Myers Gives White House A Different Kind Of Face -- Clinton's Young Press Chief Learns Fast Under Fire

WASHINGTON - White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers was on the spot.

President Clinton was close to picking a new Supreme Court justice and was discussing the candidates at a meeting. What's the agenda? Who's on the short list? When will he decide? The reporters in the press room were demanding answers.

Myers faced the mob with the poise of a seasoned performer.

"How many are still under consideration?" a reporter tried.

"I love when you guys ask questions that you know I'm not going to answer," Myers chuckled.

"It's a great job, isn't it?" another yelled.

"It really is," Myers sighed.

A DAIL ONSLAUGHT

There are at least 6,700 journalists in Washington and many have a question they would like to ask Dee Dee Myers.

If there is trouble in the White House - and there has been lots in this administration - it's the president's press secretary who faces the daily media onslaught.

What does the president mean by universal health coverage? What was his reaction to Paula Jones' lawsuit? What about funding for a space station? What is the Clintons' exact net worth? And what about Haiti, North Korea, Bosnia, crime?

The questions never end. And, though Myers spends long hours gathering information, there is no way to provide ready answers for them all.

How she handles the barrage has a powerful influence on how Americans view the Clinton presidency.

"She is the visible, up-front face of the Clinton

administration," said Stephen Hess, a scholar at Brookings Institution.

Myers has been the main spokesperson for about a year, and the word is that, after a somewhat shaky start, she is handling it pretty well. Her most important tools have been humor and patience.

"I was watching her the other day, and she was saying nothing about anything, and I turned to someone and said, `She's getting really good at this,' " said Gwen Ifill, a White House correspondent for The New York Times.

BREAKING NEW GROUND

Myers spoke for Clinton successfully through his 1992 presidential campaign. But in traditional Washington, where diversity is more talked about than acted on, she was a surprising choice - the first woman in this spotlight role.

Myers, 32, wears black mini-skirts and purple and hot pink suits in a city of crisp, white shirts, gray trousers and rep ties.

During the presidential campaign, she turned cartwheels to wake up bored reporters, and drove Secret Service agents crazy when she organized a group to rock Clinton's bus when he and Al Gore wouldn't stop talking.

From the beginning, Myers found herself on the defensive with a White House press corps that, like most of this city, takes itself very seriously.

Some reporters questioned her access to Clinton. Others complained that she sometimes spoke without having all the facts. And correspondents griped that her briefings don't produce news, just defensive posturing.

"Her problem is that she is cut out of the information pipeline," complained one reporter, who asked not to be named.

"Frequently, people are more critical of her standing at the podium because she is a woman," Ifill said. "That said, there are times when she could be more well-prepared and coherent, especially on difficult, complicated issues."

Journalists also have whispered that Myers isn't an important player because she earns less than other Clinton aides and doesn't have a big office with a fireplace.

Recently, there was sniping from Republicans and the media when it was revealed that she had procrastinated in completing the paperwork for her security clearance.

Myers says she takes the steady drum of criticism in stride.

"This is Washington," she said. "People look at your office and they look at your title, and they wonder what it means. It takes a long time to change perceptions. People can make comments like that all they want, but the bottom line is I'm here."

A PRESIDENT WHO TALKS

Beyond the media criticism, Myers has had the pleasure of dealing with a boss who loves to talk, has trouble making up his mind and frequently ends up talking to the press almost as much as Myers.

"President Clinton is really his own press secretary," said Marlin Fitzwater, who was press secretary to former Presidents George Bush and Ronald Reagan for six years.

Despite all of this, Myers is holding her own, winning the admiration of White House aides and grudging respect from some correspondents.

And Myers clearly loves working for Clinton.

She says her biggest lesson of the past year is: "You can take your work seriously, but you can't take yourself too seriously."

Fitzwater says he has noticed an improvement in Myers' presentation in recent months.

"I'm very high on Dee Dee," Fitzwater said. "She has the talent, the personality and the ability. But she has been handed a deck stacked against her in many ways. I think there's an old-boy network over there that does not help her."

Clinton political adviser Paul Begala says Myers has risen above the obstacles of ingrained Washington culture.

"It's hard to come to Washington if you're not part of this culture," Begala said. "Harder still when you are younger than some of the children of some of the reporters with whom you are dealing. And even harder still if you are a woman. Dee Dee has had all these strikes against her. Her job takes people skills, as well as intellectual skills, and she has lots of both."

A GRUELING ROUTINE

Apart from supervising about a dozen staffers, the press secretary's main job is the care and feeding of the White House correspondents.

Every day, there are at least 50 phone calls, a stack of mail and lots of meetings. But the main event is the afternoon news briefing where reporters fire off questions.

Myers' chief weapons are an easy laugh and quick one-liners. During a briefing about sin taxes to pay for health care, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked about differences between hard liquor and beer and wine. "Were you ever in high school, Wolf?" Myers joked.

Her day starts at 5:30 a.m. when she spends an hour reading the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the Washington Post in her one-bedroom, brownstone apartment in a downtown neighborhood near Dupont Circle.

She usually arrives at her West Wing office about 7:15 a.m. for a round of meetings: the 7:30 a.m. communications meeting, the 8 a.m. senior staff meeting, the 8:30 or 9 a.m. informal briefing for reporters.

Myers says she sees Clinton several times a day and can drop in to almost any of his meetings.

"For reporters, it's never enough, unless you pipe in what's going on in the Oval Office," Myers said.

Myers says she often confers with national security adviser Anthony Lake about troubles brewing abroad. And occasionally baseball.

"It helps that she can talk to Tony about Darryl Strawberry's disappearance or how Mike Piazza is coming on as a catcher and then sort of effortlessly switch back to Bosnia," Begala said. "It gives her the ability to speak the same language with a lot of the men she has to deal with in the press corps and the White House."

Myers normally leaves for home around 8:30 p.m. She works almost every Saturday, catches up on reading while sweating on a StairMaster and figures she has eaten lunch outside the office three times since joining the White House.

Her relentless schedule doesn't leave much time for a private life. She is single but declines to talk about dating. "You do the best you can," Myers said. "I don't like to talk about my personal life. I don't like reading about it. You have to work at it. I don't have the same social life that I had in L.A."

The middle child of three girls, Myers' real name is Margaret Jane; the nickname, Dee Dee, stuck when her sister couldn't say "baby."

She studied political science and French at Santa Clara University, and after she graduated she went to work for Citizens Action League, knocking on doors to get voters to support utility-rate reform. She become a protege of Los Angeles lawyer Mickey Kantor, who was running Walter Mondale's 1984 California campaign. Today, Kantor is Clinton's U.S. trade representative.

Myers doesn't speculate on her future, although she says she doesn't know how Marlin Fitzwater withstood it for six years.

"I'm here for now," she said. "This is my job."

But she smiles and says she can't imagine lasting eight years in it.