Presidents’ feuds with press date back to Washington
The recent passing of Cokie Roberts marks a substantial loss to the world of journalism. About this loss, President Trump remarked, “I would like to wish her family well. She was a professional, and I respect professionals. I respect you guys a lot, you people [the press] a lot. She was a real professional. Never treated me well, but I certainly respect her as a professional.”
Arguably fair?
OK.
What people are more familiar with — what most associate with the president’s relationship with the press — is less amenable, and his approach more, well, coarse.
In a 2017 press conference, President Trump, defended his comments about the press corps’ reporting on him. The president stated that he was “not ranting and raving,” but continued, lamenting, “I’m just telling you, you’re dishonest people.”
To the man currently seated in the oval-shaped office situated at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C., so many journalists are “unpatriotic” and suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. To our POTUS — and here comes the aforementioned coarseness — much of the press is “a joke.”
Condescendingly referred to as “The Tweeter-in-Chief,” President Trump may fairly be accused of having made social media missteps, many of them during streams of consciousness in the wee morning hours. A number of these statements have led to him battling with those who purchase ink by the barrel. Folly? Perhaps.
But is acrimony between a U.S. president and America’s Fourth Estate anything new?
Nope.
All presidents — even George Washington — have had their snags with the press, Washington’s disagreements with newspaper editor Philip Freneau being arguably the most notable. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson’s notes of an August 1793 cabinet meeting, during which Freneau’s broadside, “The Funeral Dirge of George Washington and James Wilson, King and Judge,” was raised. (Note: Washington did not die until 1799; Wilson in 1798.) According to Jefferson, this acerbic broadside “inflamed” Washington to such a heightened point that the father of our nation could no longer “command himself” due to “the personal abuse which had been bestowed on him.”
After being elected president himself and undoubtedly reeling from the Sally Hemings affair and other matters of state, Thomas Jefferson remarked in 1807:
“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”
Andrew Jackson, America’s seventh president, is probably the best comparison to Trump vis-a-vis populist stirrings and his ability to be common in many ways. On that matter, it is worth noting what history professor Thomas DiBacco pointed out about Andrew Jackson. John Quincy Adams, his opponent in the 1824 election, attacked Jackson for not being able to spell Europe correctly. Jackson apparently spelled it “Urope.” Perhaps Jackson was ahead of his time and was tweeting with clumsy thumbs?
Seriously, however, the main difference was, rather than vilifying the press, Jackson made many editors his advisers, members of his so-called “Kitchen Cabinet.” Keep your enemies closer, I reckon?
Several years after leaving office, President Harry Truman wrote to Dean Acheson, his former secretary of state, complaining that, “when the press is friendly to an administration, the opposition has been lied about and treated to the excrescence of paid prostitutes of the mind,” defining them as “skillful purveyors of character assassination and the theft of good names of public men and private citizens.”
On the other side of the coin, there is Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a press corps that hid his polio-induced lameness. Arguably, the press was differentiating between the officer and the office, maintaining a constant respect for the latter, regardless of who the former was. And, that was despite FDR’s 1941 State of the Union speech, where he acerbically asserted that “the democratic way of life” was “being directly assailed … by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still at peace.”
President Bill Clinton’s infamous tryst with Monica Lewinsky and business dealings he and Hillary were involved in led him down a warpath with the press. Querying, “what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” during his grand jury testimony probably did not help matters.
Maybe there is a lesson to be learned from Larry Speakes, acting press secretary for Ronald Reagan. After Press Secretary James Brady was shot in 1981, Speakes remained acting press secretary until 1987. (I know. What an appropriate name Speakes had for the job.)
I think Speakes spoke what needed saying: “Well, any White House is going to want to control the way it communicates. That’s been around as long as White Houses have been around. We’re just always going to have this adversarial relationship.”
It surely is right now. Isn’t it?
Christopher Brooks is a professor of history at East Stroudsburg University.