The Presidents vs. the Press by Harold Holzer

Author:Harold Holzer [Holzer, Harold]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

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Reporters did not know it at the time, but Ronald Reagan’s supremely confident 1980 debate performance against Jimmy Carter owed at least something to an unfair and, at the time, undisclosed advantage: his staff had gained advance knowledge of Carter’s strategy for the confrontation. As Time magazine’s Laurence Barrett ultimately revealed two years later, a Reagan mole in the Carter White House had spirited a copy of the president’s briefing book to the Republicans before the televised event.

As it turned out, every issue Carter raised in the debate, save for his daughter’s passion for nuclear disarmament, had been detailed in the purloined material. Reagan entered the arena that night extremely well prepared.60 Barrett had first tried reporting the dirty trick in 1980, but his Time editors had cut the mention from his final article. Only when Barrett’s 1982 Reagan biography appeared did the story finally come to light.

At first, its belated revelation aroused no more than a smattering of local press coverage; only later did journalists label the incident “Debategate” and begin digging into the source of the theft. Blame fell on an assortment of alleged culprits, including Reagan’s White House chief of staff James Baker and his CIA director William Casey, who soon engaged in a public battle of denial and accusation, essentially blaming each other. Suspicion also dogged a prominent member of the press: the influential conservative Washington Post columnist George Will.61 By 1983, Newsweek further reported that the pro-Reagan White House source had also stolen “a trove of briefing papers, policy memos, and government reports,” adding to speculation that “the Carter White House had been leaking like a sieve.”62

More than twenty years afterward, Carter himself revived the still-unsolved mystery, accusing Will anew of accepting delivery of the briefing material. While the journalist unapologetically admitted that he had enjoyed access to it, he went on the attack, condemning the former president as a “recidivist fibber” and, in a withering letter to Carter, added of the book itself: “My cursory glance at it convinced me that it was a crashing bore and next to useless—for you, or for anyone else.” Carter ultimately walked back his accusation, telling the Washington Post: “I never thought Mr. Will took my book” or “that the outcome of the debate was damaging to my campaign.”63 In that last assertion he was certainly wrong. Reagan may have been heading toward victory by the time of the 1980 debate, but the encounter with the well-prepared Reagan sealed Carter’s doom and may have turned a relatively close election into a wipeout.

Only later did George Will further reveal that he had personally helped coach Reagan during his 1980 debate prep, and had indeed been armed with the “excruciatingly boring” book that had been pilfered from the Carter camp. The columnist likened his participation in the coaching session merely to that of “a sportswriter . . . being invited into the locker room.” But his colleagues would not buy the explanation, hinting at a conflict of interest:

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