BIDEN TO hold first White House news conference.
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is set to hold his first White House news conference today.
Depending how you count, Biden is a little or a lot behind his recent predecessors in opening himself to questions in what historian Martha Joynt Kumar calls the “high-risk, high-reward” enterprise of presidential news conferences.
The past four presidents, back to Bill Clinton, each held one solo White House news conference in their first 60 days, picking up the pace to varying degrees later.
Adding in the joint, often very brief news conferences with visiting foreign leaders, Donald Trump held at least five news conferences by that point, Clinton at least four, and Barack Obama two. The pandemic has kept foreign leaders away from the White House this year.
The Biden White House is a notably tight ship.
He went through the 2020 campaign with infrequent news conferences and often hunkered down in the pandemic. Yet he debated fellow Democrats a dozen times and Trump three times.
In recent weeks, his lack of a news conference had become news itself, with reporters pressing the White House for more access to the president and some conservatives claiming that Biden was hiding something. Recognizing that the moment would draw a big spotlight, aides held a practice session with the president earlier this week.
President Dwight Eisenhower’s news conference Jan. 19, 1955, was one benchmark among several in the history of presidential news conferences tracked by Kumar, an authority on White House practices.
Until his administration, the news conferences were off the record, meaning presidents gave the public information about the country’s affairs and the workings of government without necessarily letting their name be used.
Woodrow Wilson gave the first presidential news conference in 1913. Calvin Coolidge made a habit of them, holding nearly 73 a year on average, explaining “the people should have a fairly accurate report of what the president is trying to do.”
Franklin Roosevelt, a radio pioneer who mastered communications on all fronts and nearly matched Coolidge’s unrivaled pace of news conferences, regularly summoned his favored reporters to his office, consigning the ones he didn’t like to his “dunce club.”
Off the record often meant giving the president a chance to clean up his remarks, unheard of today. At a March 1950 news conference, Harry Truman declared that Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the audacious canceler of communists real and imagined in U.S. government and society, was the Kremlin’s “best asset.”
“When one of the reporters commented that the president’s observation would ‘hit page one tomorrow,’ Truman realized he had better soften the statement,” Kumar writes. “He ‘worked’ with reporters and allowed the following as a direct quotation: ‘The greatest asset that the Kremlin has is the partisan attempt in the Senate to sabotage the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States.’”
Such manipulation became untenable when Eisenhower put the news conferences on the record and let broadcasters record them. Even so, segments were only televised later.
Although wanting to take advantage of the nascent medium of TV, Eisenhower did so with a partial step. Press secretary James C. Hagerty said at the time that live telecasts would not be allowed.
It was John F. Kennedy who ushered in the age of live, televised news conferences, and he thrived in the practice.
Smooth talking, authoritative and funny, Kennedy reached living rooms about twice a month with his news conferences.
Through the cascade of lies about Vietnam and Watergate, the adversarial relationship between the press and power took deeper root. So did the performative nature of the exercise, with the cameras watching.
Richard Nixon, like Trump, called the press an “enemy.” Yet Nixon was the first to hold White House news conferences in prime time.
Ronald Reagan also favored the big audiences and cachet of prime time, using the glamorous East Room as the backdrop just as Nixon did.
There have been plenty of flashes of anger.
Obama in 2015 didn’t take kindly to being asked why he was “content” to trumpet the newly achieved nuclear deal with Iran when that country was still holding four Americans on fabricated grounds. His face wore a smile that wasn’t a smile.
“The notion that I’m content, as I celebrate with American citizens languishing in Iranian jails,” he said, “that’s nonsense and you should know better.”
On Feb. 6, 1998, Clinton held a news conference the month after he lied in a televised speech that “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” as the evidence built for his impeachment that fall.
He was asked in that news conference at what point he might decide the crisis was too much to put his family through anymore and resign.
“Never,” he said, stonefaced.