‘Five feet from the president’: Watching history unfold as the press pool reporter

Episode transcript

Gail Chaddock:  There’s a running joke among White House correspondents that the most glamorous part of the job is telling people you cover the White House. We’re talking with two Monitor reporters about one aspect of that job, the rotating press pool. Also known as the Protective Pool. It may not be glamorous, but traveling with the president close enough to accurately record what is said sounds like a pretty glamorous job to me, a front seat on presidential history. 

What is that really like? 

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Chaddock:  This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m this week’s guest host, Gail Chaddock. Linda Feldmann has covered every presidential election since 1996. She’s the Monitor’s Washington bureau chief, senior political and White House correspondent, and hosts the Monitor Breakfast, a Washington institution. Linda, thank you, as ever, for joining us today.

Linda Feldmann: Hi, Gail. Glad to be here. 

Chaddock:  Linda, how many pool assignments have you taken on in your career?

Feldmann: Oh my gosh, I’ve been doing in-town and travel pool with American presidents for about 20 years, so it has to number in the hundreds. The point about doing pool is that you have to pay super close attention because at any moment it could be extraordinarily interesting, if not historic. 

Chaddock:  Beautiful. You were the print-press reporter in the Oval Office pool the day that President Biden spoke to the nation on why he had decided to drop out of the race. Since the rest of us only saw the president at his desk, can you help us understand the scene in that room at that time? 

Feldmann: In the room, it was very crowded. It was full of equipment. They had taken out all the usual furniture. So you had all the equipment that goes with doing a live TV broadcast. It was like being on a TV set. There were literally just three outlets represented, myself, a still photographer and a TV crew. To me, what was most interesting was the family who were seated along the wall to the president’s left, none of which you could see on television. Nine of those were family members, including his wife, his children, spouses, and then, uh, one staff member who’s especially dear to him, Mike Donilon. And I watched them very closely. When the president is addressing the nation, I don’t need to track exactly what he’s saying, because all you have to do is watch TV. 

I watched what was happening in the room. So I was watching, for example, the president’s daughter, Ashley Biden, reach her hand over to her mother, Jill Biden, in an intensely emotional moment. I thought she was going to burst into tears, which she didn’t. But when the president’s address ended and the TV broadcast ended, there were tears. The president came over and hugged family members. It was a very poignant moment for President Biden as he winds down his presidency.

Chaddock:  Now, it’s really interesting, Linda. We’re also tapping into an earlier recording session with Monitor staff writer Sophie Hills at a critical moment in the Biden presidency. It was after his debate debacle, before he dropped out of the race on July 21st. Sophie isn’t with us. She’s out covering Vice President Harris’s first campaign swing since the convention. But her comments in this earlier recording session fit so well into issues we’re discussing with Linda. We decided to use them to create our own conversation. 

I asked her how she knew what to include in these reports. And she’s obviously writing a lot of material. And she said: 

Sophie Hills: My goal this weekend was just to observe as much as I could and note everything that I observed in the pool reports. Knowing that people are particularly scrutinizing things like the way the president moves, how he speaks, what he speaks about. It’s impossible to note everything, but my goal was to err on the side of including too much rather than not enough. 

Chaddock:  Linda, how do you decide what’s important to include in a pool report? In your own coverage of the president, were there moments that you saw fumbling, and thought it’s not appropriate to report every stumble or every slip? 

Feldmann: So in the case of President Biden, who’s the oldest president in American history. It was actually very important to report every stumble, every slip, every moment of question about his age, because the White House press corps was under special pressure. There [have] been a lot of questions about whether we were covering for the president. And I can safely say from my own experience that we were not. I would say the White House was trying to protect the president, to not let us see him in unguarded moments. Um, but I honestly don’t think we were covering for him in the way that the press corps under Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy was covering for the president, either on his health or on his private activities. 

Chaddock:  Also an interesting point. I asked Sophie at one point, she said in her report: “The President didn’t respond to other shouted questions, although it’s not clear whether they were audible.” And I asked her about it. It was kind of a nice clause. It sounded like the kind of old fashioned idea that you give presidents the benefit of the doubt. You know, maybe they’re not doddering, maybe they just couldn’t hear the question. And her answer was this: 

Hills: That, specifically, is something that I learned from an orientation held by the White House Correspondents Association for reporters who were learning how to serve as pool reporters, or wanted a refresher. Someone made the comment that we can’t actually know if the president heard our shouted questions. And I’ll just say they’re shouted not out of a desire to be rude, but because often the president is far away or we were asking these questions as the president was getting on or off the plane. So, I tried to bring that spirit to all of my observations. I would write what I would see, but try to note that perhaps I didn’t have enough information to draw a conclusion.

Feldmann:  Yeah, that’s absolutely correct. I mean, remember Ronald Reagan, when he would put his cup, his hand to his ear and say he couldn’t hear what the pool was saying? Maybe he could, and maybe he couldn’t, but you cannot assume anything when you’re doing pool. You can’t assume the president heard the question. 

Chaddock: How do you get your reports out as quickly and as accurately as they have to be? 

Feldmann: So the way it works is that you send the pool reports to a private listserv to White House reporters that goes out immediately and doesn’t go through the press office. You also simultaneously send it to the press office, which gets it out whenever they can to a wider list. But the point of a pool report is to say what you know for sure. No guessing, no speculating, no assumptions. If the president says something and you’re not completely sure exactly what he said, you say that he said something to the effect of X. And then you say: “Will check recording and provide exact quote shortly.” We can go to the TV or radio pooler and get their audio, make a transcript, and send that out to the wider press corps. 

Chaddock: Now, one thing I noticed in my own reporting experience is that the longer I did it, I could take notes very quickly, but I could no longer read them. My handwriting became completely illegible. Did you handwrite what you were noting? 

Feldmann: No, I use Otter. So Otter is an app that makes an audio recording and a transcript at the same time. It’s about 90 percent accurate, so when I need to give an exact transcript of what was said, I will check the Otter recording, I’ll listen to it, make sure the written transcript is accurate and then send that to the distribution list.

Chaddock: Are you ever using a pen and pencil?

Feldmann: No, when I do pool, I just use my phone. I don’t need a pen and pad.

Chaddock: This is great.

Feldmann: The world has moved on from paper and pencil, sorry to say.

Chaddock: So you, you can type fast with your thumbs.

Feldmann: Oh my God, I can, I can write entire stories with my thumbs. It’s a new world out there. 

Chaddock: Ah, so it would seem. I actually love reading your reports about pool duty. My special favorite was one you wrote in 2006: 14 Hours, Really, with then Vice President Dick Cheney. Why did you write this piece, which had everything you ate, everything you did, and all of the interminable waiting, and ended, my favorite part of the story, with your ’92 Toyota Camry expiring in a tunnel on Route 295 at around midnight. Why did you write that story?

Feldmann: Because it was so crazy. Here I am flying around the country with Dick Cheney, of all people. I mean, here he is the most important vice president, at the time, uh, in American history. And I’m flying to Topeka, Kansas. To New Orleans. Uh, I’m listening to him talk. I’m listening to him interact with people. And then I bring it back to my old car, breaking down in the tunnel. With Mike Allen. So the famous Mike Allen, who’s now at Axios. He’s such a gentleman. I said, “Mike, you can just leave if you want. You don’t have to hang out with me.” But he waited with me for the tow truck to come to take my car away.

Chaddock: Well, I’ll tell you, for me, that story ended, any sense that the job was glamorous. There was another one I’d love you to talk about: two days with President Trump on Air Force One. If you’ve ever sat in the audience of a Trump rally, as I did in 2016, and he looks at the press, behind a cordon in the back of the room, and starts criticizing them severely. It’s a very uncertain feeling. What surprised me from your story is.... Did I miss something? He seemed to like the press. 

Feldmann: Oh my gosh. Donald Trump loves the press. Are you kidding? I mean. What’s not to love for a group of major press reporters [that] follows you 24-7. So Donald Trump calls us the “enemy of the people,” but we all know that he loves the press. He’s come to the back of the plane. I’ve gotten to see him spend a half an hour talking to us, calling it off the record, but at the end saying, OK, it’s on the record, except that last question. I was once on travel pool with him on Super Bowl Sunday. We’re sitting in the cafe at his club in West Palm Beach, not Mar-a-Lago, but near Mar-a-Lago. And at one point he came into the room to talk to the pool and, he was acting like a hotelier and asking us: Were we having a good time? Did we like the food? How’s it going? He wanted to make sure we’re happy. He’s a host among his many identities. Um, and there’s nothing like standing five feet away from the president, and looking them in the eye and seeing them as people and not as the leader of the free world. Whether it’s Joe Biden or Donald Trump or Barack Obama. You just are reminded constantly they’re just people. There’s nothing magical about the president of the United States. 

Chaddock: I loved also a piece you did in 2009, on traveling with President Obama to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Thirty hours. And at different points, you’re being deluged on your personal cellphone with questions from people. Where is he? What’s happening? Is there a deal? In addition to what else you’re doing. Tell us about that. 

Feldmann: Oh my goodness, that was completely insane. So people who are on the outside of the pool with the president think we know exactly what’s going on. The answer is that we often don’t know what’s going on. We’re in that bubble of being with the president. And sometimes we’re behind the scenes. So I’m hearing from people saying, What’s going on? Where’s he going? And I had to say, honestly, I don’t know. Um, you might get more answers by working this question from the outside. 

The most memorable part of that trip was when we, the American press pool with President Obama, were outside the room where he was about to meet with the premier of China. And we weren’t being allowed into the room. And Robert Gibbs, Obama’s press secretary, said, “If my press corps isn’t allowed in the room, this meeting isn’t happening.” And that made me so happy. 

Chaddock: That’s great.

Feldmann: This was not about Robert Gibbs being a nationalist or somehow taking sides with the press. This was about freedom of the press. We needed to be in that room. The Chinese press corps was already set up in the room, and if the Chinese press corps was in there, the American press corps needed to be in there. And the Chinese backed down and let us in. 

Chaddock: I love that, too. That was a great piece. When you’re the pool reporter, you are thinking in a very precise way about your job description: What is important, what you pass on, how you do it accurately, quickly, and so forth. But after the event is over, you go back and you’re writing for the Monitor again. How do you decide what’s important to say to Monitor readers? 

Feldmann: It really depends on the story I’m writing. So for example, earlier this year, I traveled with President Biden in South Carolina, and our first stop was at a Black-owned barbershop. And we, the pool, got to go inside and watch President Biden work the room. He talked to everybody in the room. Joe Biden is the consummate politician. Has to talk to everybody, shake every hand, pose for selfies. Then we, the pool, are let out after about five minutes, and he keeps going as long as he wants. So... not long after, I’m writing a cover story about President Biden and I decided that that moment in the Black-owned barber shop was perfect for the story I was writing about, Biden in the final stretch of his presidency. And just the fact that he’s just a consummate politician. And I described that scene in the barbershop. 

So when you do pool, you glean information that you can save for later. But I have to point out that you can’t put anything in your own story that didn’t appear in a pool report. But it just gives you a well of both hard information and impressions that inform your reporting in an invaluable way going forward. There’s nothing like it. 

Chaddock: Linda, thank you for joining us for this podcast, and thank you for your decades of standing one of the most important watches in journalism. And especially – this isn’t as obvious – thank you for your support of writers like Sophie who are coming along. As long as I’ve known you, there’s always been someone you’re talking about that you want to help in some way, and I greatly appreciated that.

Feldmann: Thank you, Gail. I appreciate it.

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Chaddock: And thank you to Sophie in absentia for moving so quickly from Monitor intern to readiness to take on big assignments. And thanks to our listeners. We value your support and your comments. You can find more, including our show notes, with a link to the stories we discussed in this podcast, at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Gail Chaddock, edited and produced by Clay Collins and Jingnan Peng and Mackenzie Farkas. Our sound engineers are Alyssa Britton and Noel Flatt, with  original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor, copyright 2024.