Truth To Tell: Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself: Notes from My White House Education - Hardcover

Davis, Lanny J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684862786 ISBN 13: 9780684862781

Publisher: Free Press, 1999

Synopsis

A leading political damage-control specialist--a former special counsel to President Clinton--shares the secrets of coping with scandal and for making bad news better, going behind the scenes of the Clinton adminstration to reveal how the White House managed and mismanaged political crises. 50,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Lanny J. Davis served as special counsel to the president from December 1996 through January 1998. A partner in the Washington law firm Patton Boggs, where he specializes in litigation and strategic crisis management, Davis is a regular television commentator and has been a political and legal analyst for MSNBC. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. He lives in Potomac, Maryland.

Reviews

Less ballyhooed than Stephanopoulos or Mortons Monica, Davis, the Washington lawyer who served for 14 months as the Clinton White Houses chief spinmeister, simultaneously offers a stinging critique of scandalmongering politics and an education in the instrumentalif not downright cynicalcraft of spin control. Davis, who served as special counsel to the president until January 1998 (he left just 10 days after the Monica Lewinsky story broke), staunchly defends Clinton as the leader of a new, centrist Democratic Party. He presents himself as a man of integrity doing a high-wire balancing act between his desire to tell the whole truth and his loyalty to his boss. Dealing primarily with the campaign-finance scandal, Davis is most persuasive when debunking the story that the White House sold burial plots in Arlington Cemetery to civilians in exchange for campaign donations and when deflating the import of Al Gores mix of Buddhism and fund-raising. Hes less convincing when attempting to dismiss the charges of influence-peddling swirling around fundraiser John Huang. In an epilogue, Davis re-creates an August 1998 phone conversation with Clinton in which he urged the president to get everything out to the public concerning Lewinsky. Following the rules of proactive disclosure might well have enabled Clinton to avoid impeachment, Davis speculates. Depending on what their definition of is is, readers may view this memoir either as an unwittingly embarrassing peek into the Clinton propaganda machine or as an informal handbook on the art of damage control. Its actually both. Agent, Arthur Kaminsky.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Davis, hired after the 1996 election to inoculate President Clinton against criticism of his campaign finance practices, spent one year learning the nuances of spin control. Whatever one's opinion of the defenses Davis advances, his book is a valuable case study of the press-politics nexus in Washington. Spinners always have two clients: the reporter and the politician or issue in question. In the Clinton saga, Davis was the designated leaker and also the press' de facto agent for prying information out of White House lawyers. The lawyers' aversion to the slightest legal risk--for instance, admitting that those famous White House coffee klatches and overnights were fund-raising instruments--goaded the press. Such fund-raising tactics were tacky but not illegal, maintains Davis. And Davis criticizes reporters for "connecting the dots," as in equating donations with policy changes. Adding war stories about the still-silent John Huang and the false story of Arlington plots sold for cash, Davis rounds out an example of how scandals grow and die in the media. Gilbert Taylor

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Whose Side Are You On?

Mike McCurry was in a good mood. I was in his office on December 10, 1996, my second day in the White House, and he was trying to explain my job as the press's point man on scandal. He was grinning like a Cheshire cat -- as if he knew something I didn't know, saw something I didn't see. His feet were on his half-moon desk. Behind him were watercolor paintings by his children, giving a surreal impressionistic backdrop for a tutorial on how to handle the scandal machine.

This is going to be fun, he said, watching me suffer.

Some fun, I said.

I remembered the first time I talked to McCurry about whether I should take the job, just a month or so before. My title was supposed to be "special counsel to the president," but my central responsibility was to deal with the press on behalf of the president and the White House on a variety of "scandal" stories, primarily the ones dealing with the allegations of Democratic campaign-finance abuses. My concern was that since McCurry spoke for the president and the White House, and since I was supposed to do the same, if I took the job how would I know where his job ended and mine began?

"That's easy," he said. "Have you ever seen the bumper sticker, 'Shit Happens'?"

"Yes."

"Well, when shit happens -- you speak."

We both laughed -- the kind of nervous laughter, however, when a joke cuts just too close to the bone of truth. McCurry got suddenly serious. He told me, Your work on the scandal watch is more important than you realize, and has serious implications. Every time I am able to shovel a bad scandal-story question over to you, you'll be helping me -- and the president -- to put public focus on the president's agenda, on issues that the American people care about and elected him to work on. That means, he reminded me, that it's your job to take the poison, to catch the flak. (Whatever the metaphor, I got the point.) Your role, he went on, will be to separate the president and his press secretary from these scandal stories so that we can concentrate on doing the business of the country. This will be critical to the president's success in his second term. Remember that, he repeated, the stakes are enormous.

Then we talked about the strategic rules for damage control that we had both come to understand through more than two decades of experience in national politics, political campaigns, and dealings with the press corps. We did not invent these rules; they are well known to corporate crisis managers and to political consultants and press secretaries who try to minimize the damage of a negative breaking story. My predecessors at the White House -- Harold Ickes, Jane Sherburne, Mark Fabiani, and Christopher Lehane -- had had great success following these rules as well.

You can't help the president, McCurry said, unless you are credible to the press. In this place, there are some people who don't get it and will accuse you of consorting with the enemy, of forgetting whose side you're supposed to be on, and worst of all, of pandering to the press. Forget them. To help your client the most, you have work to do to establish your credibility with the press. Right now, he said, most of the reporters think you're a partisan pit bull for Clinton. (I winced inwardly, hearing that, realizing it was largely true.) You need to prove so them that you can defend your client while still being straight with them and helping them do their jobs.

He reminded me of the one absolute rule, with no exceptions: Never, never lie or mislead the press. If you are under pressure to, then refuse or resign. If you can't answer a question completely and honestly, then tell the reporter exactly that. If giving them half the information is going to mislead them into writing an inaccurate story, then give them nothing.

In this context, we then talked about the difference between "good spin" and "bad spin." The rules for dealing with bad news are not about turning bad news into good news. Facts are facts -- and no amount of spinning will alter those facts. We can't change bad facts or avoid all damage. Rather, good spinning aims to minimize the damage -- by surrounding bad facts with context, with good facts (if there are any), and, if possible, with a credible, favorable (or less damaging) interpretation of these facts. Even if there is no such damage-limiting interpretation of the information available, there is still a good chance that reporters and the public will discount the impact of the story if the object of the bad news proactively puts the facts out: "If they helped put the story out, how bad could it be?"

In recent years, the word "spinning" has been given a somewhat pejorative connotation. But this fails to distinguish good from bad. Bad spinning is essentially a strategy of deception. It attempts to turn a bad story into a good story by hiding or obscuring bad facts, by releasing information selectively and misleadingly, and sometimes by being less than completely forthright in answering media questions. As I was to learn, bad spinning is not only dishonest, it is ineffective. Sooner or later, the reporters will catch up with the omitted facts or, ultimately, with the misleading information. Then the story will be written with the additional "Gotcha!" element that always makes it worse -- and the reporters who were the victims of the deception will almost certainly find a way to enjoy their revenge.

It was clear that McCurry and I spoke the same language, had the same philosophy about disclosure and accuracy. We talked for a while about his unhappy experiences the preceding fall, in the last few weeks before the November elections, when the Democratic campaign-finance stories first broke. He warned me that because the White House had mounted such an effective blocking action before the election to stop the press from writing stories about controversial Asian American Democratic fundraisers like John Huang and Charlie Trie, the press was out for blood and I would be the recipient of their ire. Which brought him to the next point, the core of our strategy in handling the campaign-finance scandal: I had to get all the bad stories written before the opening day of the Senate hearings, if possible over the Christmas holidays, when the politicians would be out of town and most normal people would be more concerned about their families and Christmas shopping than about John Huang and Charlie Trie. The key premise was that all these bad and embarrassing campaign finance stories are coming out anyway. By definition, the worse they were the more certain it was that they would come out. Better that they get written now so that they will be old news by the time the Senate hearings begin. People will be bored with this stuff by the time the TV cameras are turned on.

I'm going to be helping reporters write bad stories? I asked. Stories that will embarrass us, even damage us politically?

That's the inherent paradox in your job, McCurry said.

And you'll back me up when I am criticized for being on the wrong side -- for consorting with the enemy? I asked. I knew that charge would be made early and often.

Yes, I will.

This is a job where I am certain to make mistakes, I said. I'm going to hold you to that.

We then discussed the importance of the baseline or "predicate" story: Help the reporter writing the first story, make sure it's complete, with everything in it -- and in all likelihood the story will be over. From that point on, other reporters will find it when they search the LEXIS-NEXIS database of published newspaper stories, and so it will become the starting point for all future reporting. If you let the story dribble out in pieces, we agreed, there'll be ten bad stories, each half right and incomplete, rather than one bad story.

There are different ways of getting these predicate stori

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684862786
• ISBN 13: 9780684862781
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288