The Inoperative
As Nixon's spokesperson, the late Ron Ziegler took the ''press'' out of
press secretary. Relations between the president and reporters have never
been the same.
By David Greenberg, 2/23/2003
ITH HIS DAN QUAYLE-like cadences and condescending postures, White House
Press Secretary Ari Fleischer-a career flack who never worked as a
journalist-has drawn his share of barbs from the media. But last spring The
New Republic's Jonathan Chait subjected the Bush front man to an especially
harsh critique. Marveling half-seriously that Fleischer had ''broken new
ground in the dark art of flackdom,'' Chait detailed a list of ploys-''the
Audacious Fib,'' ''the Process Non Sequitur,'' ''the Rules''-that the press
secretary has routinely used to thwart journalists. In the face of
Fleischer's ''breathtaking audacity,'' Chait suggested, the very enterprise
of inquiring into White House policy may be obsolescing into pointlessness.
But Ari Fleischer has nothing on Ron Ziegler.
Thirty years ago, Ziegler-Richard Nixon's press secretary, who died Feb. 10
at age 63-was considered as innovative and irritating in his deceptions as
Fleischer is today. In the Columbia Journalism Review in 1974, one reporter
listed ''eight distinct techniques to frustrate newsmen'' utilized by
Ziegler and his deputy, Gerald Warren. They ranged from ''the broad-and
meaningless-statement'' and ''the I'll-try-to-find-out ploy'' to ''the
carefully constructed deception'' and ''the Lie.'' Although some were
''quite imaginative,'' the writer noted, others were ''so crude that they
served principally to insult the intelligence of the reporters present at
the briefings.''
Ziegler's passing deserves more reflection than the fleeting notices it has
received, for his tenure betokened the arrival of a new era in the
contentious relationship between presidents and the news media. Chief
executives had quarreled with journalists since 1789, but it was under
Nixon that a newly bloated corps of correspondents found itself deprived of
meaningful access to the president-and pitted instead against a
tight-lipped, hostile spokesman. The result was a widening vortex of
corrosive suspicion.
After Nixon was elected in 1968, he surprised journalists by appointing his
long-time press aide Herb Klein to head the newly created Office of
Communications, which was to handle not just the press corps but a
lengthening catalogue of public-relations functions. The 29-year-old
Ziegler, still boyish with his slicked-back hair and baby-fat cheeks, was
thrust into the post of press secretary. This choice of the greenhorn
Ziegler to answer their queries struck journalists as a snub, a show of
contempt toward a group for which Nixon was known to harbor an abiding animus.
Unlike the soft-spoken, crinkly-eyed Klein, a former newsman who enjoyed a
fluid rapport with the press, Ziegler was a sometime advertising man who
had worked with Nixon's aide-de-camp H. R. Haldeman at the J. Walter
Thompson agency. Traditionally, presidents had plucked their spokesmen from
the ranks of the Fourth Estate-to show goodwill toward the reporters and to
glean insights into the corps' workings. Often these ex-hacks were beloved
by the press, as was Kennedy's mouthpiece Pierre Salinger, a round-faced,
convivial drinker and cigar smoker who trafficked in political storytelling
and repartee.
Yet Nixon rejected such an approach. He had long since concluded that the
press loathed him unalterably. His success would rest on keeping the media
at bay while he appealed directly to the public.
Having no residual loyalty to old friends in the press corps, no training
that inculcated a belief in ''the public's right to know,'' Ziegler met
Nixon's criteria. ''Nixon was able to program Ziegler,'' Chuck Colson said.
''...I mean, Ziegler was like Charlie McCarthy. He would go out and say
exactly what Nixon said, with exactly the tone Nixon wanted.''
From one standpoint, Nixon's strategy worked, at least initially: In his
first year in office, Nixon enjoyed more favorable coverage than any
20th-century predecessor save Theodore Roosevelt (or so concluded a study
by Fairfield University political scientist John Orman). Moreover, at other
points in his presidency-his trips to Russia and China, his 1972
re-election campaign-Nixon also basked in positive notices.
On the other hand, a visitor to the Nixon White House's press room would
surely have formed a different conclusion: Here was a tinderbox of
resentment. As Timothy Crouse, Joseph Spear, and others have recounted,
beat reporters writhed in exasperation over Ziegler's robotic lack of
candor. Lacking the charm, the skills, and perhaps even the inclination to
put reporters at ease, Ziegler struck them as self-satisfied and imperious.
The Washington Post's Ben Bradlee sized up Ziegler with his characteristic
tartness, calling the flack ''a small-bore man, over his head, and riding a
bad horse.''
The horse, of course, was Nixon. Watergate would soon expose his enemies
lists peopled with columnists, the use of the IRS and FBI to intimidate or
punish reporters, the plans to strip the Washington Post Company of its
broadcast licenses. But even before those disclosures, analysts decried the
Nixon administration's obsession with controlling the news and its
hostility to the First Amendment.
But it was at Ziegler's morning briefings that the mutual contempt between
press and presidency flared up on a daily basis. Ritualistically, the
correspondents would try to pin Ziegler down on questions they knew he
would never answer. He replied with an opaque business-world twaddle that
violated all norms of linguistic aesthetics. ''I am completed on what I had
to say.'' ''This is getting to a point beyond which I am not going to
discuss beyond what I have said.'' Reporters dubbed these gems of
obfuscation ''Zieglerisms,'' ''zigzags,'' or ''ziggies.''
For all Ziegler's needless contrariness, the conflict between him and his
inquisitors was also institutional. The White House press corps had swollen
from the small coterie that congregated as Teddy Roosevelt shaved to a
teeming mass by the late 1960s. If Ziegler sounded like a corporate drone,
it was partly because the size and complexity of the Fourth Estate required
a corporate-managerial response, a system to regulate this new professional
entity.
For their part, the White House reporters were chafing at their
occupational strictures. Competing with the counterculture's iconoclastic
muckrakers, and inspired by the stylistic daring of the New Journalism,
mainstream journalists were moved to inject more opinion and attitude-and
more disdain-into their copy.
So Ziegler's smarmy approach could only dispose the reporters negatively
toward him and the president. And once the Watergate dam broke in 1973, he
became a veritable piata. While many reporters channeled their adversarial
spirit into fruitful investigations, others simply adopted a snide,
captious tone. Referring to the exploits of the youthful Woodward and
Bernstein, one regular confessed, ''We felt we'd been shown up by a pair of
kids, so some people tried to prove their manhood by bellowing at old Ron.''
On April 17, 1974, Ziegler claimed that new information about White House
involvement in Watergate had surfaced and that his previous statements were
no longer ''operative.'' What he really meant, said another Nixon aide,
David Gergen, was that ''We have been lying from the start.'' The
inoperative remark sank the hapless operative, who thereafter was taunted
at briefings. Battered and drained, Ziegler later complained that reporters
had ''crossed the line... from aggressiveness to belligerence.''
After Watergate passions ebbed, Ziegler was somewhat forgiven. For all his
smugness and organization-man banality, he hadn't committed any crimes. His
former adversaries also appreciated that Nixon had placed him in an
impossible bind by denying him information (or, worse, furnishing him with
falsehoods). Besides, it was Nixon's reclusiveness and secretiveness that
had denied the press any glimpses into White House policymaking, burdening
the exchanges with Ziegler with more weight than they could bear. Granted
partial absolution, Ziegler played out his final decades in what was really
his natural milieu: as the figurehead for the National Association of Truck
Stop Operators and, later, the National Association of Chain Drugstores.
Since Nixon, the press pack has never enjoyed the kind of intimacy with a
president that it experienced with Teddy or even Franklin Roosevelt. Press
secretaries now typically rise through the ranks as political staffers,
with little or no journalistic training. Occasionally an exceptional
charmer, like the Clinton administration's Mike McCurry, acquits himself
well as the substitute face of the administration, but on the whole the job
has become untenable.
A press secretary, after all, must serve the president's ends of preserving
executive control of information in a vast and highly complex government-a
job made harder during administrations that overvalue secrecy, like Nixon's
or the current President Bush's. At the same time, the chief flack is still
judged by the standards of an earlier day, when he functioned as something
like the Fourth Estate's provost, its delegate to the administration. This
tension has now marked and marred a whole generation of presidential-press
relations, as exchanges between reporters and flacks become ritualized into
a hollow game of show-and-don't-tell. Of this deleterious practice, the
late Ron Ziegler was both an unwitting pioneer and an unfortunate casualty.
David Greenberg, a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts &
Sciences, is the author of ''Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image,''
forthcoming from Norton.
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