Ford had been a star football player in college, from which he had learned the importance of teamwork. “I guess this goes back to experiences I have had in athletics,” he once told John Hersey. “A feuding team never got anyplace. A feuding staff in the White House is never going to get anyplace.” As a leader in the House of Representatives—where he had been first among equals—he tried to balance desires and avoid offending people. As a result, although he understood how destructive infighting was, he was ill-equipped to end it. “Throughout my political career, nothing upset me more than bickering among members of my staff,” Ford wrote in his memoirs. “It was time-consuming, terribly distracting and unnecessary. I had told my aides I wouldn’t tolerate it. But it continued, even accelerated, when I entered the White House and—given the ambitions and personalities of the people involved—there didn’t seem to be any way to put an immediate stop to it.”
Ford pondered Haig’s condition and rejected it. “You’ll have to let me deal with Hartmann myself,” the president said. On Sunday, September 15, Ford announced that he was appointing Haig commanding officer of NATO. Hartmann had scored an apparent victory, but he soon had a new rival to reckon with.
At the end of September, Ford tapped Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. ambassador to NATO and a former U.S. House member from Illinois, as “staff coordinator.” Rumsfeld had been a member of the “Young Turks,” Republican members who had engineered Ford’s initial foray into the House GOP leadership in 1965. He left the House in 1969 and played a succession of roles in the Nixon administration, escaping Watergate by being abroad.
Initial results of the Rumsfeld-Hartmann matching looked promising: Hartmann showed up for Rumsfeld’s first senior staff meeting, the first such gathering that he attended since early August. He would, New Republic White House reporter John Osborne wrote, attend enough meetings “that nobody could say he refused to attend, and not enough to acknowledge that he had to be there.”
Ford addressed the Congress at 4 pm on Tuesday, October 8, his second appearance there since taking office. On August 12, he had told the legislators that he did not want a “honeymoon with you. I want a good marriage.” Now he was going to focus on the economy. He wore on his lapel a red pin with WIN—“whip inflation now”—in white letters. The program was a voluntary call for Americans to do their part to kill inflation, which—up over 12 percent—had become a serious drag on the U.S. economy. “My conclusions are very simply stated,” Ford said. “There is only one point on which all advisers have agreed: We must whip inflation right now.”
The idea had sprung from the speechwriters. The program had its roots in a month-old idea that Hartmann’s deputy, Paul Theis, suggested for a voluntary anti-inflation program. Businesses and labor unions were to pledge to hold down costs, and would be called “Inflation Fighters,” or IF—hardly a stirring acronym, and one made worse when Hartmann and Theis presented the idea to Ford. Why not make it “Inflation Fighters and Energy Savers,” the president had asked. The idea lay dormant until Ford convened a national summit conference on inflation on September 27, at which the financial writer Sylvia Porter made a speech calling for a nationwide campaign of recycling and voluntary energy conservation measures.
At Ford’s urging, Porter agreed to lead a joint effort of inflation fighters and energy savers, and he unveiled the plan, WIN, on October 8. Ford and his advisers hoped that WIN could become a visible symbol like the New Deal–era NRA’s “Blue Eagle.” It would become an enduring symbol of the Ford administration, but not in the way they hoped. The buttons became a symbol of administration ineptitude.
There were substantive problems in the speech, which Friedman had written. Ford proposed to reduce dependence on foreign oil by converting the nation’s oil-fired power plants to coal by 1980—a goal that was completely impractical. The speechwriting shop had mangled a more modest and feasible proposal, unnamed White House officials complained to the press. Part of the problem was that Hartmann had closed the speechwriting process, cutting out policy officials who could have caught programmatic mistakes. He got the speech for final editing on Monday afternoon and had not let anyone else see it—including Roy Ash, the head of the OMB, and Treasury Secretary William Simon. Last-minute policy changes did not make it into the draft.
Rumsfeld determined to make speechwriting more transparent, opening up Hartmann’s inner sanctum. “One area in which our present staffing system is seriously out of kilter is the staffing of Presidential speeches and remarks,” he wrote in a five-page memo to Ford on October 15. “Because of inadequate staffing several errors of facts and conflicts with previous Presidential statements have recently crept into speeches. None have been disastrous, but some embarrassment has been caused.”
Rumsfeld proposed an elaborate new clearance system by which succeeding drafts would be circulated to all interested parties. The practical effect was to cement the speechwriters’ new role as wordsmithing functionaries, and not incidentally to diminish Hartmann’s power by circumscribing his ability to work directly with the president, without interference from other staffers. It also locked in a system of group editing that would drive a generation of speechwriters to distraction.
On November 5, the GOP reaped the rewards of Watergate and the Nixon pardon: a forty-seat loss in the House and four-seat setback in the Senate. It was a generation-defining election, and it left Ford in a perilous political position. As 1975 opened, he decided to try a double-barreled approach to revive his agenda, and his administration. He would preview the January 15 State of the Union address with a January 13 “fireside chat” to be televised nationwide.
The stakes, thought press secretary Ron Nessen, who had joined the White House staff from NBC News in September, were tremendous. If Ford failed to score with the speeches, the press secretary wrote in a note to himself, “the Ford presidency is never going to get off the ground and he is going to be President for two and a half years and that is all.”
Ford’s television adviser, Bob Mead, scouted locations around the White House for the fireside address, seeking the perfect locale to strike a cozy, relaxed note. He suggested three possible sites: the ground floor Lincoln Library; the grand hall on the second floor of the White House residence; or—Mead’s preference—the main family room in the residence. “This is the most ideal location for such an informal chat, the President’s own living room,” he wrote Nessen on January 7. “However, much family disruption would occur during set-up, and TV lines would have to be dropped from the balcony area on the South Portico.” The Lincoln Library it would be.
Hartmann’s draft prompted the Praetorian machinations he feared. Nessen thought it was too long, too flowery, too full of clichés and flaccidly written. He edited it a little bit while putting it onto the TelePrompTer. Hartmann, following along as Ford rehearsed, muttered: “Those are not my words. I wonder whose words those are.” Nessen took his concerns to Rumsfeld. “Do you think it can be salvaged?” the chief of staff asked. It could, Nessen replied, with very heavy editing. Rumsfeld told him to write his own version of the speech. He also commissioned drafts from Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Alan Greenspan and Robert Goldwin, the White House’s liaison with the academic community.
Ford meanwhile had been streamlining the copy with Hartmann, making it more direct and occasionally putting in more substantive detail. “Tonight, if I might, let me give you a preview of my plan” became “Tonight let me preview this plan for you.” Likewise, “Higher energy costs compound both the inflationary problem and the recessionary problem” became “Higher energy costs compound both inflation and recession.”
Nessen and Rumsfeld saw their chance on Sunday, January 12, the day before the speech was to be given. Hartmann sent Orben to deal with any last-minute edits. After Ford read through the speech and watched his performance on videotape, Rumsfeld suggested he read it once more so that they could mark the TelePrompter copy for emphasis and pauses. As Ford went though it, Rumsfeld and his allies st
arted suggesting changes—inserting a word here, deleting one there. Soon whole sections were eliminated, including a laundry list of Ford’s proposals.
Ford did another read-through on Monday afternoon, performing flawlessly for the videocameras. “If I drop dead before tonight, you can still use the tape,” he quipped.
That evening the president, the television crew, Rumsfeld, and Nessen crowded into the small Lincoln Library, which is lined on three walls with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The fireplace that evening had special logs that, because they were made of compressed sawdust, burnt quietly—no crackling to interfere with the president’s speech. While much of the furniture had been removed for the broadcast, a small desk remained, at which Ford sat, though, as practiced, partway through the speech he got up to lean on it—the better to reinforce the informal mood.*
“Good evening,” Ford started. “Without wasting words, I want to talk with you tonight about putting our domestic house in order. We must turn America in a new direction. We must reverse the current recession, reduce unemployment, and create more jobs.” He made several proposals in his address, including increased fuel taxes to discourage consumption, new special cash payments from the federal government to individuals, businesses, state and local governments, $16 billion in tax rebates, and a moratorium on new federal spending programs outside of energy projects.
When the camera’s red light flicked off, Nessen grabbed Rumsfeld’s arm and shouted: “We did it! We did it!”
The euphoria did not last long—the State of the Union was scheduled for 1 pm on January 15, two days later. Once again Rumsfeld, Nessen, and their colleagues disliked Hartmann’s effort. Ford’s assessment was that the speech was “short on specifics and long on rhetoric; worse it didn’t have a clear and central theme.”
On January 10, Nessen had written Theis a brief memo saying that while he had not had time to read the State of the Union draft thoroughly, “it seems to me that the initial portions of the speech and message in which the President sets the mood are somewhat repetitive and uninspiring. Then, the detailed portion of the proposals seems somewhat jumbled and unorganized.”
Domestic council director Ken Cole was as blunt: “There is no vision of what the President wants for America—there is no statement of what he wants—and there is no rationale for why what he proposes will get us to where he thinks we ought to go,” he wrote on the same day. “In short, it fails to indicate any leadership.”
Now, with twenty-four hours left, Rumsfeld, his deputy Dick Cheney, Greenspan, Nessen, and others sat at a conference table in Rumsfeld’s office, writing, rewriting, cutting and pasting (scissors and glue in the pre-computer age). They worked for eight hours, fueled by cookies, peanuts, steak sandwiches, and beer.
Their version of the address arrived at Ford’s desk at the same time as Hartmann’s, roughly 9 pm. Rumsfeld’s rump group, Hartmann, and Ford, gathered in the Oval Office. Ford, wearing a blazer and gray shirt, issued a presidential diktat: “Go back and give me one speech, not two speeches.”
But his staff could not agree on which paragraphs and sections would remain in. Ford had to sort it out personally, sitting with the two versions of the State of the Union on his desk—Hartmann’s on the left, the redraft on the right, the two warring camps sitting in front of it. He went through them page by page and arbitrated the squabble.
It was an embarrassing and enraging process for Ford and it was almost four in the morning before the speech was final. “It was a long, disagreeable night and a waste of time, but it did teach me a lesson,” Ford later wrote. “In the future, I told Hartmann, important speeches had to be submitted to me well in advance of the scheduled delivery date. I simply couldn’t tolerate any more performances like that.”
It was the wrong lesson. Rather than expecting his aides to get along simply because he told them to, or because it was good for the team, Ford needed to settle the situation. This was not creative tension. The president could not control his top advisers. The problem would linger through the remainder of his administration.
Operating on less than three hours sleep, Ford did a credible job delivering the speech. He opened by recalling that as a freshman member of the House in 1949, he had heard Harry Truman pronounce the state of the Union to be good. “Today, that freshman member from Michigan stands where Mr. Truman stood, and I must say to you that the state of the Union is not good,” he said. Telling the truth went against the conventions of the occasion.
He added, in another line he had inserted: “Now, I want to speak very bluntly. I’ve got bad news, and I don’t expect much, if any, applause.”
He got little.
“The President’s main problem as concerns public speaking is the somewhat flat tone of his speaking voice,” Orben wrote in a memo to Hartmann reviewing the week’s speeches. “There is an absence of highs and lows and gradations of tonal qualities. All of these lend interest to what is being said. The President is aware of this and is making substantial improvement in these areas.”
Orben’s solution was for Ford to get the speeches further in advance. Using the show business parlance to which he was accustomed, and taking an apparent shot at Rumsfeld and his group, Orben argued that the president should rehearse on a “‘closed set’—with as few people as possible in the room…. Distractions as to speech content and even unnecessary audience keeps the performer from concentrating on his primary responsibility—to deliver it well.” And in a mild shot at his own boss, who had been quoted in a Washington Post story on January 14 talking about the preparations for Ford’s setup speech, Orben added that “it is also axiomatic in show business that technique is what doesn’t show.”
Ford allowed John Hersey to shadow him for a week, starting Monday, March 10, 1975, and to write about it for The New York Times Magazine. (Hersey had done something similar on President Truman in 1950.) Hersey was present at 3:48 pm on March 10, when Hartmann, Theis, Friedman, and Orben descended upon the Oval Office to discuss Ford’s upcoming appearance at the White House Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner, and at a March 17 St. Patrick’s Day speech at the University of Notre Dame. After Ford read a draft of his Correspondents’ Dinner remarks, a brainstorming session commenced for the Notre Dame speech. The discussion meandered. Perhaps the speech should focus on foreign policy (though not Vietnam or Cambodia), or maybe on the relationship between education and the private sector, or perhaps it should announce a quasi-governmental agency where students could buy tuition bonds? None of these topics excited Ford. But touching on the fact that some Notre Dame students were eating only rice so as to help feed the world’s hungry, he finally settled on a theme of staying globally engaged.
“I am still profoundly disturbed by what seemed to me the aimlessness of the speechwriting session,” Hersey reflected at day’s end. “I keep thinking…of a speechwriting session of Harry Truman’s, at which most of his principal advisers, including Dean Acheson, were present, and during which policy was really and carefully shaped through its articulation.”
Hartmann for one wished that Ford would take a more active part in the drafting process. “He rarely took the time to put his thoughts on paper in more than a note or outline form,” he wrote. “It was flattering that he obviously felt I knew him well enough to divine what he wanted to say. But it was frustrating that he was so unconsciously intolerant of the communications process. Presidents do have more important things to think about. But except for a few memorable exceptions, Ford rarely faced up to the fact that making a major address is one of the most important things a President does.”
This was the life cycle for a major speech: discussion with Ford—usually with the speechwriters bringing a couple of suggested topics—then one of them producing a draft that Theis and Hartmann would edit. Lesser speeches often did not merit a presidential audience, in which case guidance was sparse.
Then speeches would be subjected to the staffing process, which the speechwriters had grown to despise. Cle
aring a speech now involved more than a dozen senior officials signing off—and in many cases trying to insert their own language. The opportunity to contribute to presidential prose with rhetoric or bureaucratic blandness often proved irresistible. “I feel like a man watching an old tree being cut down,” Jack Casserly had noted in his journal at the end of February after watching one speech get picked apart by bureaucrats. “However weatherbeaten and battered, it seems to me that it has more integrity than the two men axing it down.”
And the department had other problems that spring. Casserly and David Gergen, who was now writing speeches for Treasury Secretary William Simon, separately heard about one speechwriter who had developed an odd sartorial writing habit: He would come to work each day in a suit, change into old pants—his “writing pants”—and work the morning. He would change into his suit again before lunch, back into the trousers afterward, and into the suit before leaving for the day. His bizarre practice became an issue when a cleaning lady walked in on him changing a couple of times and complained.
Orben, who thought working in Hollywood made him an expert on stress, had gained about thirty pounds since joining the staff. And he was having crushing headaches, bad enough that he went to see doctors. Waiting in a specialist’s office, he recognized several other White House staffers. The specialist gave him a clean bill of health, ascribing the headaches to stress. Orben noticed a couple of weeks later that, talking on the phone, he was pressing the receiver into the side of his head. He spent a few weeks using the speakerphone instead of the handset and his headaches disappeared.
Pat Butler, a Capitol Hill veteran who had been working at the Appalachian Regional Commission, joined the writing staff in mid-April 1975. A son of a minister, Butler had worked as a press secretary for Representative Wilmer “Vinegar Bend” Mizell (R–NC), a former major league pitcher, and had observed Ford when he was minority leader. “On the House floor, we were not swept away by his rhetoric,” Butler later remembered. “What he had going for him was his sincerity and he was solid in his principles. He was never a demagogue.”
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 28