Pentagon Co-Spokesman Changed Trim After Boss’ Haircuts

Posted Feb 7, 2012 by Howard Altman

Updated Feb 7, 2012 at 12:26 PM

As someone who looks on from the outside, the relation between the newsmaker and the gatekeeper has always fascinated me.

Especially when it comes to the military, and the newsmaker has at least one star on the uniform.

I like finding out how the message gets crafted, how it’s delivered and how the spokesperson manages his or her boss.

That’s why it was particularly interesting to hear former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, now retired, talk about his relationship with his spokesman – St. Petersburg’s John Kirby, a Navy captain.

I interviewed Mullen last week as part of a profile I did on Kirby (appearing on today’s front page), a self-professed history buff and St. Petersburg Catholic High School and USF grad whose first chapter book was a biography of John Paul Jones he read when he was about 8.

The two, said Mullen, were aligned enough that he could walk up to the podium with a speech he hadn’t read and know that, if written by Kirby, it would be exactly what he needed to say.

But then there were the haircuts.

Kirby didn’t have a problem with his boss getting a trim.

It was what happened on the way to and from the haircuts that set his hair on fire.

To get to the Pentagon barbershop, Kirby explained, Mullen would walk past the press corps.

Mullen told me he would stop and talk to reporters “to see how they were, what they were looking at that day and have an off-the-record environment to talk about certain things.”

It became a running gag of sorts with the reporters, said Mullen.

Kirby “was not fond of that,” said Mullen. The reporters knew that and, eventually, Kirby would find out.

“He didn’t like it,” said Mullen. “He wanted to be the interface, always, between me and the press.”

Mullen said he didn’t have a problem with that, chalking it up to Kirby’s “completeness in what he wanted to accomplish.”

Looking back, Kirby, now Pentagon co-spokesman, said maybe chastising the boss was not such a good idea.

“He would go for a haircut and, on the way back, wandered through the press offices,” Kirby said. “He wouldn’t tell me, but when I saw that he had a haircut on his schedule, I knew that day I would be getting visits from a reporter with a grin, saying, ‘Hey, the boss was walking around.’”

The first couple of times, Kirby said he told his boss, ‘Sir, I love that you want to talk to them and have relationships, but let me know.’ He said, ‘No, I can’t’ and kept doing it.’ He was right and I was wrong.”

Kirby explained that, “as a press guy, you get possessive, protective.”

Mullen’s “attitude toward the media was the right tone, open and transparent and have relationships and engage with the press without the minder there. I learned a lot from that and got used to it.”