White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  By choosing Buchanan for the Air Force Academy speech, Nixon signaled that he wanted a blunt piece that would appeal to a conservative base that might be concerned that he was straying. Buchanan delivered. “It is open season on the armed forces,” he wrote in his first draft, dated May 25. “The military profession is derided in some of the ‘best’ circles. Patriotism is considered by some to be a backward practice of the uneducated and unsophisticated men.”

  Not wholly satisfied with Buchanan’s first draft, Nixon assigned the redraft (after a round of Kissinger editing) to Safire, a writer with a more gentle tone. Safire scrapped much of Buchanan’s draft, including the patriotism line, and shifted the pitch from a straight attack on supposed anti-military sentiment among the country’s elites to a broader indictment of what Safire styled the “new isolationists.”

  Safire sent Nixon a memo covering his third draft of the address giving his view of the speech. “The time is ripe for your own rhetorical MIRV*—a speech that explodes at several separate but close targets,” Safire wrote, citing seven purposes for the address, from rallying the air force cadets, to showing “the Kennedy crowd” that the Nixon administration could conjure its own villains, to demonstrating for the Russians that the United States would maintain a firm line on national security.

  Safire was summoned to Kissinger’s home to discuss the speech on Sunday, June 1. The national security adviser tried to dictate a rewrite. Safire refused. Negotiations ensued. “That may seem odd or improper,” Safire later wrote. “A speechwriter, one might think, is no policy setter, only an articulation aide whose highest duty is to reflect the desires of the President and his expert adviser. Not so. Nixon knew the predilections and biases of his writers, as well as their respective styles, and if he moved from right to center in writers, he knew what he was doing.”

  Nixon resurrected much of Buchanan’s original text, including the defense of patriotism, which he sharpened by substituting “fetish”: “Patriotism is considered by some to be a backward fetish of the uneducated and the unsophisticated,” he said in the final address. This was typical Nixon. “He did indeed weigh words. He was a pleasure to work with as a writer,” Safire recalled. “He was a real collaborator when it came to a speech and made you feel like a collaborator. So the speech-writers for Nixon were generally happy men. And, I should say, none of us went to jail.”

  Nixon was an aggressive and intelligent editor. “He would use that as a means of refining ideas and also on challenging policy things and so forth too,” Price later recalled. “He said, ‘If things don’t work on paper, they probably don’t work.’” Nixon’s edits would spill out from text and curl around the page. “The other writers knew I was reading Nixon’s comments because I was turning the page around clockwise,” Safire wrote.

  The Air Force Academy speech met with the predictable and sought reaction: The old, abrasive Nixon had reared his head. Here was “Nixon at his familiar but recently obscured worst,” The New Republic’s John Osborne wrote. “Here, too, was Nixon precisely as he intended to present himself.” The Detroit Free Press noted that while “the cries of outrage from the left will increase in the days to come,” it was reasonable to think that “Mr. Nixon knew that before he went to Colorado Springs.”

  “The accurate term to describe the reception to the President’s speech is controversial—not hostile,” Buchanan wrote in a memo to Nixon on June 6. “While [NBC news anchor Chet] Huntley was beside himself, [ABC News anchor] Howard K. Smith thought the President had done a national service.”

  At 11 am the next morning, Thursday, June 5, Nixon met at the Newporter Inn near his San Clemente, California, home with the big three writers, as well as Keogh, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, counsel Leonard Garment, and international trade adviser Peter Flanigan. He held forth on his reasons for taking such a belligerent tone in Colorado. “Put yourself in the Russians’ position,” he said. “All they hear in the U.S. is ‘no’ to the ABM and MIRV; ‘cut the defense budget by fifteen billion’; ‘pull out of Vietnam’; ‘the arrogance of power.’ That’s what they read in the papers and see on the television. Now, if all they were to hear from this administration is comments from me about how we really want peace, then they’d be likely to interpret it as weakness. We can’t let that happen.”

  He covered a breadth of topics. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman William J. Fulbright, a sharp Vietnam War critic, was “a fanatic—we don’t brief him fully,” Nixon said,* whereas Democratic leader Mike Mansfield “is different, we can brief him.”

  He scolded the writers for being too focused on the written press at the expense of television. He had announced his nomination of Warren Burger for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in prime time on May 21. In the past, he said, that kind of announcement would have been made at eleven o’clock in the morning so that it would be in both the morning and evening papers. “The hell with it,” he said. “This way, for eight minutes, forty million people saw it. Eighty percent of people make their minds up on TV.” He added: “On remarks—think of TV. Two minutes, something that will get ’em. And the writing press—forget ’em!”

  Later, in his memoirs, Nixon wrote that “Since the advent of television as our primary means of communication and source of information modern Presidents must have specialized talents at once more superficial and more complicated than those of their predecessors. They must try to master the art of manipulating the media not only to win in politics but in order to further the programs and causes they believe in; at the same time they must avoid at all costs the charge of trying to manipulate the media. In the modern presidency, concern for image must rank with concern for substance—there is no guarantee that good programs will automatically triumph.”

  “The President is very much concerned about the level of writing ability,” Bob Haldeman noted in talking points for himself dated September 2 for a meeting with Keogh. Nixon wanted to add a new, young writer, “who is not beaten down with eastern cynicism. He’s thinking of someone of the type of approach of Billy Graham or Norman Vincent Peale. He feels that the present writers are all now good on facts but not on heart.”

  Nixon also felt that the writers were not getting enough anecdotal material into his speeches. “What he is looking for is anecdotes, color, etc., perhaps a choice of options that the President can utilize in selecting some memorable phrases for each speech or remarks that he makes,” Haldeman’s notes stressed. “He is concerned that we turn out excellent intellectual prose, but that it’s dull. The point here is that you will agree, I’m sure, that no one remembers much of what’s said in a speech except the one or two colorful phrases that become quoted and repeated.”

  Nixon rarely issued these criticisms directly to his writers. “It was natural for him to be dissatisfied with a lot of things and especially—he had his own style because again he had been a champion debater from high school days on and he hardly ever used texts and so forth,” Price recalled. “He didn’t complain that way to us. He might have to Bob [Haldeman] but he would be more gentle, I think, in trying to coax and get us a little more in his style.

  “He would look at things differently on Tuesday than he would on Wednesday,” Price added. “He was a person of changing moods. Which he usually didn’t display very much, he kept them pretty much to himself but a lot of changing moods and satisfaction and dissatisfaction and so on. That was simply a fact of life.”

  Three days later, at a September 12 writing staff meeting, Keogh passed the word. “The President says he likes the substance, the language and all that, but he wants more parables, stories, anecdotes and similes,” he told the writers, spurring some wisecracking. “He needs the speechwriting team of Jesus and Aesop,” said Gavin, the former teacher. “With Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as staff assistants,” Keogh joked.

  In the 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon had campaigned on a promise to end the war in Vietnam, what came to be called his “secret” plan for peace. During nine months in office
he had sent mixed signals, giving a peace-focused speech on Vietnam in May, and the strongly worded speech in Colorado in June. All the while critics of the war voiced their opposition. A pair of non-violent, nationwide demonstrations—“Moratorium” days—were scheduled for October 15 and November 15. Nixon planned a speech to the nation on November 3, between the two protests, to show he would not be cowed.

  The president made sure that word leaked to the press that on the evening of October 15, as protestors circled the White House with candles, he was watching a football game—a display of what he called “cool contempt,” the message being that he had better things to do than pay attention to the marchers.* In fact, they were very much on his mind. “Don’t get rattled—don’t waver—don’t react,” he wrote across the top of the page that night as he started preparing the address.

  More than any modern president, Nixon carved time into his schedule for working on speeches, often spending long hours alone with his thoughts, scribbling on yellow legal pads. “For perhaps three or four days before a major speech, like the Inaugural or the State of the Union or a major foreign policy speech, I try to get totally away from the subject and to put it in the perspective of history—in terms of this country, its place in the world, what we mean,” he once told his top aides. For the November 3 speech, Nixon shunned his speechwriters entirely. In the early morning hours of October 22, he wrote in his notes: “They can’t defeat us militarily in Vietnam. They can’t break South Vietnam. Include a paragraph on why we are there. They cannot break us.”

  As Nixon worked in solitude, speculation built on what he would say. News reports talked about massive withdrawals and bombing reductions. Senate Republican leader Hugh Scott called for a unilateral cease-fire, and House GOP leader Gerald Ford said that all U.S. troops could be out of Vietnam by July. “The 30-minute address to be carried nationwide via television and radio might be used to announce U.S. troop withdrawals beyond the 60,000-man reduction already ordered,” The Washington Post reported.

  “Big problem building, as liberals have (very cleverly) shifted ground away from blasting [Nixon] to saying they’re with him,” Haldeman wrote in his diary. “The main result is a massive buildup of hopes for major breakthrough in November 3 speech. Problem is there won’t be one, and the letdown will be tremendous. Obvious they are intentionally building him up for the biggest possible fall…. Under the present situation, a massive adverse reaction could conceivably be developed the next day, and built up over ten days into the November 13–15 demonstrations with horrible results. No real way to stem this now.”

  On October 24, Nixon retreated to Camp David and worked twelve-to fourteen-hour days, redrafting different portions of the speech. Haldeman cleared most of Nixon’s schedule for the following week as he continued to refine it in Washington. He returned to Camp David on Halloween and again worked through the night. Around 4 am, he wrote a sentence asking that “the great silent majority of Americans” support him.

  In the 1968 campaign Nixon had talked about “quiet Americans,” the “quiet majority,” and “the silent center, the millions of people in the middle of the American political spectrum who do not demonstrate, who do not picket or protest loudly.” Vice President Spiro Agnew had in May argued that it was “time for America’s silent majority to stand up for its rights” and that “America’s silent majority is bewildered by irrational protest.”* But neither Nixon nor anyone else in the administration yet grasped that the phrase would endure. He later told Safire that if he had thought “silent majority” would be picked up, he would have capitalized it. When Safire first saw the line, it did not grab him either—no catch phrase, he thought, but no harm done.

  Nixon called Haldeman at eight o’clock on the morning of November 1 to tell him that the speech was finished. “The baby’s just been born!”

  Safire received a copy of the final text at 8:30 pm, a half hour before Nixon was scheduled to go on the air. He noticed a minor factual error in the peroration. “Fifty years ago in this very room and at this very desk, President Woodrow Wilson wrote words which caught the imagination of a war-weary world during World War One. He said: ‘This is the war to end wars.’” Safire, an expert on political etymology, knew that the phrase came from a book by H. G. Wells with that title, and that Wilson had probably never written it. Safire flagged the mistake for Haldeman, who told him that Nixon is “right down the hall from you, you go ahead in” and let him know. “Better hurry.”

  Nixon was in a cozy hideaway office he kept in the Executive Office Building, where he did a great deal of his work. Fifteen minutes before the most important speech of his presidency, Nixon must have been startled to hear that Woodrow Wilson’s big slogan was not his. “Not many people are as close a student of Wilson as you are,” Nixon said. “Leave it in. Let somebody prove he never wrote it.” Nevertheless, five minutes before the broadcast, Nixon called Safire to say that he would finesse the issue by crediting Wilson with having said the words rather than having written them.*

  Contrary to expectations, Nixon did not unveil conciliatory moves in his speech. He expounded what he called the “Nixon doctrine”: that the United States would keep its treaty commitments, provide allies a shield of its nuclear weapons, and that while it would provide economic and military assistance to countries whose freedom was threatened, those nations would primarily have to defend themselves. After laying out the history of the Vietnam conflict, and pointedly noting that he had been warned not to make the war his own, he argued that the United States needed to hang tough in Vietnam. That if he could not withdraw on his terms, there would be no withdrawal.

  And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support. I pledged in my campaign for the Presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge. The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed; for the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris.

  It was, Safire later wrote, “detailed, building a case a lawyer would.” This was a hallmark of the Nixon rhetorical style—“He was a logical student of persuasion. Painstakingly prepared,” Huebner recalled. Gavin added: “‘Let me make one thing perfectly clear’ was of course the famous thing. There was a reason he said that, because he liked clarity. He liked to lay the thing out.” Haldeman, in one of his “Talking Papers” on Nixon’s rhetorical style, wrote that “The most significant characteristic of the President’s speech style in his view is that he builds his speech like a building—a complete organization so that it marches. He builds one point on the other and they are all related.” When she put a Nixon speech into a reading copy, Rose Mary Woods would write them out in outline form, with different sections of paragraphs indented and numbered.

  On November 3, the television analysts, expecting a dramatic peace overture, were not persuaded. “Nothing of a substantial nature or a dramatic nature that is new,” CBS’s Eric Sevareid told viewers. “There wasn’t a thing new in this speech,” ABC’s Bill Lawrence said. “In his campaign he said he had a plan that would end the war and win the peace. He said that again tonight. I still don’t know where it is.”

  At the White House, Nixon dined alone in the Lincoln Sitting Room, and did not watch the television commentary. His daughter Tricia told him it was hostile. “They talked as if they had been listening to a different speech than the one you made,” she said. But better news was coming in: Haldeman reported that White House aides, in unsolicited reactions and calls to contacts, were getting positive initial results. Nixon was keyed up and directed the administration’s reaction: find out what editors are saying around the country; make sure in the morning to get out the story of wires and letters sent to the White House; criticize the networks for biased news coverage. “Then a plea,” Haldeman recorded in his diary: “if only do one thing get 100 vicious dirty calls to New York Times and Wash
ington Post about their editorials (even though no idea what they’ll be).”

  The public reaction exceeded Nixon’s expectations. The more than 50,000 telegrams and 30,000 letters set new records. An instant Gallup poll showed 77 percent approval. “Very few speeches actually influence the course of history,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. “The November 3 speech was one of them. Its impact came as a surprise to me; it was one thing to make a rhetorical appeal to the Silent Majority—it was another actually to hear from them.” The speech became a touchstone for Nixon. He would refer his writers to the November 3 speech as an example of the style he liked.

  The call-and-response between president and nation also served as an ideological pivot for Nixon and his administration. “Nixon always had a feeling that ‘folks’ were with him and were the majority, but he always felt the necessity of winning over the swing voter, the sophisticated folks or folksily sophisticated,” Safire noted. “The realization that the old Nixon ‘enemies’ and the new, all lumped together, did not pose a great threat to Nixon’s majority, but might even help solidify it, caused a sea change in the Nixon mood, from an analytical how-do-we-run-against-them to a satisfied run-’em-out-of-town.”

  It was neither a conscious nor an immediate change, but it was marked. The new mood, Safire wrote, was “superpartisan,” building a majority by harping on the unpopularity of the minority. “‘Bring us together,’* never the Nixon watchword, was used to bring ‘us’ together—the like-minded, the forgotten Americans, the ‘good, decent, taxpaying, law-abiding people’—and the best way to do that was to frequently point to the difference between the quiet movers and the noisy ‘movement.’”

  Nixon called Safire on November 4 to talk about the “Silent Majority” speech. I hope you don’t plan to write all of your speeches yourself, Safire told his boss. “No, thanks,” the president replied with a chuckle. “I did write this one all by myself, you know, but that’s the last one I’m going to do alone for a long time.” But it was a grudging admission, not one of deep satisfaction with his speechwriters.