Martha Joynt Kumar

Working from the innards of the White House buildings, Martha Joynt Kumar, an expert on the communications strategies of seven White House administrations, says President George W. Bush has not held as many one-on-one’s with the press as his predecessors. But she is quick to correct any misperception that the president hasn’t met the press often enough in other ways.

Her findings recently made headlines in the national papers in the backdrop of the media’s occasional complaints over the years that the Bush administration was not as forthcoming with information as its predecessors.

Kumar, who has taught political science at Towson University in Towson, Maryland, since 1971, and has worked on the White House and the Press since 1975, told News India-Times she brought her husband Vijay to listen in when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee came to the White House in the waning days of the Clinton administration.

“It was a nice ceremony on a beautiful day in September. Unfortunately, Vajpayee canceled out on what would have been the last press conference in the Clinton administration,” she told News India-Times. “I was sorry to see Vajpayee cancel out on that one as it was an opportunity for him to explain his view of the relationship between India and the United States.”

She can reel off almost anything about the president and the press off the top of her head, only sometimes using her notes to verify minutiae. All those years, she has been frequently sequestered in a room under the West Wing of the White House press briefing room, watching, researching and sometimes bringing in her students to see the press corps and the White House interaction with the fourth estate.

“It’s an important area of research and inquiry, because it has an impact on the public because on the quality of the relationship with the press depends the amount and accuracy of information. I think that both White House officials and the press work very hard at what they do and take very seriously what they do,” she emphasized in a telephone interview with News India-Times.

Married to Vijay Kumar, a retired Dupont Company executive, Joynt Kumar has made a niche for herself in White House press history and teaches courses on it. She has been to India five times, she says, and each time they visit different places. “My favorite place is Kerala,” she notes. Her husband hails from Bangalore where he attended the Indian Institute of Science.

As a democracy, she observes, “India has a lot more right than wrong. It’s a system where people are very involved and participation is very high. We went to a village this last time in 1998 and talked to people about governance. They had village councils and women involved and it seemed like a very good system,” she told News India-Times. “I just have been impressed at the education that people have. It’s a fine education.”

In that context she recalled a project about White House transition in 2001 funded by the Pew Charitable Trust. When a president leaves the White House, all the papers go with him, she says. “So the idea was to prepare the papers for the incoming office bearers, and to develop software that could help the incoming team,” she said, “We had money with which we could hire graduate students from American Universities. But what we ended up doing was we went to India. They did a good job developing the software.”

The project can be found at whitehousetransitionproject.org and the name of the software is nominationformsonline or NFO, she said. She also teaches a course for University of California Washington Center in Washington called White House Communications. It presents the views of White House officials and journalists and it is video-streamed live and also archived. “This semester I’ll have Mike McCurry and Karl Rove (Bush Advisor and campaign strategist), Peter Baker (Washington Post) and Alexis Simendinger (National Journal), and David Sanger (The New York Times).” McCurry was President Clinton’s Press Secretary.

An internationally recognized scholar of U.S. presidential transitions and White House communications, Kumar has also worked with governments in East Timor and Brazil. She’s been on various news channels, both radio and TV. She spent the better part of 1997 through 2001 observing and writing about reporters and administration officials in connection with her scholarly work on White House communications operations. She used some of that work in the transition project she directed: the White House 2001 Project funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Her book of project essays written for the incoming White House staff, ‘The White House World: Transitions, Organizations and Office Operations,’ was published in 2000, by Texas A&M University Press. Her book that is to be out in March is entitled ‘Wired for Sound and Pictures: The President and White House Communications Operations’, under contract with the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kumar’s latest findings have been carried by many media outlets, including The New York Times, which published a bar chart using her data, which showed the number of joint and solo news conferences various presidents since Dwight D. Eisenhower, had held. The paper noted that, according to Kumar, President Bush, through July 11, 2004, had conducted 271 “safer and briefer” ad hoc question-and-answer sessions, usually with pool reporters. By July 11, 1995, President Clinton had conducted 431.

Her published works include ‘Portraying the President: The White House and the ‘News Media,’ and her articles have been carried in the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics and the recent edition of Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to the Presidency, and elsewhere. She has received grants from the Ford Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts. She received a University of Maryland System Regents’ Award for Scholarship, and the Richard E. Neustadt Award from the Presidency Research Group, a section of the American Political Science Association. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a former President of the American Political Science Association’s Presidency Research Group.