Ultimate Insiders

White House Photographers and How They Shape History

Kenneth T. Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138737600
• eBook ISBN: 9781351603645
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Virtually unknown to the public or historians, White House photographers have developed amazing access to the presidents of the United States over the past half-century. In this book, long-time White House correspondent Kenneth T. Walsh tells their stories, emphasizing observations about the presidents the photographers got to know so well along with other key figures close to those presidents—including the first ladies, members of Congress, and important world leaders.

This book shows how official White House photographers have morphed into ultimate insiders within the American presidency, allowed to observe and take pictures of nearly everything Chief Executives do related to their job. The "photogs" have often become close friends with the presidents they have served. Using these bonds of trust and their own powers of observation, they created fundamental impressions and public images of the presidents through the art of photography. Acting not only as image makers but as visual historians, they have built pictorial chronicles of the presidency—intimate narratives of America's leaders in public and private, showing how they dealt with everyday life as well as moments of great crisis and opportunity. From children playing in the Oval Office to decisions to send troops into harm's way, images created by White House photographers can make or break a presidential administration as well as define an era.

Chapter One
How Lincoln and FDR Set the Pace, and How Their Successors Wrote Their Own Rules

Abraham Lincoln understood the importance of image, and he was the first president to use photography to enhance his reputation. An important moment came when he gave a speech at New York’s Cooper Union, an academy in Manhattan, on February 27, 1860. Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer writes that it transformed Lincoln “from a relatively obscure Illinois favorite son into a viable national contender for his party’s presidential nomination.”¹ He won that nomination three months later and was elected president six months after that.

Lincoln realized that his speech to this influential audience could affect his chances to win the presidency, so he prepared it carefully, as a summary of his stand against slavery and his defense of the Union.² He would use this address as the basis for many other speeches across the country.³

“As if to illustrate his metamorphosis,” Holzer adds, “the Cooper Union appearance also inspired the most important single visual record of Lincoln’s, or perhaps any, American presidential campaign: an image-transforming Mathew Brady photograph. Its later proliferation and reproduction in prints, medallions, broadsides, and banners said perhaps as much to create a ‘new’ Abraham Lincoln as did the Cooper Union address itself.”⁴

Lincoln had allowed photographs to be taken before, but he wanted this one to be special because it would be what amounted to his official presidential campaign image. So he went to Brady, the most celebrated photographer of his day, and sat for a picture at Brady’s Bleecker Street gallery in New York on February 27, a few hours before his Cooper Union speech. He hoped both the speech and the photograph would add to his celebrity. They did, but getting the right photograph was a challenge.

Lincoln, 51, arrived looking haggard, and his clothes seemed too small. A friend conceded that his appearance was less than appealing because he had “a large mole on his right cheek and an uncommonly prominent Adam’s apple on his throat.”⁵

Assessing his subject, Brady hit upon a brilliant idea. He would photograph this homely man standing up, at a distance, rather than doing the customary head shot, to emphasize his impressive height of six-foot-four. Brady posed him with a false pillar in the background, a table piled with books and Lincoln lightly touching the top volume with his left hand, to suggest erudition. This technique diverted attention away from Lincoln’s rough-hewn facial features and his ill-fitting clothes.⁶ Brady also pulled up Lincoln’s collar to make Lincoln’s neck look shorter and to give him a more dignified appearance.⁷ This prompted a mild rebuke from his subject. “I see you want to shorten my neck,” Lincoln said, but he went along with the adjustment.⁸

Afterward, Brady retouched the photo, removing the dark circles around Lincoln’s eyes and blurring the deep lines in his face. He came up with an image of someone who appeared to be a strong, serious, determined leader.

In May, after Lincoln won the Republican presidential nomination, Brady decided to distribute the photograph as widely as he could. He was hoping to add to his own notoriety as well as Lincoln’s.

The photo was circulated very widely, and it introduced the man known as “the rail-splitter” to the electorate not as the country bumpkin portrayed by his critics but as a sophisticated and confident individual. At one point, Brady produced and sold a large number of 3-by-4-inch cards containing his original photograph in order to meet public demand for images of the Republican candidate. Such “cartes de visite” were becoming popular at this time, bearing images not only of political figures but of other famous people and celebrities, akin to the baseball cards of the twentieth century. Lincoln later credited the distribution of the photo along with texts of his Cooper Union speech as having won the election for him.⁹

The photo showed Lincoln clean-shaven, but he grew a beard shortly before his election in November. The president posed in Brady’s Washington studio for another portrait, this time featuring his whiskers, taken by Brady associate Alexander Gardner, who would later take other pictures of the president.¹⁰ Enterprising printmakers doctored Brady’s original photograph, adding facial hair, so the first image lived on for years.¹¹

Lincoln went on to pioneer the use of photography by political figures.

“During his lifetime, Lincoln was the subject of more than 130 photographs, more than virtually any other person of his generation,” writes author Richard Lowry. “About half of these were taken during the four and a half years between his nomination as the Republican presidential candidate and his death. Clearly Lincoln understood the new medium—photography had become commercially viable only in the early 1840s—as an emerging force in politics, capable of bringing the face of the president to the electorate with unprecedented objectivity and variety.”¹² Many of these photographs were taken by Gardner, who brilliantly documented the Civil War and the overall Lincoln presidency. Eventually, Lincoln’s visage became “the most recognizable face in the country, but also the face of the nation,” Lowry writes.¹³

* * *

GARDNER AND LINCOLN first met at the gallery and studio of Mathew Brady in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, February 24, 1861. Gardner at this point had worked for Brady for nearly five years, first in Brady’s New York galley and then, for three years, as manager of Brady’s Washington operation. When Brady was commissioned to supply a photo of Lincoln for Harper’s Weekly, he accepted the job, got Lincoln’s agreement, and assigned Gardner to take the pictures. Brady was at his main office in New York when the photo session occurred, so Gardner, a burly immigrant from Scotland, was on his own.

The photos were not among Lincoln’s best. The president-elect was understandably preoccupied during the session. The southern states had begun to secede from the Union and war was looming. Lincoln said little and seemed disinterested in the whole process. Gardner took 14 images, whereupon Lincoln abruptly left the studio to manage the crisis at hand. The pictures were undistinguished and captured Lincoln looking at the floor, stolid and bored. The artist who rendered the engraving for Harper’s Weekly did some primitive photo-shopping to define Lincoln’s cheeks and add roundness to his face, giving him more of a contemplative look than the unretouched photos.¹⁴

But Lincoln’s attitude about official photographs gradually changed. He returned to his belief, manifested at Cooper Union, that image was important and he needed to have more impressive pictures taken than the lackluster ones from February 1861.

During the next four years, Lincoln posed for nearly 70 photographs, most of them in studios but on some occasions at important venues, such as battlefields. “He would come to understand photography as one of the crucial media of office—not in the way presidents today understand media as an arena for controlling a ‘message’ … but as that space that humanized him for the public,” Lowry wrote. “He would present himself variously as commander in chief, as a citizen, as the leader of a democratic republic, and as a ‘careworn’ face of the Union, embodying the harrowing grief and resolve he shared with those who elected him. In the end, photographs were for Lincoln in all senses of the word political. They proved effective tools in the rough-and-tumble of partisanship, sectional loyalty, and power-mongering. But they also offered the president’s craggy face and long, gangly body as a symbolic image of the body politic and the ideals of democracy and equality on which it was founded.”¹⁵

Sometimes photographers find entrée to presidents through their families—a tactic that also goes back to Lincoln. Henry F. Warren, a photographer from Waltham, Massachusetts, got several pictures of the president on March 6, 1865, two days after his second inauguration, by cozying up to a family member. These were among the last photos taken of Lincoln before he was fatally shot on April 14, 1865. Warren learned that Tad Lincoln, the president’s young son, rode his pony, accompanied by a military orderly, nearly every afternoon at 3:00. Warren sought out Tad at his riding spot outside the White House one afternoon, took several photos of him, and gave Tad the prints the next day. Tad was delighted, and Warren immediately made a bold suggestion. “Now, bring out your father and I will make a picture of him for you,” Warren said. Tad ran inside and came out with the president, who brought a chair to sit in for a portrait. Warren made three photographs. After Lincoln’s assassination, thousands of copies of one of them, a close-up, were sold to grieving Americans across the country.¹⁶

One other photograph stands out: Gardner’s image of Lincoln in the spring of 1865, just before his assassination. Lincoln is a frail, gaunt figure staring into the distance, smiling faintly as if a passing thought had brightened the moment but exhausted by the burdens of leading the Union through four years of carnage and suffering.

* * *

IT TOOK many years for other presidents to effectively advance from the first political use of photography by Lincoln. The process was incremental. The story of the presidents was told by the working press, and to some extent by official government photographers from the U.S. Army Signal Corps, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Navy.

As the technology of photography improved and began to replace engraving as a form of public portraiture, several star photographer-promoters led the way. One of these was a German immigrant named Gotthelf Pach who, with his brothers, started out after the Civil War as itinerant portrait photographers in New York and New Jersey. While working their way through Tom’s River, New Jersey, in 1868 with a mobile dark room on a horse-drawn wagon, the brothers encountered soon-to-be President Ulysses Grant sitting on a porch with two friends. Impressed with the pictures they saw, Grant began a long friendship with Pach and often posed for him, sometimes with his family, for the remainder of his life. Pach was the Annie Leibowitz of his time, photographing many posed celebrities and other personalities, as well as Presidents Grover Cleveland, James Garfield, Theodore Roosevelt (starting as a child), and Calvin Coolidge. Pach’s firm initiated the dry-plate method of image developing, and also made advances in “flashlight picture taking,” a dangerous enterprise with frequently explosive results.¹⁷

By 1888, durin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Author
• Note to Readers
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Insider Views and Insider Insights
• Chapter One How Lincoln and FDR Set the Pace, and How Their Successors Wrote Their Own Rules
• Chapter Two Behind the Scenes with John F. Kennedy, Cecil Stoughton, and the Glamor Lensmen
• Chapter Three Behind the Scenes with Lyndon B. Johnson and Yoichi Okamoto
• Chapter Four Behind the Scenes with Richard Nixon and Ollie Atkins
• Chapter Five Behind the Scenes with Gerald Ford and David Kennerly
• Chapter Six Behind the Scenes with Jimmy Carter and a Missing Chief Photographer
• Chapter Seven Behind the Scenes with Ronald Reagan, Michael Evans, and Pete Souza
• Chapter Eight Behind the Scenes with George H.W. Bush and David Valdez
• Chapter Nine Behind the Scenes with Bill Clinton, Bob McNeely, and Sharon Farmer
• Chapter Ten Behind the Scenes with George W. Bush and Eric Draper
• Chapter Eleven Behind the Scenes with Barack Obama and Pete Souza
• Chapter Twelve Behind the Scenes with Donald Trump and His Commanding Style of Image Making
• Chapter Thirteen The Vital Role of the “Photodogs”
• Chapter Fourteen Master Photojournalists Who Made Their Mark on History
• Chapter Fifteen The Ultimate Insiders’ Evolving Tools of the Trade
• Epilogue: The Future of White House Photography
• Selected Readings
• Index