Michael K. Deaver, who arranged some of Ronald Reagan’s most memorable photographic backdrops for public consumption and privately gave the president blunt, sometimes contrarian advice, died yesterday at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 69.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his family said.
Mr. Deaver was widely known for creating photo ops that showed Reagan atop the Great Wall of China, at the cliffs of Normandy and filling sandbags to show concern after a Louisiana flood. And he played a central role in planning Reagan’s funeral in 2004; the last visual was burial as the sun set over the Pacific Ocean.
It might be a bit difficult to find these days, but a terrific book that dealt at length with Mr. Deaver's singular talents is On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency, by Mark Hertsgaard (1988, Collins Publishers [in Canada]).
One of Deaver's innovations was the questionless photo opportunity.
From the Columbia Journalism Review:
The "Deaver Rule," named after Reagan aide Michael Deaver, was that at press conferences reporters jumping up and down and shouting would not be recognized. Reporters "would sit in their chairs and raise their hands, or there would be no press conferences."
The Reagan team's plan for the 1984 presidential campaign?
- A long-term communications plan that provides one handsomely packaged photo opportunity per day that refinforces the chosen theme of the day;
- Repeat your message many times and in many ways, and
- To assure control of the agenda, restrict reporters' access to the President and avoid whenever possible questions on unfavourable topics.
Deaver recalled a time in 1983 when housing starts went up and some people wanted Reagan to give a press conference about it -- in the White House. Deaver had them find out where housing starts were going up the fastest, identified the politically most favourable city of the bunch, and then had Reagan speak in front of a framed-up house with some hard-hatted workers and a big graph. Shades of It's Morning in America! (here's the ad to which I'm referring on YouTube).
While I can't find it in the book as I write this, I'm pretty sure that I read an anecdote once (if not there, then somewhere else) about how one AmNet reporter once did what she thought was a damning story on Reagan -- and it was, if you just read the script. But Deaver was thrilled with the story because the images she thought were ironic made his guy look great!
"It's fair to say that I always believed that most people got all their information from television, and so television was the most important part of my job," he said in a 2004 interview with the National Public Radio program "On the Media."
To that end, Deaver had the lighting altered to make it more favourable to Reagan for his second presidential debate with Walter Mondale in 1984. Mondale ended up having big circles under his eyes. "The Mondale people didn't have any lighting people with them. They didn't understand how important that was," he said.
Polling afterward had people saying Reagan looked better than Mondale by a two-to-one margin. Reagan absolutely smoked Mondale in the election..
From the NYT story:
Mr. Deaver said too much was made of his work in burnishing Reagan’s image. “I’ve always said the only thing I did was light him well,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2001. “My job was filling up the space around the head. I didn’t make Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan made me.”
Why mention Deaver now, when he's been out of politics for more than 20 years? Because the approach laid out by the Reagan White House for manipulating the media still guides politicians today.
Addendum
The CBC's Ira Basen also wrote about Deaver -- Michael Deaver: The PR Guy Who Transformed Presidential Politics.