GE: imagination at work

Progress Reports: Eric Dezenhall

The “Great Communicator”

As a young aide in the media shop in Ronald Reagan’s White House, I once inquired of Reagan’s legendary “image maker” Michael Deaver about the origins of the president’s communications philosophy. Deaver, who was always bemused by the notion that he and President Reagan were practitioners of a mysterious brand of public relations alchemy, responded with two letters: GE.

I nodded as if I understood, having a fuzzy recollection of reading something about President Reagan’s work with General Electric. Truth was, Reagan’s work as GE’s spokesperson was way before my time, but as the centennial of his birth approaches, the communications artifacts of that long-ago era seem paradoxically visionary. It is safe to say that whether you loved him or not, Reagan’s time and experiences at GE, more than any political challenge, informed the communications approach that earned him the presidential moniker, “The Great Communicator.”

An examination of Reagan’s “GE Era” leads quickly to the discovery that many of the terms, concepts and tactics that have become standard in modern-day politics were forged from the Reagan–GE relationship.

“The Mashed Potato Circuit”
While doing research for a book on high-stakes communications, I traced the phrase “spin doctor” back to the early 1980s when Reagan was president. The term was usually deployed by the Administration’s critics to suggest that Reagan’s popularity was somehow false, the product of trickery. When a friend — a Reagan detractor — once questioned me about how the White House “spun” the public, I explained that the strategy was jaw-droppingly simple: Knowing that the Washington press corps and self-fashioned elites were incurably hostile to him, Reagan simply went over their heads and spoke straight to the American people whom he knew, understood, respected and believed in.

This strategy was not, contrary to popular lore, invented by any of President Reagan’s handlers after a battery of focus groups. It was a straightforward device Reagan himself picked up from the cross-country tours he undertook on behalf of GE between 1954 and 1962, where his primary mission was to serve as a goodwill ambassador between employees in GE facilities all over the country and top management. While he was at it, he also promoted GE brands by speaking with audiences, both in-person on what he fondly called ‘The Mashed Potato Circuit” and televised on General Electric Theater, about the benefits and value of GE products in the lives of everyday Americans.

Targeting the Grassroots
Reagan learned through his GE travels and from top GE executives the benefits of communicating directly with regular people, circumventing the media and political system, and instead relying on grassroots interest and discussion to change public opinion. Reagan’s mentor at GE, Lemuel Bolware, believed public opinion could be swayed by turning everyday people into “mass communicators.” On his speaking tours, Reagan urged his audiences to write their congressmen and community groups to pass resolutions against deficit spending. He understood that a groundswell of support or opposition to a bill would get the attention of lawmakers and other political leaders.

“Listening Tours”
Reagan’s critics often write off his communications skills by saying he was just an actor. This logic fails because actors are trained to talk, not listen. As Marlon Brando once said, “An actor is somebody who if you’re not talking about him ain’t listening.” If Hollywood taught Reagan to speak, GE taught Reagan to listen.

Reagan’s crisscrossing of the country to GE facilities was, in essence, the first “listening tour,” a parlance that has become popular in modern politics, often used by politicians, most notably in New York by Hillary Clinton. Reagan held his listening tour in the nation’s heartland, and used the tours to familiarize himself with Middle America and the working class. He also used the tour to develop a kinship with everyday citizens and develop empathy for them.

These interactions didn’t solely stem from Reagan’s fabled sunny personality. The lumbering, self-confident former movie actor was, in fact, terrified of flying, and traveled hundreds of thousands of miles for GE, mostly by train. Accordingly, he was a captive audience for passengers that wanted to interact with the famous, if fading, movie star. Sometimes Reagan enjoyed the give-and-take; other times he wanted to get some sleep, but learned to, well, act, albeit in a new way than he had in Hollywood, a skill that served him well in the decades to come.

The Celebrity Politician
Well into middle age, Reagan had no illusions that he was a big movie star. The term “washed up” had been bandied about, and he knew it. Still, in the heartland he became a new kind of big deal when he signed on as the host of General Electric Theater, a CBS television show featuring adaptations of books, films and plays.

Reagan’s television role was a boon to his career on several levels. His name-recognition galvanized attention at plants and on the “mashed potato circuit” to showcase his evolving values. And on a larger scale, in the years to come, he was able to bring followers to Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964 through a televised speech.

I saw firsthand the importance of television to Reagan’s communications style decades after he first mastered the technology. My cramped White House office was adjacent to a suite occupied by seasoned former television producers, both full and part-time. Sometimes I would accompany them to the Diplomatic Reception Room where the president would film messages using a TelePrompTer for occasions where he could not personally be in attendance. A producer would summarize the audience he was addressing, and he would modulate his voice in a way that projected in a deeper resonance than it did in regular conversation. He usually nailed it on one take, but on occasions when he flubbed a line, he would default to humor. One time, annoyed with himself, the president scratched his scalp and announced, “I just washed my hair and I can’t do a thing with it!” a line from an old shampoo commercial.

Confound Critics
Throughout his transition from actor to politician, Reagan was faced with many people skeptical of his political skills. They wrote him off as a scripted carnival barker of little political substance. But Reagan learned through his GE experience to prove his knowledge of current affairs and his political acumen. He would quote Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt in his remarks to the press to demonstrate political depth. And he minimized prepared speeches and focused on question-and-answer sessions, to show he wasn’t scripted.

Perhaps his most famous spontaneous counterpunch came at the beginning of his 1980 presidential campaign when a newspaper editor requested that the former governor’s microphone be shut off. Reagan famously stood up, and to thunderous applause announced, “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green.”

That the candidate got the editor’s name wrong — it was “Breen” — is lost to history, but stumbling over names was also classic Reagan.

“Progress is Our Most Important Product”
During Reagan’s tenure at GE, one of the company’s slogans was “Progress is our most important product,” a forward-looking notion that reflected a corporate culture more than a particular consumer appliance.

The attitude encapsulated by the slogan is one that was to turn up in Reagan’s evergreen dictums to his communications staff, from strategists to speechwriters: “When in doubt, talk about the future.” He reasoned that the public will forgive its leaders for failing to achieve a goal, but won’t forgive them for failing to set them.

One hundred years after his birth, the future is the backdrop of most accounts of Reagan’s rise and tenure.

Eric Dezenhall is the CEO of Dezenhall Resources, Ltd., which specializes in high-stakes communications and crisis management. He is the author of seven books of fiction and non-fiction, including Damage Control: Why Everything You Know About Crisis Management is Wrong.