The situation was evolving quickly. During a break in meetings the next day, Tuesday, August 6, Ford told Hartmann to start thinking about what he should say at a swearing-in—nothing fancy, that was not his style.
“How much time do we have?” Hartmann asked.
“Two or three days—maybe less,” Ford said. “It will probably all be over in seventy-two hours.”
Ford knew that he could count on Hartmann, one of his closest aides, to produce words appropriate to the occasion. A native of Rapid City, South Dakota, Hartmann had gotten his bachelor’s degree at Stanford and then stayed in California. He reported for the Los Angeles Times for twenty-five years, excepting a World War II navy stint, before leaving in 1964. Never abashed about his politics, or anything else, Hartmann had become a staffer to the House Republican Conference in 1966, growing close to Ford, the House GOP leader. When Ford accepted Nixon’s 1973 vice-presidential appointment, he brought Hartmann along as chief of staff.
That appointment, Ford came to conclude, was ill-advised: Hartmann was a capable manager of neither men nor an office. He was, to put it mildly, gruff. Ford called him “brusque.” Short, ruddy, somewhat pudgy, with a raspy, growly voice and matching temperament, Hartmann gave the appearance of an old-school newspaper editor. He smoked a pipe and had a penchant for bourbon. He proudly kept on his desk as a paperweight a piece of carborundum used to abrade steel. He saw himself as serving a similar purpose for the vice president.
“Bob liked to give…the impression that he was tougher and harder to get along with” than he was, remembered Jack Marsh, a conservative former Democratic member of Congress who, like Hartmann, Ford would name as counselor. “Beneath that was a very interesting and a very talented, able person. But he used the brusque approach at times in order to get attention or to let people know, I think, who was boss.” Marsh was one of the few people who saw through Hartmann’s crust.
“Bob Hartmann may have more enemies than any other man in Washington,” The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn later wrote in a lengthy Sunday Style section profile. “It’s hard to find anybody who, once safely ‘on background,’ won’t have something nasty to say about him.” The nickname Hartmann cultivated for himself was SOB—“Sweet Ol’ Bob.”
Ford described his aide as “suspicious of everyone.” In August 1974, his suspicions were directed against the die-hard Nixonites, or as he referred to them, “the Praetorians.” To Hartmann, they were trying to hold onto power and push the Nixon agenda or their own sinister designs. Every slight was the calculated work of the Praetorians. He made his views plain to the incoming president. “You don’t suspect ill motives of anyone until you’re kicked in the balls three times,” Hartmann told his boss. “As a human being, that’s a virtue. As a president, it’s a weakness.”
Hartmann might have seemed an unlikely match for the open, easygoing, friendly Gerald Ford but, Ford later recalled, he had “an uncanny ability to craft a sentence or phrase so that it expressed my sentiments.” At three o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, August 7, Hartmann’s alarm clock went off. With his wife Roberta asleep, he set a pot of coffee to boil and started concentrating on the task at hand. He jotted words and phrases on a scratch pad: “take charge,” meaning that Ford would immediately have to convey the authority of his new office; “legitimacy,” a recognition of the fact that Ford—appointed under the terms of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to replace Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1973—had never been on a national ballot. Finally he wrote: “Truth is the glue,” a phrase denoting the polestar by which the new president would steer the ship of state.
Hartmann slipped a sheet of paper into his typewriter and started with one of Ford’s favorite biblical passages. “The Bible upon which my hand just rested was opened to Proverbs, third chapter, the fifth and sixth verses,” Hartmann typed. “I learned these verses many years ago, and have often said them as a prayer, as I do now: Trust in the Lord, etc.”
False start. Hartmann tried again. “The oath I have just taken is the same oath that was taken by George Washington and by every President under the Constitution…”
Now he was rolling.
“It is difficult to express, but I still am haunted by the feeling that some unseen hand was guiding mine that morning,” Hartmann later wrote. “Is there such a thing as inspiration? Can a ghost have a ghost? I don’t know.”
The following day, Ford picked out the lynchpin phrase of the speech. Hartmann had imagined the sigh of millions of his fellow countrymen at the knowledge that the ordeal of Watergate was finally ended. The key phrase “didn’t struggle to be born,” he later remembered. “It just flowed naturally.” Ford was not so sure: “Isn’t that a little hard on Dick?” he asked. Hartmann was sure of himself. “Junk all the rest of the speech if you want to, but not that,” he implored. Ford acceded.
Standing in the East Room at shortly past noon on Friday, August 9, Gerald R. Ford gave his first address as president of the United States, “just a little straight talk among friends,” as he called it. Acknowledging that he had not won a national election, he also said that he did not achieve office through any “secret promises.” As he had “not subscribed to any partisan platform, I am indebted to no man.” This a declaration that he had not made any deals with Richard Nixon.
“I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our government but civilization itself,” he said. “That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad.”
Ford promised openness in his administration and then delivered the key line, the one Hartmann had begged him to preserve:
My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.
More than any other utterance in his public life, Gerald Ford would be remembered for these nine words. His address struck the proper note of soothing normalcy after almost eight hundred days of Watergate, and more than a decade of national turmoil that included assassinations, protests, riots, Vietnam, Watts, Chicago, and Watergate.
Hartmann moved quickly to purge the Nixon holdovers. Arriving late at a farewell lunch for another Nixon staffer at Trader Vic’s, chief speechwriter David Gergen told his colleagues that he had just learned that he was being replaced—and that he learned that from a wire service report. Newly minted White House press secretary Jerald terHorst announced the departures of speechwriters Pat Buchanan and John McLaughlin (a Jesuit priest who had unsuccessfully run for Senate in 1970 and joined the writing staff in 1971) before either had been informed that he was leaving.*
Hartmann brought in Orben full time, mainly to add levity to the president’s speeches. The Washington press corps and Ford opponents were delighted, suddenly presented with the target of a gag writer on the presidential speechwriting staff. Orben would ask if it might not be a good idea for him to leave, but Ford ignored the criticisms—he wanted Orben.
Another new speechwriter who had a history with Ford was Milton Friedman, a former Washington bureau chief for the Jewish Telegraph Agency who had written speeches for House Republican leader Bob Michel, among others. Friedman, who spent his life being confused with the economist of the same name, specialized in foreign policy speeches. He was, Nixon holdover John Coyne wrote, “an older man, amiable, a gangling sort of fellow with an odd, loose gait.”
To replace Gergen as head of speechwriting, Hartmann brought in Paul Theis (pronounced “Tice”), a World War II bomber pilot who had worked at Newsweek before taking a job in 1960 running public relations for the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. Soft-spoken, he was also a soft touch: At Christmastime he sent notes to various White House clerical workers—the telephone operators, for example—thanking them for their work.
Later in the year, two more writers were added. Like most of the Ford writers, they did not specialize in specific policy areas. Jack Casserly was a veteran journalist—he had covered the Korean and Algerian wars as well as the Middle East—who had written speeches at the Ford Motor Company and then worked at the
U.S. Census Bureau. Working for ABC News in 1968, he had had to call Representative Ford at 5:30 am for an early morning deadline. Ford groggily answered his question and then told him politely never to call at that hour again. Casserly was struck by his gentle kindness. Years later, he would recall how, when the speechwriters met with Ford, the president would jauntily call out: “Hiya fellas!”
The other new scribe was Frances “Kaye” Pullen, who had been the first female field reporter at two different television stations in Memphis, Tennessee, and was also the first woman editorial writer at the Commercial Appeal newspaper. She had joined the press department of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee in the late summer, working for Theis. A week later, he moved down Pennsylvania Avenue and asked her to join him. As the campaign committee had paid for her to move to Washington and was clearly facing a November disaster, she decided she owed it to the party to stick around through November 5. Shortly thereafter, she moved over to the White House.
Two Nixon writers were retained: John Coyne (despite having the distinction of being both a Nixon and Agnew vet) and Aram Bakshian. Bakshian, Hartmann wrote in a December memorandum to Ford, “is the best of the old speechwriters (Atlantic City) and is cooperative, not very costly, but somewhat set in the old mold and more leisurely in his work habits than our new crew.”
There was irony in this commendation. The Atlantic City reference was to a full-throated defense of Nixon that Ford had given in mid-January, tearing into administration opponents as “a few extreme partisans…bent on stretching out the ordeal of Watergate for their own purposes.” The speech had bombed, particularly when it became known that it had been drafted in Nixon’s speechwriting shop. But Hartmann and Ford had apparently appreciated its craftwork.
Bakshian liked the fact that the writers had more access to Ford than they had to Nixon. Years later he said that this was a reflection of Hartmann’s power struggles—by getting presidential access for his staff, he confirmed and augmented his own standing.
The first order of business for the new speechwriting staff was to learn Ford’s style. The word that is most often used to describe Ford’s rhetorical voice was “midwestern”—unpretentious, straightforward, simple, lacking great elegance or linguistic flights. “Ford was not oratorical,” Marsh later explained. “He was more pragmatic.” “His approach to a speech was that of a legislator,” Hartmann wrote. “It required something on paper to spark its further development. You start with some kind of draft bill and then amend, delete, revise, substitute, and perfect it into a considerably different, and more palatable, final product.”
Friedman tried to bring the new recruits up to speed. “Ford, he told us very seriously, suffered something he called ‘swimmer’s breath,’ the result of which affliction, apparently, being the inability to make it all the way through a long sentence without drawing a shuddering gasp somewhere in the middle,” Coyne recalled.
As counselor to the president, Hartmann was a senior adviser with a portfolio virtually as broad as he wanted it to be. But the speechwriting shop itself was separated from the administration’s policy development operations, a division that produced occasional disconnects. Meeting with Hartmann in the Oval Office shortly after assuming office to discuss an upcoming speech at Ohio State University, Ford waxed philosophical about education. “Kids in college today keep complaining their education is irrelevant,” he said. “Of course they love that word and use it for everything they don’t like. But when you really try to get to the bottom of their gripes they mean that what they’re required to master on the campus has little or nothing to do with getting a job afterwards, or getting ahead in life.”
Ford and Hartmann decided that the speech would announce a federal program to bring work and education into closer alignment. They checked legislation pending in Congress and touched base with the Departments of Labor and Health, Education and Welfare. The speech-writers cranked out a text. But no one thought to run the speech by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which evaluates and signs off on any new programs that cost money.
“The Department of Labor will shortly announce a pilot program to improve occupational information for graduates and others in making career choices,” Ford told Ohio State’s summer graduating class on August 30. “There will be grants for state and local initiatives to provide data on occupations available and to help channel the potential employees into positions which are not only personally satisfying but financially rewarding.”
The press called the OMB, looking for details. Deputy director Paul O’Neill, the resident specialist in such programs, was pestered with queries he could not answer. He charged around the Executive Office Building trying to find the roots of the new program. His search finally brought him to the speechwriters.
In the end the idea died a bureaucratic death—another sign, to Hartmann, of enemy activity. “The Praetorian pattern was a thing of beauty,” he wrote. “What they could not prevent they could delay. What they could no longer delay they could cause to fail. What they could not make fail they could alter.”
Ford held his first presidential press conference on August 28, 1974, and was apparently shocked when the questions focused on Nixon: Did he think Nixon had immunity from prosecution as a former president? Would Ford pardon him? The experience focused Ford on the issue. He consulted with a handful of aides, including Hartmann.
Hartmann counseled against a pardon. “Mr. President, you’ll have to expect a lot of flak [after a pardon]. No one can predict just how deep the resentment will go, but there will be strong editorial condemnation, for sure,” Hartmann said. “There will be all hell to pay with the news media, and the White House press corps will go up the wall.”
Ford was not impressed. A Nixon prosecution would take years, he believed, and would overshadow everything. And he doubted that the public relished the notion of a former president in a prison cell. He announced his decision—a pardon—to his senior aides on Thursday, September 5, and declared that he wanted to announce it publicly no later than the following Sunday. In the Oval Office on Saturday, Ford dictated the outlines of his statement, which Hartmann was to refine into a final address.
“Can I ask you just one question?” Hartmann said, pausing at the doorway to the Oval Office.
“Sure,” Ford said, grinning. “So long as you don’t try to talk me out of it.”
“What’s the rush?” Hartmann asked. A Nixon trial would likely drag on for years, so why hurry? Left unsaid was the fact that in just under two months the party of which Ford was suddenly the head would face the voters and a pardon could only hurt the GOP.
“Well someone—one of the news people—might ask me about it again,” Ford responded.
“But all you’d have to do is say you haven’t decided,” Hartmann said.
“But I have decided,” Ford said, ending the discussion. He had decided, and to say otherwise would be to lie (truth, after all was the glue…). Ford’s character proved his undoing. His decision, and his determination to quickly make it public, ended his political honeymoon. He could have made a concerted effort to prepare the public for the decision, softening the blow. As it was, that decision was probably the single biggest reason why Ford was denied a full term in office on his own. (It immediately cost him his press secretary: Jerry terHorst resigned in protest shortly before Ford announced the pardon.)
Ford went to St. John’s Episcopal Church, across Lafayette Square from the White House, at eight o’clock on Sunday morning. He returned to the Oval Office, and read Hartmann’s draft twice. Using a felt-tip pen, he wrote in a line about Nixon’s health and telephoned key members of Congress to let them know of his decision. Shortly after 11 am Ford addressed the nation. The Nixons, he said, were part of “an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.
“My conscience tells me clearly and certain
ly that I cannot prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed. My conscience tells me that only I, as president, have the constitutional power to firmly shut and seal this book. My conscience tells me it is my duty, not merely to proclaim domestic tranquility but to use every means that I have to insure it.”
In New York City, Orben was awakened by his telephone’s ringing. It was a Broadway actor friend. Do you know what that sonofabitch you’re working for has done? he asked.
Still bleary, Orben thought: He knows I don’t work for Red Skelton anymore. What’s he talking about?
Public reaction was predictable. “‘Surprise’, ‘stunning’ pardon of RN by GF dominated Sun. w/all nets having specials and wires full of comments from Hill,” the White House Weekend News Review read. “Liberal GOPs joined all Dems commenting save [one] along w/most TV commentators in sharp criticism or in questioning the timing.”
Ford decided that he wanted to retain Al Haig as his chief of staff on a permanent basis. Haig agreed on one condition: that he have the power to hire and fire White House staffers as he saw fit. “You have at least one fellow who doesn’t belong here,” Haig said. That fellow’s identity was no mystery. Hartmann viewed Haig as a power-hungry Praetorian—an “asshole.” Bridling when Haig continued to run White House staff meetings in the days following Nixon’s resignation, Hartmann had boycotted them. It was a move that might have satisfied a visceral need of Hartmann’s to display his independence, but—since the meetings went on anyway—it was self-defeating.
Haig thought Hartmann was in over his head and good for no more than four hours a day. Anti-Haig items started appearing in the press. Ford thought Hartmann was responsible for them and he told him to cut it out—but the squabbling only got worse.
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 27