Marlin Fitzwater, less than two months away from his 74th birthday, walked into a room of reporters Tuesday like he’d done countless times before during his storied career as the only press secretary in U.S. history appointed by two different presidents.
Hale Library on the campus of Kansas State University may as well have been on 1600 Pennsylvania Blvd. in Washington, D.C.
Fitzwater — Abilene born and K-State educated — captured the room with candor and enthusiasm. He seemed 23 minutes removed from his old job, instead of 23 years.
“At the beginning I didn’t really think I could do it, or I was afraid that I couldn’t remember all the things you have to know,” Fitzwater told reporters. “And in the end, I think I realized that the human capacity to absorb information and assimilate it and use it, is far greater than most of us ever do in life. You have to be forced to really think about things everyday and use that information and remember, but you can’t.
“(The job) was trying, and in some cases difficult, but the ultimate reward was great in terms of my ability and what I learned about myself.”
Fitzwater, who served as the White House Press Secretary for President Ronald Reagan and President George H.W. Bush, was in Manhattan to help open an exhibit in his honor. The exhibit, “Marlin Fitzwater: From Wheat Fields to White House,” chronicles his life as the son of an Abilene farm family who idolized hometown hero President Dwight D. Eisenhower and took a liking to journalism.
“When I was in high school, I didn’t really know what to do with myself, but I wanted get off the farm — I just didn’t really like farming and my family had been in farming for years and years,” he said. “And my mother said, ‘Well, I think you should be a banker,’ for no real reason other than they wore nice clothes, had nice suits and probably made money. But it didn’t work.
“Then one day I heard on the street that as a student, if I would go work on The Booster — the high school paper — I could go downtown in the middle of the afternoon and sell ads to the local merchants. And I thought, that seems like a good deal. A good way to get out of class. And that was the very beginning of my interest in journalism and newspapering and so forth.”
From that point on, Fitzwater immersed himself in writing and eventually began writing for the Abilene Reflector-Chronicle, who he credited to getting him into K-State.
“Those people took care of me,” he said.
When his editors asked if he wanted to go to college, Fitzwater said he did, but added that he didn’t have any money.
“They came over here, talked to two or three professors, got me a job lined up at a little restaurant and put me to work selling ads for the Collegian — I think it was $25 a month or something like that — and by the time I put it all together I was in K-State,” he said. “They did it for me.”
By the time Fitzwater graduated from KSU in 1965 with a degree in journalism, he’d worked for four different area newspapers — including the Manhattan Mercury and Topeka Capital-Journal.
But being an Abilene kid who grew up liking Ike, he knew it was possible for a Kansan to think bigger.
“I thought, well, there are more journalists in Washington than anywhere in the world, I oughtta go there, just to see what’s happening,” Fitzwater said. “So I packed my car, had $300 and went east, and here I am.”
Fitzwater didn’t hit the road without some assurances, though.
“I had one thing set up,” he said. “I had a girlfriend who I met at Kansas State, and she lived in Arlington, Virginia, and she said, ‘Come on back, you can stay at my house,’ so I stayed with her and her family to try and get a first job.
“I went to all the newspapers and they all said, ‘Go back to Kansas, kid. Washington is where you end up in your career, not where you start out.’”
Eventually, Fitzwater found work writing for various federal agencies before he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public affairs at the Department of the Treasury from 1981 to 1982. From there, he headed to the White House in 1983, serving as Special Assistant to Reagan and Deputy Press Secretary for Domestic Affairs. He then served as Vice President Bush’s Press Secretary from 1985 to 1987.
Fitzwater credits his career to simply saying yes to job offers after his first federal agency job with the Appalachian Regional Commission.
“It was the last job I ever had to apply for,” he said. “From then on, for the rest of my life, someone found me. It was a great start. The lesson for me was just, decide what you want to do and do it. You just can’t sit around waiting for it.
“If you work hard and have modest talents at least, you’ll find something. Somebody will find you. But you gotta walk in the door. Not many people are going to get jobs by just writing letters. But somebody else will recommend you — that’s what’s always happened to me.”
Fitzwater’s exhibit will be featured at Hale Library until March 17, 2017, and will then move to the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, where Fitzwater once planted flowers.
“They gave me a job planting tulips in the Eisenhower Library and I planted about seven million tulips there,” he said. “I would take a lunch break or a water break and go inside and there would be big pictures of Eisenhower and his press secretary.
“He was our hometown hero. He was a good role model.”
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