Lanny Davis Part I: An interview with President Clinton’s former special counsel
Lanny Davis is former special counsel to President Bill Clinton. While in the White House from 1996 through 1998, Davis was assigned the difficult tasks of handling negative allegations against the President.
He had to seemingly work against the formal machinations of the White House in order to give the President credibility in the face of, at times, bizarre allegations of iimpropriety. His experience is chronicled in his 2003 book, Truth To Tell: Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself: Notes from My White House Education
Truth To Tell presents an inside view of media relations at the highest political level and soundly presents the story behind the stories.Davis’ latest book, Scandal: How “Gotcha” Politics Is Destroying America
This post is the first in a multi-part interview with Davis about crises and media relations. Please check back for future installments. Better yet, click the Subscribe link at right to get new posts by email or into your feed reader.
How did you get into your position at the Clinton White House?
LANNY DAVIS: It starts with my friendship with Hillary Rodham when I was in law school before I knew Bill Clinton. It goes back to when I was in my third year in Yale Law School in 1969. We were friends for that one year before I graduated and then over the years kept in touch off and on. I met her future husband when he volunteered in the Joe Lieberman for State Senate Campaign of 1970. That’s where all roads seemed to cross in New Haven.In the 1960s I was also a good friend of George Bush who lived nearby me at Davenport College at Yale. I mention that because going forward I have had involvement with George W. Bush as well since he’s been president. Both books come out of a spirit of knowing both of those two people.
Over years I kept in touch with Hillary Clinton, who was dragged into a lot of the attacks during the Whitewater, mid-1990s time period. I was asked to work defending her as a volunteer and as a friend. After the ’96 presidential campaign, I was invited to become a special counsel to President Clinton primarily as a public spokesperson with the news media providing the legal responses to the various charges against him in campaign finance and other areas. That’s what led to my first book.
What was your media experience before that?
LD: What led me to that unique job was I ran for Congress in the 1970s. In fact, just about the time that Bill Clinton ran for Congress, I was running for Congress in Montgomery County, Maryland. I also served on the Democratic National Committee for three terms. Politics is a great place to learn about the media and how the press operates, especially covering politicians—in that case, covering myself in a congressional campaign.
Secondly, as an active political person in Washington, a member of the Democratic National Committee representing Maryland and being involved with presidential campaigns ever since 1968, you get to know a lot of reporters. You get to know how they think and operate.
Finally, in my law practice, before the experience in the White House from ‘96 to ‘98, I learned as a litigator that what was being written in the newspapers about your case was very important. I learned that lesson way before a lot of other lawyers who still resisted—that you had to look at your litigation in a broader context of media coverage.
Those three elements–media, politics and law–came together at the White House when I was special counsel to the President. Since I left the White House I now do exactly that in my law firm for crisis management.
Great Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair noticed recently, like you did, that Watergate helped to erase the conventions of political reporting. He says that though Watergate reporting itself was important, the hunger for similar kinds of scandals since has turned into the creation of scandals by mere allegation of wrong doing. Do you think he read your book?
LD: I do think he read my book. I don’t agree with his conclusions. I think his conclusions are way over the top by somebody who is blaming the press for his own troubles. I thought it was unbecoming of Tony Blair to have that kind of attack on the media. I think there’s a critique of the media post-Watergate, which I write about in my chapter about the legacies of Watergate that led to connecting-dots journalism, which is what Tony Blair is really referring to. In the search for scandals, reporters often connect dots between facts and then draw causal inferences from those facts that are unwarranted and not supported by any evidence. That is the main legacy of Watergate: connecting-dots journalism. Tony Blair doesn’t go the next step which is to say why all the reporters are often forced to connect dots. That’s because government officials, like Dick Cheney and in some respects Tony Blair, don’t want the press to know certain things.
In the case of the run-up to the war in Iraq, I didn’t exactly see Tony Blair going transparent with every single misjudgment that led him to support the invasion of the war in Iraq based (on the reason) of weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. When government puts on a cloak of secrecy between itself and the public, reporters are often forced into the kind of journalism that Blair is criticizing. I think its impossible to criticize scandal journalists the way that Blair did without taking responsibility for causing that kind of journalism with the cloak of secrecy that, unfortunately, he, Dick Cheney and George Bush were responsible for that led us into this war.
