to Moyer’s office. That evening and night, Moyers and his staff would carefully sift through all the briefs and organize them into a large
black notebook which Moyers took to the President by 10pm. Johnson would study the material into the early morning and then go to sleep. The next morning, 5 or 6 members of the staff would meet with the President either in his bedroom or over breakfast, and for a half-hour to an hour, the President would supplement what he had studied by “asking questions to try and flush out what he needed to know.”
The importance of all this, in addition to its primary purpose, was in Moyers’ words that “It gave the President a real sense of cohesion that he might not have otherwise had.” This view closely parallels the statement by President Eisenhower quotes above.
Ron Zeigler’s procedure in the Nixon White House is essentially the same with two exceptions. A larger amount of material is given to the President, and he goes over it by himself without give-and-take with his staff. The importance, however, is the same: the President’s perspective on bureaucracy is broadened, and he is able to keep in touch with department programs at an earlier stage in their development. After Nixon’s first two sessions, his director of communications, Herbert Klein, noted that they were important in giving the President “an impression of what’s going on.”
All of this has come about as a result of television’s entry into the press conference. Because there is no longer a margin of error, the President is forced to view the conference much more seriously, and to prepare himself much more adequately. Luckily, it is easy to anticipate questions. Hagerty said that he almost always “batted 900,” and Valenti, Moyers, and Klein all agreed that it was possible to predict nine out of ten questions on any given day. But in order to do so, the President must prepare for ten times as many questions as are asked, and as a result, he has been forced to improve and formalize communication within the executive branch.
The second major problem caused by television’s entry into the press conference was a much broader one. The President was forced to confront the anguish of the written press face to face, as television began destroying their traditional roles in its spare time. The institution of the press conference — with its more or less fixed structure — offers a singular opportunity to study the change in the President-press-public equation brought about by television.
The Washington press corps only reflects the trauma of newspapers all over the country, but because of television’s particular attraction to the President (and to the press conference itself), they feel it somewhat more sharply. And because of the President’s particular and traditional dependence on the press conference reporters, he has been forced to meet the problem of smoothing their transition. The four Presidents involved — Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon — have met the problem at four different stages, and all have approached it in different ways. Before describing how they approached the problem, it is best to describe in specific terms how the reporters have felt the transition.
There were four changes made by television that irritated the press corps: first, it caused the conferences to be much less frequent. This was partly due to the increased importance and implicit risk involved in a televised conference, and partly because it simply took much more time to prepare for. Second, the nature of the questions changed for several reasons. The cameras seemed to have an effect on the reporters, and in James Reston’s words, “encouraged the theatrical characters in our business rather than the most thoughtful.”
Third, television drastically cut down the amount of information that came out of the conference. One obvious reason for this was the elimination of “off-the-record” answers, but the important reason was more subtle. When the cameras were turned on, reporters stopped asking “supplemental questions”–that is, they refused to follow the same line of questioning as the person right before them: Everyone wanted to ask his own question.
The result of this for the President is that he is able to get away with pre-polished answers lacking any depth. It has stripped the press conference of any value it might have once had for putting the President on the spot and probing his thoughts. He now tells the press only what he wants to.
The fourth complaint was more direct and more accurately reflective of the reporter’s real concern. “It has become,” wrote Tom Wicker, “more an instrument of Presidential power than a useful tool of the press.” In other words, the reporter saw his traditional role rapidly disappearing. The words he used to diligently transcribe were heard by the country and digested before he could make his way out of the conference. “He has become”, writers Douglass Cator, “an unpaid extra in a gigantic show.”
When President Eisenhower faced these problems, they were not yet acute, probably because delaying the broadcast eased the transition. The major factor in squelching criticism, however, was James Hagerty. Universally acknowledged as “a press secretary extraordinair,” Hagerty has a close rapport with the press corps. He claims that the complaints trailed off very quickly and the reporters “learned to live with it.” In one session with reporters, hagerty silenced a barrage of criticism with the reply, “it’s the twentieth century–second half.”
Slowly, the reporters started to adapt to their new role. The Restons stopped asking questions, others began; a former editor of Newsweek explains,
“For many years on Newsweek, I enforced a standing rule that no member of our staff ever asked a question at a Presidential news conference. If we got an answer, all the information was available to the press associations and daily papers – all of whom used it before we could. But when, under the Eisenhower administration, cameras were brought in…it became good publicity to have questions asked by representatives of Newsweek..”
There were several reasons why the criticism never got out of hand during the Eisenhower administration. First of all, there was little chance for the reporters to make any headway: the instant the conference was opened to television, the President became less dependent on them and their bargaining power was automatically drastically reduced. Second, because of Hagerty’s personality and the decision to delay release, the reporters never became fully aware of what the trend meant for them.
The problem entered the second and critical phase when John Kennedy was elected. During his three years in office, he was forced to choose between the old President – press – public equation and the new President – press – public equation that the television created. Kennedy’s initial decision to televise his press conference live was only the next step in the natural evolution of television in the White House. Eisenhower had gradually proven over the last eight years that the danger of such a conference was minimal and Kennedy himself had come independently to the same conclusion in as early as 1959.
At any rate, the decision to go live was made public very soon after the election. Pierre Salinger reports only half-jokingly that his announcement in Florida provoked, “…a near riot among the White House correspondents.” It is highly probable that there was a lot of resentment built up during the Eisenhower administration that surfaced all at once. For the first time, the reporters were forced to realize what was happening to their traditional roles. Joseph Kennedy told one reporter bluntly, “Jack doesn’t need you bastards anymore, he can go right to the people.” After Salinger’s announcement, frantic senior correspondents scheduled luncheon meetings with him to try to get the Administration to reconsider. James Beston met with Salinger for two hours, telling him what a terrible thing it was, how it would make the conference useless and so forth.
The reporters’ shook was heightened, and their worst fears realized when the first conference was scheduled for 6:00 in the evening (Jan. 25). Clearly, the purpose of the conference had been changed completely. After it was over, the President’s first question was, “I wonder how many people were watching.”
After this first conference, the reporter’s unhappiness with the format began to find its way into print. Sometimes, their anger was belatedly directed to the demise of the “no direct-quotation” rule and the off-the-record-answer, both of which had disappeared eight years before. At other times, they criticized the growth in the size of the press conference, a trend which began long before the introduction of television. Their underlying concern, however, was that television had changed the nature of the conferences: it was no longer a device for aiding and informing reporters. Instead it had become a new means of reaching the people directly, “an instrument of Presidential power.”
President Kennedy dealt with these criticisms by maintaining personal contacts with the White House press corps. He had many friends there already and staunchly refused to give them up: the fact that the press corps as a whole generally liked and admired the President kept the friction down.
Kennedy’s strategy for mollifying the press corps was to vastly increase the number of background conferences. (His predecessor had given very few). He met with small groups of reporters at private parties and met with them singly at the White House. This tended to satisfy their need for a steady flow of information from the White House, and at the same time allowed the President to go off the record to explain the reasons behind some of his decisions. There were, however, two drawbacks with this technique. The time listation was one, the size of the press corps prohibited anything approaching frequent meetings. Second, the backgrounder often backfired: instead of producing a favorable response, it often produced exactly the opposite. By late 1963, the President told Charles Bartlett that he was considering doing away with backgrounders altogether. His reasoning was that after a reporter received an in-depth interview, “..he had to go back and belt you just to prove he was independent…” Presumably, the more influential and prestigious the reporter was, the more this reaction would set in.
Essentially, during his administration, President Kennedy made a conscious choice between the written press and television. He determined that the advantage of reaching large numbers of people far outweighed the disadvantages of alienating the writing press corps. It is important that the choice was made consciously – or more accurately, reaffirmed consciously. In early 1962, several members of the White House staff were worried that the wrong choice had been made. They reasoned that since the conferences were not televised in prime time, not enough people were seeing them to make it worth all the trouble. Several proposals were made to alter the format, but the President remained adamant.
As a result, however, he requested in June of 1962 a survey of the effectiveness of the press conference. In many ways, this survey was crucial to the fate of the press conference. If it had shown negative results and proven his advisors correct, then the President would have been forced to choose between limited alternatives. He could not regularly hold conferences in the evening: the networks wouldn’t allow that. He might very well have chosen the alternative of limiting television’s coverage of the conference and concentrated on accommodating the reporters.
The results of the survey were interesting and unexpected. It turned out that the President’s advisors had been quite correct – relatively few people saw the conferences live. However, the conference engendered television news and by the time various segments of the conference were repeated at 6:00PM, 6:30PM, and 11:00PM (EST), a fantastic number of people had seen some part of the conference. Moreover, those who had seen excerpts on the news were much clearer about what the President had said than those who had seen it live. All in all, 90% of those polled had seen some part of the news conference, and 95% of those polled thought it was a good idea. The most commonly used phrases were, “it was a worthwhile experience,” and “it gives you a feeling of democracy.”
All of this was encouraging news for President Kennedy: there was no longer any doubt about toward whom the press conferences would be directed. As for the White House press corps (and newspapers generally), they were no longer intermediaries between the President and the public: indeed, for the most part, the reporters even stopped taking notes. They adapted to television themselves, and began to fall roughly into two categories º interpretive reporters and television critics.
The third phase of the transition to television began in early 1964 with President Johnson’s first meeting with the press. Just as his predecessor’s first news conference (held during prime time), was symbolic of the general approach taken during the remainder of his administration, so Johnson’s first conference was curiously symbolic of the general approach he would take. First of all, it was announced only two hours in advance. This habit was destined to plague Johnson’s relations with not only the written press but even more so with the television networks who needed time to set up their cameras and clear the air for a “special address.” Secondly, Johnson seemed unmistakably reluctant to face the cameras. They seemed to keep him from being himself.
There are two possible explanations for this phenomenon, both from sources close to Johnson. Moyers feels that the President was simply convinced that he was bad on television, but another aide thins the problem was more specifically a fear of being compared with Kennedy’s virtuoso performances at press conferences. Walter Lippmann seemed to agree with the latter view and felt it was absolutely justified: “I don’t blame him for not trying to do what Kennedy did with the press conference. It would be like asking Johnson to sing “Tosca.” Whatever his reason, Johnson attempted to reverse the evolution of the press conference. Unfortunately, the process had gone too far to be stopped: the televised press conference, by 1964, had become one of the role requirements of the modern Presidency. As a result of Kennedy’s proven success, the public and even the press corps, had come to expect the television conference. Whether or not Johnson was “bad” on television or whether or not he wanted to hold his press conference on television, was essentially irrelevant. It was, as his predecessor called it, “one of the tests of the President.” Many of Johnson’s troubles with the press are directly attributable to the fact that he failed this test. “The credibility gap,” says one advisor, “was between the media and the President.”
Instead of accepting the established format of the press conference, Johnson tried to get around it in a number of ways. He attempted to use the live television conferences as only one type of press conference among many, and began to experiment with a wide variety of formats. The most famous of these was a walking press conference, during which the President would walk his dogs around the White House lawn followed by the press corps en masse. Although this was probably aimed at limiting television coverage of the conference, it had the concomitant effect of infuriating the press corps. The reporters had to run alongside, jotting notes as they went, training to hear the questions and answers. In effect, Johnson tried to make himself a moving target. In addition, the live television conference had come to be thought of as the press conference and anything else was something less. This is the reason for the wide variation in the attempted tabulations of how many conferences Johnson actually held. It also explains why the President and his advisors could not understand the many criticisms of Johnson’s infrequency in meeting with the press. They felt he went out of his way to hold “press conferences” as often as he did.
The other and even more harmful stratagem was to hold press conferences on an hour’s notice, minutes notice, or no notice at all. Some observers felt this was done out of a well cultivated compulsion to “hold all his options,” while others suspected it was to limit the reporters’ preparation time and to neutralize difficult questions, particularly as the war was escalated. Both views probably hold some truth, but the last seems more plausible. For one thing, Moyers confirmed that he was told about these “impromptu conferences” well before the President announced them to the press. This, of course, is natural and customary: the Press Secretary must make physical arrangements for a conference in advance. But, if the President knows a day in advance when his conference will be, then why would he wait until 10 minutes beforehand to make it known to the press? The answer, probably, is that he wanted to neutralize the questions.
In a sense, this harks back to the President’s natural fear of mistakes, a fear that is always present in the new press conference. This problem, however, was seemingly resolved much earlier. It is just possible that the reason for Johnson’s apprehension lay back in his first conference on February 4, 1964, during the course of which had made an obvious error in answering a question about De Gaulle’s proposal to neutralize Southeast Asia. This was his first and last serious mistake in a news conference and it provoked no controversy in the press, but it is possible to speculate that it clouded the President’s personal perspective on the danger of being put on the spot in future news conferences.
As the irritation of the press corps gre, Johnson tried hard to reconcile their differences. His strategy was, again, the backgrounder and he used it more often than any of his predecessors ever had. Once, in March, 1965, he even used it at a televised press conference. When the half hour was over, he announced he would have a backgrounder and turning to the cameras, said, “Okay, shut them off, come on, we’re in a hurry.” He threw open his appointment schedule to practically any reporter who wanted to see him and as a result spent many hours each day trying to nullify the increasing criticism. the problem with this technique was two-fold. First, it consumer a great deal of the President’s time. It is hard to fault Johnson on that score, for as Moyers said, he enjoyed the backgrounders, “the was the way he relaxed.” Nevertheless, it became a problem for as Richard Neustadt writes in Presidential Power,
“One difficulty with the press an an advisor to a President is that he has had enough to crowd is calendar without attending closely to debate on prospects which for him are past…[no one] move[s] in precisely the same time-dimension as the [President].”
The second problem with Johnson’s backgrounders was that he did not seem to understand the “reaction mechanism” that President Kennedy described. As a result, he was hurt by critical columns and stories and he counter-reacted. It has been said that by the time he left office, William S. White and David Lawrence were his only remaining close friends in the press corps–the only two who continued to write favorable columns.
As a last resort, the President tried “being himself” in the televised press conference of November 17, 1967. The result was astounding: Johnson’s “new style” was the lead story that night on both Huntley-Brinkly and Walter Cronkite. In the Sunday Times, Max Frankel wrote,
“Curiously, many of Mr. Johnson’s aides long urged him to put some of his temper and tempest on public display. And when he did so… he was applauded at once for “reasserting leadership “and for finally showing himself “as he really is.” This “new” perambulatory, gesticulating President was, indeed, a vast improvement on the older model.”
Tragically, for reasons unknown to any of his aides, (at least among those that were interviewed) Johnson never repeated the performance.
The fourth and final phase of the transition began this January as President Nixon took office. Essentially, President Nixon’s press conference policy represents a return to Kennedy’s practice. He is continuing the evolution and identifying Johnson’s term as an aberration in the evolution. He has made the conference more informal by doing away with the podium, and by delivering only a short opening statement without notes (the fourth, on the ABM, was an exception: he read a 10 minute statement from a teleprompter). He is announcing his conference well in advance, and holding them on an average of once every two weeks. He and his advisors have concluded that the press conference format is “good television.” Consequently, he is using it in new and imaginative ways. For example, on his return from Europe in March, instead of the usual speech, he presented his “report to the nation” in the form of an hour long press conference in prime time (9PM). The decision to do so, says Herbert Klein, was made well before Nixon’s departure. AT this same conference President Nixon accomplished what most students of the press conference thought television had made impossible – the one-subject conference. He did so by the simple expedient of announcing at the outset that he would only take questions on Foreign policy.
The new President also plans to use the format to speak to private citizens chosen at random – such as he did during the ‘68 campaign. Whether or not these new techniques will survive, and whether Nixon will “pass the test” of the televised press conference remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: the transition to television is almost complete. Asked about the President’s use of backgrounders, Herb Klein replied, “He has held with the other reporters: after all, they need background as much as anybody else.”
[From the original 1969 printing:] Space constraints forced the editors to omit the footnotes. Much of the material in this article was obtained by the author in interviews with James C. Hagerty, Bill D. Moyers, Jack Valenti, Charles Bartlett, Herbert G. Klein, George Elsey, James Reston, and Richard Neustadt.
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Photo credit: PAUL CHINN/The Chronicle
