Michael Baruch Grossman, 70, a political science professor whose specialty was the relationship between the president and the news media, died May 14, 2007, in Oakland, California, from complications arising from pancreatic cancer.
Grossman's scholarly work spanned the period of the evolution of the modern White House press corps beginning with the Franklin Roosevelt administration. In Portraying the President: The White House and the News Media, co-authored with Martha Joynt Kumar, they argued that the White House and the media are locked in a relationship of mutual need. The underlying cooperative elements of this relationship, although often obscured by visible and memorable clashes, provide the underlying structure. In addition, they contended, most presidents' problems with news organizations stem from their overestimation of their ability to change the rules governing the relationship. The unrealistic White House expectations about how the media should “behave” have often led to the president's inability to communicate effectively with the political and public partners that the media offers to him.
Michael Grossman was born in Boston, Massachusetts on August 17, 1936. He attended public schools in Brookline, MA and graduated from the U.S. Army Dependent High School in Frankfurt, Germany. At the time, his father was in Europe with the United States Information Agency. After receiving a B.A. from Oberlin College in 1957, he worked briefly at the Washington Post and served in the U.S. Army. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from Johns Hopkins University in 1968. From 1967–1970, Grossman served as associate secretary for the American Association of University Professors, where he worked on problems involving due process, academic freedom issues, and faculty relations. Grossman left to become chairman of the department of political science at Towson University, where he served as chairman until 1977 and then taught in the department until 1993. He also taught political science and communications courses at Johns Hopkins, Goucher College, UC at Davis, Cal State East Bay, and Mills College. His last academic position was as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the recipient of a Ford Foundation grant to fund research for Portraying the President, was a president of the National Capital Political Science Association, and an officer of the Presidency Research Group of the American Political Science Association.
His friends appreciated his warmth and strong support for them, his sense of humor, and his enthusiasm for baseball. Grossman is survived by his daughters Michele Cunningham of Chicago, and Rikki Edelman of Concord, California, and four grandchildren.
