Larry Speakes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Speakes

Larry Melvin Speakes (September 13, 1939 – January 10, 2014) was an acting press spokesman for the White House under President Ronald Reagan, having held the position from 1981 to 1987.

Early life

Speakes was born in Cleveland in northwestern Mississippi, which had the nearest hospital to his parent's middle-class home in Merigold in Bolivar County. His father, Harry Earl Speakes, was a banker. His mother was the former Ethlyn Frances Fincher.

Early career

Mississippi newspaperman

Speakes received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Mississippi in Oxford. He served as editor of the Oxford Eagle' in 1961, and thereafter as managing editor of the Bolivar Commercial in Cleveland from 1962 to 1966. From 1966 to 1968, he worked as general manager and editor of Progress Publishers of Leland, Mississippi.

Senate press secretary

Speakes headed to Washington, D.C. in 1968, serving as press secretary to Democratic Senator James Eastland of Mississippi. In this capacity, he worked as spokesman for the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary and a coordinator of the senator's reelection campaign in 1972 against the Republican Gil Carmichael.

Work in the White House

The White House tapped Speakes in 1974 as a Staff Assistant and soon became the Press Secretary to the Special Counsel to the President at the height of the Watergate scandal. Upon Nixon's resignation, President Ford appointed Speakes to be Assistant Press Secretary to the President. Speakes served as Bob Dole's press secretary during his unsuccessful vice-presidential run with Ford.

After briefly serving as President Ford's personal press secretary in 1977, Speakes ventured into the private sector as vice president of the international public relations firm of Hill & Knowlton until 1981. After the 1980 presidential campaign, he worked on the staff of the Reagan-Bush team, helping to "straighten out" the press operation, eventually becoming deputy spokesman for the President-elect during the transition. Before the election, Speakes had considered working for the campaigns of George H. W. Bush, Jack Kemp, and Alexander Haig; however, Bush's people never got back to him, Speakes decided that Kemp was "too hot" (meaning too quick with an answer) for television, and was advised by another Washington insider, "You can do that [join the Haig team] if you want to, but let me tell you one thing: Al Haig ain't going to be President."

Presidential spokesman

When James Brady was shot in the assassination attempt on President Reagan on March 30, 1981, he was unable to return to work, though he retained the title of "Press Secretary" for the duration of Reagan's term. In Brady's absence, Speakes took over the job of handling the daily press briefings.

On June 17, 1981, Speakes was appointed "Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Press Secretary."

On August 5, 1983, Speakes was appointed "Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy Press Secretary," and remained in that post until January 1987, when he resigned and Marlin Fitzwater took over the role.

On January 30, 1987, he was presented with the Presidential Citizens Medal by President Reagan.

Speakes wrote in his 1988 memoir Speaking Out that he twice invented statements himself and attributed them to President Reagan. These statements included ones after the KAL 007 shootdown in 1983 and during the Geneva Summit of 1985. Speaks thought that Gorbachev's remarks at the summit had been highly quotable while Reagan's were "disappointingly lackluster", so he asked his aides to make up some quotes, polished them himself, then issued to them the press as President Reagan's statements. Speakes' revelations, something of a side note in the book, touched off a minor controversy; reporters were annoyed at having been fooled, and Marlin Fitzwater, Speakes's successor, called it a "damn outrage" and complained that they unfairly called into question the veracity of other presidential statements. Speakes said "I was representing his thought if not his words", but also apologized to Reagan, saying he had "provided fodder for those who would aim the cannons of criticism at the President I served loyally for 6 years." Speakes left a job at Merrill Lynch which he had held for a short time as a result of the controversy.

AIDS controversy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Speakes#AIDS_controversy

Personal life

Speakes was married to the former Laura Christine Crawford (born 1945), whom he met in high school. Long ago divorced, she resides in Oxford, Mississippi. They had three children.

Speakes was also married to the former Betty J. Robinson and in 2001 Aleta Sindelar, a registered nurse from Bethesda, Maryland, who claims that Speakes gave her control of his $1 million estate, an issue that has pitted her in legal dispute with Speakes' children. Ultimately, the Mississippi courts sided with Speakes' daughter and oldest child, Sondra "Sandy" Lanell Speakes Huerta of Cleveland, Mississippi. Sindelar's visitation with her husband was restricted. The Speakes' children said that Sindelar had deserted Larry and left him to care for himself in a condominium in Arlington, Virginia.

Death

Speakes died in Cleveland, Mississippi, on January 10, 2014, at the age of 74, of Alzheimer's disease. His body was interred a few hours after his death at North Cleveland Cemetery.

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Larry M. Speakes is best known as the press secretary for Pres. Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1987. Speakes was born in Cleveland, Mississippi, on 13 September 1939, although his family lived in the small town of Merigold, about one hundred miles south of Memphis. His father, Harry Earl Speakes, a lifelong resident of Merigold, both worked at the family’s grocery store and served as the branch manager of the Cleveland State Bank. Speakes’s father worked at the grocery store until nine o’clock in the morning, when he would walk across the street to open the bank. At two o’clock in the afternoon, he would close the bank and go back to work at the grocery store. Speakes’s mother, Ethlyn Fincher Speakes, was also a lifelong resident of Merigold. Speakes and several of his friends formed a band, the Cottonchoppers, when he was fourteen, and the group played several venues in western Mississippi and Arkansas. Speakes admits to trying to sound like Elvis, who made a great impression on the group of youngsters. Speakes’s love of music continued into the White House, where he occasionally held Elvis trivia contests for the press corps.

During Speakes’s senior year in high school, a trip to Washington, D.C., that included a visit to Mississippi senator James O. Eastland’s office convinced Speakes that he wanted to enter politics and work in Washington. Speakes then studied journalism at the University of Mississippi, serving as associate editor of the campus newspaper, the Mississippian, and working as a stringer for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Speakes left college without graduating to become the editor of a weekly newspaper in Oxford.

Speakes returned to the Delta in 1961 when he was hired to work at the Bolivar Commercial in Cleveland. He later worked as the county’s deputy civil defense director.

In 1964 he was named editor of the Bolivar Commercial, and he left that position to become editor of the weekly Leland Progress.

In 1968, just eleven years after his high school visit to Eastland’s office, Speakes became the senator’s press secretary. Speakes subsequently served as a coordinator for Eastland’s 1972 reelection campaign before joining the Nixon administration in 1974 as staff assistant to the president. Speakes later became press secretary to the special counsel to the president. After Nixon’s resignation, Speakes became assistant press secretary to Pres. Gerald Ford.

Speakes left political life in 1977 when he became vice president of an international public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton. In 1980 he reentered politics when he joined the communications staff of the Reagan-Bush committee during the 1980 presidential election. When Reagan and his press secretary, James Brady, were shot in 1981, Speakes took over Brady’s duties, although Brady retained the title of press secretary for the duration of Reagan’s tenure. In 1983 Speakes was named President Reagan’s chief spokesperson, and his years in the Reagan White House represented one of the longest stints of any Reagan aide. On behalf of the president, Speakes commented on such notable events as the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the military invasion of Grenada, the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, the hijacking of a TWA plane in Lebanon and holding of forty American hostages, and the Iran-contra scandal, in which the administration traded arms to Iran to secure the release of American hostages.

Speakes left the White House in February 1987 for a public relations position with Merrill Lynch. He left that job the following year and released a book recounting his White House experiences. He later worked in public relations for the US Postal Service, eventually becoming head of advertising for the organization. He retired in 2008 and returned to Mississippi, where he died on 10 January 2014.