Beckel’s spin had succeeded famously. When he arrived for a live Today show interview the morning after Super Tuesday, Beckel was enthusiastically congratulated by Bryant Gumbel. “Yup,” his elated guest beamed, “it’s the comeback of the year.”
Beckel had accomplished this miracle of news management in two stages: he built his media credibility by openly admitting the problem, and he built on this immediate authenticity by defining the events in the most self-serving way possible. By telling the press that a defeat in Georgia would spell Mondale’s doom, he was able to claim a victory on Super Tuesday by the mere force of his candidate’s victory in a single, previously overlooked primary state.
Spin was established here and in so many other contexts by progressing one step beyond last chapter’s rule. Once established as an honest player by hanging a lantern on your problem, you can exploit that credibility.
Spin is not new to politics. Years ago a driven young politician used it to pull an even more dramatic comeback.
On September 22, 1952, a thirty-nine-year-old senator was on a United Airlines flight from Portland to Los Angeles. The next night he would have to give the speech of his career. On a sheaf of souvenir postcards he had pulled from the seatback in front of him, he began to sketch his notes:
“Checkers . . . Pat’s cloth coat . . .”
The young man was getting ready to defend his fast-rising political career against charges of corruption. Just as a smart politician can seize control of a situation simply by admitting he or she has a problem, the sophisticated practitioner learns to turn the admission to his quick advantage strategically, spinning the story in a totally new direction.
If anyone needed spin, it was Richard Nixon. He had been elected to the House six years earlier by attacking his opponent’s associations with the American left. He had exposed the Communist ties of Alger Hiss and then reenergized his red-baiting to take a Senate seat in 1950. Two years later, he was the Republican nominee for vice president, running mate to the great World War II hero Dwight D. Eisenhower. Now Nixon was in the middle of a political firestorm. Four days earlier, the New York Post, at that time a liberal newspaper, had carried a two-line banner: “Secret Rich Man’s Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far Beyond His Salary.”
At first the young Californian flailed helplessly. When his campaign train was attacked by hecklers, he desperately tried to attribute the fund scandal to his earlier success in cracking the Hiss case. “Ever since I did that work, the Communists and left-wingers have been fighting me with every possible smear.”
It was understandable that Nixon would lose his cool. First of all, the fund in question was not generically all that different from those kept by many other politicians. Moreover, not a penny had gone toward his personal use. But none of these points seemed to matter at the time. The man who had built a career fishing in troubled waters was now foundering in a political typhoon.
In the ensuing days, Nixon was increasingly pressured to leave the ticket. On Saturday, September 20, the New York Herald Tribune, the voice of the Republican Party’s establishment, was blunt: “The proper course for Senator Nixon in the circumstances is to make a formal offer of withdrawal from the ticket.”
Nixon could see the handwriting on the wall: Eisenhower wanted him dumped. That same day, the Eisenhower team called on Senator William F. Knowland, a Californian and an anti-Communist, to join the campaign train. Nixon’s substitute was being wheeled into place in broad daylight. When the press asked Eisenhower whether Nixon would remain on the ticket, he told them that his running mate had to be “as clean as a hound’s tooth.”
On Sunday, more bad news. Harold Stassen, then a figure to be reckoned with in national Republican circles, sent Nixon a telegram urging that he offer his resignation.
Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the key man behind the Eisenhower candidacy, called Nixon with a proposition. The vice-presidential nominee should plead his case before the American people, in a nationwide television broadcast. It would not be good enough if the reaction to the program was 60 percent for Nixon and 40 percent against. “If it is ninety to ten,” Dewey said, “stay on.” Nixon could see that he was being set up to take the fall. Later, Eisenhower himself called. “Tell them everything there is to tell, everything you can remember since the day you entered public life. Tell them about any money you have ever received,” Ike insisted.
“General,” Nixon asked, “do you think that after the television program an announcement could then be made one way or the other?”
“Maybe,” Eisenhower replied.
Nixon went through the roof. “There comes a time in matters like this when you’ve got to either shit or get off the pot.”
Ike, not used to such language from a junior officer, was noncommittal. “Keep your chin up,” he said.
Nixon spent the day on the speech. With the broadcast just four hours away, he was about to leave his hotel. He had been discussing with Murray Chotiner, his longtime campaign manager, and William P. Rogers, his future Secretary of State, how the viewing audience should be urged to register their verdict on his public defense. The phone rang. The caller was a “Mr. Chapman,” the code name for Governor Dewey. Reluctantly, Nixon took the call.
Dewey: “There has been a meeting of all of Eisenhower’s top advisers. They’ve asked me to tell you that in their opinion at the conclusion of the broadcast you should submit your resignation to Eisenhower.”
Nixon: No answer.
Dewey: “Hello? Can you hear me?”
Nixon: “What does Eisenhower want me to do?”
Dewey: “What shall I tell them you are going to do?”
Nixon: “Just tell them that I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m going to do, and if they want to find out they’d better listen to the broadcast! And tell them I know something about politics, too.”
That night, before the largest TV audience in history—it was estimated at 58 million—Richard Nixon surprised his enemies.
“My fellow Americans,” he began, standing in front of a desk, “I come before you tonight as a candidate for the vice presidency and as a man whose honesty and integrity has been questioned.”
He then gave his huge, fascinated audience “a complete financial history.” Taking the audience back to his youth, Nixon listed all his assets:
A 1950 Oldsmobile
A $3,000 equity in his California home, where his parents were living
A $20,000 equity in his Washington house
No stocks, no bonds, nothing else
In his melodramatic appeal, Nixon rhetorically undressed himself. In an age when American families were still extremely private about their financial matters, he was telling the American people exactly what he was worth, down to the last penny. At a time when having a mortgage was still viewed as somewhat embarrassing, he was listing his debts on TV! Historian William Manchester chronicled the Checkers episode: “Here, clearly, was a man who knew what it was to worry about getting the kids’ teeth straightened, or replacing the furnace, or making the next payment on the very [television] set now tuned to him.”
Nixon was also setting up the spin. He was admitting that he needed outside help, that he could not finance a political career on his own resources. It was fine that the Democratic nominee, Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois, “who inherited a fortune from his father,” could run for national office. But in a democracy “a man of modest means” should also be able to make the race. By confessing his slight resources, he was shifting attention from the question of propriety to that of class. “It isn’t much,” Nixon said after reviewing his entire financial situation, “but Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime that we’ve got is honestly ours. I should say this—that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat.”
Nixon was revving. He described how someone had sent his daughters a cocker spaniel and how Tricia had named it Checkers. “I just want to say this right now, that regardles
s of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it.”
This was just the preliminary. People who think they remember the “Checkers speech” forget what came next. Having mawkishly bared his soul, the beleaguered candidate now took advantage of the credibility he had gained. The main thrust was counterattack. Rather than be nailed on the defensive, he dictated terms to his accusers.
“Now I am going to suggest some courses of conduct. First of all, you have read in the papers about other funds. Now, Mr. Stevenson had a couple. I think what Mr. Stevenson should do is come before the American people as I have, give the names of the people that have contributed to that fund, give the names of the people who put this money into their pockets at the same time they were receiving money from the state government, and see what favors, if any, they gave out for that.”
Now to his vice-presidential opponent. “As far as Mr. Sparkman [Senator John J. Sparkman of Alabama] I would suggest the same thing. He’s had his wife on the payroll. I don’t condemn him for that. But I think he should come before the American people and indicate what outside sources of income he has had.”
Nixon turned the issue from impropriety to the candidates’ willingness to disclose. By undergoing the humiliation of a body frisk, he made financial disclosure a standard for office. In that competition, Nixon had finished the race before the others had left the starting gate.
The spin now had reached full torque. “I would suggest that under the circumstances both Mr. Sparkman and Mr. Stevenson should come before the American people, as I have, and make a complete statement as to their financial history. If they don’t, it will be an admission that they have something to hide.”
Something to hide! At this point, General Eisenhower, watching the broadcast in Cleveland, jabbed his pencil into the legal pad he was using to take notes. This Nixon character was talking about him! If candidates were expected to make their taxes and other papers public, that would include Ike’s own tricky finances, particularly the special legislation Congress had passed shielding from taxes the income he was still receiving from his wartime memoirs. And now here was his running mate threatening to splash the whole thing onto the front pages.
The next morning the great man met his new, hardball friend in West Virginia and declared, “You’re my boy!”
The Checkers episode demonstrated that when you establish credibility, you gain control of the story and can spin it any way you want.
Nobody has done this better than the media mavens at the Reagan White House during his politically brilliant first term. A case in point: the David A. Stockman affair of 1981.
Throughout the year, the new Administration had repudiated Democratic charges that its fiscal policy would lead to huge deficits and that its tax policies were skewed toward the rich. Then the December Atlantic Monthly published a long interview with David Stockman in which the Budget Director admitted in effect that the Democrats were right. Here was the President’s own fiscal architect saying that the Reagan tax cut of 1981 “didn’t quite mesh” with the Administration’s huge Pentagon buildup. “The pieces were moving on independent tracks—the tax program, where we were going on spending, and the defense program, which was just a bunch of numbers written on a piece of paper,” the Director of the Budget told the interviewer, William Greider.
The whole issue of deficits, Stockman brazenly acknowledged, had been swept under the rug by an accounting dodge the boys at the Office of Management and Budget liked to call the “magic asterisk.” The only reason the Administration had for believing the deficits would be cut, in other words, was the Budget Director’s bookkeeping notation that the reductions would be announced by the President at some later date! In other words, Fly now, pay later. In truth, the Budget Director had no idea how the deficits were going to come down: “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.”
So much for this “conservative” Administration’s credibility on the deficit question.
Stockman’s disclosures about tax policy were even more embarrassing. For months the President had maintained that his tax-cut bill was eminently fair, that its purpose was to give the average taxpayers something more to take home in their weekly paychecks. But critics were firing away, contending that the whole bill was tilted toward the rich. Now Stockman was feeding them ammunition. The real goal of the President’s tax plan, he said, was to cut the very top bracket from 70 percent to 50 percent. The cuts for those in the middle-income bracket were included “in order to make this palatable as a political matter.” The whole bill was simply a “Trojan horse to bring down the top rate.”
It was this last metaphor that gripped the country’s attention in the publicity that followed.
To control the public-relations damage, White House chief of staff James Baker choreographed a brilliant spin. The dance was a traditional two-step: first, admit you have a problem, thereby establishing credibility; then use the enhanced credibility to define the problem in a way that keeps the political damage to a minimum.
And it was Stockman himself who gave the plan the necessary packaging. According to the Budget Director’s memoirs, he was called into Baker’s office and told that he had one chance to keep his post. “You’re going to have lunch with the President. The menu is humble pie. You’re going to eat every last motherfucking spoonful of it. You’re going to be the most contrite sonofabitch this world has ever seen.”
Most important, he was to display this mournful pose to the White House press corps. “When you go through the Oval Office door, I want to see that sorry ass of yours dragging on the carpet.”
As an insider of the Reagan White House, Stockman knew the importance that the President’s advisers attached to such imagery. He knew that it was his use of the “Trojan horse” phrase that gave the original story so much life. Having gotten himself into trouble with a figure of speech, he now took the same way out.
As a child of the Minnesota farm country, he had some clever imagery on hand. “If they [the Reagan PR advisers] didn’t know the difference between reality and a metaphor, I would have to give them what they wanted. A counter-metaphor. A woodshed story. A self-inflicted public humiliation.” Stockman told the press he had been taken to the woodshed. He had been given an emotional dressing-down by his boss and father figure, the President of the United States.
So went the Washington chorus. In one small but elegant bit of stagecraft, the West Wing PR folks, running with Stockman’s naughty-boy metaphor, shifted the entire media focus from an earth-shaking revelation of unsound public finance to a small soap opera: the betrayal by one bright young man of his trusting mentor.
The spin’s rationale was compelling. Revelation could be dealt with only by denial. Stockman refused to make such a denial; he had been quoted accurately. It was vital, therefore, that the issue be shifted to that of betrayal. The solution to betrayal is expiation; hence the woodshed. To mass, uninformed and unanalytical audiences, the moral imagery always outdazzles the scientific.
The White House press corps fell for it. Pat Oliphant and company had been provided the perfect premise for an editorial cartoon, and they seized it. There was the little farm boy, little Davy Stockman, walking gingerly from the ominous little building, where a stern pa stood brandishing his instrument of punishment. The tears flowed from the lad’s eyes, and the reader’s own eyes were drawn to the caption: “A Visit to the Woodshed.”
Within days the spin had taken complete control. Of course, there were a few stories about the economic significance of Stockman’s disclosures, but these were buried back in the financial sections. It was the woodshed angle that made the evening news and the front pages of the paper. By admitting that the Stockman caper represented a serious breach of loyalty—not much of an admission at this point—the Reagan team shifted attention to an issue they could manage. They even succeeded in winning the President some points for being (a) stern and (b) forgiving. The Prodigal Son was back working for the old man again, a li
ttle humbler, a little more appreciative of his father’s charitable nature. Betrayal had led to punishment, contrition and, finally, absolution.
There are few people or organizations who cannot make use of this technique at some crisis. In legal terms, putting the spin on an issue is basically an exercise in plea bargaining. Faced with an indictment, the attorney tells his client to plead guilty—but to a lower charge. In Stockman’s case, we were told the crime had been personal, not fiscal. What he had done wrong was betray the trust of his political master, a deed for which he had been duly chastised.
It is a fact of human life that one’s accusers can keep only a single idea in their heads at any given time. They are determined to prove your guilt, but worried that it will never be the kind of clear-cut denouncement we see in a courtroom drama. Only on Perry Mason, it seems, did the guilty party stand up in court and scream out his crime.
The joy of spin lies in telling the accuser he is dead right and then getting the personal satisfaction of delineating exactly what he is right about.
In 1987, Jesse Jackson showed how it’s done.
Speaking to an elite black-tie fund-raising audience in Washington, D.C., he paid tribute to Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey. Jackson said that Bradley was one of his personal heroes “because of his fight against racial stereotyping. Bill Bradley triumphed against great odds to become a basketball star. He had to reach these goals despite the handicap of race and family background. We all know the Bill Bradley story: how the young white man from the right side of the tracks came to one day become a professional basketball player.
“His neighbors were riding him, and his friends laughed at him, but he persevered. Bill was determined to succeed until at last he broke the chains of race-conscious behavior to join the front ranks in the great American sport of basketball.” The crowd, still giddy at the subject matter, was beginning to erupt.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 103