Service so im going to start by saying thank you. Is that okaying . 2ag youre welcome. [ applause ]uji2 and im thinking that there v6wy are others here who served, if 8aun you served in any of the administrations represented here, will you be known to us . Will you just briefly give us a little wave . [ applause ]fn and we say thank you. [5c thank you. Well talk about the whole relationship between the media and press secretaries. If there are any press secretaries here, whether you served on capitol hill or in the white house, elsewhere, can we make yourself and if you ,fo especially returned my phone calls, thank you. u;a9nn4cq and if you didnt, well, thank you anyway. Okay. Any press secretaries here . Thank you for coming. ÷ thank you, thank you. [ applause ] its a little like the defendant thanking the prosecution, but v whatever. So anyway, now that weve gotten that out of the way, lets talk about what we really want to talk about which is all the things we wanted to know when we were sitting in those chairs that we didnt get to talk about then so this is our chanc zq spill it. So lets do that. 6d÷ so the first thing i wanted to know is, did you actually want these jobs or were you did you get drafted or did you volunteer . Ron nessen, i will start with you because you were a correspondent. You covered the vietnam war. You were grievously wounded and almost died. You come back here and you reported on the administration. You reported on gerald fords inauguration and then you were reporting on the then press secretarys appointment and all j an of a sudden youre the guy. How did he talk you into that . Well, as you say, i had been s®hy a reporter for a long time. I had also covered the white y, house for about two and a half usnr years when Lyndon Johnson was president. And then i covered the first month of the ford white house. And i think what persuaded me to do, to take the job when he offered it was i wanted to see y what it looked like on the g g 9m 9n in fact, i wrote a book afterward called it sure looks different on the inside, because i had thnuvnse as a reporter that i probably knew i5 n 10 of what was going on in the z white house. And one of the reasons i took this job was i wanted to see what the other 90 was. That was one reason. 5x i think the other reason clearlyablz was that i really liked gerald ford. Xsi2asv i covered him as i say, as an cxee nbc correspondent. Wz and so that was the other reason for taking the job because i really did i really did like him. The third reason im ashamed to say is that i had a pretty large ego in those days. And i thought, hmm. Imagine that. Im moving up to a white house job. Is that right . Very satisfying for a guy with a big ego. Marlin fitzwater, you actually first went to the white house as a deputy, right . Right. ÷ . P7y i was in the civil service. And i was at the Treasury Department when jim baker caused and said we need a deputy for y domestic policy. Somebody to take the heat for the president on the recession, which we were about ready to hit 10 unemployment. Would you be interested . I said sure. And so he said come over. 0m p and i went over, spent an hour bjai with him and he said you want the job . I said sure. 2mv and he said lets go see the 39 president. Fl1 . Z we walked down to the oval office and president reagan was sitting there, he said well, marlin, jim here says youre ÷g1 willing to help out. I said yes, sir. E acelb that was it. How come . Bi hahp hc first time i ever met him and first minute id ever spent time with him. n4gq door and said mr. President , ill do my best¤skz and i got outside the oval office into the secretarys r area, and i went yes and she said what is that all about . I said history must always record that even if i get fired tomorrow, i for one day, i was a i] c president secretary for the president. [ applause ] why did you say yes . You could have said no. I dont want that job. M why . Dealing with people like me every day, really . You know, i was a professional Public Affairs person. Id been in government 17 years at the time i went to the white house. h i worked in a lot of different agencies and so the white house was the pinnacle of our profession, a professional deal. The other thing was i didnt know what the white house was all about. I mean and seeing that press corps and helen thomas said what are you doing here, kid . And it was all downhill from there. K fn [ laughter ] mike, what about you . You had come to the white house from the state department and youd been at the dnc. It wasnt a direct my story is a little different. I had been around in washington as a press secretary for 20 years. X and i had worked for im sure everyone remembers the administration of president john glenn, president bruce babbitt. Rzn president mike dukakis. President bob kerrey. 82f÷ so it was actually probably because i have an unfailing ability to pick the losing candidate. O pn i had worked against bill clinton in the primaries so my thought was, i was not likely to get a job and George Stephanopoulos took pity on me and said this guys been around a long time, he worked at the Democratic National committee for a long time. So he can probably do the job. Luckily, warren christopher, secretary of state, hired me to be a spokesman. But after two years working at the say the department and doing the job there and maybe something well talk about later being on television because at briefing was televised, the White House Briefing was not fully televised. L i caught the notice of some folks at the white house aqcen they invited me to come over. I dont know that i ev;1and of angled for it, but it made sense because had i, obviously, worked in president ial politics for a pretty long time. And it made some sense that that would be the trajectory that i wound up in. Did you have a yes . No, because it was if you remember, were in the aftermath of an election now that is not to be called shellacking i guess, but in 1994 at the end of why did you do it . Because it was an honor to be asked to work in that place. I think all of us would say its the coolest place on the face of the earth to work. Rz ,c even though i ildi time, i had never been outside the country very much and i had just worked for the secretary of state and been all over the world, that was pretty exciting. Bgn but the opportunity to work in the white house you know to x5 drive up that little west executive drive and say ive got m6a right outside the west wing, its an honor even when the subject matter you have to deal with becomes fairly zesty. Lets talk about that in a minute. But before we do, robert gibbs, what about you . If youre on a campaign, isnt kind of the working assumption if your guy wins, youre going to get the job or gal eventually . I think in most instances by the time you get to the end of the campaign, you have a fairly decent chance or decent sense of if this person wins, who is likely to be the press secretary. I think mikes absolutely right. I think the you realize pretty 5 n quickly how great an honor and 70÷ great a responsibility it is. Bos when you doll drive into that white house, a lot of days when u uz its dark. And you realize sitting in that qcdux oval office throughout the week what youre witnessing, what youre trying to describe and what youre part of. Know, i think its truly an amazing honor. I do remember pretty early into my first briefing and i was listening to a question and it was about ten minutes in and i remember this voice in my head saying i cant believe youre here doing this. And theres another voice saying Pay Attention to the questions. [ laughter ] i thought it would be amazingly gh embarrassing to somehow miss an entire question in your first briefing. Hon m so but i think thats, you know, you understand that however long youre there, youre just youre going to get to witness and see things in a seat that very, very few 0c people have. And its remarkable and its amazing. e so lets keep it going because for those of you who. Its all good times. Q [ just keep going. Qhn well get topfze ju well start it out soft. So you know, the post has a 5f] feature which called date lab which thankfully as a married t z person i dont know about. When theyre trying to fix 4x people up they have this thing caused brag a little. So brag a little. Like what was your best day . K1]n what was your best day . Robert, you want to start . dfwx i think the our best day was probably signing health care. Im starting with you because i dont know that youre going to get too many more questions like this. C thats for sure. Acr no, i think i just think the 9cjzda 9n sense of accomplishment and the ÷n ÷ euphoria of you know walking into the east room and having b the president sign that and now,l3 you know, you have people come up to you and say you know, i have had a condition for 15 rk years. I could never get health care, faduv thank you for being part of 5÷ n Something Like that i think was that was probably it. Plus also that day is, you know, thats when joe biden said into an open microphone just how big an accomplishment that was. Exactly. Pirix2afbes he did. Z [ laughter ]fpp and i remember i went back top,el you know, when youre in the east room, the microphone is lry. ÷yej the camera. Its not audible. I couldnt hear it and im there and somebody. Comes running in and said you should just know the microphone sort of picked this thing up. And so were talking about it and one of my other deputies z]6fn rushes in and says i dont think he said that. Tsxn uc i said yeah, im pretty sure he said that. Xgqn and im sure well get some of the technology of this, but i ÷y remember i was on twitter and i thought, you know, let me try to sum this up. So i remember i sat down and im like, and so i wrote, yes, 1gaee mr. Vice president , it really is. And i hit send. I think my phone is demerit. el÷ interview demerit. So two minutes later my tv assistant comes in and says the Vice President s chief of staff is on the phone. Damn, ix4u d have checked with them before i tweeted. And it was one of those things, and again, sometimes in even in politics honesty is the best policy. W and ron called in and i picked ri up the phone saying hey ron, trying to pretend like nothing was going wrong. He just said thank you. He said we were over here trying to figure out what the statement would say and we read your tweet and it was like yeah, just sort of own it. So that was a good day. All right. Though . Good point. Thank you. I just have the to find my phone. Who is next . Mike, what was your best day . Much more mundane than that although i loved that story and thinking of that, you know, you were the only one of the four of us that had to worry about tweeting because . Its a whole different job. I think the job that you ended up having to do just because of the changes in technology and media went by so quickly. But mine was okay. Very mundane but it captured as i think back on it what i think the best of what the press secretary can do was. And it was a day that we announced in the Clinton Administration that we were promulgating a very complicated federal regulation to regulate tobacco for the very first time. It was premised on the theory that a cigarette is a delivery, medical delivery device designed to deliver a dose of nicotine to the body, which was stretching 4r things as the Supreme Court later concluded. But it was the regulation went on 30 pages in the federal register. ug and i stayed up a good part of the night to read it even though i said okay, the briefing the next day, were going to bring in Donna Shalala, the secretary of health and Human Services, david kesler, head of the fda, and theyll do the briefing but i want to make sure its a big deal and make sure i know whats going on. Well, donna and david kesler got up there. ezon÷ it was so complicated. They instanu v o7]6 the weeds. And you guys all know terry hunt from the associated press. Hes standing there looking up. Going and it was clear . acer watching the reporters that we o were losing the story because explaining it. And i so i got up and elbowed Donna Shalala out of the podium which is a very difficult thing to do, if you know her. nufv 0u and i kind of took over the briefing. And got the head of the food and drug celebration administration, the secretary of health and Human Services there and looking at them saying am i explaining this correctly. But i had to simultaneously translate that complicated language and vocabulary of government to something that would actually get through and help the reporters write the story. A couple of them came up and said boy, you saved ypbuns there because we were not getting any clue what you were talking about. A6÷a thats the best of what the press secretary can do. ,o÷k[a i mean, we get accused of being spin doctors. Ff we probably sometimes get a little angry at the press corps. 3 uu but at the heart of it is tryingzffs to take the work that the white house does, the president does, ady and the federal government does and help the American People under7 it. So i mean, you know, it was not the most dramatic day. I had plenty of those. But it was the day on which i felt likevbtp ly did my job. Ronnie, want to go next. Just to follow up on that, gneqn one of my best days in the white 8 house was when is i smoked when i first went to the white house. And a bunch from the press office went to these decided to 4vc[ f join this class called smoke enders. . [fv and we went. ]o i think its eight weeks or so. And i stopped smoking. Lbek so but seriously, my best day in the white house clearly was when uraupd up and announce the end of the viu43 and i had as i say as an nbc correspond3t8anad covered the war. I did five tours there as a correspondent. Got wounded almost died. 3rw,b c go over into the Old Executive Office building and read this statement from the president saying for us, the war is over. And ive guh ait arrjad cassette tape of that at home. My voice is about five octaves higher than normal, very quavery because of what vietnam had rcu meant in my life and here im the one who has to stand up and announce the end of the war. H0 did you want to cry . Yes. Did you cry . Not in public but in private i did. How about you, marlin . What was your best day . Im thinking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall this week and i remember i shouldnt admit that i remember that. What about you . Well, theres so many days and events that you run through your mind. Whether its the fall of the berlin wall or the invasion of kuwait, liberation of kuwait or z4 panama or those kinds of things. 8v4 but i think the most special day day of the Reagan Gorbachev summit in 1987. And everyone was anticipating an end to the cold war and gorbachev had never been to the west. Everybody in the world wanted toy1t see how had he would get along with the guy who said it was an evil empire over there. Yx and we had 7,000 correspondents credentialed to attend the up mit. So we moved the White House Briefing room to the ballroom of jwnn the jw marriott hotel. J cn and we also renovated half the fy Commerce Department or at least the first floor for overflow crowd. And we got all 7,000 people packed in there. Toq. X and i explained for several days why we were accommodating these people and also that i had u unu invited my counterpart to brief t with me. My rationale was if they were wouldnt get in an argument across town which is what normally happens in these cases. I figured neither one of us wanted to upstage our principles or create a war. We would be very careful. And he and i talked aap ra. We were going to be careful. So we got to the podium and we. Wd walked up kind of on the stage like this and we were about halfway across and Sam Donaldson was sitting in the front row and he said, 50 bucks, marlin takes ;s6n bs him. [ laughter ] my first response, well, thats sweet. Nqw but my second one was, he just destroyed every purpose i had for their entire show. But nevertheless, it was a memorable five days. But why was that your best day . Was it because of what it meant . S or was it because of your role in it. No, i think p . N11e jt uaq of what it meant to the world, h7 to us. It was the beginning of the end, the unveiling of the Reagan Gorbachev relationship and all am [z the arms control agreements thatroybnfi went with it. At the same time, it had this faon kind of very exotic and credible surrounding where access hollywood was sitting in tv . Z front row and entertainment t r tonight was tops on my phone list and things like that. So it was a great show, great pavilion. Last of all, it was fragile. And the mistakes could have been disastrous. T9 i had kind of underestimated alllstc that. So but anyway, you put it all together and it was really a s series of experiences, you dont very often get. When you have an awesome day like that, does the president ever come say, good job . Almost every briefing i gave. He had a squawk box on the gavel. He would call me immediately i nrex÷d got back to the office. Sometimes he would uk 4iju down while im briefing. Wow. Loi z he almost said good job but sometimes he would say a bll criticism was, far lynn i might 8hlrr t hahp hc say that a little differently. Anybody else . Arent you going to ask us what our worst day was. Im getting there. It. Go ahead. Aet what was your worst day . Well, i think clearly my, well, the worst day was when t1x÷ ford lost the election to carters b5 i think. But i think one of the most awln difficult days was when betty ford went out to bethesda naval y n hospital and had a mammogram and cancer. Qdkd2n and she underwent a mastectomy. Ill never forget the look on fords face. They had been married for 30 years. They were so close and so in love. And you know, he was in danger of losing her. And she wanted to put out the news while she was still in the operating room. A n sent a message out. And i think by being so open about this, it resulted in a lot of women going and having q uec hahp hc mammograms. And happy rockefeller, the Vice President s wife discovered she had breast cancer. Pvn my mother went and had a mammogram, discovered she had breast cancer. This happened all over the uun country. 4 was in such great risk. Q uhhuh. Xdn it had a happy ending, of course. Sa w it sure did. Ra o anybody else . Hmm, mike. Yeah. Me 2y well, no, you know, its funny because i [ laughter ] everyone assumes that the days of la fair monique would have been you know, the hard fe y days