In a job where having an answer has not always meant the same thing as telling the truth, Michael McCurry had led a most charmed existence. Witty, candid and usually unflappable, McCurry was the rare White House press secretary whose reputation had not only survived but flourished--even as he brokered every day the conflicting interests of a scandal-prone President and a hard-bitten press corps. But as he stood gripping the briefing-room lectern last week, McCurry was showing uncustomary strain. He set his lips tightly when a reporter asked whether the press secretary could be sure that President Clinton's lawyers were giving him "full, complete, truthful" information. "Yes," McCurry said grimly. "And God help them if they're not."
These days it seems to be McCurry who could use the help. In the press conference that elicited the revealing aside, McCurry had been trying to extract himself from a misleading statement he had made over the weekend based on information provided to him by the White House counsel's office. Specifically, McCurry had flatly denied that anyone connected with the White House had hired or authorized private investigators to probe the background of prosecutors in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. A day later, on Monday, longtime Democratic operative Terry Lenzner acknowledged that his detective agency was indeed working for Clinton's lawyers and told the Washington Post that he found "nothing inappropriate" about investigating the prosecutors. So McCurry was left to reconcile a contradiction not even of his own making. When his colleagues on the communications team saw him emerge from the roomful of reporters "rocked, beat up," as a co-worker put it, they were furious on his behalf.
The 43-year-old spokesman has good-naturedly compared his role to being swatted around like a pinata. But since the Lewinsky story broke six weeks ago, the battering he's taking as the White House's chief defender is compounded by two problems. To start with, he has to handle questions he has been given no answers for. Even worse, sources say, McCurry is finding himself undercut by free-lance spinmeisters and by the President's legal teams, some of whom are engaging in their own leaks and covert counterattacks. One session last Wednesday involving McCurry's team and the lawyers exposed the difficulty of his predicament. White House counsel Charles Ruff, citing the fact that the matter was under court seal, refused to offer the press handlers any guidance on whether the President was invoking Executive privilege--even though someone among the lawyers had apparently leaked the news to the New York Times, which had played it on Page One that day. Further exasperating White House aides, Ruff added that the story was not precisely accurate but then wouldn't say where the errors were.