by Curt Smith
John Zogby explains,
He was the second-oldest man to be elected president, and the second-oldest to leave the presidency. So we’ve come to look at him as a father figure. It’s been more than twenty years since he left the office—so people have grown comfortable with him as a person. Our prism is different than when he was president. One of his sons became president, and another governor of Florida. So America thinks of him literally as a father. He built a great alliance and won a great war. That has rarely, if ever, happened since Franklin Roosevelt. So people think of him as a great commander in chief. Plus, he was a war hero as a young man and our last president from the Greatest Generation. It all fits together.
In April 2013 the George W. Bush Presidential Center opened in Dallas. President Obama and former presidents Clinton, Carter, Bush 41 and 43 gathered to hail the newest presidential library: “The headline of the . . . remarks,” wrote Peggy Noonan, “is that everyone was older and nicer.” Each president spoke. The oldest, George H. W. Bush, said, “God bless America, and thank you very much.” He rose courageously from his wheelchair to acknowledge the crowd, whose applause was loud and lasting. “That crowd,” said Noonan, “and the people watching on TV—the person they loved and honored most was him.”
Time’s Hugh Sidey had predicted it a generation earlier. “His presidential record was better than anybody in this dismal campaign ever admitted, and better than he could articulate. And there was something more that could never be fitted into the strictures of raucous electronic politics: the sheer decency of the son of Prescott and Dorothy Bush,” he wrote in 1992’s worst autumn of Bush’s life. “All last week as his mother faded from this world, Bush toasted his friends and adversaries in elegant farewells. There was one night, after the ceremony ended, when there was a glimpse of the 41st President of this enduring republic standing in the corner of the mansion: he was sending Republicans and Democrats off into the night with one of his atrocious neckties flapping and his crooked grin playing across his face and his basic goodness asserting itself above all hurt and pain. History will remember.”
It has.
FOURTEEN
Poetry of the Heart
When I was a kid,” television’s Roger Ailes said of growing up in Ohio, “everyone went to see Harry Truman when he came through on the train and we thought we knew him because Harry Truman waved to us.” Depending on the president in our modern—that is, radio and television—age, each is reflected more or less accurately by his persona.
Herbert Hoover was a pre–White House titan in education, business, and government. Later, fortune’s child became depression’s stepchild. Franklin Roosevelt flaunted self-confidence—the laugh, flung-back head, the bonhomie. “His idea of the President,” said historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, “was himself.” Exhausted and inexhaustible, FDR never let America feel pygmy or afraid.
Truman was a bespectacled machine protégé with awful sight and superb vision: the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, dropping the atomic bomb. Dwight Eisenhower’s middle-class affinity almost became the 1950s. F. Scott Fitzgerald called style “an unbroken series of perfect gestures.” John F. Kennedy’s still evokes a dreamboat home less of Camelot than élan and grace.
Lyndon Johnson loved the raw use of power—how to inveigle, even domineer. We like our president to get things done. Indomitable and indefatigable, Richard Nixon defeated almost everyone but himself, needing every bit of his surpassing courage. Gerald Ford was open, reliable, and thoroughly at ease with his assets and debits.
Jimmy Carter spurned Babylon on the Potomac for what he thought a higher calling. Ronald Reagan was “The Great Communicator” and “The Great Liberator,” using language to swell liberty. Bill Clinton had all, almost lost all, and regained much of what he lost. Aside from Desert Storm, political fallibility, personal decency, and Metternich-like diplomacy, how will we recall the subject of this book?
In 1982 Bulgaria’s former president, Todor Zhivkov, asked Nixon how many grandchildren he had. Nixon answered: four at the time. Zhivkov said, “Then you are a very rich man. Having grandchildren is the greatest wealth a man can have.” As the “Author’s Note” observes, leaving the presidency, George H. W. Bush passed a rule that any time a grandchild neared him they must “deimperialize the presidential retirement” by giving him a hug.
If grandchildren were gold—Bush today has seventeen, with three great-grandchildren—he would own part of Fort Knox. History will note his special love of children, how often he thought of them, and how that affected his desire to be a peacemaker. “My goal,” he said, “is to have a world where every child has someone who knows their name.”
To move the public, every president has had to conquer the yin and yang of presidential speechwriting. Regard prose as policy: a speech’s main course, essential but insufficient. Deem poetry inspiration: a great dessert, an after-dinner drink. Prose details, instructs: to Barack Obama, a “teachable moment.” Poetry ricochets, even chimes, playing a scale of sound, sense, and feel.
Presidential speechwriting began with George Washington’s 1789 first presidential inaugural, denouncing “public prosperity and felicity” in office. Later, Thomas Jefferson said, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Like his life, Lincoln’s language soared: “a house divided against itself . . . the better angels of our nature.” Each was helped by friends, hangers-on, and cabinet secretaries, lending a line or phrase. Presidential speechwriting as we know it began in 1921, when Warren Harding was inaugurated. His problem wasn’t a house divided—rather, corruption and backroom greed.
A critic pontificated, “Harding left the impression of a man of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.” Harding died after two years in office, having found at least one idea: the president needed a full-time speechwriter, creating the words that a president might speak.
Until the early twentieth century, to hear the speaking, you went where the speaking was. In 1908 William Jennings Bryan, nominated a third time for president by the Democratic Party, gave ten speeches a day, each averaging an hour, for sixty straight days—six hundred hours, to reach 5 million people. Under Harding, the office grew, more groups to be addressed, speeches given. Another factor: commercial radio, debuting in 1920 on KDKA Pittsburgh. Suddenly, a president needed writers to help this new medium help him.
Paraphrasing Lincoln at Gettysburg, the world has little noted nor long remembered the first full-time presidential speechwriter: Harding’s literary clerk, Judson Welliver, may he rest in peace. In the 1980s ex-Nixon writer William Safire created a society in Welliver’s name. It has about sixty members, includes writers chosen from each president since the 1930s, and fuels what the late Safire called the “strong bond among White House speechwriters.” The late Clark Clifford, Truman writer and LBJ defense secretary, said, “We are rare birds and we must hang together.”
Since Welliver, many increasingly grasp how presidents differ in voice, tone, rhythm, rate of cadence, and even whom they quote. As we have seen, Ronald Reagan liked to parrot the Founding Fathers, whom the Gipper used to poke fun at his seventy-something age. George Bush separated himself from his mentor in his first meeting with writers, preferring to quote Yogi Berra. As 41 said, once Yogi was talking about a batter who hit well from each side of the plate: “Wow, both ways. He’s amphibious.”
Harding was the first radio president. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first president to master radio. On March 12, 1933, FDR delivered the first of twenty-seven to twenty-nine—depending upon your definition—fireside chats over the next twelve years. Remember Bryan, speaking six hundred hours to reach 5 million people. By contrast, FDR liked return on investment, speaking for twenty minutes from the White House to 60 million or more listeners by radio.
Roosevelt had a born-for-the-wireless
tenor and a born-to-perform persona. He was a natural and knew it. He also understood how vivid, simple, and personal were better: “My friends . . . you and I . . . our government.” Once, lifting his hands, Roosevelt dropped them like a pianist: “Speaking, you have to strike a chord. Then you wait. Then you strike the chord again.” Helping him, among others, were Raymond Moley and Harry Hopkins and Rexford Tugwell and poet Archibald MacLeish and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Robert Sherwood—speechwriting’s Murderers’ Row.
FDR’s chords warned, then changed, the world: “New Deal”; “rendezvous with destiny”; “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”; “the great arsenal of democracy”; the “Four Freedoms” of speech and religion and against want and fear. My favorite line denounced the Nazis: “You don’t tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.” Succeeding him, Harry Truman used Clifford to outline the postwar world. Truman’s successor relied less on rhetoric than on reputation. Most people run for president pledging to save civilization. Eisenhower did it the other way around: defeating Hitler, then entering the Oval Office.
Ike’s poetry was biographical. Kennedy’s included irony, equanimity, and a fluent phrase. JFK would quote Flannery O’Connor to Robert Frost, literacy, it was said, no longer evidence of high treason. Once he called a group of Nobel Prize laureates “the most extraordinary collection of talent . . . that has ever gathered at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” It is hard to imagine that on today’s iPod, iPad, or DVD.
Like FDR with radio, JFK was the first to master television. He was a voracious reader, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, and disciple of self-improvement. Before running for president, JFK put on a smoking jacket, sat in his study, and put Churchill on his record player: “This was their finest hour” and “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” and “give us the tools, and we will finish the job.” Later, as president, Kennedy used Theodore Sorensen—“my intellectual blood bank”—to help draft his inaugural and Cuban Missile Crisis speech and nuclear disarmament address. He absorbed Churchill well.
Kennedy grasped the difference between writing for the eye and ear. The latter was more informal, casual, yet structured—an open, middle, and close. Before his inaugural Kennedy had Sorensen reread the Gettysburg Address, finding that 71 percent of its words were one syllable. “Let the word go forth,” said JFK. It did, still should, especially about how Kennedy was not a hater, seeking to grasp other points of view.
Lyndon Johnson inherited Kennedy’s writers, who penned addresses on the Great Society and voting rights: “We shall overcome.” What LBJ lacked was JFK’s charm. Johnson’s successor lacked it too. What Nixon possessed was empathy with Middle America. In White House Ghosts, Robert Schlesinger suggests that Nixon had as much respect for the spoken word as any modern president. He retreated to Camp David for a major speech, did one draft after another on legal pads, and so internalized the speech he became the speech—in sync with, protective of, the great working middle.
Nixon warned against America “as a pitiful helpless giant”; in 1971, announced his historic trip to China; in 1974, gave his surrealistic farewell—“It [defeat] is only a beginning, always.” When he wanted a quotable quote, he dialed Safire, who also wrote for vice president Spiro Agnew, he of “nattering nabobs of negativism,” “vicars of vacillation,” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” When Nixon wanted to explain foreign policy, he used cerebral Raymond Price. When he wanted to bash liberals, he summoned Patrick J. Buchanan, who has visited this narrative. Pat saluted, sat down at his typewriter, lit the keyboard, and began.
In chapter 3 Nixon showed his grasp of politics, terming it “poetry, not prose.” Successor Gerald Ford grasped little, hiring a stunning twenty-two speechwriters in his two and a half years as president. Carter ignored how poetry relates to prose. One half of a commencement speech said “we have an inordinate fear of Communism”; his other half suggested that Communism was at our door. Both fell to Reagan—like FDR, singing poetry’s greatest hits. This account shows him embodying America at Normandy, the Berlin Wall, after the Challenger exploded. The Gipper could be errant in detail, gauzy about fact. No matter. Poetry KO’d prose.
Some termed language key to Reagan’s presidency. It was his presidency, Dutch’s life revolving around the spoken word. Even his first job prophesied. Reagan broadcast the 1930s Chicago Cubs despite never being at a game. A wire operator at Chicago’s Wrigley Field sent Morse code hundreds of miles to Reagan, sitting in the studio of WHO Des Moines. “B10” meant ball one, outside; “S2C” strike two, called. Eureka! In a “re-creation,” you described a game unseen.
One day Reagan was announcing when—disaster—the wire broke. The Gipper considered having WHO play music in the lurch, then recalled three other Des Moines stations airing the same game live. “I thought, if we put music on,” he said, “people’ll turn to another station doing the game in person.” What to do? Make a big to-do. Instantly, Reagan remembered the one thing that doesn’t make the newspaper box score—foul balls. You can hit two million foul balls—and still have two strikes. Thus, in the next ten minutes, Dutch had the batter set a record for fouls.
As Reagan told it, Billy Jurges fouled to the left, right, and behind the plate, into the stands and out of the park—wherever a foul could go. Pitcher Dizzy Dean used the resin bag, mopped his brow, and tied a shoe. Rain neared. A fight began. None of this happened, but at home it seemed real. Finally, the wire revived, Reagan laughing. It read, “Jurges popped out on first ball pitched.” Years later the Gipper said, “Making things up, relating tale to fact. What better training for politics?”
Bill Clinton might agree, perhaps primus inter pares—in Latin, “first among equals”—in presidential eye contact, gesture, and segue from teleprompter to ad lib, pleasing crowds but not necessarily his writers, who despaired of Clinton speaking not for history but for the moment. Successor George W. Bush had little poetry, timing, or grasp of the middle class. Barack Obama knew the Harvard faculty lounge and Chicago machine politics, but little of America in between.
Plato said, “Before we talk, let us define our terms.” It is fair to say that to Democratic presidents, poetry means tending elements of a left-of-center coalition: New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, Great Society, Obama’s health care and economic stimulus. To Republicans, it means—at least it should—ideas and attitudes, a writer suggested, which should “have more to do with loyalty than with ideology”—among other things, faith, loyalty, and patriotism, an appreciation of American history, sacrifice, exceptionalism, and wonder. If, as Tip O’Neill said, all politics is local, most presidential speechwriting should be personal. That is especially true of the president I know best.
In George H. W. Bush, I found a hybrid of Andy Hardy and Walter Mitty. In one breath he could confess “I’m on a cholesterol high”; another, bravely vow “this aggression will not stand” and make it stick; another, become so choked as to be unable to speak about his then-four-year-old daughter’s death sixty years earlier; another, civilly address opponents in the “just war” speech. A modest man, more complex than he or critics would admit. A heroic man, like so many of his generation. An old-fashioned man, who knew that a letter—far more than an e-mail or text message or—God forbid—Tweet—could reveal and touch the heart. A man whose poetry linked vulnerability and wearability and nobility, above all.
In 1999 Bush released All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings, reissued in 2013, a collection of his letters from childhood to then. One entry is especially telling: Bush’s “self-typed” letter to each of his five children on December 31, 1990, as a president—and dad—sensed that the greatest decision of his presidency—the invasion of Kuwait—lay just beyond the river. “First, I can’t begin to tell you how great it was to have you here at Camp David,” he began. “I loved the games (the Marines are still smarting over their 1 and 2 record). I loved Christmas Day . . . I loved
the movies—some of ’em. I loved the laughs. Most of all, I loved seeing you together. We are a family blessed; and this Christmas simply reinforced all that.”
Next came a trait I had seen in the White House and beyond—Bush’s fine feeling for the person as opposed to mass. “I hope I didn’t seem moody. I tried not to.” He had vowed not to complain about “the loneliest job in the world.” Yet “I have been concerned about what lies ahead. There is no ‘loneliest,’ though, as I am backed by a first rate team of knowledgeable and committed people.” Bush had “thought long and hard about what might have to be done,” having “the peace of mind that comes from knowing that we have tried hard for peace. We have gone to the U.N.; we have formed an historic coalition; there have been diplomatic initiatives from country after country.” Only sixteen days remained till the UN deadline for Saddam Hussein to leave “Kuwait—totally.”
As a father, what “I want you to know . . . is this: Every human life is precious. When the question is asked, ‘How many lives are you willing to sacrifice?’—it tears at my heart. The answer, of course, is none—none at all. We have waited to give sanctions a chance, we have moved a tremendous force so as to reduce the risk to every American soldier if force has to be used; but the question of life still lingers and plagues the heart.” Making history, Bush retrieved prior history. “How many lives might have been saved if appeasement had given way to force earlier on in the late ’30s or earliest ’40’s? How many Jews might have been spared the gas chambers, or how many Polish patriots might be alive today? I look at today’s crisis as ‘good’ v. ‘evil’ . . . yes, it is that clear.”