'We want to discourage coverage; and so, boring is better,' the memo states. How to send the press corps to sleep

Congressional hearings can be deadly boring, whether the topic is fisheries legislation or a sexy presidential scandal.

Lawmakers (if they show up) ramble on and ask embarrassing questions. Witnesses are coached not to make news. And anything exciting is leaked beforehand to manipulate coverage.


All of which makes for the perfect playbook if you’re an administration under fire, like the Clinton White House in summer 1994, facing House and Senate hearings on the Whitewater affair and the death of White House deputy counsel Vince Foster.

In fact, they helpfully wrote out some suggestions.

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“We want to discourage coverage; and so, boring is better,” White House communications adviser David Dreyer wrote in a memo on the upcoming hearings to Lloyd Cutler, special counsel to the president, in June 1994.

The memo was released Friday as part of a cache of nearly 10,000 pages of documents from the Clinton Presidential Library. Its five pages of single-space print are distilled here into six kernels of wisdom:

Step 1: No news

“If there is more information that is new, get it out the door before the hearings begin,” Dreyer wrote. “We do not want new revelations at the hearings. The hearings must rehash old news.”

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Step 2: Keep ’em waiting

“We should make the hearings expensive and inconvenient for the networks to cover; boring and inconvenient for the press to follow. The hearings should start late, never on time. We should encourage votes on both the House and Senate floors. The Committees should adjourn to vote, never have a relay of committee members to keep the hearings going.”

Step 3: Put ’em to sleep

“We encourage detailed opening statements by every Democrat on both Banking panels. We want detailed statements by our opening witnesses. We advocate starting the hearings on Thursday, so that the weekend forces a premature media judgment on whether the hearings are worth watching. An early technical or procedural battle over, for example, scope would also suit our objectives.”

Step 4: Spin

“It is in our interest to dominate the news, and that will require a strong overall message and an even stronger tactical approach. Though their numbers may dwindle, reporters will be in those hearing rooms gavel-to-gavel. We need a two-cycle spin operation in the hearing rooms interpreting events for the reporters as they decide what is news.”

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Step 5: Misdirection

“Anything we can do to move the focus from the issues inside the hearing room will be worthwhile. The president should be scheduled in ways that show him to be engaged in his serious work. He needs to be confident and self-assured in public appearances.

“Members of Congress should be programmed to do one-minute speeches and addresses in morning business talking about the political choice made by the two parties between health care and Whitewater. DNC and White House press operations should circulate overnight Arbitron ratings for the daily hearings.”

Step 6: Attack!

“Can we float some political analysis about the Republicans having as much to lose as the Democrats? We should be raising the heat on [Republican Sen. Al] D’Amato, ’96 Republican Presidential politics, and negative campaigning.”

The White House’s fears weren’t misplaced; Dreyer’s memo carefully outlined the pitfalls of the hearing, including the possibility the issue would cause problems in the 1994 midterms (which the GOP swept).

“This is going to be a bad story,” Dreyer wrote. “The hearings are a forum for our opponents. We should anticipate bad network television set-up pieces, and expect print press stories that go beyond the narrow scope of the hearings timed as curtain raisers for the main event. If there is new information about our handling of the Whitewater, its release will create huge headlines, and reopen questions about our honesty in handling this matter.”

The White House insisted it did nothing wrong, but Dreyer said the PR plan was stil l necessary to boost its image.

“For us, the hearings are a character test, and we will be judged by our effectiveness in preparing, our candor in testifying, our consistency in responding to questions about these matters. Our witnesses should be cooperative, but also confident — they did nothing wrong,” Dreyer wrote.

“Preparation of witnesses and testimony should revolve around the idea of communicating candor, guts, a commitment to the public interest, a willingness to learn from our mistakes,” he added later.

And the audience: #ThisTown.

“Quite apart from whatever evidence is released and testimony is taken, the hearings will capture a collective impression of the administration for the public and, more important, press and Washington elites,” the memo states. “We have an opportunity to tell a positive story about our approach toward the constellation of issues now called ‘Whitewater.’”

So how did it all work out?

The Thursday idea didn’t completely pan out. The House hearing was Tuesday, July 26, but the Senate panel didn’t meet until Friday, July 29.

And the White House wasn’t fully prepared. “We are not as ready as we ought to be for the hearings,” Dreyer wrote in a July 19 memo to Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, blaming the lack of cooperation from Hill Democrats as well as a delay in receiving part of a report from Whitewater prosecutor Robert Fiske before expressing concern about the messaging strategy not being unified or complete.

The first night’s reviews, however, were exactly what the White House would have hoped for.

On the first day of the House Budget Committee hearing, the CBS Evening News opened with two reports on the day’s events — and not much to say. The hearing was dull and Clinton was too busy minding the store.

“On Whitewater itself, there was little new,” reported Bob Schieffer. “Neither the testimony nor a stack of internal White House documents released by the committee contained any startling new information.”

Rita Braver’s report noted the president met with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein of Jordan (they had announced a peace accord on the White House lawn the previous day), as well as congressional leaders about the crime bill.

“What they were trying to show was perhaps even a little more business as usual here,” Braver said.