Biden set to face the press in his first televised press conference as US leader

He had led the combined allied forces to defeat of Nazi Germany – only to find himself, a decade later, intimidated before the cameras in an echoey room of the old executive office building, ready and willing to make history again.

“Well, I see we’re trying a new experiment this morning,” president Dwight Eisenhower told the press corps. “I hope that doesn’t prove to be a disturbing influence.”

It was the first presidential news conference broadcast on TV.

In the scratchy black and white of 1955 television, Americans saw those trademark Ike grins and heard him beef about being asked a “loaded question”.

With that, an enlightening, contentious and often showboating tradition came into the modern age, one US President Joe Biden faces today with his first White House news conference.

Stay tuned for any disturbing influences.

Depending how you count, Biden is a little or a lot behind his recent predecessors in opening himself to questions in what historians have called the “high-risk, high-reward” enterprise of presidential news conferences.

The last four presidents, back to Bill Clinton, each held one solo White House news conference in their first 60 days, picking up the pace to varying degrees later.

Adding in the often very brief joint news conferences with visiting foreign leaders, Donald Trump held at least five news conferences by that point, Clinton four, and Barack Obama two.

The pandemic, however, has kept foreign leaders away from the White House this year.

The Biden White House is a notably tight ship, fully aware of his history of flubs, as is Biden himself, a self-described “gaffe machine.”

He went through the 2020 campaign with infrequent news conferences and often hunkered down in the pandemic.

Yet he debated fellow Democrats a dozen times and Trump three times without apparent harm to his campaign.

In one of his few extended and open-ended sessions with the media before today’s scheduled meeting, the world gained an insight into his thinking about Vladimir Putin (Biden called him a killer who “will pay a price” for US election interference), as well as on the surge of young migrants at the border, a possibly delayed troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, and more.

Eisenhower’s news conference on January 19, 1955, was one benchmark among several in the history of presidential news conferences.

Until his administration, the news conferences were off the record, meaning presidents gave the public information about the country’s affairs and the workings of government without necessarily letting their name be used.

Woodrow Wilson gave the first presidential news conference in 1913. Calvin Coolidge made a habit of them, holding nearly 73 a year on average, explaining “the people should have a fairly accurate report of what the president is trying to do.”

Franklin Roosevelt, a radio pioneer who mastered communications on all fronts and nearly matched Coolidge’s unrivaled pace of news conferences, regularly summoned his favored reporters to his office, consigning the ones he didn’t like to his “dunce club.”

Off the record often meant giving the president a chance to clean up his remarks, unheard of today.

At a March 1950 news conference, Harry Truman declared that senator Joseph McCarthy, the audacious canceler of communists real and imagined in US government and society, was the Kremlin’s “best asset”.

When one of the reporters commented that the president’s observation would hit page one the following day, Truman realised he had better soften the statement.

He worked with reporters and allowed the following as a direct quotation: ‘The greatest asset that the Kremlin has is the partisan attempt in the Senate to sabotage the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States.’

Such manipulation became untenable when Eisenhower put the news conferences on the record and let broadcasters record them.

Even so, segments were only televised and shown in the broadcast.

Later today, we may find out what’s really eating Joe Biden.

Reuters