Word: ziegler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That recent exchange was deceptively benign, an interlude in a harsh running confrontation that seems to be destroying Ziegler's usefulness. Ziegler, 34, has never been popular with White House reporters. Unlike most of his recent predecessors, he had never been a newsman-he was an account executive for J. Walter Thompson, where he met H.R. Haldeman. His friendship with Haldeman and his work on the 1968 Nixon campaign lifted him into the White House...
...press secretary, Ziegler was unresponsive to journalists. During the early months of the Watergate investigation, he turned brusque. At first he dismissed the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters as a "third-rate burglary." He responded to some of the Washington Post's revelations by charging "character assassination" and "the shoddiest kind of journalism." Often his answers seemed deliberately unclear or misleading...
Thus there was no cushion of rapport when the full impact of Watergate began to be felt. Ziegler labeled previous inaccurate pronouncements "inoperative." He apologized to the Washington Post for his earlier attacks. But reporters are in no mood to forgive...
...hardly surprising when Post Columnist Nicholas von Hoffman, an old adversary, last week compared Ziegler to a Pinocchio whose nose grows longer with every public prevarication. But James Kilpatrick, a conservative commentator who was generally friendly to the Administration before Watergate, recently said: "I don't believe the White House is best served by Ziegler. The word 'inoperative' is going to follow him the rest of his life...
Paul Healy agrees: "I think he should resign. His credibility has been ruined. Reporters who cover the White House every day say, 'Who's going to believe him again?' " Some argue that because he is a prisoner of the President's wishes, Ziegler's personal trustworthiness is not at issue. "Ziegler's credibility doesn't trouble me at all," says the New Republic's John Osborne. "Ziegler's credibility is Nixon's credibility...