Welcome to White House Watch, a new reported feature here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, written by me. I aim to continue what I started with the First 100 Days, my daily chronicle of the Donald Trump White House’s whirlwind first period. That ended this weekend (read my wrap-up for Trump’s first 100 days here), but the Trump presidency goes on—and so does our reported coverage of the White House.
The truth is, White House Watch isn’t new. A longstanding column at the New Republic magazine, White House Watch became a must-read in Washington during the 10 years it was written by Fred Barnes, starting in 1985. Fred covered three White Houses in that column, reporting behind-the-scenes details that helped Washington (including people working in the White House) understand better what the president was doing and saying.
Fred left TNR and White House Watch to co-found THE WEEKLY STANDARD in 1995. When I joined the staff 15 years later, Fred was my first boss and my mentor. As I prepared to write the new White House Watch here at TWS, I thought it would be worthwhile to interview Fred about his experiences covering the White House. Our exchange, edited for clarity, is below. And watch this space for more reporting on the Trump White House.
Michael Warren: How did you get to start writing White House Watch?
Fred Barnes: White House Watch had been a column in the New Republic for a couple decades or more, first by a guy named John Osborne, and I read him when he was doing the Nixon White House and the Gerald Ford White House. And then Mort Kondracke, my great friend, came in at the New Republic and he started writing it. Well, he got hired away by Newsweek and so I was hired to replace him at the New Republic.
This was 1985. And my view of it was, this needs to be about the president, and not just about the factions in the White House fighting. Every White House has them. They’re not quite as stark as they are in the Trump White House today, but they were there in the Reagan White House and both Bush White Houses. There’s always the ideologues versus the pragmatists, and that was certainly there, and I wrote a little about it. But the column really needs to be about the president. That’s what people are interested in, that’s what’s important. My view is, I don’t care how influential you think some of these aides are, presidents are always in charge.
Dick Cheney did not run the George W. Bush White House. Jim Baker didn’t run the Ronald Reagan White House. It’s always the president. Presidents, when they come in, always realize, “Gee, I’ve got a lot of power. I have a lot authority, and I’m the man!” So the president’s important.
MW: What was your goal when you took over the column?
FB: It was different under Reagan than it would be under Trump, because presidents in those days were not tweeting, they were not saying things all day, they were not going public with their every thought on morning TV shows and so on. So my goal in writing the White House Watch was to find out things that President Reagan and then President Bush were saying but not in public.
There were a lot of meetings. You just had to hunt down people where you could find out what was the president doing, what was he saying, and if you could get that, you were doing something the rest of the press was not doing.
The idea was always to figure out, what’s the president doing, what’s he thinking. That’s a little harder with Trump because he’s so public with so much of it. There’s so many conventions in writing about the White House that you want to avoid, or at least avoid emphasizing. The political press in Washington spends half its time on the divisions among the White House staff. The White House staff is important, but they overdo it. “Is it Steve Bannon, or is it Jared Kushner? They’re fighting and they don’t like each other!” The important thing is what the president does, and that’s what you always have to keep in mind.
MW: How many times did you interview the president when you were writing this column?
FB: I interviewed Reagan several times when he was a candidate. I interviewed him once as a group, but then I was invited to a lunch with him in 1986 in that little room next to the Oval Office that was used for other things by Bill Clinton. And then I interviewed him in 1987.
Remember, by 1987, according to this book by Bill O’Reilly, the president had supposedly started to lose it. Well, I interviewed him in 1987. I brought in a picture that he autographed of the second movie he ever made, called Sergeant Murphy. And he did it at the Presidio of Monterey, and it just so happens the post commander was my grandfather, and his daughter became my mother, and one of the young lieutenants in the cavalry turned out to be my father. I had this picture I had of all the women at the post, including my grandmother, and Ronald Reagan. This is 1987, now, when he was supposed to be losing it. I brought the picture in—he remembered everything about it. I realized he really did have a photographic memory. And he autographed it.
He was extremely sharp. And then I saw him the next year in 1988 when he went to Moscow and was very, very sharp there, including this great speech and Q&A sessions at Moscow University, one of the most forbidding campuses I’ve ever seen. It was more like a prison!
MW: What was your favorite column you wrote?
FB: It was in 1986 after the summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik, Iceland. And Reagan proposed, as he had said many times in public before, to eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. And Gorbachev agreed: “We can do that, but you have to get rid of Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiatives, the missile-defense system.” And Reagan said no. And that was the end of the summit, and they left, and my story was about the mood on Air Force One, flying back to Washington. There were only two people who were really happy: Ronald Reagan and his communications director, Pat Buchanan. They were delighted that it fell apart. I mean, Reagan didn’t mind, because he wasn’t going to give up SDI. It was the kind of column I was very proud to have written because it was about Reagan and not about the rest of the staff.
MW: How did the column change when it became the George H.W. Bush administration?
FB: For one thing, it was a lot less interesting. I just knew a lot of the people coming in. I had covered the Ford White House [for the Baltimore Sun] and I had covered the Reagan White House, and a lot of the old Ford people came back in the George H.W. Bush administration. And I dealt with a guy who I had gotten to know very well who became the vice president’s chief of staff, and that was Bill Kristol.
There were people to talk to there, but they didn’t spend a whole lot of time trashing each other. It was a different era, it was a different White House, and the press was certainly not pro-Reagan or pro-Bush, but they weren’t oppositional in the way the press is now. They were not merely objective. Look, conservative presidents are covered much more harshly than liberal, Democratic presidents. But nothing like the way Trump is covered. Now, it is purely oppositional. They’re not just being objective, they’re not reporters just giving you their analysis, which may be slanted. It’s just, we’re against this guy, and we want to bring him down.
MW: You covered the Clinton White House for a few years with White House Watch. How did that change? You were probably perceived as less friendly in the Clinton White House.
FB: I was, particularly by that time. I had started doing television. I did a show called The McLaughlin Group that was aired on the weekends and was a very popular show for a while. And on shows like that, you tend to be very candid, and I was.
And so the Clinton people knew that I was a conservative and I was not going to be particularly sympathetic to them. This was before THE WEEKLY STANDARD started. So it was a little harder to find sources. But there are always ways to do it. You find out, who is the president meeting with? And, well, he meets with a lot of guys on Capitol Hill, in the House and the Senate. And they all like to talk! So there’s always a way to do it, but it really wasn’t quite the same. I would say White House Watch fell off in its exclusivity in the Clinton years.
MW: Was it valuable to spend time in the White House briefing room?
FB: I practically never went.
MW: So where did you go, and what did you do?
FB: Well, I didn’t go anywhere. I just talked to people. You really have to drum up sources, and you never know where they come from. You never know who they’re going to be. Sometimes it’ll be somebody you just met. And there are people who like to blab, or they like to build themselves up, they want to show you they’re in the know. You ask a question, and they answer it! And it can come from odd people. You know from your reporting after you’ve talked to a person once or twice, you get a pretty good idea whether you’re ever going to learn anything from them or not. And you want to stick with the people you want to learn things from. That’s your job.
It is source development. It is reporting. There is no sense in writing a White House Watch column that is purely opinion. It has to be a lot of reporting. It’s going to be slanted. It’s going to be your opinion, but it needs to have some real facts and things in there. Any anecdotes or quirks are fine. I’ve seen them described as “texture.” I think a lot of texture can really be helpful. People love to read it.
MW: How did you know that people in the White House were reading White House Watch?
FB: They did. Some of them would tell me. They used to refer to my columns.
In those days, the New Republic‘s deadline was on Wednesdays. And I think on Thursday or Friday, they’d send about 30 or 35 copies to the White House, and people would read it. You can ask Andy [Ferguson] and other people who were there, and I think a number of them did. But it wasn’t just because I was writing it. It had become a habit going back to earlier White Houses. Now I think I may have gotten a bigger audience there, and that’s encouraging. You didn’t have the internet then, and so you would just have to rely on people telling you, because you didn’t quite get the feedback that you can get now.
I remember there was a guy named Rich Williamson, now deceased, an ambitious, young Republican. I forget what job he had at the Reagan White House, but he was kind of a blabber. And I talked to him some, and others did as well. Jim Baker, the chief of staff, found out about it. This poor guy got exiled to some no-name job in Vienna—Austria! Poor guy.
MW: How should I think about covering President Trump?
FB: Trump has been so covered. Usually the Washington Post and the New York Times will have a couple of stories about the Trump White House every day, and sometimes three or four, on the front page. So it’s a White House that has been covered differently and so much because Trump is such a big figure, and he’s saying things that are controversial all the time. I think he dominates almost every conversation in Washington, no matter what subject they start to be on, they wind up being about Trump. It didn’t quite work that way with Reagan.
One thing you want to do in White House Watch is find out what Trump is doing and saying not in public. There may not be much of that!
