Flacks

Early in 1985, a stocky public-relations man in his middle years named John Scanlon, a vice-president of the firm of Daniel J. Edelman, began what he came to call his Believe It or Not file. From newspapers across the country, he clipped every story he could find of outrageous claims in personal-injury cases. There was the bishop in Florida who injured his knee while playing on a U.S. Navy tennis court and sued the Government on the grounds that he had trouble genuflecting. There was the woman who sued a college chancellor because he had failed to impregnate her as promised. There was the man who jumped in front of a subway train and survived to sue the transit authority on the grounds that the train had not stopped quickly enough. These and many others went into Scanlon's file.

Then Scanlon began to send his collection around to carefully chosen names from his bulging Rolodex: influential reporters, columnists, editors, TV producers. He had more in mind than mere eagerness to communicate the state of litigation fever in America. He had recently scored a triumph by helping a client, CBS, turn the public-relations tables on General William Westmoreland in the celebrated libel case that ended in the general's abject surrender. Scanlon had emerged from that contest with a reputation as an expert in litigation PR, and he had now been retained by the law firms of Arnold & Porter and Shook, Hardy & Bacon, which were, in turn, acting as counsel for cigarette makers Philip Morris, Brown & Williamson and Lorillard. The tobacco companies and their lawyers were becoming seriously concerned about the prospect of a damage suit against them arising from cigarette use. Scanlon's job was to lay the public-opinion groundwork for the firms' defense. Musing on his strategy, he explains, "There was very little chance of being able to turn the public's mind around on the issue of smoking, even though I truly believe there's a body of facts that demonstrates clearly that the health dangers of smoking are overstated. But start, as I did, with the proposition that most of these liability cases are a demonstrable effect of the increase in the number of lawyers in America. Then try to generate a body of data about lawyers' excesses that the public can easily understand. My clients could only be the beneficiaries of that kind of consciousness."

Scanlon's strategy was this: Before juries started handing out millions in smoking cases, he would stir up a public ground swell against the lawyers who facilitated and promoted personal-injury suits. The campaign worked. By 1986, the ground swell, now directly promoted and amplified by the insurance industry as a whole, had led a number of state legislatures to set caps on liability awards amid the public presumption that America was being laid waste by a "tort explosion" and a "liability crisis," in the words of insurance-industry flacks. Scanlon's targeting of the lawyers was a crafty stroke, with the Believe It or Not type of clips finding fuller expression in the twin pinnacles of a PR man's dream: 60 Minutes and a speech by President Ronald Reagan.

In March 1986, Harry Reasoner, bluff amazement etched in his craggy countenance, was reporting to his vast audience that hard-working Bernie Kline, boss of the Lynn Ladder & Scaffolding Company of Massachusetts, had been forced to fork over $300,000 in damages to a man who had "hurt his ankle" when the ladder on which he was standing had slipped on a pile of dung. As Kline wryly put it, "Unfortunately, we didn't warn him about the viscosity of horse manure." Around the same time, the President, wallowing in his favorite element, the pithy anecdote, made rich sport with the tale of the fellow in California who had sued the phone company because a drunk driver plowed into the phone booth in which he happened to be standing.

As with many such stories, both, as presented, were substantially untrue. Reasoner had not bothered to discuss Kline's ladder with the jurors in that case, who had been driven to their verdict by the fact that the improperly manufactured ladder had broken when bearing less than half its advertised maximum carrying weight. The plaintiff, who got only $200,000, was permanently crippled. Horse manure was not an issue. The phone company was held to be liable in the California case because the fellow in the booth, fully aware of the approaching driver and eager to escape, had been unable to open the door, which had jammed. For that interesting and corrective information, we have to thank the press package of those hated foes of the insurance industry, The Association of Trial Lawyers of America. Notes Scanlon, "In fact, our Chicago office represents them. I never talk to them. It would clearly be a conflict of interest." Welcome to the world of public relations.

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Scanlon's is but one particularly fertile brain in an industry surging to ever greater strength, prosperity and respectability in Reagan's America. If the mission of the PR person, or flack, is to put the best light on a situation that may, in fact, be verybad, to manipulate his client ever higher in public esteem or simply to control the flow of information on subjects of his or her interest, then the U.S. is becoming a vast public-relations factory in which the practice of flacking is regarded as an honorable activity. Not only do colleges offer courses in public relations but the flacks are flacking to become licensed professionals, like doctors and lawyers. Credentials: a liberal-arts degree and at least two years of specialized study in the social sciences. This gets you a master's degree in public relations and the right to apply for a license. There is even a professional code promulgated by members of the Public Relations Society of America, basing "their professional principles on the fundamental value and dignity of the individual, holding that the free exercise of human rights, especially freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press, is essential to the practice of public relations."

All the talk about a professional code and standards may mask the essence of public relations, which is an effort to gull, diddle and otherwise bamboozle people into thinking that something is different from what they believe it to be. The public-relations man tilts reality to suit his taste, and he has engendered a national disease--a taste for form rather than content, appearance rather than reality, perception rather than truth. The attitude is found everywhere, and it ranges from the anecdotal to the catastrophic.

First an anecdote, the way it happened to our friend Bill Broyles, Vietnam veteran, columnist and former editor in chief of Newsweek. Eager to move himself, his wife and his children from their costly Manhattan co-op overlooking Central Park to a slightly cheaper one up the street, Bill was relieved to find the dream apartment at a reasonable price. Better still, it was in a building inhabited by a dear friend and influential editor whose wife had been a close colleague of Bill's. While the real-estate agent went about closing the deal, Bill lost no time in breaking the glad tidings to his friends and future neighbors. A couple of days later, the agent reported troubling signs of a hitch in the deal. Bill mentioned these to his friends, who expressed sympathy and concern. Worse news followed. The apartment had been sold to someone--according to the Realtor--"living in the same building." A few weeks later, Bill learned the awful truth. The mystery buyers were his friends. He called the husband to remonstrate. How could they have done this? Their children had played together. There was a long silence. Finally, his friend made an Eighties confession, as Broyles vividly recalls: "Yes," he said, "I guess I handled that badly."

I handled that badly. Ethics and the ties of loyalty and friendship were not deemed to be at issue; but, rather, the matter was one of lousy PR.

Move now from Broyles's housing problems to the sadder fate of the inhabitants of Bhopal, India. In December 1984, 2153 of them were killed by a release of poison gas from the Union Carbide plant there. It was the worst industrial accident in history, but in certain quarters, it is remembered in a more upbeat way. According to Public Relations, Strategies and Tactics, a textbook for college courses on the subject, "Union Carbide was able to generate a level of public respect in the days immediately following the disaster by implementing a crisis communication plan that portrayed genuine company concerns for the victims. Corporation chairman Warren M. Anderson flew to India within hours of the accident. Serving as the company's chief spokesmanon the disaster, he made himself available to hundreds of reporters clamoring for information. Reporters were impressed with his open manner and found him believable when he said the disaster was Union Carbide's 'highest priority.' "

This all sounds fine until you listen to Jim Lindheim, a senior executive at Burson-Marsteller, the largest public-relations firm in the world and the advisor to Union Carbide in its hour of crisis. Apparently spontaneous gestures, such as Anderson's dash to India, turn out to have been the result of earnest confabulations within the massed ranks of PR men and lawyers pondering the company's best strategy for handling the issue. After careful calculation, they decided to dispatch Anderson to India, where he was immediately arrested on arrival. This, according to Lindheim, was a "positive development," since the chairman's travails demonstrated that the "company was reaching out." In addition, "it was also helpful that it happened in India. It distanced it. People have this image of flaky Indians. It isn't really true, of course, but, you know, teeming masses. ..." Burson-Marsteller was happy to steer the press to the Union Carbide plant in Institute, West Virginia, which ran smoothly under conditions of First World efficiency. Things took a turn for the worse when, eight months later, Institute also sprang a leak and Bhopaled the neighborhood. But by that time, to a certain extent, the heat was off.

Burson-Marsteller is the acknowledged master in handling crisis PR. Battle honors include Tylenol (cyanide contamination), Jewel's Hillfarm Dairy (salmonella), Jalisco Mexican Products (listeriosis) and the asbestos industry (cancer). Reviewing the honor roll, Lindheim stresses, along with other tips of the trade, the importance of the "style of communication," even if--as was the case in the Bhopal affair--you don't immediately know much of what is going on. "It is important to express the degree of concern and indignation that the situation demands."

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By no coincidence, the birth of the American public-relations industry can be dated to an exercise in crisis management, handled in a manner on which Burson-Marsteller could hardly have improved.

In 1914, minions of John D. Rockefeller, the richest and most hated man in America, caused the state militia in Lud-low, Colorado, to attack an encampment of miners and their families on strike against a Rockefeller company. Rifles and machine guns were used, and the tents were deliberately set on fire. Twenty-one men, women and children died. Even for the craven establishment press of the day, this was a bit much. Under a hail of public vilification, Rockefeller sent for a newspaperman named Ivy Lee and retained him to do what he could to quiet things down.

Lee's strategy was strikingly modern, even if his billing--$1000 a month--was (continued on page 193)Flacks(continued from, page 102) not. As a start, he distributed "fact sheets" of astounding mendacity, defending the Rockefeller record. Then he dispatched John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to go out to Ludlow and mix with the miners, dance with their wives and generally project concern. He was even to spend a day toiling in the mine itself. It all worked. The press lapped it up, giving ample and uncritical space to pictures and accounts of young Rocky consorting with men whose friends and relatives his family had recently caused to be incinerated. The Rockefeller name was slowly winched out of the mud. Astounded at Lee's success, the grateful plutocrat then retained him permanently to carry out the task of burnishing the Rockefeller image. The great PR man succeeded brilliantly in making the old robber's name synonymous with philanthropy through such simple strokes as advising his client to give a dime to a child whenever there was public opportunity to do so.

If Lee was the founding practitioner of modern public relations, its first philosopher activist was Edward Bernays, now 95 years old and still active as the leading proponent of the move to license public-relations professionals. Symbolic of the enduring and fruitful connection between the twin 20th Century disciplines of PR and psychoanalysis, Bernays is the nephew of Sigmund Freud and, indeed, supervised the first translation and publication of Freud's writing in the U.S. Arising from the dingy ignominy of a Broadway press agent's life, Bernays spent World War One working for the Government, flacking Wilsonian war aims. After the war, Bernays pressed on to fame and fortune, applying the lessons learned on Broadway and in Government, not to mention his uncle's notions about the human psyche, on behalf of corporate clients.

Bernays understood that theorizing on the nature of his calling, formulating a rationale for its existence, which he did in a stream of books and articles, some of which later found their way onto the bookshelf of Joseph Goebbels, could only augment the respectability of the new profession and, thereby, its power and profits. In Propaganda, which was published in 1928, he laid it out straightforwardly enough: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important clement in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

"We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of." Just when the average reader or corporation president may be thinking that this is some communistic radical talking, Bernays assures the reader that this is, in fact, a good thing: "Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society."

Bernays defined the role of public relations as "the engineering of consent." A year after Propaganda was published, he gave sound practical demonstration of what such engineering could involve. One of his clients was George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, who was displeased that the taboo against American women's smoking in public was limiting the sales of Lucky Strike cigarettes. He called for Bernays. Bernays, in turn, consulted the eminent psychoanalyst A. A. Brill. Brill gave Bernays the hot poop from the couch, which was that cigarettes were "torches of freedom" and, therefore, their denial, at least in public, to women symbolized man's oppression of the second sex. For Bernays, the rest was easy. He solicited a number of New York debutantes to make a political gesture for women's rights by marching in the 1929 Easter parade, smoking. Gratifyingly copious press coverage ensued: The taboo was cracked.

The third member of the pioneering trinity was Benjamin Sonnenberg, who, like Bernays, began his career as a press agent. Sonnenberg was the great master of self-promotion as an important asset in the profession of profitably promoting others. He occupied a handsome town house in New York's Gramercy Park, which he furnished with costly art and antiques and in which he threw lavish parties, commanded an extensive personal staff and organized a salon to which clients--most of whom, as corporate executives, earned less than he did--would come and marvel at the range of his acquaintances. He took care to make the frequently straightforward task of propaganda a mystery in which he alone held the secret of sinister persuasive powers, but he appears to have been rather less self-important than Bernays about the whole business. He used to say that his tombstone should be inscribed, I never took a cent from Joseph Kennedy or Howard Hughes. To Sonnenberg, in 1958, came the Ford Motor Company, urgent and anguished over how to handle the humiliating failure of the Ed-sel. Sonnenberg announced that his price for the answer to the problem would be a fiat $50,000, whatever that answer might be. At the end of three days, he announced that his plan was ready. Eager for the recipe to restore the company's good name, the Ford men rushed to his office. Sonnenberg gave them two words: "Do nothing."

"Is that all?" cried the incredulous Ford men.

"Yes," said Sonnenberg serenely as he trousered the $50,000.

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In many ways, the era in which both Sonnenberg and Bernays achieved their greatest influence--the Thirties--had significant similarities with the era that prompted the present great boom in corporate and political PR, which began around 1974. Both eras saw crisis ravage the system. In the Thirties, it seemed as though capitalism and, hence, corporations had failed America. In the Seventies, it looked as though the President and the corporations had betrayed it.

The American citizen of 1974 had, for a decade, been told by Ralph Nader that big business was selling him shoddy and possibly lethal products, poisoning his air and fouling his water. By 1974, this same citizen had come to the belated realization that he had been lied to for a decade about what was happening in Vietnam. That same year, he watched the captains of corporate America admit that they had been black-bagging slush funds into the Committee to Re-elect the President. Finally, he had watched the resignation in disgrace of Richard Nixon. The American citizen drew the appropriate conclusions. Between 1966 and 1976, for example, the percentage of the public describing itself as having a great deal of confidence in corporate leaders dropped from 51 to 20.

Nor was it just a matter of confidence. The arms manufacturers, already shaken by the negative PR stemming from their part in the Vietnam war, also faced the lowest defense budgets since the overflowing trough before the Korean War. For the oil companies, the situation was potentially even worse. Not only was there public mistrust over their possible complicity in the oil-price explosion of 1973-1974 but the U.S. Congress was threatening to break them up.

At this grave hour, corporate America began to fight back and the golden age of the PR profession began. The most visible counterattack came from the Mobil Oil Corporation and its pugnacious vice-president for public affairs, Herb Schmertz. Mobil had been running its "issue" advertisements on the op-ed page of The New York Times since 1970. In the wake of the oil shock, their tone became sharply combative as Schmertz and his copy writers began to confront the enemies of Big Oil, most notably the consumer lobby and critical journalists. So saturated have the media now become with corporate self-advertisement that it is hard to remember the stir that Mobil's aggressive posture caused and the criticisms leveled at The New York Times for running Schmertz's essays on its opinion page.

Schmertz and his boss, William Tavoulareas, tried to bring off the tricky shot of turning a major oil corporation into the underdog, maligned by slapdash journalists and rabid McGovernites. Mobil's advertising program expanded from The New York Times to hundreds of newspapers and magazines across America. Simultaneously, Schmertz went about the business of securing a captive middle-and upper-income audience on television for Mobil commercials and in the process established for himself the reputation of being the most munificent patron of culture since Lorenzo de' Medici. He did this by getting Mobil to sponsor Masterpiece Theatre on PBS. Schmertz, the patron, and Stan Calderwood of the PBS station WGBH in Boston, the original object of his patronage, can take a lot of the credit for turning public television into the prime corporate showcase, returning in the process to the sponsorship system from which commercial networks had extricated themselves in the early Sixties.

Today, Schmertz, by virtue of shouting louder, is one of the best-known flacks in the country, a notoriety on which he has capitalized by publishing Good-bye to the Low Profile, a chatty bundle of reminiscences and tips to C.E.O.s on how to handle themselves when Mike Wallace and other irritants come knocking on the door. Appropriately enough, Schmertz retained the services of a flack, William Novak, to write his book for him. If Novak, who wrote Lee Iacocca's autobiography, can turn the chairman of Chrysler into a possible candidate for the Presidency, what might he not achieve for Schmertz?

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While Schmertz was giving PR a high profile, roaring his corporation's defiance, some equally determined men were embarking on a far more devious enterprise in public relations.

In the mid-Seventies, the arms companies and their partners in the Defense Department tried to restore diminished defense contracts by quietly orchestrating the most successful PR campaign of our era: the selling of the Soviet threat. The success of this campaign can be gauged very simply. In 1975, defense spending was at a 20-year low, a matter of extreme concern for both the bureaucracy in the Department of Defense and its pals in industry. By 1985, the military budget was higher in real terms than at any time during the wars in Korea and Vietnam. This triumph was achieved not by running noisy advertisements but by the more effective strategy of getting almost every journalist in the country to accept the premises of the campaign: that the U.S. was vulnerable and the Soviets were ahead.

The most important asset for any PR campaign is the need of journalists for material, preferably organized for them in a coherent fashion. The more "exclusive" or "secret" the material, the more receptive the journalist. Thus it was that in October 1975, James Schlesinger, then Secretary of Defense, disclosed that "new intelligence" made it clear that the Soviet Union was spending twice as much on defense as had previously been estimated by the CIA. What the CIA had, in fact, discovered was that the Soviet defense industry was half as efficient as previously supposed and that, therefore, it was costing the Soviets twice as much as U.S. analysts had previously reckoned to build a tank or a plane or a missile. Soviet military capabilities had not doubled, as Schlesinger and his associates had implied, but no matter. The spending gap was born.

News of the Soviet "spending surge" slowly seeped into the journalistic culture, where, though bogus to the core, it became the focus for discussion in hundreds of editorials, columns and news stories. The hidden persuaders had achieved the first objective in a public-relations campaign, which is to get the topic on the public agenda while at the same time framing the terms of the debate.

The man at the heart of this extraordinarily effective PR campaign stands in striking antithesis to Schmertz. Whereas Schmertz strutted on the ramparts of corporate H.Q., spanking his chest, Paul Nitze had no need of such posturing. In 1975, the former Deputy Defense Secretary was 68 years old and had devoted the previous quarter of a century as an arms consultant to the successful promotion of the Soviet threat and the consequent maintenance of U.S. military spending at a high level.

His lifelong experience had taught this crafty manipulator the crucial importance of intelligence assessments in public discussion of defense matters. The CIA at that time was, from the point of view of Nitze and his fellow hawks, taking an insufficiently alarmist position on the Soviet threat. In 1975, therefore, he organized a coup. With the help of George Bush, then director of Central Intelligence, Nitze supervised, from behind the scenes, the formation of Team B, a group of reliably hawkish figures, to scrutinize the data on which the CIA based its assessments of Soviet strength and strategic intentions and, if necessary, to reassess the agency's conclusions. This they did, and their findings--that the CIA had been dangerously complacent in its estimates--were duly leaked to The New York Times. One key conclusion arrived at by the team was that the Soviets were now perfecting nuclear-missile-guidance systems that would enable them to launch a successful first strike against the U.S.

The timing of the leak was crucial, for it appeared on December 26, 1976, less than a month before Jimmy Carter took up residence in the White House. So Carter, who had campaigned on a promise to reduce the Pentagon budget, found the terms of the debate already framed for him by Nitze and his friends. Within three years, Carter found himself throwing the full weight of the Administration behind Nitze's claim of U.S. vulnerability to a first strike and had inaugurated a huge boom in military spending. Under Reagan, of course, the arguments that appeared tendentious in the mid-Seventies have become so much part of the official scenery that Nitze himself is now treated by the liberal press as a responsible moderate.

Part of the success of Nitze's campaign can be traced to two inherent advantages enjoyed by defense public relations: a supposed monopoly of information and an actual monopoly of images. A working journalist is constitutionally incapable of resisting anything with the word Secret stamped on it. Once given the Top Secret report on some new Soviet superweapon, he will generally feel relieved of the necessity to do any further checking to see if the report bears any relation to the truth.

A TV journalist operates under a further constraint in that he or she is entirely dependent on the Pentagon for film of any military activity. Since modern weapons at work and play make for exciting televised images, the networks are usually happy to make the unspoken but well-understood bargain of benign commentary in exchange for access.

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Carter's pledge to cut the defense budget (albeit by a modest amount), so easily snuffed out by a well-organized public-relations campaign, was not the only irritant bequeathed by post-Watergate America to the establishment. Carter was also following public sentiment of the time when he pledged to make human rights an important consideration in the dealings of the U.S. Government with other countries.

As Carter took office, the right-wing military junta in Argentina was embarking upon a campaign to murder and torture thousands of its citizens. Its political strategy was pithily expressed by General Iberico Saint Jean, the governor of Buenos Aires, in May 1976: "First we will kill the subversives; then we will kill all their collaborators; then...their sympathizers; then...those who remain indifferent; and, finally, we will kill the timid."

These developments did not pass unnoticed in Washington: Patricia Derian, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, took her duties seriously enough to make strong public criticisms of the Argentine regime. The PR firm of Burson-Marsteller, on the other hand, was able to turn the horrifying image being projected to the world by the generals into a profitable opportunity. At the end of 1976, it submitted to Buenos Aires its program for an international communications strategy for Argentina.

The strategy, according to the plan, amounted to the PR firm's taking over the junta's nongovernmental relations with the rest of the world, in exchange for $1,000,000. When an Argentine ambassador arrived in the U.S. or Britain or Japan, he would speak to the press and public in lines scripted for him by Burson-Marsteller. Argentine officials would learn to reply to press queries and criticism according to the guidelines drilled into them by the PR professionals. Burson-Marsteller would arrange for visits to Argentina of "opinion formers" from around the world. As the proposal reveals, the major problem in cleaning up the junta's image was a "well-defined subversion campaign of international origin." The firm's advice, as an example of the PR technique and flack mentality, has a relevance beyond the story of a propaganda campaign on behalf of a bunch of murderous, anti-Semitic Fascists.

The campaign, as mapped out in the proposal, was to be aimed at "those who influence thinking, which includes the press, Government functionaries and educators. It is important to note that we are not looking at the press as a conduit for transmitting specific messages, as is the usual case, but rather more as itself a target audience." Two other targeted groups were "those who influence investment, which includes key persons in banks and commercial enterprises, investment counselors, Government functionaries concerned with international trade, businessmen and administrative consultants" and "those who influence travel, which includes travel agents, travel writers, airline personnel and tour operators."

Having defined the targets, the plan then details the themes to which they were to be subjected. The firm urged the junta to strive above all else to project an image of economic and political stability. "The matters of terrorism and human rights, the alleged anti-Semitism and repression and isolationism must all be put to rest if Argentina is to assume its rightful place in the world." On the thorny subject of terrorism and repression, the firm suggested that the junta should stress that it was fighting terrorism not only of the left but of the right. "The government should release a white paper on what it is doing to combat terrorism, showing that the police are being controlled and that right-wing terrorism is not condoned," explains the proposal. As the writers at Burson-Marsteller must have been well aware, the government of Argentina was the right; but they also knew then, as now, that solemn oaths to extirpate terrorism are a sure way to achieve international respectability. Thus, in the interests of international public relations, the junta should "attempt, through diplomatic channels, to obtain the cooperation of a large number of other free-world governments in calling a meeting to examine terrorism and means of eliminating it. The identification of Argentina as a member of a group of free-world nations condemning all classes of terrorism and committed to using all legal means to dissipate terrorism would immediately unite it with those countries which respect human rights and civil liberties."

To a certain extent, Burson-Marsteller's advice was worth the $1,000,000. Articles sympathetic to the Argentine "predicament" in the face of terrorism did appear in the foreign press. Argentina's "responsible" and "tough-minded" finance minister's effort to bring stability to a troubled economy brought good reviews in the business press. Once the Reagan Administration took office, the task became easier as Jeane Kirkpatrick and others spoke up for the bloodstained generals.

Country management of the sort practiced by Burson-Marsteller on behalf of Argentina is now an increasingly important part of the PR industry. It is not entirely novel. Back in the Thirties, both the legendary Ivy Lee and Carl Byoir, whose name until recently adorned the third-largest PR firm in the U.S., took on the task of selling Nazi Germany. Today, however, in tune with the free-enterprise ethos of the Reagan Administration, the foreign relations of the U.S. are becoming increasingly privatized, with the top firms vying to represent foreign governments. When Jonas Savimbi, the South African--backed Angolan insurgent, went to Washington in 1986 on a fruitful trip to generate support for his cause, his visit was entirely organized and superintended by the operatives of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. So alert was Savimbi to the importance of PR that he actually took time off from an important battle in the Angolan bush to negotiate his contract with the emissaries of the Washington firm. While Savimbi went with Black, Manafort, the Angolan government thought it only prudent to retain the services of Gray and Company, the best known of the Washington firms specializing in this line of business. A Gray executive, Daniel Murphy, gave a telling example of the contemporary blurring of State Department and PR-firm functions when he announced in statesmanlike tones that the best thing for Angola would be the removal of Soviet, Cuban and South African troops from the country and that "Gray and Company would work toward this end."

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Just as relations between the United States and the rest of the world are increasingly becoming the province of the public-relations industry, so, too, are other old-fashioned activities that have hitherto managed to exist without the assistance of flacks. The growth of litigation PR, as popularized by John Scanlon, means that court cases are no longer a simple matter of advocates, judge and jury. And no Wall Street titan would dream of embarking on a take-over battle without the aid of expert advice in merger-and-acquisition PR to blacken the name of the other side and defend his.

Then there is the vast and multifaceted field of public affairs, which is public relations as applied to the Government. This has long been a familiar feature of the political landscape under the more familiar title of lobbying.

Lobbying may be thought to be distinct from PR as it has been discussed here in that its object is not a mass audience but a limited number of relevant representatives or officeholders. To be sure, pressing the flesh--or greasing the palm--of a few selective movers and shakers is a prosperous and growing profession; there are more than 10,000 lobbyists listed in the Directory of Washington Representatives alone. But there are aspects to the profession today unknown to simpler ages. Is your corporation menaced by some legislation currently before Congress? Apart from having your lobbyist make the correct representations and campaign contributions, it may be wise to retain the services of a firm such as Matt Reese and Associates of Arlington, Virginia. For a suitable fee, the Reese group will arrange for an instant grass-roots campaign to spring up in the districts of key legislators, which will shower the hapless representatives with letters and Mailgrams urging or denouncing whatever piece of legislation is the subject of the campaign. The business is rendered possible by geodemographics, a computer analysis of census and opinion-poll data that enables the specialists at Reese to identify and target what the specialists call lifestyle clusters who can be expected to respond to a suitably crafted appeal on behalf of the client. Thus, in a campaign on behalf of the natural-gas industry in 1984, Reese targeted, among others, Mid-American Blues--i.e., blue-collar families in the Midwest, deemed likely to be roused to action by the prospect of U.S. dependence on foreign gas unless U.S. natural gas were speedily deregulated.

Reese honed the skills he now applies to lobbying on behalf of large corporations while working for politicians running for office. Another and far-better-known professional to have moved from the political to the corporate lobbying business is Michael Deaver, a man who is perhaps more responsible than anyone else today for the dominance of public relations in our national life.

Deaver gained his greatest notoriety when he surrendered his greatest power. Until he left the White House in 1985 in the hope of making a lot of money as a lobbyist by trading on his close connections with the Oval Office, Deaver had been the most important and powerful public-relations man in the United States. He was the keeper of the President's image; and under his guidance, the image projected by the Chief Executive became far more important and powerful in the eyes of the media and the public than Reagan's actual behavior.

Deaver's great genius was to treat the Presidency as if it were a movie production of which he was the director. The President, a professional actor who had received the bulk of his political education as a flack for General Electric and who subsequently described the Presidency as "the best role I ever played," was in intuitive sympathy with Deaver's style.

With such a client, it was not hard for Deaver and his associates in the White House to put proven PR techniques to work. Thus, in accordance with the basic flack rule of setting the terms of the debate and controlling the flow of information from the White House, they instituted a line of the day. A meeting chaired by Deaver would consider the question "What are we going to do today to enhance the image of the President?" together with "What do we want the press to cover today and how?" Once decided upon, the line (which might be anything from the President's projection of his concern over Soviet arms-control proposals to Congress' responsibility for the budget deficit) would be relayed via computer to all senior Administration officials, as well as press spokespeople throughout the entire Federal bureaucracy. A fine example of this system at work came a few days after the bombing of Libya in April 1986. The media, after dutifully echoing Administration euphoria over the raid, were beginning to raise awkward questions about the precise number of innocent women and children killed in the attack. At that point, with one accord, official spokesmen at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon expressed total lack of interest in Libya as a topic and refused to answer questions about it.

Having thus established a monopoly of theme in the daily national discourse, the White House Hacks bent all their efforts to ensuring that this monopoly would not be eroded by the vigilant guardians of democracy collectively known as the Washington press corps. That meant giving access to the President under conditions of maximum control, best symbolized by the photo opportunities in which Ron and Nancy walk toward their helicopter smiling as the chopper's engines drown out any possibility of coherent discourse.

Against this ongoing backdrop, the PR campaign calls for a number of set-piece performances each year. A classic Deaver production was the D-day commemoration on the beaches of Normandy in 1984. Entranced with the visuals of Reagan on Omaha Beach, the press was adroitly steered away from any inconvenient questions about Reagan's whereabouts on June 6, 1944, and similarly failed to note that the logistics of Deaver's production had caused a large number of elderly veterans to be excluded from the ceremonials and the scene of their heroism 40 years before.

It is not as though the Deaver team were the first in White House history to think a lot about public relations. Nixon was surrounded by PR men, most notably Bob Haldeman, who enjoyed, at least for a while, a considerable measure of success. Jimmy Carter had his image minders in the form of Jody Powell, Gerald Rafshoon and Pat Caddell. But the Reagan White House has two advantages denied the Nixon and Carter teams. There is the client himself, seasoned by his years in Hollywood and with G.E. to a profound understanding of public relations and self-projection.

But in addition, and perhaps more important, Reagan has been the beneficiary of all those other PR onslaughts on the American people. The way was paved for his benign policies toward big corporations by the long campaign of Schmertz and his fellow corporate flacks. Public acceptance of vast increases in military spending since 1981 would hardly have been so easily gained without the unremitting efforts of the Nitze school. Anti-terrorism, now so frequently a line of the day, had earlier been recognized by Burson-Marsteller as a suitable foil for otherwise unappealing policies. If the issues with which the White House public-relations team must deal are to a considerable extent the products of other PR campaigns, then they are that much more susceptible to "handling."

The success of PR in dominating the Government of this country can be gauged by the rare occasions on which it breaks down. To the anguish of his minders, the President must give a number of press conferences each year and, thus, face questioning for half an hour under conditions of less than total control. To the ordinary viewer, these performances are sometimes horrifyingly incompetent. In a June 1986 press conference, for example, the President displayed complete ignorance of a major Supreme Court decision on abortion earlier that day, twice answered the wrong question and reversed his recently announced decision to abandon SALT II, for which error he had to be sharply corrected by his own press flack the next day. An unkind person might have said that the President belonged in a nursing home. The networks were not unkind, and neither were the major political correspondents. Reagan's astounding performance barely raised a ripple.

And that is the measure of the cumulative impact and success of PR in our time. Acts and consequences cease to have a causal, moral relationship. Thus, when the President distorts the historical record or misstates a major policy decision, the media do not conclude that Ronald Reagan is therefore a liar or an ignoramus. Like the journalist who lied to Bill Broyles, they say that the President could have handled himself better and comment knowledgeably about the PR stratagems that will be brought into play to restore the image. Reality becomes a matter of PR techniques. In fact, the assumption that public relations must be the dominant factor in all acts of state is applied to the rest of the world. In 1985, the Soviets suggested that both sides stop testing nuclear weapons. The Administration responded with an obviously PR-inspired invitation to the Soviets to come to Nevada and watch a U.S. nuke go off. The media began to talk about the "public-relations war" over nuclear testing.

When Bernays wrote his book on propaganda in 1928, he spoke of his colleagues in the business as manipulators and as "an invisible government" ruling the country. So saturated today is American democracy by the ethos and techniques of the public-relations profession that the manipulators no longer need remain invisible. They glory in their power. Public relations has finally come of age in the visible Government of Ronald Reagan.

The good, the bad and the whoops!

The Good: Every year, the Public Relations Society of America presents the Silver Anvil awards for good PR, whose quality is "ultimately shaped on the anvil of public opinion," as the P.R.S.A. says.

In 1986, Tang March Across America for MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), submitted by Richard Weiner, Inc., and its client General Foods, swept the field in the Special Events and Observances (More than Seven Days)--Business category. The company had introduced Sugar Free Tang in April 1985. Richard Weiner was retained to develop a comprehensive PR program that would target mothers. The result was the march.

The results? Without the expenditure of a penny in paid advertising. 47 newspapers featured the promotion on the front page. The morning network-TV shows covered it extensively, as did the local affiliates: "More than 325,000,000 consumer impressions were generated," according to one citation. MADD got a lot of publicity and Tang sales jumped 12 percent.

The Bad: NASA, described by space expert John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists as a "public-relations operation with a space agency attached," must qualify as the biggest PR disaster of 1986. What was essentially a public-relations stunt--the orbiting of schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe aboard the shuffle Challenger--literally blew up in the faces of America's schoolchildren.

For a parallel to the shuttle explosion, seasoned flacks go back to the unhappy experience of drug company Eli Lilly in 1982. The company introduced a new drug called Oraflex, promoting it in media releases as an arthritis remedy. It subsequently transpired that overseas trials had indicated the strong possibility of an unfortunate side effect--Oraflex killed people. Apparently, Lilly management had been aware of that fact before launching the drug in the U.S. with a $12,000,000 media drive. Sales were stopped after 61 deaths caused Oraflex to be banned in Britain. Lilly chairman Richard D. Wood later claimed that he had halted sales not "from a scientific point of view" but only because adverse reactions had become a media event. In other words, Oraflex was worse than lethal--it was bad PR.

The Whoops!: Flacks had a PR disaster all their own in 1986 when Detroit PR man Anthony Franco, who while president of the Public Relations Society of America liked to lecture about professional ethics, came under SEC investigation for a little insider trading in a client's stock.

The architects of modern PR

great manipolators' hall of fame

Ivy Lee applied his practical PR approach by calming things down for John D. Rockefeller after his company had knocked off 21 men, women and children during a miners' strike in Colorado. EDWARD BERNAYS, nephew of Sigmund Freud and PR's first philosopher, believed that "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society." BEN SONNENBERG, a former press agent, pioneered the concept of self-promotion, which revolved around a salon to which he invited the great and near great. MICHAEL DEAVER directed the White House line of the day, treating the Presidency as if it were a movie. When he entered private business, Deaver was accused of trading on his White House connections.

Words to hype by

Important jargon no flack can do without!

Classified--Along with secret and top secret, this word is a serious press attractant. Just slug it on a sleepy report of doubtful credibility and watch an unquestioning press drool.

Pitch--An attempt to snag a journalist's interest in a client or a product, as in, "I gave him my pitch."

Press release--A short piece of writing about a client, crafted to make a low-budget newsroom view it as news copy.

Copy points--The main message a client wants the PR operative to put across.

The drill--As in "I put him through the drill," meaning that the PR professional has been interviewed by the press and has addressed the prearranged points.

Professional--Anyone in public relations above the secretarial level.

Coordinator--A public-relations secretary.

Media consultant--A press agent.

Spokesperson--Any expert or celebrity who has been chosen to get the client's message across. Often requires a make-over and spokesperson training. Frequently requires a PR operative to help control his/her excesses. For example, a major-league ballplayer and spokesperson for a drug company announced, with no scientific knowledge to bock him up, that within three or four years there would be a cure for a widespread disease. The company's PR deportment was apoplectic; the star was told to temper his imagination.

Increasingly competitive subject--An overexposed topic.

News bureau--An information center that appears to have no commercial connections but is really a phone in an office manned by a flack who is being paid by commercial interests to give the right answers.

Media event--A gimmick that will get the media out when there is no story.

Position paper--A document designed to address the weak points of the client or product. In the words of a professional, "Position papers provide loopholes and generally cover your ass."

Survey--A study financed by a client solely to get news coverage. If the product or issue requires a plug, just commission a survey and then publicize the results. The media will almost always mistake it for news.

The whizzes

a guide to the crackerjack flacks

John Scanlon

A vice-president at Daniel J. Edelman, Scanlon specializes in litigation PR. He helped CBS turn the PR tables on General William Westmoreland.

William Novak

Novak is the pre-eminent flack biographer, having co-written puffy tomes with Lee lacocca, Herb Schmertz and Sydney Biddle Barrows, a.k.a. the Mayflower Madam.

Daniel Murphy

The vice-chairman at Gray and Company, the Washington firm that leads the rest in country management. Former Navy admiral Murphy has sailed clients such as Angola into calm waters.

Matt reese

Reese redefined grass roots. For a fee, through the magic of geodemographics, he produces and directs instant grass-roots campaigns nearly anywhere from his office in Arlington, Virginia.

Herb Schmertz

He mated Mobil Oil and Masterpiece Theatre, led with Mobil's chin during the oil crises of the Seventies and is well known for his confrontational style of flackery. Nobody does it better.