Larry Speakes, Public Face of Reagan Era, Dies at 74

WASHINGTON - Larry Speakes, who became the public face of Ronald Reagan 's presidency when a would-be assassin's bullet gravely wounded his boss, press secretary James Brady, died Friday in his native Mississippi. He was 74.

Dr. Nate Brown, the coroner for Bolivar County, Miss., said Mr. Speakes, who had Alzheimer's disease, died at his home in Cleveland, Miss.

A Southerner who started many days in his White House office by listening to Mozart for what he said was its calming influence, Mr. Speakes served as acting White House press secretary from 1981 to 1987, parrying the increasingly adversarial queries from the press along the way. His nickname among friends was 'the Mississippi catfish,' a fish that stings when mishandled.

He worked in the West Wing in a pre-Internet era, when the tense exchanges with reporters took place twice a day and deadlines were geared toward the morning papers and the networks' nightly news programs. He was regarded as having a straightforward but sometimes acerbic style by journalists who bristled at the administration's attempts to manage the news.

Some journalists questioned whether Mr. Speakes had the access necessary to give him credibility as a spokesman for the president. At times, his job seemed less about communicating policy and more about handling the television personalities like Sam Donaldson of ABC News, who became famous for his shouted questions at Mr. Reagan from the airport tarmac or White House rope line.

Mr. Speakes also fought battles inside the White House with presidential advisers as they all struggled for influence and access to Mr. Reagan. Mr. Speakes clashed with, among others, David Gergen, who became communications director. In 1982, Mr. Gergen described his relationship with Mr. Speakes as 'warm and getting warmer.'

But Mr. Speakes survived in briefing room longer than most modern White House press secretaries, in part because of his laid-back Southern style, which often hid the ambition that is always present in political operatives who make it to the White House.

A banker's son, Mr. Speakes called himself 'as middle class as you could get' and married his high-school sweetheart before attending the University of Mississippi in Oxford. A reporter at the student newspaper, he covered the 1962 integration of the campus for a local newspaper, but friends said he did not seem especially passionate about the cause.

'He struck me as not really having any politics,' Curtis Wilkie, a college friend who later covered the White House for The Boston Globe, said in a 1982 profile of Mr. Speakes in The Washington Post.

Mr. Speakes left student journalism for a job as a press secretary on Capitol Hill before heading to the White House as a spokesman for President Richard M. Nixon's Watergate lawyer. It was a job he later called 'a tightrope,' but it led to a jobs with President Gerald R. Ford and Senator Bob Dole before getting the call from Mr. Brady to be his deputy after Mr. Reagan's victory.

After the shooting, Mr. Speakes took over Mr. Brady's duties, though he never got the title, out of respect for his wounded colleague. 'As long as it's important to Jim, the title is his,' he told a reporter for The New York Times in 1985.

As Mr. Reagan increasingly ran into political trouble - including an arms-for-hostages deal with Iran - it was Mr. Speakes who was often called upon to deflect the attacks and protect his boss in the Oval Office. In those times, he struggled to balance the demands of reporters with the need for secrecy imposed by the White House that he served.

Once, when a reporter asked him whether the United States would seek to invade the island nation of Grenada, Mr. Speakes said - on the advice of an official at the National Security Council - that the idea was a 'preposterous' one. The invasion took place the next day, and Mr. Speakes later acknowledged that he had learned about the assault after it had begun.

'That was the most difficult,' he recalled in 1985. 'I was misled. I ended up giving incorrect information. We were left out.'

'There are 10,000 ways to say, 'No comment,' ' he once told The Times, 'and I've used 9,999 of them.'

Mr. Speakes is survived by a daughter, Sandy Speakes Huerta of Cleveland, Miss.; two sons, Scott Speakes of Cleveland and Jeremy Speakes of Clifton, Va.; six grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.