SPUN IN CIRCLES: THE PRESS CORPS AND REAGAN’S REYKJAVIK CHALLENGE
by
Lee Hudson Teslik
Presented to the
Committee on Degrees in History and Literature
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts
with Honors
HarvardCollege
Cambridge, Massachusetts
March 1, 2005
Word Count: 17, 824
Contents
Introduction…………………………………..4
Section 1……………………………………..12
Section 2……………….....………………....21
Section 3………………………………….....31
Section 4………………………………….....36
Section 5………………………………….....44
Section 6………………………………….....48
Section 7 (Conclusion, part 1)……………...61
(Conclusion, part 2)………………64
Bibliography…………………………...... 69
On July 25, 1986, Ronald Reagan sent a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev.[1] It was the first contact between the two leaders since the deadlocked Geneva summit of 1985, where Reagan had first met the Soviet General Secretary, and where the two leaders had discussed potential reductions of nuclear stockpiles but failed to reach an agreement. The letter was Reagan’s attempt to renew negotiations—in it, he invited Gorbachev to Washington to discuss the terms of a potentially sweeping nuclear disarmament treaty. Reagan felt there was cause for optimism. “Well, we finally came up with a letter to Gorbachev that I can sign,” he wrote in his diary, several days before sending the letter. “In fact, it’s a good one and should open the door to some real arms negotiations if he is really serious.”[2]
Gorbachev did not respond to Reagan’s letter for three months. In the meantime, Soviet-American tensions heightened. In late August, the FBI arrested Gennady Zakharov, a Soviet physicist working in New York at the United Nations, on charges of espionage. Soon thereafter, the KGB arrested Nicholas Daniloff, the Moscow correspondent for the U.S. News & World Report, on similar charges, apparently to use him as a bargaining chip for Zakharov’s release. Reagan was caught in a political bind. Releasing Zakharov risked appearing diplomatically weak, but public sympathy for Daniloff was mounting due to extensive news coverage of the reporter’s apparently unjustified abduction. So when, on September 19, the Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze visited the White House and delivered Gorbachev’s response, proposing a meeting in London or Reykjavik, Iceland, to prepare for a summit in Washington, Reagan seized the opportunity for all its political potential. The President immediately accepted Gorbachev’s offer, “opt[ing] for Iceland,” as he put it in his diary.[3] Shultz and Shevardnadze then set the terms of a hostage swap, the announcement of which was postponed several days so as to coincide with the news of a planned Reykjavik summit (Reagan correctly assumed that the political accolades he would win for setting a summit date would offset losses from the Zakharov-Daniloff exchange, which was indeed almost unanimously interpreted as a victory for Gorbachev.)[4]
Spirits were high leading up to the summit, and few in the West Wing considered the possibility of negative fallout from the scheduled meetings, which were scheduled for the weekend of October 12-13, 1986. Lou Cannon, a Washington Post White House correspondent and Reagan biographer known by both colleagues and competitors as the most well-connected and knowledgeable presidential reporter of the era,[5] claimed that enthusiasm about having skirted the Daniloff political crisis ran so high that Reagan did not prepare adequately for Reykjavik. “Reagan…was brimming with confidence in September. [White House Chief of Staff] Don Regan and [National Security Council Chair, Vice Admiral John] Poindexter raised no caution flags. The mood in the White House was so secure that no one even bothered to prepare a fallback position that could be cited should the Reykjavik summit prove a bust.”[6]
Whether Reykjavik was in fact a “bust” is a question riddled with complications. The story of the summit’s particulars is elusive. Due to a news blackout of unprecedented scope enforced by the summit’s delegates, it was understood that the press simply didn’t have the access needed to produce a comprehensive account of the summit’s proceedings. And equally, in light of a massive public relations campaign launched immediately following the summit, it was assumed that everybody—literally—with an intimate knowledge of the meetings, who then shared an account thereof, was bending the facts to his or her own advantage. Nor is there necessarily much to be gained by analyzing the summit’s influence on Soviet-American relations, or nuclear non-proliferation efforts, even if new information on the summit’s particulars could be turned up. Simply put, the precise details of the summit are now of limited historical relevance. Though no arms agreements were made at Reykjavik, an Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty between Reagan and Gorbachev was signed a little over a year later, in December 1987—and more generally, Americans and Soviets would, in the end, reconcile their differences. Whether Reykjavik marked a moment of progress or a stumbling block in this larger diplomatic success story—i.e. whether the summit was a “success”—is a question beyond the scope of this essay.
The purpose of this inquiry therefore is not to get at the slippery facts of the summit itself. Rather, I intend to examine the ways in which the slipperiness of these facts was interpreted by the American journalists covering the summit—Cannon and his peers—whose ostensible calling was to get at some kind of verifiable truth, and who consequently had the most to lose when they proved ill-equipped to do so. In the wake of the Reykjavik summit—during the editorial course of the Reykjaviknews story—journalists encountered the inaccessibility of the Reykjavik story, became frustrated with it, grappled with it, and gradually, grudgingly and cynically, came to terms with it. This coming-to-terms was reflected in their changing understanding of their own profession, and consequently, in their work. It was reflected in the words they chose to describe their interactions with the President and his advisers, and the words they chose to describe themselves. The ultimate relevance of Reykjavik, then, lies not in the political details of the summit itself, but the cultural effects of its fallout—and specifically one particular cultural consequence, a linguistic one, the effects of which are felt to this day in the way English-speaking peoples write and think about their elected officials. Reykjavik’s legacy is the legacy of “spin.”
“Spin” and “spin doctor” were not new words in 1986. The terms have a convoluted history and etymology, the details and significance of which will be examined later. For now it is enough to note that “spin,” as a political colloquialism, first appeared in a major newspaper in 1978, in the British paper The Guardian.[7] “Spin doctor” followed suit in 1984, first appearing in a National Public Radio report by Linda Wertheimer on the first Reagan-Mondale debate, then turning up in both the New York Times and the Washington Post within three weeks’ time. The terms, however, were relegated to the fringes of the journalistic vocabulary during the earliest years of their existence. “Spin doctor” appeared only four times in major United States newspapers before October 11, 1986, the first day of the Reykjavik summit, and “spin” appeared only a handful more.[8] Reykjavik was the linguistic turning point. In the aftermath of the summit—which saw a great deal of “spinning” by both American and Soviet political insiders—the terms increasingly crept into daily usage and, significantly enough, lost the quotation marks in which they had frequently been couched. Two years later, by the time of the 1988 Bush-Dukakis elections, the terms were rhetorically established (and what’s more, popular). At stake here is just how this transition took place, what role Reykjavik played, and what cultural significance can be attributed to the popularization of these terms at this specific historical juncture.
These are questions no historian has previously tackled. This analysis will therefore rely heavily on documentary evidence: news-clippings and magazine articles which analyzed the summit and its aftermath in terms of “spin,” and later, a flurry of books and articles which questioned the evolution of the complicated relationship between the press and the executive office. The ideological shifts surrounding Reykjavik—which motivated the popularization of the term “spin” and which then, circularly, were propelled by it—are still underway. Reykjavik’s significance was as a catalyst, provoking new questions among a small group of elite journalists such as those at the New York Times and the Washington Post—that is, those with general expectations of access to internationally significant political events. Reykjavik was ideologically jarring, but its immediate implications only confronted this small group of reporters. The documentary analysis provided in this essay, then, is limited in scope to America’s most prominent news sources, relying almost exclusively on a small group of newspapers based in major, mostly north-eastern, urban markets.[9]
This essay deals primarily with documentary evidence. To contextualize these sources, it is necessary first to revisit the circumstances of the summit itself, to understand the stakes involved both for those trying to get at the facts (the press) and those trying to obscure them or limit access (the politicos, both American and Soviet, involved with the summit and concerned with its public reception). This is the purpose of the first section of this essay. The second section turns to the etymology and meaning of “spin,” contextualizing the term within a brief history of the idea of objectivity, and questioning what the term replaced, both linguistically and ideologically. The third section takes the history of the Reykjavik summit into the preliminary “post-summit” phase, questioning why a positive public reception of the summit was so important for the Reagan administration, examining the early stages of what administration officials themselves termed the “most extensive public relations campaign” of Reagan’s presidency to that point, and reflecting on why the elite press generally took a stance of casually acknowledging this campaign as it unfolded, without trying to undermine it or even worrying too much about it. The fourth section describes the resounding success of this public relations campaign, and the press’s coverage thereof. The fifth section takes a step back to contextualize the press’s understanding of this public relations campaign in the context of public relations campaigns both before and after it. This provides a framework for section six, which is an analysis of the press doing something, following Reykjavik, which it had never done before: covering itself being “spun,” in those terms. This section proceeds to question how this moment fits into a broader ideological shift among the elite members of the press corps, analyzing a thematic shift in Reagan literature hinged around the Reykjavik summit and relating this shift to the meteoric rise in popularity of the term “spin,” both in the summit’s immediate aftermath and the weeks and months to follow. Finally, my two-part conclusion takes up, first, the specific ideological and linguistic shift which followed Reykjavik, and then, more broadly, how this shift fits into a larger understanding of the press’s shifting self-consciousness, including a brief analysis of where these ideas stand today, and where they might logically proceed.
I argue that the newly prevalent term “spin” was a product of the elite press’s reconsideration of its relationship with the American government, and that it in turn spurred further questioning. It became much harder, in a post-spin world, for the press to consider itself, as it had for decades, the “fourth branch” of the American government.[10] But paradoxically, it also became much harder for the press to launch an outright attack on the government. “Spin” created a linguistic middle ground between terms previously used to describe similar activities: “news management” or “public relations” on one end of the linguistic spectrum, and “propaganda” on the other. “Spin” was originally intended to split the difference between these extremes, but gained such rapid popularity as to become an umbrella term which encompassed the entirety of this spectrum. In the process, it became a dangerously ambiguous term. It served not only to distinguish—to draw a middle-ground between “news management” and “propaganda”—but to replace, swallowing up the terms the meanings of which it was supposedly splitting. Particularly interesting in terms of the ideological trajectory of the press corps is how “spin” replaced, in all but the most extreme circumstances, the term “propaganda,” which given its Soviet connotations had previously served as a chilling indictment of the practice of “guiding” the news. By replacing “propaganda,” “spin” seemed to excuse the practice it was initially meant to condemn.
In doing so, the term “spin” ultimately served to undermine the press’s authority. But in positing this claim, one comes upon a problem of causality. Did “spin,” a term the press created, turn on its master, planting seeds of cynicism in a structure reliant on notions of objectivity, thereby poisoning its idealistic infrastructure? Or was the term popularized only in reaction to a process of self-exploration in which the press, much to its dismay, found itself far less powerful than it had previously assumed, and sought a new vocabulary that could somehow excuse this impotence? Each scenario is right to an extent, and clearly each feeds the other. In seeking a dominant cause, however, the latter seems more compelling. The press’s shortcomings had been exposed in the past, after all, and by 1986 it was not exactly a shocking revelation that presidents sometimes tried to deceive the public. What was new was the idea that maybe, at the end of the day, the press did not have the power or access needed to turn up the truth, no matter how fervent its efforts; that maybe, in a more efficiently run administration, Woodward and Bernstein would never have had the chance to succeed. And it is here that Reykjavik becomes relevant. For it was at Reykjavik that the press, for the first time, reported its own inability to get at facts, and did so using this new, divisive word, “spin.”
On October 12, 1986, the circumstances at the Reykjavik summit were bleak, at least meteorologically. It was cold and rainy. It had been that way all weekend. But the outlook for the summit ahead was contrastingly bright. That morning, the New York Times had run an upbeat front page “News Analysis” (alongside a picture of Reagan and Gorbachev sharing a light-hearted moment of laughter) in optimistic anticipation of the summit’s final day. “Areas of Agreement Appear to Take Shape As Summit Leaders Seek Concrete Results,” a headline ran. But now, roughly twelve hours after the Times had gone to press, the meetings were over and Secretary of State George Shultz had his head in his hands.
*1*
The Reykjavik summit was never intended to solve the problems of a polarized world, but it was expected to be a decisive step in the right direction. There were a few concrete resolutions which a consensus of talking heads thought the weekend of meetings was likely to produce. Foremost was the hope that a date would be set for a full summit, sometime the following spring, in the United States. Beyond that nobody really knew what to expect. But when two working groups were established on the summit’s opening day, one on arms control and the other on human rights and other issues, hopes were sparked that more immediate results might be in the works. The Times reported that the two sides appeared to be “crystallizing areas of agreement,” but reiterated that “the principal test of the meetings [was] whether Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev [would] agree to meet again in the next several months.”[11]
The human rights issues pertained to the opening of emigration channels for Soviet Jews. Soviet emigration policy was highly restrictive in general, and Jewish communities had been particularly affected mainly because they had been among the groups most inclined to leave. The government had liberalized its policy in the late 1970s, and in 1979 a record number of more than 50,000 Jews had flocked from the country. But during the early 1980s the number of Jews emigrating had declined precipitously. The Soviet government claimed that most of those who had wanted to leave had already left, but there were complaints from Jews already abroad (some highly publicized) that family members wishing to leave the country still could not. Jewish protestors descended on Reykjavik’s Hofdi House, a reputedly haunted former private residence often used for Icelandic state receptions,[12] where the summit’s meetings were scheduled to take place. There was a Sabbath service in which protestors from the U.S., Western Europe, and Israel joined with Icelandic religious leaders and displayed pictures of Soviet Jews who had been jailed and denied permission to leave the country.[13]
But according to the Times, “[t]he demonstrations probably went unnoticed by President Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev.”[14] And despite the President’s assertions to the contrary, few suspected that human rights held equal priority as arms control for the principle participants of the summit. As The Economist put it, “it was the possibility of a deal on nuclear weapons that brought the two leaders together,”[15] and if one was to assume that, given the working groups, there would be a push for real results at Reykjavik, the success of that push would be dependent on arms control. Here again there seemed cause for optimism. In a separate article, the Economist outlined the “elements of a possible accord” as follows: