For better or for worse, the office of President of the United States is fundamentally different today from the way it was even 30 years ago. The man most responsible for that is Michael Deaver, the man who did more to create the idea of the image of the Presidency than anyone else, and who helped Ronald Reagan become one of the most popular President’s of the 20th Century.
Michael Deaver died yesterday at the age of 69:
Michael K. Deaver, 69, the media maestro who shaped President Ronald Reagan’s public image for 20 years, transforming American politics with his powerful gift for image-making, died of pancreatic cancer yesterday at his home in Bethesda.
As the White House deputy chief of staff during the first term of the Reagan presidency, Deaver orchestrated Reagan’s every public appearance, staging announcements with an eye for television and news cameras. From a West Wing office adjacent to the Oval Office, Deaver did more than anyone before him to package and control the presidential image.
After his years in the White House, Deaver endured a public fall from grace when he was convicted of perjury for lying to Congress and a federal grand jury about his lobbying business. He later atoned for his misdeeds through unpublicized charitable works and regained his standing as a prominent Washington power broker.
A close friend of both President Reagan and his wife since their days in the California governor’s mansion, Deaver introduced the “photo op,” which positioned the former actor in visually irresistible locations where troublesome reporters’ questions could not intrude: atop the Great Wall of China, on the beach at Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day or in front of a construction site as the president announced the latest government report on housing starts.
“I’ve always said the only thing I did is light him well,” he said. “My job was filling up the space around the head. I didn’t make Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan made me.”
And the best example of that is what has happened to the President’s that have followed in Reagan’s footsteps. They’ve used the same media tricks that Deaver did, and more, and none of them have achieved the same popularity Reagan did. The bumps in popularity that Bush 41 and 43 received after the Gulf War and 9/11 are an exception because they were influenced by outside events and, in both cases, proved to be extremely short-lived.
Of course, media “manipulation” was hardly new to the White House when Michael Deaver came along. It was an art-form during the Kennedy years, and in the creation of the Camelot myth after Kennedy’s assassination. What Deaver did, though, was recognize that substance was no longer important to the mainstream media, and that, as in Hollywood, image could carry the day in Washington as well.
Whether that’s a good thing or not is open to debate.
