Things We Lost in the Fire

DATE February 19, 2001 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Sam Brylawski and Cooper Graham on their CDs of
presidential speeches
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

This Presidents Day we're going to listen back to presidential speeches from
the 20th century and consider some of the changes and what presidents say
and
how they say it. My guests, Sam Brylawski and Cooper Graham, compiled a CD
box set that collects historical presidential speeches from 1908 to 1993.
Brylawski and Graham work in the Library of Congress' Division of Motion
Picture Broadcasting and Recorded Sound. Their CD of presidential speeches
is
a co-production of the Library of Congress and Rhino Records. I spoke with
them when the CD was released in 1995. In a moment we'll hear an excerpt of
President Roosevelt's first Fireside Chat, broadcast just weeks after he
took
office in 1933 during the Great Depression. I asked Brylawski about the
significance of this speech.

(Excerpt from 1995)

Mr. SAM BRYLAWSKI (Library of Congress): What he did was he went directly
to
the people. He didn't give a speech to Congress. He didn't go to a major
organization. He went directly to the people and this was a very
significant
thing that Roosevelt did. By going to the people so often through radio, it
almost sort of usurped machine politics at the time. It even traces the
descendancy of machine politics to Franklin Roosevelt and the fact that he
skips over them and goes directly to the people over the radio through what
were called `intimate chats.'

GROSS: So before we hear this 1933 Fireside Chat--Roosevelt's first
Fireside
Chat--tell us what the crisis is that he's addressing so we can hear this in
context.

Mr. COOPER GRAHAM (Library of Congress): There was a depression and the
depression had gotten worse and worse, to the point where a lot of banks

were
having all their money pulled by anxious depositors who felt that all the
banks were going to fail. Of course, any bank has far more deposits in it
than it has cash on hand, so the banks would have--there would have been a
run
on all the banks in the United States and there would have been complete
financial panic.

Roosevelt has the reputation of being a liberal. But at that point, I think
the business community was sufficiently frightened that they were also
asking
that he take any steps that were necessary to try to avert this crisis. I
don't think most people now can imagine how serious it was. So there was an
awful lot riding on the speech to try to persuade Americans not to pull
their
money out of the banks.

GROSS: So let's hear it. This is Franklin Roosevelt, his first Fireside
Chat
in 1933.

(Soundbite of 1933 Fireside Chat)

President FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: First of all, let me state the simple fact
that when you deposit money in a bank, the bank does not put the money into
a safe deposit vault. It invests your money in many different forms of
credit, in bonds and commercial paper and mortgages and in many other kinds
of
loans.

In other words, the bank puts your money to work to keep the wheels of
industry and of agriculture turning round. A comparatively small part of
the
money that you put into the bank is kept in currency, an amount which in
normal times is wholly sufficient to cover the cash needs of the average
citizen. In other words, the total amount of all the currency in the
country
is only a comparatively small proportion of the total deposits in all the
banks of the country. What, then, happened during the last few days of
February and the first few days of March?

Because of undermined confidence on the part of the public, there was a
general rush by a large portion of our population to turn bank deposits into
currency or gold, a rush so great that the soundest banks couldn't get
enough
currency to meet the demand. The reason for this was that on the spur of
the
moment, it was, of course, impossible to sell perfectly sound assets of a
bank
and covert them into cash except at panic prices far below their real value.

GROSS: Franklin Roosevelt, recorded in 1933, his first Fireside Chat. What
was the public reaction to the first chat?

Mr. COOPER: It was very, very favorable. Of course, the expected panic
didn't take place, which is negative evidence, but seemed to be proof that a
lot of people listened to the speech and took the president's words to
heart.
Also, there was an incredible amount of mail. The White House received
something like four or five times the mail that it received after a speech
by
the previous administrations, to the point where they had to hire extra
people
to deal with it. So the response to Roosevelt's speech was overwhelming.
One
commentator says that, `Within the space of this speech capitalism was
saved.'
Maybe it was.

GROSS: On this new CD box set you've included a speech by President Truman
recorded in 1948 upon accepting the Democratic nomination for president.
Why
did you choose this speech from Truman?

Mr. GRAHAM: Going into this campaign, Truman was very much the underdog.
Most people didn't think he had much of a chance, and his speaking style was
generally considered to be terrible. It was a very flat, pronounced
Missouri
accent and people had been talking with him for years about changing his
style, trying to make his sentence shorter and punchier, and if he really
could speak to an audience the way he could speak to friends of his at a
poker
game, he would be a wonderful speaker.

And for some reason, at 2:00 in the morning of his acceptance speech, of the
Democratic candidate in '48, he seemed to take their advice to heart because
you hear Truman at his best in this speech.

GROSS: Let's hear an excerpt of this speech; Harry Truman from 1948 at the
Democratic National Convention. He's accepting the nomination for
president.

(Soundbite of 1948 Truman speech)

Mr. HARRY TRUMAN: Confidence and security have been brought to the American
people by the Democratic Party. Farm income has increased from less than
two
and one-half billion dollars in 1933 to more than $18 billion in 1947.
Never
in the world were the farmers of any republic or any kingdom or any other
country as prosperous as the farmers of the United States. And if they
don't
do their duty by the Democratic Party, they're the most ungrateful people in
the world.

Wages and salaries in this country have increased from $29 billion in 1933
to
more than $128 billion in 1947. That's labor, and labor never had but one
friend in politics and that is the Democratic Party and Franklin D.
Roosevelt. And I'll say to labor just what I've said to the farmers. They
are the most ungrateful people in the world if they pass the Democratic
Party
by this year.

GROSS: Harry Truman accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in
1948.

I don't know if you'll agree with me on this but it seems to me a
presidential
candidate would never call voters ungrateful. I mean, you don't say
anything
that could alienate any voters. What do you think?

Mr. BRYLAWSKI: I certainly agree with you. On the other hand, as Cooper
said, this was 2 AM in the morning, so I'm not sure how many voters heard
this address.

Mr. GRAHAM: But there was also a drifting away, both by labor and by some
of
the farmers in '48 and I think it would not be considered to be necessarily
a
judicious thing to do, but it may have reminded them exactly who their
friends
were, and I think I would have been somewhat impressed by it if I'd been a
union man or a farmer in '48.

GROSS: Let's jump ahead to 1969. You've included an address by President
Nixon to the nation on the war in Vietnam. Why did you include this speech?

Mr. BRYLAWSKI: Well, this is the Silent Majority speech. In making the
selections for this set, which were mostly done by Cooper, here we
decided--or
Cooper had the great idea that for recent presidents and the current
presidents--and we started this thing during the Bush administration--that
we
would contact the presidents or their staffs or families to see what speech
they would like to be represented by. Initially this was a contact to say,
`Gee, we're going to preserve a speech in a special new process with some
experiments we're doing at the Library of Congress. What speech would you
like to be assured was preserved for posterity?' And all of the presidents
or
their families from Mrs. Onassis on responded, but the Nixon office did not
respond to Cooper.

Mr. GRAHAM: Therefore, we decided to go with a speech that President Nixon
admired. He had mentioned very favorably "In the Arena"--I mean, that's one
of the books--he had mentioned his Silent Majority speech several times as
being one of his best and also he felt one that changed public opinion in
the
United States, so we decided to go along with it. And, of course, Silent
Majority is one of the best known sort of catchwords of the period. Also,
since it deals with Vietnam, we thought it was a topical--not a topical
speech, but a speech that dealt with that epic in American history. So for
these reasons we decided to go with the Silent Majority speech.

It was, evidently, partly the speech that some commentators have said marked
out a new group in the United States, some Democrat, some Republican, that
might vote for Republicans in the future and this, in fact, seems to have
been
a pretty accurate prediction.

GROSS: OK. Richard Nixon, recorded in 1969.

(Soundbite of Silent Majority speech from Richard Nixon in 1969)

President RICHARD NIXON: I have chosen a plan for peace. I believe it will
succeed. If it does not succeed, what the critics say now won't matter. Or
if it does succeed, what the critics say now won't matter. If it does not
succeed, anything I say then won't matter.

I know it may not be fashionable to speak of patriotism or national destiny
these days, but I feel it is appropriate to do so on this occasion. Two
hundred years ago, this nation was weak and poor. But even then, America
was
the hope of millions in the world.

Today we have become the strongest and richest nation in the world, and the
wheel of destiny has turned so that any hope the world has for the survival
of
peace and freedom will be determined by whether the American people have the
moral stamina and the courage to meet the challenge of free world
leadership.

Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in
the world we passed on the other side of the road, and allowed the last
hopes
for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces
of
totalitarianism.

And so tonight, to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans, I
ask for your support. I pledged in my campaign for the presidency to end
the
war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action
which will enable me to keep that pledge. The more support I can have from
the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed, for the more
divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris.

Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat, because
let
us understand North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States.
Only Americans can do that.

GROSS: President Nixon's Silent Majority address, recorded in 1969, on the
war in Vietnam. You know, it's interesting--I mean, he didn't reprise the
words `silent majority' a lot during that address. What do you think it was
about those words that caught on?

Mr. BRYLAWSKI: I think there's sort of that--I don't know, I guess I'd--the
polarizing aspect of the speech is what made it catch on, by dividing the
public into camps. It's important to remember that the context of the
speech
is all these mass demonstrations going on outside the White House at the
time.
So by calling someone silent, you're placing them, you know, in comparison
to
these dirty hippies who were, you know, burning flags and having these sort
of--in many cases, you know, unseemly protests going on in the shadow of the
Lincoln Memorial.

GROSS: My guests are Sam Brylawski and Cooper Graham of the Library of
Congress. We'll talk more after our break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Let's get back to our interview with Sam Brylawski and Cooper Graham
of the Library of Congress. In 1995, they produced a box set of
presidential
speeches of the 20th century. That set is still in print.

Now let's jump ahead to President Clinton. You've chosen a speech from
1993,
his remarks to the convocation of the Church of God in Christ. What is this
speech about and what do you think it shows about Clinton's style of
speechmaking?

Mr. BRYLAWSKI: Well, this speech is about race in the United States and
class and economic policy in the United States. I think it was a very
successful speech for him, at least in its immediate response. It was to an
African-American audience in Memphis. I think that, as Cooper said earlier
about President Truman, Clinton has a very good reputation for one-on-one
speaking. He's a very charismatic speaker privately and I don't think that
his reputation is as good as a public speaker. But I think he tries to be
somewhat intimate, if that's a word you can be with hundreds of thousands
listening to this speech.

GROSS: OK. This is President Clinton, an excerpt of a speech to the
convocation of the Church of God and Christ in 1993.

(Soundbite of President Bill Clinton's 1993 speech to the Church of God and
Christ)

President BILL CLINTON: If Martin Luther King--who said, `Like Moses, I am
on
the mountaintop and I can see the Promised Land but I'm not going to be able
to get there with you, but we will get there'--if he were to reappear by my
side today and give us a report card on the last 25 years, what would he
say?
`You did a good job,' he would say, `voting and electing people who formerly
were not electable because of the color of their skin.'

`You have more political power and that is good. You did a good job,' he
would say, `letting people who have the ability to do so live wherever they
want to live, go wherever they want to go in this great country. You did a
good job,' he would say, `elevating people of color into the ranks of the
United States armed forces to the very top, or into the very top of our
government. You did a very good job,' he would say.

He would say, `You did a good job creating a black middle class of people
who
really are doing well and the middle class is growing more among
African-Americans than among non-African-Americans. You did a good job.
You
did a good job in opening opportunity.' But he would say, `I did not live
and
die to see the American family destroyed.'

`I did not live and die to see 13-year-old boys get automatic weapons and
gun
down nine-year-olds just for the kick of it. I did not live and die to see
young people destroy their own lives with drugs and then build fortunes
destroying the lives of others. That is not what I came here to do.'

`I fought for freedom,' he would say, `but not for the freedom of people to
kill each other with reckless abandon. Not for the freedom of children to
have children and the fathers of the children walk away from them and
abandon
them as if they don't amount to anything.'

`I fought for people to have the right to work but not to have whole
communities of people abandoned. This is not what I lived and died for.'

My fellow Americans, he would say, `I fought to stop white people from being
so filled with hate that they would wreak violence on black people. I did
not
fight for the right of black people to murder other black people with
reckless
abandon.'

GROSS: What do you find effective about the excerpt that we just heard?

Mr. BRYLAWSKI: I think the setting itself is significant. It's in the
South. I couldn't prove this now, but I think his Southern accent is a
little
more pronounced than it is on a normal news conference, a televised news
conference. And also, of course, he is in a church and I think he--you
know,
President Clinton spent a lot of time going to church in the South and I
think
there's a rhetorical style reflected, a sermon style reflected in this
speech.
I think he's very comfortable giving this speech. It's an accepting
audience.
This was not going to be a major address. I'm sure there were cameras there
but this was not for live television. This was for a group that he felt
very
comfortable with. I sort of erroneously call it intimate. It's not so much
that it's a one-on-one style of speaking. It's obviously a very
rhetorically
flamboyant speech. But he's very comfortable and I think he feels that the
audience is very accepting of him while giving the speech.

GROSS: You're both at the Library of Congress and work with sound
recordings.
Now in the early 1900s, there weren't many sound recordings, so if you have
something from a president, it's a wonderful, special, rare thing to have.
What with local television and radio, national television and radio and then
C-SPAN, you know, playing this kind of stuff all the time, there's zillions
and zillions now of presidential comments. What's it like for you to--are
you
getting inundated with presidential speeches and other political speeches
that
you have to catalogue?

Mr. GRAHAM: Yes, we are. We are getting inundated. Partially, we welcome
it. We would not want to have less. Of course, we would like to have more
time and more people and more money to do it better but I would certainly
not
want to see the flood stop. I think we're very privileged to live in an age
where we can have this. And it's also very difficult to say what might not
be
important 20 years from now. So I think we have to take it all and
catalogue
it and store it and preserve it the best we can.

GROSS: Sam Brylawski and Cooper Graham work with the Library of Congress'
Division of Motion Picture Broadcasting and Recorded Sound. They
co-produced
a CD of presidential speeches from the 20th century. Our interview was
recorded in 1995 when the CD was first released. It's still in print.

I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is NPR, National Public Radio.

Coming up, Marlin Fitzwater, press secretary for Presidents Reagan and Bush
Sr., talks about doing damage control after presidential gaffes and mishaps
like throwing up in the lap of the Japanese prime minister. And Ken Tucker
reviews the latest CD by indy rock band Low.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Marlin Fitzwater, former press secretary for Reagan
and Bush Sr., talks about his press secretary career and his
novel, "Call the Briefing!"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

On this Presidents Day, we're going to hear about life as a presidential
press
secretary. While serving as press secretary to Presidents Reagan and Bush
Sr., Marlin Fitzwater developed three rules: cave early and often, grovel
if
you have to and you can run and hide. He wrote a memoir about his
experiences
in the White House called "Call the Briefing!" He was in tight spots
during momentous events like the Iran-Contra hearings and the Gulf War and
for
less historic occasions like when President Bush threw up in the lap of the
Japanese prime minister.

Fitzwater was Vice President Bush's spokesman in 1985. Became President
Reagan's press secretary in '87, replacing Larry Speakes, and served during
the Bush presidency. In 1995, Fitzwater told me he thought of his daily
White
House press briefings as psychological warfare.

Mr. MARLIN FITZWATER (Former Press Secretary; Author): I used to plan for
the
press briefing for two or three hours every day and a big part of that
planning was to sit down with my staff and say, `OK. What's the mood of the
press corps? Give me a feedback. I want you to circulate among them, find
out, you know, who had a bad night. Who's getting a divorce? Who's angry
with the president and who thinks we're nuts to be doing this?' And so that
by the time I go out there at 11:00, I want to know what these people are
thinking, what their attitudes are and where they're coming from. And, as
it
turns out, the press is back in the back of the room doing the same thing
about me. They're asking each other, you know, `Is Marlin in a good mood
today? Is this going to be a contentious kind of briefing or is it going to
be fun? Do we have a lot of issues to deal with? Is there only one?' And
so
it's a very psychological battle that goes on and both sides get ready for
it.

GROSS: Now you didn't allow your press briefings to be recorded for
broadcast. Why not?

Mr. FITZWATER: Well, mainly because if I said something stupid, I didn't
want
it repeated every 15 minutes on camera. And the--I mean, that's the honest
reason. The more institutional reason is is that I felt it gave me the
freedom to answer questions a little more fully if I didn't have to worry
about how it appeared on television. Because on TV you have to maintain a
certain presence and dignity. Whereas there were times where I wanted to
argue with the press corps. I wanted to convince them we were right. And
that didn't always call for a good television picture.

GROSS: Now as press secretary you sometimes have to cover up for
presidential
gaffs. In fact, in your memoir you reprint a funny cartoon that has
President
Reagan saying, `Two plus two equals five.' And then it has you saying,
`What
the president really meant was...'

Mr. FITZWATER: Yes. The press is always eager to get you to amplify on the
president's words or at least to acknowledge that he didn't quite know what
he
was saying. And after President Reagan's speeches, the press would always
say, `Did the president really mean to say that this is the way the country
was going?' And it--finally, I just got around to saying `The president
said
what he meant and meant what he said,' and try to let it go at that. But
there's always a kind of a second-day examination of everything the
president
said.

GROSS: Well, what is one of the gaffs you did have to cover up for?

Mr. FITZWATER: Well, I don't know. I suppose maybe the most famous one
with
President Reagan, which actually Larry Speakes was press secretary then, I
was
his deputy. But when President Reagan did a radio broadcast from Santa
Barbara and joked before the broadcast about, `Look out, Russia. The bombs
are coming in five minutes.' And the whole government was having to cover
up
for that one. We had to call the allies and tell them there wasn't any
bombing happening. We had to call Russia and say, `We're just kidding,
folks.' We had to tell the press corps the president was just joking and it
took us several days to get through that one.

GROSS: After President Bush raised taxes in spite of his `Read my lips, no
new taxes,' you had to answer to that, too. How did you deal with that?

Mr. FITZWATER: Well, it was a very disastrous decision for the president
politically because it was interpreted by the American people as `the
president broke his pledge that he had made at the time of the convention.'
So it was a difficult issue to describe. Plus our people in the White House
never really faced up to kind of what the impact of that decision in terms
of
the president's pledge. And I think had we gone out right afterwards and
said, `Look, this is a matter of conscience and President Bush is trying to
really do what Ronald Reagan said still needed to be done. We cut taxes.
We
made a strong defense. But we've got a huge deficit that's got to be
reduced.' But instead we never really got around to saying that very
strongly
and that was a poor job, I think, on my part and everybody's part.

GROSS: Now after President Bush raised taxes, didn't you have to
participate
in calling those taxes `revenue enhancers'...

Mr. FITZWATER: Well, the fellows in...

GROSS: ...to get around to saying, `Yes, these are really taxes'?

Mr. FITZWATER: Well, it was--we didn't have to do that very long because
the
press took one look at the revenue enhancement language and within two
nanoseconds understood it was a tax increase and we'd broken the pledge.

GROSS: Was this your idea to use this euphemistic phrasing?

Mr. FITZWATER: No. This was the phrasing that was worked out by the budget
negotiators themselves, including the president and a senior team on our
side
and on the Democratic side was George Mitchell and Foley and Gephardt and
others. And they worked out this language. And the minute I saw it, I said
to our chief of staff, you know, `This is not going to fly.' But they said,
`Look, we negotiated this. Go do it.' And sure enough, it didn't fly two
feet.

GROSS: What's it like for you when you have to say something that you don't
really believe in?

Mr. FITZWATER: Well, you have to do it intellectually. I mean, there were
two or three major issues that were central to the policies of President
Reagan and President Bush that I did disagree with personally. And I took
some pride in the idea that after 10 years, there really was nobody in the
press corps who could identify those issues because I had to argue them all
intellectually. When you have no heart in it, you have no emotion in it,
but
yet you have to make the case for the president the best way you can if
you're
a professional spokesman.

GROSS: Would you care to say what those issues were that you disagreed on?

Mr. FITZWATER: I'd rather not. But they were major social issues of some
promise. And litmus test issues, really, for President Reagan and President
Bush.

GROSS: Now you sometimes had to do damage control on yourself. You
sometimes
said the wrong thing at a briefing. One example is when you called
Gorbachev a drugstore cowboy.

Mr. FITZWATER: Yeah. I think that was the worst really of my tenure.

GROSS: What did you mean by that? I mean, I think of drug--I saw the movie
"Drugstore Cowboy" and in that it's people who rob drugstores to steal
prescriptions drugs so that they could get high by them. What did you mean
by
`drugstore cowboy?'?

Mr. FITZWATER: You saw a pretty updated version from what I was talking
about, I'll tell you. No, but I--we were looking for a way to describe the
Soviet Union in 1989 because they were--Gorbachev kept making speeches of
promising arms control reductions of various kinds. He said, `I'll reduce
my
conventional forces in the Eastern bloc countries. I'll reduce nuclear
warheads by one-third.' And he was promising all these things but he never
submitted a concrete plan to our negotiators to get to work on. And we were
trying to find a way to kind of smoke him out. And so I looked it up in the
dictionary and it said, `A drugstore cowboy is one who makes promises he
doesn't keep.' And I thought, `That's perfect. That's exactly what I want
to
say.' And I read it to my staff and I said, `How about this? I'm going to
say, "They throw out these arms control proposals like a drugstore cowboy."'
And my staff said, `Don't do it, Marlin. That's terrible. That's the
dumbest
thing we ever heard.' But I was convinced it's right and the opportunity
presented itself and I did it.

And the minute I did it I knew I was in trouble. And the press laughed and
groaned, you know, like they do when you tell a bad joke because they knew
they had me. And I had miscalculated, frankly, how personal that term is.
And the press shortened it immediately to, `Fitzwater calls Gorbachev a
drugstore cowboy.' When in fact, I'd said that he throws out arms control
proposals like a drugstore cowboy. And I should have known that, I of all
people.

GROSS: Now I wonder how that was translated into Russian? It's an idiom,
you know. I wonder...

Mr. FITZWATER: I suspect they were afraid to translate it into Russian. I
don't know--it'd be interesting to know how long it took them to take that
to
Mr. Gorbachev and say, `Sir, look what this guy Fitzwater is saying about
you.'

GROSS: What would you say were the main differences between working as
press
secretary for President Reagan and President Bush?

Mr. FITZWATER: Well, mainly their personal characteristics and how they
chose to govern. The one--the similarities were that they were both men of
great dignity and honor and integrity and wonderful to work for. They were
not shouters or screamers. They treated everybody with kindness and in
essence they were just terrific. The difference was that President Reagan
liked his briefings in writing. If he had a decision to make, he'd want you
to write it up, write down the options, give him the best arguments. He'd
go
home. He'd think about it. He'd come in the next morning with a check mark
and say, `That's it.' And the result was I can read the same briefing
papers
he read and I knew what he knew. I knew what his decisions were based on
and
what went into them. So I could be with President Reagan maybe 20 percent
of
the time during a day and know 80 or 90 percent of what he was doing and
thinking.

With President Bush, he liked oral presentations. He would bring people
into
his office and they would discuss an issue and he'd decide on the spot:
`OK,
let's do this. Let's do that. Here's what I want to do.' And so that I
had
to spend maybe 80 percent of my day with President Bush just to know what he
was doing and thinking. So from a press secretary standpoint, it was a lot
more time consuming and difficult to keep track of President Bush's
activities.

GROSS: What was it like to prepare President Reagan for his press
briefings,
for his press conferences? How would you prepare him?

Mr. FITZWATER: Well, President Reagan had 48 press conferences in eight
years
as opposed to President Bush, who had 280 press conferences in four years.
But they were different kinds of press conferences. And President Reagan
liked the kind that utilized the abilities that he had as an actor and that
he
had learned in years before in terms of staging and presence and so forth.
He
liked the big, formal press conferences in the East Room. And he didn't
like
to do them more than about once every couple of months or so. So usually by
the time he did a press conference, there were a lot of issues to catch up
on.
And we would have formal rehearsals the night before our press conference
where we would fire questions at President Reagan so that he would hear them
in advance, he could practice his answers. And he concentrated on his
answers
almost like an actor does with a script, almost like they were memorized.
And
you could see it as soon as he felt got it right, he kind of pushed an inner
button someplace and that memory was locked away and sure enough, the next
night at the press conference, it would come back in the same form.

GROSS: During the Reagan presidency, many of his critics felt that the
president wasn't always grasping the details of the policies that his
administration put forward, that he wasn't among the most intellectual
presidents or even intelligent presidents and he often got by on acting
skills. When you'd hear those criticisms, how would you take it?

Mr. FITZWATER: Well, I wince when I hear those things because I think
they're
so demeaning to a leader who understood the American character better than
any
president in the last 50 years, who gave America direction and strength that
probably now we recognize that even more than we did 10 years ago. And who
understood policies quite well. He knew exactly what he wanted to do and he
knew how he wanted to do them. But he didn't bother a lot with the details,
that's true.

GROSS: My guest is Marlin Fitzwater. He served as press secretary to
Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr.

More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Let's get back to our 1995 interview with Marlin Fitzwater about his
life as press secretary to Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr.

I think any nightmare for a presidential press secretary if when the
president
is sick. And you write about this a little bit in your memoir.

Mr. FITZWATER: Right. Uh-huh.

GROSS: I remember when President Reagan had colon cancer.

Mr. FITZWATER: Right. Uh-huh.

GROSS: Every network had a doctor with a pointer pointing to a
representation
of the presidential bowel.

Mr. FITZWATER: Right.

GROSS: And I was thinking, what was that experience like for you? What was
that experience like for the president? I mean, it's a potentially very
embarrassing thing.

Mr. FITZWATER: Yeah. Well, it was really incredible and when that
happened,
of course, President Reagan was in his 70s. Age had always been a concern
to
him and when it was occurred, this was in his first term and he still had to
run for re-election. So he had two things working here that have a great
impact on a presidential illness. One is that he's up for re-election and
people--you're always worried that people think you're too sick to hold
office. And the other was that this was during the Cold War and people
always
had this fear that a president--if he ever lost consciousness or was out of
sight for more than two minutes, somebody would send a nuclear bomb in here
and he wasn't around to respond. So it was a very tense kind of situation.

And we convinced the president, the staff around him that he had to be
totally
open and honest with this illness. We couldn't--it was just coming out then
that Jack Kennedy had covered up his drug use as a means of dealing with his
back pain and there'd been stories about Eisenhower had had a heart attack
for
almost a year before anybody knew about it. And we convinced President
Reagan, `We've got to tell everything about this so that there's no question
in the public's mind that you're fit as a fiddle and ready to run again at
age
76,' or whenever it was--74. And he agreed.

But then when we saw the people on television holding up plastic models of
his
colon and tracing the various instruments that were being poked into his
body,
we said, `Whoa. Maybe we've gone too far here.' And so that was a
frightening sight.

GROSS: Now I must ask you about the day that President Bush threw up at the
dinner of Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa.

Mr. FITZWATER: Yes.

GROSS: And that was actually on film. That must have been a miserable
moment
for you. What was your job after the illness?

Mr. FITZWATER: Well, of course, the press secretary's job anytime like that
is to give the American people and indeed the world some assurance about the
status of their president. Is he sick? Is he OK? Is he going to survive?
Has he been shot? If he's about to die, have you put in place all the
constitutional systems to get the vice president sworn in? All those
questions come into play. And so it's a very fearful time for a press
secretary because every word is picked up and everything you say is--it gets
blown out of proportion or can be.

And so in this case, President Bush got sick in the dinner with the prime
minister. I was not at the dinner. But I immediately got a call and we put
out the word to the press corps who were all around Tokyo and they all
gathered. Well, fortunately, President Bush was OK and went back to his
hotel. But my job was to get on the air, on television and radio as soon as
possible to assure the world that he was OK. In this case, it took me 45
minutes because I wanted to make darn sure from that doctor that what we
were
giving was accurate. And the worse thing is that if you go out and say,
`Well, the president just has the flu,' and it turns out later that he was
deathly ill. So you've really got to verify your facts quickly.

GROSS: So you weren't sure. You thought he might be pretty sick at first.

Mr. FITZWATER: Well, he looked sick to me and I was sitting in the hotel
and
I looked up at the TV screen as CNN played the tape of the president
throwing
up in the prime minister's lap, then falling down on the floor and being
treated by the doctor. And I called up the president's physician. I said,
`Have you seen that tape? That doesn't look like the flu to me. It looks
like he's dead. What in the world is going on?' I said, `You better not be
lying to me, Doctor. I want to know every subject.' And we went through it
and he said, `Marlin, honest to God. It's just the flu.' And he says, `If
you tried to do it through a state dinner when you had the flu, you're
likely
to pass out, too.' I said, `Yeah. Right.' He said, `You've got to believe
it, Marlin. I promise you this is all it takes.' I said, `All right. Give
me all the vital signs.'

GROSS: So what did you try do to try to limit the damage?

Mr. FITZWATER: Well, the first and most important thing to do is simply to
show that it was a temporary illness and had no long-term impact. From a
political standpoint, you had to identify the issues that this image
impacted
on. And the biggest impact in this case was an illness tended to, in
people's
minds, to raise a question of `Was he really fit? Could he run for
president
again? Was he getting too old?' That sort of thing. So you tend to then
show pictures of the president jogging and working out and in physical
situations. In President Bush's case, he was a very physical man and that
was
not abnormal or hard to do.

GROSS: Just one more question about this. How embarrassed was President
Bush
about the incident and about it being captured on film?

Mr. FITZWATER: Well, it's interesting. He never really said anything about
it. I mean, I think he was embarrassed. Certainly he was very apologetic
to
the prime minister and--but, you know, he was sick before he went to the
dinner and the doctor said, `You really shouldn't go to this dinner.' And
he
said, `I've got to go.' He said, `They've put all this one for me. The
prime
minister's gone to all this trouble. What do they do? The last minute I
call
in sick, they cancel the dinner.' And he just didn't want to put them out.
He said, `I can make it through. I can make it through.' And so I think he
was more embarrassed about even trying to go to the dinner than he was about
the idea that he actually got sick.

GROSS: Is there a moment of your period as press secretary for Presidents
Reagan and Bush that you would most like to do over again and get it right?
Something you blew that you wish you could do over?

Mr. FITZWATER: Yeah. I'd like to do two events over. I'd like to do the
drugstore cowboy over that we've talked about.

GROSS: Uh-huh.

Mr. FITZWATER: And there was an event during the campaign when I was
totally
`flustrated' and tired. We'd been 10 points behind for four months. We
weren't getting any closer and everything was going wrong. And I couldn't
get
the press to come outside and see this great rally with 20,000 Oklahoma
people
shouting about how great President Bush was and the press was just kind of
sitting back in the auditorium and listening to it on the speaker. And I
went
in and I said, `You lazy bastards. Get out here and cover that event.'

GROSS: Oh.

Mr. FITZWATER: And I've regretted that ever since.

GROSS: How was the comment received by the press?

Mr. FITZWATER: It was not received with great equanimity, no. They
thought--they were not very happy about it and worst of all I ruined the
whole
day for the president because all the stories were about Fitzwater's
explosion, Fitzwater reflects the frustration of the campaign, everything's
going wrong. And I felt so sorry for President Bush. We had to go to three
cities that day and he had to go through all these speeches and all these
handshakes and motions knowing he would get no press out of it because it
was
all going to focus on my mistake. And that was really a horrible feeling
for
a press secretary to have.

GROSS: Now did you say anything about that at the briefing the next day?

Mr. FITZWATER: Well, I didn't wait that long. It was within an hour after
I
said it I apologized to the press corps. I told the president what I had
done
and apologized to him and I just let everybody know that it was--they were
right in a sense that it did represent the flustration of myself and
probably
the campaign as well. And that hopefully it wouldn't happen again.

GROSS: Marlin Fitzwater served as press secretary to Presidents Reagan and
Bush Sr. Our interview was recorded in 1995 after the publication of his
memoir, "Call the Briefing!" He has a novel coming out this spring called
"Esther's Pillow."

Coming up, Ken Tucker reviews a new CD by the indy band Low. This is FRESH
AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: New CD by independent rock band Low
TERRY GROSS, host:

The rock band called Low formed in the mid-90s in Duluth, Minnesota, led by
the husband and wife team of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker. They recorded
for
a number of small, independent labels and rock critic Ken Tucker says their
newest release, "Things We Lost in the Fire" on the Kranky label, is one of
their most compelling.

(Soundbite of song)

LOW: (Singing) We will never cure this thing with medicine and magazines,
oh.
Oh, oh, oh. Oh, oh, oh.

KEN TUCKER reporting:

Sometimes it seems as if in the world of indy rock, everything's got to have
a
label, a genre to quantify a band's cult. In the case of Low's music, the
group has been tagged with the term `slow core.' That is, an opposite of
hard
core featuring low volume and slower melodies. The slow-core tag works only
so far with Low. Like all good bands, their best music defies easy
category.
A ballad such as "Laser Beam," for example, sung by drummer Mimi Parker, has
a
stark simplicity that almost recalls an old Appalachian folk ballad.

(Soundbite of "Laser Beam")

LOW: (Singing) I don't need a laser beam. I don't need the time. Leave me
in the car tonight. Rest your drunken mind. I need your grace. I...

TUCKER: I like the songs that are sung by Parker's husband, guitarist, Alan
Sparhawk, but I find Mimi Parker's vocals the most piercing. On the song
"Embrace," she voices the utter isolation of a lonely woman who hugs herself
to feel human warmth and contact.

(Soundbite of "Embrace")

LOW: (Singing) Holding my head for the last of the raise. Pushing my body
to
get that embrace. It won't last. Hold on.

TUCKER: Advancing from slow-core to majestic music, Sparhawk and Parker,
along with bassist Zak Salley, build a number of songs on "Things We Lost in
the Fire" around carefully harmonized vocals and pellucid guitar hooks that
rarely lapse into merely languid melodies. Low occasionally grasps for a
bigger, broader sound letting the volume increase as the song's emotion
warrants. The prime example of this is "Dinosaur Act."

(Soundbite of "Dinosaur Act")

LOW: (Singing) You and your daughter and your father flew airplanes. You
and
your sister could tell by the back of their hands it was a dinosaur act,
dinosaur act, dinosaur act, dinosaur act.

TUCKER: "Things We Lost in the Fire" is the work of a band in such complete
control of the mood it wants to create that its very rigorousness grants the
music a kind of freedom. You get the feeling that as lulling and lovely as
much of this material is, it could fly off in any direction at any time.
For
all their murmured entreaties, Low knows what it wants and leads you through
its collective subconscious like a wickedly intelligent tour guide.

GROSS: Ken Tucker is critic at large for Entertainment Weekly. He reviewed
"Things We Lost in the Fire" by Low.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

(Soundbite of "Dinosaur Act")

LOW: (Singing) Black like a forest and still like Goliath, my knees are...

(Credits)

LOW: (Singing) They're moving their feet but nobody's dancing. Take your
time.
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