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The education of Mike McCurry
Filed May 7, 1997Slowly but unmistakably, Mike McCurry is losing it. Who can blame him? The president's press secretary has gone from being the darling of the White House press corps -- trustworthy, good-natured, witty -- to arguing with UPI's Helen Thomas about who is more disreputable, the press or the president's men.
"Once you're in the news business," McCurry sneered during a press conference in March, "your standards for accuracy are much lower than ours are standing here."
"Mike, how can you say such a thing?" Thomas cried out.
"It is true, because we have to be one hundred -- one thousand -- percent correct here."
This broadside aimed at the entire Fourth Estate was followed by another odd explosion, when a reporter asked McCurry about Rep. Dan Burton's complaint that the White House has been withholding documents. McCurry's response was to toss a quarter at the reporter and bark: "Go call him. Tell him to come on down here, and he can look in any document he wants to."
It's no wonder that the adjective most often used in describing McCurry these days is not "smart" or "witty" but "testy." Ever since the first faint outlines of the campaign finance scandals became visible last fall, both his aplomb and his reliability have begun to erode.
The two are not unrelated. McCurry is passionate about his reputation for honesty: "I've got to stay rock-solid in the direction of truth," he said earlier this year. "Any time the general perception is that I've not done that, I'd leave."
"Press secretaries," according to Tony Blankley, who only recently left the fold, "have to meet a higher threshold of truth than politicians. After all, when a reporter misinforms, that's what a correction box is for. When a press secretary misinforms, that's what firing is for."
But trying to remain reliable while serving as the public voice of the Clinton administration is a little like trying to dam a river without getting wet. Witness the verbal contortions to which McCurry had to resort earlier this week in straining to explain just how much Clinton knew about Webb Hubbell's criminal activities when the president's friends were busy finding him six-figure consulting contracts: "The full nature and seriousness of the allegations against Mr. Hubbell were not fully known to anyone at the White House until he pled guilty."
"Full" and "fully" are wonderful qualifying words, of the sort that make an essentially untrue statement technically true. I enjoy using them myself, although less creatively, as when I say that the White House press secretary is "full of it." Perhaps in this administration, though, trying not to be full of it is a losing battle.
More serious than McCurry's snide comebacks are his lapses in reliability -- what Helen Thomas called his "credibility gap." On Jan. 30, for example, the press corps was peppering his deputy, Barry Toiv, with questions about whether anyone at the White House had spoken to Clinton financial supporter Truman Arnold about possible illegal use of the White House database. McCurry, watching in the corner, failed to volunteer that he himself had talked with Arnold the night before.
The sin of silence was followed by more active sins when he insisted that no one at the White House was aware that the Lippo Group had paid Webb Hubbell $250,000 until the news appeared in the press. It was in fact revealed that White House aide Bruce Lindsey had known about the payments a full year earlier. This came on top of McCurry's describing Clinton's numerous meetings with James Riady as "social calls," a fiction he maintained until the day before the election. Which came on top of his assertion that the president did not know Dick Morris had an affair that produced a daughter. When it became clear that the president did know, McCurry had to admit that he had misled the press.
When he was first appointed press secretary in January 1995, McCurry made the smart move of referring all scandal questions to then White House counsel Mark Fabiani. But once the fund-raising scandals began to gather steam in October, the reporters insisted on getting answers not from the designated scandal handler but directly from the president's spokesman. In turn, McCurry had to start looking for answers from people in the Clinton camp who were either lying, fleeing the country or pleading the Fifth. Ron Ziegler, the Nixon administration mouthpiece who famously described Watergate as a "third-rate burglary," had it easy by comparison.
McCurry had a remarkably long honeymoon with the press corps -- during which he actually got away with making the comment that Republicans would like to see Medicare "just die and go away -- that's probably what they'd like to see happen to seniors, too, if you think about it." A Republican press secretary would have been hung in effigy for making a similar comment about Democrats, but the press chalked it up to McCurry's mordant wit.
Now the honeymoon is over, and McCurry finds himself directing his sharp tongue at the press more often than at the Republicans. I wonder how much longer he will last before he realizes this is a thankless job, and hops the fence to pursue a much more profitable career as a member of the press. After all, their standards are much lower.
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