Former WH press secretary: Lewinsky scandal the ‘easy days’

Former White House press secretary Mike McCurry says he considers the job he had to do right as news of the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal broke the “relatively easy days.”

“You know it’s funny because everyone assumes that the days of ‘l’affaire Monique’ would’ve been, you know, the hard days, but they were relatively easy days,” the spokesman who served under President Clinton, replied when asked by NPR’s Michel Martin about his toughest time at the White House.

{mosads}“The press corps was consumed with only one subject, and I was saying nothing,” he told a sold-out crowd Thursday at the Foundation for the National Archives in downtown Washington. “So it was just basically, as I said at the time, 100 different ways to be double-parked in the no comment zone,” McCurry added to laughs from the audience.

Now a communications consultant, McCurry, 60, said of handling his press secretary duties during the 1998 political melodrama, “It was just bizarre but it wasn’t particularly challenging, or hard, or wasn’t the worst day. It was just … unbelievable.”

McCurry was one of four former White House press secretaries gathered at the 10th annual McGowan Forum on Communications to share behind-the-scenes stories from his time on the job.

Rather than the Lewinsky days, McCurry revealed his hardest job experience was when then-Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was killed in a 1996 plane crash while on a trade mission in Croatia.

“We’re supposed to go out there [to the White House briefing room] and be very cool, collected, and calm,” said McCurry, who formerly served as Brown’s director of communications at the Democratic National Committee. Saying he didn’t stop to collect himself before talking to journalists, McCurry remembered getting through most of the briefing before “I felt myself losing it.”

“I had to stop … so I went out and pretended that I was getting some important information from the president and then came back and was able to do the briefing,” McCurry recalled.

“It’s those moments that we handle a lot, and prepare for a lot, but every once in awhile you get something that just jerks you out of your place.”