Linda Lotridge Levin’s new book about Franklin Roosevelt’s press secretary, The Making of FDR: The Story of Stephen T. Early, America’s First Modern Press Secretary (Prometheus Books), tells us some interesting new things about the Roosevelt administration — though the title exaggerates Mr. Early’s role a bit.

It’s surprising that historians have not done more with Steve Early, a powerful figure in FDR’s Washington. Mrs. Levin’s book has been well received, including by this paper — see Edward J. Renehan Jr.’s April 13 review, “The Making of the Press Secretary” — and that is well. It’s an often engrossing, and long-overdue study, driven by the drama of FDR’s rise to national power and his leadership of the nation during the Depression and World War II — scary if sometimes inspiring days that established the big federal government we know and, more often than not, love now (especially when we get Medicare).

But what the book really got me thinking about was how much the role of spokesperson has expanded in public life. That is partly because executive jobs in government and business have become more complicated. Thus, more expert, or at least more glib, spokespeople (salespeople) are needed to explain what the executives are doing, even when the executives are not quite sure themselves. But it is also because of the rise in the “profession” of public relations, in which PR folks seek to manage every message to the maximum benefit of the organization or individual paying them.

In politics, it’s all geared to benefit individual politicians. Spokespersons are hired, at public expense, to keep their bosses in power, and maybe even get them a promotion, and not to serve the public by explaining policies. How odd that taxpayers don’t complain more about this. But even in business, the role of the spokesperson is often more to promote the mogul they report to than to serve the interests of the company as a whole.

Mr. Early helped lay the foundation for the often dubious tradition of political PR flack, building on the work of such publicists as Ivy Lee and, especially, Edward Bernays, a nephew by marriage of Sigmund Freud, and onetime journalist, who promoted himself into “The Father of Public Relations.”

In his book Propaganda, he wrote: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” He called this the “engineering of consent.”

I interviewed Eddie Bernays in 1970 at his Cambridge home, and he told me that he thought that highly educated, “civic-minded” PR men were among the heroes of the age. I have a more ambiguous reaction to the growth of this trade, which is part carnival barker, part mass psychologist, part lobbyist and all domestic servant.

Stephen Early was a former Associated Press man himself, and understood journalism and the practical and psychic needs of its practitioners and customers. While sometimes irascible, he generally dealt with news people in an honorable way while seeking to understand the intentions of his often Machiavellian boss. But in so successfully developing the foundations of the Washington spin machine, he left a dubious legacy.

Now, of course, there are far more PR jobs than journalist jobs. The spinners are all around us.

As much as many in the public dislike those nosy, negative journalists, I’m not sure that, upon reflection, even the journalist haters would think that this ratio, still widening with the implosion of news-media business models, is a good thing.

—Robert Whitcomb