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As always, Press Secretary Hagerty pulled up a chair directly across the desk from the President and began running down his list: "Mr. President, there is likely to be something on the economy . . ." From time to time other staffers chipped in with a word of advice or a piece of information. Their aim was not to put words in the President's mouth but to help him assemble relevant facts; they had long since learned that Eisenhower answers questions in his own way. On the question of Russia's demands for an international summit conference. Hagerty pointed out that last May Russia's Nikita Khrushchev had taken a position that was now close to the U.S. position; i.e., that a summit conference should be preceded by a working-level preliminary conference. (Secretary of State Dulles had dug up the Khrushchev statement and passed it to Hagerty by telephone just before the briefing.) It was an item that President Eisenhower could (and did) use at his press conference. At 10:27 o'clock, only three minutes before conference time, Hagerty concluded: "That's all I have." President Eisenhower, already on his feet, replied: "Fine. Let's go."
Forty-eight minutes later, press-service teletypes across the U.S. were clattering with news of the conference, copy boys were ripping off the white sheets of the Associated Press and the yellow of the United Press, and editors began making over their front pages. Jim Hagerty had done well; only two news-conference questions touched on areas that Hagerty had not anticipated. One was whether President Eisenhower planned to accompany Mamie to the May launching of the first nuclear surface ship at Camden, NJ. (Ike's answer: "I don't know anything about it.") The other was whether he planned to meet and discuss racial problems with New York's Negro Representative Adam Clayton Powell. (Answer: "I will have to look this one up.") In fact, Jim Hagerty's news judgment, as evidenced by his briefing, may have been better than the reporters': they asked no questions in the headline-making field of U.S. missile progress, for which Hagerty and Ike were thoroughly prepared.
"Let's Hear." Such judgment, backed by meticulous attention to detail, has made New Yorker Jim Hagerty by every standard the best—and most powerful—White House press secretary in U.S. history. Day in, day out, year in, year out, between presidential speeches and press conferences, during Eisenhower vacations and Eisenhower illnesses, Hagerty is the authentic voice of the White House and, to an extent rarely recognized, of the whole Administration.
To the U.S. public, Hagerty's voice sounds loudest when he announces White House plans and decisions—and in a republic where the manner of presenting policy can be almost as important as its substance, Hagerty's influence is great. "Jim has been largely responsible for the complexion of the Administration," says Sherman Adams, a man not given to gushing. "His accomplishments have been heroic."