White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  Senator Mike Mansfield, the Democratic leader, said that excepting the last two minutes, he thought it Johnson’s finest speech. Several Democratic politicians wanted to know who would carry the standard in Johnson’s place. “Will Humphrey be the man?” Senator Russell Long of Louisiana asked, as did Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia.

  Newspaper publisher Eugene Pulliam, a Republican who had supported Johnson in 1964, offered to organize a draft of the president at the Democratic Convention. Representative Cornelius Gallagher, a New Jersey Democrat, agreed. “We have the delegates,” he said. “We have the votes.” Illinois Democrat Roman Pucinski flatly guaranteed a draft. “He is whistling Dixie in the grave yard,” Pucinski said. “He will be drafted. He will be nominated. He will be elected. He will serve.”

  At the White House, they knew better. “Afterwards, there were bottles pulled out and some rather masochistic drinking done in the lower depths of the White House,” Maguire recalled. The revelry was halted temporarily when Cater realized that he still had to finish a speech for the next day. Much laughter was had about the problem of getting a news lead out of it.

  “Concern for Image Must Rank

  with Concern for Substance”

  JANUARY 18, 1969

  Richard Nixon and Raymond Price finished working on the inaugural address at around midnight on Saturday, January 18, in Nixon’s Pierre Hotel suite in New York City. Nixon split a bottle of Heineken with his speechwriter and put his feet up on the desk. “Only the short ones are remembered,” he had told Price. “Lincoln’s second was a great one—Theodore Roosevelt’s was damn good, even though it came in the middle of his presidency. Wilson’s was very good, and FDR’s first. Kennedy’s basically stands up because it has some good phrases, and because it caught the mood and it caught himself.”

  Ray Price had spent two years running the editorial page of the liberal Republican New York Herald Tribune before it folded in late 1966. He had written the Tribune’s editorial endorsing Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Nixon had called him in February 1967, and despite Price’s initial skepticism, he had signed on. He went for lofty, philosophical rhetoric.

  Nixon had drawn ideas from sources that ranged from the previous inaugurals to top aides such as Henry Kissinger, who would serve as national security adviser, and domestic policy aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan to friends including the Reverend Billy Graham and Laugh-In scriptwriter Paul Keyes.* Kissinger contributed a couple of sentences that had been negotiated with Soviet representatives as a public affirmation that the new administration would seek more relaxed relations.† Price had made a key contribution in an early draft, suggesting that the country should “lower our voices.” The speech had taken form in the final week before the inauguration. Price joined Nixon in Key Biscayne, Florida, for the final push, and they flew to New York City a few days before the swearing-in, where they finished the speech on the 18th.

  January 20 was cold, raw, and overcast, with dark clouds threatening. “Greatness comes in simple trappings,” Nixon told the country.

  The simple things are the ones most needed today if we are to surmount what divides us, and cement what unites us. To lower our voices would be a simple thing. In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading. We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another—until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

  In many ways, Nixon’s eloquent address echoed his old rival John F. Kennedy’s: lofty talk of summonses, contrapuntal phrasing (“We find ourselves rich in goods but ragged in spirit; reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous discord on earth”), and at least one instance of borrowed language (Kennedy: “Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary…” Nixon: “Those who would be our adversaries…”). But where Kennedy spoke of bearing “the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out,” Nixon promised that he did not “call for a life of grim sacrifice.”

  A little over a month into his White House tenure, Nixon made his first trip abroad as president, a weeklong European swing that took him through Belgium, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, France, and the Vatican. He read the remarks prepared for the various stages of the trip on the seven-hour flight across the Atlantic.

  Nixon was welcomed by King Baudouin I in Brussels on a cool February 23 evening. “It was exactly half a century ago this year, in 1919, that one of America’s greatest presidents made an historic postwar visit to what was then a devastated Belgium,” the president said. “That was the last occasion on which an American President set foot on Belgian soil.” Watching with the rest of the staff, speechwriter William Safire paled. Nixon had pulled those remarks from a folder marked “Statements: Brussels.” They were the departure remarks. As the president spoke, Safire feared that Nixon would thank the Belgians for their hospitality and wish them a fond farewell. He did not: He had not liked the arrival remarks, so he had substituted the departure ones and ad-libbed a conclusion.

  Bill Safire, public relations expert, had worked with Nixon since the 1950s, and on the 1960 presidential campaign. He had also aided a number of other New York State politicians, including Governor Nelson Rockefeller in his 1964 presidential bid and his 1966 gubernatorial reelection. Safire viewed himself as an ideological centrist or, as he called it, an “opportunist. I would go one way and then the other, depending on the circumstances.”

  Safire had a playful, clever style, quick with a quip or witticism, both in speeches and in person.* Thirty-nine years old when the administration started, he served as a mentor to younger staffers. “I would like to have been what Presidentologists call an “intimate adviser,’ but [White House chief of staff H. R.] Haldeman explained once that Nixon considered me too ‘brittle’—that was the President’s word for someone who would not hang tough over the long haul—and too much a loner,” he later wrote. “No complaints: I am better off in print than in court or in jail.”

  Nixon next flew on to London, where again he joined his statement to an ad-lib. The following night he was the guest of honor at a small stag dinner at 10 Downing Street. There was tension at the gathering. Expecting Lyndon Johnson to be reelected, Prime Minister Harold Wilson had appointed John Freeman, editor of the left-leaning New Statesman, as the new British ambassador to Washington. Freeman had been a Nixon critic for more than a decade and his position in Washington figured to be uncomfortable.

  “You could feel the strain in the room, especially from our side, and poor John was perspiring and trying to look at ease,” one British diplomat told Safire. Safire had prepared a brief toast for Nixon, who recited it without notes. “They say there’s a new Nixon. And they wonder if there’s a new Freeman,” he said. “Let me set aside all possibility of embarrassment because our roles have changed. He’s the new diplomat and I’m the ‘new statesman.’” The room broke up.

  Safire had written it as a light wordplay, but Nixon delivered it with gravity. “That was one of the kindest and most generous acts I have known in a quarter century in politics,” Wilson wrote on the back of his dinner menu. “Just proves a point. You can’t guarantee being born a Lord. It is possible—you’ve shown it—to be born a gentleman. H.”

  Later, on Air Force One, Nixon told Safire of the note. “That was your crack,” he said. “It went over very well.”

  In West Berlin on February 27, Safire noticed a sign: HO-HA-HAY, NIXON IS OK—from a German soccer chant, “Ho-ha-hay”—and the president quoted it in his speech at a Siemens factory, eliciting a roar from the crowd. It was as close as he dared come to speaking in German: when he quoted Goethe—“Without haste, but without rest”—he did so in English because trying to say it in German would have sounded too much like Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

  Flying from Berlin t
o Italy, Nixon summoned Rose Mary Woods, his longtime secretary, and Safire to his private cabin. Kennedy got the Berliners all excited, then let them down, he said. “He is constantly competing with Kennedy—not with Johnson,” Safire noted in his diary. “In my London arrival statement, I referred to his accompanying the Queen in 1958 to the dedication of the American Chapel in St. Paul’s and recalled the ‘unforgettable’ playing of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. He killed the paragraph, telling Kissinger: ‘That’s a Kennedy song’—a reference to the spontaneous singing of the Hymn at the Robert Kennedy funeral train.”

  Nixon’s statements for the trip were originally drafted by the State Department, then rewritten by the National Security Council staff under Kissinger’s supervision, and redrafted by the writers, with Kissinger’s final approval. Nixon had read all the drafts. Incredible, the stuff the State Department produces, Nixon told Safire. No heart at all or feeling in it. It was always safe, he said, always empty. But while he was pleased with the trip, Nixon was thinking about shaking up the speechwriting process for foreign policy speeches. With Bob Haldeman he discussed adding a speechwriter to the National Security Council who would focus solely on foreign policy.

  On March 19, at Safire’s invitation, Samuel Rosenman dined in the White House mess with Safire, Price, speechwriter Patrick Buchanan, research and writing staff head James Keogh, and domestic adviser John Ehrlichman. Rosenman said that he was impressed that Nixon had “found his own medium—the televised press conference—so early in his administration, and it comes over so well because those guys [the press] are vultures.” Nixon of course had firsthand experience with the power of television: In 1952, he had saved his vice-presidential spot on the GOP ticket when he responded to allegations of a secret slush campaign fund with a speech acknowledging receiving some gifts but refused to give back at least one of them—his little dog, Checkers. In 1960, television viewers thought that Kennedy had won their debates, while radio listeners believed the opposite.

  Rosenman compared Nixon’s facility for ad-libbing with those of his former bosses. “President Roosevelt could never read, retain and ad-lib the way Nixon does, nor could Truman,” Rosenman told his hosts. “President Nixon has a legal mind that is trained for that. And there’s no doubt that showing that you know your subject, without notes, instills confidence.”*

  It was a perceptive comment. Nixon preferred to speak without notes. When he could, he studied his subject as much as possible, outlined his thoughts on yellow legal pads, committed to memory the salient facts and the gist of what he wanted to say, and then spoke. He reminded Buchanan of a “workaholic student” hoping to get high honors on his oral exams. “If you’re talking about a disciplinarian, a student, a guy who really worked very, very, very hard on his speeches and his press conferences and really felt the importance of them, that this was a real performance and that he had to get it down just what he wanted to say and precisely, that was Nixon,” Buchanan recalled. “You could trust his ad-libbing because he thought about it beforehand,” Safire said. “It was as if he had a tape recorder in his head that warned him before he said something that would be a mistake.” Raymond Price, who would stay in the administration for the duration and headed the writing staff for two years, estimated that only one in twenty talks that Nixon gave were from a written text. “He was more comfortable without a text than with one,” he said. “We had what was called a ‘writing and research staff,’ not a speechwriting staff,” Price noted. “This was deliberate and partly because our writing was not all speeches and Nixon’s speeches were not all written.”

  On most occasions, what Nixon wanted from his writers were “suggested remarks,” two to three typed, double-spaced pages with statistics, historical references, juicy quotations, puns, jokes (“My staff was a little concerned today when I told them that tonight we were going to ‘turn on’ at the White House,” went one suggested joke for a ceremony unveiling a new exterior lighting system for the White House in November, 1970). One writer, Lee Huebner, who had a particular talent for them, described “suggested remarks” as “ornaments he would hang on the tree of his outline,” akin to a Chinese menu of items Nixon would choose from.

  “Whenever he was able to get the time to get to work on his remarks, he invariably used the staff suggestions largely to fuel his own thoughts, and he wound up developing a great deal of material from personal recollections and experience,” Keogh recalled.

  Of particular importance in the suggested remarks, Nixon thought, were anecdotes that he could weave into a speech. “Anecdotal material is the most important part of the speech,” he told Haldeman.

  An April 14 meeting of the writing and research staff turned into a discussion of the administration’s philosophical thrust. Buchanan said that it was a conservative White House, not a moderately progressive one. Price, Keogh, Safire, and another writer, Jamie Humes, disagreed: moderately progressive sounded about right to them. Price tried to bridge the divide. There is an old Chinese proverb, he said: He who wears two faces sees the entire horizon. It was an apt proverb for Nixon and his writers, and illustrates the ideologically and tonally diverse staff he had assembled. Nixon knew his writers’ philosophical predilections and he used them as needed. “Nixon was a reflective man, but he reflected those he wanted to reflect, when he wanted to reflect them,” Safire noted.

  If Price was the staff liberal and Safire the centrist, Buchanan was the conservative. He had been a twenty-eight-year-old editorial page writer at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat when he joined Nixon’s staff in early 1966. “It was merely Rose Mary Woods and me,” Buchanan recalled. He handled all of Nixon’s writing in the 1966 campaign. “My own relationship was very, very close with him,” Buchanan said. He would affectionately refer to Nixon as “the Old Man.” The word most often used to describe Buchanan was “pugnacious,” but he was quick with a hearty laugh. He kept the administration’s lines open to the conservative movement, and was wary of influences that he thought pushed the president toward liberalism. He had a sharp, confrontational sense of how to handle the media, prepared Nixon’s briefing book for press conferences, and was in charge of the daily news summary. His writing style was “to try to bring it to the concrete rather than these Latinate, abstract words and phrases,” Buchanan said. “I was called in when Nixon wanted a strong, tough, direct, pointed statement or speech.”

  Price, Safire, and Buchanan were Nixon’s big three, but the staff had several junior writers. Jamie Humes specialized in historical anecdotes. Lee Huebner had met Nixon in 1963, when he was with the Ripon Society, a liberal GOP group he had helped found. He worked for and traveled with Nixon during the 1964 campaign season. “Lee was our best guy on substance, bar none,” Price said. “The most complex [assignment] you could give to Lee, you knew it would be done right. A very first-rate mind, a very thoughtful guy, a very serious guy.” Perhaps the speechwriter with the most unusual background was William Gavin, who had been a high school teacher in Philadelphia in 1967 when he wrote a letter to Nixon encouraging him to run for president. It led to a lunch with Nixon’s friend Leonard Garment, and eventually to a writing spot on the staff. If Price, Buchanan, and Safire were, in Peggy Noonan’s formulation, “Murderer’s Row,” Gavin said, “I was the utility infielder.”

  In charge of the writing staff was James Keogh, a former Time reporter who had written a biography of Nixon in 1956. His arrival on the campaign after the 1968 Republican Convention marked a shift in the writers’ relationship with the candidate. They had had unfettered access to their principal, but once Nixon was officially the GOP nominee, Keogh was interposed as an executive editor. He had a good sense of how to handle the writers, though, Safire recalled, and rarely wrote himself.

  By June, Nixon felt that he needed to give a speech reaffirming his conservative credentials. His inaugural had been conciliatory and he had pursued a surprisingly progressive agenda both domestically, where tax reform had benefited low-income workers, and on the forei
gn front, where he was starting to withdraw troops from Vietnam (he had given a speech on May 14 laying out a number of peace proposals). Aside from a push for an anti-ballistic missile system, he had had surprisingly few run-ins with the progressives. “Richard Nixon realized he was in mortal danger of being perceived as a liberal,” Safire wrote. “Worse, he felt this false perception could lead to a weakening of America’s national will.”

  The president was concerned that a leftward drift would spur the peace movement at home and a feeling abroad that America’s resolve was weakening. He decided to use his June 4 commencement address at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs to dispel the notion that he had softened. He would send a shot across the bows of liberals and adversaries at home and abroad. On May 24, he dispatched Kissinger to brief Buchanan on what should go into the speech.

  This was fairly standard procedure. Sometimes Nixon would outline a speech with his writers, but as often he would have one of his inner circle, a Kissinger or Haldeman, give the writer guidance. “Sometimes he would have a firm idea of what he wanted to say,” Safire recalled. “‘Don’t deviate from this line, Safire. Don’t soften this.’ And we would give him back what he wanted. Other times he would…give a general theme. And then he would be able to get back to campaign speeches from years before—saying, ‘Remember when I talked about this? Get some of that feeling into it.’ So he would assign the general mood of the speech—‘Let’s be tough about this one,’ or ‘Let’s take them to the mountaintop.’ And then on specifics he would direct you to ‘Go see John Connally on this.’”