by Pat Cunnane
I was always curious: What must the president have thought, walking around the White House and seeing twenty-five-year-olds essentially running the place? What would Americans have thought if they knew that terrifying, wonderful truth: that their hopes and dreams rested in the hands of a bunch of twentysomethings? Mostly, I’m sure the president was proud, impressed by our professionalism, rejuvenated by our energy, grateful for our optimism. But that general sense of pride had to be punctured at least weekly by interactions like these: reminders that, yep, you’re the leader of the free world, but you’ve got a bunch of Millennials who actually make the place go.
Another good impression, I thought to myself as the president turned the corner to his elevator for the two-story ride home, tired after a long day of work, with the weight of an impending government shutdown bearing on him. He would have just a few minutes for dinner with his family before heading right back down to take three hundred photos with strangers.
“What kind of a question is that?!” Crystal shot back the moment POTUS was out of sight. “You been having some of that eggnog, or what?” She feigned exasperation. I begged her not to tell Desiree. Crystal had a superb knack for deadpan humor. “Do I go around asking you what happened on How I Met Your Mother last night?”
• • •
Many hundreds of journalists claim to be White House reporters, but there are maybe a hundred regulars who make up the true press corps: the reporters, photographers, producers, camerawomen and -men, audio crews, and radio correspondents whom we saw day in and day out on the North Lawn of the White House and in the West Wing. They keep watch over the place, dutifully monitoring the goings-on, witnessing and participating in history. The White House is their office, too.
In fact, President Obama, or any president, for that matter, couldn’t walk between his office and his residence without passing the Briefing Room. Situated between the West Wing and the People’s House, the Briefing Room’s location is a reminder of the crucial role of the press as intermediary between the president and the public. We hold briefings there, but it’s also a workspace for reporters on deadline and a location from which TV journalists broadcast their reports.
Pebble Beach, named for its once-gravelly, muddy, outdoor mess, is a collection of tented press stand-up locations where television reporters film their daily dispatches, often for the nightly or morning news shows. But traffic flows to and from the area at all hours of the day, as reporters, producers, and camera crews try to keep up with the all-day demands of MSNBC, Fox, and CNN. It was a visible reminder that the business had changed—that the media were evolving, trying to keep up with the increasing demand for news, or what passes for it, in the attempt to fill the void.
When I first started in the West Wing, Pebble Beach was obscured by a massive, mysterious hole in front of the main lobby, where the driveway used to be. The hole required a temporary, elevated walkway to and from Pebble Beach and the main entrance for press and staffers at the northwest gate on Pennsylvania Avenue. The moat-like mystery hole, given its prime location under the feet of dozens of reporters as they made their way to and from work each day, was the cause of much speculation, especially among the press.
The General Services Administration, the agency responsible for managing government buildings, provided a bland statement about renovations to the West Wing’s standard systems—electrical, for instance. That take was met with healthy skepticism among the press. Frankly, most of us who watched the hole grow wider and deeper for more than a year weren’t buying it either. Not when giant hunks of concrete were lowered into the abyss right outside our windows. We figured it was security related but knew better than to ask. Like anything having to do with the protection of the place, it was beyond my pay grade. I just hoped there might be room for me in what I assumed was an apocalypse-ready bunker.
If our space in the West Wing is tight, the press space is tighter still. Reporters are stationed behind, and beneath, the Press Briefing Room. Five, six, sometimes seven members of an outlet—the Associated Press or CBS News, for instance—squeeze into booths no more than ten feet deep that are separated by slender glass doors. In the midst of the crammed glass compartments, there’s an open space where a metal sign hangs from the ceiling. This is “Stills Country.”
The “stills” are a rotating crew of still photographers, a cast of characters who range in age from late twenties to early sixties. By and large, these are the living historians of the White House. Some have taken thousands of flights on Air Force One, working for the bulk of their lives—over a number of presidencies—in the bubble. They’re from the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Reuters news agency, Agence France-Presse (AFP), and a revolving group of additional outlets from across the country and around the world. They move like a pack, and when it’s just the men, they verge on the vulgar. They are as dedicated to having a good time as they are to doing a good job. They make the place more fun.
Stills don’t “take pictures.” They “make pictures.” And they adhere to a strict code of conduct among themselves. Yes, they’ll jostle for position on the rope line, but they respect that their peers need to make the shot as well, and they’ll help a photographer if he or she is in need. Making space. Advocating for one another. Working as a team. It was all a part of the code. There are infamous stories, mostly from the distant past, about what happened when a photographer or some other reporter in the pack broke the code. One of my favorite photographers, a genteel older man with a sweet affect and shy charisma, was said to have opened a competitor’s luggage during an overseas trip and relieved himself on the contents of the bag. Nobody quite remembers why he supposedly did it, but all seem to understand the frustration that can build over days, weeks, sometimes months on the road.
Fortunately, the crew had evolved by the time Obama took office, graduating to harmless pranks when I met them, such as teasing newer reporters into thinking big news was just around the corner. To a new press wrangler, though, a trustworthy still photographer can be a godsend, as a few were to me. I often looked to Doug—the bald, friendly leader of the pack—for advice. As I was still getting my footing, he’d give a subtle nod, flagging for me that something was amiss: a Secret Service agent was blocking the shot, for instance, or a newer reporter was creeping too close to the president. Most of all, the stills are a remarkably talented bunch, and their work regularly lands on the front pages of the nation’s largest newspapers—above the fold.
We trusted the photographers. They were the nucleus of the president’s press pool.
Press pool was a term—like POTUS on my first day—that I had heard thrown around but never truly understood until I became a wrangler, tasked with herding the pool from place to place and country to country.
There were variations for in-town pool versus out-of-town travel pool, but the basic gist is this: a group of reporters, camera crew, and photographers traveled everywhere with the president, from foreign trips and domestic rallies, to rounds of golf and birthday dinners in DC. There were five stills, four writers, a radio reporter, a sound tech, a cameraperson, and a producer.
The pool, established during the Eisenhower administration, was born out of simple logistics: not everybody who wanted to cover the president could. There’s not enough space, and most outlets can’t afford the expense of doing so in the first place. So this group of reporters pools its talents, time, and resources to cover the president continuously. Its purpose is straightforward: report and record what’s happening with the president.
Sometimes they record real history—swearings-in, Papal visits, the State of the Union—but more often, they’re around “in case.” When there are date nights, parent-teacher conferences, midnight arrivals of Marine One, their purpose is understood and unspoken and often grim. Truth is, the pool is around in case something goes wrong around the world or in the president’s protective bubble. After all, any picture of the president could be the last. That’s when they’re really recordi
ng history: those flashes of intrigue or tragedy that play in our public conversation for years.
The pool was there when President Kennedy was shot in Dallas; it’s how a devastated nation, and my distraught nana, were kept informed as their president fought for his life. So, too, the pool fed footage to the country in the aftermath of the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in Washington. It’s how we know of President George W. Bush’s immediate reaction upon learning that we were under attack on September 11, 2001. The pool—including then–Time correspondent Jay Carney and favorite photographer, Doug—was aboard Air Force One, the only plane in the sky, as America considered its next move.
A similar moment—a stark change of course—could replay itself at any time, but that was easy to forget while sitting in the food court at JBA, short for Joint Base Andrews, the US Air Force facility where the president’s planes were stored and where we departed on countless domestic and overseas trips. But when the weekend rolled around, assuming there wasn’t snow on the ground, there was a good chance we were headed to JBA for a different reason.
It was a wrangler’s worst nightmare: Obama loved to golf.
We in the Press Office often said he just enjoyed the chance to take a walk outside. That was the company line, and it was certainly true, but to use a frequent Obama-ism, “what is also true is” that the man had become somewhat obsessed with the game. Many weekends, he’d try to squeeze in a round or two. And, naturally, the pool was always along for the ride. I would sit with them in the food court for five hours while the president played. It was the bane of whichever wrangler had “weekend duty”—especially for me. I’m an avid golfer, and I would much rather have been on the links than watching the pool scarf down junk food at creaky cafeteria tables. One of the producers who frequented the pool liked to try his hand at “eating around the world”—like at Epcot in Disney World, except with Taco Bell, Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta, a Burger King, a knock-off cheesesteak place, and a fish sticks stand. He’d pile his tray high, one item from each spot, and dig in until I got word from the Secret Service agent stationed with us that the president was on the sixteenth green.
That’s when we would head to the pool vans to link back up with the motorcade. The print reporter would send a note to the rest of the White House correspondents any time the pool or president made a move. They were called pool reports and went something like this: “The pool has moved to the vans; the president evidently wrapping up his nearly five-hour round of golf.” That was about the extent of insight we wanted the pool to have. Golf was one of those “in-case” circumstances: if something went wrong, the pool was there. If not, I was to keep everyone at a reasonable distance.
We didn’t like footage of the president playing golf.
A duffed chip or missed putt could draw out trite, stretched analogies to a failed policy or flawed rollout from a bored press pool. And if he striped one right down the middle? Well, then why is the president so good at golf? He was clearly playing too much golf and had too much time to practice his drives. Most of all, the right-wing media just didn’t approve of the president playing golf, and the far-right-wing media personalities more specifically didn’t approve of this president playing golf.
To keep the fodder to a minimum, we rarely let the pool film or photograph the president while he was on the course. Instead, we staged the pool vans about a block away. One summer afternoon, we lined up on the wrong block and missed the motorcade. That meant they couldn’t report in real time exactly when the president left and when he returned. They wondered if something was up, worried that they were missing important news. They weren’t. It was a routine drive home. Still, the pool let me have it in the van, yelling, bickering, complaining all the way back to the White House. I was pissed at them, but I also knew they were right.
“Where’s the president now?!” That’s what the print reporter in charge of writing pool reports called out every few minutes, both to do her job and to get back at me. It was like a back-seat driver asking “Are we there yet?”
“Where’s the president?”
• • •
It was the same thing Josh was anxious about as he scampered to Upper Press on a similarly beautiful day the following summer. “Pat, I need a favor.”
I had recently moved on from wrangling to writing—for me, golf trips were a thing of the past—and I was toiling away at my desk on the White House “daily message points,” which I sent every day to stakeholders—from basketball legend Charles Barkley and POTUS’s high school friends, to liberal economists and political pundits—anybody who we thought might spread the good word about the news of the day.
But this day was getting out of hand, and this was an all-hands-on-deck moment. Josh told me: “We don’t know where the president is right now.”
It was the summer of 2014, and the president was feeling a bit caged in. He wanted out of the bubble. We had developed a term for it earlier in the summer when POTUS veered from the preapproved path around the White House to greet tourists nearby. “The Bear is loose,” we took to saying. In fact, that’s exactly what the president told Jennifer Palmieri as he departed the White House with Denis. They were going to Dunkin’ Donuts, we thought. The wranglers scrambled to assemble a pool and made a run for it toward Dunkin’ Donuts. Half of the pool got left behind and was waiting out front of the West Wing lobby as I burst through the doors. The marine who typically guarded the door, opening it for everyone who walks through, was off duty, which meant the president truly wasn’t in the West Wing.
Without stopping, I waved the pool to follow as we darted through the northwest gate and headed north toward Dunkin’. Just as we were about to cross into Lafayette Park, I spotted a commotion to our left, up Pennsylvania Avenue. It had to be him.
He was at Starbucks.
I did my best to keep the pool at bay, but it was pandemonium when we arrived. The pool crept close. “C’mon, guys, give me some space,” the president asked, coffee cup in hand. Somebody asked what he’d ordered. It had to be tea. That’s all he drank during the day. Rather than answer, he looked at me. “Let’s test your wrangling skills.” At that point, I started screaming at the pool, “Back up! Back up! Let’s go, pool!” And every wrangler’s favorite euphemism for “Leave this instant!”: “Thank you, pool!”
The case of the missing president was solved quickly, but the ramifications lasted quite a bit longer. The Secret Service wasn’t thrilled, and the press corps was up in arms. Unacceptable, they thought. The poor guy just wanted to take a walk, but it was a reminder that he couldn’t. Yeah, Barack Obama could theoretically go for a stroll whenever he wanted, but the president can’t. Thank you, pool!
These flare-ups often come off as petty press problems, and we were frequently frustrated by their fretting. But the White House Correspondents’ Association, the group that represents the press and advocates for coverage of the administration, was right to push for more access. It was their duty to obsess over the pool’s continued coverage. There’s no law mandating that the president be covered continuously by a press pool. It’s simply a White House norm, preserved by tradition. Like so many norms, it can be upended. That’s why it needs to be protected every day, by the press, by the president, and by the people of the United States demanding to know what’s going on, taking agency over their citizenship.
There’s a reason it’s called the People’s House.
• • •
It’s clear that the White House press pool plays a crucial role in our democracy, and if common sense prevails, it’s not going away any time soon. But with an evolving media landscape, tight budgets, and shifting norms, change will come to the pool over time. Fewer individuals per pool, possibly. New, less traditional companies—BuzzFeed and who knows what else next—joining the ranks of the rotating outlets, for instance. The form it ultimately takes and when the pool evolves are less important than the basic function of the press pool continuing. That’s a norm that shou
ld be an ironclad rule.
There is another White House custom that appears to be in limbo, its future considered by some to be on the chopping block.
The daily press briefing, even with its live feeds and miles of wires where the famous White House swimming pool used to be, can feel archaic, harkening back to a time when what was learned at the briefing drove the day; when the press secretary could steer the day’s narrative from behind his or her podium.II That capability, for a number of reasons—some good, some not so much—has been diminished.
Still, Josh recently put it to me this way: “The daily briefing gives the White House an unrivaled platform to advocate and defend the president’s agenda. It also gives journalists—as agents of the American people—the opportunity to ask skeptical, pressing questions to hold those in power accountable for their actions and demand transparency into how that power is being used.”
At its best, that’s exactly what it does. Picture the first row in the White House Briefing Room: What do you see? Probably reporters jostling for attention, jotting notes, holding the president to account. And it’s true: the first row is filled with reporters at their professional peak—many fulfilling a lifelong dream, years of diligent work in the making—grilling the administration, rooting out answers, sifting through half-truths and misspeaks, exposing evasions.
So, what’s the problem?
Well, the Brady Press Briefing Room has more than one row.
The room has moved away from the gritty, wizened reporter—the Helen Thomas, a legend who questioned ten presidents from the front row—toward younger journalists looking to bigger and better things.III Somewhere along the way, for many, the White House beat became a stepping stone. Too often, the reporters are out for themselves or their network, which is understandable—just not ideal for getting at answers, insight, and the truth.