Fleischer had defied early predictions that he would flame out fast (and an Internet pool betting on when he’d pack his bags). He has managed to earn the president’s trust enough to be in a lot more meetings than George W. Bush himself first predicted. The Texas club around Bush had initially viewed the 40-year-old New Yorker with some suspicion. If there was anyone they thought would be a leaker (a dirty word in this White House), it was Fleischer.
He was a creature of Washington; he spent many years working on the Hill as a spokesman for Sen. Pete Domenici, the New Mexico Republican. But his Washington insider knowledge has served him well. While some reporters have accused Fleischer of “parsing” the truth with his semantic gymnastics, Fleischer gets high marks from one of his predecessors and occasional advisers, Marlin Fitzwater. “I think he is doing quite well; he has the instincts,” says Fitzwater, who served as White House press secretary under Ronald Reagan and then George H.W. Bush.
The press secretary job is its own secret society. Each exiting press secretary writes a short note-a few lines usually-to the new kid. There seems to be a blood oath not to reveal what the notes say. But Fitzwater would tell me what he wrote to himself when he stayed on for a second term. “Marlin: Know when it’s time to leave.” The letters are all kept bound in the pocket of black bulletproof vest decorated with blue flowers designed to look like evening wear. No one has ever really used the vest (Fitzwater says he could never fit into it), but it’s a reminder to Fleischer that he is not the only one who has been in the press corps’ crosshairs. “[The press secretaries] experience with the Washington press corps is uniquely their own,” Fitzwater explains. “Nobody else has known the terror of facing 50 reporters every day on every subject in the world.”
Sam Donaldson was Fitzwater’s nemesis. The TV correspondent was the master badgerer. “In the middle of the night, in dreams or perhaps nightmares, I destroyed him. The man just retired on the spot,” Fitzwater now jokes. They have subsequently become friends. Fleischer is not saying who he considers his nemesis (a badge of honor among reporters). He has mastered the art of not scoffing or rolling his eyes at reporters’ questions (a game face some of the lower level press secretaries haven’t quite gotten down.) “The press always wants to push you farther than you can go,” Fitzwater says. “The trick is not saying the wrong thing but then moving the story about a half inch further because you want to make news.”
Making news about yourself, however, is about the worst thing you can do as press secretary. Fitzwater recalls when he got so exuberant in his defense of the president that he called Mikhail Gorbachev a “drugstore cowboy.” Then there was the time the Danes were complaining about our submarines and he said: “To me Danish means breakfast.” They didn’t like that. Among the advice Fitzwater has passed on to Fleischer: “Anytime you pick a fight, the president has to end it, so don’t do it.” Another tip: “You can only speak for the president.” That’s a lesson Fleischer learned early when he mischaracterized Sen. Tom Daschle’s remarks to Bush. Fleischer and the White House ended up apologizing in private. “That was a good mistake for him to make early,” Fitzwater says.
The golden rule of press secretaries is: “you lie, you die.” “The press corps is not very forgiving,” Fitzwater continues. “They’ll forgive mistakes, but they better know they are mistakes.” Fleischer has earned the president’s trust, but he is still working on the press corps’. Part of his challenge is getting a straight answer out of a lot of people in the administration who see information as power and the press as a nuisance at best. The Bush administration has not mastered the art of selective leaking to get its version out. “You can win respect. It is not impossible,” Fitzwater says. “The job will ruin your health, destroy your family and drive you crazy. But it’s the best job you’ll ever have.”
Fitzwater, now an author, has found the roles reversed lately. When his father passed away in 1995, a family secret surfaced: a great uncle had been banished from the Fitzwater clan just after the turn of the century for tar and feathering a local school teacher who was accused of seducing a student. “Here I am a former press secretary for two presidents. Supposedly I know the secrets of the Western World, and my own family has been keeping a secret from me for 80 years. I couldn’t believe it!” he says. Fitzwater had to call on his training as a journalist to unearth the court records and newspaper clippings about the incident. The bare facts were there but there was little color. “Newspapers didn’t do personality profiles back then,” he says.
His celebrity helped uncover more detail. When he was on a book tour for his nonfiction book about his years in the White House, “Call The Briefing,” an elderly couple from his family’s little town in Kansas approached him to say they knew his father. Fitzwater immediately stopped signing books and took the couple aside to ask them if they had ever heard about what happened to his long-lost great uncle, Jay Fitzwater. They had, but the facts were still sketchy. So he decided to base his first novel, “Esther’s Pillow,” due out in June, on the incident. One of the blurbs on the book jacket is from none other than Sam Donaldson. It reads: “White House reporters always suspected that Fitzwater had a gift for weaving fact and fiction together … and here’s the proof.”
