Richard A. Clark Quotes

As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White House briefing room.

When presidents are in trouble, there's two things they always do: reshuffle the staff and call in a bunch of reporters for advice.

The press conference is as much a White House fixture as the cabinet meeting.

Today being President is really no different than running for President. It’s about approval ratings and photo ops and damage control and deniability.

Everyone in politics turns to the press, if only to manipulate it or deflect it.

Misunderstanding is the great enemy of every White House press secretary.

I have no more obligation to spin. When you’re in the White House, you spin.

We studied Western journalists' reporting methods, fed them story ideas, steered them toward sympathetic interviewees, and supplied them with the revolutionary movement's facts and figures.

The most important thing that the person at the White House knows when he talks to you is that you are not in there.

Politics is the business of managing perceptions.

Every administration is theater because this is the nature of public life in America.

I was instructed let’s put out press releases touting advances and let’s minimize problems because we want the Department of Home Security to be a good news story…. But you have to tell the truth when you are in a job like this.

Every successful president has suffered imputations that he has in sinister fashion charmed the press or used a new medium of communication (radio, television, the Internet) to claim an undeserved standing.

Talking to the press is not always good.

Sean Spicer has somehow been doing PR since 1999, which is 18 years. Somehow, after 18 years, his go-to move was denying the Holocaust.

I find it so astonishing how poorly a lot of politicians handle negative whatever in the press. You have to just get it all out there. You have to be totally, uncomfortably honest.

People are more sophisticated in the way they go about dealing with the press.

Parliamentarians certainly know how to do bad public relations.

People are terrified for their own reputations. They want the press on their side.

I hate dealing with the press. But I think it is a necessary evil.

I thought I might say something to newsmen that could be turned into a scandal.

The genius of David Petraeus has always been his masterful manipulation of the media.

Sure I know where the press room is - I just look for where they throw the dog meat.

There is so much misinformation out there. If you give people even a little bit, it gets blown out of proportion then you have to go put out fires. So it's much easier to say, 'No comment.'

Negative publicity makes people forget your best times.