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The chief spin doctor - White House spokesperson, Michael D. McCurry - Interview
Insight on the News, August 31, 1998 by Susan Crabtree
Mike McCurry, the Clinton White House's outgoing spokesman, is famous for his ability to put the best face on the ugly truth. Here he talks about a recent book on Clinton's propaganda machine.
As tension builds in the latest presidential scandal, White House spokesman Mike McCurry says he will leave his hot-seat post in October. Susan Crabtree talked with McCurry about Washington Post media correspondent Howard Kurtz's book Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine.
Susan Crabtree: Mike McCurry, what went through your mind when Howard Kurtz approached you for his book about the White House propaganda machine?
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Mike McCurry: The same thing that goes through my mind when anyone approaches us about writing a book that touches on White House affairs. You sort of say, "0h man, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't."
I got the short straw in dealing with these book projects, because invariably an author will start calling around to the White House until everyone says, "Are we cooperating with this project or not?" And most of the time my view is that you're better off cooperating just as you would with anyone writing a feature piece on the White House.
SC: What is your overall reaction to the book?
MM: I think the book, for what it is, is an interesting slice of that relationship. It's not by any means a comprehensive look at the relationship, you know. It's an interesting slice of one story as it was managed in one year.
I think spin is a somewhat overused term to describe press relations. On the other hand, he was trying to sell a book, to do something that would be provocative, and it has been on the best-seller list to my astonishment for about five weeks in a row.
But in a way it really sharpens the focus on some of the negative sides of this adversarial relationship [between the White House and the press]. I don't think ... in that sense ... it may leave a reader with a more jaundiced view of the relationship than is really necessary. If you had ... decided, all right, this book is about spin cycles inside the propaganda machine, inside the White House, and it was about the clever ways the White House manipulated reporters to write [stories] to our advantage in the balanced-budget negotiations, [then] we would be positioned better to get some of the things that Clinton wanted in the balanced-budget agreements, which was also a major story line in 1997, [and] I think it would have been a much different book. It would have been about: relationships with many of the same players.... But it would have [involved] conversations that I think were a little less acrimonious ... and testy. I think partly by choosing .... a contentious story -- in which the White House was doing it's best to answer questions and divert attention to other subjects -- you get one general impression. It operates more ... like a case study than a comprehensive treatment of what this relationship is like.
SC: Is it a completely accurate portrayal of how the White House deals with the press?
MM: No, some things are accurate -- some things aren't accurate. People have different recollections. A lot of reporters feel they have different recollections ... of episodes involving them. They feel that they didn't necessarily say exactly what they were quoted as saying in some cases. Some of that may just be the cinema-verite technique of writing a book where you're trying to capture the flavor of what people were thinking at the, time.
I think in some cases he's got -- I was actually surprised. There were quite a number of conversations (the mummy thing being one of them) that I don't believe he asked me about -- things he clearly got by talking to other people I had talked to. In some cases they're very accurate and much better than my own memory. He recalls a whole conversation I had with Newsweek about the Kathleen Willey story ... back in the summer of last year. And there are direct quotes -- and yet I don't recall ever talking that specifically about it.
SC: You have complained publicly that Kurtz got some things just plain wrong in the book. I'm referring particularly to the infamous "mummy quote" where Kurtz recounts a controversial, off-the-record conversation you had with a group of reporters on a plane coming back from a fund-raiser. After Clinton made a tasteless joke about dating a 500-year-old Inca mummy, Kurtz quotes you as saying, "Probably she does look good compared to the mummy he's been fucking." Is that completely correct?
MM: I'm confident that I didn't say exactly what I'm quoted there saying, and a number of people [who were] there are confident that I didn't say that ... but just about everybody agrees that I said something that was in that general vicinity [laughs]. And the point he was making may have been a largely accurate one: That the press corps said, "Aaahhh, it's the end of the day and we're not going to blow this up and make a big deal out of it, and we're treating this as off the record"
