Behind the Podium

TERENCE SMITH:

As the Clinton years draw to a close, we're joined by three spokesmen who communicated the administration's message to the public through the press. Mike McCurry began as the White House Press Secretary in January 1995 after a stint at the State Department; 539 briefings later, he stepped down in October of 1998, months before President Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives. He is now CEO of Grassroots.com. James Rubin became Assistant Secretary of State in August of 1997. From the podium at the State Department, he fielded questions on a variety of international crises, including the war in Kosovo, until last April. He is now writing and lecturing from his base in London. Kenneth Bacon has been presiding over the Pentagon press corps since September of 1994. He served under two Secretaries of Defense including the tense days of the NATO air war in Kosovo. He assumes a new role as president of Refugees International next month. Gentlemen, welcome to you all. Mike

McCurry, what thoughts did you take away from your experience at the White House about the art and science of communicating government policy through the media to the public?

MIKE McCURRY:

Well, what I remember when I took the job in January of 1995 I vowed to make it fun, and boy, it really was. It is a real joy to get up there and match wits with journalists, to feel like you're helping the American public understand something about what is going on in our government and having that dialogue every day. It's not a terribly efficient way to communicate information about what government is doing, but it is an awful lot of fun. And that's the main thing I remember about it — even the hard days.

TERENCE SMITH:

And you say that even though you had some very hard days obviously involving the Monica Lewinsky affair?

MIKE McCURRY:

I did, but, you know, the harder days were the ones that we were dealing with those things that involved people dying, and I remember the day that Ron Brown died in that crash — Ken I think probably remembers that day real well, too. Those were the really tough times. Sometimes it was just theater of the absurd and you could only be struck by the humor of the whole thing.

TERENCE SMITH:

Ken Bacon, you certainly had some days when the news was not too good and you're still at it. What have you learned from it?

KENNETH BACON:

I think — I think Mike is right. You have to try to have as much fun as possible. But mainly you have got to be credible. You can't lie. You can't answer questions if you don't know the answers. In other words, don't speculate. And at the State Department and certainly at the Defense Department we were frequently called upon to comment on fast breaking news. Sometimes the facts appear faster on CNN than they do in the Pentagon war room, so we have to wait for the facts to catch up with this. And I think; finally, if you do make a mistake, and we have all made mistakes from time to time, misstatements, correct it as soon as possible. You don't want to the let bad news or mistakes linger. And I guess also I would say you have to be as proactive as possible. You don't wait for the bad stories to come to you. You have to go out and try to head them off and try to deal with them as quickly as possible.

TERENCE SMITH:

Jamie Rubin, you have an even greater perspective now and a little distance in London. What did you take from the experience and what about Ken's point about the incredibly fast-paced news cycle?

JAMES RUBIN:

Well, it was a challenge, and as Mike said, going out there every day and trying to communicate obscure policies from Afghanistan to Iraq to Kosovo to the Middle East peace process knowing that any word that you use wrong, someone in a country is going to react badly to; that was a real challenge walking that tightrope every day.

TERENCE SMITH:

Mike McCurry, you possibly had that same experience, and I guess that has to do in part with what some critics say is preoccupation on the part of the press, the media, with process and with motive when you announce something.

MIKE McCURRY:

And with speed. Remember that the rules of the profession of journalism is to get the story quick, get the scoop, get the news out there and, you know, reporters can report what they know based on what they hear from two sources if they think something is true. They can go on the air and they can report that. We, as spokespeople, can't. We don't have that luxury. We have to be 100 percent that you get, looking for that one piece of information that someone neglected to tell someone higher up, and that's a very painstaking process. So it does take time. I agree with Jamie. The other thing I'm struck by is that all of us, collectively, have done daily or briefings for years and years and years. It is a horribly inefficient way to communicate, to gather everyone together, to have this one session. It's a very antiquated way in this age of miraculous technologies to move information out. I think that's why Ken and Jamie and others have been part of the effort to move more information out to Internet technologies and encourage people in government to be more forthcoming and build better mechanical procedures to get information out.

TERENCE SMITH:

Is that the way to do it, to put it all on the Internet?

KENNETH BACON:

I think you have to do both. I think that the give and take is very fundamental to democracy. I think the press have to right to come and ask questions. Nothing in the Constitution requires us to answer all of those questions, but they certainly have a right to answer them and I think we ought to be as forthcoming as possible. We have to explain the government's policies and it's a, I think, a sacred obligation. At the same time, we are all using the Internet to great effect. We can put out documents, 100-page reports, thousand- page reports instantly and then refer people to them and say, read the report, find out for yourself. You don't have to depend on our summary of it or the press' summary of it. You can go out and make your own decision, and I think that's been very enriching to people who the public policy wonks who want to get into the details of what's happening in Washington.

MIKE McCURRY:

Terry, I really agree with that, and another lesson I took away and probably I would fault myself is the American public wants less spin and less propaganda and less argumentation from people who are there to provide information. They want facts. They can hear plenty of opinions on the radio and on television but when they hear the government speaking, they want to know that they are getting factual information that they can rely on. I think that's one thing — I think Jamie and Ken had different roles because they were speaking for national security institutions but at the White House, in the institution of presidency, I feel like I certainly got too political sometimes and I think that's a danger.

TERENCE SMITH:

Jamie Rubin, you were articulating policy and you had an audience beyond the press in front of you or even the American public. You had an audience abroad. I assume that's a big part of the job.

JAMES RUBIN:

It really was. You know, I found that over the years, diplomats in other countries — our own diplomats — often found out what American policy was by reading my briefing or watching it on television, that in the current era we don't have to wait for an ambassador to get an appointment with a head of state to go trot into the palace of the king or whomever and say what it is the United States thinks about a current development; we can put it out right away — instantly — and if we're in a crisis situation, we know the briefing will be covered live, very often we give our reactions publicly before we can possibly tell all the different countries that would be interested in them, and so my challenge was in the room in front of me, generally, were Washington reporters although they were probably the most sophisticated, given that they focused on diplomacy and foreign policy — they had a Washington perspective. But at the same time most of the work that was prepared for me and what the State Department wanted me to do was to project our policy out foreign governments or to foreign populations who have a completely different orientation than the Washington press corps.

TERENCE SMITH:

Mike McCurry we touched briefly on the Monica Lewinsky phase, which must have been very difficult for you. I've read that you said that you decided not to ask the President the truth of that situation. Why? Was it self-preservation?

MIKE McCURRY:

Well, it was partly that. I didn't have any interest in getting a bag full of subpoenas from Ken Starr dropped on my desk. But it was also true that the President… it is said very often about the President that he is not above the law. He is not beneath the law either. He was entitled to rights as an American citizen, and one of them was to confer with his lawyers and to have those conversations protected by privilege. Now, if I'd walked in the door and said, 'What's the deal with you and this young lady?', of course, that would have been him forfeiting his own right to have privileged conversation.

TERENCE SMITH:

His attorney-client privilege.

MIKE McCURRY:

And it was one of those rare situations. I mean normally– Jamie and Ken can tell you– we can tell you we struggle hard to get all the information. We want to go and get every last shred of information that we can lay our hands on so we can tell the story accurately. So it was a very difficult situation to do everything contrary to what your normal instincts would be; to deliberately be out of the loop.

TERENCE SMITH:

Was it also then that you weren't in a position to lie about it if you don't know the answer?

MIKE McCURRY:

Correct. You know, in the past in our history, White Houses have suffered grievously when spokespeople have gone out in the name of President and dug the hole deeper. And I was very determined not do that.

TERENCE SMITH:

Ken Bacon, have you had times when, for interest of national security or administration policy, you have had to tell less than the truth, or withhold parts of the story?

KENNETH BACON:

Well, I have never had times where I have been asked to bend the truth.

TERENCE SMITH:

To lie?

KENNETH BACON:

Yes, to lie. I certainly have had times when I have been less than forthcoming, and I think when you have the lives of soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines at stake is a time when any spokesman has to be very, very careful.

TERENCE SMITH:

Are there also times when it's politically necessary to withhold?

KENNETH BACON:

There are certainly times when the system makes it difficult to be forthcoming and to answer questions in a natural way. Let me give you an example. After we deployed our troops into Bosnia in 1995, we made it very clear that they were going to stay for one year, and there was… anytime you set a deadline, anytime an administration sets a deadline, the press sets out to see if it can break the deadline, if it can find the deadline really is slippery and won't hold. So we were faced– Jamie, Mike, and I; I guess it was Mike and I then, Jamie later– were faced with– Jamie was at the U.N.– we were faced with hundreds of questions every day. "Well, how can you say you're only going to stay a year?", "Under what circumstances would you extend?" It…

TERENCE SMITH:

And that was five years ago; they are still there.

KENNETH BACON:

Five years ago, and they're still there. The fact of the matter is in that political situation, it's very difficult to answer in a normal way. "Well, we're going to watch what develops and make a decision later." We couldn't say that because, in fact, the policy was we were going stay a year, so we had to say everybody is agreed that we will be out within one year.

TERENCE SMITH:

Very briefly, can you tell me… I want to ask all three of you very quickly if you have some advice for the Bush administration spokesmen that are coming in.

MIKE McCURRY:

Well, I'll only repeat the advice that Marlin Fitzwater, one of my distinguished predecessors, gave me. He told me, and I didn't understand at the time, but he said if, any day that you're at the podium at the White House talking about the opposition party in Congress, you're probably on very dangerous terrain, and that's true. I guess it gets to the point. My main point is avoid the temptation to be too political at that place where people are looking for just the facts. I think that that's the lesson that I took away from my time there is that you can get a little too political, and there's a time and place for that. You know, it's interesting — we have all been visited by our counterparts from other countries. In virtually every other democracy in the world, they divide… the spokesman's role in politics is very much separated from what the official government spokesperson says on behalf of the elected leader, and that's probably a good division.

TERENCE SMITH:

Maybe we should do the same. Ken Bacon, very quickly?

KENNETH BACON:

Keep your sense of humor.

TERENCE SMITH:

Good advice. Jamie Rubin?

JAMES RUBIN:

Two quick things. One, don't ever brief when you're tired. My biggest mistakes were always on the back of a plane on an overnight flight. Don't brief when you're tired, and secondly, don't let the journalists create the news cycle. If they feel they have to write a story but you have nothing to say, say you have nothing to say.

TERENCE SMITH:

All right. There's the advice. We'll see what they do with it. Gentlemen, thank you very much.