Five Minutes With: Dee Dee Myers

Only 31 years old when she became the first woman and youngest person to ever serve as White House Press Secretary, Dee Dee Myers found herself under the lights at the start of the administration of President Bill Clinton. Before that, Myers worked on local, state and national political campaigns, including for Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, California State Senator Art Torres, Dianne Feinstein’s gubernatorial bid and the presidential campaigns of Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale. After leaving the White House, Myers co-hosted, with Mary Matalin, the CNBC talkfest Equal Time, and became a consultant to NBC’s The West Wing and a frequent campus speaker. Myers talked with Campus Progress about the tribulations of the campaign trail, wearing jeans in the Oval Office, the outcome of the Jimmy Smits-Alan Alda matchup on The West Wing, and the rise of the blue state/red state media divide.

It seems like there are some people who really get off on going from campaign to campaign, and love having fast food boxes in the back of their car. How did you like the campaign lifestyle?

The best part for me was definitely the camaraderie. Many of my closest friends now in middle adulthood are the people I met in young adulthood on political campaigns. But you have to have a certain tolerance for unemployment, especially as a Democrat in the 80’s. I always figured I’d find something and I always did. Campaign work becomes your entire life, it’s intense. I think everyone should try and work on a campaign if they can at least for a little while. Because I think you learn a lot about how the system works, what’s good about it and what’s not so good about it. I think it forever changes the way you look at electoral politics.

And how about that fast food?

You definitely eat a lot of pizza. I had a lot more empty take-out containers around my desk than in the back of my car though. And there were stacks of newspaper everywhere. On one campaign, I remember we discovered there were mice living in the stacks of newspapers. It was pretty grim. But I could put up with mice in the news stacks for Dukakis.

You were the first woman to serve as White House Press Secretary – in fact, you’re the only woman in history to hold the job. What gives?

When I went to work for Clinton in 1991, President Bush was pretty popular coming out of the Gulf War. I didn’t think many people thought any Democrat, let alone Bill Clinton, had a good possibility of winning. So, I didn’t get into it because I thought it was my shot to be White House Press Secretary but because I believed in him. Only about fifteen minutes into my interview with Clinton, I was agreeing to move to Arkansas. He’s a very persuasive guy. We won, and I was named Press Secretary to the transition and then I was named Press Secretary to the White House. I’m also one of the youngest people to ever hold the job. That’s not necessarily the best combination – being young and female in Washington. It wasn’t always easy sledding for me, but it was a wonderful opportunity that’s completely changed my life.

The Clinton administration was known for having a lot of young staff. What was that dynamic like?

There are always advantages to being open to new ideas, particularly during the campaign. It was less of an advantage when you got to Washington, which has a culture of being much more traditional. And there’s a lot of credibility – with good reason in many cases – given to people with experience and grey hair.

Now the truth is that there weren’t as many young people as it looked. The people who had positions where you would expect to have a lot of experience had it. But George Stephanopoulos and I became the particularly younger faces. And then there was James Carville who wasn’t that young, but was just unconventional. He fed into the psyche of this young, jeans-wearing kid.

There were a couple of cosmetic changes we could have made that would have made a big difference. We certainly could have had a different dress code. It’s a symbolic thing; no one should wear jeans to the White House. We had a young president and a staff perceived as young. I think paying attention to some of the traditional standards would have given people one less thing to shoot at.

Could you compare the level of political discourse and civility in Washington in terms of what comes out in the press now and what you were seeing when you were in the White House?

I think there’s ever less civility and the discourse is ever shriller. I think there are a lot of reasons for that and they’re complicated. I think one of them is we’ve just moved into a more partisan atmosphere. I think we have a coarsening political discourse where hearts and minds are hardening. There’s so many organizations competing for stories and it encourages many of them to make their name by being bold or reckless. I think a lot of good people who might otherwise have served have been discouraged because of the consequences; you get the stuffing beat out of you. Most people don’t want to live through that.

What have you made of the recent journalistic shenanigans of folks like Jeff Gannon and Armstrong Williams?

I think the Williams thing is infinitely more serious. With Jeff Gannon, the story was odd and curious and bizarre but the truth is that there’s a lot of unusual people in the White House briefing room. I know a lot of dirty little secrets, you wouldn’t believe the people who were in there. When I was there, there was a woman named Naomi whose husband had passed away 30 years before and he had a small news service. She was very elderly and would still come shuffling out with a shopping cart filled stacks of papers and ask completely off-the-wall questions. She had a hard pass for years.

I can’t imagine the administration when I was in the White House paying media to go out there and flack a particular agenda. With the Williams thing, people said “what’s the big deal, he’s conservative and everyone knows that. The media pays consultants, why wouldn’t they pay him. There’s no difference between a consultant and a media outlet.” He didn’t disclose he was being paid – disclosure in this age is very important.

People have come to this point where they no longer believe in the idea of an objective media. Now you go to whatever organization supports your view. There’s red facts and blue facts. Red media and blue media.

Truth is a tricky thing, but some truths are more objective than others. The Washington Post may be viewed as liberal, but I promise you the facts in the Post are more objective than the facts on GOP or Talon.com. They’re not all created equal.

From the point when you were Press Secretary to now, things like blogs have taken a more prominent role. What role do you see them taking now, and what future do you see?

There were no blogs; there was barely an internet when Clinton became President. Maybe Al Gore had e-mail but that was it.

I think we were a transition period. I think there’s a lot of really good news and a lot of bad news. The good news is I think it’s a leveling force, it provides accountability. For example, I was struck by the role bloggers played in undermining the CBS story. The broadcast wasn’t even off the air when the blogs started saying things like, “I’m an expert on IBM typeballs from the 70’s and it couldn’t possibly have been used for these documents.” I didn’t even know there were IBM typeball experts.

On the other end of the spectrum, I think not all blogs, not all news sources, not all internet sites are created equal. It’s sort of consumer buyer-beware. If information comes from the web, that doesn’t mean it’s true. I think information is good, access to information is good, transparency is good, and all those things are increased through the internet and blogs. But I think the reliability of that information and any collective sense of truth will suffer.

Tell me about how you got involved in The West Wing and what kind of role you play there.

When I was working at the White House, the show’s creator, Aaron Sorkin, was hanging around working on a movie called The American President that starred Michael Douglas. Later, Aaron called me and said “I’ve written this pilot for a TV show, why don’t you take a look at it.” So I did and I liked it, but I didn’t think it would ever get made because the conventional wisdom was shows about politics don’t work. But he said “I’d like you to be a consultant if the show is made.” And I said “great, I’d love to do that.” About a year later he called and said “Warner Bros. is going to make a pilot and NBC will have the option to air it.” And they made it and it was a hit and the rest is history.

I do a couple different things. The thing that I’ve enjoyed the most and done the most is helping come up with story ideas. I work with writers on how the story unfolds, does it make sense, does it seem realistic. In the early years when the show was still trying to figure out how things look around the White House, I was sort of a technical consultant. They’d ask things like, “So, how does the Secret Service know you’re on the President’s staff?” “Well you have these little pins.” “Well do you HAVE one?” And I did so they took a look at it.

And there any episodes that have already aired that you feel were closest to your experience in the White House?

There were a lot – some that I had my hand in and some that I didn’t. I would say that the most fun I ever had was way back in the first season – I got to do a little bit of payback. Everybody on the show thinks they can brief better than CJ [the former press secretary on the show.] When you are the briefer at press conferences, like I was, you know people are thinking that. So we did an episode once where CJ had a root canal so Josh went to do the briefing and made a complete mess out of everything and cause a couple of political scandals. That was a lot of fun because everyone thinks they can do this job but when you are actually standing there without the hindsight, it is harder than it looks.

There’s an election coming up on The West Wing in the Fall. I don’t suppose you’ll tell me who wins.

There’s no answer to that question yet. Really. John Wells, the executive producer of the show, might have an idea in his head and certainly we all speculate but ultimately he gets final word. And John likes to play things pretty close to the vest.

The show’s now on hiatus. The writers should get together in June to figure out how to get from the convention to the election. We do know we’re going to follow the political and chronological calendar. We’ll have the election in November and the inauguration in January and the transition in between.

There are a couple of times in the last few years where my parents would pretend Martin Sheen was our President. But clearly that falls very heavily on one side of the spectrum. Are you ever bothered by snarky conservative blog references about the “Left Wing?”

The truth is that the White House is either going to be Republican or Democrat. That’s just the way it is. I think the current White House is too Republican. And The West Wing is a Democratic White House – Martin Sheen’s personal politics and his character’s politics are well known. Certainly there are still more Democrats who feel strongly about it, like the ones who say “Jed Bartlett is my President!” What I find gratifying is when I hear, “I’m a Republican but I love the show and seeing behind the scenes. You try to give the other side a chance to make the argument.” And our writers work hard to do that. We do a story about trade policy and you have an actual debate about it. We don’t make them look insane.