CIA advice

The CIA’s suggestion to President Reagan that an invitation to Sir Robert Muldoon would show the New Zealand people “he is an international leader of some stature who is taken seriously in Washington” was not borne out by the hilarious White House press briefing that followed their talks in 1981.

The briefer — one of the President’s top advisers — had the press corps rolling in the aisles as he mocked the way Muldoon told Ronald Reagan (who had a notoriously short attention span) about the patois used in Papua New Guinea — “pidgin — p.i.d.g.i.n. — for those of you who care”.

I was the NZPA’s staff correspondent in Washington at the time.

Earlier, when Muldoon visited President Jimmy Carter in 1977, the briefing was apparently no less hilarious. There was just one question from a White House correspondent — about whether they had discussed Muldoon’s earlier reference to the President’s brother Billy as a “beer-drinking petrol station attendant”. David Barber, Waikanae