In early 1983, presidential aide Michael Deaver called in his pollsters and told them to find out what his boss` weak points in the public eye were.
”I wanted to get as many of the negatives out of the way as I could before the 1984 campaign began,” Deaver recalled recently. ”When I got the results, the big negative that kept blipping up was that he didn`t care about people, that he wasn`t concerned about people.”
If anyone could discover a way to overcome negatives, it was Deaver, whose chief responsibility at the White House was to make sure Ronald Reagan looked good on television and in the press.
”I decided to go at it from a visual standpoint, and I said to my advance people, `I want you to be looking for human-interest kinds of things we can do.`
”We were up in Boston one day. The routine by then was that we`d get Reagan to a spot where he`d be for a couple of hours, making a speech or giving an interview, and I`d get in a police car and drive around, looking for visuals that might work. In Boston I found this pub.
”It was 11 o`clock in the morning. The parish priest was in there. So were 25 blue-collar workers, some of them drinking coffee, some of them drinking beer. Beautiful.
”I called the Secret Service and told them where we were, and they brought the President over for some photographs.
”One picture-a still photo-went all over the country for months, and it did more to overcome that `doesn`t-care-about-people` negative than anything else I can think of.
”As silly as it may seem, all it showed was Ronald Reagan standing at the bar with a mug of beer in his hand, surrounded by a bunch of blue-collar guys. But it was great. That simple little photograph said it all: Ronald Reagan cares about people. The polls had discovered a misconception about Reagan because anybody who knows him knows how much he likes people.”
These days, we`re getting particularly heavy doses of such images and symbols, as presidential candidates seek to win our hearts, minds and votes.
The presidency has become a marketing campaign that never ends, operating on the principle that if you appeal to the emotions with the right
”visuals,” the mind will follow. But there`s a down side, too, of course, if you`re not careful.
”A photograph can also destroy you,” Deaver said during a book-tour interview. ” There was a simple little photograph that destroyed Jerry Ford in Texas during the `76 campaign, when a photographer caught him eating a tamale with the husk still on it. He didn`t know you`re supposed to peel it.” Deaver paused, probably seeing that picture of Ford and the tamale in his mind`s eye. ”That`s why I spent just as much time on these fellows as I did with TV,” he said, nodding toward Tribune photographer Michael Fryer, who was clicking away as Deaver spoke.
”Funny thing about Reagan and still photographers,” he continued.
”Bring in a television crew, and he`d go about his work as if there were no one in the room. But if a still photographer was there, you`d see the back of his neck stiffen. One day I asked him about this. `With a still photographer,` he said, `I can never recover.`
”I`m convinced that a still photographer is trying to get a shot that`s going to sell. He wants to make news or he won`t have a job. If this fellow right here (Fryer) could have gotten a shot with my finger in my nose, that would have been a good picture for him, so we`d be stupid not to try to beat them at their own game.”
Beat them at their own game. Deaver used the same words during a recent interview with Barbara Walters on ABC`s ”20/20.”
”It`s a game, Barbara,” he said. ”A game that politicians and office-holders play daily with the media, and my goal, if you want to call it that, was to stay ahead of them, to beat them at their own game.”
In his five years in the White House and during his 20 years on Reagan`s staff and as a confidant to the First Family, Deaver was Reagan`s stage manager, his public-relations adviser, the impresario of images. In the early years in Washington the reviews were glowing. In one article, Deaver was called ”the Vicar of Visuals,” in another he was ”Magic Mike.”
The main stage was television, because that`s the medium where perceptions can overwhelm facts. ”One-hundred million people get their news in 50-second bites,” he said, ”and that`s not much time to work with. Fifty- second bites with three minutes of comment around it . . .”
It was Deaver`s job to make those 50 seconds count, and even those who decried the hype acknowledged his skill in packaging the scenes of the President that would appear on the nation`s TV screens.
Deaver learned that visuals, in turn, could be used to smother content. In ”The Great American Video Game: Presidential Politics in the Television Age,” author Martin Schram describes CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl`s report during the `84 campaign on how Reagan`s use of ”photo opportunities”-public appearances orchestrated for media exposure-contradicted his actual policies. The White House was not at all upset.
As examples, Stahl had shown scenes of Reagan`s appearances at the Special Olympics and at the dedication of an old-age home, noting that Reagan had tried to cut services for disabled people and for federally subsidized housing for the elderly.
After the segment appeared, Schram wrote, someone from the White House called Stahl to thank her: ”You gave us 4 1/2 minutes of great pictures . . . (The viewers) don`t hear what you are saying if the pictures are saying something different.”
Controlling news coverage means paying attention to the smallest details. Deaver has credited Ronald Reagan with teaching him some of the fine points:
camera positions, checking the marks where a performer is to stand.
Some of the rules he developed himself. ”I would never let a photographer get on his knees (to shoot pictures) in front of Reagan,” Deaver said during the interview, ”because you`re not going to get a good shot coming up from underneath that way.
”There`s a wire-service picture of me taken the day I was indicted. The photographer was down on his knees in front of me, and I must have looked 80 years old.”
Oh, yes, the indictment. An event that Deaver did not stage, it came in March, 1987, during his almost-breathtaking plunge toward disgrace, financial ruin and treatment for alcoholism.
He had resigned from the White House in May, 1985, to go into private business, aiming to cash in on his contacts-or, in the buzzword of the day, his ”access” to the people who could get things done.
He never considered himself a lobbyist. Rather, he ”hoped to offer management strategies to clients who needed a Washington presence.”
Several big U.S. corporations, some from Saudi Arabia and South Korea and even the Canadian government, found Deaver`s management strategies irresistible; by Christmas, 1985, with billings at $4.5 million, Deaver was driving a silver-gray Jaguar and overseeing 21 employees.
But the cover of March 3, 1986, issue of Time magazine might as well have been a bugle call to the hounds. It showed Deaver in the back seat of a Lincoln Town Car (thoughtfully provided by the magazine), with a cellular telephone to his ear and the Capitol in the background. The headline was
”Who`s This Man Calling? . . . Influence Peddling in Washington.”
It was at least first-degree flaunting. The day it appeared on the newsstands, Deaver received a call from Nancy Reagan. ”Mike, you made a big mistake,” she said. ”I think you are going to regret posing for that photograph.”
He did. Eventually Deaver became the subject of five investigations into possible violations of the 1978 Government in Ethics Act, which aimed to curtail potentially unethical lobbying by former members of the executive branch.
In the end, a special prosecutor charged him not with breaking that law but with five counts of perjury before two of the investigative bodies. Last December a jury found him guilty on three counts. He has not been sentenced, pending appeal.
A few weeks after the conviction, Deaver joined a dubious and ever-expanding literary circle-authors who have been convicted of felonies-with the publication of ”Behind the Scenes: In Which the Author Talks about Ronald and Nancy Reagan . . . and Himself” (Morrow, $17.95).
Deaver then kicked off a promotional tour with a press agent`s dream: the Walters interview. This coveted showcase seemed essential in offsetting the book`s damaging reviews, one of which described the book as a ”self-pitying memoir-most of it told in a valet-tells-all tone of pompous fatuity.”
Not that Deaver was surprised. ”Sooner or later,” he wrote, ”no matter how open you think you have been, or how friendly the relationship, the press will do a job on you. Not always a big job. Maybe a small job. But it will get you.”
The New York Times reported that the Reagans were hurt by the book,
”primarily because it portrayed the President as the malleable object of considerable manipulation.”
Indeed, although professing admiration for the Reagans, many of his revelations and assessments are less than flattering.
”Ronnie Reagan had sort of glided through life,” he wrote, ”and Nancy`s role was to protect him.”
He declared that the President ”has a 1950s concept of the world,” and is ”incurably superstitious,” reading his horoscope each day in the newspaper-after turning first to the comics.
For someone who says he owes his lawyers more than $1 million, who has been reviled by a host of book critics, columnists and commentators and who may wind up in prison, Mike Deaver, 49, looked unusually relaxed.
During the ”20/20” interview he had said: ”I`ve got the best sense of my own worth I`ve ever had. I spent a lot of time thinking about what really is important to me and I found out that all the power and access you like to talk about and the public attention and the Jaguars and all the rest of it really don`t stack up against health, family and friends.” Deaver is married and has two children.
In some ways, Deaver has been a lucky fellow. He opened his book, for instance, with the shooting of the President by John Hinckley on March 30, 1981. ”Five of us walked out of the Washington Hilton Hotel together (that day),” he wrote, ”and four were shot. I was the only one not wounded.”
He was hospitalized in January, 1985, with kidney failure, facing the possiblity of dialysis for the rest of his life. But almost miraculously, he wrote, his kidneys began to respond to heavy infusions of liquids, making dialysis unnecessary.
Looking back, Deaver understandably has had some second thoughts. ”In truth,” he wrote, ”I probably could have been just as happy working as a musician in clubs and lounges,” which he did as a young man.
Had he chosen the piano over politics, he certainly would have avoided the uproar over his failure to discover that SS troops were buried in that military cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, that Reagan had announced his intention to visit; he might not have written the ”White House Diet Book,” Deaver`s own tale of his 30-pound weight loss during Reagan`s first term, which drew criticism for cashing in on his presidential connections; and he could have avoided all the trouble that followed him after leaving the White House.
But he also would have missed those years at the center of power: Even his detractors agree that groundwork for Reagan`s visits to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day and to Korea`s 38th Parallel deserve 4-star ratings. ”Normandy and Korea seem to be what most people mention,” Deaver said.
”But I think my greatest contribution was in the White House. When I watched the first couple of TV addresses Reagan delivered from the Oval Office, I realized that the beige drape that covers the bay windows behind the President`s desk was a terrible liability.
”Reagan`s head was just disappearing into that curtain. The next day I got all the lighting people at the White House together and said to them,
`Open the curtain and backlight the windows. The curtain makes Reagan look washed out. I want to see the outdoors from those windows.`
”They said it couldn`t be done. All the lights in the room, they said, would bounce off that window and there would be a terrible reflection. Well, I called a lighting expert in New York, flew him down to Washington and he backlit those windows permanently. It cost several thousand dollars, but it`s worth it.
”Now whenever a president speaks from the Oval Office, you`ll be able to see snow falling or leaves turning or flowers blooming in the Rose Garden . ”It`s wonderful! The lighting is soft and natural. Every president is going to look better.
”And when I was in the hospital with my kidney failure, I turned on the TV and saw Ronald Reagan making an address from the Oval Office and they`ve got the curtains closed and I picked up the phone and called my assistant and said, `You idiot! You left the curtains closed!`
”He said, `I thought you were dead.”`
