The White House press corps should have seen it coming. Ari Fleischer, the spokesman for the president, had warned them that once the war in Iraq started, he would be even less forthcoming than usual. And their coming isolation was etched all the more vividly when a coincidental renovation on the press building sealed the whole place in plywood.
No windows, no light. Just one little hobbit hole for ingress and egress.
Crammed into a small work-space, they watched tiny televisions as Baghdad was ignited on Friday. A few television technicians made the same kind of noises that children make when playing a particularly vivid video game, while the writers in the back room mostly watched in silence. The air raid subsided, and after US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's televised briefing from the Pentagon concluded, the lights came up in the press room and Fleischer stepped to the podium.
Campbell Brown, a correspondent for NBC, pressed Fleischer on whether the commander in chief had seen the violence he had authorized as it was broadcast on television.
"The president, again, understands the implications of the actions that he has launched to secure the disarmament of the Iraqi regime to liberate the people," Fleischer said evenly.
"Right, right, right," Brown responded. "The question, though, is he watching TV or not?"
"The president may occasionally turn on the TV, but that's not how he gets his news or information," Fleischer said, smiling this time. Just 90 minutes after the US military unleashed "shock and awe" on Baghdad, it was all bob and weave on the podium.
As the war began, the routine became even more frustrating for reporters.
The White House press room, a place one might expect to be a throbbing epicenter of wartime news and rhetoric, seemed vestigial. Issues of national importance, like Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's status -- "We do not know how Saddam Hussein is feeling today," Fleischer said sweetly -- were considered operational details and best left in the hands of the professionals at the Pentagon.
As Fleischer repeatedly suggested that the answers to questions lay elsewhere, the White House reporters who fancy themselves part of one of the mightiest journalistic corps on the planet realized that once again they were embedded in the wrong unit.
Sometimes Fleischer does not know the answers to the questions, but often he seems just not in the mood to share.
"My job," he explained in a telephone interview later, "is to reflect the president. My job is to reflect his mood and reflect it accurately."
More often than not, especially since the Sept. 11 attacks, the president's mood is "resolute." And so is his spokesman. Lording it over a drab press room that looks like an underfinanced public school kindergarten classroom Fleischer, with his immaculate suits and an unwrinkled manner, passes for glamorous in Beltway culture.
He has mastered the art of the entrance and knows how to work both a lectern and the room it confronts.
A recently reconfigured seating chart has set up a new hierarchy, with those reporters from major news organizations who show up the most regularly receiving prized permanent spots, and Fleischer scrupulously observes it. By calling on people right to left, front to back, he radiates even-handedness, even as the routine thwarts the possibility of rapid-fire questions that would build momentum.
Fleischer observed sympathetically in a phone interview that "reporters have come to cover the White House at the peak of their career." But, he added, "the best place to go to get operational information about the war is not from the White House." Enterprising reporters have been invigorated by the challenge of covering a ship of state that almost never leaks, but an air of fatalism hangs over those awaiting spoon-fed scoops.
Tight image management matches the message management. When photographers were allowed out into the Rose Garden to take pictures through a window while the president gave his speech announcing the beginning of the war, The Associated Press had the gall to send a picture that showed the president before he began speaking through the wires, when he made a real, live, spontaneous gesture.
Presidential spokesmen are often imprisoned in an awkward middle earth, caught between serving the chief executive and enabling the public's right to know. Fleischer has no such problem. He works for the president, serving as the emperor's clothes when his boss is particularly exposed.
His boss has no problem with a well-timed bout of lockjaw. On Friday morning, when the president was meeting with members of Congress, reporters wanted to ask the president why he was leaving town at such a critical juncture in the war. They shouted their questions to Bush.
"You're on the wrong beat," Bush replied. "You should have been at the Pentagon."
The president flew to Camp David at 1:30pm, leaving reporters in Fleischer's capable hands.
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