February 21, 2000

Mike McCurry praises 'West Wing': 'It's not entirely demeaning...'

By ROGER ANDERSON Scripps Howard News Service

Suppose you worked as White House press secretary during the darkest days of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. What would your favorite TV viewing be, now that the whole sad story is over and you're working in Washington as a media consultant?

"'The West Wing is the only entertainment show I watch," says Mike McCurry "Everything else is CNN or other news programming."

He's referring, of course, to NBC's hit drama about life and love inside a fictitious White House, with Martin Sheen as the commander-in-chief. McCurry freely admits that's what he's glued to every Wednesday night.

It was McCurry's highly unenviable job to run interference between President Clinton and the White House press corps back in the days when his then-employer was living on denials that he had had "sexual relations with that woman." So it makes sense that a TV series about personality conflicts and political pragmatism in and around the Oval Office would speak to him, if not send him screaming into the night.

"It lends a human dimension to people in politics," McCurry says of the show. "Usually elected officials are portrayed on TV as dastardly guys with black helicopters in the desert. But the characters in 'The West Wing' are drawn with sophistication and accuracy. It's not entirely demeaning to people in politics. And the plot lines are pretty accurate, too."

Accurate plot lines? For instance, when it turns out Sheen's president suffers from a form of multiple sclerosis, unbeknownst not only to the electorate but to his closest advisers?

"Well, that's a little farfetched," McCurry admits. "And yet it does remind me of the excruciating experience I went through when the president had a ruptured knee tendon.”

Of course, it’s not as though series' creator and writer, Aaron Sorkin, were making all this stuff up out of whole cloth. He's got experienced individuals like Dee Dee Myers (McCurry's predecessor in the press secretary's job); Patrick Cadell, one of President Carter's main men; and Lawrence O'Donnell, a longtime go-to guy for Sen. Patrick Moynihan, closely advising him on matters of verisimilitude.

The series' main shortfall when it comes to accuracy is the way in which the workplace setting is portrayed, according to McCurry.

"It's a wildly improbable set," says McCurry, who agrees with veteran White House reporters that most of the people comprising the perennial "ER"-style mob scene in "The West Wing's" corridors would in truth be working next door at the Old Executive Office Building.

"There really aren't that many young, underemployed people in the West Wing of the White House - not even under Bill Clinton," McCurry laughs. "And people aren't so clipped and brisk. They aren't in that much of a hurry all the time."

McCurry says that some of the show's minor details, by contrast, are uncannily accurate.

"The striping you see on the couches in the show's Oval Office is identical to the striping on the couches in Bill Clinton's Oval Office," he says. "And the ID tags people wear around their necks are an exact rip-off of the real tags. Except big guys like the chief of staff wouldn't wear them."

McCurry thinks the show has a pretty truthful feel for what goes on between the White House and the press, "although actually that feeling tends to be a bit more combustive in real life."

How about the story where the press secretary (Allison Janney) smooches with a top reporter (Timothy Buslleld, formerly of "Thirtysomething"), right there in her West Wing office?

McCurry just laughs. "No."

McCurry also opines that the TV president's close nucleus - John Spencer as the chief of staff, Bradley Whitford as his deputy, Richard Schiff as director of communications, Rob Lowe as his No. 2 man, and Dule Hill as the young African American fellow who serves as the president's personal aide - is made up of "an improbable collection of job titles."

"But where it's true to life is in the feeling that these are the people who helped him get elected," McCurry says. "To that extent, I'm sure it's very close to what Dee Dee experienced. And it's also probably pretty close to Pat Cadell's experience with Carter back in the '70s."

One recent episode involved a series of gaffes made by the staff during the president's absence, culminating in a scene in which a sleep-deprived Sheen goes into a priceless slow burn while being briefed on the problems by his hesitant, apologetic underlings.

"They wouldn't be that hangdog," McCurry observes. "And they already would have their plans in motion to make everything right."

Obviously, the African American "personal aide to the president" is a piece of dramatic license, one might think.

"No, there is such a job," McCurry says. "And it's a hard, hard job. They take it a little bit far. He wouldn't go right into the president's bedroom to wake him up for a meeting. But he would be the one to call him on the phone to wake him up. And he breaks up meetings and gets the president onto airplanes. It's a very hands-on job."

A hands-on job filled, as in the show, by a guy who just happens to come to the front desk looking for a job as a messenger?

"Well, no," McCurry says. "In fact, Bill Clinton has had a whole series of personal aides, and it's a very highly coveted job - coveted by intense career-path type young men. And I can't remember that any of them have been African American."

Roger Anderson is arts and entertainment editor at Scripps Howard News Service.

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