The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Ronald Reagan would probably not have fired him for fabricating presidential quotes, but Merrill Lynch forced him out. Former White House Spokesman Larry Speakes last Friday also became a former vice president of communications, dumped from a job worth nearly half a million a year in salary and perks.

Speakes self-immolated, revealing in his White House memoirs Speaking Out how he had made up Reagan statements without the President's knowing. A fire storm followed. Speakes had violated a flack's first commandment: Be believable.

In one of the incidents, at the Geneva summit in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev seemed to be getting the better of Reagan in quotesmanship, Speakes recalled in a phone interview last week. As he rode along frigid Lake Geneva in his car, he searched his notes for a good Reagan quote to feed the ravenous media. He knew Reagan's reasons for going to the summit. He knew he could put them into words the President would approve. Propelled by the intensity of the moment and his sense of power, he slid into deceit.

Speakes huddled with his aide Mark Weinberg, and they worked out an eloquent line; then Speakes marched out in front of hundreds of reporters with his crafted lie. Reagan had turned to Gorbachev at one point, Speakes said, and told him, "There is much that divides us, but I believe the world breathes easier because we are talking here together." The frenzied sharks of journalism fed.

Last week protests came from all quarters. "Damn outrage," said White House Spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, who took Speakes' place. "This is the man who said he had never lied to the press," scoffed the Washington Post's Lou Cannon.

"Well," said Speakes from New York City, "if I get criticized for writing the truth, so be it. I said I was going to write an honest book. I told about the mistakes of others, and I thought it was right to tell about mine."

When Reagan was asked about the episode, he said he "was not aware" of the fabrication until now. Reagan never even noticed that he was quoted as saying things to the Soviets that he in fact had never said. His notorious detachment was in place. Speakes claims that he told Reagan what he had done. "That the President does not recall that now, I fully understand," says Speakes.

Speakes is surely not the first White House spokesman to fake a President's words, though he may be the first one to admit it. Washington is a city with a large industry devoted to making inarticulate politicians sound lucid, to turning what is prosaic into poetry. But, as Speakes ruefully admits now, even manufactured words ought to be placed in the proper mouth before they are passed out to history.