“We have got to discuss the speech writing problem again and see if we can’t work a way out,” Haldeman wrote in a “personal and confidential” memo to Keogh on November 7. An August speech on welfare, which “had strong input from Safire, who does have considerable ability for a good phrase or cheer line,” had worked well. And several speeches on which Nixon had been able to work closely with Price had worked well too, but in those cases Nixon had translated them into “his own method of speaking. The problem is that even Ray does not seem to develop the knack of putting those same directions into his own original product so that the President doesn’t have to spend time with him,” Haldeman noted, adding, “He feels this need very strongly.”
In particular, Haldeman noted, a September 18 speech to the UN General Assembly and one on Latin America (likely his address to the Inter American Press Association on October 31) “were fine from the standpoint of content, but both were deadly from the standpoint of having to deliver them.”
Keogh replied three days later: The United Nations and Latin American speeches were dull because “they were produced under the heavy hand of Henry Kissinger,” he told Haldeman. “In the case of the Latin America speech, Henry put Ray through so many drafts with short deadlines and with such insistence on his own organization and language that Ray said later, ‘I’m sick of being Henry’s stenographer—if we can’t change this pattern he’ll have to get a new one.’* If this office is to have responsibility for these speeches then we should have control of them.” Keogh added: “We continue to work almost entirely in the dark as to what the President wants in specific cases—which makes personalizing difficult.”
Nixon thought the writers were talented but not precisely in tune with what he wanted: they were oriented more toward the written than the spoken word, as he had pointed out to them. And there were also in Nixon’s attitude hints that he suspected the writers of being—as writers—too much a part of the elites, more interested in egghead arguments over gut appeals that would reach regular folk but that his writers might think lowbrow. “Feels our people are all too intellectual and are ashamed of using the devices and approaches that move people,” Haldeman noted in his diary. “Need is to reach folks, not intelligentsia.”
“I know how you and Ray hate those letters from folks, but the polls show that’s what the people remember,” the president told Safire once, explaining why he was inserting into a speech quotes from letters to the White House.
Nixon told Haldeman that Safire “is too damn smart to want to, to want to just put out a little emotional schmaltz.” He said of Price that “it repels him to put in something that is going to grab people.”
“The President has the feeling that we still have a major problem regarding the need for a writer in Kissinger’s shop to help on speeches,” Haldeman’s “Talking Paper” for December 15 noted. “The result we get out of Kissinger now is too turgid.” Nixon wanted a full-time speechwriter in the shop.
Preparation for the 1970 State of the Union address had begun at what Keogh called a “bull session” in mid-August in San Clemente. Nixon wanted a thematic speech rather than a “laundry list,” he told his speechwriters. Discussion picked up again in mid-November when Nixon met with them in the Executive Office Building. He repeated his desire for a thematic State of the Union. “Why do we have to have all that dull stuff about agriculture and cesspools?” he said. “I want an idea speech rather than a pragmatic one. Let’s get the dull subjects out of the way in a paragraph toward the beginning.” He leaned back and put his feet up on a desk. “Good God,” he said with a frown. “Agriculture in a State of the Union isn’t worth a damn.”
Raymond Price was given the assignment to write the speech, which Nixon said should focus on environment, inflation, and crime. The speech was scheduled for January 22, and Price handed in his first draft on Friday, January 9. Nixon reviewed the speech and told Haldeman that it was an eloquent disaster—no substance, no applause lines, no organization. “Led to a new harangue for a speechwriter who can write a Nixon speech,” Haldeman wrote in his diary. “Tough. Hard for Ray to hit it right when he has no direct contact with [Nixon] and no real guidance.”
Price had another excuse. Powered by White House doctor–prescribed amphetamines—“greenies”—he had pulled two consecutive all-nighters. “I’d get more done sometimes working through the night,” he recalled. Working for a third day without sleep, Price saw that his desk was simultaneously in front of him and against a far wall. It was “complete spatial disorientation.” The desk was “in front of me but I also saw it over there. And this was a little disorienting.” A young aide, Richard Blumenthal, got Price home, where he caught up on sleep. Nevertheless, the hallucinations “took several days to settle down,” Price remembered. “I would still walk the corridors and see corridors on right angles where there were not. It was sort of unsettling.” Even months later he got occasional echoes of the experience.*
Starting Monday, January 12, Haldeman limited Nixon’s schedule so that he could work on the speech. Nixon holed up again. The solitude did not induce productivity: he spent Monday and Tuesday engaging in what Haldeman characterized as “forced procrastination.” “All this hemming and hawing about getting to work on a major speech is pure Nixon,” Haldeman said. “I tried to develop a basic plan for handling it more efficiently but found it was usually best just to clear the decks and let the process run its course. There did not seem to be any way to change Nixon’s personal modus operandi.”
By Wednesday, Nixon was at Camp David, and after puttering through the morning he finally focused, asking for Price to produce a new section on the environment, Safire one on inflation, and Buchanan one on crime. He wrote notes to himself: “Lift spirit of people…Pithy, memorable phrases. Need for a name—Square Deal, Fair Deal, New Deal, New Frontier, Great Society.” He stayed at Camp David until Saturday, sleeping late and then working deep into the evenings.
Nixon returned to the White House that night, January 17, and continued to work on the speech. He lit a fire in the Lincoln Sitting Room fireplace—which was blocked up. The resulting alarm caused a scramble of activity, but when everything was cleared, Nixon stayed up working until two thirty. “I love the smell,” he said of the lingering smoke.
He finished his work on the speech on Wednesday, January 21, the day before he was to deliver it. “We can be the best clothed, best fed, best housed people in the world, enjoying clean air, clean water, beautiful parks, but we could still be the unhappiest people in the world without an indefinable spirit—the lift of a driving dream which has made America, from its beginning, the hope of the world,” he told the Congress.
On April 20, 1970, Nixon surprised the nation in a speech broadcast from San Clemente by announcing that he planned to withdraw 150,000 of the 434,000 troops remaining in Vietnam. It was a public relations triumph because he had arranged for leaks to both The New York Times and The Washington Post saying that the next withdrawal would be in the 40,000 to 50,000 range.
But the seeds were already planted for his next major speech, ten days later, which would have the opposite effect. In Hawaii on April 19, after meeting with the astronauts who had safely returned from the troubled Apollo 13 mission, Nixon had had breakfast with Admiral John McCain, Jr., the head of U.S. military forces in the Pacific, whose son, a navy pilot, was a prisoner of war in Hanoi. Admiral McCain spent an hour and forty minutes discussing Vietnam and Cambodia. The Cambodian government was in danger of falling to the North Vietnamese, he said. If Cambodia fell, it would threaten Vietnamization, the South Vietnamese government—the entire war effort.
The arguments were not new to Nixon, and he found them persuasive. Over the next week and a half, Nixon and Kissinger plotted a joint United States–South Vietnam strike across the border, assaulting North Vietnamese pockets that the U.S. military had been secretly bombing for thirteen months. It was a week in which Nixon’s darker, weirder side was on display as the enormity of the dec
ision bore down on him: jags of isolation, multiple viewings of Patton, late-night phone calls to Kissinger and other aides. “Our peerless leader has flipped out,” the national security adviser told his staff on the evening of Friday, April 24.
The move would require a speech. “This was not the time, the President was sure, for Ray Price’s uplift or my tightrope walking,” Safire later recalled. Pat Buchanan was the man to provide the proper slant for the speech.
Kissinger had prepared a draft, but Nixon did not like it. He dictated ten or twelve pages to Buchanan, “and said marry this, get this portion of what Kissinger says here, get this in,” Buchanan recalled. It was typical Nixon. “Anybody that worked with him on a major speech would find that you’re going through draft after draft after draft and it’s essentially being turned and twisted and moved around and in the end it’s far more him than it is a speechwriter,” Buchanan recalled. They went through eight drafts, with Nixon working alone on the speech until after midnight in the Lincoln Sitting Room—more calls to Kissinger—and then to bed. After an hour’s sleep, he was up and working again, returning to bed at 5:30 am.
Kissinger briefed the staff on the talking points the evening of the speech. Safire, who asked a number of pointed questions during the session, piped up: “Doesn’t this fly in the face of the Nixon Doctrine?” Should the Cambodians not be defending themselves? “We wrote the goddamn Doctrine and we can change it!” Kissinger shot back, probably half kidding. “We never said U.S. troops would never be used.”
“The speech gave it to the people ‘with the bark on,’ as Nixon liked to say—patriotic, angry, stick-with-me-or-else, alternately pious and strident—and he would soon be criticized for heightening and harshening the crisis with his pitch,” Safire said.
“If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world,” Nixon told the nation on April 30, in the speech’s best-remembered line. If the November 3 speech had drained “the venom from the protest,” Price later wrote, Nixon “did the opposite with his speech announcing the incursion into Cambodia.” Campus reaction was swift and vociferous, including at Kent State University in Ohio, where four days later national guardsmen clashed with demonstrators, leaving four students dead.
Foreign policy speechwriting remained an issue throughout 1970. The National Security Council had tried to recruit Lawrence Eagleburger, a former Kissinger aide who had the previous fall joined the U.S. mission to NATO. They had also sought Philip Quigg, an editor with Foreign Affairs. Staffers like Winston Lord and—until his resignation over Cambodia—Anthony Lake helped prepare initial drafts; but Nixon wanted someone who could handle the process through the final draft.
“My monthly question,” Haldeman wrote to Kissinger aide Al Haig on May 5: “What’s happened regarding a foreign policy writer?” On September 14 he wrote, “It is getting kind of ridiculous now, we still have to get a foreign policy writer.” And on October 1, “I hate to keep riding on the same subject, but it keeps coming up. We still have to get a foreign policy writer on your staff.”
Nixon’s speech to be given to the UN General Assembly on October 23 was twice as long as the president had asked for. “The first draft was worse than nothing at all. It was the usual laundry list,” Haldeman’s “Talking Paper” for a meeting with Haig said. “Apparently there is no way to get State or the NSC to understand the value of a short speech. There is apparently a lack of understanding of the fact that we are in a powerful position and we should act that way.”
Haldeman’s repeated queries came to nothing. The NSC never hired a speechwriter, and instead stuck with the part-time work of staffers such as Lord. On November 15, Nixon made notes to himself. The third point on his list was that “My speech & idea group is inadequate—but part of the problem is that I have spent too little time with them.” By December, Nixon got the idea of having a writer attend all of his meetings with an eye toward, as an aide wrote, “‘the little things’—the witticisms and catch-phrases, the expressions, the poignant moments…all of which when occurring in the Presidential environment reveal in a variety of ways the warm and generous and human side of the man who serves as President.” The anecdotalist would then make sure that the vignettes were placed in the media. Enlisted were Dick Moore—an aide who during the campaign had specialized in gathering local color, and in the White House occasionally wrote or contributed to speeches—and Safire. The rest of the writing staff was soon recruited.
After Keogh left at the end of 1970, Nixon selected Price to take his place as top man in the writing department. Price hired several new writers. One was John Andrews, a young navy veteran who had been working for White House press secretary Ron Ziegler. Andrews was a Christian Scientist. “He would come reliably along about October with the sniffles, which would lead into full-blown walking pneumonia and keep it until some time in May,” speechwriter Noel Koch, who started around the same time, recalled. “But John was a superb writer, he was very, very good and a real clean desk guy.”
Andrews was conversant with the Bible, and brought some of the emotional “lift” Nixon sought. He recalled that Kissinger said of him that when Nixon was in a patriotic or flag-waving mood, Andrews was the right ghost, but that if Nixon had to go against his own grain, then Andrews was the wrong choice because his instincts jibed with Nixon’s.
“Which wasn’t particularly a compliment to Nixon or to me, but I didn’t take it amiss,” he said. “I was pretty dazzled by rubbing elbows with Henry Kissinger.” He quickly became a Nixon favorite. “He’s got a sense of contemporary, up-to-date, sharp quick wit,” the president told Haldeman in February.
The new year brought another State of the Union and another round of Nixon grousing. On January 12 he called Ehrlichman. “Tell everyone there’s to be no contact with the president for the next two days,” Nixon said. He wanted time to work alone. “I’ve read every inaugural speech ever given. And I’ve read many of the State of the Union speeches. None of them that were over three thousand words were any good.”
For the meat of the speech, Nixon was to unveil his plan for a new federalism and reorganization of the government. He planned to reduce the cabinet agencies from twelve to eight, which he viewed as the maximum number of secretaries that a president could have reporting to him. He wanted to reduce the number of social aid programs, too, replacing them with block grants of money. “We’ve been searching for a slogan,” Nixon told Price. “What I’ve decided on—it’s going to shock the people like yourself, the purists, the intellectuals—it’s the ‘New American Revolution.’”
“The intellectuals.” Again, Nixon was suggesting that some of his writers were too highbrow to appreciate the phrase, which the president thought would appeal to his silent majority. Nixon had awakened at 3:30 am with the idea. (Unlike “silent majority,” “New American Revolution” was initially capitalized—but did not last nearly as long.)
On January 19, three days before the speech, Haldeman aide Larry Higby sent Safire and others a memo asking for “a list of superlatives” for spinners. The missive had HIGH-PRIORITY stamped in red capitals. Safire thought this a bit heavy-handed. “Somebody is using your name to circulate a supposedly high-priority memo that is an hilarious satire on our public relations efforts,” Safire wrote back. “It is a clever puton—calling for a ‘list of superlatives’—but I think you will want to track down and burn any copies in case some historian a century from now sees it and does not realize it was intended to be tongue-in-cheek.” Nevertheless, Safire sent Higby nine different superlative descriptions of the speech on the following day.
At 9 pm on Friday, January 22, 1971, Nixon extemporized a quick tribute and moment of silence for Senator Richard Russell, the Georgia Democrat who had died the previous day. Then he congratulated the winners and commiserated with the losers of a recent se
t of competitive congressional leadership elections. “I know how both of you feel,” he said to general laughter. He went on to lay out “six great goals” on his legislative agenda, encompassing his “New American Revolution.” “If we act boldly—if we seize this moment and achieve these goals—we can close the gap between promise and performance in American government,” he said. “We can bring together the resources of this nation and the spirit of the American people.”
Two days later, on Sunday, January 24, Nixon called Safire at home at 6:40 pm to chew over the speech. “How’d you feel about only twelve cheer lines in the State of the Union?” he asked. “Three of them were yours, five were mine and four were Ray’s—he doesn’t like them you know.”
Talk turned to Rosenman’s comment that Nixon had made television his medium. “FDR only averaged three or four fireside chats a year, you know,” the president said. “But he’s right. It’s okay to try and deal with the press people, but you have to go directly to the people. That’s the way I played the State of the Union—I didn’t work to the Congress, I went after the TV audience.”
Discussion in mid-November 1971 focused on whether Nixon should speak at the AFL-CIO’s annual convention in Bal Harbour, Florida. AFL-CIO chief George Meany had been harshly critical of Nixon and the president did not want to offer him a presidential appearance. On the other hand, Nixon thought that he could appeal to the blue-collar union members or, failing that, put on a “Daniel into the Lions’ Den” show for the rest of the country: the solitary president bravely facing his enemies in their lair.
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 24