Presidential campaign coverage over the past century has changed in many ways, but there are also continuing, unchanging themes in the history of candidates and the reporters who cover them, a historian says.

"As the new century dawns, the struggle between candidates and the media continues," Doris Kearns Goodwin said yesterday at the Newseum in Arlington. She also spoke at Newseum/NY later the same day. Goodwin is guest curator of the Newseum's newest exhibit, "Every Four Years: Presidential Campaign Coverage, 1896-2000." It opens tomorrow at the Newseum and at Newseum/NY.

Presidential candidates always have struggled to project a certain image, Goodwin said, while reporters strive to project the image of the candidate they see and want to describe.

For example, during Campaign 2000, she said, "we've talked about image over and over again, ranging from George Bush's smirk, to Al Gore's continually changing wardrobe to reflect his earth tones, to poor Steve Forbes' awkward facial expressions."

She said the media's concern for image harks back to William Howard Taft, who weighed 350 pounds. Teddy Roosevelt, then Taft's campaign adviser, told the candidate never to appear on a horse, "because it [would] be cruel to the horse and dangerous for (your image)."

Another continuing theme in the history of presidential campaign coverage is the "shifting of boundaries of what defines what should be private and what should be public, and what is inappropriate for reporters to cover," Goodwin said.

During Franklin Roosevelt's presidency, for example, there was an unwritten code among reporters never to portray the president in his wheelchair, on crutches or with his braces on. In 1936, Roosevelt lost his balance and fell when his braces unlocked. "He simply said to the Secret Service, 'Clean me up.' He got up to the podium [and] somehow got his speech back in order. [He] delivered the great 'Rendezvous With Destiny' speech."

There was never a picture of Roosevelt falling, nor was there any mention of it in the newspapers the next day, Goodwin said. "They simply reported the speech."

Today, however, reporters jump at the chance to reveal a candidate's embarrassing moments, Goodwin said. Journalists covering Bob Dole in 1996 in Chico, Calif., were quick to attribute the president's fall to old age, when in fact the railing he was leaning against was not secure.

The news media's growing interest in presidential candidates' personalities is another theme over the past century, she said.

Teddy Roosevelt was the first candidate to share his family with the public through pictures and anecdotes. That special coverage "spoiled every other candidate," Goodwin said, "because the press then thought they could get equal access to other candidates, so they actually followed [Roosevelt's] opponent, Alton B. Parker, around on his morning ritual — a skinny dip in the Hudson River. He was not too pleased about that."

Aside from the continuing themes in the history of campaign coverage, Goodwin said the Newseum exhibit also portrays the "arc of change over the century, from the days when McKinley sat on his front porch in the days before the man sought the office rather than the office sought the man."

A big change, she said, occurred in the relationship between the candidates and journalists as the more-democratic presidential primaries replaced party bosses, who until the 1950s controlled the nominating process.

Later, "newspapers, then radio, then television replaced the parties as the central screening mechanism to give the citizens information about the candidates." This put the media into a more important role, she said, "and escalated the age-old tension between the candidates and the members of the media."

Through all the changes, Goodwin said, "one could argue that the coverage of campaigns has become less partisan, more sophisticated, more capable of holding the candidates accountable."

Later, in New York, Goodwin affirmed the democratic value of adversarial relations between politicians and the press.

"There has always been a healthy adversarial relationship between the press and the candidates, and that is as it should be in a democracy," she said at Newseum/NY. "That is what free press and free speech is all about."

Speaking from an essay that is the centerpiece of the exhibition publication and featured on the exhibit's website, Goodwin emphatically relayed the personal roots of her professional endeavor to examine press coverage of presidential campaigns: storytelling, baseball, and storytelling about baseball.

"When I was only 6 years old, my father taught me that mysterious art of recording scores of baseball games," she said. "I recounted in excruciating detail every inning of every game."

"My father made it more special to me because he never told me that the same story would be in the sports section of the newspaper the next day." It is not surprising to hear another story, then — that she was the first woman journalist to enter the locker room of her beloved team, the Boston Red Sox.

The rocky relationship between the press and presidential candidates during campaigns is characterized by Goodwin as a tug of war over storytelling — both the storytelling of politics by the press, on one side of the rope, and the politics of storytelling as the candidates shore up images of themselves on the campaign trail, on the other side.

Goodwin shared tales about some of our nation's largest presidential personalities. She admitted she was enamored with President Johnson's "tall tales" as his assistant and White House intern.

"There was a problem with these stories," she said. "Half of them weren't true." Once, she recalled, Johnson lied about having a great, great grandfather who died in the battle of the Alamo. "I turned to President Johnson and said, 'How could you do this?' "

The audience laughed when she recalled Johnson's glib response, "Oh, these journalists, they are such sticklers for detail!"

Depicting how coverage of the modern political campaign has changed over the last century, the exhibit uses campaign and media memorabilia, news photographs, historic front pages and archival television and radio broadcasts.