Presidential press conferences

The other night, Thursday night, watching a beleaguered president being interrogated and chivvied, at times more like a prisoner at the bar than a head of government who had kindly consented to see a few members of the press, I recalled a time, a particular occasion, in London shortly after the United States came into the Second World War.

It must have been no later than the spring of 1942. The first batch of American correspondents had settled into London, one or two of them, as I remember, provoking ribald remarks by hunkering down on the front line in the bivouac of the Savoy Hotel. But there were others, the best of them who, no matter where they slept, got out into the night bombings and, pretty soon, would manage to go along on bombing raids over Germany and in the fullness of the spring of 1944, be in on the first landings on the Normandy beach.

But in that first spring, both the good and the bad were puzzled to find something missing in Britain in the relations between the government and the press. There were of course regular briefings, as there were in most departments of the government in the United States. What puzzled them was the missing link. There was no such thing as a press conference, regular or irregular, held by the Prime Minister. Why was that?

They'd all been brought up to take the presidential press conference as a normal, necessary, democratic institution, though I imagine few of them knew that it has no legal sanction. It's not prescribed by the constitution. In 1942, it was, indeed, only about 30 years old. The point was put in a memo, or petition, to Mr Churchill. Why no press conferences, Prime Minister? This is a democracy, isn't it?

Mr Churchill didn't hesitate for a second. 'Indeed it is,' he said, 'and in this country, the obligation of the Prime Minister is first to the people who elected him, to the common people through their representatives in the Commons. That is the place to ask questions and the people who have the first right to ask them are the members of the Commons.' That was that.

And, after the war, whenever American politicians visited Britain who wanted to sit in on a debate in the House of Commons, I used to urge them to get in early and watch a session of Question Time – an institution which clearly does not exist in the United States, since the head of the party in power, the president, does not live and have his being in the legislature. Indeed, he may never visit either House of Congress except by invitation for special occasions, like making his annual State of the Union address, which is the ceremonial and political equivalent of the Speech from the Throne.

One old and powerful senator, I recall, was a veteran of American politics; Senator Vandenberg of Michigan, who, yet, had never heard about or, anyway, thought about, the vital institution of Question Time. He was sitting in the gallery during a pretty brisk and acrimonious hour with Prime Minister Attlee in charge. At the time, the American view of Mr Attlee was that artfully composed by Mr Churchill in two or three mischievous strokes – 'a sheep in sheep's clothing' and, 'Most certainly he's a modest man but then he has so much to be modest about'. And so on.

Well, Mr Attlee put on what to the regulars was a perfectly regular performance – sharp, short, on the ball, well-informed, fielding questions on everything from a reported move to approach the Russians to the intrusion of a policeman on the slumbers of an innocent householder in Yorkshire. He was asked, I recall, about a rumour that there'd been rumblings of a mutiny in a British ship on duty somewhere in the Mediterranean. Would he care to comment? Certainly not, he snapped.

Senator Vandenberg was fascinated and amazed and when it was all over, he came out and said, 'Boy, they are tough babies and that Attlee, he's the toughest of the lot!' 'He was a major and a survivor at Gallipoli,' I said. 'Is that so?' said the senator, in wonderment.

Of course, a similar institution is not possible in the American system since the Cabinet is a collection of the President's cronies, not recruited from the Congress and they, like him, have no reason or right to appear in Congress. They call press conferences from time to time if they feel like it, but the only way they can be challenged by the people's elected representatives is when they're called to testify before committees of Congress and that can be rough too.

So the nearest equivalent to Question Time in the Commons is the presidential press conference and it is, as I say, in the history of the republic, a comparative newcomer. It started on the initiative of one man, of Theodore Roosevelt, the day he became one of what we call the accidental presidents, immediately after the assassination of President McKinley. That was in 1901.

During his time as governor of New York, he'd started a unique practice of having the press in twice a day – twice a day! – at eleven and five, to feed them bits of information about the goings-on in the state. The very first day in the White House, he called in the very small press corps and told it that he would regularly see two reporters he had known and trusted in Albany and he would give his news to them but, for the time being, to nobody else. Others came along he trusted; if they violated his trust by spreading confidences abroad, they were banned for ever.

A pretty dictatorial routine but far freer than any known before. He came, however, sadly but honestly to expect and accept violations on the principle – which was remarkable for a president to announce in those days – that if there is one thing we ought to be careful about, it is in regard to interfering with the liberty of the press; we have to take the good with the bad. It's a good deal better to err on the side of having too much discussion and having too virulent language used by the press, rather than to err on the side of them not say what they ought to say, especially with reference to public men and measures.

Now that would not be a remarkable thing for a president or a prime minister to say today, though most of them might wish they could. But in 1901, those were brave words.

After Teddy Roosevelt, the practice lapsed under Taft. Woodrow Wilson took it up and instituted the first formal and regular press conferences. He, too, believed in what he called 'pitiless publicity for public business' but when America got into the First World War, pitiless publicity could mean open publicity for wartime secrets. Press censorship put an end to the press conference.

Later on Coolidge, an easygoing man who spoke and thought in monosyllables, revived it for a time, but all the questions had to be sent in in written form and screened by the president's secretary. In a word, Coolidge chose what he wanted to talk about and after a while he got bored even with that concession.

Hoover came along and dared, after a year or two, to take spontaneous questions. Not for long. He committed a couple of bloopers and in those far-off days, if the president got his facts muddled or confessed to not knowing what was going on, his reputation would have suffered disastrously. Hoover abandoned the habit.

It was left to Franklin Roosevelt to revive the press conference in its liveliest form, to revel in it and to make it a permanent obligation of the presidency, one that no succeeding president has ever dared abandon. Roosevelt held two conferences a week, 998 in all his time and, at the start he set four rules, four categories of news. He would retail news that could be attributed to a White House source, not to him. There would be background news not to be attributed to anyone. Very rarely, his own words could be quoted as coming from him. This happened so rarely – about two or three times a year – that it made the headlines, like the Oracles coming from Olympus and he would, when he chose, say, 'No comment'.

These rules were to be strictly followed and – amazing to consider today – they were not broken. The same rules went for Truman. I think the big – for the president perhaps fatal – change came with President Eisenhower. Acting on what some people, even some of his aides, deplored as a mistaken view of democracy, Eisenhower held televised press conferences, brought in the signal corps to transcribe them and, from then on, everything was on the record. In fact, Eisenhower's press conferences were much less helpful to the reporter than Franklin Roosevelt's. Obviously, the president still couldn't say out loud everything he knew everything on his mind, so instead of saying, 'No comment', he had to waffle around pseudo explanations. Eisenhower, I think, managed to say less in more words on more topics than any president before or since.

So this is the parlous institution that Ronald Reagan inherited. Like most of his predecessors, he was almost impatient at the start to get going, to rollick in the free-for-all of spontaneous, unedited questions. Well, what with his hazy way with facts, his fondness for encapsulating complicated problems in old, cosy anecdotes, his love of patriotic rhetoric, he has found, in the twilight of his presidency, that the press conference is a perilous high wire, that he's best at performing a written script in his incomparable, affable, gutsy fashion.

But the televised press conference has become to the media and the public the one certain revelation of the president's competence and character and it is not to be denied, so that Mr Reagan actually lost ground and credibility simply from not having held one for four months. And so, on Thursday, he had to hold what everyone said would be the most direct and intimate test of his presidency.

He did far better than his detractors had anticipated and not as well as his disciples had hoped. But he did not stumble. He was good-tempered, if not relaxed. Surely it's time for him to declare, 'I have had my say about Iran, the arms, the Contras, now please wait for the findings of the joint congressional select committee!'

Any earlier president would have said that at the start. But he didn't. And the appetite of the media is insatiable in the new era when everybody claims the right to know everything, all the time, preferably tonight.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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