Wilson implored correspondents “to write from the country in and not from Washington out”—to “help me and help everybody else just by swathing my mind and other people’s minds in the atmosphere of the thought of the United States.”47 That plea revealed a fundamental misconception about the role of the White House press corps. Washington reporters were specifically assigned to report “out” rather than write “in”—to tell the nation what the president was thinking, not the other way around.
