“Now what these gentlemen did, in terms of their advice to the president, I have no idea.”
—Marlin Fitzwater, new White House press manager
The saga of Marlin Fitzwater is a tragic one. He is a genuinely big time political operative, Ronald Reagan’s new press secretary and chief media spokesman for the White House. ... He clawed his way to the top in a truly evil business, a savage trade that will eat some of its best and brightest practitioners.
The last White House press secretary who really thrived in the job was Pierre Salinger, who worked for John F. Kennedy in the early ’60s. Pierre was good. He was trusted on both ends—by Big Jack and also the press people, and his brain was extremely quick. If you ever got bored with hanging around your desk in the White House press room and started feeling too smart for the job you were stuck with, all you had to do was get uppity at one of JFK’s weekly press conferences:
If Kennedy didn’t flog you, Pierre would ... he was a player, and he would give you all the action you wanted, and when Mr. Salinger was quoted in the Washington Post, it was usually on Page 1.
But Pierre had to quit when JFK was murdered. He now lives in Paris and covers Europe for ABC. He set a standard, in terms of style and tone, that none of the hacks who came after him could match or even understand . . . until Jim Brady came along in 1981.
Brady was a class act, but he didn’t last long in the job. Some pimply young geek named Hinckley put a bullet into his head, and another one through Ronald Reagan’s armpit. . . . Big Dutch survived, but Brady was shot through the brain and was soon replaced by Larry Speakes, a shallow-brained, mean-spirited, pot-bellied yuppie from the bowels of Mississippi. . . . The only fun Speakes ever had in his job was when he had to formally deny that President Reagan had called one of the ranking journalists in the White House press corps a “son of a bitch.”
Speakes mopped the sweat out of his eyes with a blue silk handkerchief. “You must be deaf,” he said to the reporter. “What the president actually said was, ‘It’s a sunny day and you’re rich.’ “
Some people laughed, but Speakes was not among them. And neither was Marlin Fitzwater, who was then employed as press secretary for Vice President George Bush. Fitzwater was being groomed for the job he always wanted—the main nut, the voice of the president, heir to the throne of Jody Powell and Ron Ziegler.
It is a nasty job, but they rarely get put in jail. Ziegler walked, somehow, through the darkness of the Watergate scandal—and so did Patrick Buchanan, who was guilty as 16 dogs (and who will also walk out of the Iran/contra scandal because he was only a speech writer, they said, and he never got near the money).
But if real justice were done in this world, Patrick would be chained ankle-to-ankle with Oliver North and forced to hitchhike together like Siamese twins from coast to coast on U.S. Highway 6, which runs in a twisted line from the George Washington Bridge at the top of New York City to the lip of the Malibu pier . . .
Number 6 is gone now, swallowed up in the huge gray web of the new interstate highway system; they changed the numbers and laid concrete over the old two-lane blacktop, but U.S. 6 still shows on old highway maps that they used to give away free at the Gulf and Sinclair stations.
On most days it is a waste of time to read the newspapers, but last Saturday was not one of them. The front page of The New York Times reads like the Book of Revelation. From left to right, across the top of the page, it was a chain-link indictment of some doomed and twisted vision of the old American Dream:
Column One began “REAGAN UNAWARE OF ANY COVER-UP, A SPOKESMAN SAYS” . . . The spokesman, of course, was Marlin, and the best he could do was, “As far as the president is concerned, there is no cover-up. He certainly was not aware of any.”
Next, for comic relief, a beady-eyed single-column cut of Dennis B. Levine, the scandal-ridden stock-swindler turned stool pigeon, with a caption slugged SENTENCED. He got off with two years in prison.
Back to business: “U.S. SAID TO PLAN FOR AID TO EGYPT IN ATTACKING LIBYA.” The deck gets to the meat of it: “Reagan Reportedly Approved Help in ‘Pre-emptive’ Raid if Tripoli Made Threat.” The Fitzwater denial is relegated to the jump page: “There was no policy or plan to do that that was put in motion.”
Then, the real zinger: A two-column picture of Mario Cuomo, a hand over his eyes, despondent, with one of the most vicious cutlines ever— one brief line: “Q: And what about the Vice Presidency?”
Honored with the top of Column Six was “The Brazilian problem,” as bankers refer to it: “BRAZIL TO SUSPEND INTEREST PAYMENT TO FOREIGN BANKS. DEBT TOTALS $108 BILLION.”
All this pushed more world-class stories below the fold: “Regan and Mrs. Reagan Feud over President’s Work Load,” “Senate Panel Told of Weaknesses in the Control of U.S. Arms Sales,” and, for dessert, “Judge Gets Poisoned Candy; Man He Sentenced Arrested.”
It had the look of bad news and big trouble for Marlin Fitzwater. His life was going to turn strange and awkward, as more and more of his people were taken off to jails and federal prisons. . . . Marlin peaked about five years too late; that job he always wanted and that fine office full of teakwood and soft Spanish leather in the West Wing of the White House was suddenly beginning to look more like a jail cell than the Room at the Top his mother always told him he would have.
They were guilty. They were criminals, and many would be sentenced in the same pinstripe Ralph Lauren suits they used to wear when they swapped war stories about Egypt and Bangkok and commando raids in the Congo after hours in the Oval Office.
U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North will probably do three years in Lompoc for his role in the treacherous Iran/contra scam, and people like Regan and Casey and Poindexter will also spend time in prison— just like the boys from Watergate, who were also big hitters in the White House.
But Marlin’s main problem will be Dutch, The Old Man, The President, The Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan. As the foul evidence unfolds, even his own people like Ed Meese and John Tower are forced to confront the awful possibility that the president is guilty of major crimes and may have to be locked up.
February 23, 1987