Prepping The President

By Jacob V. Lamar Jr

During Ronald Reagan's intensive press-conference preparations, the tensest moment came on Thursday afternoon in the family theater of the White House. In the course of a two-hour practice session, Roman Popadiuk, a Foreign Service officer on loan to the press office, began boring in on Iranscam. The object was to make certain that Reagan would stay consistent, no matter how sharp the cross-examination. Popadiuk got so caught up in his role as a Sam Donaldson stand-in that Press Spokesman Marlin Fitzwater began to worry. "I thought we might all get kicked out," he said. "It was pretty tough stuff." Reagan hung in, however, a bit unsteady at times but improving.

The preparations started some ten days earlier when Executive agencies were asked to provide background information. Fitzwater's aides then spent two days boiling down a foot-high stack of material into a 31-page summary for the President to read over the weekend at Camp David. Only after Reagan and Nancy returned and said that he was comfortable with the material was the final decision made to schedule the conference.

On Monday Chief of Staff Howard Baker and Iranscam Counselor David Abshire held an hour-long session with the President that focused on eight basic issues raised by the Tower commission report. The next morning Reagan was given what one aide called the "50 nastiest, dirtiest questions that could be dreamed up" about Iranscam. That afternoon he discussed them with Baker and Abshire.

Two-hour practice sessions on the day before and the afternoon of the press conference are the heart of the preparation. As mock inquisitors grill him, top aides take notes and critique the answers with Reagan afterward. This time, his senior staff came to a startling realization: it had been so long since he had last held a press conference that virtually none of them had ever been in on the preparations. "We had to put in an urgent call to ask Ed Meese over here so we'd have a little experience," said one top staffer.

During Larry Speakes' tenure as spokesman, aides were ordered to try to worm likely questions out of correspondents in advance. "We discovered what reporters have known for years," boasts one former staff member, "that if you ask enough, some people will actually tell you. It's hilarious." This time the dominance of Iranscam reduced the need for pressroom espionage.

Wednesday's rehearsal was a no-nonsense affair: Reagan was asked 36 mock questions, 30 of them on Iran and related issues. (Every question asked at the real press conference, claims an aide, was among those asked at the first practice session.) He answered in a straightforward way, avoiding the jokes he sometimes tells to entertain his audience. "I was really nervous until practice today," said one staffer that afternoon. "The President is on target; he'll do fine." The aide then knocked on wood.

The next day's session, which featured Popadiuk's grilling, went even more smoothly. One personal touch that Reagan never got the chance to use came in answer to a practice question on AIDS. He replied by telling a story he heard from a friend about a man who had contracted the virus from a blood transfusion; within a year both the man and his wife had died. "I'm not sure I should tell this," Reagan said. "You should tell it," responded Howard Baker. "It's you. It shows the feeling you have for people in trouble, and it's touching because you're so clearly sincere."

By the end of the second run-through, Reagan was so relaxed that he even tossed off a bawdy joke. It helped that there were no women among the dozen aides in attendance at the session.

Before each press conference, aides prepare a 3-ft. by 5-ft. seating chart with photos, so the President can call on specific reporters by name. (The ( shot of Donaldson was once embellished with satanic horns and a goatee.) Reporters are seated 20 minutes early, while Reagan and his aides gather in an anteroom to survey the scene on closed-circuit TV. A cameraman pans the audience, getting instructions through a headphone to focus on correspondents Reagan may want to recognize. He called upon most of the renowned tough questioners during last week's session.

All the work paid off. When Reagan walked into the family dining room at the end of his performance, Baker proclaimed, "You did even better than you did in your last rehearsal." Replied the President: "Your questions were a lot tougher than the ones the press asked."

With reporting by David Beckwith/Washington