As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White House briefing room.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I was driven to give the best possible performance I could based on the material that was given to me and that material was documentary footage of the President speaking to people.
I've covered the White House and been yelled at by presidents.
The day I became press secretary to the President of the United States, I was in an entirely different world from the one I'd been in the day before.
When words I uttered, believing them to be true, were exposed as false, I was constrained by my duties and loyalty to the President and unable to comment. But I promised reporters and the public that I would someday tell the whole story of what I knew.
Presidents hate the press. They hate me most of the time.
I look forward to these confrontations with the press to kind of balance up the nice and pleasant things that come to me as president.
Being a press secretary is like learning to type: You're hunting and pecking for a while and then you find yourself doing the touch system and don't realize it. You're speaking for the president without ever having to go to him.
AP promoted me to the White House beat because I knew Clinton, his family, friends, and staff better than anybody in the national press corps. Those contacts helped me break a few stories and get my career in Washington jump-started.
I was given a White House - well, you will have to ask the White House that. But I asked to attend the White House briefing because I was, you know, because I wanted to report on the activities there.
All my stories were usually titled, 'White House Says,' 'President Bush Wants,' and I relied on transcripts from the briefings. I relied on press releases that were sent to the press for the purpose of accurately portraying what the White House believed or wanted.