News Watch Thomas Griffith: Restoring Reputations

Newswatch

The press makes and breaks reputations: that's well understood in show business by people who spend half their lives trying to get their name in the paper and the second half of their careers trying to keep it out. In television coverage of Washington, CBS Correspondent Robert Pierpoint discovered, the truism is "that most people are not worth interviewing if they are not known to the public, and that once known, they often don't want to be interviewed."

Not all careers follow that trajectory of seeking the press, then avoiding it, or of still seeking attention after the press has lost interest. More fascinating are the public figures who lose out in press favor and then make it back: they show skill in damage limitation. Billie Jean King at first denied having an affair with a woman who sued her for palimony, then, against her attorney's advice, called a press conference to admit it. She ended up more praised for her honesty than condemned for her behavior. John Kennedy quickly took responsibility for the Bay of Pigs and saved himself endless days of press search through the Pentagon and the White House for those who had misled him. Moral: once a public burning is in prospect, act swiftly before the kindling can be gathered.

In Jane Fonda's earlier off-to-Hanoi days, she was widely reviled as a combination of La Pasionaria and shrill brat. She has since become thought of as a fine actress. Her book on physical exercise is a bestseller, and she has a chain of body-fitness shops. She hasn't changed all that much; opinion has. In most American families, she is now regarded as the niece with strident and unpopular opinions that are accepted as part of her.

For politicians, the sustaining and safeguarding of reputation come hard. Not only are they cut up by rivals, and by columnists with opposing views, but their presence, in the limelight exposes traits in them that reporters seize upon. With Gerald Ford, a frequent target was his physical clumsiness; with Jimmy Carter, it was his "meanness." (The knock on Ronald Reagan, which White House publicists are trying to deflect, is "insensitivity" about the poor.) Carter is still in limbo: he roams the country flogging his memoirs, to a public not yet ready to resuscitate him.

Reagan's patchy record in foreign affairs, though, is reviving the reputations of some who used to tend the store. Zbigniew Brzezinski, once associated with the confusions of Carter's policy, now gets respectful attention in the papers. So does Carter, when he is talking about Arabs and Israelis. Henry Kissinger, anathema to Reagan's right-wing supporters, has been called in as a consultant by Secretary of State George Shultz. "The reason guru-grabbing has come into such vogue is that a strategy vacuum exists within the divided Reagan White House," writes conservative Columnist William Safire. He regards Reagan's National Security Adviser, William Clark, as "Living proof that still waters can run shallow." Safire's remark is living proof that when it comes to malice toward one another, top conservatives are in a class by themselves.