A great deal has been written this year about the tensions between White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and White House national security communications adviser John Kirby. Their uneasy relationship reflects a host of internal and external expressions of doubt about Jean-Pierre's lackluster performance, internal disagreements about whether to support Israel, and legitimate confusion about the odd division of responsibilities between the two. Typical of internal White House conflicts, the personal tensions also reveal larger dynamics buffeting the troubled Biden team.
Jean-Pierre took over from the generally well-regarded Jen Psaki in May of 2022. Kirby was spokesman at the National Security Council before getting an expanded role as deputy White House press secretary in February of this year. Between the two, Kirby is the far more experienced communicator, having served twice as Pentagon spokesman and also as spokesman for the State Department. In the diversity, equity, and inclusion-focused Biden administration, however, Kirby suffers from the affliction of being a cis white male. Following the brutal Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, Kirby has shared the podium with Jean-Pierre on national security matters, something that Jean-Pierre, who reportedly is "pretty aggressive about marking her territory," apparently resents. According to one source, "Sometimes, he talks to her and she acts as if he is not talking."
Using Kirby for briefings related to national security makes sense. "When Karine has to, you know, talk about the things that usually John Kirby talks about, it's not as strong as when she talks about things that are more in her wheelhouse — political messaging, for instance," Fox News White House reporter Jacqui Heinrich said.
Heinrich was being diplomatic. Even before Oct. 7, it was noticeable that Jean-Pierre did not internalize her briefing books. This became inarguable when compared to the smooth and skillful Kirby. According to a source who spoke to the New York Post about the situation, "Karine doesn't have an understanding of the issues and she reads the book [binder] word-for-word." That source also noted that "she doesn't have a grasp of the issues and doesn't spend the time to learn." What makes things worse is that she apparently is unaware of her limitations. Despite all of the negative reports about her, "she thinks she's doing an amazing job."
The situation became more complicated in April, when the New York Post reported about a plot hatched by senior adviser Anita Dunn to encourage Jean-Pierre to decamp to a soft landing at the abortion-rights group EMILYs List. The plot, which had the support of White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, failed when Jean-Pierre refused to depart and said she was not interested in the job. Dunn, who has been described as the "de facto White House communications chief," has a long history of taking on tough assignments for Democratic presidents. In the Obama administration, Dunn was in charge of the administration's war on Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, telling the New York Times's Brian Stelter about the network that "we're going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent." That campaign was so aggressive that even a generally sympathetic reporter like Stelter called it "unusual." Dunn also ran President Joe Biden's debate preparations in the 2020 presidential campaign.
Despite Dunn's pedigree and the respect she has in Democratic circles, she has thus far failed to resolve the Jean-Pierre situation. One of the reasons for this is that the White House is reportedly unwilling to take aggressive action against Jean-Pierre, who is black, female, and gay. As a source told the New York Post, "There's a huge diversity issue, and they're afraid of what folks are going to say."
Of course, it's not fair to lay Biden's many difficulties at the feet of his press secretary. Political problems for an administration usually start at the top and stem from a host of things. As Dana Perino, a former press secretary for George W. Bush, said of the Biden team's challenges in 2022, "It's not a communications problem. They have a policy problem." Still, having a suboptimal communicator who is feuding with her colleagues does not help.
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates, of course, denies that there is a problem at all. But there is ample reason to doubt his take. Fox News reporter Peter Doocy has reported that a "high-ranking person" has said the tensions between Jean-Pierre and Kirby are "absolutely true."
What's also true is that we have seen communicators clash in the White House in the past. Press secretary is a high-profile job, and presidents can't succeed if they don't have representatives who are successful in that role. In addition, the White House can be a snake pit, and rivalries can upend many a career, not to mention a presidency. Furthermore, the overlapping roles and responsibilities between the White House press secretary and communications director can often lead to conflict.
Looking back at history reveals that full-time communicators in the White House are a relatively new development. The White House did not have a full-time press secretary until Stephen Early in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, and the role of White House communications director did not come into being until Herb Klein originated the job at the start of the Nixon administration.
After Nixon resigned, Gerald Ford took over, but there were significant tensions between the Nixon holdovers and the new Ford team. C-SPAN's Brian Lamb, then a key member of the Ford transition, recommended that Ford replace Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler, who had major credibility problems after defending Nixon during the scandal. His suggested replacement was Detroit News Washington bureau chief Jerald terHorst.
Two problems quickly emerged. The first was that, according to Ford biographer Richard Norton Smith, terHorst was "ill-prepared" for the challenging job of press secretary. The second was that terHorst falsely, but unknowingly, told the press there was no pardon in the works for Nixon when in fact there was — terHorst resigned in the wake of the pardon, ostensibly because he objected to the decision. In reality, his lack of preparation and the loss of credibility from the unintended falsehood, for which he apologized, meant that his position was unsustainable. He was philosophical about the amount of conflict he witnessed during his brief tenure, observing that "to expect no frictions, uneasiness, or distrust in such a situation is to defy the psychological dynamics of the human personality."
Replacing terHorst was Ron Nessen, also a journalist, who had previously been an NBC News correspondent. Nessen also encountered a lot of conflict as press secretary, recalling, "I tried to stay out of the never-ending staff feuds. But that was not possible." Still, he managed to remain in his position until the end of the Ford administration and even represented the administration as a guest host of Saturday Night Live on April 17, 1976.
A different dynamic was at play in the Carter administration. Jody Powell served as press secretary, and Gerald Rafshoon served as the communications director. Both were in the so-called Georgia Mafia of aides who came with Jimmy Carter to Washington, and the two men had been friends since 1970. Powell was unbothered by Rafshoon taking the communications director position. Powell saw the need for a long-term communications planner, even if it seemingly took away some responsibilities from Powell. As press secretary, Powell's time was occupied with the daily crush of dealing with the White House press corps.
The challenge that Powell and Rafshoon encountered was Carter himself. The president was thin-skinned and could be nasty to reporters. At the end of the 1976 campaign, Boston Globe campaign correspondent Curtis Wilkie offered Carter a cheeky congratulations on his narrow victory. Carter snapped at him, "If it weren't for people like you, this election would have been over at 9 o'clock last night."
As president, Carter disliked the White House press corps, calling it in his diary "completely irresponsible and unnecessarily abusive." When Rafshoon wanted Carter to attend the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 1978, Carter refused, saying, "Why should I spend all this time to prepare jokes to entertain your and Jody's friends?" Powell handled the rejection with aplomb, appearing at the dinner instead of his boss and joking that Carter "wanted me to express his regrets. Unfortunately, time does not permit me to say all the things that are regrettable about the White House correspondents." Still, Carter's attitude made things harder for both Powell and Rafshoon — and did not really help Carter, either. He was soundly defeated for reelection by Ronald Reagan.
The Reagan administration had a very talented and successful communications apparatus. At the same time, there was tension between the press office and David Gergen, the communications director. Gergen had a reputation as a leaker and even earned the nickname "Professor Leaky" for his suspected frequent interactions with the press. The Reagan administration itself was a leaky administration, starting at the top with chief of staff James Baker, who was a terrific chief of staff but also a notorious leaker. The leaking was so rampant that even the president himself complained about it, telling aides in 1983 that "I've had it up to my keister with these leaks." In a great irony, the New York Times reported that the keister "comment was given out by David R. Gergen, the White House director of communications."
As for Gergen, dislike of him went beyond just grumbles about his leaking. Larry Speakes, who served as acting press secretary for much of the Reagan administration, was one of many who tried to undermine him. Speakes was "acting" press secretary for so long because press secretary Jim Brady was shot in the 1981 assassination attempt against Reagan and retained the title even as he was no longer capable of serving in the role. According to Speakes, Gergen wanted to take over for Brady and Speakes did not want him to. As a result, the two men and their teams engaged in what Speakes called "guerilla warfare" against one another.
From the Gergen side, he would undercut Speakes to Baker, telling the chief that "Speakes didn't get this quite right." Gergen would also send an underling to stand in the back during Speakes's briefings to report back on what Speakes was saying. Speakes confronted the underling and told him, "If you want to come to the briefings, you're perfectly welcome. Why don't you just stand up front with the rest of the staff?" Following that exchange, the active monitoring stopped.
Speakes also retaliated against Gergen with nicknames, jokes, and pranks. Gergen was quite tall, standing 6 feet, 4 inches, and Speakes dubbed him "the Tall Man," which he later shortened to just "Tall." Speakes also made jokes about Gergen's height, along the lines of "Gergen had been kidnapped as a child and raised by giraffes." Before Gergen would go brief the press, Speakes would have his aide Mark Weinberg set the White House podium to its lowest height and tighten the setting so it couldn't be easily adjusted upward. The result, according to Speakes, was that "Gergen would go in and tower over it like Ichabod Crane. He never was able to figure out why the podium struck him well below the waist."
Eventually, Gergen's leaking became so problematic that Baker told him he had to go elsewhere. He ended up at U.S. News and World Report, and press aide Marlin Fitzwater noted archly in his memoir that it was a "perfect perch" for him. Speakes won the interaction in the short term, but Gergen would go on to fame and fortune as a pundit. He would also have another contentious White House stint, later in the Clinton White House.
When Gergen joined the Clinton team, the inexperienced administration was in turmoil. There had not been a Democratic administration in 12 years, and the Clinton administration was loathe to take veterans of the failed Carter administration. As a result, the newbies floundered amid failed Cabinet nominations, unnecessary scandals, and poorly handled controversies. According to Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers, "There was a piece in I believe the New York Times that basically said this would be a failed presidency — you know, 10 days into Bill Clinton's first term." By the spring of his first year, Clinton was ready for a change, and with the encouragement of chief of staff Mack McLarty, he brought in White House veteran Gergen to be the adult in the room.
Gergen was indeed a mature veteran and a skilled operative, but he also remained a notorious leaker. (Old habits die hard.) He also made an enemy in George Stephanopoulos, who remained in the administration but lost his role of briefing the press as Gergen replaced him in the daily exchanges. Stephanopoulos also disliked Gergen's leaking and estimated that Gergen was the source for about a quarter of the stories about the administration's foreign policy troubles. Gergen's leaking also alienated Clinton national security adviser Tony Lake. With these enemies in powerful places, and with his patron McLarty exiting the chief of staff role, Gergen left the White House for the State Department in June of 1994, 13 months after his arrival.
As for Myers, she faced her own challenge when Leon Panetta took over as chief of staff shortly after Gergen's departure. Panetta was concerned about Myers's performance as press secretary since, according to the Washington Post, "on numerous occasions, Myers was sent out to brief reporters with information that turned out to be erroneous or incomplete and then drew sharp criticism for her performance." In a situation similar to the current Jean-Pierre contretemps, Panetta wanted to let her go but was unable to succeed because of the optics of getting rid of a female press secretary. Myers even used the controversy to earn herself a promotion from deputy assistant to assistant to the president, snagging a prized West Wing corner office in the process. She would eventually leave the administration, apparently on her own terms, at the end of 1994.
One press secretary who was successfully pushed out by an incoming chief of staff was Scott McClellan under George W. Bush. When Josh Bolten took over for Andy Card in 2006, he made a number of changes in the White House, most prominently bringing in Tony Snow to replace McClellan as Bush's spokesman. NPR's Don Gonyea reported that McClellan had seemed "a bit weary, a bit embattled," largely because of altercations with the press about the leak of the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame and the failed Supreme Court nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers. Bolten wanted a change at the podium and got it. As he later told C-SPAN's Lamb about McClellan, "I fired him. And he hasn't made any bones about that. I haven't made any bones about that."
Unfortunately for Bolten and the Bush administration, the story did not end there. McClellan wrote a tale-telling memoir that was critical of the Bush administration, accusing Bush of not knowing all the facts before ordering the 2003 Iraq invasion. McClellan's book prompted a strong response from his former colleagues, including Dan Bartlett, who called the accusations "misguided" and said McClellan "would not ... have [had] access to the types of meetings and deliberations that the president participated in."
Two other embattled White House communicators who left and later wrote books about their experiences were Sean Spicer and Anthony Scaramucci under former President Donald Trump. Spicer was press secretary from Day One of Trump's administration and started off on the wrong foot with the press over his assertions about the size of the crowds at the Trump inauguration. His tenure was a difficult one, punctuated by a brutal impersonation of him by Melissa McCarthy on Saturday Night Live. In addition to the press secretary job, Spicer also held the role of communications director, which was responsible for stopping leaks — an uphill battle in the constantly leaking Trump White House. In one meeting, Spicer demanded to see White House aides' phones to see who was leaking. Unsurprisingly, that tidbit leaked to the press as well.
To improve the administration's press and try to stop the leaking, Trump brought in Scaramucci, "the Mooch," as communications director in July of 2017. The brash Scaramucci impressed Trump with his TV appearances defending the administration and pledged to take charge of the communications apparatus. Spicer, unhappy at losing the communications director role and at the prospect of having to report to Scaramucci, resigned. Scaramucci then left 11 days later, after an expletive-laden rant to a New Yorker reporter that Scaramucci had failed to make clear was off the record.
The tumultuous early period was only a preview of the communications shop problems inside the Trump administration. Trump would cycle through six communications directors and four press secretaries during his single term. None of them, unsurprisingly, were able to get the leaks under control.
When it comes to White House communications aides, they best serve the president if they manage the news rather than make it. As veteran Washington reporter Mark Leibovich has observed, "There's a bit of a 'If-No-One-Remembers-the-Referee's-Name-He's-Probably-Doing-his-Job' factor in assessing a press secretary." In all of the controversies outlined above, the infighting among the communicators made headlines while making the administration's job harder.
What all this means for the Biden administration is that intracommunication conflict usually stems from fundamental administration challenges. Some of those challenges in previous administrations have included an inadequate press secretary, internal disagreement about key issues, or disagreement within the White House about the roles and responsibilities of key officials. The Kirby-Jean-Pierre squabbles in the Biden administration seem to suggest all three are at play.