Ronald Reagan would probably not have fired him for fabricating presidential quotes, but Merrill Lynch forced him out. Former White House Spokesman Larry Speakes last Friday also became a former vice president of communications, dumped from a job worth nearly half a million a year in salary and perks.
Speakes self-immolated, revealing in his White House memoirs Speaking Out how he had made up Reagan statements without the President's knowing. A fire storm followed. Speakes had violated a flack's first commandment: Be believable.
In one of the incidents, at the Geneva summit in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev seemed to be getting the...
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