Transcripts

Interview 2 – July 12, 2007

Johnson:
This is Kathleen Johnson, interviewing Tina Tate, former director of the House Radio-Television Gallery. This is the second interview with Tina Tate. The interview is taking place in the Cannon House Office Building, and the date is July 12, 2007. I would like to begin with talking about some of the changes from the 1970s until today.
Tate:
All right, these were some things that I had thought of after our first discussion that really made a big difference in how the House was covered from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. And one of those was the Speaker’s press conferences. The Speaker would have a press conference 15 minutes before the House was in session, every day that the House was in session. So reporters had an opportunity to talk directly to the Speaker—ask him a question on any subject they wanted, whether it was legislation, or visitors to the Congress, or whatever he wanted to, even a political question. So that was something that was a real tool for reporters, to have that kind of access with a Speaker directly, on a face-to-face basis. As staff, we would attend and take notes on it. If a reporter missed the session, he/she could check our notes to see what questions were asked. And that went on until Speaker [Newton] Gingrich was elected. He began to do his press conferences on camera because he was a very visible figure—and a very telegenic person—and would always have something interesting to say; it would frequently make air. You would begin to get reporters asking baiting questions, in order to make air, or in order to get a point across, rather than to solicit information. They discontinued doing the Speaker’s press conferences on camera, and then they discontinued doing the Speaker’s press briefings altogether and began doing Majority Leader briefings, and after that Minority Leader briefings occurred as well.
The Speaker’s press conferences really began as early as Carl Albert. And it may have been under [John] McCormack, I don’t know. That was before I was here, but it was one of those tools that gave the press an opportunity to face-to-face talk to the Speaker of the House anytime there was legislation. And I thought it was a very integral part of the way they covered.
The other things that were different in the ’70s especially, and even in the ’80s, were how much information we got from the leadership. Now, you get conference papers that come by e-mail, you get on the Web sites, you get the schedules, you get all of these talking points, all of these legislative details, you get a breakdown of the bill, you get the amendments that are going to be offered. You get those all delivered to you. And those are the kinds of things we track for reporters, but it goes to the reporters as well. You get inundated with information from all different sources, minority and majority. In the ’70s and ’80s, you didn’t have much other information coming in, so we had a much closer relationship with the Parliamentarian’s Office. We spent a good bit of time working with them, and we could always go to the floor when there was a question, a parliamentary question. We still have floor access, but we hardly need it now. Earlier we would actually have to go down to the floor and get copies of amendments that had not been printed until the time they brought them to the floor or check out what was going on with the Parliamentarian or his staff. So we had much more direct communication with the Parliamentarian’s Office. We were expected to have all of the parliamentary procedures down pat. But if there was any kind of a change, or any kind of a schedule arrangement, or any surprises, we would do much more with them directly than we need to now. Now, by the beginning of the day you know if there’s going to be a conflict later on, and it’s all much more programmed than it was then. It was much more spontaneous, as were the speeches, much [4:00] more spontaneous.
And one of the other committee changes was in the lighting of the committee rooms. One of the things we had to do was open the committee rooms for crew setup. We had to work up a system of opening the committee rooms two hours ahead of the committee hearing because they had to bring the big television lights in order to do television because the equipment really required that level of lighting. And in the ’80s, the committees got very tired of having to take that much time, and if you can imagine how much gear it required. This was not even for a live hearing. This was for any hearing that was going to be televised—the networks were going to televise—they would bring these great big pole lights in. The committees began to light the committee rooms themselves. They asked the networks if they wanted to light them, and they said no. They wanted to continue bringing in the lights because they had people they paid to do that anyway. They didn’t want to do installations. So the committees did installations themselves. It didn’t reduce the amount of time people would go in to set up. But it reduced a lot of the clutter in the committee rooms, and that was one of the things we had to deal with, was how much extraneous equipment was required, and how it would go in, and where it would go in, and whether it would fit in a committee room. That was one change from the ’70s to the ’80s. Now, you almost need no additional lighting. Some lighting makes it better because you don’t get the raccoon eyes if you light from underneath, but you can shoot both video and still photography with the technology we’ve got now, just with the regular light in the room, and the augmented overhead light that the committees have put in helps, but it isn’t even necessary anymore.
Johnson:
You mentioned a close working relationship with the Parliamentarian’s Office.
Tate:
Yes.
Johnson:
What are your recollections of the Parliamentarians at the time?
Tate:
Well, they’re just the best people in the world. Charlie Johnson is one of my oldest friends, and they are wonderful people. They’re really the institutionalists of the House.39 Bill Brown before him; I did not know [Lewis (Lew)] Deschler very well. I was there when he was here, but I didn’t know him well.40 But Bill Brown was just an amazingly good person, and knew the House, and knew the Members, and would guide us in anything that we needed. One call from us, or one visit with us, would save them 20 calls from press people. And it wasn’t that they didn’t particularly want to talk to press people, it was that that was not their mission. So we tried to be the ones to go to them and get information from them. And they were always so helpful.
One of the more recent times when we were still working with them as directly as we had been in the past was when Vice President [Albert] Gore [Jr.] presided over the Electoral College when he was defeated.41 That was going to be carried live. Now that’s another time that we have cameras in the chamber. There are only three times, regularly, that we bring cameras into the chamber over and above the House Recording Studio cameras, and that is: Joint Meetings, Joint Sessions, and opening day.42 The fourth one is the Electoral College count. That’s usually procedural, and the networks may go to a minute of it or use a minute of it on the evening news, but because Gore was presiding over his own loss, and there was going to be a challenge by the Florida delegation, they were going to carry large parts of it. And of course, by this time you also had competing cable networks. So you were going to have a lot of it go to air, and we needed to have it scripted. So we really went through and walked every detail of it with the Parliamentarian’s Office to find out not just the procedure, which we knew didn’t change very much, but even some of the terms—what the box was called, who [8:00] would carry it, which people would come in in which order—because you’re looking at these pictures on television, you want to be able to identify them, and a reporter needs to know what he’s describing. There’s a lot of ceremony going on that isn’t obvious. And so that was what we did. We worked out a script with them so that we knew how to explain exactly what was going on prior to it happening, so the television people could have a running commentary that would track the pictures the audience was seeing. So there have been many events, but that was the most recent, where we worked so directly with them.
Johnson:
In that case, did you have to start from scratch, or was there any kind of precedent that you could fall back on?
Tate:
There was precedent, but this was going to be different. And even in the precedents—the precedents for when we went up to air and how long we were on and that sort of thing—really were for a standard ceremonial count, not for a newsworthy event, where it was going to be described in much more detail. So we were going to need much more detail than we had any background on.
Johnson:
Since we’re talking about the 1970s, how did the atmosphere and the culture of the radio-TV gallery change from when you first started in the 1970s to when you just recently retired?
Tate:
Well, the change can really be tracked by the technology because we talked about the film. When you began to have satellite coverage, and you began to have live coverage out of committee hearings, not just when it was the impeachment of the President or the crime hearings with very visible people. It wasn’t once every six months; it began to be once a month, then it began to be once a week, then it began to be daily. As we got the infrastructure in place, you had much more information that you had to find out. I mean, if something is covered, and they’re going to do a piece, and they’re going to use a little piece of film from it, the reporter will need to know what went on and how it happened and all that. But if you’re going to take large segments of it to air, then the reporter needs a different set of information, a different type of information, much more detailed information—statements and agendas—and if there’s any changes, who’s coming, who’s not coming. So those were the kinds of things that changed as the technology changed, just the amount and type of information that was required for them to tell their stories.
Johnson:
Was there more time to socialize, was it a more laid back atmosphere in the 1970s?
Tate:
Oh, much, much.
Johnson:
Did the staff and reporters have time to get to know each other?
Tate:
Oh, yeah. There was a lot of down time. One of the other things, reporters would actually (because there was no television until ’79), reporters would have to sit in the chamber if there was a very major debate. Once we got audio and video…now most reporters do not sit in the chamber unless it is something akin to the impeachment vote on—or the war vote, a vote of that magnitude, or the tax bill that went overnight. For a major political story, they may sit in the chamber to get the atmosphere because that isn’t picked up by the in-house television. The [House] Recording Studio does a six-camera switched feed that everybody gets. And that’s what they cut, and that’s what they use. That’s what you see on air. C-SPAN takes it gavel to gavel; they’re the only group that does, but any group [12:00] could. Any group that’s credentialed to the radio-TV gallery. So, you know, that is the material they have to use to cut a piece for the news. So they’re watching the same thing that their audience will be watching, and then they decide which pictures that are available there for them to use. When they sit in the chamber, then they get the sense of what the rest of the room is. And for more description, more reporting. They used to all sit in the chamber because that was the only way to see what was going on.
And we’ve had sessions that went, I believe the first year of [Thomas (Tip)] O’Neill’s speakership, the ending of that session went three days without a break. And reporters would have to come and go and sit in the chamber to take notes, and we’d have to take notes through the whole thing because you had to have a running log because reporters couldn’t be here all three days or through the whole weekend. But you don’t get very many reporters sitting in the chamber anymore, unless there’s a political atmosphere where they want to see who’s talking to whom in the corners. That occurred when we had the tax bill, when you had the change in votes in the end; this was under [J. Dennis] Hastert. The drug bill was another bill where you had a political element to it that was going to play out. And you would see it, but you wouldn’t see it on camera. So the reporters would come into the chamber then. But you know, before ’79, if they wanted to report on it, they had to come into the chamber and sit and take notes themselves.
Johnson:
Can you describe the average or the typical journalist that would be in your gallery in the 1970s? And then if you could just expand on that on how that might have changed during your career?
Tate:
Well, Bob Foster, who’s still around, was a typical reporter. He reported for WGN. Joe McCaffery was a radio reporter. Most of them knew their Members very well because there weren’t that many reporters, and there wasn’t that layer of staff that you now have. You now have a communications director, and a press secretary, and a deputy press secretary, and this is for leadership, but you didn’t have that many staff people, and Members of the House will talk to reporters. They don’t need to go through staff all the time. Senators have many more levels of staff you have to go through to get to them, but House Members will talk to reporters almost any time.
But in those days, I mean, they did pal around with them. They knew them—they knew them well. They would go out and have drinks with them. There was a great deal more drinking, there was more socializing, there was more overlooking or ignoring scandals that didn’t become just blatant. Once they became blatant, everybody would cover them, but the chairman of Ways and Means, Wilbur Mills, when he had an affair with I think a stripper, that got local coverage at first, because they fished him and her, or her, I don’t remember which, out of the Tidal Basin.43 It was a local story before it became a national story. But because he was a national figure, as the chairman of Ways and Means, it became a national story. So there were stories like that, that would not get the kind of coverage—I mean, now it would be 24 hours. There were personal things that were simply not covered that are now considered fair game. That’s definitely a change. Reporters [16:00] did not report on private lives unless they became so public—as in this case it did—that they couldn’t ignore it. And the drinking was one of the things, and womanizing was one of the other things, that was ignored a great deal, where now it couldn’t be. Well, I mean, obviously you can’t be drinking that much if you’re going to be on the House Floor talking at two in the morning, you’d better not be slurring your words because it will be picked up on audio, and you will be able to tell it. So, you know, that kind of atmosphere is different.
I think Members, after Watergate, and after [Richard] Nixon resigned, you had the Watergate Babies come in, and that class all ran on clean government and changing the system.44 And you did begin to see changes, where the chairmanships were not the fiefdoms that they had been before. You began to see younger Members demand more attention and demand more of the power structure. So as the power dissipated from just the chairman, there were more angles for stories to come. So members of the press would need to know more about what was going on in a committee than just to talk to the chairman.
Johnson:
Just a few of the basics about journalists before we move on. The average age, gender, and educational backgrounds?
Tate:
Well, they were almost all men. There were a couple of women working out of the House Gallery: Tina Gulland, and Maria Gwaltney, and Mariah McLaughlin. Those were just a few, and then Cokie [Roberts], of course.45 But there weren’t a great many women covering the Hill, and there weren’t many women Members either. There were—the average age—it’s hard to remember because I was so young. They all looked old to me because I was in my 20s, I was in my mid-20s. But I would say they were probably 40s; they were mostly 40s. And they would spend a whole lot of time just talking to each other and chatting about what was going on among themselves. There were card games occasionally, but that was more in the print gallery. That was not as much in the radio-TV gallery. Our gallery, physically, wasn’t conducive to too much socializing.
Johnson:
How much did the demographics change? There were more women reporters as time went on. Did the age stay about the same as well?
Tate:
Well, generally, the House reporters have always been in their 30s and their 40s. You get some 20-somethings, but the 20-somethings usually are in the very, very small bureaus, and they’re just beginning to make their names You know, they’re just beginning reporting, and they’ll be at the small bureaus or doing freelance or that sort of thing. But they’ve always been sort of in the 30-40 group because, as I mentioned in the first one [interview], there has been that hierarchy of the House being sort of the place people start to become national reporters. And that used to be, that was very much so in the ’80s and ’90s, and much less so now. But most of the reporters now I think would probably be an average age of about 40. Now, if I were thinking through them right now, they would be probably in their 40s.
Johnson:
What was the relationship like between the radio and the TV journalists?
Tate:
They weren’t very different. Radio and television, because a lot of people go back [20:00] and forth from one to the other—radio’s easier to deal with because it doesn’t require as much equipment. It doesn’t require pictures. We had a couple of radio incidents when the audio was first put in the House Chamber. They did an audio experiment before they brought in television. And there was a time when audio was picked up in the House Chamber from the House Floor. I believe there were two incidents. One was at a Joint Meeting with the President of Liberia, I believe; Tolbert, I think his name was. T-O-L-B-E-R-T, I think. Nelson Rockefeller was the Vice President, and he was in the chair, talking to the Speaker, and I’m not sure—I think it was [Carl] Albert. And he said, “Do you see how light skinned he is? If he were”—he said a remark that was racial—it had racial overtones. It was picked up in audio, and they used it on the news.46 After that, they began to have a House employee control—turn on and off the audio—because it was picked up on an open mic; it wasn’t intentionally picked up. We’ve had other open-mic instances that television would get some—but radio would get something and use it, and only if it was really extraordinary would television use it because it would just be audio from the House Floor. That was one incident, and each time they were trying to do something to make sure it didn’t happen again.
Johnson:
Was there any sort of rivalry between the radio and the TV journalists?
Tate:
Not particularly. There was between the print—and still is—between print and television. There’s this sense that print believes that they are the true journalists, and radio and television are the entertainers. That’s how the gallery started, really. Or that’s what I’m told, since I wasn’t around in ’39, that the reason that they were not accepted as members of the press gallery, the print people decided that radio and television people were entertainers and not journalists like they were.47
Johnson:
Can you provide a little background on your promotion to director of the radio-TV gallery? Were you next in line to become the director?
Tate:
No, there was a person next in line over me, named—what was his name? [Recollects name]. And he was from South Carolina, and he had been on the staff as long as I had. I had not been on that long—I’d started in ’72, and this was ’81. And Mike Michaelson was superintendent at that time.48 And it was superintendent, not director, at that time. He had been offered, and had accepted, a job with C-SPAN. So before, when Mike was made superintendent, [name redacted] was over me, and it became apparent he was not going to get promoted, so I applied for the job of deputy director, which I still think is the best job on the Hill because you are involved in everything and not responsible for any of it. Because they decided I’d done a decent job at that point, and we only had a four-person staff. It wasn’t as demanding, not nearly as demanding a job as it is now, they promoted me to deputy director, and [name redacted] did leave, as you [24:00] would expect if somebody didn’t get appointed in the hierarchy, didn’t get moved up. When Mike decided to go to C-SPAN, Cokie Roberts was the chairman, and she asked me if I wanted to be the director, and I said, “Yes.” She said, “Okay.” So that was it. {laughter}
Johnson:
You mentioned in this interview and in the last interview, about the title of superintendent versus director.
Tate:
Yes, Brian Lockman was the chairman of the Executive Committee, and he was with C-SPAN. And he decided that he just hated the term superintendent, and quite frankly, Mike had too because he was from New York—I don’t know whether he was from New York, but he had relatives from New York, and they always thought of a superintendent as being a custodian. And his relatives never understood what the superintendent term meant. So Brian Lockman decided he was going to change our titles to “director.” And that was one of the things he really, really wanted to do. We didn’t care a whole lot, and for the longest time, the print people didn’t change their title. But he decided “director” just had a much more modern and much less anachronistic tone to it. So he made that a mission. Since all it required was for the [Committee on] House Administration to change the title, and it didn’t require them to give us any more money or change our duties or do anything bad, they said, “Fine. If you want to be called directors, you can be called directors.”
Johnson:
In the previous interview, you talked about some of your responsibilities as a member of the staff. What were some of your major duties as director when you first took over?
Tate:
Oh, the director has quite a bit more responsibility. All the logistics planning for the events that we do is really up to you to set the tone for it—you arrange which staff is responsible for which part of it. You have to work with the networks on anything that’s a major event, like the State of the Union, which is an annual event, and you not only do the State of the Union, but you have to do the Democratic response or the Republican response.49 And the Statuary Hall setup for the react for Members of Congress.50 So it’s a good two weeks’ worth of work, and you’re the one who is assigning everyone to their specific task, but you’re ultimately responsible for all of it. The conventions, we’ve done the conventions since—I know they were doing them in ’72. I did not go in ’72. In 1972, I’d just been hired, so I was not taken to the conventions. I was the only staff person who didn’t go. And in ’72, they were both in Miami, and they were very, very hostile. This was when there was a great deal of difficulty in the country at that time. I didn’t get involved in that one.
In ’76, I was staff, and in ’80 I was staff. And when you’re staff at a convention, you go and you hand out credentials, and you have an office time that you have to be in the office, and you have a time when you do the floor. When you’re handling credentials for the floor, and that’s all you have to do. When you’re in charge of it, as I was in ’84, you make all the arrangements with the parties for all of the credentials, how many our media gets. We were responsible for the [28:00] independent radio and television. We did not handle the networks. The parties have always handled the networks directly. But by ’84, the local stations were starting to do live coverage. So you were handling live stand-up positions; live skybox positions; radio, live radio positions; and then in ’92 when talk radio came in, you started doing the radio talk shows. So our portion of the conventions was by far the biggest—they say there are 15,000 journalists who come to the conventions. And there are five galleries—well, the four galleries and the networks. So there are five different divisions of press. And 15,000 press people, and we handle 5,000 of the 15,000. So we handle a third of them with six people. We do all the arrangements. We meet with the press to find out what they want. We meet with the party to find out what we can have. We assign the skyboxes; we assign the locations. We put out information about what’s available, how much it’s going to cost. We negotiate with the parties to be sure that we are providing as much information—we don’t handle any of the money. The workspace, all of that is done through our office. And that responsibility is enormous. And how they’re going to do this next set of conventions I don’t know because they’re going to be three days apart. And normally what we do is we go into a city a week ahead, do all of the packaging, get everything ready. The big groups are taken care of while we’re there. I mean, there are some groups that come in with 250 people. Some groups come in with one. And quite frankly, some of the groups with one are as much trouble as the groups with the 250.
But by the time I had finished doing 20 years’ worth of conventions, I felt very comfortable that I knew not only going into it what responsibilities I had but also how to make the best decisions with groups, even when some of the groups didn’t know they didn’t understand entirely what was available to them. What you would end up doing is talking them through—what did they want to accomplish? And then when you realized what their mission was, you could match them with the resources that were available. And in most cases, if you kept competitors in the same markets—or competitors in the same styles equal…You would never be able to give them everything they wanted, but you could give them what they needed—and they would be very pleased with the type of coverage they could do. But it was learning each time, the different groups and how they worked and what they needed, and understanding what they needed, so that you could be sure that they had everything they needed, everything that would get the job done for them. And the independents cover a lot heavier than a lot of the networks have lately because they’re covering all the delegations, they’re covering individual Members. They’re covering the parties that go on. It’s always a local story, whether it’s a national story or not. So that’s literally another job on top of your job, and we’ve done those continuously since the ’70s.
Johnson:
You said that you would go two weeks early onsite.
Tate:
Right.
Johnson:
But even before that…
Tate:
You’d do site visits, and you do several. It depends on how difficult the site is and if there are any problems with the site, as in Boston they changed the workspace at the last minute. Sometimes they would make changes…in Moscone in ’84, in San Francisco, the Democrats were preparing to build—some places they go, there are existing skyboxes and then you build platforms that are for stand-ups. And stand-ups are the reporters standing there with the camera on him, with the [32:00] background of the convention floor. Skyboxes are usually sets that are built in existing skyboxes in existing arenas. But occasionally they would go to a place that was a convention hall, not an arena. They did that in ’84 in San Francisco and in Moscone—Moscone was the hall. And in San Diego.51 At that point, they have to actually construct skyboxes and stand-up positions. And that gets to be—can be very expensive.
We went to Moscone. The way it was designed, there were large struts that held the building up. And the skyboxes were designed in them. And there was obstruction in some of them. So they decided—the [Democratic] party decided—at first they would do different costs for different booths, and this was after they’d already been assigned at a certain price. So we got all the groups together and had them complain because you are kind of the one focus for them. You can generate a meeting and then come up with a strategy that would take care of everybody’s problem. In this case, it was unacceptable to have assigned people with an expectation that their cost would be X, and then say “Okay, but the people who got this, it’s now going to be three times X, and the people who got that will be half X.” You know, that was just not acceptable. So there have been times when we’ve had to help the groups as a focal point, to raise a question or raise a problem to the parties that was addressed by the parties. And in our case, we always deal not with the political people at the parties, but with the media and logistics people, who are just some of the best people in the world. They are wonderful, and their goal is to make this as easy to cover, and as inexpensive to cover as is possible. So we worked very closely with them, and occasionally there would be something that we would mutually agree needed to be done, but only the broadcasters themselves could do it. And we would be somewhat of the cheerleader to get that together, and the coordinator to help them get the message that they needed to get to the party, to get something corrected.
In New York, I forget which New York convention, but it was a Democratic [National] Convention, and [David] Dinkins was mayor.52 The networks just went ballistic over the fact that they had been given workspace across the street, as were the independent broadcasters. And that was fine, everybody was happy about that. And then they realized that they were going to have to cable over the street. And that was fine. And then the cost of cabling over the street was going to cost more than—it was going to be like double what anybody had budgeted. And so the networks went to the mayor and said, “This is not going to fly.” And they needed for me to represent the independent broadcasters, who were all their affiliates and their stations. So, you know, I got in on that meeting. So there were times when I would represent them as a group, or times when I would be the staff for that group, to get them together on things that needed to be changed for their benefit.
But that’s years of experience and years of knowing the convention people. But we go in a week ahead and package all of the credentials. In the Republican case, there are different levels of credentials, but the Republicans also do them by days. So you not only have—I think I figured out at one point, we handled 50,000 different tickets because even though they were packaged, they were packaged by days and different groupings. And a certain pass would get you to a certain area. But if you had reporters who had workspace in one building, a stand-up in one [36:00] area, a skybox in another, or were working with someone who did, then you would have to manage all of those tickets. And the way we would do it is to provide the bigger groups—go back to ’84—’84 was the turning point. And prior to ’84 for the conventions, the locals were all doing film. Nobody was doing live at the local level. And we were not handling the networks. So you would have everyone standing in line for an opportunity to go on the floor. And since they were not going live, it didn’t really matter when they went to the floor. Starting in ’84, that changed. We assigned the specific locations with specific passes for people to go live. And these were for the independent broadcasters as well. Groups like CBS Newspath and ABC News One would bring large groups of their affiliate stations. The owned and operated stations would come as groups. They would handle their facilities as groups. So you would give them the passes themselves to handle in their group. You wouldn’t try to manage ABC-owned and -operated stations, getting their reporters to their locations and to the floor, because there was no way you could coordinate all of those times. So you would give the credentials that that group would need to their manager, and their manager then would handle the floor passes.
So gradually less and less of the floor passes went from us directly to the reporter for a station. It tended to be the smaller groups who would go through the floor pass line because they were the people that didn’t have a specific place they had to be to report from, like a skybox, like a seat that was assigned to them. They would just be going onto the floor to get a report, a live report maybe, but probably not live, to get some tape to talk to a Member, to get some color, and then come off the floor. So it didn’t make a big, big difference what time of day they went. If they did have a specific speech they needed to do, we would work with them to be sure that if they stayed out of the line for two hours then, when their mayor of Philadelphia spoke, we’d have them on the floor then. And there were times that we would even do things to assist the different groups—the bigger groups, too, if there was a specific night that they needed something more for their group than they needed all week, then we would try to make sure that we arranged that. But it was just a lot of coordination, a lot of facilitating, and a lot of just knowing the people very, very carefully because, during the convention itself, you’re troubleshooting, and you’re handling just the floor passes for the smaller groups. And in the convention coming up, there are three days in between.53 So I don’t know how they’re going to do it, but I don’t have to know. I can watch it on TV this year. {laughter}
Johnson:
Logistically speaking, this must have been a huge project.
Tate:
Oh, it is.
Johnson:
Did you have the opportunity to hire extra temporary staff?
Tate:
No. We would occasionally—we would pick up people at the convention, and we would take the Senate staff with us, and they would help manage the actual event because you are—you’re staffing an office, you’re doing the credentialing, and then you’re staffing the convention, and the convention can go two sessions, so you’ve got to have people in one facility and people in another facility. Now with cell phones and BlackBerries and all that, you can handle it a lot easier than you could when you physically had to have a place for them to be open because, obviously, if somebody hasn’t picked up their credential, you need to have a place outside of the area that’s manned, so they can get their credential to get into the [40:00] area. So you would have to staff two different offices. We would use the Senate Radio-TV Gallery staff; [they] would go with us for the convention itself and would come in a week ahead.
There were also site visits and planning visits and things like that that go on the month before. And trying, getting a system, the computer system—we didn’t even use computers—in the notes Mike handed me from the ’80 convention were legal sheets, handwritten legal sheets.
And in ’84, in the ’80s, we began using computers. And they were very rudimentary. And that was both a good thing and a bad thing, as the computer’s coming in, as the event got more sophisticated, the computers got more sophisticated, but you were constantly having to learn what else could we do, what else did we need to know, how much do we need to know. And now, there’s just like I was saying, in the information that is now being put out by so many different offices on legislation and details of legislation, is things we had to learn and find out on our own before. But there was so much less of it. And that’s the same thing with the conventions. The conventions, there’s so much more required, and it’s so much more immediate information, so many more groups that need to know what’s going on that the electronics are driving what the party wants to know, and what lists you have to have, and it’s gotten much more technological and much less one-on-one, which was really where my skills were.
Johnson:
Did you handle any of the Internet news organizations?
Tate:
Yes. Philadelphia, much more so even than LA, but that was the year that the Internet groups came in, and that was before they crashed.54 That was the year that everybody was saying, “Well, you know, what is the Internet going to be?” And my board wanted me to open to them if they could meet the criteria that other newsgroups met, in that their primary goal was to provide news and information. And we do use a slightly different criteria for conventions than we do for accreditation on the Hill. You know, the conventions are parties, and the parties want people there that will cover them in a positive way, and that’s fine because it is not access to the House. These people are putting on this event, they want these people there, so we have a much more lax way of—like we do not credential radio talk shows on the Capitol. Their format doesn’t work for anything up here, and they also are not really considered news gathering. News comes out of them occasionally, but they’re not really news gathering. They’re more, just conversational. So they’re not credentialed on the Hill. They are credentialed at the conventions because it would’ve meant from one radio station, you would have the talk show person, the engineer, and the news person, and they’d have to go different places to get their credentials if we didn’t take them. And that was a big decision made in the ’90s. Did we take them? Did we not? They’re not really news in our definition, on a day-to-day basis, but in fact, for practical purposes, it’s the same engineers doing two setups—a table goes one place, a table goes another. He’s got to get both places; it didn’t make any sense logistically to separate it. We did take them.
When we got to the Internet in 2000, we didn’t know how many groups we’d [44:00] have, we didn’t know how big they were going to be. But we opened up. If they wanted to apply for skyboxes and stand-ups, and could manage the costs and could prove to us that they had stations that they’d be using or that they had a product out there, and if I had a question, my Executive Committee always—any question about accreditation they would review. And if there were groups that were too advocacy, or not news, or really not appropriate for our gallery, then they would make the final decision on it. But you would go on the Web site and you’d see, do they have a news quotient? But there were a lot of groups that we did credential, including one that had a skybox. A couple had a skybox. I think AOL had a skybox because they had news at that time. Many of them no longer are in business though. That whole Internet bubble crash took down a lot of these sites. And now the primary Internet groups are related to some news organization. There are a few free-standing ones, but there are not as many. And most of the free-standing ones that were not related to an existing news deliverer have ceased to exist. There are a few, but very few that are just free-standing that have all news content.
Johnson:
According to the [House] Radio-TV Gallery Web site, the first Internet news organization accredited to the gallery, and you said those were stricter guidelines, was in 1994. Do you remember this, and was there any reluctance to accept an Internet organization?
Tate:
Do you remember the name; do you have the name of it?
Johnson:
It was just listed as the first Internet news organization. Or if not the first, do you remember, in general, was there any reluctance?
Tate:
Actually, no. Our group—our Executive Committee—has always felt that if you do audio and video, and it’s news, then we want you. Because, well, you don’t want your competitors out there seeking another place to go. We didn’t want them to end up asking for another gallery like the radio-TV had to ask for a gallery from when print wouldn’t let them in. We wanted them, if they were doing audio and video, to be a part of our gallery because they would be competing with our reporters for access and for space. So if they were going to be going by the same rules we were because they were going to carry the same equipment—if it’s audio and video, you’ve got to have cameras of some sort, you’ve got to have recording devices of some sort. So you want those people to be playing by the same rules we are. And what we’re dealing with now is the fact that the equipment is getting much smaller, and the definition of a journalist is changing.
Is a citizen-journalist with a camcorder? You know, my cell phone takes pictures. My digital still camera that I have from my grandchildren takes video. I have video pictures of my frogs. When I was on a trip, a friend of ours had a video camera that he took pictures of the Beijing Opera, in performance, with no extra lights, and could plug it into the television and play it back, and it was usable. You’ve seen pictures from cell phones of the bombings in London. Now, at what point do you decide is that a journalist or not? That’s something my board is much more concerned with than Internet sites that have news on them. Internet sites with news on them are a slam dunk. But are these other individuals who are providing news content, are they journalists? Or is a citizen-journalist, by definition, a citizen or a journalist? That’s something they’re struggling with right now. But just accepting Internet—Internet news providers—no, that was never a problem. They just had to have audio and video. And a lot of them didn’t in the [48:00] beginning. Most of them start with print and then add a quotient. One of the things we wouldn’t do is “on spec.” You couldn’t tell us you were going to have something up on the third of October. You needed to have it up before you get credentialed.
Johnson:
You mentioned the use of computers for the conventions. What about computers for the gallery? Do you remember about what time you had use of them?
Tate:
It was probably in the ’80s, I guess, because I know we had them for the conventions. And one of the things I’m proudest of, and partly from working with our Parliamentarian friends, is that when we began using—when we began using computers on a regular basis to do most of our work in the galleries, we asked if we could put a computer in the chamber, to take notes. And this was very early on. There were no computers on the floor at the time, or if there were, there were very few. They were just at leadership desks. But we felt like we could do a much better job of keeping notes if we had computers and didn’t have to take longhand and then go back in and type it up. That seemed like an incredible waste of time. And the computers were quiet. And we were far enough up. And the Parliamentarian said, “Yeah, there’s no reason why you can’t do that.” They did not give permission for reporters to bring computers in, but reporters really hadn’t asked to do that. On the Senate side, they’ve never been able to get that permission. They still do longhand notes and go in and type them up. Now, the Senate doesn’t work like we do, but our log is now time-coded and color-coded, so that a Member—you hit a set of keystrokes, and you get the Member, his name (and it’s in color), and his state, and whether he’s a Republican or Democrat. So it’s a visual log, as well as a written log. So you can easily see—and the time code is in it because for radio and television, you need to go to the tape, and you can do that from the time code we have. We don’t publish it because it’s not for outside consumption. It’s simply for the reporters. But it’s the same log that we’ve always done, just in a much more sophisticated and much more technically ideal way, and it has the blocs of votes. So if you’re looking for a specific vote, you can go back to that vote very quickly. Now there are ways, there are Web sites that have not only the log, but they have audio and video that if we miss anything—if for any reason our computer crashes or something like that, we can do—we can go back to the recap and get it for a reporter in case he was not able to see it, and something that wasn’t news when it happened, but became news because of something after that. So there are now ways to even go back and recoup it. When we first started doing it, ours was the only list like that. We were the first ones to put computers in the chamber. And that was with, you know, just because the Parliamentarian trusted us not to be doing anything we shouldn’t be doing. It was just another way of doing it.
We also added a television in the chamber. There was one year when the House had so many freshmen, the House changed so dramatically, and I can’t even remember what year it was, but there were 94 new Members, almost as many new House Members as there was in the entire Senate.55 It was a quarter of the House turned over that year. And trying to learn every one of those Members before they spoke, so that you could get their names up when they stood up to speak, we were so concerned that we weren’t going to do a good job with that that we [52:00] persuaded them to let us put a TV in there with audio muted, and we keep it on the House broadcast system because they put the names of the Member who’s speaking up. So it’s another tool so we don’t miss anything. Unfortunately, what it does is make us lazy. We don’t learn the Members’ faces as quickly as we used to because we know we’ve got this crutch.
Johnson:
Something to fall back on?
Tate:
Yes.
Johnson:
What about the Web site that your gallery has? Do you remember about what time you created your first Web site and what kind of information was included on it?
Tate:
Very little. It was, I think right now, I think we’ve got the best Web site of—I don’t know if you’ve looked at the other galleries, but I think ours is by far the most sophisticated. And I think it provides an enormous amount of information about the gallery, about the history of the gallery, and about what’s going on on the floor, and what’s going on the schedule, and logistics information for specific events, and links to things that we know our reporters are interested in that we’re not handling directly—like the officers, in May they do that memorial out on the House, on the West Front, and we don’t deal with it directly, but the police do, so we link to the police for their logistics information.56
We reworked our site about two years ago. And we really went through, worked with the House. The CAO’s office has been very good about supporting all of the equipment we needed. And we have had cutting-edge equipment as long as I’ve been here. They’ve been very supportive of giving us the best and the first of anything that we needed. And they worked with us on the Web site, and they worked with us on the first Web site we had for the conventions that allowed people to apply online. That was the first one we did online was not last convention, it was the convention before—so it would have been 2000, not 2004.
Johnson:
Did journalists at the time have any input on what was included on the Web page? Was some of this prompted by what they were asking for?
Tate:
I think the way it looks now, we did get them to look over what, you know, we did ask if they had anything else they wanted on there, and we tried to include anything they suggested. But it was mainly brainstorming with the staff, I would say. Eighty percent of it was staff driven, and 20 percent of it was reporter driven. We have had to make some adjustments so that the House and Senate information was as similar as possible, and there was this complete—you could go to one place and get all the information of a schedule. You wouldn’t have to go to the House and get the House, and go to the Senate and get the Senate. You could get all of the stuff, all of the schedule on one. And, of course, the Executive Committee information is universal to both. I would have to ask Andy Elias or Bev Braun.57 I guess the first Web site would’ve been when Bev was here, so we’ve had a Web site of some sort probably since the mid ’90s, but I would have to get a date for you.
Johnson:
You mentioned just a few minutes ago the House Recording Studio. Can you provide an example of how your two offices might have worked together?
Tate:
We worked together very closely on a lot of issues. The House Recording Studio—most people believe that C-SPAN has the cameras in the chamber. I think everybody at C-SPAN, my office, and about six other people in the world know that that’s not true. Including Members that think that. But the House Recording Studio has the six-camera switched feed of the House Chamber every day, through special orders. They provide that to all accredited members of the gallery. Any accredited member of the gallery can use any portion of that for news [56:00] purposes. Most of them use it for spot news stories, just little snippets of it. Sound bites is what they call them, from the floor, of a particular story, a particular event.
The other—I’ve mentioned that there are times that we were traditionally allowed to bring additional cameras into the chamber: opening day, State of the Union, Joint Meetings, and Joint Sessions. And, of course, State of the Union is a Joint Session. And the Electoral College. Those are the days. There used to be a lot of ceremonial events that we would bring cameras in for as well, too. We’ve never had any Speaker challenge if we wanted to bring them in on those days. Sometimes we don’t bring cameras in on those days. We always do for State of the Union. And now we’re up to nine cameras, and two feeds from the House Recording Studio, three manned cameras on the floor. A couple of—no—three manned cameras on the floor, because we have the jib camera now. And two robotic cameras—and one, two, three, four cameras, manned cameras up in the chambers. And we also get a couple of camera feeds from the recording studio for our Joint Sessions.
When the President speaks, the presumption is everybody in the country will want to know what’s going on. Half of them don’t watch, but if they do, it’s a great show. And that’s part of the selling point. If you don’t make it an interesting visual experience, people who are watching television are going to switch to something else. It’s important for people to know what their President is saying. He’s talking to them, whether he’s talking to the Members in the room in a Joint Session is incidental. It is important for people to know what he’s communicating. He’s using that room and that forum to communicate to the American people. And it’s up to us to make it as good a television show as we can.
And fortunately, the last Speaker (Hastert) had a gentleman, Ted Van der Meid—who was his legal counsel—was in charge of the chamber. And CNN came in with the idea of this jib camera in the back of the chamber, and I didn’t think we’d ever have a prayer of getting it, but you’ve got to give it a try. And David Bohrman—who I have worked with at prior conventions—he had run one of the Internet groups that had done a convention’s skybox in 2000. So I had known him from then. He’s now the bureau chief for CNN, and he wanted to do something that had some pizzazz to it, that had a better look to it, and would really give you a feel that you were in the room. So he came up with the idea of this jib camera, which is a huge piece of equipment. I can give you pictures of this. But he wanted to see it—it gives you the look like you have in a sporting event, where it goes up the aisle. But it has this great huge arm. And it takes up space, and that’s precious on the House Floor. Because it made good television, and they were able to demonstrate it and show they were able to put it in a place that did not take up more than two or three seats. The seats were not for people that couldn’t be moved. This is on the floor, and the operation of it didn’t interfere with any of the security operations—we checked it out with all the [60:00] Officers of the House to be sure it didn’t create a problem we were not aware of. They let CNN try it. And it looked good, they liked it, and we used it again last year.
Each time we tried something, we would have to get permission from the Speaker’s Office, and from the Officers of the House that this would be a trial, and if it worked, we’d go on with it. If it didn’t work, we wouldn’t. And each one of these additional cameras was added because we started off with four cameras in the chamber, and now we’re at nine and counting. I don’t know that there are any more places we can put cameras in there because it’s not that big when you get it all wired.
Johnson:
For a big event like the State of the Union, where are the journalists assigned seats? Where are they in the gallery?
Tate:
Well, they’re in the same section in the gallery. You know, the print gallery has a large section of seats, about 100 seats. And on either side, the periodical gallery has about 13 seats, and we have about 13 seats. But for a State of the Union, most of ours are taken up with live gear, whether it’s live television gear for the pool, the network pool, or whether it’s live radio from the room, there’s always been live radio broadcasts from a State of the Union. And these reporters have seats with headsets and microphones. And this last year, we had the first live television audio from the room. We were not allowed to put a camera on any of the TV reporters, but we had TV reporters doing the same thing that radio reporters were doing, which was introducing the President, speaking over applause, and exiting the President. They’re not allowed to have newscasts, they’re not allowed to do any promotions or anything like that, but they are commenting from the room. And the TV people came to me—Mike Viqueira with NBC—and said if anything were to happen, radio would be in there describing it, TV would not. And we want to try to have TV. So we opened it up to TV, with the approval of the Speaker, and with the approval of the Officers of the House.
Johnson:
Is this—the State of the Union specifically—is this a joint operation with the other press galleries or does radio-TV really take the lead?
Tate:
Radio-TV takes the lead. The print people have to give credentials out for their seats, and they have to mark seats, and they have to get their people down to the Statuary Hall.58 We do everything else.
Johnson:
How has this event changed during your tenure?
Tate:
Oh, the first people that we had in Statuary Hall were from ABC, and I think that was in the mid-’80s. And they had one position. We’d have files on the dates of these. We had one, one year, then we went up to about five groups that were in there. At one point, we had 30 cameras in there. We realized that didn’t work—the [Capitol] Police didn’t think it worked, we didn’t think it worked. So we limited it now. I think there are either 21 or 22. I have one person who does nothing but that. And they’re stationary positions. There’s network lighting brought in. The Architect [of the Capitol] assists us with extra power. The setup requires the Sergeant at Arms to close down Statuary Hall from about 1:00 on so that we can do the setup. Each group has to be in and swept by a specific time. There has to be a coordination of who is in which group. If we’ve got more groups than can fit into the assigned number of positions, then we have to marry the groups. What one of my staff people who’s done it most recently—he’s done it several years in a row—is Jay Rupert, he talks to each group about what they’re doing, and what timeframe, and could they work with someone else, and how many groups are there, how many interviews are they expecting to do, so that there will be groups that if they’re not going live, but somebody else is, they [64:00] use one camera, and both of them use the same area. So that has become the react position for all of the Congress, House and Senate, after the speech. Sometimes they leave before the President finishes speaking to get to the live shot. It’s going to make the 10:00 p.m. or 11:00 p.m. news all throughout the country.
So it’s an important way for not just leadership. Leadership’s always going to be listened to, but it’s an important way for lesser-known Members of Congress to reach their audience, immediately, about what they think about—regardless of who the President is, what his speech was about, and what it means to his constituents. So you know, anything that we’re doing that makes Congress more understandable to the people, I think, is what our mission is all about.
And that is about a two-week setup because you have to give—you have to be sure people have the right credentials, and that they have the right timeframe, and you have to talk to the press secretaries, and the press secretaries have to have—the map is the most essential thing—a map of Statuary Hall that tells each group, each Member of Congress where the groups they’re going to be interviewed by, where they’re located. And the press secretaries can’t wait to get that. We publish it, and we put it out.
Johnson:
Your office designs it?
Tate:
Our office designs it. Our office creates it. We do signs. One year, we had—each time—we come up with something new. One year, we went down there, and people had started putting signs up. There was a CBS eye on one of the statues. And we said, “Oh, no, no, no, we’re not doing this. We are not advertising. {laughter} We are allowing you to use this very special room [Statuary Hall].” So we went and made standard signs. We wouldn’t let them use their own signs so that there would not be any kind of advertising there. I think we got them done by one of the graphics offices, either House or Senate; they’re just standard ABC, CBS, whatever. So people know where they’re going. We also have locations in the balconies of the Cannon Building and in Russell. The Senate does the Russell ones.
Johnson:
Well, based on the example you just provided, was it difficult to find a balance between meeting the needs of the journalists and the news organizations and then also trying to make sure there was a semblance of order and decorum in Statuary Hall?
Tate:
Well, we do describe it as “organized chaos.” And you know, whether or not it stays there is something because it is very congested for a short period of time. It’s very well organized, but it’s very congested for a short period of time. Yes, there is a balance that you have to find. And at times, it’s gone back and forth. We try very hard to work with the [Capitol] Police to be sure that we have kept proper aisles so that people who do not want to be stopped can continue to move, and people who do want to do interviews can be interviewed. So it’s trying to satisfy both of those needs, both very important needs. Whether they’ll keep it in Statuary Hall once the [Capitol] Visitor’s Center is finished, whether they’ll move it into an area in the Visitor’s Center, I don’t know.59 That’s something that we’re prepared to do, but not suggesting that they do. We did wire the Visitor’s Center quite thoroughly to be sure that if they were to move it into the Great Hall or someplace else, we would—we’d be prepared to do that.
Johnson:
Well, I know we’re running out of time.
Tate:
Yeah, got to get to the dentist.
Johnson:
Was there anything else that you wanted to add?
Tate:
Not today.
Johnson:
Okay, great. Thank you.

Footnotes

  1. For a complete list of House Parliamentarians, see “Parliamentarians of the House,” Office of History and Preservation, Office of the Clerk, http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/parliamentarians.html. Charlie Johnson served as the Parliamentarian of the House from the 104th Congress through the 108th Congress (1995–2005).
  2. William (Bill) Brown served as Parliamentarian of the House of Representatives from 1974 to 1994. For more on his career, see “William Holmes Brown; House Parliamentarian,” 29 May 2001, Washington Post: B06; Lewis Deschler served as the House Parliamentarian from 1928 to 1974. For more information on his career, see Richard L. Lyons, “Parliamentarian Lewis Deschler Dies,” 13 July 1976, Washington Post: C6.
  3. For historical information on the Electoral College, see “The Electoral College,” Office of History and Preservation, Office of the Clerk, http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/electoral.html.
  4. For historical background and a complete list of Joint Sessions, see “Joint Meetings, Joint Sessions, and Inaugurations,” Office of History and Preservation, Office of the Clerk, http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/Joint_Meetings/index.html.
  5. For more information, see Julian Zelizer, On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and Its Consequences, 1948–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 164–166.
  6. The term “Watergate Babies” refers to the 75 new Democrats who were elected to the House of Representatives in 1974 in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.
  7. The daughter of two former Representatives, Hale Boggs and Lindy Boggs, both of Louisiana, Cokie Roberts also worked as a congressional correspondent. The Office of History and Preservation conducted two oral history interviews with Cokie Roberts, dated August 28, 2007, and July 11, 2008.
  8. For additional information, see “Albert Apologizes to Brooke for Racial Remarks,” 25 September 1976, Washington Post: A2.
  9. For information on the establishment of the House Radio-TV Gallery, see “The Opening of the House Radio Gallery,” Weekly Historical Highlights, Office of History and Preservation, Office of the Clerk, http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/highlights.html?action=view&intID=288; Donald A. Ritchie, Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005): 58–59.
  10. Mike Michaelson served as the superintendent of the House Radio-TV Gallery from the 94th Congress (1975–1977) until his retirement on October 1, 1981, during the 97th Congress (1981–1983).
  11. For historical background on the State of the Union address, see “State of the Union Address,” Office of History and Preservation, Office of the Clerk, http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/stateunion.html.
  12. For more on the history of Statuary Hall, see “National Statuary Hall,” Office of History and Preservation, Office of the Clerk, http://clerk.house.gov/
    art_history/art_artifacts/virtual_tours/statuary_hall/index.html    .
  13. The 1996 Republican National Convention was held in San Diego, California.
  14. The 1992 Democratic National Convention was held in New York City.
  15. The Democratic National Convention was held in Denver, Colorado, on August 25–28, 2008, and the Republican National Convention took place in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 1–4, 2008.
  16. The 2000 Republican National Convention was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Democratic National Convention took place that year in Los Angeles, California.
  17. In the 1992 elections, there were 93 open seats in the U.S. House. More than 100 Representatives won a seat in the House for the first time, making the freshman class of the 103rd Congress (1993–1995) one of the largest in House history. For a list of the number of freshmen Members for each Congress, see Mildred Amer, “Freshmen in the House of Representatives and Senate by Political Party: 1913–2008,” 20 August 2008, Report RS20723, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
  18. Reference to the Annual National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service held on the West Front of the Capitol.
  19. Reference to House Radio-TV Gallery staff.
  20. Also called the Old Hall of the House, the media conducts many post-State of the Union interviews with Members of Congress in Statuary Hall.
  21. The Capitol Visitor Center opened on December 2, 2008. For information on the nearly 580,000-square-foot addition to the Capitol, see “Capitol Visitor Center: Project Information,” Architect of the Capitol, http://www.aoc.gov/cvc/project_info/index.cfm.