Not only did Stockman denounce what he called “the shameless, groundless fiscal fiction [that] steadily emanated from the White House,” but he asserted that Reagan’s presidency almost certainly would “record the lowest eight-year real GNP growth rate since World War II.” Historians, he said, would be left with the riddle: “Why was this fiscal and financial mutation allowed to build and fester for seven years after it was evident that a stunning but correctable economic policy error had been made in the first six months of 1981?” Although Reagan always blamed Congress, Stockman blamed Reagan for mobilizing the nation’s voters as “an overpowering bloc vote against necessary taxation.”72
Without following all of Stockman’s arithmetic or knowing how the Rosy Scenario had been put together inside the Reagan administration in 1981, most members of Congress had come to share Stockman’s conclusion about the false promise of Reaganomics by 1985. Disillusionment was rampant. Most leaders in both parties in both houses had concluded that some tax increases were needed, and Reagan was simply wrong and being stubborn about it. In short, Reagan and his team had lost the intellectual initiative by 1985. That loss of faith was as important as the tactical blunders of Reagan and his lieutenants in stymieing Reagan’s agenda game in the second term.
12. The Image Game: Scripting the Video Presidency
That’s what it comes down to: We are marketing; we are trying to mold public opinion by marketing strategies. That’s what communications is all about.
—William Henkel, Reagan White House chief advance man
The annual spring dinner of the Gridiron Club, an elitist social club of sixty print journalists, is one of the high tribal rites of Washington insiders. It is a gathering of political celebrities that combines snob appeal with Hollywood glitter. The Gridiron dinner brings together six hundred of the most powerful, best-known people in America in an evening of poking fun. Every president since Benjamin Harrison has come to the Gridiron Club dinner at least once. To less exalted politicians, an invitation to the Gridiron banquet is coveted as a mark of making it. The occasion always draws a sidewalk crowd, as limousines deposit the high and mighty in white tie and tails and evening gowns at the Capitol Hilton hotel. Inside, the red-jacketed Marine band stirs a throb of patriotism with Sousa marches. Spotlights play over long tables, festooned with red roses, picking out Hollywood stars rubbing elbows with the captains of industry, the anchors of television, the publishers and other princes of the print press, the deans of the diplomatic corps, the elders of the Supreme Court, the movers and shakers of Congress, and the ranking echelons of the current administration.
For more than a century, the Gridiron has roasted the nation’s leaders with vaudeville skits. By tradition, one politician from each party gets the right of reply: Geraldine Ferraro after the 1984 Democratic defeat, Bob Dole after the Republican loss in 1976. The president is always given the last word and receives a toast. Lyndon Johnson, who took heavy flak in his final years, once groused earthily that the Gridiron dinner was “about as much fun as throwing cowshit at the village idiot.” More deftly, Ronald Reagan—who thrived on the by-play—called it “the most elegant lynching I have ever seen.”
But Reagan got off his own sallies, year after year, especially at the 1984 dinner. Eyeing potential Democratic rivals, Reagan ruled out Gary Hart with the quip that “the country won’t want a president who looks like a movie star.” As for Alan Cranston, then a bald sixty-nine-year-old, he said: “Imagine running for president at his age! He won’t have the problem I had—the press won’t be bugging him, does he dye his hair?”
For some politicians, the Gridiron has been a priceless forum for reshaping their images and reputations by showing a human side, an ability to laugh at themselves, which is the principal formula of success at the dinner. After his “hatchet man” role as the vice-presidential nominee in 1976, Bob Dole turned a new leaf at the Gridiron by ruefully joking that the person wounded most by his razor tongue “was me.” Senator Edward Kennedy, whose 1980 presidential hopes were badly damaged by his fumbling television interview with NBC’s Roger Mudd, brought down the house in 1986 with his mock protest that Mudd, a Kennedy family intimate, “came up to my house on my Cape Cod and sat in one of my chairs on my front lawn and asked me trick questions, like ‘Why do you want to be president?’ ”
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter made a hit in 1978 by jitterbugging on stage. Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew had a Gridiron audience roaring with a piano duet doing a parody on Nixon’s “southern strategy” for the 1972 campaign. Whatever tune Nixon would start, Agnew would drown him out with “Dixie.” Ronald Reagan scored with a soft-shoe routine in a black-and-silver sombrero as the surprise kicker in a Gridiron Club chorus line, doing a self-parody to the tune of “Mañana Is Soon Enough for Me.”
But for a sheer turnaround—and a political facelift—no Gridiron guest in recent years has outdone Nancy Reagan.
By the end of 1981, the Reagans’ first year in the White House, she had become a terrible political liability. The press was snapping at her as a frivolous clotheshorse who hobnobbed with the idle, partygoing rich. Her inaugural wardrobe—a red Adolfo dress, a black formal dress by Bill Blass, a white, beaded, off-the-shoulder gown by James Galanos, and a brand-new full-length Maximillian mink coat—was said to have cost twenty-five thousand dollars. She had three hairdressers at her beck and call.
Mrs. Reagan stirred up a hornet’s nest by putting the arm on Republican fat cats for $800,000 in private donations to spruce up the White House mansion, inviting howls that the donors were buying influence. Another hullabaloo broke out when Mrs. Reagan purchased a 220-piece set of gilt-edged china, through similar private financing, for $209,508. When Mrs. Reagan went to London for the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, the British press knocked her for splashy fashions and cumbersome motorcades. Novelty shops sold postcards mocking her as “Queen Nancy” in ermine and a crown. In a 1981 poll by Good Housekeeping, Mrs. Reagan did not even make the ten top women in America.
Reagan strategists feared that Nancy Reagan’s bad press could hurt the president’s popularity; they held meeting after meeting to figure out how to fix her rich-girl image. They got her to donate her fancy designer dresses to the Smithsonian Institution. When an Air Florida passenger plane crashed into a Potomac River bridge in January 1982, Mrs. Reagan went to hospitals to comfort survivors. But unlike Lady Bird Johnson with her beautification projects, or Betty Ford with her antidrug work, Mrs. Reagan had no cause which touched a popular chord. Initially, the imagemakers had rejected the drug issue as too depressing, but now they agreed when Mrs. Reagan wanted to pursue that issue. Her staff developed a campaign that eventually had her making forays to drug rehabilitation centers, talking to teenagers, appearing on such popular television shows as Diff’rent Strokes and Good Morning America, and making a joint appeal to the nation with the president in 1986.
But the pivotal moment in her press coverage was the Gridiron dinner of March 27, 1982. The idea of having the first lady do a Gridiron appearance was the brainchild of Sheila Tate, Mrs. Reagan’s Washington-wise press secretary. Tate figured (correctly) that Mrs. Reagan was bound to be a target of a press parody; her notion was to have Mrs. Reagan seize the moment by responding. “For an event that has no television coverage and almost no press coverage, the Gridiron dinner is the most influential three or four hours,” Tate later explained. “The criticism of Nancy was coming mainly from the Washington political community. What better event for her to humanize herself?”1
Tate floated the idea with the first lady. “Would you sing?” Tate asked her. Nancy agreed. “Would you dance?” Another nod from the former movie starlet. Then Tate secretly tried out her notion with Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent for United Press International who in 1975 had become the first woman elected to the Gridiron Club. Thomas, club President Ben Cole and club Vice President Charles McDowell, leaped at the offer to put Mrs. Reagan on stage. The clu
b would parody Mrs. Reagan’s lavish wardrobe; they wanted her to respond by making fun of the press. But wisely, Mrs. Reagan sidestepped a sparring match. “No,” she told Tate and Deaver, “you have to be able to laugh at yourself. I think that’s how we ought to do it.”
Landon Parvin, a witty White House speechwriter, worked with Tate to put together a routine based on the old tune “Second Hand Rose” but restyled as “Secondhand Clothes.” Secretly, Mrs. Reagan rehearsed it at the White House, without telling the president; she sneaked off for one tryout on the Gridiron stage. Her moment came when the Gridiron chorus did its version of “Secondhand Clothes,” mocking her extravagance. Mrs. Reagan slipped away from the head table, her husband thinking she was headed for the ladies’ room.
Tate, sitting between two newspaper publishers, recalled one telling the other, “Nancy Reagan has left the head table. I’ll bet she’s ticked”—presumably at the ribbing the Reagans had been taking. Tate pretended not to hear. “I felt that typified the feeling in the room,” she said. “There was a delicious meanness toward Nancy. Her image was of a very brittle, uncaring, self-absorbed socialite.” Then, moments later, Mrs. Reagan burst through a rack of clothes on stage. She was clad in an outlandish getup, an aqua skirt with red and yellow flowers held together by safety pins, a floppy feathered hat, and a feathered boa.
There was a moment of incredulous silence. “People were shocked,” Tate recalled, which is how I remember it, too. No one thought that Mrs. Reagan had any slapstick, any self-mockery in her. “As it registered, people jumped to their feet and started to applaud. I felt the attitudes in that room change,” Tate went on. “It was as if that was all she had to do. People were so surprised that she would do something that looked so foolish. It was very risky. She could have messed it up. The words were so self-deprecating. The point was that she cared what other people thought of her and she showed it.”
Nancy Reagan, with a touch of soft-shoe and a steady voice, swung into her lyrics:
Secondhand clothes,
I’m wearing secondhand clothes.
They’re all the thing in spring fashion shows.
Even my new trench coat with fur collar,
Ronnie bought for ten cents on the dollar.
… … … … … … … … … …
The china is the only thing that’s new.
Even though they tell me that I’m no longer queen,
Did Ronnie have to buy me that new sewing machine?
Secondhand clothes, secondhand clothes.
I sure hope Ed Meese sews.
For an exit, she was supposed to shatter a china plate on the stage. She slammed it down but it did not break. The audience did not care. She got a standing ovation and the cheering crowd brought her back for an encore. “It was a gutsy move on Nancy’s part,” observed Joseph Canzeri, then a presidential aide. “Nobody knows how anybody’s going to react to that routine. It could have backfired. The factor of surprise was important. The fact that it couldn’t be on TV helped make Nancy willing.”2
Her success hinged on following one cardinal rule of politics: Hang a lantern on your problem; that is, play up a vulnerability and dispose of it by mocking your own foibles.3 As Reagan himself proved many times, that technique can lance the boil of criticism. So often, criticism loses its edge if a politician simply admits his problem. Often the best way to disarm a hostile press is to embrace them; “love bombing,” some call it. In this case, it was strictly an inside-the-beltway phenomenon. A story about Nancy Reagan at the Gridiron dinner appeared in Monday’s Washington Post, but otherwise, according to Gridiron tradition, the affair remained unreported. Only the inner core of the Washington community had seen this side of Mrs. Reagan. But that community included most of the important journalists and politicians, and among this crucial audience, Mrs. Reagan’s image had been remade in a few short minutes. Inside the beltway, people talked with amusement and warmth about her Gridiron appearance. She had won a new beginning—a new image—with the political press.
It would be many months before the country would realize that the stinging criticism of the first lady had become muted. Her public standing changed, with stories appearing about her antidrug campaign and her bringing home two deathly sick children from a trip to Korea. By Reagan’s second inauguration, she rivaled the president in popularity. In fact, a New York Times/CBS News poll in January 1985 found her public approval rating was seventy-one percent compared to his sixty-two percent. Time magazine did a cover story on “Nancy Reagan’s Growing Role” in policy and appointments. NBC followed up with an hour-long special on Mrs. Reagan “at the peak of her power and the peak of her popularity.” Plenty of work and press agentry went into such flattering coverage, but the world beyond the beltway never knew what had propelled Nancy Reagan’s image turnaround.
The Video Presidency
No presidency has been more image conscious or image driven than that of Ronald Reagan. During the Reagan era, Washington began calling itself “Hollywood East,” exulting in celebrity politics. As the nation’s first chief executive with a long show-business background, Reagan exploited his acting skills to the fullest. His choreographers played to those strengths as they staged his presidency. Reagan never seemed more at home as president than when performing: standing before an audience or landing on a former battlefield in Normandy or Korea to personify the nation’s strength and determination. Reagan has loved the role of president, especially the ceremonial role, and he has played to the emotions of his countrymen in an almost-endless string of televised performances. For millions, the Reagan years became a political home movie.
Quite obviously, image making or political public relations was not invented by Reagan, though it reached new peaks of sophistication in the Reagan era. Theatrics are in the blood of most politicians. Fred Dutton, a well-known Washington lawyer and political strategist, told me of arriving at John F. Kennedy’s home in Georgetown one morning to discuss a White House job, after Kennedy’s election in 1960 but before his inauguration. From the hallway, Dutton could see Kennedy sitting alone in another room—wearing a bowler, smoking a cigar, holding a glass of brandy, and listening to recorded speeches by Winston Churchill—obviously imagining his own oratory.4
Probably the first President to grasp the power of modern public relations was Teddy Roosevelt, who originated regular press conferences and coined the memorable metaphor that the presidency is a “bully pulpit” for preaching to the nation. Roosevelt understood the hypnotic pull of the camera. During the Spanish-American War in 1898, he took along two movie cameramen who filmed his Rough Riders as they charged up Cuba’s San Juan Hill. Actually, Roosevelt’s biographer, Edmund Morris, recounts this “charge” was less a heroic dash to the ridge top than a bloody slaughter of the American troops, ambushed by Spanish riflemen while painfully seizing the terrain.5 But the movie newsreels—turning news into entertainment—dramatized Roosevelt’s heroics and launched a political legend.
Newsreels also helped make Franklin Roosevelt larger than life, but radio was his medium. FDR used radio vividly to evoke the miseries of the “little people” and to offer them hope amidst the economic holocaust of the Depression. His fireside chats deliberately eschewed silver oratory. They were compassionate conversations with a mass audience, FDR’s easy, confident voice an immediate presence to millions of plain people. His folksy anecdotes invited listeners to conjure reality in the theater of the mind. Like Reagan, Franklin Roosevelt was a master at simplifying, at brushing aside the complexity of the nation’s problems. He exulted in his own dramatic talents, once telling Orson Welles, “There are only two great actors in America—you are the other one.”6
Television came of age politically in 1952. Political lieutenants of Dwight Eisenhower used it to wrest control of the Republican National Convention from Senator Robert A. Taft, the favorite of party regulars. They televised charges of convention chicanery by Taft’s forces, helping Ike get nominated. That fall, Eisenhower becam
e the first presidential candidate to use political ads on TV, to publicize not only his views but his famous grin and common touch. Ike’s success set a pattern; television became the springboard for political outsiders to beat established politicans: Jack Kennedy in 1960, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan in 1980. Experienced inside operators such as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Walter Mondale got to the top through orthodox organization politics. Image-game politics was the province of the upstarts.
Once in office, all modern presidents have enlisted the power of the tube to try to increase their bargaining leverage with Congress; they “go public” to sell their policies by demonstrating that public opinion is with them. Richard Nixon used prime-time television so often to promote his Vietnam policies that the Federal Communications Commission finally insisted that, under the “fairness doctrine,” TV networks had to give Nixon’s critics time to respond.7 Jimmy Carter delivered four nationally televised addresses on the nation’s energy crisis and was ready to do a fifth when his pollster, Patrick Caddell, persuaded him another TV pitch on energy would not work. But no president has used television more than Reagan to promote his personal popularity as well as his policies, and then to use his popularity as a club with Congress to pass his programs. In Reagan’s hands, the presidency became the terrain of the permanent campaign.
Television is particularly well suited to presidents such as Reagan, Kennedy, and Eisenhower who sell mood, confidence, and image as much as the substance of policy. Television’s compelling power is its immediacy. TV gives viewers a direct experience of political leaders and gives politicians direct access to the living rooms of the electorate. This immediacy fuels the politics of emotions, gut reactions, and impressions rather than the politics of logic, facts, and reason; it emphasizes personality rather than issues.
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