What I've Learned: Pete Souza
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As a former chief official White House photographer who’s served under two presidents, Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan, Pete Souza has spent more time in the Oval Office than just about anyone (ex-presidents excluded). He estimates that he spent more than 25,000 hours “inside the presidential bubble” during the Obama administration alone.
Now Souza is showing readers what really goes on in the halls of power in his latest book, The West Wing and Beyond: What I Saw Inside the Presidency. Here, he tells us what he’s learned.
There are a lot of people in this book, dedicated public servants who take seriously the job of supporting the president. And despite that seriousness, they try to have fun, occasionally. Like anyone, I guess.
My dad was a boat mechanic. I could not change the oil in my car. I struggle to change a flat tire.
I was the first one in my family to graduate from college. I remember coming home and telling my mom that I was going to be a photographer, and she said, “Oh my God, we spent all this much money, and you just want to take pictures.” She became my biggest fan, of course.
They just had my big high school reunion. I didn’t go. I just didn’t want to relive those memories.
The biggest detrimental change to journalism is the cutting of staff at local newspapers. I wonder whether Covid would’ve become such a political football if local newspapers were able to do profiles of the people that were dying—paying tribute to them, so people would realize it’s your neighbor down the street that’s dying. We’ve lost that kind of coverage in local markets. After 9/11, The New York Times was doing profiles every day of those that died, and so we all felt that. With Covid, those profiles weren’t being done on a local level, so instead of people saying, “My God, this is really bad,” it became a political football. But it takes resources to do those little profiles every day.
If I had been a photojournalist at the State Journal here in Madison during Covid, I would’ve been moving boulders to get inside hospitals to try to show people what was really going on.
What would it have been like to have been Cecil Stoughton, the White House photographer—Kennedy’s photographer, not Johnson’s—who made the picture of LBJ being sworn in on Air Force One? You can’t fuck this one up, you know what I mean?
In January of 1986, the day Reagan was scheduled to give his State of the Union address, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. Later that morning he was waiting for some folks to come in and meet with him through the formal front door of the Oval Office. I was standing there ready to take photographs, and it was just him and I. And he said to me, “Well, the fellas”—that’s what he called his aides—“the fellas want me to cancel my speech tonight because of this tragedy. What do you think?” I’m thinking, “Who the hell am I to...?” But clearly he was leaning towards going ahead and giving his State of the Union speech, so I said, “Yeah, I think life goes on. I think you have to go ahead.” Of course, history shows that he postponed his speech, and he gave probably the best speech of his presidency sitting behind the Oval Office desk that night when he spoke to the nation. I’m glad he didn’t listen to me.
Without photojournalists putting their lives on the line, we wouldn’t have the same—what’s the right word?—feeling, or knowledge, or understanding of what’s taking place in Ukraine.
There would not have been the reaction there was if not for Darnella Frazier, a 17-year-old high school girl who had the presence of mind to, with her iPhone, stand there and show us without question that George Floyd was murdered. Lawrence O’Donnell and I have been pushing for her to get the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
President Obama taught me to slow down. We live in a society now where everything is right away—boom, boom, boom, boom. And he was occasionally criticized for taking a long time to make a consequential decision—how many troops to send to Afghanistan, for example. He took weeks and weeks and weeks to make that decision, had meetings and meetings and meetings in the Situation Room. I was in all of them. He showed how to think through what’s the right thing to do and not make a decision without getting all the necessary information.
I have no idea what kind of pictures exist of the Trump administration, but what we saw was essentially a reality show. There would be a Cabinet meeting, and the press pool would be in there the entire meeting. He’d go around the table and everybody would just sing the praise of Donald Trump. So it wasn’t really a meeting, it was a reality show.
One of the January 6 committee members said that no pictures exist of Trump in the dining room watching the insurrection on TV. We know he was doing that for hours and hours. There are no photographs, and according to this congressperson, the White House photographer, Shealah Craighead, was told no photos. The question I have is, who told her that?
If you’re taking pictures on your iPhone, pay attention to the framing. If there’s a pole behind you and it’s sticking out of your head, it’s not going to magically disappear when you click the photo. You’re going to have to move left or right.
If you’re shooting pictures of little kids, get down at their level. Don’t be towering over them, looking down.
My mother was a nurse. Nurses run the show.
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Photographs excerpted from THE WEST WING AND BEYOND by Pete Souza. Copyright © 2022 by Pete Souza. All photographs were taken by Pete Souza while he was Chief Official White House Photographer for President Obama.
Used with permission of Voracious, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.
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