Mike Deaver: "Light Him Well"

By Charles Bierbauer

If Ronald Reagan was the "great communicator," Mike Deaver must have been the "great illuminator." In fitting understatement, Deaver once told an interviewer: "I've always said the only thing I did is light him well,"

When Deaver died of cancer Saturday at age 69, he was vice chairman of Edelman International, a global public relations firm. But his days in the spotlight, so to speak, were in the Reagan White House.

Deaver was deputy chief of staff and so much more. He was Reagan's imagemeister and First Lady Nancy Reagan's confidante. By her description, Deaver was "like a son to Ronnie." He was also the buffer between the First Lady and the Reagan campaign and staff aides who tiptoed around or blundered into differences with her.

Deaver was in on Mrs. Reagan's use of an astrologer to plot a safe course for her husband. But that's another story and too long to tell here. It suffices to convey that Deaver, of all the Reagan aides, was closest to the couple and most entrusted with projecting and protecting their images.

Leslie Stahl, then the CBS White House correspondent, tells the often repeated story of writing what she considered a scathing report about budget cuts made by the Reagan administration. Stahl came to the White House the next morning expecting to be berated by White House officials. Instead she was greeted with compliments for her report.

Finally, Stahl confronted a Deaver deputy who shed light on her bewilderment. "No one heard what you had to say in that piece," Stahl was told. "They just saw the pictures." And in those pictures, Reagan was glowing.

In this regard, the Reagan team was cocky, but good. Spokesman Larry Speakes kept a framed saying on the wall of his office that said: "Don't tell us how to stage the news. We won't tell you how to report it."

I don't buy the notion, as Stahl put it, that "pictures drowned out my words." At least not as an absolute. Perhaps I'm just an old radio guy, but the television in my office is not in my line of sight. I rarely just watch. I listen for audio cues to catch my attention. And I admonish our broadcast students that the audio-both words and ambient sound-are not afterthoughts to their reports. In fact, much TV news video is little more than wallpaper to accompany the sound.

But the way Mike Deaver set the scene was masterful. The light rising over the beach cliffs in Normandy caught the glint in Reagan's eye at a World War II commemoration. The Brandenburg Gate was framed behind the president in Berlin when he declaimed, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." The balloons cascaded from the rafters in just the right pattern to frame Reagan's buoyancy at Republican conventions.

Deaver was not always successful. The pictures of Reagan visiting a military cemetery at Bitburg, Germany, haunted the White House when it became apparent that Nazi SS troopers were among the German soldiers buried there.

Deaver's own photo on the cover of a 1986 issue of Time presaged his downfall. Time's headline: "Who's This Man Calling? Influence Peddling in Washington."

Now Deaver has shaped one last scenario-a conundrum for the dean of a college of mass communications. This weekend we welcomed hundreds of new students at our freshman convocation. And Mike, in absentia, and I were recast in our old roles from White House days where a certain tension between the press and the presidency was a democratic essential.

As a PR guy, I suggested, Mike would have told our public relations students to show their clients in the best possible light. I told the journalism students that it is their responsibility not to be blinded by the light.

Charles Bierbauer was CNN's Senior White House Correspondent covering the Reagan administration. He is now Dean of the College of Mass Communications and Information Studies at the University of South Carolina, though the views here are his own and not those of the university. Bierbauer is senior contributing editor and a consultant to SCHotline.

judythpiazza@newsblaze.com