U.S. Attorney Flap Is a Primer on How Not to Manage a Crisis
As senior Justice Department officials and its communications office struggle to regain control of the spiraling U.S. attorney crisis, they could learn some valuable public relations lessons from a biblical tale of deception and redemption, crisis management experts say.
When Eve, snookered by that wily serpent Satan, ate the forbidden fruit and shared it with Adam, and God figured out he'd been crossed, says crisis management consultant Eric Dezenhall, that first couple had pretty much the same response that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and senior Justice officials did when Congress confronted them about the federal prosecutor firings.
"An organization under attack is like an individual under attack; the response is visceral, not strategic," says Dezenhall. "That response goes back to Adam and Eve. What do you do when you get caught? You cover up."
In this case, officials first used a fig leaf of an excuse by asserting that the dismissals were based almost exclusively on performance and not at all on politics. But that fig leaf was quickly stripped bare when they kept burnishing the original account, just as Milton did.
Now, it's unclear whether Adam and Eve colluded and tried to get their story straight before 'fessing up to God, and how he first figured out that they had been very naughty. But in this case, the scores of E-mails between Gonzales's chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, and other senior Justice and White House officials gave the long paper trail the "whiff of malice," says Dezenhall, which in turn assigned a certain "narrative locomotive" to the convoluted saga.
"When you lie, it causes a chemical reaction, almost a biological hostility, so much so that you don't really have the opportunity to say, 'Let me revisit why I gave you bad information,' " he says. "Nobody cares at that point because there has been a primal betrayal. It's almost like adultery."
The Justice Department's mishandling of the U.S. attorney firings is a case of Crisis Mismanagement 101, Dezenhall and other crisis management experts say. For one thing, senior communications officials made the rookie mistake of caving to the incredible media and congressional pressure to "purge the story," even before they themselves knew what that story was, says Dezenhall. Instead, someone at the senior level, perhaps even Gonzales himself, should have admitted that even he didn't realize the scope of the problem. They should then have assembled a blue-ribbon panel to investigate it and promised to find out the answers and get back to Congress and the American public. "The problem with this one is in their effort to make it go away quickly," says Dezenhall, "they violated the PR Hippocratic oath of crisis management, to do no harm."
If not from Genesis, senior Justice officials should at least have borrowed from Benjamin Franklin's sage warning, "Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead," says Carole Gorney, founder and director of the Center for Crisis Public Relations and Litigation Studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.
In this case, Gorney says, the situation also offers some parallels to the mishandling of the 1969 Chappaquiddick tragedy, in which a car driven by Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts went off a bridge, killing a young woman, and the senator's staff and family failed to acknowledge the tragedy for hours.
Gorney has coined a term called the Chappaquiddick Theorem: "If a little bit comes out today, a little bit tomorrow, and they keep changing the story to address new information, they just dig the hole deeper and deeper," says Gorney. "People make up their minds, and pretty soon, you have people's opinions being reported, and it's very hard to get rid of that. You need to nip it in the bud as quickly as possible."
But the White House quickly distanced itself and President Bush from the whole scandal. And even if Bush and Gonzales had spoken out, they had a huge hurdle: the steep erosion of trust and credibility both men have suffered in the wake of their "war on terror," legal strategies, and the war in Iraq.
"We don't like to think that something as schoolyard as likability plays a role in this," says Dezenhall. "But I've got to tell you, it plays a huge role." Dezenhall, who worked in the Reagan administration, says that's what helped the president's communications strategists.
"When Reagan said something incredibly stupid, how did we spin it?" says Dezenhall. "We picked up the phone and said, 'he says things like that,' and people didn't care, because people liked him." And that's why, despite the incident of the Blue Dress, President Bill Clinton is an international icon, the world's most popular elder statesman.
Which leads to the final question: what to do?
Someone, says Dezenhall, has to be banished from the Garden of Eden.
"As shallow as it sounds, there is no more powerful human impulse than the impulse to blame, and to figure out, what is the price to be paid?" he says. "That's what brings the narrative arc to its conclusion."
But who should it be? Gorney thinks it should be the man with the lowest likability rating in this administration: Karl Rove, she concludes, because the apparent involvement of Bush's political adviser in the deliberations has stoked the fire.
"He's very controversial and has already raised the ire of a lot of people in Washington," says Gorney. "It looks like another one of those manipulation things going on."
Once someone is punished, says Dezenhall, there will undoubtedly be redemption. That's why Martha Stewart is back on top, he says, earning the big bucks, because she did her stint in jail.
"We're willing to let you up again, provided you demonstrate pain," says Dezenhall. "The problem with modern America is everyone wants redemption without the pain. But it doesn't work that way."