White House Press Secretary
The White House press secretary is a senior White House official whose primary responsibility is to act as spokesman for the executive branch of the United States federal government, especially with regard to the president, senior aides and executives, as well as government policies.
The press secretary is responsible for collecting information about actions and events within the president's administration and issues the administration's reactions to developments around the world. The press secretary interacts with the media and the White House press corps on a daily basis, generally in a daily press briefing. The press secretary serves by the appointment and at the pleasure of the president of the United States; the office does not require the advice and consent of the United States Senate; however, because of the frequent briefings given to the global media, who in turn inform the public, the position is a prominent non-Cabinet post.
On January 20, 2025, Karoline Leavitt became the 36th White House press secretary.
History
Early press relations
During the United States' early years, there was not a single designated staff person or office responsible for managing the relationship between the president and the growing number of journalists and media entities that were covering him. It was not until after President Abraham Lincoln's administration that Congress formally appropriated funds for a White House staff, which at first consisted merely of a secretary. Ulysses S. Grant's White House staff officially numbered six people at a cost of $13,800, though he supplemented with personnel from the War Department. Fifty years later under the Coolidge administration, the staff had increased to just fewer than fifty people at a cost of nearly $100,000.As presidents increasingly hired more staff, some showed a tendency to pick aides and confidantes who had backgrounds in the field of journalism. One of Abraham Lincoln's private secretaries, John G. Nicolay, had been an editor and owner of a newspaper in Illinois before he worked for the president in the White House. While the modern equivalent of a private or personal secretary to the president of the United States would be more narrowly concerned with the care and feeding of the president, the small size of the White House staff at that point meant that Nicolay interacted with the press occasionally in carrying out his duties. He was occasionally asked to verify stories or information that various members of the press had heard. Though the title and establishment of the roles and responsibilities of the press secretary job was still decades in the future, the small and growing White House staff was increasingly interacting with a growing number of professional journalists and mass media entities covering the president and the White House. Andrew Johnson was the first president to grant a formal interview request to a reporter, sitting down with Col. Alexander K. McClure from Pennsylvania. Although various presidents and reporters had participated in conversations or dialogues prior to Johnson, the exchanges had been less formal.
Cleveland and McKinley administrations
Prior to the 1880s and the presidency of Grover Cleveland, the relationship between the president, his administration, and the small but growing number of newspapers covering him was such that there was little need for a formal plan or designated spokesperson to manage it. The relationship between government and the press was not as inherently adversarial and arms length as in modern times. In fact, prior to the establishment of the U.S. Government Printing Office, some newspapers were awarded contracts to print government publications and often supported the president in exchange. For example, the Gazette of the United States won an early U.S. Treasury contract and was supportive of President George Washington. In general, though coverage of the president could be harsh and opinionated, newspapers were to some degree extensions of the political party apparatus and subsequently not seen as entities requiring specific, sustained management by the White House or administration.The media had changed significantly by 1884, when Grover Cleveland was elected as president of the United States. Between 1776 and 1884, the United States had quadrupled geographically and increased in population from 2.5 million to 56 million. The number of newspaper publications in active circulation had increased from 37 to more than 1,200 dailies, in addition to the many new monthly magazines. The rapid growth in journalism as a booming industry resulted in an increase in reporters covering the activities of the president.
Grover Cleveland married 21-year-old Frances Folsom in 1886. The growing number of reporters and the increasing aggressiveness of their style of coverage led to frustrations when the president and his new bride were unable to rid themselves of reporters who followed them to their honeymoon in Deer Park, Maryland. President Cleveland relied on his private secretary, Daniel Lamont, who had once been an editor of the Albany Argus, to keep the reporters at bay. The controversy surrounding coverage of the trip resulted in a public debate about the balance between the right of the president and his family to privacy and the role of the press in covering the country's most public figure. In an editorial, the New York World defended the right of the press to cover the president at all times:
The idea of offending the bachelor sensitiveness of President Cleveland or the maidenly reserve of his bride has been far from anybody's thought...We must insist that the President is public property; that it is perfectly legitimate to send correspondents and reporters to follow him when he goes on a journey, and to keep watch over him and his family.
White House press corps
At the end of the Cleveland administration, a new feature of press coverage of the White House materialized. William W. Price, a southern reporter, auditioned for a job at the Washington Evening Star by stationing himself at the White House to seek out stories. He interviewed guests coming and going from meetings or events with the president and ultimately reported a story in a piece carrying the headline "At the White House". Competitor newspapers responded by sending their own reporters to cover the White House in a daily, sustained way and soon the White House had reporters dedicated to covering the "White House beat". Some point to this as the early origins of a more formal White House Press Corps.When President Cleveland was elected to a second, non-consecutive term in 1893, George B. Cortelyou, formally trained as a stenographer, was named confidential stenographer at the White House and later named executive clerk. Though he was not given the formal title of private secretary to the president until later and the term press secretary had not yet been conceived, Cortelyou was highly respected by the press and William McKinley's biographer, Margaret Leach, called Cortelyou "the first of the presidential press secretaries". President Cleveland's successor, William McKinley, kept Cortelyou on during the transition and later formally named him private secretary to the president, though he had been informally doing the job for some time prior. Under McKinley, Cortelyou became notable for his popularity with journalists covering the White House. The correspondents relied on him for information and his tenure as private secretary was noteworthy for some of the same working traits modern press secretaries have become popular for, including providing information to reporters later in the evening if events had transpired in the afternoon, offering advance copies of remarks prepared for the president, and ensuring reporters received transcripts of unprepared remarks made by the president while traveling, which were recorded by a stenographer. Cortelyou also circulated noteworthy stories to the president and other staffers, which is similar to the exhaustive news summaries formally distributed to the White House staff in the modern era. The nascent press corps' appreciation for Cortelyou's responsiveness is similar to how a modern White House press secretary's responsiveness to the press corps can shape their positive or negative view of him or her.
Working space in the White House for the press corps
The White House "beat" concept that had been started during the Cleveland administration by reporter William Price was continued during the McKinley administration. Around the time of the outbreak of the Spanish–American War in 1898, the reporters covering the White House were invited into the mansion itself and provided with space to write, conduct interviews, and generally cover the White House. Now reporting from inside the White House, the reporters used their new location to interview guests entering or leaving the White House or confirm pieces of information from the president's secretaries as they passed through in the course of their duties. Reporters working in the White House did, however, honor an unspoken rule and refrain from asking the president himself a question if he happened to walk through their working area.The long-term presence of the White House Press Corps in the White House was cemented by Theodore Roosevelt, who asked that planners include permanent space for the press corps in the executive office building now called the West Wing, which he had ordered built in the early 1900s. It is the West Wing that ultimately housed the Office of the Press Secretary and the now-famous James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, which was renovated by the George W. Bush administration in 2007.
Woodrow Wilson administration
When Woodrow Wilson was elected governor of New Jersey in 1910, he asked Joseph P. Tumulty to serve as his private secretary. When he was elected president two years later, he brought Tumulty with him to the White House, where Tumulty served as private secretary to the president. As private secretary, Tumulty dealt extensively with the press. At the outset of the administration, Tumulty convinced Wilson, who was known for his distaste of the press, to hold news conferences on a regularized schedule, sometimes as much as twice every week. During the first such news conference, over one hundred reporters crowded into Wilson's office to ask him questions. Wilson often requested that reporters not publish answers given in these settings and on one occasion threatened to cancel the news conferences when a reporter revealed comments he had given regarding Mexico. The press conferences were later discontinued after the sinking of British liner Lusitania, and despite attempts to revive them during his second term were held only sporadically during Wilson's final years in office.Joseph Tumulty also put into place a more regular schedule of briefing the press. He gave daily briefings to the press in the morning, which were attended by as many as thirty reporters. By formalizing the press briefing process, Tumulty laid the groundwork for what would later be called the White House Press Briefing. Tumulty also worked to clarify embargo rules for the press, ordering that the exact time a press embargo was lifted be noted on the confidential information that was being released.