Apologies, from the get-go, for remarking on another Trump-Nixon analogy. But one has to go back to Richard Nixon’s presidency to find another White House press secretary so tugged between media and master, and so mocked for his subsequent contortions, as Sean Spicer. That man was Ron Ziegler.

There is much to be said in admiration of Ziegler, who served more than five years in turbulent times and was Nixon’s only press secretary—a significant exhibition of survival techniques and endurance that Spicer will be fortunate to match. He was loyal to a fault—a rare quality in Washington. Almost alone among senior aides, he stood by Nixon when the disgraced president rode Air Force One into the sunsets of exile in 1974. And though he hid it well, the often publicly surly Ziegler had a sly, self-deprecating sense of humor. As I rummaged through the files at the presidential library for my upcoming biography of Nixon, I often chanced upon wry exchanges, on tape or paper, that Ziegler had with superiors like Henry Kissinger, who served as Nixon’s national security adviser, or foes like Katherine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post. Perhaps most impressively, Ziegler was a rarity among the California public relations types who staffed the Nixon White House—in that he avoided the criminal wrongdoing, prosecution and imprisonment that many earned in the Watergate scandals.

Ziegler’s guilelessness, however, cut both ways. He was the youngest man to hold the job up to that time, and Nixon (whose own relationship with the truth was as estranged as Trump’s) viewed Ziegler as a tool and a mouthpiece, not a trusted confidante. Ziegler may have escaped prosecution because much of the time he was out of the loop—not the best spot for advising the media, but a good way to stay out of jail. Like the skilled members of Nixon’s speechwriting team (Ray Price, William Safire and Pat Buchanan among them) and Kissinger’s NSC staffers, he wasn’t invited to the meetings where the laws got broken.

Above all, Ziegler was a weapon of war. The best presidential press secretaries have, from principle or pragmatism, seen their job as two-way streets: not only to convey the White House line of the day to the media, but to represent the press in the high councils of government. Nixon didn’t value that perspective, though—“The press is the enemy … write that on a blackboard a hundred times,” he once told Kissinger. Which left the young shill as cannon fodder—exposed to the scorn of the White House press corps, taking lumps on behalf of his employer and savaged for his rhetorical stumbles.

“The president is aware of what is going on in Southeast Asia,” Zeigler said memorably in 1971, when asked if American and South Vietnamese forces were preparing to invade Laos. “That is not to say anything is going on in Southeast Asia.”

Trump, who libeled the press as “the enemy of the American people,” has followed Nixon’s template when it comes to the Fourth Estate. The tools aren’t always the same. Back in the day when a handful of newspapers and three broadcast networks set the national agenda, Nixon sicced Vice President Spiro Agnew on them and had aides like Charles Colson conspire to bring financial ruin to fault-finding media companies. Trump, meanwhile, employs 21st century tactics to undermine the old media, spreading half-truths, lies and tall tales via Twitter, and undercutting legitimate news stories as “fake news.” Like Nixon, Trump uses his press secretary as a truncheon. Spicer may not be as inexperienced, or as out of the loop as Ziegler was; but he’s no less an instrument of war than his unfortunate predecessor.

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I have chronicled, in these pages, Nixon’s long and torturous experience with the press, and how it led to his political self-destruction. Like Trump, he was hyper-sensitive to criticism, and lashed out as his tormentors. “Was there a conspiracy … on the part of the Nixon administration to discredit and malign the press? Was the so-called ‘anti-media campaign’ encouraged, directed and urged on by the President himself? And did it contribute to the us-against-them divisions that then cracked back at Nixon after his election victory?” wrote Safire, in his memoirs. “The answer to all these questions is, sadly, yes.”

Ziegler rode point in that campaign. He is remembered for the instances when Nixon callously abused him, dispatching him with faulty information and misleading “lines of the day” that bred contempt among the press corps. In the week after the Watergate arrests in June, 1972, as the news broke that the burglars had ties to the Nixon re-election campaign, Nixon ordered Ziegler to minimize the crime. He did so memorably, dismissing it as a “third-rate alleged burglary attempt.” When Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein doggedly pursued the story, Ziegler accused them of “shabby journalism” and “character assassination.”

In the spring of 1973, as the extensive ties between the burglars and the White House became known—and Nixon began to throw staffers to the wolves—Ziegler apologized to the Post and its reporters for criticizing their work and questioning their motives. “Mistakes were made,” he said. Yet, the ultimate Nixon loyalist, he continued to duck and weave in Spicer-like fashion, and even introduced his own “alternative facts” into the lexicon of politics, begrudgingly declaring the president’s longstanding insistence of White House guiltlessness “inoperative.” “If my answers sound confusing,” the Los Angeles Times quoted him saying during a 1974 White House briefing just a few months before Nixon resigned, “I think they are confusing because the questions are confusing and the situation is confusing—and I’m not in a position to clarify it.”

Ziegler’s New York Times obituary noted how one particularly convoluted 1974 statement about the custody of Nixon’s White House tapes even won him an award from the Committee on Public Doublespeak of the National Council of Teachers of English: “I would feel that most of the conversations that took place in those areas of the White House that did have the recording system would, in almost their entirety, be in existence, but the special prosecutor, the court, and, I think, the American people are sufficiently familiar with the recording system to know where the recording devices existed, and to know the situation in terms of the recording process, but I feel, although the process has not been undertaken yet in preparation of the material to abide by the court decision, really, what the answer to that question is.”

The press secretary was rewarded for his loyalty: Praise and censure in the Nixon years were parceled out according to an aide’s willingness to defy the hated press—a pattern that has also been attributed to Trump. To their dismay, and that of their furious spouses, Safire and Leonard Garment, two Nixon aides who lobbied for a ceasefire in the media wars, were stricken from the guest list when Nixon staged a Rose Garden wedding for his daughter Tricia. Ziegler got to attend, and it was he that Nixon called the next morning, raging about the Post’s impertinent coverage of the ceremony. The Post reporters were to be banned from social events, Nixon declared. “They’re never to be in the White House again,” he said. “Never! Is that clear?” “I just don’t like that paper,” said the wounded father of the bride. “They don’t care if it hurts.”

But while Ziegler’s role grew more important during Nixon’s final days in office (as by then most of the others in Nixon’s original team had been forced out or resigned), he largely remained a chess piece, not a player. Other White House aides tended not to respect him—the Secret Service code name for the double-chinned press secretary was “Whaleboat” and when he objected, his snickering superiors told the Service to ignore him.

Ziegler was just 29 years old when he became the White House press secretary. It was a job that most thought would go to Herb Klein, a former southern California newsman and longtime campaign spokesman for Nixon, but the new president wanted someone more compliant. Ziegler’s inexperience was itself seen as an insult by the White House press corps—more so when Nixon confirmed it, by putting the press secretary at the bottom of the official protocol list.

Ziegler’s immediate predecessors—George Christian, Bill Moyers and George Reedy under Lyndon Johnson, Pierre Salinger under John F. Kennedy, James Hagerty under Dwight D. Eisenhower and Steve Early under Franklin Roosevelt—were former journalists, who knew the media’s trade and tricks, and respected the contributions of a free press. They could put their feet up on a desk, cradle a drink, and share confidences with their former colleagues.

Ziegler was different. His most notable experience as a spokesman, the press never tired of noting, was as the talking guide on the jungle cruise ride at Disneyland. A native of Kentucky, he had attended the University of Southern California, where he fell in with like-minded young conservatives like H.R. Haldeman, Dwight Chapin and John Ehrlichman, and was tapped to help in Nixon’s unsuccessful campaign for California governor in 1962. Ziegler became a Haldeman votary and remained in public relations and advertising, at the J. Walter Thompson agency, before arriving at the White House in 1969. (Safire’s New Political Dictionary gives Ziegler credit for coining the phrase, “photo opportunity.”)

“Most of the press corps began by treating Ziegler like a puppy-dog front man, recognizing his advertising background and low rating in the inner circle to be the insult it really was,” Safire recalled. “Then, as he grew in stature in the White House inner circle, and his ability to fend off their questions gained some finesse, they began to see him as the symbol of their frustrations. … Many angrily blamed Ziegler for the lack of news or the manipulation of the news.”

Much has been made of Spicer’s belligerence, of how Trump is said to watch the briefings, looking for combativeness and confrontation from his spokesman. So Nixon kept an eye on Ziegler. In one famous episode, his attitude toward the press, and the press secretary, played out in public: As Nixon began to crack under the pressure of the Watergate scandal in August 1973, he was caught on camera manhandling Ziegler—grabbing him by the shoulders on an airport tarmac and shoving him toward the press.

For the members of the media, the incident spoke volumes about the relationship between the president and the media. Nixon wanted to vent his frustration by giving the press a good knock; he settled for shoving Ziegler.

Source: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/ron-ziegler-abused-press-secretary-sean-spicer-214922