Crossing Larry Speakes: The New Yorker I wish I could add a fond remembrance of Larry Speakes, who died yesterday at the age of seventy-four, in his home state of Mississippi, after suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and who served as Reagan's press secretary for several of the years when I covered the White House for the Wall Street Journal. There have been plenty of accolades, and I'm sure there will be more. But it's worth adding a note about how Speakes treated reporters who strayed from the company line. Every White House has its own approach to the press and, in many ways, the Reagan White House was far more accommodating than the Obama White House is, but that was because Reagan's successive chiefs of staff, including James Baker, Donald Regan, Howard Baker, and Ken Duberstein, all understood that they would get better coverage if they met regularly with reporters for background briefings, which they did, sometimes weekly. Speakes, on the other hand, reveled in cutting off access at the slightest infraction, leaning in to the microphone at the podium in the press room, in front of the curtain bearing the Presidential seal and, with a reddened face and a southern drawl, declaring to whatever reporter had challenged him too aggressively, "You are out of business." At one point, in an effort to document the elaborate and expensive staging of Reagan White House imagery, I convinced the Wall Street Journal to send me to the island of Grenada a week before the President was due to arrive to celebrate the glorious first anniversary of the U.S. rescue of American medical students from local Marxist forces on the tiny spice island. My boss in the Journal's Washington bureau at first sniffed at the proposed assignment and said, "I smell suntan lotion on this one." But those were the days of nearly unlimited news budgets, and he indulged me. Soon after I flew to Grenada, I watched as a seemingly endless procession of huge military cargo planes landed on the tiny island's airstrip, disgorging not just the usual Presidential limousines and ambulances but also equipment for paving the island's roads, for building bleachers and viewing stands, and piles and piles of American flags. By the time the President arrived, the island had been transformed into a Hollywood-worthy backdrop for television-news consumption, at serious public expense. When the story ran on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, Speakes was not amused. It was my turn to be told, "You are out of business!" My friends in the press corps kindly gathered up furniture and supplies from the rabbit-warren-like back room of the press area - a desk, a chair, an inbox and an outbox, along with an assortment of pens and other junk - placed them on the White House lawn, appended price tags, and held a "going-out-of-business sale" for me. The merriment faded soon, however, when every appointment I had made to interview White House officials thereafter was mysteriously cancelled. I couldn't reach anyone in the building on the phone. I couldn't even get the Presidential travel schedule, which the newspaper needed to plan its coverage. My bosses were exasperated, not with Speakes, but with me, for having so little juice. Speakes eventually turned his ire on others. He particularly liked to pick on Lester Kinsolving, an annoyingly aggressive reporter for the conservative outlet WorldNetDaily, and Ben Taylor, a reporter for the Boston Globe whose Brahmin approach provided a perfect foil for a Mississippi good ole" boy like Speakes. The daily pettiness of it all, however, and the bullying, with its clear message that independent reporting would be punished, helped set the abysmally low standard that continues today for White House relations with the press. Photograph by Cynthia Johnson/Time Life Pictures/Getty.