The Presidents vs. the Press: The Endless Battle between the White House and the Media--from the Founding Fathers to Fake News

by Harold Holzer

Hence came the negative construction of the final First Amendment: not that the press was entitled to write what it pleased, but that Congress had no constitutional power to restrict it.

From Thomas Jefferson to Donald Trump, they have optimized the media platforms of the day to advance their arguments—Jefferson by pioneering “official” administration newspapers, FDR through Fireside Chats, Kennedy with his charismatic presence on television, and Trump by dominating an entirely new medium to transport his unfiltered views: in his case, Twitter.

Jefferson approached the end of his presidency certain that, as he put it, “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. . . . I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors.”

“I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus & Thucydides, for Newton & Euclid,” he reported, “and I find myself much the happier.”

When his government was not focusing on censorship, Lincoln proved one of the ablest presidential press manipulators ever, fully as adept at generating press coverage as he was at preventing it. Although he held no news conferences and sat for no real interviews as we now understand them, Lincoln adroitly pulled wires on his own behalf behind the scenes, confiding news to press allies, providing them with copies of his letters for publication (they became known as “public letters”), and periodically misleading newspaper critics.

He feared opposition from Democratic generals who had warned they would fight only for the Union, not for black freedom.

Delaying the order until his army could boost national morale with a battlefield victory, Lincoln used the time to convince the public, via the press, that if and when he did act against slavery, it would be for the purpose of winning the war, not elevating black people.

“[P]ublic sentiment is everything,” Lincoln once declared. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.

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.

Gossip loves a vacuum.

FDR learned from each leader’s successes—and failures. TR’s rise but his inability to rise again exposed the limits of personality-driven public relations and overt favoritism. And Wilson’s ineffective final years laid bare the limits of policy without affability.

By addressing millions of people live on radio, FDR had made news without newspapers, forever upending relations between presidents and the press. No longer would the public be required to wait a day to learn what a leader was thinking, or depend on party-affiliated print journalism to filter his messages. Beginning with Roosevelt, Americans would be in on news as it was being made by a president bold enough to bypass traditional media yet warm enough to address the people as “my friends.”

Remarkably, it was “one of the unwritten rules of the conference that once he has signified his intention of not answering a question, he must not be pressed on the same topic.”78

FDR occasionally brought surprise guests to bear witness or participate. Eleanor joined the throngs from time to time, especially at Hyde Park, conspicuously occupying herself with her knitting. At one memorable 1941 session, White House visitor Winston Churchill joined FDR, the smoke from his trademark cigar intermingling with the plume from Roosevelt’s omnipresent Camel. At one point, though he seldom took press questions at home, the British prime minister even stood on a chair to field a few inquiries from the American correspondents.

“If he could not control his publisher-critics,” David Brinkley observed, “he could go around them.” The airwaves gave FDR “a seamless pipeline running directly to the American people with nobody in between to turn the valves.”

Then, on signal, complete silence, a nod from the chief radio engineer,” and an announcement “stating tersely that the broadcast was coming live from” the White House from the president of the United States—“and finally, the clear resonant voice.”63 “My friends,” he began, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking—to talk with the comparatively few who understand the mechanics of banking, but more particularly with the overwhelming majority of you who use banks for the making of deposits and the drawing of checks. I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, and why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be.64

The down-to-earth broadcast captivated the country. “The people listened,” John Gunther reported, “. . . and felt that the man in the White House was their friend, as well as leader, who would save them from further catastrophe no matter what. Almost audible sighs of relief went up through the entire land.” Gunther marveled at FDR’s technique: “You could practically feel him physically in the room.”65 Echoed journalist Richard Strout: “[His] voice, calm, beautifully modulated, came right into the living room with you. You felt he was there talking to you, not to 50 million others, but to you personally.”

Roosevelt was not only an instinctive public relations wizard. He mastered powerful new media techniques and deployed them brilliantly to gain favor and undercut criticism, but never to divide and conquer the public—except to remind the powerful of their obligation to help the needy. Aside from legislative innovation and military might, press outreach became FDR’s most potent weapon in fighting both the Great Depression and the Greatest War.

JFK brought not only movie star looks to the political table but also a substantial if slightly padded résumé. Like TR a genuine war hero and published writer, he was also, like FDR, the scion of multigenerational political royalty and, like both Roosevelts, a graduate of prestigious Harvard. Plus he was wealthier than either of them, younger than any presidential candidate of the twentieth century, and the first credible Catholic nominee

Again like Roosevelt, Kennedy found a means to sidestep the print press entirely and target American audiences through the newest of the new media: in his case, television. If FDR possessed the perfect voice for radio, JFK boasted the perfect appearance for TV—and his New England–accented tenor proved irresistible, too. Exuding “youth,” “glamor,” and “excitement,” in the besotted assessment of CBS newsman Bob Schieffer, Kennedy “turned the black-and-white movie of American politics into blazing technicolor.”

On September 26, Kennedy and Nixon squared off for their initial debate at the studios of a CBS TV affiliate in Chicago. Few would remember what either nominee said that night. What stood out in high relief was how much Kennedy looked the part of a dynamic leader, and how much his opponent did not. Looking tanned and fit, JFK made Nixon appear haggard and weary by comparison. Genuinely weary he was: Nixon had recently spent time in the hospital recovering from a knee infection, shedding so much weight under a regimen of antibiotics that he had lost a shirt size—without bothering to buy new shirts. Worse, Nixon dressed for the event in a light-colored suit that blended into the pale backdrop, while Kennedy sported a dark outfit that contrasted vividly. Then, just before airtime, Nixon’s persistent five o’clock shadow began visibly emerging. To conceal it, aides applied cheap Shavestick makeup that made him appear practically “clown white,” in the words of a technician.

Although Nixon corrected his cosmetic malfunctions in time for the next three telecasts, the initial impression that he (and Kennedy) made on September 26 proved indelible. “It is a devastating commentary on the nature of television as a political medium,” Nixon later sourly observed, “that what hurt me the most in the first debate was not the substance of the encounter between Kennedy and me, but the disadvantageous contrast in our appearances.

In the thousand days of his presidency—a reign marked by such solid achievements as the establishment of the Peace Corps and the launch of America’s race to the moon, not to mention victory in a nail-biting war of nerves with the Russians—Kennedy all but weaponized the medium that had helped elect him. Under Kennedy, presidential news conferences became not “experiments” but events. In a way, they came to overshadow his accomplishments. Not even FDR could have made (or would have wanted to make) such a claim.

Reporters eventually came to rely on the sessions to unearth genuine news, even if many television viewers tuned into the broadcasts to bear witness to Kennedy’s radiant smile and regular flashes of humor. Like a skilled film actor emoting subtly for the big screen, JFK performed not alone for journalists but for home audiences. Subtle and restrained but exuding virile good looks and charm to spare, Kennedy became a genuine television star.

“This Administration intends to be candid about its errors,” he proclaimed, “for as a wise man once said: ‘An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.’” Besides, he added, “we expect you to point them out when we miss them.” But the president also doubled down on the warning he had expressed at his very first news conference back in January, when he had predicted that, from time to time, the government might withhold news in the national interest. The “need for a far greater public information,” he now elaborated, might indeed be outweighed by “the need for far greater official secrecy.”

Notwithstanding JFK’s fixation on television (“We couldn’t survive without TV,” he told Sorensen),78 he kept a sharp eye on print publications, believing their impact was longer lasting than fleeting impressions on the tube. “JFK was a compulsive reader—and pilferer—of newspapers and magazines,” Salinger testified. “When he came into my office and saw one he hadn’t read on my desk, he would invariably walk out with it. No one on the staff was safe from his shoplifting.”

“I found with Kennedy,” Lawrence frankly admitted, “that a round of golf could be much more fruitful in news terms than many formal presidential news conferences. John Kennedy thoroughly enjoyed ‘leaking’ a news story, and I was lucky enough to be the recipient.”

Kennedy might have enjoyed no well of residual goodwill from which to draw during the Bay of Pigs crisis had the public learned of his extramarital sexual adventures in and out of the White House. Fortunately for him, just as the press had shielded FDR for the innocent happenstance of his disability, it similarly chose to “protect” the public from news of JFK’s guilty pleasures.

At one point, he ordered an FBI wiretap on the paper’s chief military correspondent, Hanson Baldwin, over an alleged security breach. Then, when the paper’s Saigon correspondent David Halberstam began questioning the legitimacy of South Vietnam’s pro-U.S. Diem regime, Kennedy demanded that the Times’ new publisher, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, reassign the “28-year-old kid” to a less sensitive outpost. Sulzberger refused.105

The Cuban Missile Crisis signaled a turning point not only in the Cold War but in the even longer history of tension between presidents and the press. As James T. Graham has noted, it marked the last time a president could mold (or kill) press stories by appealing to friendship and patriotism.

The transcendent John F. Kennedy brought a New Frontier vigor to government by crossing a new frontier in presidential communications. As long as the medium of television dominated American politics and culture, no one seemed fresher, more vital, or more compelling.

To one White House aide, LBJ’s outdoor session amounted to “sheer madness—a press corps thirty to forty strong following him at a jog trot and elbowing each other for position where they could catch a few words.” Still, Johnson remained “enormously reluctant” to schedule formal news conferences. “He preferred impromptu affairs—presumably because they did not afford reporters time to think up ‘mean’ questions.”

LBJ was especially masterful—and the most intimidating—one-on-one. In intimate situations the six-foot-three Johnson could deploy his already notorious “Treatment”: looming close to a guest’s face, throwing a big arm around his victim’s shoulder, thumping his chest with the presidential index finger for emphasis, and offering ceaseless monologues and off-color jokes seemingly without pausing for breath.

“He’d get annoyed whenever someone criticized him or didn’t get the story right,” Califano told me of LBJ’s viewing habits. “If CBS didn’t use the lead he wanted, he’d say, ‘Call Cronkite.’”54 The president ended each long workday in his bedroom, surrounded by briefing papers but glued to any late-night current-events programming he could find in the era before twenty-four-hour cable news.55

Once appointed, Reedy not surprisingly found he had inherited a thankless task. Johnson, he claimed, “never understood the functioning of the press or its role. For him it was just a public relations outlet for whatever individual or group that was astute enough to manipulate the system.”

Reedy’s devotion never approached the levels the new president demanded—what LBJ colorfully described as the “kiss-my-ass-at-high-noon-in-Macy’s-window loyalty” he required of all subordinates.70 Inevitably, LBJ came to believe his new pressman was not doing enough to shield him from negative coverage.

LBJ remained “a frustrating paradox—the most accessible and yet the most thin-skinned of Presidents. He encourages contacts with [journalists], then reacts indignantly when their stories don’t come out as pro-Johnson.”

After 1965, Johnson’s relationship with the press—indeed his presidency as a whole—spiraled downward, cleaving along fault lines separating domestic policy achievements from foreign policy failures. On one side stood the laudatory triumphs of the Great Society, but on the other, the tragic morass of the Vietnam War.

Making matters more challenging, a new, damning catchphrase had taken firm hold in the American vernacular: the “credibility gap,” a clever appropriation of the U.S.-Soviet “missile gap” of which John Kennedy had spoken during his 1960 campaign. Now the words defined the perceived chasm between what the administration told journalists and the facts they subsequently uncovered. Punctuated by antiwar demonstrations and urban riots, it signaled growing distrust for the entire government notwithstanding its accomplishments.

LBJ might have withstood both the criticism of his TV image and the defection of sages like Walter Lippmann. But he could not survive the steady loss of support from mainstream media. In 1967, Life magazine, long an enthusiastic cheerleader for the Great Society, broke with Johnson over Vietnam. Then in January, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese launched the surprise Tet Offensive against one hundred targets in the South.120 On February 27, CBS-TV aired a dramatic field report from the war zone featuring the revered Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America.” After putting American casualties on display for the cameras, Cronkite ended the now-famous telecast by offering an unsparing editorial comment: “[I]t is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out . . . will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” According to legend, Johnson turned from his television set and lamented to staff aides: “If I have lost Cronkite I have lost middle America.”

Ironically, his liberality in this regard may have hastened his undoing. The unvarnished reports and images from Vietnam that horrified Americans came back to haunt a president who had implicitly defended the right of the media to gather and publish them.

In fact, Nixon’s political resurgence in 1968 would be built on the very resentments he had bared in 1962: his belief that the liberal press was biased against him; that it improperly tainted news coverage with editorial opinion; and that the media itself constituted an Eastern elite devoted to stifling conservative voices to the detriment of ordinary Americans, particularly white ones.

the combative Richard Nixon ushered in a seismic—and, as it turned out, permanent—shift in the long-standing relationship between presidents and the press. Adversarial wariness gave way to open combat, inquiry to inquisition. What followed were not only the opening skirmishes of what we now often call the culture wars, but the earliest technological innovations and regulatory retreats that heralded the reduced power of the television networks Nixon so despised.

Should the morals of this nation be offended and polluted in the name of freedom of speech and freedom of the press?”10 For the rest of his career, Nixon would grapple with that very question.

Perhaps most important for Nixon—and for history—he had shown he could marginalize hostile print journalism by communicating through other means.

He even survived a last-minute “October surprise” designed to tilt the race to Democratic opponent Hubert Humphrey: a Lyndon Johnson–ordered pause in the bombing of North Vietnam meant to trigger peace negotiations. Only later did it come to light that Nixon likely worked behind the scenes to sabotage the peace initiative. LBJ’s gesture might have been cynical and desperate, but Nixon’s attempt to undermine the cease-fire proposal may well have been treasonous.

On the other side sat the adrenalized speechwriting team, putting angry words flogging the networks into the mouth of a malleable surrogate intoxicated by his newfound prominence. Firmly in the take-no-prisoners camp was young staffer Roger Ailes, hired as Nixon’s television advisor to make him more likeable on the small screen. Ailes later said that the attack-dog methods he learned in the Nixon White House inspired his blueprint for operating Fox News as its founding CEO.

As these revolutionary ideas percolated, Agnew’s rants continued. Technically speaking, the president himself never uttered the divisive phrases Agnew mouthed during his oratorical road show. But in a sense, Nixon bears historical responsibility for every word. His speechwriters crafted them. His administration sanctioned their delivery, urged the media to cover Agnew’s appearances, and savored the results. Even while insisting that Nixon “can’t read speeches in advance,” communications director Klein admitted at the time to the Washington Post that “the President tells them which way to go.”53 And the direction in which he sent his speechwriters—and Spiro Agnew—set the rancorous tone that would permeate his entire presidency. As Pat Buchanan himself might have expressed it, Nixon became the villainous ventriloquist of venom.

His suspicion of the newspapers notwithstanding, Nixon had remained a dutiful reader of the big dailies. Each morning, he received the New York Times and Washington Post, and each night aides left the Washington Star at his bedside. But not even a workaholic like Nixon could keep up with the papers as Kennedy once had, especially once the administration went into crisis mode. So, each day at 7:00 A.M., Pat Buchanan began preparing a “daily press briefing” that summarized the most recent media and wire reports on the Nixon administration in a thick booklet.

Nixon’s secret “Enemies List,” exposed amid the avalanche of Watergate revelations in June 1973, cemented the administration’s reputation for harboring resentment and plotting vengeance. The McCarthy-era blacklist was long dead and discredited, so when Nixon’s roster of targets was revealed to the public, it transformed a number of its previously anonymous designees into heroes. More accurately the sum of several lists compiled by various administration staffers, it overflowed with both liberal activists and supposedly biased journalists. In addition to members of Congress (Bella Abzug), celebrities (Barbra Streisand), labor leaders (Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO), civil rights activists (Ralph Abernathy), and men who had been prominent in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations (Ted Sorensen and Jack Valenti respectively), the roster came to encompass more than sixty media people from magazines, television, and newspapers. The watch list featured three entire news organizations: the Washington Post, New York Times, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch.