The Bite Without the Sting

By Thomas Griffith

Not long ago President Reagan remarked, "I know that what we've been doing doesn't read well in the Washington Post or the New York Times, but, believe me, it reads well in Peoria." Like most of Reagan's hand-carved one-liners (which is about all we get these days), this remark was ambiguously simple. It seems a criticism of two papers unpopular with right-wingers, but in Reagan fashion it was a bite without a sting. The remark could also be read, suggests David R. Gergen, the White House's director of communications, as implying that people in Peoria are more receptive to Reagan's message.

More receptive than whom? Than those who follow public affairs more closely? Decidedly. The Reagan Administration, more than any before it, aims its message to the big television audiences and wastes little time on those who want to follow the fine print. Reagan obviously didn't invent the homely example: Remember how Roosevelt shrewdly argued for Lend-Lease to Britain, justifying it as lending a hose to a neighbor to put out a fire? Nor did Reagan invent the bite-size explanation of policy. Gergen, from his speechwriting days for Richard Nixon, remembers Nixon's insistence that press statements be less than 100 words long: "That way, Nixon said, he and not somebody else controlled how much of what he said got used." Gergen thinks of Nixon and Carter as two Presidents who boned up and documented a lot. Reagan, like Eisenhower and Ford, prefers to get his information face-to-face rather than from reading. "This is the most oral Administration I know of," Gergen says.

Gergen spends much time devising visual backdrops for Reagan appearances. Outlined against the U.S. Capitol dome, Reagan proclaims his support of a balanced-budget constitutional amendment. In St. Louis his backdrop is grinning black children. Last week Reagan tried waging diplomacy by camera. White House spokesmen pointedly referred newsmen to how unsmiling the President was in greeting Israel's Foreign Minister Shamir. If this was meant to signal a new kind of diplomatic rebuff, it didn't overwhelm the Israelis, who went on bombing Beirut.

Reagan has given more prime-time speeches on TV than any other President, but only a third as many press conferences as Carter. As an actor, Reagan learned that the box office personality more important than the critics. Sharp words have appeared about him in print, but Reagan's only real outburst of White House pique came over TV interviews of the unemployed. Not that Reagan totally ignores the printed press. After all, in Gergen's view, it provides much of the news and many of the ideas that TV picks up.

Reagan occasionally socializes with a few sympathetic print journalists and is not vengeful toward others. He has had conservative Columnist George F. Will in to lunch alone twice, and Columnist Patrick Buchanan once. He has gone to dinner at the home of Katharine Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Co., who many right-wingers think hovers over Washington on a broom.

In the Post the other day ex-Senator J. William Fulbright recalled, "In the old days, when your speeches were reported in the press, reading was clearly a habit with everybody. But in television, it's this sort of instant impression. They always to cut down everything to just a fraction. Your reasons are usually left out because they're not flamboyant."

Our agreeable and anecdotal President is well suited for a medium that makes the wrathful appear foolish and the meticulous seem boring. But his agreeableness does not totally conceal his stubborn adherence to long-held opinions (which he might call convictions) even when their results are disastrous. Ful bright but that the polls show "disapproval of the policies of this President but still show great approval of him personally. It means he has a fine personality, but ... it has nothing to do with the formulation of wise policy."

That pollsters not only measure what the public thinks of a President's policies but must give equal attention to whether he is liked personally says something troublesome about a TV presidency and the skillful merchandising of personality.

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