Sean Spicer, meet Ron Ziegler.
.. Nixon didn’t value that perspective, though—“The press is the enemy … write that on a blackboard a hundred times,” he once told Kissinger.
.. In the week after the Watergate arrests in June 1972, as the news broke that the burglars had ties to the Nixon reelection campaign, Nixon ordered Ziegler to minimize the crime. He did so memorably, dismissing it as a “third-rate alleged burglary attempt.” When Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein doggedly pursued the story, Ziegler accused them of “shabby journalism” and “character assassination.”
.. he continued to duck and weave in Spicer-like fashion, and even introduced his own “alternative facts” into the lexicon of politics, begrudgingly declaring the president’s long-standing insistence of White House guiltlessness “inoperative.” “If my answers sound confusing,” the Los Angeles Times quoted him saying during a 1974 White House briefing just a few months before Nixon resigned, “I think they are confusing because the questions are confusing and the situation is confusing—and I’m not in a position to clarify it.”
.. Praise and censure in the Nixon years were parceled out according to an aide’s willingness to defy the hated press—a pattern that has also been attributed to Trump.
.. Ziegler was just 29 years old when he became the White House press secretary. It was a job that most thought would go to Herb Klein, a former Southern California newsman and longtime campaign spokesman for Nixon, but the new president wanted someone more compliant. Ziegler’s inexperience was itself seen as an insult by the White House press corps
.. Most of the press corps began by treating Ziegler like a puppy-dog frontman, recognizing his advertising background and low rating in the inner circle to be the insult it really was,” Safire recalled.