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Presidential Press Conferences Press conferences and short question-and-answer sessions represent the best examples of presidential communications in unscripted forums. Presidents and their staffs go to great lengths to control public situations where a chief executive appears. They do not like surprises. Yet, at the same time, presidents need to demonstrate that they can answer hard questions about their policies and motivations. Because presidents do not answer questions from officials in other branches of government, there is no public questioning of a chief executive in any official setting. By tradition, that role has been filled by reporters acting for the public. How presidents and their staffs adjust to reporters’ queries under different sets of conditions demonstrates the ability of the White House to respond to changing times and rules. It also shows how enduring such forums have been in the face of presidential discomfort in environments where they don’t control the setting. Presidents may joke about the sessions, but it is clear that they don’t look forward to press conferences. Before every Thanksgiving holiday, it is traditional for the president of the United States to host a gathering in the Rose Garden at which he grants a pardon to a turkey. Before performing this ritual in 2002, George W. Bush made a joke about the apparent anxiety of the turkey. “He looks a little nervous, doesn’t he,” he asked his audience of youngsters, parents, and teachers. “He probably thinks he’s going to have a press conference.”1 In 1953, President Eisenhower made the same point more starkly: “I will mount the usual weekly cross and let you drive the nails.”2 As president-elect, Eisenhower considered avoiding news conferences. Like presidents before and after him, Eisenhower believed that most reporters were rude in their questioning. On behalf of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, concerned the presidential press conference was in danger of being cut back or cancelled, James Russell Wiggins, edi7 254 Managing the President’s Message tor of the Washington Post, went to see the president-elect. The president expressed concern about the conduct of the press. “Eisenhower told me that he thought press behavior at Truman’s press conferences seemed unpleasant and often rude to President Truman and disrespectful of the presidency. He said the president was questioned as though he were a person suspected of a crime or a witness in a criminal proceeding,” Wiggins recollected in 1998. In touting the benefits of press conferences to President Eisenhower, Wiggins stressed two points: helping citizens to understand policy and the front-page coverage the sessions guarantee a president. As government has grown, it has become more difficult for people to understand the government’s actions. Press conferences are an educational tool, Wiggins argued to Eisenhower. And they guarantee him front-page coverage in the nation’s newspapers.3 President Eisenhower and his successors have grumbled about their treatment at the hands of reporters, but they have continued to hold press conferences. On November 8, 2006, President Bush held one in the East Room, more than ninety-three years after President Woodrow Wilson gave the first formal news conference there in 1913. The intervening years have been accompanied by an explosion in communications technology, growth in the size and importance of the presidency in our national political system, and enormous changes in the scope, reach, and the public face of government. Yet some things have not changed in the years separating Presidents Wilson and Bush. In their conferences, both men answered questions from reporters on a broad range of topics, and the reporters came in on an equal-access basis—that is, all credentialed reporters could attend, not just those hand-picked by the president. The fourteen presidents serving in the years between Presidents Wilson and Bush also held such conferences , where they met with reporters to answer their queries. The bottom line is that the presidential press conference endures even after dramatic changes in the ways that such a forum exists in the environment within which presidents and reporters must do their respective jobs. The two basic elements of the press conference mentioned above, a broad range of topics and a large number of reporters participating, have remained. At the same time, many developments have affected the format of press conferences, the frequency with which they are held, and the ground rules under which their participants operate. The changing shape of the presidential press conference illustrates how the essence of [3.144...

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