that would help to focus the issues more clearly—and fatefully for the President.
VII
MEDIA WARS
In December 1968, on the eve of his presidency, Richard Nixon solicited his speechwriters for a research paper recapitulating “the typical opposition smears of Richard Nixon back through the years, including the more vicious press comments.” The staff ignored this particular request and according to William Safire, one of the writers, denied Nixon and his men the opportunity to “rub each other’s sores”—a favorite Nixon phrase. There were plenty of sores to rub. Five years later, as his Administration began to unravel, Nixon described some reporters as snobs and offered a familiar refrain to one visitor: “I’ve earned their hatred.” The hostile press was, he said, “all wrong on Hiss.” Alger Hiss had provided Nixon with national attention, but Nixon knew the price. “[The Hiss-Chambers case] left a residue of hatred and hostility toward me—not only among Communists but also among substantial segments of the press and the intellectual community,” he wrote in 1962. Anticommunism eventually lost some of its political appeal, but intellectuals and the press remained formidable adversaries, another vital link in Nixon’s chain of enemies. 1
Nixon had both an instinctive, visceral hatred of the news media and a compulsive desire to manipulate and tame them. At times, they were an enemy; at other moments, useful instruments to be played for political and public-relations gain. Richard Nixon and his aides spent much time attempting to master both drives. The Nixon Administration mounted an unprecedented, transparent assault on the media and individual reporters; yet that Administration, like others, went to extraordinary lengths to cultivate thepress. And for good reason: the media had become an essential component in the task of governance in late-twentieth-century America. Mastery of it, or at least maintaining its goodwill, became a recognized, desirable prize as presidents sought to reach and shape public opinion and to build constituencies for their programs and future campaigns.
The news media have fostered and promoted a cult of presidential personality. Presidents make easier copy than such less sharply defined, more impersonal institutions as Congress, the courts, or the regulatory agencies. The President makes news; he
is
news. For many Americans, the President is the government of the United States. The problem for a president, therefore, is not visibility—that he has in abundance—but controlling that visibility to show himself in the best possible light.
Usually, the relationship between press and President has been relatively easy and friendly, and the media have normally been deferential. But because Richard Nixon believed the relationship to be adversarial and hostile, both by the nature of American government and because of his personal views, the problem became a fixation for him. His longtime friend and media adviser, Herbert Klein, acknowledged that “there was no organized conspiracy in the White House, but mistrust of the press was strong and ever present.”
Klein had worked for Nixon since the 1950s as a press-relations specialist. After the 1962 gubernatorial defeat in California, Klein returned to San Diego, where he became the editor of the
Union
, the Copley chain’s flagship newspaper. Klein rejoined Nixon for the 1968 presidential campaign. He soon recognized the ominous signs that the “New Nixon” had new extensions—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Mitchell—to reflect and carry out some of his darker designs. It was a side of Nixon that Klein remembered and disliked. While Nixon shifted power to a new set of aides who would be close to him, however, he also found places for such older retainers as Klein.
Nixon and Haldeman installed Ronald Ziegler as Press Secretary. This was apparently a conscious move to diminish, certainly to subordinate, the position. Ziegler
VII
MEDIA WARS
In December 1968, on the eve of his presidency, Richard Nixon solicited his speechwriters for a research paper recapitulating “the typical opposition smears of Richard Nixon back through the years, including the more vicious press comments.” The staff ignored this particular request and according to William Safire, one of the writers, denied Nixon and his men the opportunity to “rub each other’s sores”—a favorite Nixon phrase. There were plenty of sores to rub. Five years later, as his Administration began to unravel, Nixon described some reporters as snobs and offered a familiar refrain to one visitor: “I’ve earned their hatred.” The hostile press was, he said, “all wrong on Hiss.” Alger Hiss had provided Nixon with national attention, but Nixon knew the price. “[The Hiss-Chambers case] left a residue of hatred and hostility toward me—not only among Communists but also among substantial segments of the press and the intellectual community,” he wrote in 1962. Anticommunism eventually lost some of its political appeal, but intellectuals and the press remained formidable adversaries, another vital link in Nixon’s chain of enemies. 1
Nixon had both an instinctive, visceral hatred of the news media and a compulsive desire to manipulate and tame them. At times, they were an enemy; at other moments, useful instruments to be played for political and public-relations gain. Richard Nixon and his aides spent much time attempting to master both drives. The Nixon Administration mounted an unprecedented, transparent assault on the media and individual reporters; yet that Administration, like others, went to extraordinary lengths to cultivate thepress. And for good reason: the media had become an essential component in the task of governance in late-twentieth-century America. Mastery of it, or at least maintaining its goodwill, became a recognized, desirable prize as presidents sought to reach and shape public opinion and to build constituencies for their programs and future campaigns.
The news media have fostered and promoted a cult of presidential personality. Presidents make easier copy than such less sharply defined, more impersonal institutions as Congress, the courts, or the regulatory agencies. The President makes news; he
is
news. For many Americans, the President is the government of the United States. The problem for a president, therefore, is not visibility—that he has in abundance—but controlling that visibility to show himself in the best possible light.
Usually, the relationship between press and President has been relatively easy and friendly, and the media have normally been deferential. But because Richard Nixon believed the relationship to be adversarial and hostile, both by the nature of American government and because of his personal views, the problem became a fixation for him. His longtime friend and media adviser, Herbert Klein, acknowledged that “there was no organized conspiracy in the White House, but mistrust of the press was strong and ever present.”
Klein had worked for Nixon since the 1950s as a press-relations specialist. After the 1962 gubernatorial defeat in California, Klein returned to San Diego, where he became the editor of the
Union
, the Copley chain’s flagship newspaper. Klein rejoined Nixon for the 1968 presidential campaign. He soon recognized the ominous signs that the “New Nixon” had new extensions—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Mitchell—to reflect and carry out some of his darker designs. It was a side of Nixon that Klein remembered and disliked. While Nixon shifted power to a new set of aides who would be close to him, however, he also found places for such older retainers as Klein.
Nixon and Haldeman installed Ronald Ziegler as Press Secretary. This was apparently a conscious move to diminish, certainly to subordinate, the position. Ziegler
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