White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  Price turned around the president’s morning joke about Agnew. You cannot resign, he said. Agnew is not equipped to do the job. Your foreign policy work is too important to entrust to Agnew. When Nixon twice more pressed later in the day, Price deflected him with the same response. If anything would snap Nixon out of his funk, it would be matters of world policy. The more Price talked about that, the more Nixon seemed to come back to life. He decided to go for a swim. Price accompanied him, fearful that in his unraveled state, the president might trip or hit his head and drown.

  Price was relieved when he watched the speech in his office that night to see that the president got through in a calm, authoritative manner, not betraying the emotional turmoil and self-doubt he had revealed earlier.

  “In any organization, the man at the top must bear the responsibility,” Nixon said.

  That responsibility, therefore, belongs here, in this office. I accept it. And I pledge to you tonight, from this office, that I will do everything in my power to ensure that the guilty are brought to justice and that such abuses are purged from our political processes in the years to come, long after I have left this office.

  The first Senate Watergate Hearings were gaveled into session on May 18, 1974. A steady and damning flow of revelations hit the front pages of the newspapers: Dean alleged that the president knew of the cover-up. Watergate investigators found a memo addressed to Ehrlichman detailing plans to break into the offices of a psychiatrist whom Daniel Ellsberg, the defendant in the Pentagon Papers case, had seen. The crisis reached a new level on July 13 when former White House aide Alexander Butterfield publicly revealed the existence of the White House taping system. Ten days later, Nixon refused to turn the tapes over to the Senate committee or to Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who had been appointed to investigate.

  Nixon scheduled another speech on Watergate for mid-August and John Andrews was tapped to help write it. The president was increasingly isolated, even in the White House, so Andrews was sent to Kissinger and Ziegler for guidance. Kissinger told Andrews that the key idea was contrition. Citing John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, Kissinger said that the American people wanted to think well of their president and believe him. This will work again, Kissinger said.

  “Contrition is bullshit,” Ziegler told him. “This president has nothing to apologize for. This president will not grovel to the American people.” The scandal was a cooked-up plot by Nixon’s enemies.

  Andrews was reminded of FDR’s famous “weave them together” dictum. He consulted with Price. “The answer is you couldn’t make a coherent speech out of it,” Andrews recalled. He ended up sending in a draft that leaned too far toward Kissinger’s contrition.

  On July 12, Safire had sent Nixon a memo on how to regain the initiative. He advised against “constant contrition” (“you could never humiliate yourself enough for your critics, and a steady stream of apologies would only dissipate the faith of the people who believe in you”), a “counterattack” (“It would mean three years of trench warfare, interminable investigations, and probably a black eye in the light of history”) or hunkering down and trying to ignore the whole affair.

  Instead, Safire argued for a tone of personal redemption: that Nixon, having learned the lessons from Watergate, should become a reformed sinner who can save the rest of the country. “The great lesson of Watergate,” Safire wrote his old boss, “is what happens when a nation is driven by a philosophy of ‘us against them’—when partisanship leads to the fear of excessive counter-partisanship and when men in both camps think they see a higher law than the written law.” Watergate and the unrest of the 1960s were of a piece, Safire suggested that Nixon say. Nixon should position himself as wiser for having been caught up in the “us-against-them” fever, and willing to lead the country back to a level of respectful discourse. He said that the president should pledge the remainder of his term to “creative controversy”—respectful debate about big issues.

  In his speech on August 15, Nixon again took “full responsibility” for the Watergate abuses, claiming that he had no prior knowledge of the crimes or the cover-up, and said that he wanted full disclosure, though he could not give up the tapes for reasons of protecting presidential executive privilege.

  As we look at Watergate in a longer perspective, we can see that its abuses resulted from the assumption by those involved that their cause placed them beyond the reach of those rules that apply to other persons and that hold a free society together. The notion that the end justifies the means proved contagious. Thus, it is not surprising, even though it is deplorable, that some persons in 1972 adopted the morality that they themselves had rightly condemned and committed acts that have no place in our political system…. But ultimately, the answer does not lie merely in the jailing of a few overzealous persons who mistakenly thought their cause justified their violations of the law. Rather…it requires that we learn once again to work together, if not united in all of our purposes, then at least united in respect for the system by which our conflicts are peacefully resolved and our liberties maintained.

  Five days later, Safire praised the speech in his Times column, calling it a “thoughtful speech” and critiquing his own paper for using “irrelevant but effective” arguments to attack Nixon. “Take it from a President who, tempered in the fires of excessive partisanship, has become far more temperate,” Safire wrote. “He has found that the future of creative controversy ‘lies in a commitment by all of us to show a renewed respect for the mutual restraints that are the mark of a free and a civilized society.’”

  He did not mention his July memo to Nixon.*

  Watergate moved on through its grim and shocking—to those within White House as well as those without—revelations. October brought the “Saturday Night Massacre.” Nixon fired Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor, and abolished his office, which led to the resignations of Attorney General Elliott Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus. “People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook,” Nixon said in a question-and-answer session with Associated Press editors in November. “Well, I am not a crook.”† In December, an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap was discovered in one of the subpoenaed tapes.

  Huebner was acquainted with Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein and Gergen knew Bob Woodward, the other half of the reporting team that had stayed on the Watergate story when other reporters let it go. Huebner and Gergen would run into each other in the hallway and say, guess what question I was asked today? “Journalists are always saying, ‘Who’s your source at the White House?’” Huebner recalled. “In this case it was, ‘Who’s your source in the press?’” By the time of the Saturday Night Massacre, Huebner was starting to suspect how high the scandal reached. When he was offered a job in New York that week, he leaped at the opportunity. He left the White House staff in January 1974. He would go on to be the publisher for fourteen years of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune.

  Andrews had resigned in December 1973, disgusted with events, and feeling “soiled” to have been a party to them. “I was not effective anymore,” he recalled. “I increasingly seemed unable to earn my pay every day. I couldn’t get up for the intense intellectual and emotional involvement that it takes to effectively put words in the mouth of the president of the United States. It got to be where I didn’t want to be part of it anymore.” In 1998, he was elected to the Colorado state senate, where he served two terms.

  Spring and summer brought the shocking tape transcripts, setbacks in the Supreme Court, and the wheels of impeachment. “Emotions ran high during the final days, as each week brought a new round of mortar shells into the White House compound, and we lived on adrenaline, counterattacking an increasingly expanding field of attackers,” recalled John Coyne, who had joined the writing staff in October after his previous position as an Agnew speechwriter disappeared with the vice president. “But the context was very different. It was no longer a matter of real or imaginary revolutionary
threats. The context now was the survival of one man, and few of us, no matter how rabid, could quite believe Dan Rather was a Weatherman.”

  A few minutes before 6:30 pm on Thursday, August 1, 1974, Raymond Price arrived at the office of Al Haig, Haldeman’s successor as White House chief of staff. It was a strategy meeting on how to handle the impending articles of impeachment. Others drifted in, including Buchanan, Gergen, and writer Ken Khachigian, who had joined the staff as Buchanan’s assistant in 1971 and had become a speechwriter in 1973. Haig arrived fifteen minutes late and announced that the meeting was to organize for a “total mobilization” against impeachment. He unveiled organizational charts detailing how the different White House staffers would be deployed: strategy, rapid reaction, task forces addressing each article of impeachment—Price would lead the task force combating Article I, pertaining to Watergate and the cover-up.

  After about three quarters of an hour, the meeting broke up. Price was outside Haig’s office chatting when the chief of staff’s secretary, Muriel Hartley, quietly told him that Haig wanted him back inside. “We need a resignation speech,” Haig told Price. The previous hour had been a facade. Nixon had decided that the release of a tape from June 23, 1972—the “smoking gun” tape on which he ordered that the CIA be brought into the cover-up—would make his position untenable. He would announce his resignation on Monday, August 5. He had dictated notes to Haig to pass on to Price: He would concede that he no longer had the political support necessary to govern, and acknowledge a mistake, but did not, as Nixon later recalled it, “want Price to write a groveling mea culpa.”

  Price started working on the speech on Friday in secret: no Nixon decision was final until he had announced it, and this one required the utmost discretion while there was still doubt. In late July, he had hired a new assistant, a young lawyer named Ben Stein, the son of Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Herbert Stein, and a devoted Nixon loyalist. Not knowing Stein well enough to trust him with such a secret, Price created make-work assignments for him, at one point telling him to write up a draft of a speech for the president announcing that he would not resign.

  As he wrote, Price started to have doubts: Maybe the June 23 tape was not as damaging as advertised. Buchanan had not yet seen a transcript of the tape either, so the two writers convened in Haig’s office late that afternoon with Haig aide George Joulwan and White House Watergate counsel Fred Buzhardt. Price and Buchanan passed the pages of the transcript between them. Price shook his head quietly. Buchanan banged his clenched fist on the conference table, yelling: “Jesus Christ.”

  Saturday brought word that Nixon would not resign. He would release the transcripts to the public and address the country on Monday, but would hold off on resignation until he saw how things went. The president was now determined to see the constitutional process through to the end. He wanted the speech to include a pledge that he would testify at his impeachment trial, answering any questions the senators put to him. Price was distraught. Their congressional liaison and allies on the Hill had already told them that the votes were not there for Nixon to survive. Better to end it quickly, Price thought.

  Haig called Price as the writer tried to switch gears to draft a steadfast speech. The president wanted him at Camp David the next day. Then Haig asked: Did he want anyone else along? Buchanan, Price replied. Nixon had viewed Buchanan and Price as the heart and soul, respectively, of the administration. Now Price was hoping that they could sway their boss.

  The two men met on Sunday morning at Buchanan’s office and Price found that his old ideological rival had shifted positions: Yes, the Old Man would have to go eventually, but there was no reason not to play it out. That way there would be no nagging questions later for Nixon as to whether it was avoidable. But with no resignation, they wondered about the need for a speech. The president agreed. At Camp David, Haig told the assembled aides that Nixon was holding open the possibility of resignation, but would see how the Monday release played.

  The transcripts exploded on Monday, closing off Nixon’s options. Sitting in his Executive Office Building hideaway with a yellow legal pad on Tuesday, August 6, he wrote: “Resignation Speech” across a fresh sheet. It would be on Thursday night.

  “We’ll need a thousand words,” Haig told Price.

  “As I believe you know, I think this has been a sad but necessary decision in the circumstances,” Price told Nixon in a cover memo on the first draft of the speech on Wednesday. “But I do hope you’ll leave office as proud of your accomplishments here as I am proud to have been associated with you, and to have been and remain a friend. God bless you; and He will.”

  They worked down the hall from each other that day, with Nixon in his hideaway office. Things had come full circle from their collaboration on his inaugural to their working together on his departure. The president contributed key lines—“I have never been a quitter. To leave office is abhorrent to every instinct in my body.” He included a favorite Teddy Roosevelt quote about the man in the arena “who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievements and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” Price persuaded him to trim the opening—“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better”—lest Nixon be accused, again, of belligerence in defeat.

  Elsewhere in the building, the writers milled about in a daze. “We wander from office to office drinking, watching the blanket coverage on television,” Coyne wrote. “The EOB has filled up with wandering people. Ben Stein, not a drinker, walks by carrying an open bottle of scotch. It’s the first time we can remember seeing a Nixon staffer walking through the White House compound with an open bottle.” Safire wandered through both as commiserating former colleague and as columnist seeking details “for history.”

  The writing staff had been pumping out speeches for friendly members of Congress to give on the House floor. Minutes before Nixon was supposed to go on the air, Coyne heard a solitary typewriter click-clacking down the hall. Finding someone still writing, Coyne put his hand on their shoulder. “Look,” he said, “it’s over.”

  Nixon’s staff assembled on the morning of August 9, many in tears. He rambled a farewell to the White House staff in which he talked about his mother (“she will have no books written about her, but she was a saint”), his father (“they would have called him sort of a, sort of a little man, common man”), his own inadequacies (“I’m not educated, but I do read books”), and the ups and downs of life (“only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain”). Appropriately, the speech was extemporaneous. It was pure Nixon.

  SEVEN

  “Go Back and Give Me One

  Speech, Not Two Speeches”

  AUGUST 5, 1974

  As the Nixon administration was collapsing, one man was tucked into the Executive Office Building trying to generate a few laughs. Robert Orben had occasionally helped out Vice President Gerald Ford with “upfront,” as he called it, or jokes to kick off speeches. And Ford was scheduled to take a twelve-day trip through California and the West.

  On the afternoon of August 5, Orben was in the office of Robert Hartmann, Ford’s gruff chief of staff and head speechwriter. He spent two hours as Hartmann was intermittently summoned by phone call or a knock on the door. When Hartmann would return, he kept alluding to “If we go across the street…”

  “Which street are you talking about, Bob?” Orben finally asked. “West Executive Avenue, or Seventeenth Street?”

  West Executive Avenue was the narrow road that separated the Executive Office Building from the White House, while 17th Street ran along the building’s opposite side. What Orben was jokingly asking was whether the Ford crew was on the verge of ascending to power, or getting swept out with the current crowd.

  Implied was that Orben would be part of the “we” going across the street. He was a novel choice. Tall
and balding, with a crew cut and a quick laugh, Orben had spent most of his life in show business, principally in comedy. But he had a sharp sense of what worked in speeches, especially for Gerald Ford. Orben had first encountered Ford in 1968, when the then-Republican House leader was scheduled to speak at the Gridiron Club Dinner, the regular black-tie spring fête where the Beltway’s political and media elites drink and dine and laugh. There were skits performed, and a main speaker from each party was expected to amuse the diners.

  That year, Ford was scheduled opposite Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who was running hard for the presidency. Facing the prospect of being overshadowed by the witty and garrulous Humphrey, Ford sent Hartmann to Hollywood for aid bearing two names. One was George Murphy, a Republican senator who had been a Hollywood actor, and would know where to look for a humorist with GOP sympathies. Murphy sent Hartmann to comedian Red Skelton, who passed him on to a producer, who passed him on to gag writer Bob Orben. The other name on Hartmann’s list was a former Barry Goldwater speech-writer: Bob Orben.

  Ford was the surprise hit of the 1968 Gridiron Club Dinner. “Let me assure the distinguished Vice President of the United States that I have absolutely no designs on his job,” Ford said, to great laughter. “I’m not at all interested in the vice presidency. I love the House of Representatives despite the long, irregular hours. Sometimes, though, when it’s late and I’m tired and hungry on that long drive home to Alexandria, as I go past 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I do seem to hear a little voice say, ‘If you lived here, you’d be home now.’”

  Now, six years later, the joke seemed prophetic. Before he flew back to New York City that night, Orben was approached by a network news correspondent. What’s going on, Bob? Why are you here? Orben responded: I’m just a writer, what do I know?

  Watching the news that night, Orben got a chuckle when the reporter announced on the news that something must be afoot, as Ford had brought a writer down from New York. What does he know? Orben said, nudging his wife. He could not imagine Richard Nixon leaving the White House voluntarily. The president would go down fighting.