Roughing Up Ron

The query from the back of the White House briefing room cut through the clamor: "Do you still enjoy your job?" Presidential Press Secretary Ronald L. Ziegler, clutching the Styrofoam coffee cup that seems to serve him as a big worry bead, offered an uncharacteristically clear response: "I haven't enjoyed it as much over the past few months as I did in previous years. But I don't mind it. I understand the scope of what you're involved in."

That recent exchange was deceptively benign, an interlude in a harsh running confrontation that seems to be destroying Ziegler's usefulness. Ziegler, 34, has never been popular with White House reporters. Unlike most of his recent predecessors, he had never been a newsman--he was an account executive for J. Walter Thompson, where he met H.R. Haldeman. His friendship with Haldeman and his work on the 1968 Nixon campaign lifted him into the White House.

As press secretary, Ziegler was unresponsive to journalists. During the early months of the Watergate investigation, he turned brusque. At first he dismissed the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters as a "third-rate burglary." He responded to some of the Washington Post's revelations by charging "character assassination" and "the shoddiest kind of journalism." Often his answers seemed deliberately unclear or misleading.

Thus there was no cushion of rapport when the full impact of Watergate began to be felt. Ziegler labeled previous inaccurate pronouncements "inoperative." He apologized to the Washington Post for his earlier attacks. But reporters are in no mood to forgive.

Rather they jeer at his inability to answer questions about the scandal fully and are giving him the roughest treatment any presidential press secretary in memory has absorbed.

It was hardly surprising when Post Columnist Nicholas von Hoffman, an old adversary, last week compared Ziegler to a Pinocchio whose nose grows longer with every public prevarication. But James Kilpatrick, a conservative commentator who was generally friendly to the Administration before Watergate, recently said: "I don't believe the White House is best served by Ziegler. The word 'inoperative' is going to follow him the rest of his life."

New York Daily News Reporter

Paul Healy agrees: "I think he should resign. His credibility has been ruined. Reporters who cover the White House every day say, 'Who's going to believe him again?' " Some argue that because he is a prisoner of the President's wishes, Ziegler's personal trustworthiness is not at issue. "Ziegler's credibility doesn't trouble me at all," says the New Republic's John Osborne. "Ziegler's credibility is Nixon's credibility."

The derision and acrimony of the daily briefings have left Ziegler so far outwardly unruffled. Hearing laughter during one of his recent responses, Ziegler interjected: "If I said something wrong, I'll retract it." The harsh reply from one reporter: "If you said something right, retract it." His answers, as Westinghouse Broadcasting's Jim McManus quipped, still "run the gamut from vague to opaque." A question concerning the possible presence of Senator Thomas Eagleton's medical records in the White House drew this reply: "Here again, the convergence of events leads me not to step right out and issue flat denials."

"Ziegler doesn't seem to be caving in at all," Healy says. "He throws off the criticism and the nasty questions." But Ziegler's former haughtiness has been replaced by a kind of humble patience and he has made some moves toward detente. Angrily accused of "total obfuscation" by the New York Times's R.W. Apple, Ziegler responded by granting the reporter a private interview. The next day, Apple published an exclusive story revealing that John Dean's disputed Watergate report had been transmitted to the President by John Ehrlichman. Ziegler did not deny other reporters' charges that he had leaked the story to Apple. He has even acknowledged his own evasiveness as contributing to "some of the confusion that you are operating under."

Ziegler gives no hint of leaving his $42,500-a-year post. He says that he will simply stay and "do the best job I can as long as the President wants me here." A White House aide observes: "He is one of the few senior guys remaining, and he hasn't gotten anybody in trouble in all these months of questions." Maybe so, but keeping people out of trouble now seems a negligible contribution to an Administration badly in need of public trust.

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