The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Larry Speakes, 47, left his job last week after five years ten months one day and nine hours as the President's spokesman, the longest tenure in that chamber of horrors since James Hagerty served Ike, twelve press officers ago.

As Larry headed for the Big Apple and big bucks ($250,000-plus) with Merrill Lynch, a roly-poly, hail-fellow, stogie-smoking Kansan named Marlin Fitzwater, 44, moved into the cauldron. Therein lies one of the most intriguing questions of this age in the presidency.

Speakes, who would not win a personal popularity contest among the White House media corps, has nurtured the most successful era of public esteem for a President that we have had in the past 40 years, even including the Iran-arms downer. A predecessor, Jody Powell, who was Jimmy Carter's press secretary and might win the corps's popularity vote, presided over a disastrous loss of presidential prestige. Is there cause and effect? Is the great old White House press corps hooked on calamity? Can Good-Guy Marlin break the cycle?

Speakes eyed a crackling fire in his elegant White House office last week, a little sad at the prospect of parting, and talked about the problem of serving "three masters -- the American people, the President and the press."

"It's not an elective office, nor is it a popularity contest," he said. "But communications policy is an absolutely essential ingredient of any White House policy. All success starts with the man in the Oval Office. I can't take one iota of credit for the standing of Ronald Reagan in the polls. It all happened naturally." That is Speakes' genius. With the aw-shucks cunning of a Mississippi country editor, which he once was, he instantly understood that the modern appetite for news meant that anytime he stepped out into the anarchy of the White House briefing room he could be on the nation's screens; he could get more airtime than any other official, including the President. He curtailed live coverage of his briefings and became more of a background voice than a television star.

He also kept his loyalty pure -- he was the President's man. The press corps he viewed as the adversary, necessary but not to be embraced. He often closed his office door, gave nasty answers to nasty questions, got personal when his integrity was up for debate. The nonsmoking, nondrinking, nonswearing Speakes fitted no previous pattern. If 90% of the press corps took umbrage and cursed his unorthodoxy, 90% of the mail he got from the public (1,500 letters a month) approved his tough style. "I had to take a lot," he said last week, "so I gave back a lot. You cannot stand there with no backbone."

During the first four years, when the White House staff was run by the Meese- Deaver-Baker troika, a combine widely hailed by the press for its success, Speakes was cut out of the inner loop and often operated in ignorance of events, for which the same group condemned him. "I fought my way off the floor," recalled Speakes. "When I finally got into the meetings, I had a seat in the corner. When I finally got up to the table, I didn't have any papers or charts."

It was the current chief of staff, Don Regan, who gave Speakes full membership in the inner circle. For the past two years the President's spokesman could and did fill himself with all the information he could absorb, and the tension between him and the White House press corps eased noticeably because the reporters sensed that Speakes had the facts.

Now consider this irony: Don Regan, the man who heard the grumbling about Speakes' isolation and took the action to end it, is almost universally savaged by the media as the fellow most responsible for running the Reagan Administration into deep trouble.

O.K., Marlin, it's your baby.