Presidential Wave

Helen Thomas, the now retired-in-disgrace White House correspondent, spent 50 years in the White House press room. I spent half a day there, at the end of which I was rewarded with a presidential wave intended for me and me alone.

While in graduate school at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, I did a paper on pack journalism. Prompted by coverage of the recent inmate uprising at Attica State Prison in upstate New York, the general thesis was that too often reporters pursued the same storyline en masse, usually at the expense of doing individual legwork on different angles of a story. A secondary aspect of the paper was research on whether the presence of a large press contingent altered events, inducing participants to play to the camera.

I chose to focus on presidential press coverage. This was pre-Watergate. February 1972. I secured visitor’s privileges from the White House press secretary’s office, traveled down to Washington through a snowstorm, stayed overnight with my brother and his wife in Silver Spring, Md., and arrived at the White House gate on Pennsylvania Avenue around noon. The West Wing of the White House contains the press room and the executive offices. When approached from Pennsylvania Avenue, the West Wing is on the right side of the White House.

Inside the press room, at the time a pretty dingy ground floor location with cramped desk space, I interviewed Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News, Robert Pierpoint of CBS Radio and a few other names known to me then, but a distant memory now. Press Secretary Ron Ziegler pawned me off to one of his assistants, though he did stop by for a “nice-to-meet-you” chat (I reminded him of our casual first meeting some 20 years later when he was head of the chain drug store association and I was associate publisher and editor of a retail industry magazine).

My interviews complete, I left the White House the way I came in, walking along the circular driveway towards Pennsylvania Avenue. It was around 4 pm, I was the only one in the area when I heard running footsteps to my left, coming from the space between the White House and the Executive Office Building. There he was, Richard Nixon, wearing just a suit, no overcoat on this wintry day, walking back to the White House from the EOB, his Secret Service escort jogging alongside him.

Most people I knew back then, even before Watergate, loathed him. As did I. As our paths crossed some 30 yards apart, he waved to me.

I waved back, a full five-finger wave.