Crisis Management 101

PETER: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today on the show, we’re looking at America’s history of scandal.

ED: These days, there’s a whole profession devoted to helping politicians weather scandals. Take Olivia Pope on ABC’s Scandal, for example. And here at BackStory, we couldn’t help thinking that a couple of politicians from the 18th and 19th centuries might have benefited from Ms. Pope’s assistance. So we called up a real-life crisis management guru to ask for a little help on their behalf.

JOHN HELLERMAN: My name’s John Hellerman. I’m a co-founder of Hellerman-Baretz Communications, a Washington DC-based crisis communications firm.

BRIAN: Welcome to BackStory, John.

JOHN HELLERMAN: Nice to be with you.

BRIAN: We got a ton of crises over the course of American history.

PETER: It is American history.

BRIAN: Exactly. More than we know what to do with. So give us the formula for handling crises.

JOHN HELLERMAN: Well, in general, I think gossip and the rumors and what not sort of exist because of an absence of information. And so one of the key ways to deflate rumor and gossip in some of these types of scandals is to just fill the obvious void of information with as much information as you can that is favorable to your side’s messaging. A lot of times, you can’t hope to make something better. But you can hope to make it boring and go away. And that’s–

ED: Not on BackStory.

BRIAN: He, Ed, Peter, this guy’s billing us. So I think we really got to get down to business here.

JOHN HELLERMAN: A lot.

BRIAN: And I’m just going to turn to Peter Onuf and have him throw the first one at you.

PETER: I want to start with my man, Thomas Jefferson. And you may have heard, because this is a scandal that has reverberated through the centuries, about Sally Hemings, his slave-mistress and the mother of many children. Here it is. It’s a guy named James Callender who is a, well, ne’er-do-well, somewhat low-life journalist from Britain. And he hears about the Sally Hemings liaison.

He’s the guy who put some things in the Richmond Register and reprinted in some other papers. This could be the start of something big. I want you to advise me as Jefferson’s living embodiment what to do about it.

JOHN HELLERMAN: Well, I think that he does have a lot going for him, obviously, as famous a politician as he was at the time. There’s obviously a lot of people that want him to succeed and do well.

PETER: That’s right.

JOHN HELLERMAN: He’s a man of stature. And so as a communicator, I’d be looking to leverage his stellar reputation against the allegations of Callender.

PETER: And John, we should be clear– and I know I’m going to get some hate mail for this– that he did have this relationship.

JOHN HELLERMAN: Yeah. And that’s a very important thing to know when you’re dealing with these things because lots of times you’re making judgments about the information that the client is sharing with you. So when clients aren’t forthcoming, they really don’t have access to your best guidance and advice.

PETER: Right. OK. So I’ve just dished the dirt on myself. And I need help. Yep.

JOHN HELLERMAN: So I think my first piece of advice to him would be figure out who can speak on your behalf and vouch for your credibility and reputation. But fundamentally, I would also be trying my best to communicate with Sally and make sure that she’s on the same page as I am about keeping it as quiet as possible.

PETER: Same parchment, yeah.

JOHN HELLERMAN: I mean, the goal is, again, to make it boring enough so it goes away so that I’m able to do what I need to do.

ED: So, Peter, what did Jefferson actually do? Did he take John’s good advice?

PETER: He stonewalled it, though he certainly had lots of testimonials that was part of the whole culture of the Democratic Party celebrating him as a great and good man. And that should be kept in mind that, in our terms, this is a hopelessly racist culture, North and South. And people simply did not take too seriously the idea of sexual depredation against somebody you owned or a servant or anything like that.

JOHN HELLERMAN: And as unfortunate as that is, I think he had that going for him.

PETER: Yeah.

ED: So I’ve got a harder situation here, John.

PETER: Yeah, go for it, Ed.

JOHN HELLERMAN: All right.

ED: It’s 1884. We now have massive printing. We have the telegraph. We’ve got rapid spread of news. And I’m the campaign manager for a guy named Grover Cleveland, a remarkably popular and accomplished politician. But rumors are circulating that Cleveland, a bachelor, fathered a child out of wedlock. And he allegedly put the child in an orphanage and forced the mother into an insane asylum.

And the Republicans are really running with this. And they actually have a taunting cheer out on the hustings. Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? What should I do about this? It’s so embarrassing, and so, more importantly, so damaging to his political future.

JOHN HELLERMAN: Right. Well, I think he’s facing something pretty difficult because I imagine that there’s a lot of people that likely know the truth. But I think as a typical crisis response would be to get people who know him and are friendly to him and his cohorts to be the ones out in the public realm discussing this and denying it on his behalf. And then tactic number two is to try and– as sort of evil as it sounds– impugn her reputation–

ED: Ah, yes.

JOHN HELLERMAN: –while continuing to suggest is high reputation, and to become her victim.

ED: And you know, that’s just what he was, we believe, in 1884, if we’re a Democrat. But the thing is, there is this baby. And it’s widely known that there is a baby. But he says, following your script, yeah, but she was a loose woman. And, you know it could have been any number of men who were the father of that child. But I, Grover Cleveland, am stepping up and taking responsibility that may not even be mine. So it shows that–

JOHN HELLERMAN: Likely it is mine.

ED: Yeah, exactly. I’m a great guy. And the fact that I put the child in an orphanage at my own expense and the fact that I paid for her to go to a mental institution just shows you what a wonderful guy I am.

PETER: Oh, Grover, you’re so good, yes.

ED: It also shows you what scum she is, right?

JOHN HELLERMAN: Right, well you have to get it to the point where no one is interested in listening to her.

ED: And I think that’s what happened. The rest of her life, she remained silent.

BRIAN: Let’s go to Washington, DC, in 1994. Mayor Marion Barry, three-term mayor–

JOHN HELLERMAN: Oh, boy.

ED: That’s all the time John has today.

BRIAN: Hey, you’re not going to quit, are you? This is Mayor–

JOHN HELLERMAN: There’s video. There’s video. You guys, there’s video.

BRIAN: That’s right. He’s a three-term mayor. He is caught in a sting operation smoking crack cocaine in a DC hotel with a former girlfriend. So Barry goes to jail on a misdemeanor charge for six months, that something like 12 other charges are dropped. Barry gets out of jail. He runs successfully for city council in 1992. But he promises that he’s not going to run for mayor. And in ’94, we want to run for mayor.

PETER: OK, now you’re hired, John.

BRIAN: And by the way, Barry used to be a great civil rights activist. So this should be pro bono.

JOHN HELLERMAN: Well, again, yeah– I’ll take it pro bono.

BRIAN: Thank you.

JOHN HELLERMAN: There’s other things going on here besides the scandal, right? This is his history as a civil rights leader. So you have a hero that really can’t do any wrong. I mean, this would have been the big asset that I had in my pocket, not only the fact that he’s a hero, but just the fact that no one trusts the police.

BRIAN: You got it.

JOHN HELLERMAN: And so, I mean, I would be counseling him to do exactly what he did, which is to put this onto the police as them being out to get him.

BRIAN: Yeah. He ran as the guy who was defending DC against those intruding outsiders, starting with the FBI.

JOHN HELLERMAN: And people trying to get him out of office because of his impropriety were just trying to keep him from doing good for all his constituents.

BRIAN: And he did good as a fourth-term mayor.

JOHN HELLERMAN: That’s right. And he won.

BRIAN: John, thanks so much for joining us on BackStory.

PETER: Yeah, you’ve been great, John. Really enjoyed it.

JOHN HELLERMAN: This was a lot of fun. It’s interesting to think about.

BRIAN: John Hellerman’s award-winning firm is Hellerman-Baretz Communications.