Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency by David Greenberg

Author:David Greenberg [Greenberg, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-01-11T06:00:00+00:00

Stevenson had wryly warned that Ike’s election would mean the eclipse of the New Dealers by the Car Dealers, and, as predicted, the businessmen with whom Eisenhower stocked his cabinet showed a distinct comfort with the ethos of salesmanship. “Politics these days is like a business,” explained Republican National Committee chairman Len Hall. “First you set up a real business shop. . . . Then you sell your candidates and your programs the way a business sells its products.” Governing, as much as campaigning, was now suffused with the language and techniques of marketing.8

“We all suddenly realized we were busy manufacturing a product down here, but nobody was selling it,” an administration aide told the Wall Street Journal a few months into Ike’s presidency. So the White House created an office to do just that. Heading it was a Seattle mortgage banker named Walter Williams, dubbed by Ike “the greatest salesman in the world.” Williams had led Citizens for Eisenhower and served briefly in the Commerce Department. Though it would take two decades before Nixon, as president, created the White House Office of Communications, Williams’s shop was a prototype and precedent. When administration officials went on TV or radio, his small staff would furnish talking points—simply “the facts,” administration sources insisted—so that they wouldn’t “get tied in knots” on the air. The new unit also aggressively promoted Eisenhower’s accomplishments to reporters: its aid to drought-stricken farmers, its improvement of public housing, its “hard money” economic policies.9

Besides Williams, Eisenhower also employed a who’s who of experts who would, Lou Guylay said, “rely on scientific methods [rather] than on instinct alone” in selling his policies. Ike’s younger brother, Milton, who had schooled the general in his Army days on wooing reporters, remained a trusted adviser. Sig Larmon of Young & Rubicam declined the president’s requests to join the White House staff but served on ad hoc committees and offered regular counsel. Arthur Page, who had helped spin Hiroshima, joined “Operation Solarium,” Ike’s project to draft a defense strategy. Edward Bernays was brought in to help when Joe McCarthy attacked the new United States Information Agency. Bruce Barton, though rebuffed in his modest offer to reorganize “the whole public relations and propaganda machinery of government,” built a relationship with Nixon through private Manhattan dinner briefings. BBD&O furnished a poll-hungry Eisenhower with weekly survey research, while Gallup and other pollsters also shared data. The heavy reliance on public relations men was noted with dismay by the press. “There’s too much BBD&O,” groused New York Times correspondent Bill Lawrence.10

Of all Ike’s information managers, the most visible was his press secretary, James C. Hagerty, forty-two, formerly a newspaperman and aide to Tom Dewey. The son of a New York Times reporter, who never forgot his boyhood meeting with Teddy Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill, Hagerty grew up steeped in politics and adopted a Front Page demeanor. “A long and slightly drooping upper lip gave him a passing resemblance to Humphrey Bogart,” reporter James Deakin recalled; “his accent was Sidewalks of New York.

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