Ron Nessen, who as President Gerald R. Ford’s press secretary from 1974 to 1977 pledged a new era of openness after the Watergate scandal but had an often rocky relationship with the White House press corps, died on Wednesday in Bethesda, Md. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by his son, Edward.
A former wire service and NBC News correspondent, Mr. Nessen joined the White House at an extraordinary time: President Richard M. Nixon, facing impeachment for Watergate crimes, had quit; Vice President Ford had replaced and pardoned him; and a nation and its press, fed up with lies and deception, looked upon the new president and his spokesman with varying degrees of suspicion.
It hardly helped that Mr. Ford’s first choice as press secretary, J.F. terHorst, had resigned after a month, saying he could not support the president’s decision to pardon Mr. Nixon, sparing him from the criminal charges and prison terms faced by other officials in the Watergate affair, as well as by young men who had evaded military service in Vietnam as a matter of conscience.
Trying to restore trust after a two-year cover-up that began with a break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex in Washington, Mr. Nessen said his first loyalty would be to the public. He promised to “get as much news out as possible,” and he told his former colleagues, “If I lie or mislead you, I think you are justified in questioning my continued usefulness in this job.”
He added, “I’m a Ron, but not a Ziegler” — a reference to Ronald L. Ziegler, Mr. Nixon’s press secretary, who had been widely criticized for withholding information and misleading the press during the Watergate scandal.
Mr. Nessen, assured of a free hand and daily access to the president, arranged more news conferences and photo ops; persuaded Mr. Ford to give one-on-one interviews to reporters; and provided the press corps with on-the-record briefings and quotations from presidential policy meetings.
But press secretaries work for their bosses, not the public, and reporters soon soured on Mr. Nessen. He was accused not of lying but of shading and omitting facts. At Mr. Ford’s meeting with the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Vladivostok, Russia, in 1974, Mr. Nessen infuriated American reporters by saying that they had been “dazzled” by the summit’s arms limitation agreement. On a 1975 Ford visit with China’s leader, Mao Zedong, reporters said Chinese officials were more helpful than Mr. Nessen.
“Mr. Nessen has become the object of growing dislike or disfavor among the correspondents,” James M. Naughton wrote in a commentary in The New York Times. “So long as he is willing to be the object of scorn that might otherwise be directed at his boss, Mr. Nessen admirably serves the president’s purposes.”
In April 1976, Mr. Nessen hosted “Saturday Night Live” and appeared in a sketch with Chevy Chase, who, as he frequently did on the show, portrayed the president as a klutz. Mr. Ford’s image as accident prone had proved hard to shake: Although he had been a football star at the University of Michigan and played golf and tennis, he became known for tumbling down the last step of Air Force One in Austria, wiping out on a ski slope in Vail, Colo., and being zonked by a chairlift.
“It was frustrating,” Mr. Nessen recalled of the president’s image in an interview for this obituary in 2017. “Ford was one of our most athletic presidents, but he was portrayed stumbling. He said to me once, talking about a bunch of reporters, ‘I’ll bet those people get their exercise sitting on a bar stool.’”
Mr. Ford also made a cameo appearance on the show, prerecorded at the Oval Office, delivering its signature line: “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” He recorded it at Mr. Nessen’s behest, and it became a benchmark for presidential skills: an ability to publicly laugh at oneself.
Ronald Harold Nessen was born on May 25, 1934, in Washington, D.C., to Frederick and Ida (Kaufman) Nessen. His father owned a variety store.
Ronald and his younger sister, Sheila, grew up in the affluent Shepherd Park neighborhood. He graduated from Calvin Coolidge High School in 1952 and from American University in Washington in 1956 with a degree in history.
In 1954, he married Sandra Frey, his high school sweetheart. They had a daughter, Caren, and a son, Stephen, who died at age 5. The couple later divorced. In 1967, he married Young Hi Song. They had a son, Edward, and were divorced in 1981. His marriage in 1988 to Johanna Neuman, a White House correspondent for USA Today, also ended in divorce.
He is survived by his son and daughter; his sister, Sheila Wyron; two grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Mr. Nessen began his journalism career at The Montgomery County Sentinel in Maryland in 1956. He adroitly covered school integration issues, and he was soon hired by the news agency United Press (it became United Press International in 1958) as a Washington reporter, covering Congress and general assignments.
In 1962, he joined NBC, where he covered natural disasters, Apollo spaceflights and the presidential campaigns of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and Mr. Nixon in 1968. He had five tours in the Vietnam War and was seriously wounded by a grenade in 1966. Other assignments took him to Europe, Africa and Latin America. He began covering Vice President Ford in 1973 and became his press secretary after Mr. Nixon resigned and Mr. Ford succeeded him.
Leaving government when Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, Mr. Nessen was a freelance writer for several years and in 1980 became executive vice president of the public relations firm Marston & Rothenberg.
From 1984 to 1992, he was Mutual Broadcasting’s vice president for news. He was then an executive with the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, a host on Nostalgia TV and an executive and journalist in residence with the Brookings Institution, the Washington research group.
Mr. Nessen, who lived in Bethesda, wrote “It Sure Looks Different From the Inside” (1978), a chronicle of his experiences in the Ford administration; a memoir, “Making the News, Taking the News: From NBC to the Ford White House” (2011), and a series of political and murder-mystery novels.
Interviewed for the Gerald R. Ford Oral History Project in 2009, Mr. Nessen said he had been naïve as press secretary to think of his duties as a kind of “pool reporter” for the press corps.
“I did say I would never lie, and never cover up, and I think I kept that promise,” he said. But, he added, “I think I probably delayed announcing some things every once in a while for what seemed like good reasons.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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