Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch
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BACK AT THE CRAWFORD ELEMENTARY School gym, five blocks away, reporters sat and waited for something newsworthy to happen. Every few hours, TV correspondents would walk outside into the blistering heat to shoot a news segment—a ritual that involved the frantic powdering of noses, the rehearsing of lines ("No decisions on military action have been made . . ."), and the application of so much hairspray that the wind blowing in off the prairie could not rustle even one strand of hair. If you have seen a news clip from Crawford , you are familiar with the backdrop: Behind the reporter lies an idyllic green pasture dotted with hay bales. This is not, in fact, the Bush ranch, as most TV viewers might assume. Reporters are actually in town, standing in a parking lot, next to a field and the Crawford High School running track.
Inside the gym, fifty or so newspeople—print reporters, TV and radio correspondents, photographers, producers, sound techs—sat at long folding tables, where they typed on laptops and waited, and waited, and waited some more. It was a grim assignment for some of journalism's brightest stars, who were reduced to groveling before White House Press Office underlings, recent college graduates who lorded their power over us like imperious waiters. A vast navy blue curtain separated us from the press office, whose staffers rarely ventured beyond it, since reporters (myself included) tended to corner them with nervous inquiries about our chances of seeing the president on the ranch. Each day, we waited for the blue curtain to stir, bringing news that the president had cabin fever and wanted an audience. Each day we were disappointed. "Did you hear?" a reporter cracked. "There's an Amber Alert out for the president!" And so, day in and day out, we idled away the hours reading each other's stories. "The only glamorous thing about being a White House correspondent is getting to tell your friends that you're a White House correspondent," groused one White House correspondent.
The tedium of our days was interrupted when the press corps discovered, with much carping, that President Bush had invited one reporter—Scott Lindlaw, of the Associated Press—to the ranch while leaving the rest of us behind. Not long after Lindlaw's article appeared on the AP wire, one annoyed reporter posted a sign in the gym: "Spend a day with the Rancher-in-Chief! Sign up for your chance to report first-hand on how the President spends his vacation at Prairie Chapel Ranch. *Help him clear brush and burn cedar. *See if you can reduce your heart rate to 44 beats-per-minute after a three-mile run across the prairie. *Bring the First Lady her morning coffee. 'I had a great day,' says AP's Scott Lindlaw. Sign up now!"—below which several reporters had dutifully written their names. Not long afterward, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer arrived in Crawford to hold daily press briefings in the gym. Invariably, these briefings began with a remark about how President Bush had been working up a sweat clearing brush back at the ranch. So ubiquitous did the term "clearing brush" become that the Washington Post published an in-depth article on the subject. ("Brush-clearing is can-do, hands-on, results-oriented—all the things a chief executive strives to be.") We never actually saw the president clear brush ourselves; instead, the press office issued official photos of him in a sweat-stained T-shirt and a white Stetson, gritting his teeth as he carried a load of freshly cut cedar over his shoulder.
The White House Press Office understands that symbolism is at least as important as substance when the president is home on the range. Bush knows this as well—that the ranch, which he seems to genuinely love, is as much a political tool as a retreat. "Most Americans don't sit in Martha's Vineyard swilling white wine," Bush told the Associated Press this summer in a jab at Bill Clinton. (Most Americans don't own a 1,583-acre ranch either, but political symbolism has always been fuzzy on the details.) Just as Lyndon Johnson used his ranch to redefine himself as a product of the West, rather than the South, so Bush has used his ranch to cast himself as a regular Texan, rather than a product of Northeastern privilege, like his father. But while LBJ was born on his family's ranch and raised in Johnson City, Bush bought his land in 1999, when he was the Republican party's presumptive front-runner. Crawford had no sentimental pull for him; it was a practical choice. Unlike the Hill Country, the Blackland Prairie still has large parcels of relatively cheap land for sale. Although Bush had never lived in the country and never wore a Stetson in Midland, he now chops wood, drives a pickup, and peppers his speech with folksy turns of phrase. "I haven't been on the good side of a saw in a while," he told a reporter who asked him if he had finished a home-improvement project on the ranch. "If I need a hand, I'll holler."
President Bush may not have longed for the salt air of the family compound at Kennebunkport, but the press corps did. "To recreate the feel of Crawford in August, you'd need to wear a wet suit in a sauna," said Bob Kemper, of the Chicago Tribune. "There's only one guy who wants to be down here. Our only perk is that the people here are nice. They wave at us with more than one digit, not just the one we're used to." In the gym, we looked for diversions: Reporters tossed a football around, photographers practiced fly-fishing on the lawn, CNN cameraman Mike Greene played cheerful tunes on the ukulele. Greene also developed a habit of sunning himself in his rental car with the air conditioning on, dangling his pale legs out the window. "I'm trying to get rid of my North Lawn tan lines," he explained. At night, the press corps stayed in Waco, unwinding at a sports bar across the street from the Hilton called Cricket's Grill, where Ari Fleischer was besieged one night by Baylor girls wearing Mardi Gras beads and pink feather boas ("We love you, Ari!") and where Secret Service agents usually stood, straight-backed, along the bar.
Although President Bush kept busy during his working vacation, taking five trips to ten states where he attended Republican fundraisers that netted nearly $9 million, many reporters in Crawford never saw the man. Mike Allen, of the Washington Post, made a habit of driving past the ranch each day, just to make sure it actually existed. "This administration has an overwhelming suspicion of the press corps," said Bennett Roth, of the Houston Chronicle, mirroring the comments of many of his colleagues. "We're viewed as the enemy. The Bush administration does not see it as a public service to keep us informed but as a necessary inconvenience." In turn, White House correspondents have learned to get their information from less-proprietary sources. At United Nations meetings and G8 summits, they now regularly attend other countries' press briefings. And when Bush meets with heads-of-state, the press corps often relies on the foreign country's news services and diplomats to apprise them of what transpired. "Viewing us as an antagonistic press corps and treating us accordingly leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Kemper, who, in his three years of covering Bush for the Tribune, has never been granted a one-on-one interview. "When everything is so controlled and spun, it breeds suspicion."
Hopes for a Bush sighting rose during our last week in Crawford, when Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia visited the ranch. The meeting came during the debate over whether the U.S. should take military action against Iraq, a move that would require Saudi Arabia's cooperation. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice had flown in for the occasion, as had many national reporters, whose newspapers anticipated press coverage of the meeting. But as the hours ticked by that morning, no one from the White House appeared from behind the navy blue curtain. At two o'clock Ari Fleischer arrived to give a press briefing. He was guarded about the substance of the president's meeting, saying the two men had talked mainly about the war on terror. "On the topic of Iraq, the president stressed that he has made no decisions," Fleischer said. Then, in response to a follow-up question, Fleischer insisted that "Iraq did not come up in the conversation." He was more generous with other details. "Lunch included grilled chicken, Mediterranean salad, fresh green beans grown locally, and biscuits," he said. He was equally forthcoming about what they had worn—"They were casually dressed, wearing jeans and blazers"—as if the diplomatic meeting were actually a bridge party we were covering for the society pages.
"Why was there no media coverage given?" ABC News's White House correspondent, John Cochran, asked. "As you said yesterday, Prince Bandar is affable and speaks excellent English."
"Because, when I announced the meeting on Friday, I said there would be no press coverage," Fleischer said. "And when the president, when he has meetings with ambassadors, [he] does not have press coverage." Fleischer smiled, trying to smooth ruffled feathers. "I mean, I know it's Crawford and it's August and it's the only game in town in Crawford in August for the president. But that's part of White House policy. We typically do not have coverage of meetings with ambassadors." And so the media went back to waiting in the gym, counting the hours until Labor Day and the trip back to Washington.
