Former Press Secretary closes FAS

In the final event of their spring lecture series, the Foreign Affairs Symposium (FAS) brought former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to Shriver Hall on Tuesday.

Gibbs, who served as Press Secretary under President Barack Obama, also served as Obama’s Communications Director during the 2008 presidential election and Press Secretary for John Kerry during the election four years prior. He resigned as Obama’s Press Secretary in February 2011 and currently works as an outside advisor to the White House.

Gibbs began his speech with an anecdote to introduce a series of stories about the various negative attention and comments that were directed at him during his time as the White House Press Secretary.

“I was thumbing through a stack of mail in my secretary’s office one day and found a postcard with no return address, no greeting and no salutation. On the back, it simply stated, ‘If you lost forty pounds, you’d be a

skinny buffoon.’ True story,” Gibbs said. “In fact, I’m now about 15 pounds closer to the auspicious title ‘Skinny Buffoon.’ Ironically, I kept that postcard on my desk in my time there because I wanted to ensure some sense of humility.”

He also discussed hurdles the Obama administration has faced since their election in 2008. At the time of his appointment, the country was losing 7,000 jobs a month, in the throes of the first months of the housing foreclosure crisis.

“The country was facing circumstances unlike any we’ve seen since the Great Depression. It was nothing short of an economic calamity,” he said.

Gibbs addressed the difficulties of dealing with issues within the administration, including the fallout of General Stanley McChrystal, who resigned from the position of top commander of forces in Afghanistan after making controversial comments towards Obama administrators in a Rolling Stone magazine interview.

“Some of what McChrystal said was simply unflattering, and so we immediately saw the Chief of Staff, called the President, and a couple of days afterwards the president made the tough decision to change leadership in Afghanistan,” Gibbs said.

With the next election approaching, Gibbs shared his opinions on the race. He believes that it would be a very close and “extremely important” election and nothing close to the landslide victory of the 2008 race.

A question-and-answer period followed the lecture. When asked to describe a favorite element of his job as Press Secretary, he referred to both the company and the responsibility.

“First and foremost, the people that you get to work with each and every day are remarkable. And to be involved in trying desperately to try to fix our country’s most enduring problems and to be able to serve the public is really the highest honor that I think you can have,” Gibbs said.

He also admitted that there was a certain adjustment period in acquiring his position on Capitol Hill.

“I still remember that first time, walking down from my office, through the ramp and walking into a room [the Oval Office] that was much smaller than it was on TV. One voice kept saying ‘I can’t believe I’m really doing this’ and another voice said ‘focus on the questions.’”

From his experiences in politics, Gibbs underscored the necessity of tolerance in today’s society rather than closed-mindedness.

“I fear that in a time in which we probably need more than ever to understand the viewpoint of others, we tend each night to re-emphasize or strengthen the beliefs we already hold. It is a barrier and we need to give that up in order to gain perspectives about where the other side is coming from,” he concluded.

Amidst the anecdotes, the message of balance appeared to resonate with the audience.

“He had a good message. I liked how he talked about how it was more about the compromise and not about the extremes,” freshman Dev Patel said.

Sean White, a freshman who admitted he did not support the Obama camp, agreed with Patel.

“I was surprised at how non-partisan he was,” White said. “He was very reasonable in characterizing both Republicans and Democrats in terms of not always being understanding of the other side. I thought something really interesting he said was how on a lot of TV news stations, they talk more about the politics of an issue than the policy itself. It was very interesting, and very true. He used the healthcare example and he’s definitely right... I don’t know most of what’s in [the healthcare bill] because news stations mostly talk about the politics of it.”

Patel and White were among the event’s sizeable audience, which also included former senator Paul Sarbanes, who represented Maryland from 1997 until 2007.

Junior Eleanor Gardner, one of FAS’ three Executive Directors, celebrated the neutrality that Gibbs brought.

“The Foreign Affairs Symposium strives to provide a politically neutral symposium and I believe that Robert Gibbs was the ideal speaker to end [this year’s series]. Though a member of the Democratic party, he highlighted that our differences in political ideologies are often not so great and it is important that, as a nation, we stop polarizing ourselves along a political divide in order to find the values and beliefs that we agree upon.”