Martha Joynt Kumar

Michael Baruch Grossman

Michael Baruch Grossman, 70, a political science professor whose specialty was the relationship between the president and the news media, died May 14, 2007, in Oakland, California, from complications arising from pancreatic cancer.

The White House Interview Program

MW: Well, I went to the University of Redlands. I was majoring in economics at the time. In my junior year I came to Washington to participate in the Washington semester program at American University. I ran out of money because I was doing scholarships and working and ended up filing correspondence in the basement of the now Old Russell Office Building for Senator [William] Knowland, who was the minority leader from California. I got Potomac fever and I went back to Redlands and—I tell this to kids, particularly in speeches—I determined to make public service my career. Six years later I had worked for seven elected officials who managed to lose eight elections between them. True story. And Richard Nixon was two of those. But I did change my major to Political Science and I got my MA from Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers. Between college and graduate school I came back to Washington and ended up working in Vice President Nixon’s office for Herb Klein, who later became the Director of Communications. So there is a path here.

The Rise and Growth of American Politics: A Sketch of Constitutional Developments by Henry Jones Ford

“It is the rule of our politics that no vexed question is settled except by executive policy,” noted Henry Jones Ford (1851–1925) in his 1898 work describing the state of national politics. “Whatever may be the feeling of Congress towards the President, it cannot avoid an issue which he insists upon making,” Ford wrote as he continued with his discussion of the central role played by the president as the leader of his party (283–84). Even presidents whose congressional party members turned their backs on the leadership of their presidents were needed to provide their parties in Congress with an agenda, as was the case with Presidents John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, and Grover Cleveland. “Although repudiated by the parties which elected them, [they] furnished the issues upon which party action turned,” noted Ford (284). Even though he may have arrived at his views through shaky research means and was often inaccurate in his predictions about the direction of American politics, in the late nineteenth century Ford noted the special energy provided by the presidency to our political system. He anticipated the soonto-come activist presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

Milton's army: The white house press corps

Abstract White House reporters follow a path constructed by presidential advisers that they hope will lead them to fulfill goals set by their news organizations. White House officials ration them facilities for work, access to newsworthy people, and reportable information in amounts that depend on the importance to the President of the type of media they work in, the status of their particular news organization, and the staffs respect for the influence and competence of a particular individual. In this context, several constraints that affect White House reporting are discussed here: those placed on reporters by their organizations; by the way their type of media covers the White House; by their relations with each other; and by their concepts of what they are required to do. The framework for this discussion and analysis is a classification by type of media and news organizations that assign journalists to the White House. Of the resulting six categories, the first three have the most structural and org...