The Briefing

by Sean Spicer

Clay and I watched the returns that night along with his gracious and supportive wife, Emilie. Every politician should be so lucky as to have a spouse as dedicated she was. The three of us watched as every precinct came in. The polls closed at 7:00 p.m., but the race was still too close to call at 10:00 p.m. Eleven o’clock in the evening came and went. Then the stroke of midnight filled the air. By the wee hours of the following morning, with our eyes still wide open with anticipation, we heard a TV anchor report, “the race in the twenty-second is too close to call.” Clay Shaw was clinging to a 380-vote lead—the tightest race of his career. Convinced that those 380 voters were hands he had shaken at diners, I was ready to pop the champagne and celebrate this hard-earned victory. And then my festivities got put on hold. “Just because the news declared us as being in the lead,” Clay said, “we can’t declare victory. There will probably be a recount.”

  “You win by saying you already won,” I said. “Winners declare victory.”

  Clay trusted me and declared his victory.

  The recount eventually confirmed our win . . . but then there was a much bigger recount. It was the historic Florida recount of the 2000 presidential election.

  The media had declared Al Gore the winner of the election and the next president, only to have to retract the announcement. We got caught up in the whirlwind called Bush v. Gore because Clay’s district consisted of the three counties—Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade—that were at the heart of the electoral dispute. I had a ringside seat for it, attending recounts and watching auditors scrutinize hanging chads under magnifying glasses until the state and the presidency were finally awarded to George W. Bush, and Clay Shaw got to return to Congress for his tenth term.

  Clay went on to do great things in Congress. He deserved a longer career, and Washington needed people like Clay. He served until he lost his re-election bid in 2006. That was a bad year for Republicans—the Democrats picked up five Senate seats and thirty-one House seats. As President Bush said memorably afterwards, “If you look at it race by race, it was close. The cumulative effect, however, was . . . a thumping.”4

  I was done with being in constant campaign-mode, living out of a suitcase and cleaning my clothes in hotel laundry rooms—or laundromats. I thought it was time to find “experience” of a different kind. But my work on Clay Shaw’s campaign had drawn the notice of the top folks at the NRCC, then chaired by Virginia Congressman Tom Davis. The committee’s executive director, John Hishta, offered me the job of director of incumbent retention, which meant I oversaw the re-election campaigns of more than 200 Republican members of Congress. It was my job to spot their vulnerabilities, advise them, as I had with Clay Shaw, on how to shore up voter support, and lead them to victory in their re-elections.

  The hardest part of my job was saying “no” to powerful members of Congress who were secure in their re-election bids but still wanted the NRCC’s resources—money and campaign help. They didn’t need our help to survive. They needed it to win by a larger margin, and that wasn’t the role of the NRCC. As a young and eager staffer, I had a lot responsibility and power because of my position. I had started to get over my skis (and some might say “cocky”) when John Hishta shared a very important piece of advice with me: “Your mail can always be addressed to ‘occupant.’ ” People weren’t sucking up to me; they wanted resources from whomever held that job.

  After I spent two years at the NRCC, the chief of staff for the House Budget Committee, Rich Meade, reached out to me because the committee chairman, Representative Jim Nussle of Iowa, needed a communications director. I spent three amazing years working for Jim and creating projects and strategies that highlighted our efforts to curb federal spending. After that, I worked for the House Republican Conference, which was under the leadership of Representative Deborah Pryce of Ohio. My job was to shape communications for the House GOP caucus. Managing such high-profile communications, I felt I had finally arrived. I was also, for the first time in my life, making decent money . . . enough that I only needed one roommate, not several “housemates.”

  While at the House Republican Conference, I helped prepare our message for promoting the House Republican budget. Getting a budget passed through Congress is as tedious as carving a grain of rice. At the time, a congressman from Indiana named Mike Pence was the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a large caucus of conservative members who were often critical of the party’s leadership. They wanted House Republicans to argue for a much smaller federal government. They had a point—one that had my personal sympathies. But as a leadership staffer, I could also see the point of the House leadership—politics is the art of making the impossible possible. The budget proposed by the Republican Study Committee had little chance of passing the House. While I was trying to coordinate the budget message ideas coming from our committees and leadership offices, an aide for Pence, Matt Lloyd, told us that the Republican Study Committee was going to announce its budget as an alternative. In other words, he was going to blow up our messaging and present two House Republican budgets to the American people.

  I’d like to say I handled this coolly. I didn’t, and my eruption got back to Pence. Most people in politics don’t worry about things like that. I do. While Melissa McCarthy later made fun of me as the angry press secretary, the truth is that I hate to lose my cool. I have too much Catholic guilt to berate people and feel good about it. I later apologized to Matt. And years later, when I was at the RNC, I took then-Governor Mike Pence aside at an event and told him I was sorry for how I had handled the budget controversy.

  He looked surprised.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You’re doing a great job.”

  That is classic Mike Pence.

  Life wasn’t all work. On St. Patrick’s Day in 2001, I showed up at the Eighteenth Street Lounge in DuPont Circle dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, planning to meet up with a girl I was casually dating.

  The bouncer took a close look at me, and his eyes did a visual survey of my attire. I was digging for my wallet to pull out my ID. But before I could show it to him, his deep voice bellowed, “No jeans.”

  Dejected, I walked across the street to a place without a dress code called the Lucky Bar. (I would learn later just how aptly named the Lucky Bar is.) I showed my ID to the bouncer who motioned me in. As I ordered a beer, I saw a young woman sitting alone at the end of the bar. I struck up a conversation with her. Her name was Elizabeth Manresa, and she had just moved to Washington for a new job at the local ABC station, WJLA-TV (channel 7). Elizabeth and I quickly became fast friends, two people who enjoyed Washington’s culture, social scene, and gossip. After a few months, she mentioned that there was a colleague of hers she wanted to introduce me to. She suggested we all meet at the Virginia Gold Cup steeplechase. This was pre-app America—you actually had to go outside to meet people and have a face-to-face conversation with them.

  The Gold Cup is held in a scenic meadow in the hills not far from the farm estates of Middleburg, Virginia. It’s the kind of event where people dress up in their “Sunday best” to sample delicacies and champagne in tents sponsored by luxury car companies and other corporate sponsors. Many spectators, including myself and my friends, used it as an excuse to drink in the middle of a Saturday.

  You know, a real Sean Spicer kind of place.

  In 2001, the Gold Cup took place a few weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11. That tragic day united our country in sorrow, but it also united us in our pride for our country and compassion for our fellow citizens. It seemed like everyone started looking at life a little differently. The Gold Cup races, like many other events around the country, proceeded as planned so that America could begin its long healing process.

  A woman of her word, Elizabeth brought her mysterious friend to the Gold Cup and made sure to run into my buddy John Sankovich and me. It was a perfectly planned “accidental” meeting. I have to admit that I really noticed Elizabeth’s friend, taking in with one glance h
er chestnut hair and green-blue eyes. (We debate the color of her eyes to this day—she claims it depends on the weather.) She worked with Elizabeth at WJLA, and her name was Rebecca Miller. I did not forget it. We had a great afternoon, getting to know each other while having a drink . . . or two . . . and sharing a few laughs. We may have even seen a horse run around the track, too.

  On Monday, Elizabeth asked me if I could meet for drinks that Thursday night at Cafe Deluxe on Wisconsin Avenue, not far from where the WJLA studios were at the time. “Rebecca and I are going for drinks after the 6:00 p.m. newscast. Wanna join us?”

  Thursday night finally arrived, and I made sure I left work with plenty of time to cross town and make it to Cafe Deluxe. As promised, the three of us met and ordered a round of drinks. After twenty minutes of nonstop conversation between Rebecca and myself, Rebecca leaned over to Elizabeth and said, “I thought you had to go.” Elizabeth was quick on the uptake and vanished into thin air.

  The next week, I sent Rebecca an email asking if I could cook her dinner at my townhouse in Old Town Alexandria the following Sunday night. I gave her precise directions (again, this was pre-app America). When she arrived, our conversation picked up where it had left off at Cafe Deluxe. I cooked a surprisingly decent meal—steak (cooked to a perfect medium rare), potatoes, and salad. She devoured it, which impressed me considering her petite frame. I didn’t know until years later that Rebecca doesn’t like black pepper, yet she graciously ate every bite of the rib-eye that I had doused in cracked black pepper, thinking that I was making it extra special.

  I continued to see Rebecca. And in 2004, we married at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in the shadows of the Washington National Cathedral. She had taught fifth and sixth grade Sunday school there in her single years, and it was a very special place to her. We had three priests officiating at our wedding—including a Catholic priest from St. Anselm’s Abbey in D.C. We partied the night away with our family and friends aboard the Cherry Blossom riverboat while it cruised the Potomac River. (We have since learned that some of our guests never realized that the boat set sail. Evidently, they stayed by the bar all night!) We have changed addresses in Alexandria a couple of times and are now raising two amazing children—a darling, blue-eyed, blond boy who loves Legos, soccer, baseball and football, and a spunky, brunette, brown-eyed, little princess who enjoys soccer, lacrosse, cooking, and ballet. They are the light of our lives and the greatest blessings we could imagine.

  Rebecca, a proud graduate of the University of the South (a.k.a. Sewanee), moved to Washington for her career. She worked in local news and had hopped from local market to local market, as many broadcast journalists do. She told me that she always had her dreams set on being a news producer in Washington, D.C.—much like Holly Hunter’s character in the 1980s movie Broadcast News. After twelve years in the news business, Rebecca was asked to serve in the George W. Bush White House communications office. And, after twelve years as chief communications officer for the National Beer Wholesalers Association, she recently joined Airlines for America as the senior vice president for communications.

  Throughout my time in politics, Rebecca has provided keen focus and shrewd counsel, and she has kept our family firmly rooted. During my six years at the RNC, the emotional rollercoaster of the presidential primary, the nail-biter of the Trump election, and my White House tour, Rebecca was my rock.

  She still is.

  To many in Washington, I was a congressional aide on the rise. Inside, I was still a kid from an Irish Catholic family in Rhode Island, where the biggest celebrity I had ever met was the local weatherman. (I’ll never forget you, John Ghiorse.) Now I was on a first-name basis with the Speaker of the House of Representatives, regularly in the company of the most famous politicians in America, and had opportunities to meet the nation’s leading thinkers, actors, and athletes. Sometimes these opportunities overlapped. I once spent four days doing media for Clint Eastwood to highlight how lawsuits harm small businesses. On another occasion, the Bush White House invited me to the Rose Garden to celebrate the New England Patriots win of the Super Bowl, where I got to meet Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, and other greats from my favorite football team.

  My opportunity to work in the executive branch came when former Representative Rob Portman, then the U.S. trade representative (USTR), was asked to become President George W. Bush’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. Portman’s deputy, Susan Schwab, was selected as his successor by President Bush, and Portman’s aide, Christin Baker, asked me to help her find someone to handle media and public affairs. I sent them several candidates, but in the end I went from sending them job candidates to becoming a candidate. As much as the USTR job appealed to me, I didn’t know anything about trade at the time. I might have even lost a bet as to what NAFTA stood for.

  Two things happened next, almost simultaneously. I got the job, and I broke my jaw.

  It was July 2006, and the congressional softball league was in full swing. On my last day at the House Republican Conference, a Wednesday, I went to play what I thought would be my last congressional softball game.

  We were in Anacostia, a neighborhood in D.C., playing on a rough soccer field. I was asked to pitch.

  I took twenty paces to where I thought the mound should be. I turned to face a broad-shouldered, six-foot-three batter from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. My first pitch was to the outside. I threw again, and he whacked a line drive straight into my mouth.

  The next thing I remembered was lying on the ground with a cluster of staffers looking down at me. I drew “GW” in the bloody sand. I knew how well the emergency room at George Washington University Hospital had taken care of President Reagan when he had been shot in 1981. That’s where I wanted to go.

  My teammates Josh Hartman and John Sankovich got me in the back of a car and drove me across town to the hospital. As we were driving, another teammate, Amy Lorinzini, tracked down Rebecca who was working late that night, preparing for a special Little League game that would be played on the South Lawn of the White House the next day. Working at the White House, Rebecca was a few blocks away from the hospital and walked over to be with me.

  As Josh and John were pulling up at the hospital, they handed me a towel, and I put it over my face before walking into the ER. Since I couldn’t talk, John told the admitting nurse that I had been hit in face during a softball game. Once I was in the triage area and the towel was off my face, the nurses tried to hide their shock. John looked at them with a lot of concern and a dose of his trademark humor and said, “Take care of him. He’s a spokesman for a living. He needs his mouth to work.”

  I went into surgery and woke up in the ICU missing six teeth, three up, three down. The blow had crushed my face, breaking my jaw in two places and requiring a plate and screws to be set in place. My jaw had to be wired shut for what they said would be at least six weeks. While many people would want to have my jaw wired shut in the coming years (and probably in years prior), this was not how I planned to start a new job as a spokesman. Thankfully, Rebecca was there, holding my hand. I spent the next several days in the hospital, missing my first few days of work and our first foreign trip to Geneva, Switzerland, the headquarters of the World Trade Organization.

  Then I got out and went to work for Susan as the USTR spokesman, unable to actually talk. A few weeks later, with my mouth still wired shut, we flew to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the G20 Trade Ministers Meeting. When we arrived, the U.S. delegation headed to a local steakhouse. While my colleagues raved about the steak, I ordered soup. That was the only thing on the menu that I could eat. I sat at the end of the table, sipping soup through a straw.

  Susan Schwab looked after me with a mix of good humor, concern, and a grateful empathy for how hard it was to travel and work while being in such discomfort. She is a brilliant woman and was a fantastic boss with a small, cohesive team of political appointees and career trade negotiators who epitomized the work hard, play hard philosophy.


  Toward the end of the Bush administration, we were in Geneva working nearly around the clock for seventeen straight days on a world trade agreement. At the end of another long day, we walked back to our hotel. Every cell in my body was crying out for sleep, but I was still wound up. I couldn’t stop thinking about work. So, I did something I don’t do often. I popped an Ambien. Then I took a relaxing, warm shower and planned to head to bed. Then there was a knock on the door.

  I cracked the door and peaked into the hallway. It was a Secret Service agent.

  “Hey, you didn’t answer your phone,” he said. “There’s a meeting downstairs.”

  We were in a critical phase of negotiations, and the team wanted to huddle before the morning.

  I nodded and shut the door.

  I quickly got dressed and went down to the meeting, which was in the posh, boutique restaurant of our hotel that we had all to ourselves.

  Then the Ambien kicked in. I don’t remember anything about what happened next. But that didn’t matter, everyone else was happy to remember it for me, in detail. I got reports the next day from my colleagues Tim Keeler and Gretchen Reiter that when I was asked a question, I was passionately illogical.

  Such events stand out in my memory. But it was a glorious time in my life and career. Before going to the USTR’s office, I had been to Canada, Mexico (Tijuana), Iraq, and Ireland. I spent the last three years of the Bush administration doing press events on six continents, attending summits and ministerial meetings in Brazil, India, China, Japan, Australia, and in over thirty cities around the world. In between work, we snuck in a little culture. Private tours were arranged for us in the Vatican and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

  I also got to work with some of the most interesting people in the world. One of them was Peter Mandelson, a British politician who had helped Tony Blair brand “New Labour.” When I worked with Peter, he had been the European commissioner for trade. Well-tailored, well-spoken, Oxford-educated, Peter once hammered out a statement with me, giving me a chance to see how a master of the English language weighs the impact of every word.