Presidential Press Secretaries in Times of Crisis

Transcript

MR. HESS: Good afternoon and welcome to the second of the weekly series, a Harvard and Brookings forum on the role of the press in this present crisis. The first week, you may recall that we discussed lessons of wars past. This week, we're going to turn to the role of the presidential press secretary in times of crisis.

I co-host. I'm Stephen Hess of Brookings. I co-host these forums with Marvin Kalb, the executive director of the Washington office of The Shorenstein Center of the John F. Kennedy School of Government of the Harvard University. All of the above. The first president who had a full-time press spokesman was Herbert Hoover. Needed it too, poor man. The man's name was George Ackerson, and he wasn't very successful. The press secretary really came of age under Franklin Roosevelt and Steve Early, his press secretary. But the modern Press Office, virtually as we know it today, was invented by Jim Hagerty, Eisenhower's press secretary.

I can remember very well, because I was a young speech writer on the Eisenhower staff, the hundreds of hours at lunch at the White House mess at the staff table listening to Jim Hagerty, being amazed at his amazing store of information on virtually everything, until one day he decided to hold forth on the game of lacrosse. Now I had gone to Johns Hopkins, so that's something I knew something about. It was at that moment that I devised the very famous Hess's first law of White House press secretaries, which is: The successful press secretaries must speak with authority about everything, whether or not they know anything.

There have been 23 men and 1 woman who's held this august post. I think if I counted correctly, 14 of them are still alive. We have two of the 13 men with us and 100 percent of the women.

MS. MYERS: The women turned out in force.

MR. HESS: That's right. The women turned out in force.

MS. MYERS: A hundred percent attendance.

SPEAKER: Is that a comment on their life expectancy?

MS. MYERS: Yeah.

MR. HESS: Yes. As a matter of fact. Afterwards, I'll tell you a little about that. I wrote the encyclopedia entry on press secretaries, so yeah, I can give you something.

I should tell you that this event is on the Internet on our Webcast. We provide a live streaming video. If you are listening, you could click on the Brookings main home page, www.brookings.edu. Then the full video will be archived on the Brookings Web site, and also the full transcript. For those of you we welcome who are watching on C-SPAN, that's a taped program so you can't ask us questions, but those on streaming video can E-mail their questions to question@brookings.edu.

We have three press secretaries with us today: Ron Nessen, who was the press secretary for President Gerald Ford; Dee Dee Myers, who was press secretary during the first term of President Bill Clinton; and Joe Lockhart, who was press secretary during the second term of Bill Clinton.

Now let's turn to my co-host for the first question. Marvin.

MR. KALB: Okay. My first question to our three guests is sort of a simple one. We are all consumed right now with the war in Afghanistan. My question to each of you, and I'll start with Ron and then just go straight down the line, is on the issue of national security. What was the single most pressing, most important, most challenging national security or foreign policy issue that you had to deal with? Looking back at it, how do you think you did? Ron, you start.

MR. NESSEN: Well, I guess there were two in the Ford Administration. One was the capture of the American merchant ship Mayaguez by the Khmer Rouge in the Gulf of Siam. The interesting part of that was that there was anarchy in Cambodia at that time. Nobody was really in charge; there wasn't any real government.

The United States didn't know how to communicate its demands that the crew and the ship be let go because there was nobody running a government in Phnom Penh.

So we thought, well, maybe there are some news tickers still active in Phnom Penh, so we sent the message via the press. We held a briefing and read this statement, which was meant for the Khmer Rouge. I remember I was reading this statement and reporters wanted to go very slowly so they got, you know, they wanted to go at dictation speed and so forth. But that was the only way to really get in touch with the Khmer Rouge, was to do it through the press.

MR. KALB: So you were using the press as a kind of middleman to the enemy in this case?

MR. NESSEN: Correct. But the real—I think the real security episode that we had in the Ford Administration was the end of the Vietnam War.

MR. KALB: Exactly.

MR. NESSEN: The Vietnam War ended in April of 1973.

MR. KALB: '75.

MR. NESSEN: '75, excuse me. '73 was when the American troops pulled out. '75 was when the remaining Americans in the embassy in Saigon were airlifted out by helicopter, and the helicopter lift lasted a lot longer than expected.

Finally it was over and all the Americans who had been in the embassy were evacuated. Some of the Vietnamese who had helped the United States were evacuated. Kissinger and I went to the Old Executive Office Building—

MR. KALB: Kissinger, then-Secretary of State.

MR. NESSEN: He was, to do a final briefing. I read a statement from President Ford and Kissinger did a detailed briefing. The thrust of it was, of course, all the Americans have been evacuated from Saigon; our role in the war is over.

So we came off the stage of the Old Executive Office Building and Brent Scowcroft, who was then the National Security Advisor, said I have bad news. All the Americans are not out of the embassy compound in Saigon. There are 24 Marines still there.

MR. KALB: Oh, boy.

MR. NESSEN: Not left by accident, but left as a rear guard; get all the civilians out of the embassy, and then the helicopters were going to come back for these 24 Marines. So the question was how do you tell reporters that you told them all the Americans were gone, and now, a half-hour later, you're telling them there are 24 Marines there? So there was a debate about if we should say anything? What should we say? How should we say it? After all, they're going to be gone in an hour anyhow. Don Rumsfeld, who was then the Defense Secretary and is again the Defense Secretary—and I'll never forget this because I can still hear the words sort of echoing in my head—Rumsfeld said this war has been marked by so many lies, let's not end it on one last lie.

MR. KALB: Whoa.

MR. NESSEN: We put out a statement saying whoops, we made a mistake, all the Americans are not out of Saigon. There are 24 Marines there. They'll be gone in an hour. I always thought it was a very admirable thing for him to do and I think it was the right thing for us to do.

MR. KALB: It's a fascinating story. Thank you very much. Joe Lockhart, your moment and how did you handle it?

MR. LOCKHART: Well, I think probably as far as volume went, we spent more time on the Middle East peace process than any other issue. But as far as intensity, the most difficult communications challenge we had was the conflict in Kosovo. It's interesting, because we generally thought we were pretty good at communicating and understanding the different challenges and understanding in our political tradition the need to be awake and aware 24 hours a day and stay ahead of a story. We learned in the first couple weeks of Kosovo that we weren't as good as we thought.

I remember it being brought home to me one of the things that I'd often do and— at the start of a day was, you know, get a recap from the National Security people what had happened overnight, including Presidential phone calls. I remember one morning sort of going into the person I used to get me that information and said, you know, what did he do last night? He said, well, he had about a 30-minute conversation with Tony Blair. I said, well, you know, give me some points; what did they talk about? They said, well, mostly they talked about you.

I thought wow, you know, these guys are talking about me. Then I said, well, what did they talk about? They said, well, about you, his press secretary, and what a miserable job you're doing. So that sort of brought home that this was a real problem as opposed to a perceived problem. The problem was, we were doing an okay job, I think, of communicating here in Washington, but we kind of forgot the idea that in a NATO-led conflict, there are 19 capitals, each telling their own story, and that's a reporter's dream. You just line up the 19 stories, find the differences, and you can go all day on that. So we quickly realized how we had not planned for that and very quickly set up an operation.

The other piece of this was, a sort of revelation moment, was there was a very professional gentleman in NATO named Jamie Shea, who used to do two briefings a day, and I always marveled at his ability to get up and talk. But he was a little slow sometimes in getting back to you when you asked him something. So one day, I asked him, well, you know, just get some of your staff to do it. I realized that he had three staff people and was doing the work of what 19 governments had hundreds of people working on.

So we made the decision to move a lot of people over to Brussels that, for political reasons, once within the alliance, we couldn't become the primary spokesperson for this conflict, but we had to have an influence in how it was talked about. I'd say three weeks into this, we had our act together. But it was a very steep learning curve and very painful as far as what our performance was.

I think the interesting thing is there's a certain parallel now to what's going on now. I don't know any more than what I read in the newspaper, but if what I read in the newspaper is accurate, some of the same growing pains happened and have been addressed in quite the same way. My only hope is that, you know, Ari doesn't come into the office one morning and find that, you know, President Bush and Tony Blair were talking again about him.

MR. KALB: Thank you, Joe. Dee Dee Myers, your sense of the major moment and, looking back, how do you think you handled it?

MS. MYERS: Gosh, this is not a fun story to tell. Helen will remember it well. You know, the first years of the Clinton Administration were marked mostly by small foreign policy problems. There were no major conflicts ongoing, certainly nothing on the scale of what we're seeing right now.

Very early in Clinton's term, President Bush—the former President Bush—had gone back to Kuwait to mark an anniversary of the liberation. While he was there, there was an assassination attempt on his life that was foiled by the FBI. Of course, an investigation began immediately into who was responsible and there was tremendous interest both here and around the world. Of course, the immediate suspect was Baghdad; that the Iraqis had been involved.

So I would of course regularly get asked about the situation at my briefings. The guidance that I would give, which I had gotten from the National Security Council, the National Security Advisor, was that the FBI is investigating; when they've reached a conclusion, they'll forward that to the President and he'll make a decision on how to respond.

Well, one Friday, in preparing for my briefing, I went through the usual steps, checked the status of the investigation; they said no change—I was told no change.

I went out to my briefing and I was asked about the question, which I was only asked, not every day, but you know, two or three times a week. I gave the usual response: The FBI's looking into it; once they've reached a conclusion, they'll forward it to the President and he'll make a decision.

Unbeknownst to me, the FBI had forwarded the decision to the President on Wednesday night; the President had decided, and the conclusion was that the Iraqi government was indeed involved. The President had made the decision to retaliate, to bomb the defense ministry in Baghdad using cruise missiles launched from ships in the Gulf. I didn't find that out until Saturday.

Not only by that point had I given the wrong guidance, that the President hadn't received the conclusion; we put a lid on. A lid, for those of you who don't know, is at the end of the news day, when the President isn't going to make any additional statements or be seen—put a lid on saying no more news. And a bunch of White House reporters for some reason had gone to an Orioles baseball game, or were planning to go and were en route when we had to beep out and say not only is there no lid, but you better get back here as quickly as possible. By then, the missiles were already in the air, we were just waiting for— actually, they had already landed in Baghdad; we were waiting for a bomb damage assessment to be able to brief on what was happening.

The bombing went pretty well. My credibility bombed in the process. There was nothing I could do except move forward trying to put out the best information that I could going forward. That was, again, very early on. It was an incredibly difficult moment for me.

To this day, I believe it was more a sin of omission than commission. I don't think people were trying to keep me out of the loop, but that was a problem that I had, one. Two, there was a little bit of a gap in how the information was being transferred.

The other problem was the way that I set up the guidance. It was another important lesson that I learned, which was—the guidance that I had given was, when the President gets the results—I mean, when the FBI reaches a conclusion, they'll forward that to the President. I should have said that once and say I'm not ever going to say anything else about this until we've decided what to do and done it, because I set up a situation where I was going to get asked the question and there was going to be a gap between—

MR. KALB: Yep.

MS. MYERS: How I could answer it.

MR. HESS: By the way, we should clarify, Dee Dee, when she said "Helen" she was referring to Helen Thomas.

MS. MYERS: Correct.

MR. HESS: For the benefit of our three press secretaries, and to make them feel right at home, Brookings and Harvard, sparing no expense, made sure that Helen Thomas would be here in the front row on the aisle.

MS. MYERS: An eerily familiar sight.

MR. HESS: I thought so—

MS. THOMAS: I get the first question.

MR. KALB: You do. You will get it when we get there.

MR. LOCKHART: Can we each tell our Helen story?

MR. NESSEN: I don't think we have time.

MS. MYERS: We certainly couldn't stop at one.

MR. KALB: Dee Dee, you were mentioning something that you think is terribly important about the role of the spokesperson in this process of passing on information and lids, various things like that.

The relationship that the spokesperson has in the White House; access to the President, access to the National Security Advisor and all—access, it would seem to me, as an outsider, would be absolutely crucial. That if you had the reputation—and it were true—that you had access to the President whenever you wanted it.

Ari Fleischer, for example, the current spokesman at the White House, is said not to have that kind of access to the President—

MS. MYERS: Right.

MR. KALB: But rather, to Karen Hughes. Starting with you, explain the process to us, how did it work?

MS. MYERS: Right.

MR. KALB: But rather, to Karen Hughes. Starting with you, explain the process to us, how did it work?

MR. HESS: Could I just add that the New York Times, in its profile of Ari, asks Helen Thomas what she thought, and she says he's a likable young man, but they keep him on a very short leash. So, maybe the words "leash"—"in the loop," "out of the loop" all would refer to your response here.

I think my access was at times better than others, but often not as good as it needed to be. The example that I just gave, being sort of Exhibit A. That was by far the worst moment that I had in the White House.

MR. KALB: Was it because it was a national security issue? Let's say it were a domestic political issue; would you have been brought into the loop more?

MS. MYERS: Probably. I mean, certainly more. I mean, it would have depended upon at what point in the shifting tides and staff structure that we went through in the early years. I think it got a lot better. I think the structure got institutionalized in a way that was much more effective. I think the Clinton Administration worked through a lot of the early bugs, a lot of the early wrong attitudes about the press and what the press's role was.

Of course, I was a part of all that. I'm not trying to point fingers. It's just something that I think got a lot better. You can't do the job without the information. I think that was certainly one of the problems I had.

Part of it was born in the structure that we came to the White House with, which was—my title was Press Secretary. I had a lower rank, smaller office, and a smaller salary than all of my previous male predecessors. I reported to George Stephanopolous really, in much the way I think Ari Fleischer reports to Karen Hughes.

I didn't initially do the daily briefings; George did those. After a few months, he moved on to a more protected job and I took over the daily briefings, just in time, you know, for this Iraq incident. So there were a lot of problems in that. There were a lot of people who had responsibility for talking to the press in the early days. We had a lot of overlapping responsibilities. The press had access to just about everybody that worked in the West Wing, and it made for very difficult situations, not just for the Press Secretary, not particularly for me, but also for the President, because he wasn't able to speak with one voice.

Also, I think people would— there was myself, David Gergen, who we all know, colleague of yours; George, who continued to be a very senior Administration official, and Mark Gearan, who was the communications director. All of us had overlapping responsibilities.

By about 18 months into it, that was fixed, but you know, after much damage had been done I think to the White House in general and to my credibility in particular.

MR. KALB: So Joe, by the time you took over, which was about six years later—

MS. MYERS: Three and a half years, maybe?

MR. LOCKHART: About three and a half, four years later.

MR. KALB: Did you, on a daily basis, or whenever you wished, have access to the President?

MR. LOCKHART: Yes. I think there's a lot of focus on did you—you know, do you talk to the President every day? That's a little misplaced, although Helen would ask almost every day, have you seen the President yet? I'd say not yet, Helen; it's early.

MS. MYERS: What would we talk about?

MR. LOCKHART: Let me make a couple points. One is, I think the idea of unlimited access is important, both in it's practical and symbolic values. The ability to get in and see the President at a moment's notice is an important part of doing the job, because there is a certain quality to the information you can get from the President that you can't get from anyone else.

That's both on crisis information and then what my classic example was always, the morning after the Oscars were given out. Without fail, three years in a row, the morning after that, someone would ask me did the President's actor or actress win or movie win, because they knew he was a movie buff, and how did he feel about the show? There's just no way that I could, knowing what his policies were and what his political philosophy was, make that up. I mean, and it would be folly to try. So I remember, you know, there were mornings on sort of inconsequential things that if I had to go and make my case to the Chief of Staff and the National Security Advisor, it would be crazy; that I would need a moment or two.

But I think the ability to know you can, allows you not to overuse the privilege or the privileges you're given to do it. I think more importantly, and it's why the job of Press Secretary is very similar to the job of a reporter, is understanding the structure of the building. You know, there are lots of people and they all look important and they'll all tell you they're important, but you quickly find out who is and who isn't. You find out where decisions are made. And I had the benefit of coming into the Clinton Administration for the second term, where a lot of the problems Dee Dee has alluded to were solved.

Not that we didn't have problems, but during my tenure there, we had both a very strong National Security Advisor and a very strong Chief of Staff. So it was very easy for me to—and pretty, you know, sort of one-stop shopping; make sure I knew almost everything that was going on. And if you would ask—

MR. KALB: Did you feel that they were leveling with you?

MR. LOCKHART: Sure, because I think they understood. And if you had asked me before I was going out to my daily briefing—if you'd given me the choice, I'm going to give you five minutes with the President or I'm going to give you five minutes with John Podesta, the Chief of Staff, most days, I'd take it with the Chief of Staff.

MR. KALB: Really?

MR. LOCKHART: Because in the structure of the White House that I worked in, that was where all roads led to. I could, in three or four minutes, find out what was going on throughout the government—all the things that were likely. Whereas, half of these decisions hadn't made it to the President's desk yet.

So I guess my conclusion is you need to be able to work like a reporter within the Administration, knowing where decisions get made; and secondly, you need to know which questions are the right ones to put to the President and which are the right ones to put other places.

MR. KALB: Ron, you had worked for many years as a reporter.

MR. NESSEN: Right.

MR. KALB: So you come on in then as the President's chief spokesman to the world. Did the people around the President trust you as a totally reliable guy, that you were not going to leak things to the reporters?

MR. NESSEN: Well, people in the White House never trust the Press Secretary. It's one of the reasons why—I mean, Dee Dee is absolutely right; the single most important quality for a good Press Secretary is access; to know what's going on. To get the information first-hand, so you don't have to ask somebody how should I answer this question.

I'll tell you a terrible story about one of our colleagues in just a second. But that is the most important quality. And I think there's this sense among other White House staff people, gee, if we don't tell the Press Secretary, he won't accidentally blurt it out when we don't want anybody to know about it, or not right now, anyhow.

When I went down to talk to President Ford—and he offered me this job—I had been a White House correspondent for NBC and I had seen all the press secretaries back to Salinger. I knew that this was the one quality that you had to have was access. I said that would be the only way that I would be able to take the job. You know, I want to be in on all the meetings and all the discussions and all the decisions and hear what's going on, and then you can decide what to say and when to say it, but you need to know the information.

Then Helen or somebody will always ask, did you see the President today? In the Ford White House, I always had an official appointment on his calendar every morning. But as Joe said, you also have to know who else in the building you can get a lot of information from.

MR. KALB: But you did see the President every day?

MR. NESSEN: But I did see the President. And I spent—you know, when you're traveling, there are many more opportunities to see him—or go up after work, have a drink, you know, and pick up kind of—because I agree that—I was somewhat naive. Having been a White House correspondent, I thought, well gee, this is sort of like the same job, you know; I'm like a pool reporter of one. I was going to go and find out what was going on—

MR. KALB: Right.

MR. NESSEN: And then I was going to come back and tell the other reporters. That was, in the long-run, naive, but that was my original concept. To show you what happens if—and let me just say one other thing. I think it was harder to make sure you knew everything that was going on in the kind of issues we're talking about, foreign policy, security issues, because Kissinger was the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of State at first. He had his own ideas about the uses of information.

MR. KALB: Oh, yeah.

MR. NESSEN: So it was harder to pull that out. An example of that happened to Larry Speakes. When Bill Plante of CBS asked him one day about rumors that the United States was going to invade Panama.

Larry Speakes had never heard of this before. So he went down to the National Security Council and asked John Poindexter whether we were going to invade Panama. Poindexter said, according to—

MR. HESS: Grenada.

MR. NESSEN: Grenada, I'm sorry, thank you. Poindexter said, that's preposterous, knock it down hard.

MR. KALB: Oh my God.

MR. NESSEN: He didn't say no, did you notice that?

MR. KALB: Yes.

MR. NESSEN: But Larry went out and said, no, we're not going to invade Granada and we did. It undermined Larry's credibility for—

MR. KALB: Honest lies?

MR. HESS: This is what's called honest lies. This is Jody Powell being asked about the rescue mission in Iran and he knocks that down and reporters seem to allow that as an honest lie. There are inadvertent lies that come up all the time. The inadvertent lie is things are happening so fast that you just sometimes are wrong; you—

MR. KALB: But that's different from a lie.

MS. MYERS: From a lie, right.

MR. HESS: Well okay, there are certainly half-truths. I think that's what Mike McCurry would have called telling the truth slowly. Then there are damn lies, which would be Joe McCarthy saying there are 205 Communists. But they all don't have to be about great questions. The Nixon White House gave out the recipe for Tricia's wedding cake, which was—

MR. KALB: Did they lie about that?

MR. HESS: Oh, yes, it was an old family recipe they said. It wasn't an old family recipe. So you gotta watch it. So go back a stage, are these confession moments? Will any of you guys admit to lying to the press?

MR. LOCKHART: Well, it depends on how you define it. I'll admit to being wrong. I'll give you an example. The last time the President went up to the U.N.— that I was with him, I think it was his last trip—Castro was there, and there was a luncheon where it was only the Heads of State and their personal aides were allowed in; even the diplomats were thrown out. There were no photographers, no cameras. There was a lot of speculation about would the President talk with Fidel Castro, would he shake his hand? It was the only thing about that lunch that I cared about.

The President's personal aide at the time had a different set of things he cared about. So I called him and I said did anything happen? He said no. In his mind, nothing had happened, because the President got in on time, got out on time and got to the next event.

To him, it didn't matter that the President—that, as Castro came up from behind, tapped him on the shoulder and shook his hand. So there was a report that the Cuban Castro people told his people, they told the press and they came to me and they said did it happen? I said no, it didn't happen. Then a reporter came up to me and took me aside and said, you really should check again, because I have this from a very good source, another leader who had been in the room and had seen it, he said that they had no reason to lie to me about this.

So I called the guy back up and said did the guy, did they shake hands? He said of course they did. I said, well, why didn't you tell me? He said, you didn't ask me that.

So under the inadvertent lies, I lied and I, you know, I cleaned it up as quickly as I could. And I'll tell you the fall-out on making a mistake was that I think if I had just said yes at the beginning and described the circumstances, it would have stopped there.

But we had a couple days of follow-up stories about why the White House was withholding the photograph because I had lost a measure of credibility—I don't think it hurt me long-term.

But because I lost a measure of it, there was some doubt about whether I told them there was no photographer, which there wasn't, which was very unusual; there's always a photographer, but there wasn't for this, because they had thrown everybody out of the room. There, you know, we made a half-day story into a day-and-a-half to two-day story. But it's, you know, under your definition, that's it.

MS. MYERS: But I don't think a lie has to be intentional. I think—

MR. KALB: A witting lie—that—

MS. MYERS: Yeah.

MR. KALB: That's right, I mean, none of these four variations.

MS. MYERS: Right. And I—

MR. KALB: You wittingly lie.

MS. MYERS: I think it's very rare that you have to lie. Lying destroys your credibility, unless lives are genuinely at stake. And I think Jody Powell agonized over having to tell a direct lie, but he believed—and I think he was right, that it would have put Americans' lives at risk if he told the truth.

I think that what that sets up is a difficult dynamic, which is, Jody was totally in the loop, he knew everything that was going on. The press wants a press secretary that knows everything that's going on. There occasionally, and very very occasionally, are times when that forces the press secretary to lie. The press has to give the press secretary a pass on that, as hard as that is, because it's the price of them being in the loop even on the most-sensitive, high-risk, national security types of missions. And I don't know if the press will ever give us that wink and nod, but that's absolutely required.

MR. KALB: Dee Dee, what would have been wrong with the spokesman saying simply, I can't answer that question?

MS. MYERS: Because to say that would—if you can't say no, if he'd set up the dynamic, maybe earlier, I guess he could go back and tweak his guidance in a way that that might have been possible. But the problem is, to say nothing creates the suspicion that there's something going on. In order to knock down that suspicion, he had to give an unqualified no.

MR. NESSEN: Well, I've had this argument with Jody over the years, and I really believe, and more so as time goes by, that what you lose in credibility through the deliberate lie is so damaging that you shouldn't deliberately lie. I think every press secretary has a different formulation and, after all, you have to remember that this was a very good friend of his who asked the question, Jack Nelson. I think you have to say, "I'm sorry, Jack, I can't talk about that right now— I don't have anything for you on that right now." Because I think the damage is too great for lying.

I think some of what you have to do is there's an area of sort of operational potential events that even on the most innocuous things, you have to know you can't answer certain questions because—not because it's putting anybody's life at risk—you know potentially, you could, and you really can't establish the precedent of providing the kind of details that, you know, the reporters don't quite understand at the time why you can't share with them.

I understand the difficulty of this, but I think I tend to believe that your long-term ability to do the job rests on your ability to not corner yourself into that position. It sounds like an easy thing to do, but it's the most complicated part of the job.

I remember I saw a little clip about a month ago of something that I had done. It was me and someone talking. I remember my reaction being that the conversation I was having had about nine layers to it and it was complicated and it was, you now, somewhat personally dangerous, because if you—you know, you slipped in any of these areas—and I think it highlights just how difficult the job can be.

To people on the outside, it looks like, oh, you have to stand there and get yelled at a lot and not get mad and do all that. That's not the hard part. The hard part is exactly what Dee Dee said, which is getting yourself in the loop, staying in the loop and then sort of wriggling out of situations and not allowing yourself to get into a situation where the information can betray you as opposed to the people you're trying to communicate to.

MR. KALB: I want you to get off the hook.

MR. NESSEN: No, I want to—

MR. KALB: Did you lie or didn't you?

MR. NESSEN: No, I never did, but here's what I did do. Then I want to tell you—I'm going to tell you—my Helen story at this point because it's pertinent to what Dee Dee said. I think the closest I ever came, and it was out of an oversensitivity and protection for Ford. But he wanted to go to Florida to play—he loved golf—and he wanted to go and play in the Jackie Gleason Pro-Am golf tournament in Florida.

For some reason, I was too protective to say, hey, the President wants to go to Florida and play in the golf tournament. So we cooked up some HUD housing conference as an excuse for him to go to Florida because I was too sensitive to just say hey, he's going to Florida to play golf, you know. So that's the closest I came.

But this issue of, you know something, you can't say it then and a lot of times you can't say it then for national security reasons, but there are other reasons.

So Helen came to me one time when I was in the White House, and in her own inimitable way, said, "Is Bill Simon quitting?" I'm sorry, "Is Bill Simon going to be fired?" William Simon was the Treasury Secretary in the Ford Administration. Well, you know, Bill Simon wasn't the most popular guy, and there had been talk about, maybe, him moving somewhere else and moving on. Obviously, I couldn't say yes and I couldn't say no. So I was trying to think of just the right formulation, you know, that would wriggle me off the hook, as Joe said. So it took me like half-a-second longer to answer the question. Helen took my silence as acknowledgement that he was going to be fired and wrote a story. I think you quoted White House sources suggested tonight that William Simon would be fired as Treasury Secretary. You know, he wasn't; we were both wrong.

MR. HESS: Well, these folks never lie, not even a little white lie. Do you remember the Miss Lillian story about the little white lie? It might have been you, Helen. Miss Lillian was Jimmie Carter's mother. She was quite a character. A reporter came and asked her, is it true that the President never lies? Oh, she said, he never lies.

And the reporter just kept pressing. Never lies? Never lies. Well, maybe a little white lie. The reporter said well, give me an example, what's a little white lie? Miss Lillian said, well, remember when you came in and I said that's a beautiful dress you're wearing?

Well, they never lie, but how about leak. Do they do any leaking? Is this Orwellian, all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others? Dee Dee, how do you deal with the press on that regard?

MS. MYERS: Well sure, press secretaries leak, selective leak, for a lot of different reasons. It's selective placement. It depends on how you define a leak.

MR. HESS: A plant.

MR. KALB: Help us define a leak.

MS. MYERS: There's a lot of different kinds of leaks. There's the kind of leak where you give a story to—you go forum shopping and you give a story to a particular news organization that you think will either get maximum coverage in a way you think will be helpful to you, or you think a particular reporter has a particular understanding or sensitivity to the issue; maybe they have a particular background in it so you think you'll get a fairer hearing.

There's the kind of leak where somebody says something that they're trying to see how it plays. A trial balloon. There's a leak that happened all too frequently in my experience with the White House, which is people trying to push the President in one direction—people, you know, the White House is a—or the Executive Branch of the government is a cauldron of competing ideas. Everybody wants the President to, ultimately, come down on their side. A lot of times, people will leak that he's further along towards a decision— those can be very damaging kinds of leaks.

Then there's the anecdotal leaks, which are innumerable. People want to tell little stories, usually to let everyone know that they were where the thing was happening and that they know. Those can also be very damaging kinds of leaks. What else am I forgetting, guys— of variety of leaks.

MR. LOCKHART: The mistakes and people who say things by mistake.

MS. MYERS: Yeah. Yeah. It can either be right or it can be wrong. And it doesn't matter if it's right or wrong, the damage can be devastating either way. So yeah, I think press secretaries engage in a lot of different kinds of leaks to try to further the President's agenda. It's always in the name of righteousness and good, of course. But it's part of the game. It's part of the way the game is played. Part of it is it helps you build credibility or chits with certain reporters.

You're giving them a little inside information; you're telling them something; you're steering them off of a story. There's a lot of different reasons that you do it—a lot of different ways that you do it.

There's planting a little anecdote to make the President look good. You know, just a million ways—

MR. KALB: Have you been involved in anything, Ron, Joe, where the President asks you to put out this particular bit of information and give it to "Y" newspaper?

MR. NESSEN: I don't, yes and— but no, on the second—

MS. MYERS: Right.

MR. NESSEN: I mean, there are certainly pieces of information that the President will say make sure that people know this. I never had the sort of specific conversation where he said, you know, I want you to leak this and give it to this paper or something.

MR. KALB: To pick and choose reporters to be—

MR. LOCKHART: Dee Dee's experience may be different. I think President Clinton definitely had an opinion from reporter to reporter, although the vast majority of reporters, he had no opinion of because he didn't know very well.

MS. MYERS: Right.

MR. LOCKHART: But he had a group of people who he thought very highly of, another group of people who he didn't think so highly of. You know, I think, on leaks, it's amazing how, you know, there's really, sort of, two kinds: One is the one you do yourself, which you think, what a great story, you know, it's not—you don't think of it as a leak because it's sort of a pejorative phrase. Then the something that you didn't want out, which is the damn leak, which there are a lot of.

My personal experience was—and reporters will judge me on this, but I didn't myself leak a lot of stories. I found that it was easier to have a relationship with the broadest group of reporters you could, and that caused occasionally some problems.

I was actually more sort of the referee, and both being aware of what everybody was doing and trying to, ultimately, taking it slightly longer-term, make sure that it was done somewhat on a fair basis, that we didn't sort of—in an uncoordinated fashion—four days a week give a story to one newspaper, leaving everyone else out.

That doesn't mean that, occasionally, that I didn't engage in it personally, but it made more sense given the way we were structured at the time to, again—more of this, you know, sort of, you know, scorekeeper role.

MR. KALB: Ron, what—

MR. NESSEN: I somewhat agree with Joe about it. My attitude towards leaks was that the press secretary ought to be the one who puts his name against the the story. And not to leak, but I mean, obviously, everybody does, but everybody does. The most famous leak story about the White House was during Kennedy, when he called Salinger into his office one morning, you know, pointing to the paper and there's a story in there with some anonymous source, some leak, and he's raging about it and complaining about it and gives Salinger the orders to go out and investigate and find out who's responsible for this leak. Couple days later, Salinger comes back and says I found out who the leaker was, Mr. President. It was you. Because Kennedy did have a closer relationship with some reporters than later presidents.

MR. LOCKHART: I mean, a lot of the things that happen are not treated— they're not deliberate attempts to leak information. One of the issues that we faced—I don't know if Dee Dee will appreciate this—is the President had a lot of friends and he loved to talk to them. You know, he would have a work schedule, he'd work, you know, 15-, 16-hour days, and his way of unwinding at the end of a day, whether it be 9:00 or 10:00 or 11:00 at night, was to get on the phone and talk to people, you know, not people in Washington—people around the country. In that very large group of friends of the President were lots of people who liked to communicate to reporters how friendly they were with the President. So they would—literally, he'd hang up and they'd pick up the phone and call their favorite reporter and say, guess what he just told me?

You sometimes sit and wonder. You'd look at a story and you'd say, how could they possibly have gotten it that wrong and that distorted. Then you'd sort of think, oh, you know, and then you'd sort of go back and look at maybe who he'd talked to and it—you know, the people would just take one little piece of the story, as what, you know, what he was interested in or what they were interested in, and that's how a lot of things get out.

The reporting community will probably disagree with me, but there is a sense, sometime, of not always the due diligence that should be done on particular sources. I think we've dumbed-down sourcing here in political reporting in Washington—

MS. MYERS: Yeah.

MR. LOCKHART: And it's almost anybody who says it has the—you know, the Press Secretary could say it or the cab driver who took the deputy assistant secretary for transportation logistics from point A to point B; it doesn't matter. And the only quote that is more valuable than the one from someone who will put their name on it is from someone who won't put their name on it, which is sort of inverted logic, but it's the way that this town works.

MR. KALB: Why did you say, before, that leaks are pejorative? Why is it seen as pejorative?

MR. LOCKHART: Because I think when there's a story out that you don't want out, there's a lot of ranting and raving about the leaks. Finding the leaker—

MR. KALB: But what about the stories that are good ones?

MR. LOCKHART: Well, those are just good stories.

MR. KALB: Those are good stories—

MS. MYERS: Through hard work.

MR. NESSEN: That's just an example of good, hard journalism.

MS. MYERS: Right, right.

MR. HESS: Dee Dee, before, had talked about the problems of coordination, there were overlapping jurisdictions and so forth.

It does strike me, getting back to the present situation, that that seems to be part of the problem of this Administration, at least in the last two months. There seem to be so many different voices, and they've added a new one with Tom Ridge and the Homeland Security and so forth.

Tell us again how you folks coordinated with the State Department, the Defense Department, and so forth, and what's the right system. And am I right to think that there's something not quite in sync yet with the present Administration? Anybody want to start?

MR. NESSEN: Well, you know, Joe touched on this briefly, and I wanted to come back to it, because I think one of the key rules, particularly during a national security or wartime situation, is to have one spokesperson. Joe told, you know, about Kosovo.

I think you had a NATO political spokesman—NATO military spokesman, State Department, White House, Pentagon, everybody telling a slightly different story, and I mean, essentially the same story, but slightly different. Then reporters always drive right through those wedges. So I think it's important to have one spokesperson. And I think today, there isn't one spokesperson for the current anti-terrorism campaign. And I think that one of the problems is that there isn't one spokesman. And to the extent that there is a main spokesman, it's Rumsfeld, which strikes me as not a good use of a Defense Secretary's time in the middle of a war, to be doing the daily briefing.

But in terms of coordination, I think the arrangement was probably more informal in the Ford Administration than it has become over time. But it was, basically, you know, a phone call around in the morning to coordinate what we're going to talk about and what the story of the day was and—

MR. KALB: Ron, from a practical point of view, given the current situation in this war against global terrorism, how can there be one spokesman in a democracy? I mean, theoretically, put that aside, but practically, how do you have one spokesman to speak for the government?

It would seem to me that the burden on that one person would be simply unbearable and it would look so artificial that, if you had only one spokesman, I think you'd be subjected to a lot of criticism. I don't see how, from a practical point of view, only one person could be up front. Explain that to me.

MR. NESSEN: Well, I think, to bring it back more to the experience of the three of us, I think what's grown up in the White House over the past 20 or 25 years is the communications director and the press secretary, and the communications director is a guy who is not—or a woman who is not out in front doing the daily briefing, but is doing strategy and tactics for information.

MR. KALB: For the whole government?

MR. NESSEN: There have been efforts made in various administrations to combine the two jobs. I think Stephanopolous tried to do some of that. The problem there is that there's not enough time for one person to do the entire job, so you have to have more than one person.

MS. MYERS: Right.

MR. LOCKHART: I actually think there's a new element in this. And I'm not sure—I'll sort of come down between you. We live in a media culture now that's on 24 hours a day. So as a spokesperson and communicator, you've become very much, now, almost a television programmer. Because CNN, MSNBC and Fox are on all day long. You can sort of sit back and say, no, we're just going to do one briefing a day and then we'll let—you know, we'll let them chew on that—that I think is counterproductive because, although maybe only 1 million people are watching at any given time, if you look at one important subset of that million, it's other journalists who keep one of these stations on all the time.

Just like they used to read the wire every 5 or 10 minutes, now they have, you know, wire copy with pictures; it's much more entertaining. You have to program. You have to, because if you don't program, if you don't have the Transportation out at 10:00, the Pentagon at 11:00, the State Department at 12:00, the White House at 1:00, the Homeland Security guy at 2:00, that leaves this incredible void, where less-informed people get to tell the American public what's going on. So I think you've got to think of this as almost as a programming person who's got to fill up the time.

MR. KALB: Or the executive producer.

MR. LOCKHART: Well, somebody needs to be. I don't know that it's the White House press secretary, but somebody's got to—it depends on the structure of the building. I know that during Kosovo, this was something that we got very involved in. But the more important than the programming, actually picking the times and the spokespeople is the quality of the information.

I think that we have, in the current situation, a recognition of the first piece, and it took some time, but we now have a recognition that you really need to keep people out throughout the day because there is a rhythm to the story. You have to feed it at different times in the day, otherwise the story will get out of control or you will lose your ability to shape the parameters of it.

But the quality of information doesn't seem as consistent. It's one thing to tell the American public that you have someone who is now speaking for Homeland Security, but if he can't speak to the essential question the people are concerned about, then it's not going to be an effective briefing; it's not going to be an effective part of the information show that is going on.

So I think there needs to be at least as much or more emphasis on trying to get at the information that people want to know about or feel they need to know. I mean, I think the great dichotomy over the last six weeks has been how well the Bush Administration, from the Pentagon to the White House to the State Department, have described what we're doing in Afghanistan and why we're doing it.

Then on the other hand, how they've come up short in explaining what we're doing at home and why we're doing it and what the real threat is.

I think ultimately, with all your messengers deployed, there are times when there's only one messenger and that's the President, himself.

If you look at the last four or five weeks, I think some of their trouble stems from the fact that they have been reluctant to put the President in a situation where the answers aren't as clear, where the issues are murkier. And they've tried to put other people out and the results have been fairly predictable.

MR. KALB: Well, let me—

MR. LOCKHART: But there's strong support on one side and it's not quite as strong on the domestic side.

MR. KALB: Let me frame what Joe is saying as a kind of concluding question to the two of you, and then we'll go to the audience for their questions. But how do you think the Administration is doing? We've been in this war now for two months, a little more than two months, and there have clearly been different phases in this operation. I mean, there was the shock of September 11. We didn't start bombing until October 9. Right now, we're in a period of very dramatic change within Afghanistan itself.

Ron, do you feel the American people are getting all of the information that they need, and do you think that this has been a steady pattern? And overall, your judgment on the Administration's handling.

MR. NESSEN: Well, I think you have to go back to, really, a fundamental decision that was made at the Pentagon after the Vietnam War. I was a correspondent in Vietnam for NBC. We could go anywhere, we could do anything we wanted to; the news bureaus had their own cars, their own motor scooters, they could hitch rides on helicopters and planes. We weren't even accredited to the U.S. military; we were accredited to the South Vietnamese government. You could go anywhere and see anything.

The lesson of Vietnam that the Pentagon learned was never let reporters do that again. They never have, including this war, and all the intervening wars. The reason is that—and it's an accurate reason—is that negative reporting affects public support, and no president can pursue a war for very long without public support.

So the decision was we'll keep reporters away from the battlefield; that way, they can't do negative stories; that way, it won't demolish public support. And we'll be able to pursue the war. I think that's the rule that is in place now. And?

MR. KALB: Has it been effective?

MR. NESSEN: It's been effective in keeping reporters off the battlefield. Clearly, Americans have not gotten information about everything that's going on. The justification for withholding information during wartime or military operation; it used to be two things: You wouldn't give out the information, or if you got it, you wouldn't publish it or broadcast it if it would endanger lives or if it would endanger an operation.

I think both sides have misused that rule. Reporters, out of competition, have bent that and have published information that can be harmful. The government has bent or broken the rule to not put out information, not because it would endanger lives or an operation, but because it was embarrassing.

MR. KALB: Dee Dee?

MS. MYERS: Yeah, I agree with a lot of that. I think the Administration has done with those—well, it's very clear how much the President hates leaks. I think the culture of the current White House is very tight with information, sometimes to their own detriment.

That said, I think they've done a pretty good job communicating about the war in Afghanistan. I mean, I agree with everything that Joe said about the way the current media climate sort of forces you to become a programmer, but I think the voices that they've had going out—they seem to most days coordinate pretty well between State and the White House and the Pentagon.

The briefers are all very credible. Secretary of Defense, General Myers, right down the line. Including, I think, Ari Fleischer's done a good job of just doing his job in that role . I think they've done a less-good job, clearly, on the domestic terror, particularly around anthrax. Part of it— it was a new—a whole new ball of wax—

MR. KALB: Right.

MS. MYERS: No one had seen before. There weren't processes in place for dealing with it. But I think that their proclivity to try to control information worked against them. Their sort of desire sometimes to put out reassuring information, which was then incomplete and only served to hurt their credibility down the line. I think they've started to do a better job of that, but I think Joe's absolutely right, until the quality of the information coming out of some of the briefers on the sort of domestic side of the story, is more reliable, they're going to continue to have a problem.

I think they recognize that. And that's why, last week we started to see the President. We saw him more last week than we've seen, probably, almost in the previous two months of this conflict combined. So I think that that's probably a good thing for them to use the one person who can reassure people. And I think he's done a pretty good job of saying a couple of things.

This is going to be a long war.

The American public needs to be patient, and I think hearing that over and over has made the American public sort of cognizant of the fact it's going to be a long time. Last week, we started to see the word "quagmire" creeping back into stories about Afghanistan. This week, you know, sort of strategic cities are falling all over Afghanistan. So patience, I think, is a good message. The President is often the right and only messenger.

The quality of information could use some improvement on the domestic side, but given the newness and the uncertainty of that, if they can get it together now, nothing that they've done is, I think unforgivable.

MR. HESS: Well, I think it's time now to give our audience a chance to ask questions of the panel. Raise your hand; there's a microphone that will come to you. Please identify yourself because we do have a transcript that will be on our website. We would, of course, expect the first question to come from the dean of White House reporters, Helen Thomas.

MS. THOMAS: I would like to ask each of you how do you think Ari Fleischer is doing and do you think the press is rising to the occasion in terms of the overall. Fleischer does not answer any questions on the war or anything else. Very limited. He's on one page, no matter what you ask. So—Helen Thomas, Hearst Newspapers, columnist.

MR. KALB: Ron, why don't you try to answer Helen's question?

MR. NESSEN: I think Ari is doing pretty well. I think you are right, he's not answering questions about the war and he is repeating over and over again what the message is that they want to get out and he's not going beyond that. From my point of view, that's successful. From your point of view, that's not successful.

But I think he has a good sense of humor and thick skin, which are two good qualities for a press secretary; he doesn't let hostile questions get under his skin. To come back to this issue, he is the official spokesman for the White House, so he's giving the official White House line. If you think he's going to go beyond that, you know, he's not. He's going to get fired if he does.

MS. THOMAS: Well, can you carry that a little farther? Why is it—

MR. NESSEN: Is this a follow-up question?

MS. THOMAS: Why is it so limited? Why don't they want the American people, really to know more?

MR. NESSEN: Well, whether they want them to know more or not, they're not going to get it out of the White House, because the military information is coming out of the Pentagon and the diplomatic information is coming out of the State Department, and the White House spokesman is giving you the official White House line. I think you can beat on him all you want. He's not going to go beyond that and that's his job.

MR. KALB: Joe, do you want to take on Helen?

MR. LOCKHART: Sure. It's been a while; it should be fun. Let me take up the second part of your question, which is how the media's doing?

But I thought the media was taking some value judgments that they had made and properly should have made about the difference between good and evil, and letting that influence too much of the actual reporting about what was going on, who was doing what and why.

But I think we've settled back into our normal pattern of sort of whiplash journalism, based on how things are going that day. Because, I think as Dee Dee recognized, last week, we were settling in for a mess with no plan, and this week, we're settling in for lightning strike victory. We'll be someplace else by next week.

Much of that is based on the facts on the ground, as well as they can tell what they are.

You know, we do have a sense, though, that rather than letting the facts speak for themselves, we have to have some sort of conclusion at the end of each day, which I think leads to, you know, this whiplash between the war's going well, no, it's going bad, well, you know it's going well.

The war is going the way, I think, probably the way the Pentagon thought it was going to go. But it doesn't quite go on the schedule that the media might want it to.

In a broader sense, I agree, I think that, you know, Ari's done a good job. You know, his job, some of what you have to remember is that the White House briefing is different than it used to be. You know, we now have cameras in the briefing room and it becomes more of a performance and less of information going back and forth.

Reporters, as you know, get their information from the press secretary, a lot of times in different ways during the day. So I don't think it's an attempt to keep information away from the people, but I think it's part of what that event has become, which is delivering whatever the line of the day is and trying to stay on it at all costs.

The final point I would make, which just sort of brings in the last question is—I think, you know, I don't think this—really, I don't think this is about Ari or about someone at the Pentagon or someone at the State Department. I think overall, they have done a good job of communicating what's going on and why it's going on.

With two exceptions. And I think their problems come from the same root cause, which is, you know, before September 11, the handlers of the President's image were obsessed with the idea of always putting him in a situation where he demonstrated strength, unequivocal strength.

There were lots of different situations that Bill Clinton used to naturally go into. There was strength, there was empathy, there was—but for George Bush, because of what they thought he needed to do was always a position of strength.

I think if you look at the areas where there's been some faltering, it comes from the same place. The first is something they already mentioned. I mean, he was absent for the better part of the really dangerous time on anthrax, when people were really concerned about their families and about themselves. It was only last week that I think they stepped up to that realizing that the public noticed that he wasn't there.

But I think it was because it wasn't a situation where he could unequivocally demonstrate strength. There were unanswered questions. I think there was a need there for perspective, which I'm not sure they thought needed addressing.

I think the second and much more important area, as we go long-term into this, is some real sense of what defines victory here. I mean, when we started this thing, and I think, coming from the idea that they needed to show the country that the President was up to this and that he would demonstrate strength and resolve all the things he needs to do as Commander and Chief, they laid out a very, very broad sense of the things we'd have to accomplish before this would be over.

Things like—we would rid the world of terrorism and evil, and very broad things that I think as they move forward over the next couple of months, they really have to refine what's achievable here and what isn't, because if it stays the way it is, you can have briefings all day long with the best information in the world, they will come up short because the the goals in the broadest sense are not achievable.

But there are very achievable and very worthwhile things to do here. We need more information and more perspective from the President, you know, on what they are and what will define, you know, a success.

MR. KALB: Dee Dee.

MS. MYERS: Just a follow-up, Joe, I think they started to do that a little yesterday, saying that the aims of the war, once again, were to do something about bin Laden and eliminate the Al Queda network so it could no longer perform terrorists acts against the United States.

I already sort of talked a little bit about the White House, but how's the press doing? I think mostly pretty good, actually. I agree with Joe that the coverage in the beginning, you know, sort of was a little uncritical. I think it's interesting to watch the media do what politicians do, which is how far can we push, what's our image, what does the public think of us right now?

Nobody wanted to take on the President or the White House in the early weeks of this because it would have been tremendously unpopular, and it's still difficult, because the President's approval ratings are so high. You see that happening on Capitol Hill, you see that happening in the media. The media where they're so critical of everyone else for doing that, has to do it themselves.

That said, I think the area that they—and there's been a lot of really good coverage. The war coverage is limited by the prescriptions that Ron talked about, but I think what we've gotten is a lot of really great coverage about what's going on in Central Asia, which we haven't see very much of.

I think one of the criticisms of the American media is we don't get that much information about what's happening in other parts of the world. We now know a lot more about the culture, the governments of the countries, the tribal nature of society, things that go beyond simply the war.

On anthrax, I think the media was indispensable. I think they did what the government could not do, which was provide a tremendous amount of information that people could use to help deal with a very scary situation. What is anthrax? Where does it come from? How is it spread? How do you treat it? What should you be doing now to protect your family?

I think most of that information that the public found useful came not from the government but from the media. I think they filled a big void. So I think in that regard, they've done a really good job of sort of helping to blaze a new trail—what are we dealing with?

Who knows where this is going to go from here, but I think the press will continue to play a really important role, in spite of the shortcomings in educating the public about a series of very important issues.

MR. KALB: I have a sense, Helen, since you've allowed me and Steve to say something about this question also. I just wanted to throw in, I think the reporters have done a terrific job. I think the pundits have done less than a terrific job.

One of the reasons is that an awful lot of people are being called in to be pundits about this issue and there are very few people who know anything about this issue.

But there's a lot of time that is required to be filled, and there are a lot of pundits around who are perfectly happy to fill the time.

I was just reading the latest New York Review of Books, a column by a Paris-based columnist named William Pfaaf, who said in this column that the air war against Afghanistan has clearly failed, just as it failed in Kosovo, just as it failed in Bosnia, and that the American strategies are going to have to be totally revamped if they're going to be successful in Afghanistan.

Now obviously, he wrote this, at least I assume he wrote this before this week's developments, because otherwise, it would be really foolhardy. But there's a lot of stuff that goes out now under the banner of punditry that is very much less than that.

MR. HESS: In fact, I was going to make the same point. Let me first say, in 1991, I did a survey of 39 White House reporters in which I interviewed them and asked them for their preferences of press secretaries they had known. They mentioned both personal and professional qualities. Among the personal qualities they appreciated were friendliness, a willingness not to embarrass reporters, a sense of humor, and honesty. The professional qualities they admired included an understanding of journalists' needs, a lack of favoritism, and good briefing skills. On those skills, I think Ari Fleischer does very well. But overwhelmingly, what they wanted in a White House press secretary was confidence that what he told them came from an immediate and intimate knowledge of what the President was doing. Here, unfortunately, I don't think they have that same confidence.

As far as the press goes, I would make some of the same points, obviously, as our panelists. The dailiness of journalism is giving reporters, at this time, a good deal of trouble in what we all recognize is going to be a long, protracted engagement. So we get the story moving rapidly and retreating week after week. I think, generally, they have really done a superb job.

Go back to Marvin's point, since I don't know the answer to all your questions, either, but—because I was going to make the same point about punditry. And particularly here, I'm not thinking about the columnists as much as I'm thinking about the 24-hour cable stations, in which television news, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

They're filling it somehow and they're filling it with people who are raising their hands anxious to get to the front of the line to be an expert. There's a shortage of experts, and this puts into the ether so much misinformation, so much speculation that then the professionals, the press secretaries and others, have to deal with and have to knock down—

MS. MYERS: Yeah.

MR. HESS: The other thing is a point that Joe raised earlier. Now that these briefings are on cable every single day, it has turned the briefer into an actor, which is certainly a relatively new thing. That certainly wasn't the case when Ron was the Press Secretary. It's unfortunate that you're now getting criticism as you get in The New York Times, that says, He smiles regularly, his smile flashes disconcertingly, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera."

It's unfair. I don't know if it's going to be in the job description of future press secretaries, but it's worrisome— another worrisome trend. Shall we go on with other questions?

Q: I think I would just take some issue with Marvin on the punditry issue. I don't think the bad reporting is all coming from pundits. It's coming from a—

MR. KALB: It's commentary.

MR. NESSEN: It's coming from a couple things, one that Joe talks about which is the coming of the 24- hour-a-day news cycle. The cable news networks which have 24-hours-a-day, 60-minutes-an-hour to fill up and a lot of what it's filled up with are predictions and guesses and how do you think it's coming and so forth. Those aren't pundits, those are reporters. You know, if there's five minutes of new news in an hour, they've got to find something else for the other 55 minutes.

I think the other factor working here is another folk way of the Washington media, which is the herd mentality, the herd mentality—everybody reaches the same conclusion, sort of simultaneously. You combine that with the 24-hour news cycle and the need, as Joe says, to somehow reach a conclusion every day about the outcome of the war. So we had this period of time in which the herd mentality was George Bush was too dumb to be President; he couldn't absorb a lot of information, couldn't make decisions very well, couldn't reassure people.

Rumsfeld was kind of this whacko corporate executive that was going to have to go pretty soon. Colin Powell was out of the loop, well, he would be the first Cabinet member going, and so forth. Then overnight, September 12, all of a sudden, all of these people became completely different people. Well, they didn't, you know, the herd changed its mind.

So last week, not just the pundits, but The Washington Post, The New York Times, the mainstream press—I mean, I think the most overworked word last week was "quagmire" and the second most overworked word was "bogged down," right. So then along comes the fall of Kabul and the fall of other cities, and now, all of a sudden, no, no, that's not the story, this is a different story. Now, you know, now we're rushing to try to keep up with the military victories by getting a political organization in place. So, I'm not quite as sanguine about the performance of the press as my colleagues are.

MR. HESS: Yes, please.

Q: Hi, my name is Cindy Samuels. There's a word missing from this conversation, and I don't know whether it's on purpose or because it's irrelevant and it emerged from when Dee Dee started to when Joe left, and that's the Internet. Can you talk about the impact that the Internet's had on your jobs as you see it?

MR. LOCKHART: Well, I'm not so sure it's the Internet. I think, what the Internet did or what it came to symbolize was the great leveling of the media elites. It used to be—when I started in this business, I'd say about 50 to 60 million people every night turned on the news and watched one of three stations.

Those three stations were heavily influenced by what The New York Times wrote that morning. There was probably a universe of a couple hundred people who helped us as a country make up our mind about what was going on.

It was easy, it was clean, it was very elitist. The Internet sort of, I think, represents the pyramid being turned upside down. Where now anyone has the right to publish. Anyone has a voice. What's happened here is is there's great things about that.

There's the idea that somehow you can live outside Westchester County or not have a place in the Hamptons and still have an influence on what the intelligentsia of this country thinks and talks about.

That's all very positive. The problem is there's been sort of a loss of, I guess, clarity on where information comes from. We have an example from last week, and it's, you know, I sound like I'm back defending my former boss, but he gave a speech last week at Georgetown; a very thoughtful speech.

I didn't see that speech, but I've seen him speak twice along the same lines. Both times outside of Washington, both times the media didn't seem to pay much attention to it.

But he gave this speech here in Washington and a reporter for The Washington Times was there and wrote a front-page story that basically said Clinton blames U.S. for terrorism—it's our fault, we deserved it.

That's what the reporter took from it. If it stopped there, you know, I guess some of the readers of that paper thought it was right and accurate. But it didn't stop there.

It went to the talk radio circuit with Rush Limbaugh spending time on it. It went to several Internet sites. There was a program on "Crossfire" and some other cable things. It took—I don't know, three or four days before some reasonable people weighed in and said, well, you know, that's not really what he said.

What you have now is a situation where quality isn't very important, but volume is. If it fills up space and it's loud, it gets attention. And it directly impacts the way even the old elites cover the news now.

The best example we have is right in front of us, which is, if September 11 hadn't happened, what would the biggest story of 2001 been? Hands down, Gary Condit. Well, how often have we talked about Gary Condit? Why did that all of a sudden on September 11 not become the single most pressing issue that journalists in Washington felt was important?

MS. SAMUELS: I think the Internet is where people respond to frustration about Gary Condit, not where they spread it. I mean when you do your job, do you consider ways that the Internet could enhance the message of a President or ways that you have to ensure the President's message because the Internet is now involved? Because I see it regularly as having emerged partly because so many people were frustrated with the way the mainstream press was making decisions.

MR. LOCKHART: I think that's probably right. I think, unfortunately, those who supply information from government sources haven't yet figured out how to take full advantage of it, and those who are supplying information for other reasons have. Unfortunately, it has distorted the process.

And I think—I used to spend most of my time, you know, dealing with crazy stories and rumors that somehow managed to be on the Internet and then within a day or two be in the mainstream press without any reporting having been done.

So it to me, coming from outside, it was a problem rather than an opportunity. You know, we never did get our arms completely around how we could use that.

MR. HESS: I tend to think that we're not nearly at the place that both of you state we're at with the Internet. Either as a means of spreading misinformation or as a means of spreading populist sentiment. I mean, yes, there are examples of both. If you look at the current issue of American Journalism Review, there's a marvelous case study of someone in Brazil who put on the Internet, and on a small website at that, a statement that the film in Israel of Palestinians cheering the plane crashing into the World Trade Center was old file material and didn't happen.

Then it shows how that moves around the world, and how it's ultimately denied by Reuters, and wasn't the case. So that happens. The other happens as well.

But basically, I think at this point the Internet is mainly moving material that is produced by mainstream journalism. If you just look at the uses of it. CNN, USA Today, just down the list of hits, you're going to see that that's where the information is coming from.

So it's just a way of recycling in a rather grand way, like a megaphone, material that is already out there. There's relatively little serious journalism that's being done on the Internet now that has huge audiences.

The audiences so far today are for sources that existed and are providing the information instead in hard copy. In my opinion, we're not there yet, in my judgment.

MS. MYERS: Just add one thought to that, though. I think the biggest change that the Internet has wrought is speed. It used to be that news organizations, like USA Today, newspapers, The Wall Street Journal, had to wait until the end of the day to post their reporting. That gave them additional time to check facts, run it through editors.

Now the competition has become, not just cable networks, but breaking stories first on the Internet and owning them, and there's been a lot of mistakes, and we can all point to them in our experience, where reputable, even the most reputable journalist with the most reputable news organizations have made mistakes because of the pressure to go first. I think that's changed things a lot.

MR. HESS: If you ever want to understand that, read Marvin Kalb's new book One Scandalous Story.

MS. MYERS: Right, if you haven't already read it, of course.

MR. HESS: It's all in there, Free Press is the publisher. Marvin, we're just about out of time. We thank you. We thank our terrific panel, we thank our wonderful audience. We have some announcements for the future. Next week being Thanksgiving, we will take a pass; we won't be back next Wednesday, but the following Wednesday, November 28, a new time. We're going to do it starting then regularly from 9:30 to 11:00, because we find it's a much easier time for working journalists to be there.

We have what's a remarkable program because Andy Kohut of the Pew Research Center is going to release through our little forum, his latest survey, which will be about the findings about public attitudes on media coverage of the current terrorist campaign, and then he relates that to past long-term trends from the Pew Research Center on the Persian Gulf War and other things.

So, that is November 28, here at Brookings from 9:30 to 11:00. Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone. And thanks again to our terrific panel.

MR. KALB: Thank you, Stephen Hess. Thank you Ron.