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"You're Not Being Fair." Hagerty does not scare easily, but his problems were a stern test of fortitude. To be sure, his boss was a pressagent's dream, and Hagerty set about making the most of the Eisenhower personality—to the point of letting presidential press conferences be filmed for television for the first time. (Other Hagerty press-conference innovations: tape recordings for radio, and an end to the tortured old rule that required indirect quotations.) But if Ike was a public-relations natural, a good many other members of the Administration were not. Cabinet officers, out of the business world and unfamiliar with the ways of the Washington press, at first talked too much, got hurt, and began clamming up completely.
During an early Cabinet meeting, Hagerty talked for 30 minutes, advising Cabinet officers to loosen up, to sell their accomplishments, get on TV panels ("make some use of that free time"), and to defend themselves when necessary. He explained exactly what off the record means (some of them had got to thinking that a clever way to kill a story was to call in reporters and give it to them off the record). Says Hagerty: "I told them I didn't care who they saw, but that if they talked to a reporter, it was going to turn up in print some way or another. I said, 'You're not being fair to yourselves or to the reporters, if you don't understand that.' "
Joe McCarthy was in his raucous prime during the first Eisenhower years, and it was Hagerty who bore the brunt of refusing to respond to needling questions at his twice-daily press conferences. Actually, the decision to avoid a public brawl with Joe was the President's, but Hagerty, who loathed McCarthy, agreed completely from a public-relations standpoint. Says he: "You could only lift the junior Senator from Wisconsin to the President's level or—worse—lower the President to the level of the junior Senator from Wisconsin." After McCarthy's Senate censure, Hagerty suggested that Utah's Republican Senator Arthur Watkins, chairman of the special McCarthy-investigating committee, be invited to the White House for congratulations, which he was.
"Tell Jim to Take Over." At 5:30 o'clock on the afternoon of Sept. 24, 1955, Hagerty was napping on the couch of his den at his Chevy Chase home on Reno Road when a phone call changed forever the dimensions of his job. It was from Assistant Press Secretary Murray Snyder at the President's vacation headquarters in Denver: Dwight Eisenhower had suffered a coronary thrombosis. The word that Hagerty was flying to Denver to take charge was soon relayed to the stricken President by Major General Howard McC. Snyder, the presidential physician. "Good," said Ike. "Tell Jim to take over."
Hagerty took over. For twelve weeks, both in Denver and during the convalescence at Gettysburg, Jim Hagerty controlled Administration news. His press conferences and medical bulletins began before 7 a.m. (to help the afternoon papers get a fresh lead), and, with the help of Heart Specialist Paul Dudley White, furnished the fullest, frankest information ever given the U.S. about the physical condition of an ailing President (some Administration leaders bridled at public discussion of the presidential bowels ; Hagerty ignored the complaints).