Lipstick on a Pig: Winning In the No-Spin Era by Someone Who Knows the Game

By Torie Clarke

Torie Clarke, renowned and respected in political and business circles as one of the nation's most gifted communicators, offers a complete guide to the new age of transparency. Clarke's message is refreshing and straightforward: No more spin. Always a dubious proposition, spin has become increasingly vulnerable as information sources have proliferated; spin is simply no longer viable. Or put another way, "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig." Distilling her twenty-five years of experience and wisdom into eight concise rules, Clarke counsels that politicians and executives need to tell the truth early, often, and in plain language.

Clarke's experience is incomparable: She was the Pentagon's communications chief during the early years of George W. Bush's presidency and, prior to that, a high-ranking adviser to the first President Bush and to Senator John McCain. She illustrates her lessons with riveting behind-the-scenes accounts of some of our country's crucial moments over the last two decades -- for instance, as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, she was at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, and she recounts her experience that day as Rumsfeld's office strove to inform, instruct, and reassure the public.

Clarke shows that a policy of transparency not only protects you, but that you even stand to gain from it -- because once you figure out that you can't put lipstick on a pig, you've actually learned something far more powerful: not to create a pig in the first place. Her lessons for getting your message out include:

• Tell your own story -- especially if it's bad news -- on your own terms, before someone else tells it on theirs. It will allow you to survive controversy and will also enhance your reputation.



• It's about one thing. Be ready and able to explain yourself to the proverbial man on the street in a clear, simple sentence or two.



• Admit your mistakes, because the truth will out.

Entertaining, approachable, and full of crucial insight and practical guidance, Lipstick on a Pig will be indispensable for business leaders, public figures, and anyone working in media relations. With humor and savvy, Clarke's vision offers truly new opportunities for communications in the Information Age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Free Press
• Release date: Feb 6, 2006
• ISBN: 9780743282475

Torie Clarke

Torie Clarke is a former Pentagon spokeswoman and the former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Press secretary for President George H. W. Bush's 1992 re-election campaign and a close adviser to Senator John McCain during his early Congressional career, she has advised some of the nation's best-known executives. She lives in suburban Washington, D.C., with her husband and three children.

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Chapter 1

You Can Put a Lot of Lipstick

on a Pig, but It’s Still a Pig

Deliver the bad news yourself,

and when you screw up, say so—fast!

If you could only know one thing about Charles Keating—the man who came to personify the savings-and-loan crisis of the late eighties—the thing to know is that he never, not once that I ever saw, carried his own briefcase. Keating had an entourage for earthly tasks, a gaggle of high-powered lobbyists who trailed him in cowed silence wherever he went. Three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, they strutted around D.C. like peacocks in $1,800 suits. The one day Keating was in town they had to carry his briefcase. It was, depending on your perspective, pathetic, poetic justice, or both.

The entourage was always a spectacle to behold, never more so than one early afternoon in March 1987, when I was working as Senator John McCain’s press secretary. Keating and his crew blew by my office, exuding indignant rage.

For weeks, Keating had harangued his contacts in the Senate, of which McCain was one, to get federal regulators who were looking into Keathing’s company, Lincoln Savings & Loan, off his back. Keating was a political supporter and a personal friend of the family as well. The request put McCain in a tough spot: Keating was also Arizona’s largest employer; it was reasonable for a senator to look into the matter on behalf of his constituents. Moreover, McCain felt that after months of investigation, the regulators needed to make a decision about Lincoln one way or the other. They should either crack down or move on and let everybody go about their business.

Keating, though, wasn’t one to be satisfied with restrained inquiry. By the time he barged into McCain’s office that spring day in 1987, he had a list of demands for the senator. That was his first mistake. McCain’s a fair guy; he’ll listen to requests, he encourages open discussion, but he’s not the type to whom you put ultimatums. Keating’s second screwup—the big one—was calling McCain a coward for failing to step and fetch when presented with the list. A few angry words later—McCain doesn’t need many of them to get his point across—Keating was on his way out the door. At the time, all it seemed to be was a brief flash of twisted entertainment for a bored staff on an otherwise slow day.

The slow days wouldn’t last for long.

In the months that followed, McCain and four other senators participated in two meetings with regulators. Some of the senators pled Keating’s case aggressively. McCain’s intervention, if it can be called that, was delicate: He said explicitly that he was inquiring only on a constituent’s behalf. The regulators should do their jobs; he wanted to gather information, not apply pressure. But they did feel pressure. They would say later that the fact of the meeting itself—even if McCain and the other senators said nothing at all—conveyed an unspoken message: get off Keating’s back.

Within two years, Lincoln Savings & Loan collapsed under a $2 billion mudslide of stupidity and corruption. Stories about the senators’ meetings began to hit the headlines. The Keating Five scandal was under way.

At first, McCain was flitting around the periphery of the story. The press seemed more interested in other senators who appeared to have done more on Keating’s behalf. In the summer of 1989, though, the Arizona Republic started an investigation into McCain’s ties to Keating.

McCain’s instincts told him the story would be bigger than the rest of us guessed. In the fall of 1989, on the Saturday before the Republic story was supposed to appear, I was hosting a pig roast on the cramped patio of my apartment in D.C. McCain was supposed to stop by but never showed. By nightfall, Mark Salter, his then foreign policy legislative assistant, and I had put a few beers back. Mark was on the patio dousing the pig with lighter fluid in a vain attempt to get the thing to catch fire and cook. I was sitting on the kitchen counter when the phone rang. It was McCain. The normal exuberance was missing from his voice.

I’m sorry I’m not there, he said. I don’t want to be a wet blanket.

John, I laughed, you couldn’t be a wet blanket if you tried.

McCain had a bad feeling about the story, and the next morning’s Republic proved his instincts right. A detailed account of McCain’s relationship with Keating—campaign contributions, personal friendship, joint family vacations at Keating’s place in the Bahamas—was splashed across page one. McCain instantly moved to the forefront of the scandal.

McCain’s advisers were split on how to handle the story. The other four senators were, for the most part, trying to lie low. The conventional wisdom for a story like this was to get on with your business and not talk about it. I disagreed. This story was too big. All the ingredients were there: taxpayers who had been ripped off, politicians who appeared corrupt. The press wasn’t going to let go. Leaving the charges unanswered would make them look true. What was more, I felt we had a good, fair, accurate story to tell: As he would say, McCain shouldn’t have gone to the meetings in the first place. But he had been careful not to pressure the regulators, and the moment he heard Keating was being accused of criminal activity, he backed off entirely. Other aides—the lawyers especially—insisted that McCain stay silent. That, too, was conventional wisdom: an investigation was under way, they said, and a potential subject of it should just keep his mouth shut.

McCain thought it over and called a staff meeting.

Here’s what we gotta do, he said, sitting behind a massive, ornate desk that belonged to McCain’s mentor and predecessor, Barry Goldwater. I want to have a press conference in Arizona. I will answer every question anyone wants to ask. We’ll stay as long as we need to. When we get back, I’m going to take every press call on this thing that comes in. I don’t care where they’re from or who they report for. And I want all of you to remember that we’re going to have to work twice as hard on our normal legislative duties to show the people back home that we aren’t being distracted by this.

My only concern about the press conference was McCain’s temper. He’s a laid-back guy, a jokester most of the time, but he’s capable of blowing his top, especially when his honor is questioned. I cautioned McCain on it.

OK, he said, I’ll tell you what. You sit in the front row, and any time you think I’m overdoing it, rub your nose with your forefinger.

A sophisticated clandestine operation it wasn’t, but it worked. We booked a bare, low-ceilinged meeting room in a Phoenix hotel. As McCain walked to the podium, a crowd of dozens of reporters from around the country overflowed the room. McCain’s opening statement was short and direct. Our intention was to take a tough issue and air it out. A long, lawyerly explanation would have looked like an attempt to cloud the issue. McCain just gave a brief account of his meetings with the regulators and said he would stay at the press conference as long as it took to answer every question. He did: it took about an hour and a half, and while the questions were tough, they were mostly fair. And I never had to rub my nose.

When we got back to Washington, McCain repeated his instructions to me. We’re going to take every last press call, he said. And he did. We spent months categorizing press calls by a sort of journalistic triage. Reporters on a tight deadline talked to McCain first. In cases of a time conflict, an Arizona journalist got the call before a national reporter. Depending on what time zone he was in, McCain started returning press calls as early as six a.m. and often didn’t finish until well after dark.

It was tough going, but the strategy worked. By diving straight in and doing it early, McCain was able to get his message out before the story took over and got out of control. His candor earned reporters’ respect. And perhaps most important, the fact that he was talking at all communicated something important to his constituents: McCain didn’t have anything to hide.

This man is a United States senator, said Roger Mudd, introducing a segment on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in November 1989. He is John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, and you are about to hear him say something that very few senators have ever said before. Listen carefully.

It was a very serious mistake on my part. The appearance of a meeting with five senators was bad and wrong and I agonized over it at the time. It was a clip from McCain’s Arizona press conference.

The four other senators involved in the Keating story, Democrats Cranston of California, DeConcini of Arizona, Glenn of Ohio, and Riegle of Michigan, all had been following a policy of stonewalling the press, Mudd said on the show. McCain, however, seems to be trying to talk the story to death.

I’m doing everything I can to try and set the record straight, again, admitting that I made mistakes, and serious ones, McCain said in one of the clips Mudd showed of the senator granting numerous interviews. But I did not abuse my office, and I think that’s the key to this issue. The fact is, I want to talk to anybody that wants to talk to me because I feel the more that is known of my involvement in this issue, the better off I am.

In that MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, Mudd called McCain’s open-door policy a roll of the dice. McCain plays a mean game of craps, so he knows something about rolling dice. His strategy paid off. The Senate Ethics Committee outside counsel, Robert Bennett (a Democrat), largely absolved McCain; he survived the scandal and went on to forge a very successful Senate career and a strong presidential run in the 2000 Republican primaries.

Lessons from the Keating Five scandal served me well during a dustup at the Pentagon. That crisis—every day, it seemed, had at least one—involved Lieutenant General Michael W. Hagee. Hagee—a brainiac, a Marine’s Marine, revered by uniforms and civilians alike—was about to reach the high point of his career: taking the oath as the thirty-third commandant of the Marine Corps.

Hagee’s ascension, while important, wasn’t on my radar screen. He sailed through Senate confirmation. His swearing-in ceremony was only a few days off. As far as I knew, all was going according to plan.

Then my phone rang. The head of Marine Public Affairs was on the other end of the line. Ma’am, he said, employing the formal salutation I never quite got used to, there’s a story in the works.

A few months before, after Hagee was nominated, he had ordered his staff to investigate all of his medals to ensure he had the paperwork on hand to back them up. It was a routine precaution—a point of honor, and a matter of public relations smarts for a commander about to take a highly visible job.

The staff quickly turned up the paperwork to back up all the medals but three. No one seriously suspected bad faith on Hagee’s part; one of the medals in question was the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, for example, and Hagee was widely known to have served heroically in Vietnam. This was a case of missing paperwork, pure and simple. The documentation was somewhere in the vast archives of the Marine Corps’ records branch, and probably in Hagee’s personal files as well, but the chances of its turning up before Hagee took over command of the Corps were slim.

Just to be safe, Hagee decided not to wear those decorations when he sat for his official photograph. But when the portrait was distributed to the press, an eagle-eyed reporter for Stars and Stripes compared it to an old photo of Hagee and noticed the discrepancy.

There was, of course, a clear explanation for Hagee’s not wearing the medals. Still, the story had all the makings of a Washington scandal du jour: Hagee’s opponents—he didn’t have many, but everyone in power has some—could make it look as though a general about to take command of the Marine Corps, arguably the branch of the military most known for its devotion to honor, had been caught having worn medals he didn’t earn. A similar allegation had, in fact, driven Admiral Jeremy Mike Boorda, the chief of naval operations, to suicide just a few years before.

The story was about to break by the time the Marine public affairs officer briefed me.

Does the SecDef know? I asked, using the Pentagon shorthand for Rumsfeld.

No.

Don’t let him hear it from somebody else, I warned.

Not long after that call, Hagee and I were standing in Rumsfeld’s office as Hagee explained the situation. When he finished, Rumsfeld turned to me.

What do you think?

It could be a problem, I said, stating the obvious. Not an effective tactic with Rumsfeld.

"What do you think we should do?" he shot back.

We had plenty of options. We could, for example, have let the story sit with Stars and Stripes and hope it didn’t go any further. Or Hagee could strike a defiant tone. Neither, I believed, would work.

Sir, I replied, I think General Hagee should brief a large group of the media and explain this himself before somebody else does.

The lighting is dim in the SecDef’s office, but I think the blood drained from Hagee’s face. This Marine, who served in Vietnam and Somalia, was awash in anxiety at the prospect of facing a room full of reporters. That reaction was understandable but, as it turned out, groundless. To his credit, Hagee held a briefing within hours, explained the decision to remove the medals, answered every question directly and honestly, and made no excuses for the mix-up. For their part, the Pentagon press corps was tough but generally respectful. The coverage was thorough but, for the most part, not sensational.

The New York Times coverage was a scant 239 words, and the lead sentence captured the story in a simple and nonhyped way: The incoming commandant of the Marine Corps, Lt. Gen. Michael W. Hagee, said today that he had stopped wearing three military decorations because he and top aides could not find the documentation for the awards, Eric Schmitt wrote. Given how bad the story could have been, not bad.

A few others wrote more, but they gave play to Hagee’s stand-up behavior.

Describing the process by which one documents commendations, Hagee said, as quoted in the third paragraph of Vern Loeb’s Washington Post story, I should have been more aggressive, and I should have had this done much sooner.

All the stories made sure readers knew that Secretary Rumsfeld had issued a statement giving Hagee his strongest backing.

A few days later, probably with a few more gray hairs, Hagee became commandant of the Marine Corps.

McCain’s and Hagee’s stories are less remarkable for what happened than for what never occurred: spin. All they did was go straight to the press and tell their stories. There was a time when it might have been different, when the last thing someone in their position would have done was volunteer to go before the press and lay out all the facts—unvarnished, untainted, unspun. Chances are a mouthpiece would have been dispatched to do the talking. If the principal had appeared personally, every word would have been poll-tested in advance, the timing of the news conference precision-calibrated to hit just the right moment in the news cycle, and questions planted with friendly reporters.

That’s no longer true, or at any rate, it shouldn’t be. Information travels too quickly. Sunshine permeates every corner of public and corporate life. A public figure who tries to hide from it is bound to be exposed—not just for what he or she has done, but for being unwilling to face it.

Because they faced the issues squarely, McCain and Hagee came out of the flare-ups with their integrity not only intact but enhanced. Reporters respected them for facing the music and telling the truth. Their approach could be summarized as a three-part strategy:

Own up. McCain shouldn’t have met with regulators in the first place, and he said so. Denying the obvious would have cost McCain the credibility he needed to fend off the charges that were genuinely unfair. Similarly, even if it clearly existed, Hagee should have had the documentation for the medals in hand before he ever put the medals on. By saying that openly, he avoided a round-robin of stories picking apart his denials.

Stand up. McCain admitted what he did do, but he didn’t engage in confessional politics. He rebutted unfair charges with a simple message that could be repeated ad nauseam: I never asked any regulator to back off Keating. Hagee explained forcefully that while he took responsibility for not having the documentation, the medals were genuine.

Speak up. McCain and Hagee spoke up early and often. No matter what’s being alleged, charges unanswered are charges assumed to be true. Most important, they spoke up personally. Had they sent a staffer like me out to do the talking, they would have looked like they were hiding. By putting themselves on the line, McCain and Hagee let people know they were the kind of leaders who took responsibility for their actions and who weren’t afraid of the truth.

Of course, the McCain and Hagee stories were simplified by the fact that, at bottom, they really hadn’t done anything wrong. Sometimes, though, you do just plain blow it. And on those occasions, it’s more important than ever to do the talking yourself. Take it from someone who has gotten it wrong as many times as she’s gotten it right. This tradition reaches so far back into my past, in fact, that the very first sound bite of my career was none other than these eloquent words, doubtless destined for eternal remembrance in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations:

I screwed up.

It was my first political campaign. I was press secretary for Kansas congressional candidate Morris Kay in 1982, and I was on the front page of the Topeka Capital Journal acknowledging that I had misrepresented my candidate’s views on Social Security. I must have missed the staff meeting on Social Security, because in some hastily written—and unapproved—press release, I left the senior citizens of northeastern Kansas with the distinct impression that Mo was going to ruin their retirements.

Morris Kay had bigger problems than me, like a very talented opponent, Jim Slattery, who went on to win. But he was very kind to me. For starters, he didn’t fire me. Secondly, he laughed about it after I held an impromptu press conference before the Topeka press corps to admit my mistake.

That wasn’t too bad, was it? he asked when I crawled back to the campaign headquarters down the street.

I guess not, I mumbled. And then I went into the bathroom and threw up.

Now, you’d think apologizing on the front page and throwing up in the campaign office would have taught me a lesson. But ten years later, I was still at it. On the 1992 Bush-Quayle campaign, I seemed to find myself apologizing a lot. For referring to women as chicks (I thought you could do that if you were the youngest of five girls). For suggesting that then candidate Bill Clinton had so little national security experience he thought B-52s were a rock group. For referring to then President Bush as studly when he rode on a fire truck, as compared to Michael Dukakis in his infamous tank ride.

All of those comments paled in comparison to what I said about Pat Buchanan. We were heading into the Republican Convention after a tough primary season, thanks to Pat Buchanan’s aggressive pounding on the president. Ross Perot was in the wings waiting to cause trouble, and even though the economy had started to improve, the public perception was just the opposite. All in all, it was a cranky time.

Conflict being the name of their game, the White House press