Read So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life Online
Authors: Frank Mankiewicz,Joel L. Swerdlow
In 1983, I left NPR to become a senior vice president of Gray and Company, which later merged into Hill & Knowlton (now HK Strategies), where I have remained for more than thirty years. I was sixty years old when I went into the public relations business—a normal time to have a brief capstone of one’s career before retiring. But the mathematics of life in the United States has changed. With America’s new longevity, I stayed in the PR business—and the center of D.C. action—well into the new century. The employment choice capping my career became the job I stayed with far longer than any other.
Throughout this time, I have given the same basic advice to clients, especially those in crisis:
• Never take public relations advice from your lawyer; never take legal advice from your public affairs consultant.
• Tell the
truth;
tell it
all;
and tell it
now
—especially in a crisis. If you do not, the truth will dribble out, and no matter how bad things are, they will get worse.
• When you are interviewed on television, long answers turn off the audience, which is more interested in how you’re dressed than in what you’re saying.
A person who took jobs at the Peace Corps and with Robert F. Kennedy without asking or knowing what his salary would be jumping into
public relations
? An effort to cash in? An act based on losing youthful idealism? A sign of giving up on politics? Or does thinking in such terms show a bias against public relations?
Some clients were interesting, and some clients’ battles were exciting. Some issues had good guys and bad guys. But I learned the most basic lesson during my first few weeks on the job. Robert Gray had assigned me to a new client, NBC, the National Broadcasting Company. NBC was really standing in for the other big networks in a titanic battle with the studios that produced and distributed almost all the leading TV shows over who had the rights to rerun the programs after they’d had their first runs on the network. NBC maintained it had paid the producers for those rights, and the producers just as vigorously claimed they had only given up first-run rights. For wildly popular shows like
Little House on the Prairie
and
All in the Family,
literally billions of dollars were at stake. This was, after all, the early 1980s, before cable, when all the programs most anyone watched were on NBC, CBS, or ABC. ABC, in fact, had recovered from its disastrous days of the 1970s, when its prime-time shows had such poor audience ratings that the comedian Milton Berle once suggested the way to end the war in Vietnam was to put it in prime time on ABC; it would be canceled in thirteen weeks. I ran into Robert Strauss, the consummate lobbyist, at some reception or other, and he asked what client his pal Bob Gray had put me on. I replied it was NBC, at which Strauss took enormous delight and, with an arm around my shoulders and a big grin, said, “Great, that’s the best kind of client to have; I wish I had a client in that fight.” When I asked what made it so great, he said it was because the only thing at issue was money—lots of money. He explained, “There’s no environmental issue there, so that doesn’t count; there are no First Amendment issues involved, nothing threatening the benefits of people who are disabled or senior citizens—just billions of dollars. All that’s at issue is whether one extremely rich group of people is going to get richer. Think of it—the other side can call you up one afternoon and offer you more money just to represent them instead of the client you have, and you can agree, and switch, without the slightest remorse or feeling of guilt.”
As it turned out, the matter was settled by the FCC, and sure enough, Robert Strauss represented both sides in the settlement, with the consent of each. His main point has remained valid: The best clients are businesses seeking to maximize profits fighting other businesses also wanting to maximize profits; there are no principles or key issues involved, and you won’t feel bad about changing sides.
Bob Gray was a real character. Among other things in the public relations business, he was the first to combine public relations with lobbying, taking on legislative tasks as well as crisis/reputation assignments. He rigidly excluded any political action for or against candidates, however, making the perfectly valid point that “it would be very difficult to lobby some guy after you had just supported his opponent.” He was also highly social, a friend of the Reagans’, and even often escorted the First Lady to events for which her husband either had a conflicting engagement or wished he had. And those who had visited him at home noted that his bathroom was totally papered with stock certificates representing failed investments.
I liked the lobbying, where sometimes you could argue the merits of a matter rather than just use whatever influence was at hand. “Influence” can be criticized, but it comes from many sources, not just the suspect ones. There’s a whole side of lobbying now, with really respectable goals and capable of being drummed up and then exerted on politicians in perfectly honorable ways. It even has a fancy name; it’s called grassroots politics or sometimes just plain grass roots. And all it means is either rallying large numbers of an elected official’s constituents in support of some piece of legislation your client wants passed or defeated—overwhelming poll numbers, in which case the lobbyist is hardly needed (to paraphrase Joseph Kennedy, you don’t want to pay for a landslide)—or else getting the support of key people in a particular member’s district, people who could swing votes: union presidents, bank managers, CEOs of major companies, real estate tycoons, editors, TV station managers, anchormen, and talk show hosts.
It means, in a great phrase I heard once from then-Senator John Kerry, “de-Keatingizing” the member. I was lobbying Senator Kerry once on a legislative matter, and he interrupted my pitch to say, “You don’t need to sell me; I’m on your side—I think your client’s right. But you have to de-Keatingize me.” Well, I’d never heard that word—“de-Keatingize”—so I asked him what it meant. He harked back to Charlie Keating, a big real estate developer and a large figure in the savings and loan scandal of the early 1980s. It had been alleged that Keating had paid large sums of money to five senators (none of them Kerry) to get him off the hook. The senators were known as the Keating Five and suffered, two or three disastrously, at the polls. Kerry had no intention of being “Keatingized”; that is to say, having it said that he took a position on an issue, or a vote, because of the influence of one campaign contributor, or even a group of them. So his message to me was to “de-Keatingize” him by making it clear, in public, that our position—and his—had strong support in his state. Once
The Boston Globe
could report the support for our client was widespread among key people, the senator was free to call it as he saw it.
* * *
What we’re selling in public relations is getting our telephone calls returned. Much of it comes down to what Branch Rickey, the great baseball executive who racially integrated Major League Baseball, once said: “What is called ‘luck’ is often, in my experience, the residue of design.”
The entire field is nebulous. Public relations. Press relations. Lobbying. “Redress of grievances.” How could you ever distinguish among them? In any particular instance, one might be able to define the work. But definitions that work across the board? Very difficult, maybe impossible.
* * *
I have several boxes filled with news clippings, television interviews, and Web stories that focused on me once I began to work in public relations. They cover three decades and tell the same story over and over again: Mankiewicz, from a legendary Hollywood family and accomplished in national politics and journalism, has made the transition and established himself as an outpost of something new in public relations, but no one quite knows how to describe it. The only thing that changes is the photograph. I keep getting older.
After skimming through these boxes, I select one profile from
The New York Times
in 1987, several years into my new career. The story is about medium length and has a nice photograph of me smiling. It has no “news” to report and quotes me as believing that “everyone has the right to public relations counsel just like they have a right to legal counsel.”
I groan now when I reread it. That story drives me crazy. To some people, the statement might have sounded brilliant in a Machiavellian, cynical way. As politics and media have morphed into public relations, just about everyone may
need
PR counsel in one form or another. But the statement is incorrect and silly and just the opposite of what I believe. The right to public relations counsel is not guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled, and confirmed time and again, that everyone has the constitutional right to a lawyer, but there’s nothing about PR said or implied in the Constitution. The
Times
misattributed to me a (really silly) statement about a “right” to public relations help actually made by Robert Dilenschneider, a PR executive who once headed Hill & Knowlton.
* * *
I am often asked: “Given how information flows and opinions are formed in our times, if one side has PR and the other side doesn’t, the playing field is hardly even.”
I usually reply, “As the real world works, people with more money can buy more lawyers and better lawyers, which often translates into more ‘justice.’ And people with money often, but not always, can buy better public relations.” Is this bad—an egregious distortion of how a civil society should work? Let me describe a few typical experiences.
* * *
The moral aspects of such “public relations” efforts mostly lie in the eyes of the beholder. When public relations firms worked closely with Jewish groups both before and during World War II to generate attention for and concern about Nazi policies, was that “propaganda”? Or, for that matter, are efforts today on behalf of the environment or democracy “propaganda”?
Let me share an example.
* * *
We began representing the Citizens for a Free Kuwait a week or so after the Iraqi invasion. We were asked to undertake the effort by a group of Kuwaiti citizens living in the United States, including a number of people who had been a part of the earlier National Assembly and, in some cases, had served as ministers of an earlier government. Our job was to acquaint Americans—as best we could—with the country of Kuwait, its people, and the facts of the Iraqi invasion and occupation. We played absolutely no role in helping determine whether or not the United States should intervene militarily to help regain Kuwait’s territory. In fact, we consistently urged our clients that their role should be an informative one only and that they should leave politics and political and military decisions to the U.S. Congress. They did that, and as a result, at no time did we participate in any propaganda effort of any kind either supporting or opposing initiation of the Gulf War.
Our major effort had been to try to counter the notion that Kuwait was “just another Arab country.” We pointed to freedom for women to drive, dress as they pleased, pursue careers (including deans of medical and law schools)—everything, in short, but vote, but then, neither could men. We also pointed to fully paid education, health care, and so on. Michael Kramer of
Time
summed it up as “a pretty good country in a bad neighborhood.”
We arranged for Kuwaiti citizens in the United States to speak on a variety of college campuses, we worked to organize rallies in support of a free Kuwait, we were able to persuade several professional football teams to schedule pro-Kuwait rallies and other events at halftime during the NFL games that fall, we provided the media with news from inside Kuwait, we were instrumental in presenting evidence that led to resolutions of support for Kuwait from city councils and state legislatures, and we also—at the request of Chairman Tom Lantos of the House of Representatives’ Human Rights Caucus—provided the names of some potential witnesses among Americans and Kuwaitis who had been in Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion, had observed a variety of Iraqi atrocities, and had then escaped to the United States.
One such witness, scheduled at a hearing in October 1990, was Nayirah al-Sabah, daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. She had remained behind after the Iraqi invasion, performed volunteer work at a local hospital, and finally—after a few weeks and at great personal peril—escaped with other members of her family to the United States. Her story, which she was encouraged to tell at the Human Rights Caucus hearing, was that while volunteering at a Kuwaiti hospital, she observed what was common knowledge elsewhere in the country, that Iraqi soldiers entered hospitals, commandeered incubators, removed the babies, and left them to die. She had observed only one such incident but had heard about more from fellow volunteers and nurses.
At the request of her father to the committee, her last name was not revealed at the time she testified. Witnesses frequently seek protection when testifying before a congressional committee by asking that their names not be revealed, and it should also be noted that the members of the committee and their staff knew at all times the identity of the young witness, and indeed her name in full, had been on the public witness list the day before the hearings, so we played no role whatever in her name’s being withheld.
More than a year later,
The New York Times,
of all places, ran an unusual opinion piece by John MacArthur. The
Times
made no effort to check the facts in MacArthur’s article, which alleged that our public relations firm had arranged for the appearance of the witness (false), that we had connived with the chairman of the committee to conceal her identity (false), and that this was a collaboration in which we had joined in order to put the United States into the Gulf War (false). The article also questioned whether Nayirah had been in Kuwait at all and made the flat statement that “atrocities” involving removing babies from incubators had not occurred. In a subsequent book, MacArthur repeated and elaborated upon these assertions, labeling Nayirah’s claims an example of a nefarious and blood-soaked phenomenon he called “propaganda in wartime.”