Crisis Communications

by Michael Deaver, former Chief of Staff to President Ronald Reagan

This is the transcript of Michael Deaver's remarks on "Crisis Communications" delivered to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Arlington, Virginia on February 1, 2002. Bellwether Forum co-sponsored CPAC and Mr. Deaver's speech.

I'm delighted to be here. I was on an airplane not long ago and a fellow sat next to me coming in from St. Louis and never said a word to me until we started coming over the monuments into Reagan National Airport and finally he turned to me and he said, "Pardon me, but I've been dying to ask you a question."

And I said, "Sure, what's that?" He said, "Didn't you used to be somebody?"

I get a lot of credit for, as some people say, Ronald Reagan's image maker. Well, Ronald Reagan didn't need an image maker. The only thing I ever did for Ronald Reagan was to light him well. He did most of the rest of it himself.

But, let me talk a little bit, for a few minutes, about the 30 years or so that I've been involved in communications. A lots of things have happened in those years. I started out in 1964 working for Barry Goldwater and we carried six states and the Eastern press said that the two-party system was dead. And four years later Richard Nixon won in a landslide.

And, then we had Watergate and the press said there would no longer be a Republican Party. And, six years later, Ronald Reagan became the first President to serve two full terms in 35 years.

And then Bill Clinton got elected President and two years after that, we took over the House of Representatives for the first time in 50 years.

A lot of things have happened in the 30 years that I've been involved in politics and communications and a lot of things have happened to the technology in those years. It doesn't seem possible that when I left the White House in 1985, there was not one computer, there were three networks, CNN was just coming into the pool, there were 16 Lilly Tomlins in the basement of the EOB plugging in telephone calls, and today we have 500 networks, everybody in the White House is on e-mail. You call the White House today and you get a mechanized telephone system.

The communications, the technology of the internet and of the global television and the dish and cable have changed the amount of information we get. I saw something not long ago that said we get more information in a day than our grandparents got in a lifetime. Just think about that.

We have become a society that walk around as if we had a channel selector on the end of our hands and we surf from the time we get up in the morning until we go to bed at night. And, when something historic, or horrific, or amusing, or entertaining happens, we stop for a few seconds and then we start surfing again. So that all of the technology of information has changed but I suggest to you that in crisis management or any kind of communications, there are three or four principles that haven't changed since Caesar changed his toga to purple so he could stand out from the rest of the senators.

All of these things that I'm going to talk about very briefly, I learned from Ronald Reagan. And the first one is you have to know who you are before you can communicate effectively. If you don't know who you are, if you're confused about what you are or who you are, the message will be muddled.

Years ago before Reagan became President, he and I used to travel around the country on what he called the "mashed potato circuit" and we were not an army of people, it was just he and I. And we went into New York on a Saturday night, because he was going to make a speech Sunday afternoon. Sunday morning he called my room and he said, "You know, I'd like to go for a walk, would you like to go for a walk with me?" And I said, "Sure" and we took a couple of steps out on the avenue and instantly there was this little crowd of people around us, and one of these fellows had a spiral notebook and he took it out and thrust it at Reagan with a pen and he said, "I know you." He said, "I've seen you on television and in the movies" and he said, "Ray Milland." And, Reagan signed the book "Ray Milland" and handed it back to him.

And as we walked on, I said, "Governor, why didn't you tell that guy who you are?" And he said, "Well, I know who I am." And it was the great secret of his success. There was never any doubt about who he was. David McCulloch's book about Harry Truman has a wonderful line in it that works for Ronald Reagan too. McCulloch said about Harry Truman, there was nobody in the world he rather be. And isn't that what we want in a leader? And, frankly, that's what we've got in a leader today as far as I'm concerned.

The other thing is that you have to settle on two or three simple messages in order to communicate. You can be all over the lot all the time and the impression, you remember I'm talking about the surfing we do today, the impression becomes very fuzzy and we have seen political leaders, both in the Republican and the Democratic Party, who are fuzzy, and part of it has to do with not only not knowing who they are, but frankly it has to do with not understanding that you have to have simple messages.

And, thirdly, you have to understand today that you can't say anything once. You can't say anything once today. It doesn't work, largely because of what I just said about the amount of information that comes to you. That's why you see presidents and candidates today – Bill Clinton, "It's the economy, stupid." We knew exactly during the last weeks of the Clinton campaign what he was talking about, it was the economy and it was successful for him. He didn't stick with that after he became President for a while, it became muddled. But, then, about a year and a half into his presidency, he figured it out again.

So, know who you are, have some simple messages, understand that you can't say something once and lastly, you have to repeat it over and over and over and over again. So those are the three or four lessons that I think are, that sort of mean stays of a good communications program whether you are in a crisis or whether you are simply trying to communicate a message. All those my pal Reagan did in spades. So I think that I will close with that and let the other panelists talk and then we'll take some questions.

Thank you.

Michael Deaver was deputy White House chief of staff in the Reagan administration. He is currently Vice President of Edelman Public Relations Worldwide, and author of the best-selling book "A Different Drummer: My Thirty Years With Ronald Reagan."