Mike McCurry served as the White House Press Secretary during the Clinton administration.
Harvard Political Review: What led you to pursue a career in public service and communications?
Mike McCurry: Growing up in high school I had two loves, one was journalism and one was politics. I got to Princeton and worked my way through as a newspaper reporter on campus. This was during the Watergate years so Woodward and Bernstein were the role models for everybody. I said, “Ok, that’s what I want to do; I want to be the next big Washington Post reporter.” I actually worked at Princeton for a paper that was owned by the Washington Post and I thought that I had my job lined up.
During my senior spring semester, I was all set up to work for them and then they decided to sell the newspaper. I said, “Oh shit, I’m getting screwed by the Washington Post.” I always tell that story saying that was not the last time I got screwed by the Washington Post. I ended up without a job.
I was a senior in college, and Jerry Brown was running for president in 1976. I was from California and I liked him. I said “Well, I’d be interested in working for a campaign,” so I went down and volunteered. The guy who was running it said, “Can someone write a press release because we’re getting an endorsement from the Middlesex Democratic Party?”––or something like that––and I said, “Yeah, I can write a press release.” So I wrote the press release and I’ll never forget the guy who was the campaign manager––a big cigar-chomping guy––said “Who wrote this?” I raised my hand and he said, “Kid, you’re our press secretary now.” I had no idea what a press secretary was. It was just a natural fit with what I enjoyed doing so off I went.
HPR: Moving to your work for the Clinton administration, can you describe the preparation process for a White House press briefing?
MM: It’s very intensive, but for me it was mostly in my head. I’ve always been a fairly early riser, but when I worked at the White House I’d get up at about 4:30 in the morning because that’s when the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal got delivered on my front driveway. First I’d strap on my earphones and listen to the BBC, which was on our local National Public Radio station, and I’d walk the dogs. I’d start hearing what the news of the day looked like then get back and go through all the newspapers and read them very thoroughly. Then I’d go take a shower. I’d say that in the shower, 80 percent of what was going to happen that day ran through my head. And I started thinking, “Here’s what the questions will be, here are the answers I can come up with, let me try that out.”
Then I would obviously drive down to the White House and be at the 7:00 a.m. staff meeting, but as I went through that I’d already kind of figured out, “Here’s what I think we’re going to have to say about this issue or that issue,” so I had it in my head already. But then there was an enormous amount of getting information, going around to the different agencies, going around to the colleagues at the White House and saying “Ok, you have to help me understand this particular issue, we’re announcing this big initiative, let’s walk through that, explain that to me.” I’d go down to the secure room at the Situation Room in the White House and read all the classified intelligence from around the world. The stuff that screws you up is when there’s something going on that you don’t know about and you sort of say there’s nothing going on when something is going on. That’s the fatal mistake that press secretaries make.
I’d rehearse what I thought the answers were for some of the questions we could anticipate. We had a big, laminated sign on the first page [of our binder] that said, “Pretend they’re all naked,” because it was important to get in the right frame of mind. I had the whole thing organized so that if a subject came up, I would give the official line and then I could actually answer some questions. When the thing was over at 2:30 everyday I felt like I’d already worked a full day, so I’d go back to my office, take a nap for about 20 minutes, and then start all over again.
HPR: The biggest scandal that happened during your tenure as press secretary was, of course, concerning Monica Lewinsky. How do you think it was handled, and what were the lessons learned from dealing with such a big press crisis?
MM: The first lesson, which was a painful lesson, was that we all instantly assumed there was no way it was true. You sort of say, “How does a president have an affair with some kid?” Because there are so many Secret Service people around it just couldn’t happen. So we started by disbelieving the allegation, which of course ended up being a mistake.
I learned the second lesson because I had worked my first job in Washington for the senator who went to jail in the Abscam investigation, which the movie American Hustle is about. One of the lessons I learned there was not to get more information than what you can actually share publicly when it involves a legal case. I described the way I did my job earlier: most of the time I scrounged for information and wanted to find out as much as I could. But in the whole Lewinsky thing we said, “Ok, we don’t know what happened, it’s something involving President Clinton personally. If we start talking to him about what’s going on here or what’s the issue, then we will all be subject to subpoenas by the Independent Counsel.”
We all decided that we would only communicate the answers that come through the lawyers who have executive privilege and attorney-client privilege so that we’re not jeopardizing the president’s own defense and putting ourselves in any kind of jeopardy. Otherwise I would’ve had to hire a lawyer and spend a lot of money. That ended up being a good thing to do because it meant that we had one story, we were sticking to it, we didn’t amplify, and we didn’t try to explain when he said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” I got asked 227 times within the next three days what he meant by “sexual relations” and I said, “I’m not going to parse the statement, I’m not going to amplify.”
If I had said, “Oh, he said he didn’t have sexual relations, so come on, it is what it is”––if I had said anything like that, I would’ve been compounding the lie that he was in the middle of at that point, and I think that would’ve been much more troubling at the end. In a way, I kind of preserved our ability to still have credibility when we talked about other issues because I wasn’t trying to invent some explanation to something I didn’t know the full facts about. It ended up working out well, but boy, it was not a particularly comfortable situation.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Photo credit: Kellie Ryan