How previous White Houses — and the press — might have handled Tyler Cherry’s controversial tweets.
How previous White Houses — and the press — might have handled Tyler Cherry’s controversial tweets.
I f you read only the mainstream media, you would have no idea that the Biden White House recently hired a staffer named Tyler Cherry who has a disturbing history of making radical and extremely anti-Israel remarks on social media. While the New York Times and the Washington Post have ignored the story, a number of outlets, including National Review, Fox News, the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Insider, JNS, the New York Post, and Newsweek have covered Cherry’s online statements, forcing him to delete the relevant tweets and insist that he is committed to the Biden agenda.
The lack of coverage of the controversy is unusual considering how such incidents have been covered in the past. In the modern era, a number of other White Houses have encountered instances when an administration aide has been caught saying something inappropriate and categorical about another group. In each of the incidents, the reaction has been more severe, and there has been more mainstream-press coverage, than in this case.
One of the most prominent incidents involved Indiana politico and Gerald Ford’s secretary of agriculture Earl Butz. In August 1976, Butz told a racist joke about “coloreds” to a small group on a plane. Former White House counsel John Dean, who heard the joke, told a reporter about it without naming Butz. Butz was identified shortly afterwards, and President Ford issued a “severe reprimand” for Butz’s “highly offensive” comment. The New York Times, which has yet to report on Cherry’s controversial comments, mentioned the Butz comment multiple times in the run-up to the 1976 election and included the incident prominently in Butz’s 2008 obituary.
In a story with some striking similarities to the Cherry time line, on February 15, 1987, the Reagan White House hired John Koehler as its communications director. It quickly emerged that Koehler, as a child in Germany, had briefly been in a Nazi youth group, a revelation covered in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, among other outlets. Koehler was fired on February 21, six days after his hiring (meaning that his stint lasted slightly longer than Anthony Scaramucci’s eleven-day tenure).
A few years earlier, the Reagan administration also had to deal with controversial comments made by Reagan interior secretary James Watt. In September 1983, Watt gave a speech to the Chamber of Commerce in which he joked about the diversity of a Department of the Interior coal-leasing panel, saying, “I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple.” Watt got some pushback for the remark, to which he said, “If you can’t joke about things, you shouldn’t be in Washington.” Watt had already been in the crosshairs of the media and liberal interest groups, and his remarks were widely denounced, including by a group of Republican senators. Watt sent a letter of apology to President Reagan in an effort to keep his job. It did not work. Watt resigned on October 9, 1983, within three weeks of making the remark. The New York Times editorialized favorably about his departure and, as in Butz’s case, featured the inappropriate comment in his obituary.
Even before the Cherry incident, Democratic administrations had not been immune from this problem. In summer 2009, it emerged that Van Jones, Obama-administration special adviser on green jobs, had referred to Republicans as “a**holes” and that he had signed a letter suggesting that George W. Bush might have allowed the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to happen as “a pretext to war.” The revelation highlighted the radicalism of Jones’s background. Jones issued an apology in an unsuccessful effort to keep his job. On September 6, 2009, the White House announced Jones’s resignation in what Politico called an “unusual pre-dawn announcement” on a Sunday. Jones landed on his feet with positions at the liberal think tank Center for American Progress and, as a commentator, at CNN.
As these incidents show, such revelations usually lead to breathless coverage from the media, rebukes from the White House, and an eventual resignation. None has happened in this case. In fact, White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said of Cherry, “We’re very proud to have Tyler on the team.” Given the history of these controversies, it’s hard to imagine a similar statement coming from the White House in these other instances. In other words, Tyler Cherry is getting off lightly.