| It was around 9:40 a.m. on September 11, and Frank Thorp ’92 was thinking his words were a bit harsh. He had been standing by a television with his staff and coworkers, watching the smoke from the World Trade Center, but there was a project to finish and it was time to head back to their desks near the big glass windows on the west side of the Pentagon. “Okay,” he had finally said, “we’ve gotta get back to work.” But Thorp was sensitive to the impact of words—he is, after all, a press officer—and he felt he was being too hard on a naturally distracted staff. So he added a suggestion. “But first,” he said, “let’s all get a cup of coffee.” At 9:43 a.m. Thorp and eight of the 10 people on the staff were in the corridor when United Flight 77 smashed almost directly into the office they had left, and a wall of black smoke came rushing at them. Five eventful years later, he is a rear admiral (lower half), the naval equivalent of a brigadier general, and the newly named deputy assistant secretary of defense for joint communications. What he is doing, and the changes he is implementing, will help to shape the way the military works with the media in the Information Age. His new office is spare and clean; he’s still moving in, but he’s brought his mementos. Some are playful; all make him think. There’s his old name plate, which somehow escaped the flames on September 11. There’s a framed poster of an Arab crowd, with a single printed question: “Blame the media?” It’s a gift from the staff at the Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera, who Thorp got to know at his press briefings during the invasion of Iraq, when he was media chief for U.S. Central Command in Qatar. And there’s a plastic action figure in a black beret. That one is a gift from his wife, a network news producer. Push on “Baghdad Bob,” and the 12-inch version of the Iraqi information minister repeats what he said when he and Thorp were both, as it were, expressing different philosophies of media relations. One day in April 2003 stands out in his memory. The live 24-hour news cameras were trained on both spokesmen—Thorp in Qatar and Mohammed Said al-Sahhaf in Baghdad. “I triple guarantee you,” al-Sahhaf was insisting, “there are no American troops in Baghdad.” Meanwhile, the U.S. tanks in the Baghdad streets were clearly visible to the world. What, reporters asked Thorp, did he make of that statement under the circumstances? “It indicates,” Thorp said, “that the war of words is over.” It was a very twenty-first century moment. 
Above: When Frank Thorp ’92, right, was promoted to rear admiral on December 2, 2005, he was led in the oath of office by his former boss, General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, left. Top: Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, left, congratulated Thorp, center, with his wife, Tammy Kupperman Thorp. “People think of a spokesman as the podium jockey. But a fairly small percentage is about that,” says Rear Admiral Steve Pietropaoli ’89, who has been the Navy’s media chief and spokesman for two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Generals John Shalikashvili and Henry Shelton. A good spokesperson spends a lot of time “on background”—chatting with reporters and providing context to help explain say, the culture of the military or the players in a policy debate. There’s an element of advocacy, but much of it is education. No one wants a front-page story that gets everything wrong. “These official spokespeople are really on the hot spot,” says journalism professor Laird Anderson ’73. “They have to be not only knowledgeable, but credible in their reputation with the media, and at the same time very careful about what they say or not say. Lies don’t work. If you get caught in one of those things, you’re dead. “That doesn’t mean some won’t try to put a spin on certain things, depending on the depth of the subject and how controversial the subject matter might be. But you start screwing around with trying to put a spin on this stuff, and it gets murkier and murkier, and you’re going to lose your credibility with journalists. That’s one thing they don’t want. They want to be credible.” And if the numbers don’t add up, or a mistake is concealed, there’s another audience whose faith is broken, Pietropaoli says. “Your troops won’t trust you. They’ll think, ‘If you lie to the public or the press, maybe you’re lying to me about why I’m going over that hill.’” continued next page >> top |
