Inside the Oval Office

Brill's Content, November 1999

Unsung author William Doyle spent the last five years slaving over his book about modern presidents and their White House tapes. Now he's got five days to determine its fate.

Publicize Or Perish

By JENNIFER GREENSTEIN

Photographs by Andrew Lichtenstein
It's nearly midnight on a muggy June evening, and author William Doyle has been selling himself since 9 A.M. That's the hour when he emerged from his Washington, D.C., hotel dressed in a starched white shirt and his one good suit. Since then Doyle has hustled from studio to studio, taping four radio and television appearances, all to drum up sales for Inside the Oval Office, the 419-page opus that he spent the last five years producing. Now, on an eerily quiet sidewalk in front of an office building in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, he waits to be admitted for his final sales call of the day.

A harried radio producer appears at the locked glass doors and whisks Doyle into the Westwood One studio where Jim Bohannon earns his keep chatting with authors, politicians, sports figures, and insomniacs from 10 P.M. to 1 A.M. five nights a week. Guest and host talk briefly about a mutual acquaintance, then sink into silence. Doyle knows nothing about how the nationally broadcast show will go-and he doesn't ask. Finally, the "bop bop" of the introductory music fills the room. "Welcome back to The Jim Bohannon Show, at 1-800-998-5462, 1-800-998-JIMBO…And with us now is the man who has written Inside the Oval Office: The White House Tapes from FDR to Clinton. And welcome to The Jim Bohannon Show. The publisher-can you pronounce that please? "

Doyle: "That's a Japanese word known as Kodansha."
Bohannon: "Kodansha. Gesundheit."

And so it begins. Bohannon poses questions in his sonorous radio voice; Doyle comes back with quick, fluid answers, moving effortlessly from Presidents Truman to Nixon to Clinton. Doyle succeeds at introducing the book's best, most dramatic material, regardless of what the question is.

Bohannon: "Do you find many instances in which it is quite clear by the context that the president knew the tape was running but the other person did not?"

Doyle sidesteps the question, opting instead for a dramatic description of a Nixon tape: "In 1971, you can hear Richard Nixon clearly ordering a break-in…You hear him say, 'Break into The Brookings Institution, clear out the files, go in at eight or nine o'clock.' And his aides are spluttering in confusion, and he repeats the order over and over, and he is virtually shouting. Now if that tape came out, ordering an impeachable offense and a felony, think about how history would have been different."

To every question that comes his way for the next 40 minutes, Doyle replies with enthusiasm, his eyes fixed on his host. But Bohannon spends much of his time peering at his computer screen, thumbing through his notes, even applying lip balm.

As a tape plays of President Ronald Reagan addressing his cabinet on the morning that U.S. troops invaded Grenada, Bohannon pulls a silver nail clipper from his pocket. "At 5:15 this morning"-clip- "the joint force landed"-clip-"at two spots on Grenada: Paratroopers in the south"-clip-"the marines and this other multiple force in the north"-clip-"secured both airports...."

If his host's foray into personal grooming distresses Doyle, the author doesn't let on. Riding back to his hotel a few minutes before 1 A.M.-his media escort, Christopher De Young, is at the wheel-Doyle is asked how the interview went. His reply: "I enjoyed it immensely."
There's a saying in publishing circles that's truer today than ever: "Books are sold, not bought." If you're an unsung author like William Doyle, and you've written an interesting, historical book that lacks a startling thesis or a clear audience, getting people to fork over $28 for the privilege of owning the complete collection of your 120,000 well-chosen words isn't all that easy.
But there is one relatively cheap commodity at your disposal: the media. Radio and TV shows are ever more desperate for engaging interview subjects, and you must become a performer if you hope to survive in a publishing world that spits out thousands of new titles every year.

Enter the book tour. Though not a new phenomenon, it has taken on increased importance in recent years. Such a tour gives the media their first chance to glimpse the author's performance. If the act earns accolades, the author's reward will be more media interviews, perhaps more reviews, and, if all goes well, more sales.

Doyle's publicist, Maria Carola, scored a few national TV bookings for Doyle in addition to the usual run of radio talk shows-The Crier Report on the Fox News Channel and a three-and-a-half-minute interview (at 5 A.M.) on ABC News. She also landed one coup in the world of radio: a two-hour interview with Chicago radio host Milt Rosenberg, dubbed the nation's leading author interviewer this year by Talkers magazine, a trade publication.

And a somewhat unanticipated gift turned up in USA Today on May 24: Larry King trumpeted Doyle's book in his column, calling it "a fascinating account" and adding, "I couldn't put it down." (Carola had sent him a copy.)

All the signs indicated that the book had the potential to break out of the pack and become more than one of those non- fiction books you find in the back of the third floor of a Barnes & Noble, right next to a 500-page tome about farming in colonial times.

Now it was up to Doyle. So, for five days, starting on June 14, he hustled from Washington, D.C., to Chicago, to Boston, and then to New York, battling his TV and radio hosts' indifference, ignorance, and nail clipping. Doyle's mission: to keep his book, and his fledgling literary career, from being remaindered.

The night before the start of his book tour, Bill Doyle lies in a hotel bed in Washington, D.C. Steep, however, eludes him. Twenty thousand copies of his book are in bookstores around the country, and the next day's round of interviews dances in his head: A five-minute spot on a local cable TV show; appearances on two national radio shows, clocking in at a total of one hour; a half-hour on Voice of America, which is heard in more than 120 countries; and 53 consecutive minutes-no breaks allowed, no bloopers edited out-of taping for C-SPAN 2's Book TV.

Doyle's mind fixates on what could go wrong. "Mutilating myself shaving-that's what you worry about," he says the next morning over a breakfast of sliced bananas and a toasted cinnamon raisin bagel. Thankfully, the worst has not happened-his broad, ruddy face is nick free, and his crisp white shirt is pristine. He's been up since 6 A.M., reading-of all things-his own book. "I needed to remember what the hell I wrote," he explains.

Bill Doyle is a gracious, likable, and almost excessively unassuming man. After growing up in the New York area and attending college in Washington, D.C., Doyle worked in advertising at J. Walter Thompson Company and Home Box Office before becoming infatuated with writing. He'd never fantasized about being a journalist or a historian-though he's always been a voracious reader-but after he and a friend hatched a plan to edit a book of essays by top American business executives, he was hooked.

The idea for Inside the Oval Office gelled gradually after Doyle read a magazine article about the discovery of secret recordings made by President Roosevelt. But his first book proposal, which pitched an analysis of various presidents' management styles, was greeted with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Doyle then reworked the book into a narrative heavily informed by the recordings made by nearly every president from FDR to President Clinton. In 1996 Doyle continued his research by cowriting and coproducing a program for the A&E network called The Secret White House Tapes, which won the 1998 Annual Writers Guild Award for best documentary (other than current events). Finally, the American division of one of Japan's largest publishers, Kodansha, bought the book in 1998. Doyle received an advance of less than $50,000.

Despite his lack of any credentials as a historian, Doyle interviewed major figures-Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and Dan Quayle among them-while researching the book. Inside the Oval Office paints an enlightening picture of how 11 presidents conducted business from behind that grand desk, mixing charming details (President Nixon ate a slice of canned pineapple and a scoop of cottage cheese for lunch every day) with close analysis of the presidents' decision-making and management styles.

As Doyle sits in The Westin Grand Hotel in Washington buttering his bagel, he considers what he needs to accomplish in the next five days. "I damn well better be interesting and entertaining during this period, or what's the point?" he says. These interviews, in fact, will either get the ball rolling-- more interview requests, editors commissioning reviews, readers asking for the book in stores, the publisher investing in more publicity-or they will halt the momentum from his first interview on National Public Radio's Morning Edition two weeks before.

"It's the first live television I think I've ever done," Doyle remarks to his media escort, De Young, as the pair weave through Washington's midday traffic on day one of the book tour. Doyle's previous (taped) TV experience had been pretty laid back. "The [previous guest] came in in his bathing trunks," Doyle recalls. "He had a shirt and tie and a jacket, but when he stood up and walked away, he had floral bathing trunks on."

Doyle is not as relaxed for this appearance, though his interviewers are far from intimidating. "They're really enthusiastic," De Young says a bit snidely of Newschannel 8's Dave Lucas and Jane Karlen. "They're always, 'Wow, you've had phenomenal success with your book.' And these people will not have read your book at all" (Karlen says the two usually spend about 30 minutes with a book prior to interviews.)

Doyle is summoned to the set and perches next to Karlen. A small microphone is fastened to his lapel, the cameras roll, and Lucas and Karlen begin asking irrelevant questions in their melodious TV voices. They are struggling to sound knowledgeable, but are leading Doyle astray. Doyle refuses to follow.

When Karlen asks if presidents have ever been taped without their knowledge-a topic the book barely addresses-Doyle skillfully negotiates his way out of trouble. "I assume and I think the presidents assumed that when they were overseas [that there was electronic surveillance by other governments] .... But the book concerns White House taping sanctioned by the presidents. In some cases they built the microphones into the lampshade-FDR did that-so you wouldn't know you were talking directly into a recorder. John Kennedy built an on/off switch into the pen-and-pencil set, right on the Oval Office desk. It was almost like James Bond.... "

Doyle is on a roll, countering the anchors' ignorance with deft diversions. And then Karlen hits him with a gut punch: "What do you think here is really, truly groundbreaking?" she asks. It is a question De Young had posed as they were getting out of the car en route to the first interview of the day. Doyle didn't have a succinct answer then, and he doesn't have much of one now.

"Well, I never knew that so many presidents did this, number one, a lot of fragmentary recordings have been heard. Secondly, it's that, this is a, I also interviewed many Oval Office insiders...." For the first time that day, Doyle stumbles.

After Doyle is thanked and praised and politely guided off the set, he steps back into the hot sun and immediately asks his media handler for reassurance. "Did it go okay, more or less? What should I do better? Sit up straighter? Talk slower?"

De Young homes right in on Doyle's weakest moment: "I think you need a better answer to, Jane asked you, what's groundbreaking?" he says. "It's a difficult question to answer. You didn't answer. You answered a different question."

Doyle wakes up in his Chicago hotel room on day three of the tour at 5:45 A.M. Forty-five minutes later, he's ready for his first interview-this one with a radio network based in Massachusetts. These tours aren't all about authors charming their hosts with in-person interviews; often they end up sitting in a hotel room doing interviews over the phone. Doyle does two on this morning, for America, Good Morning, the national talk show out of Canton, Massachusetts, and for Wisconsin Public Radio. "You want to take every opportunity that you have," says Elizabeth Bennett, Kodansha America's director of sales and marketing, of the hotel room "phoners." "If you can do it, why not?"
The personal marketing push continues with "the drop-in," during which authors visit bookstores to sign copies. That's what Doyle finds himself doing with a few midday hours to kill until his 9 P.M. appearance with Milt Rosenberg. Doyle is game. "If [you're] not George Stephanopoulos, and you don't have that kind of automatic firepower, you really do have to help," he says.

But as eager as Doyle is to put in long hours on the book's behalf, he struggles with the drop-ins. They require a measure of self-promotion that clearly makes him uncomfortable. He is so reluctant to bother the clerks at two independent stores near the University of Chicago that he passes up prime opportunities to deliver his sales pitch.

"My mission in a situation like that is to get out of their way as fast as possible, and let them get back to selling books," he says after one drop-in. But the unfortunate result of Doyle's hesitancy is a blown marketing opportunity. For an unknown author, a bookstore employee's recommendation-known as hand-selling-is one of the most effective ways to get a midlist book to catch on.

At the huge chain stores, however, getting a clerk or a manager excited about a book is exceedingly difficult. The hope is that an "autographed copy sticker" will do the trick and trigger sales. So a few minutes before 6 P.M., Doyle, and his local media escort, Bill Young, pull up at Borders Books and Music's four-story store on North Michigan Avenue's Magnificent Mile, Chicago's busiest shopping district. There's no parking, so Young sends Doyle in alone. Entering the bustling store, Doyle heads to the back counter and offers to sign copies of his book. They're nowhere to be found, even though Young had pulled copies off a top shelf earlier that day and handed them to a clerk. As the clerk runs downstairs to round up the copies in stock, Young materializes (he parked illegally and persuaded the store's security guard to watch the car). He is miffed. "I went up on the ladder myself," Young says. "It's the only way to get them. This is a store run by kids, and I don't mean smart kids." Finally, a clerk appears with six books and news that sounds good, if it's true. "Looks like we sold some."

Doyle pulls a blue Flair pen from his pocket and quickly signs. Then he thanks one of the clerks, adding, "I could even slap on the stickers if you wanted." She assures him that is not necessary.

All Doyle's efforts at self-promotion lay bare the incongruity of achieving the status of author. "It's the only situation where you can be an elitist and an underdog at the same time," observes Young.

"On the one hand, you've done something that's very difficult to do," namely, writing a book. "You have an agent, you have a publisher, you have a designer, you have a publicist. You've done all that, you're at a very elite level, and then you start running around town signing two copies."

On top of that, the autographed copy itself is of dubious value. Andre Schiffrin, director of The New Press, a not-for-profit publishing house, doesn't think signed copies do much for sales. "I think most people couldn't care less unless it's a well-known author," he says. But because stores can return books to the publisher for a full refund, there is an upside to signings. "In the business the joke is that they can't send it back if it's autographed, so you should sign as many as you can."

It's 5:17 A.M. on day four, and waking up early to talk, and staying up late to talk, and catching planes to get somewhere to talk, is taking its toll on the yes-I'll-do-anything author. "My eyes are like little volcanoes," he offers as he waits in the hotel lobby for his taxi to the airport, where he'll board a plane for Boston. Breakfast? "Bufferin and Pepto-Bismol."

There's only one interview today, a taping of The Smoki Bacon and Dick Concannon Show, a public-access cable program that's probably the most unusual stop on the book circuit. The hosts are a wealthy Beacon Hill couple in their 70s-fixtures on the Boston social scene-who delight in intellectual banter. Doyle arrives to find Bacon, impeccably attired in an elegant red suit, heavy gold jewelry, and owlish tortoise shell eyeglasses, peering into the viewfinder of a tiny Sony camcorder that's perched on a tripod. Her husband, clad in a seersucker suit and bowtie, is interviewing the consul of Monaco. After lunch is served, the couple switch roles: Concannon mans the camera while Bacon chats with Doyle. In her hands, the book sounds more like a juicy tell-all than a scholarly treatise on the presidency. Doyle returns to the hotel exhausted. He goes to sleep at 8 P.M.

Day five's starting time: 7 A.M. Assignment: Katz and McCarthy. Lowdown on the radio hosts: "Let's see," says Lynn Cannici, Doyle's Boston media escort. "They're fast-talking, shallow people. But they have a huge audience and they're pretty irreverent."

Host Jeff Katz calls himself a libertarian; his cohost, Darlene McCarthy, considers herself "a realist." Together, they produce a combustible show every weekday from 5:30 A.M. to 9 A.M. that dwells on politics, current events, and whatever else comes to mind.

Almost as soon as Doyle takes his seat in the studio across from the grinning, garrulous Katz, the program resumes. The host (sans McCarthy that day) dives right in. "So-let's get to the dirt. What'd you hear? What'd you hear? What'd you hear?"

Doyle wastes no time adapting to his host's brash, brusque, tabloid style. The tapes, he replies, show 11 presidents "if not with their pants down exactly, with their guard down."

At that, Katz's eyes light up. And with Katz egging him on for the rest of his appearance, Doyle launches into his most derogatory anecdotes about each president, peppering his retellings with snarky assessments. President Nixon: "He was a Walter Mitty, sloppy, dysfunctional, bizarre executive." President Carter: "One of his own men said the Carter White House was like a Marx Brothers movie-only instead of four brothers, there were about a dozen." President Clinton: "A bogus, invalidated president ... [and] the most flawed man of the century."

Doyle is hip, loose, funny, a little outrageous, and he leaps at the invitation to ridicule presidents for the delight of his interviewer. Katz-no slouch when it comes to yapping-barely gets a word in. Sure, Doyle had told many of these same anecdotes before-and even used some of the same phrases in assessing these men-but he'd never told all these disparaging stories on one show in such a short period.

The tour is over, and Doyle is beat. But his performances are working. Tailoring his material to his hosts, styles and interests, he became the perfect radio guest: well-spoken and full of catchy anecdotes, with the added bonus of made-for-radio tape excerpts. "He's A-level material as far as interview guests go," says Austin Hill, host of his own show on KTKP radio in Phoenix, who's had Doyle on three times. "He's stellar at extemporaneous discussion on any one of the presidents, [and] he's very witty and has a good sense of humor. It's always important for a radio guest, as scholarly as he can be, if he jokes around. That certainly makes him more palatable."

Doyle's successful appearances begat more media interest. In the two months following the book tour, Doyle did another 21 radio interviews. And although only four U.S. newspapers and The Nation ran full reviews of the book (including a mixed critique from The New York Times Book Review,), sales boomed. By the end of August, Kodansha estimated that nearly 16,000 of the 20,000 copies in stores had been sold, and the publisher was poised to order a second printing of between 6,000 and 10,000 copies.

Doyle has also been lifted out of the realm of the unknown author. When Doubleday executive editor Gerald Howard saw a proposal in his in box in June from a writer named William Doyle, the name was immediately familiar to him. Within a week Howard had made Doyle an offer that, with bonuses, could reach the low six figures-about double what the author got for Inside the Oval Office. Doyle is now at work on research for the new book, an hour-by-hour examination of the civil insurrection that erupted when James Meredith integrated the University of Mississippi.

How did the Doubleday editor recognize Doyle's name? He'd heard him interviewed on the radio.