Product Description

On a November afternoon in 1996, Lanny Davis got a phone call that would change his life. It was from a top aide at the White House, asking him if he was interested in joining the president's senior staff. Within a few short weeks he had signed on as special counsel to the president. Fourteen months later, his tour of duty almost over, he got another phone call, this time from a Washington Post reporter who asked, "Have you ever heard the name Monica Lewinsky?"

In the time between those two phone calls, Davis received an extraordinary political education. As President Bill Clinton's chief spokesman for handling "scandal matters" he had the unenviable job of briefing reporters and answering their pointed questions on the most embarrassing allegations against the president and his aides, from charges of renting out the Lincoln Bedroom, to stories of selling plots in Arlington Cemetery, from irregular campaign fundraising to sexual improprieties. He was the White House's first line of defense against the press corps and the reporters' first point of entry to an increasingly reticent administration. His delicate task was to remain credible to both sides while surviving the inevitable crossfire.

Upon entering the White House, Davis discovered that he was never going to be able to turn bad news into good news, but he could place the bad news in its proper context and work with reporters to present a fuller picture. While some in the White House grew increasingly leery of helping a press corps that they regarded as hostile, Davis moved in the opposite direction, pitching unfavorable stories to reporters and helping them garner the facts to write those stories accurately. Most surprisingly of all, he realized that to do his job properly, he sometimes had to turn himself into a reporter within the White House, interviewing his colleagues and ferreting out information. Along the way, he learned the true lessons of why politicians, lawyers, and reporters so often act at cross-purposes and gained some remarkable and counterintuitive insights into why this need not be the case. Searching out the facts wherever he could find them, even if he had to proceed covertly, Davis discovered that he could simultaneously help the reporters do their jobs and not put the president in legal or political jeopardy.

With refreshing candor, Davis admits his own mistakes and reveals those instances where he dug a deeper hole for himself by denying the obvious and obfuscating the truth. And in a powerful reassessment of the scandal that led to the president's impeachment, Davis suggests that if the White House had been more receptive to these same hard-won lessons, the Monica Lewinsky story might not have come so close to bringing down an otherwise popular president. For as Davis learned above all, you can always make a bad story better by telling it early, telling it all, and telling it yourself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1610034 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .94 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 284 pages

From Amazon.com
The title of Lanny Davis's book will catch many readers by surprise. Davis, after all, was a top White House spin doctor in the Clinton administration and a constant presence on television during the flap over the president's "inappropriate relationship" with Monica Lewinsky--a moment when truth seemed in short supply. Yet this is also an interesting memoir of Washington's scandal-mongering culture told by one of its major participants. The bulk of the book focuses on Davis's time on the White House payroll (he actually resigned shortly after Lewinsky hit the headlines, a departure he had previously scheduled). Davis provides an insider's guide to the controversy surrounding Bill Clinton's fundraising practices and other disputes. These anecdote-rich accounts provide a rare glimpse of how Washington really operates. He remains a dyed-in-the-wool loyalist (no Stephanopoulos-like backbiting here), yet is not afraid to criticize White House tactics that failed to serve Clinton's political goals.

The most interesting sections come when Davis distills lessons from the stories and experiences he relates on these pages. A few tips for aspiring spinners: "Acknowledge the obvious," "Trump the opposition's premises," and "Label any criticism as pure politics." At these moments, Davis reveals the motives and strategies that make Washington politics simultaneously fascinating and infuriating. And it's hard to disagree with one of his chief conclusions, no matter what your politics: "All of us in the process--Democrats and Republicans, journalists and lawyers, not to mention a public ready to assume the worst about politicians--have combined to produce rot, horrible rot." --John J. Miller

From Publishers Weekly
Less ballyhooed than Stephanopoulos or Mortons Monica, Davis, the Washington lawyer who served for 14 months as the Clinton White Houses chief spinmeister, simultaneously offers a stinging critique of scandalmongering politics and an education in the instrumentalif not downright cynicalcraft of spin control. Davis, who served as special counsel to the president until January 1998 (he left just 10 days after the Monica Lewinsky story broke), staunchly defends Clinton as the leader of a new, centrist Democratic Party. He presents himself as a man of integrity doing a high-wire balancing act between his desire to tell the whole truth and his loyalty to his boss. Dealing primarily with the campaign-finance scandal, Davis is most persuasive when debunking the story that the White House sold burial plots in Arlington Cemetery to civilians in exchange for campaign donations and when deflating the import of Al Gores mix of Buddhism and fund-raising. Hes less convincing when attempting to dismiss the charges of influence-peddling swirling around fundraiser John Huang. In an epilogue, Davis re-creates an August 1998 phone conversation with Clinton in which he urged the president to get everything out to the public concerning Lewinsky. Following the rules of proactive disclosure might well have enabled Clinton to avoid impeachment, Davis speculates. Depending on what their definition of is is, readers may view this memoir either as an unwittingly embarrassing peek into the Clinton propaganda machine or as an informal handbook on the art of damage control. Its actually both. Agent, Arthur Kaminsky.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Davis, hired after the 1996 election to inoculate President Clinton against criticism of his campaign finance practices, spent one year learning the nuances of spin control. Whatever one's opinion of the defenses Davis advances, his book is a valuable case study of the press-politics nexus in Washington. Spinners always have two clients: the reporter and the politician or issue in question. In the Clinton saga, Davis was the designated leaker and also the press' de facto agent for prying information out of White House lawyers. The lawyers' aversion to the slightest legal risk--for instance, admitting that those famous White House coffee klatches and overnights were fund-raising instruments--goaded the press. Such fund-raising tactics were tacky but not illegal, maintains Davis. And Davis criticizes reporters for "connecting the dots," as in equating donations with policy changes. Adding war stories about the still-silent John Huang and the false story of Arlington plots sold for cash, Davis rounds out an example of how scandals grow and die in the media. Gilbert Taylor