Packaging the President: what the public sees of the nation's chief executive is carefully manipulated by the spin doctors at the White House.

• Author: Purdum, Todd S.

A somber, dark-suited President George W. Bush cuts through row on row of stark white crosses in Normandy, France. He stands so close to that other George's carved-rock face at Mount Rushmore that he seems already immortalized there. In China, the most populous nation on earth, he and his wife, Laura, smile all alone on the Great Wall.

The pictures are striking--and no accident. If you've ever wondered why photographs of the President turn out so much better than the ones in your family scrapbook, it may be because the Bush White House--like its predecessors--works overtime to guarantee the most flattering images possible.

In fact, these pictures have a special name. They're not just photos. They're "photo opportunities," photo-ops for short, a term coined more than 30 years ago by Ron Ziegler, press secretary for President Richard M. Nixon, whose staff institutionalized the practice.

WHEN REALITY WASN'T VIRTUAL

Once upon a time, news photographers had the kind of access to Presidents and other politicians that let them capture spontaneous reality (even if they often protected their subjects in exchange). Franklin D. Roosevelt, who led the country through the Great Depression and World War II, was paralyzed from the waist down by polio and needed a wheelchair or heavy leg braces to move around. But most of the public never knew, because the press never showed them.

Some Presidents just couldn't avoid the camera's unflattering glare. Lyndon B. Johnson, who was President during the Vietnam War, once decided to prove his health by pulling up his shirt to show off the scar from gall-bladder surgery. In the mid-1970s, President Gerald R. Ford managed to trip in public just often enough to give a young comedian named Chevy Chase and a new TV program called Saturday Night Live lots of good material.

CHOOSING THE VIEW

Gradually, however, through a combination of heightened security concerns and determined effort to control what the public sees, presidential aides have penned up photographers in smaller spaces, all but guaranteeing that they will use the camera angle and backdrop the White House wants.

That usually means big flags, majestic mountains, beautiful beaches, smiling children, uniformed troops, helmeted firefighters, soaring skyscrapers, and a blue-and-white Boeing 747 better known as Air Force One. Nine times out of 10, the tactic works, because it produces such terrific pictures.

Every White House has at least one person whose main job...