White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  Three days later, Orben sent an SOS to Hartmann: “If we consider our goal to be effective and accurate speeches prepared on time, it is unlikely that this goal will be achieved unless substantial changes are made in our present method of operation. The speechwriting staff is apparently limited to a fixed number of people. The number we now have is too small to cope effectively with the volume of work required. If the volume increases, as it will, the Speech Department will just break down…. Because we have so few experienced writers, I am forced to give brand new writers fairly major speeches and hope for the best—or frantically rewrite them at the last minute. This is not the stuff that campaign winning speeches are made of.”

  “In show business you can wrangle with yourself, but you’re not going to do anything to hurt the client,” he later reflected. “And in politics that ain’t necessarily so.”

  Reagan skipped the New York and Wisconsin primaries on April 6 and the Pennsylvania primary three weeks later. Ford hoped to finish off the conservative challenger in Texas on May 1, but Reagan scored a victory there.

  Two days later, Ford was campaigning through Indiana and Alabama, two states that, along with Georgia, held their primaries on May 4. A late-afternoon speech was scheduled for Wilson Park in Birmingham. Pat Butler, who would become chief campaign speechwriter before the year was through, realized that Ford’s prepared speech would not work in the relaxed setting—it was too long and too detailed. They needed a brief, patriot-stirring crowd-pleaser, and he banged one out in about fifteen minutes.

  “In two hundred years we have forged from a struggling group of colonies to the greatest nation in the history of the world,” Ford told the crowd. “Our progress in every field has been unprecedented, and much of that progress has always been due to the strength and to the character of young Americans.”

  Butler had not checked with Hartmann before rewriting the speech and Hartmann exploded—How can you take things on yourself like this?—and then told Butler he was fired. Hartmann never spoke of it to Butler again, did not apologize, but Butler was not fired.

  Reagan swept all three primaries. Through the remainder of May and into early June, Reagan and Ford battled to a standstill. They split two dozen primaries where they squared off head-to-head. As the primary season closed on June 8, Ford held a plurality of delegates, but not a majority. He would have to spend June and July personally wooing delegates in the eleven states that used party conventions to pick delegates.

  One event where Ford might shine came in early July, as the country celebrated its two hundredth birthday. The president was scheduled to speak at celebratory events in the first five days of July—the opening of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and at the National Archives in Washington; at Valley Forge; and at Monticello. “Very, very important,” Ford jotted in a note to Hartmann on June 1. “What about asking several outstanding historical writers like Dan Boorstin (Dave’s Dad), [Neoconservative] Irving Kristol + maybe others to help plan and write the outline suggestion.”

  A week later, Hartmann submitted a selection of speech themes, and another volley in his ongoing bureaucratic struggle: “It will be possible to develop four or five outstanding speeches of very high quality with a consistent tone and theme, IF I can obtain the full cooperation of everyone concerned and the motivation, concentration and creativity required are not destroyed by conspiratorial game playing, secret double and triple tracking and last minute power and policy contests which have been disrupting our efforts to attain orderly development of superior speech drafts all this year,” he wrote the president. “Competition has degenerated into clandestine contests which waste your time. Their sole object is neither producing a superior product nor serving your interest best, but the unworthy end of showing who’s ‘king of the mountain.’”

  He added a plea: “To this end I must remind you that since the first of April, I have been permitted only 5 personal meetings with you, and would hope that we can work together on this project as much as is necessary to make the speeches truly your own.”

  As far as some on the staff were concerned, five audiences with the president were too many.

  “What I’m going to say next…epitomizes the root cause of many of your problems,” David Hume Kennerly wrote to Ford in a memo on June 10. Although Kennerly was the White House photographer, Ford liked his brash, irreverent manner, his willingness to be blunt with the president of the United States, and had come to rely on his judgment. “Your speeches are usually long, boring, and filled with rhetoric that turns people off,” Kennerly said. “I’ve seen advancemen literally cry when after ten or fifteen minutes after you started speaking the people would start leaving…. Your speech-writing department has driven mediocrity to new heights. If this were my opinion alone, I’d say perhaps I could be wrong. It’s not. It’s universal.”

  One critic who had a chance to do something was Craig Smith, thirty-two, a University of Virginia professor who specialized in the theory of rhetoric. He had listened to a Ford speech before the North Carolina primary and had been appalled, not just by the substance but by technical aspects such as unclear transitions and poor organization. He wrote Ford a letter critiquing the speech. The note ended up in the speechwriting office; after a couple of interviews, he was offered a job.

  Smith’s first assignment was to read and analyze everything Ford had uttered since he had been nominated as vice president three years earlier. Hartmann asked Smith what he thought of the president’s style. The problem is, he doesn’t have one, Smith responded. He has several styles, and it depends on who’s doing the writing—and that’s not a good thing because you’re not conveying a consistent persona when you’re doing that. “I had paragraphs from one speech and paragraphs from another speech and I said, ‘This isn’t the same man,’” Smith recalled. “The language is too different—and too disparate.”

  Smith’s first assignment was a June 15 address to the Southern Baptist Convention in Norfolk. Smith thought of it as something of a test for him, a Catholic, to write a speech for Ford, an Episcopalian, to be given before a group of Southern Baptists. He had several sessions with Ford. The president gave him specific instructions: Please don’t use phrases like “I have been saved,” Ford told him, I’m not that kind of religious person. I don’t want to talk about Jesus as my personal saviour or any of that kind of thing.

  This would set him apart from Jimmy Carter, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, who had spoken in the primaries about his religious convictions. “Jimmy Carter’s open espousal of his Christian beliefs in the 1976 Presidential campaign has raised the issue of religion’s place in politics more arrestingly that it has been raised in any Presidential race since John F. Kennedy’s in 1960,” The New York Times had reported in April.

  Keep it pretty high-minded, Ford told Smith.* They also discussed Ford’s style. I want to speak the language of the common man, Ford told him. Smith pointed out that FDR had used simple language. Roosevelt used repetition, he said, he used rhythm, but it was all small words.

  Ford was impressed. And the results were good. The Washington Star, not a presidential booster, gave Ford’s Baptist Convention speech a good review in a story headlined: “Righteous Ford Talks Like Carter, Wows Baptists.”

  Hartmann had received many drafts and suggestions from a variety of sources for the bicentennial addresses. They included submissions not only from the senior Boorstin and Kristol, but from Gergen, Baroody, White House counselor Jack Marsh, academics such as Notre Dame president Theodore Hesbergh, Dr. Martin Diamond of Northern Illinois University, Dr. Herbert Storing of the University of Chicago, and a host of others—and of course from the speechwriting staff. On June 8, Hartmann sent Ford a memo with the various suggestions so the president could choose the ones he preferred. “Excellent,” Ford wrote, sending it back. “It worked well.”

  The half-dozen bicentennial speeches that Ford gave at the start of July were a high point of his rhetoric and statesmanship.

&n
bsp; “They came here in the snows of winter over a trail marked with the blood of their rag-bound feet,” Ford said at Valley Forge on the morning of July 4, 1976, in a speech drafted by Smith.

  The iron forge that gave this place its name had been destroyed by the British when General Washington and his ragged Continental Army encamped here—exhausted, outnumbered, and short of everything except faith. We gather here today, the 200th anniversary of our independence, to commemorate their sacrifices even before we celebrate the glorious Declaration. Americans will remember the name of Valley Forge as long as the spirit of sacrifice lives within their hearts.

  The Republican National Convention was scheduled to convene on August 16, in Kansas City, Missouri. The nomination was still up for grabs between the president and the challenger, but Ford turned his attention to the acceptance speech he hoped to give. He told Hartmann that he liked the process used for the bicentennial and wanted to do it again. Hartmann saw this as a sort of Kabuki ritual: Ford wanted him to go through the exercise of gathering opinions before they worked on it exclusively. “To me it was a lot of bother,” he wrote. “To him it was the essence of politics.”

  The lesson from the bicentennial experience, Hartmann thought, was that a good speech should focus on a single theme. He suggested three options: Heal and charge up the party; use the moment as a showcase for his own character; or go after the Democrats. Ford responded predictably: “Why don’t we do all three? Well, let’s see what everybody recommends.”

  On July 13, Hartmann followed up: “The lesson of the Bicentennial speeches seems to have been that to be effective a speech should have only one main purpose or point to get across…. It may be argued that the speech can and should accomplish all three of these objectives. My view is that it is perhaps possible to combine [any two] but not all three.”

  He attached a list of thirty-two people from whom he might solicit suggestions, the fewer the better. Ford checked every name on the list, excepting Attorney General Edward Levi, who was supposed to remain non-political. “Go home and write it,” he told Hartmann. He had one key instruction: “Since 1956 no candidate for Pres. could accept nomination + say U.S. not at war,” Ford scribbled on a piece of White House notepaper on August 9.

  What the speech needed, Hartmann thought, was a news hook—something to grab the voters’ imagination. He solicited ideas. A variety came in: David Boorstin suggested a new Marshall Plan “to reassert America’s leadership position in the free world, or to establish such a position with the Third World.” Charles McCall, head of the speechwriting department’s research division, suggested announcing that Reagan would either be put in charge of the Panama Canal negotiations or appointed ambassador to the United Nations (Reagan had been highly critical of Ford’s foreign policy during the primary campaign, especially the possibility of handing over the canal to Panama). Smith suggested that Ford “take the unprecedented step of pledging to give no more than five campaign speeches in the fall. Such a strategy would gain national attention from both the media and the audience. It would allow each speech to be fully developed and crafted. It would enhance the Presidential image by insuring [sic] that campaigning would not interfere with Presidential duties.” Hartmann thought this last suggestion inane.

  Ford had already come up with an idea of his own, but he was keeping it secret.

  Shortly after midnight, on the morning of Thursday, August 19, Ford won the Republican nomination. That evening, he would have to give a speech to rouse the nation and rally his campaign against the large lead Democratic nominee Carter had built in the polls.

  Ford had rehearsed the speech all week. Don Penny, a former television writer and stand-up comedian who had joined the staff as a speech coach, produced a videocamera and tape player so the president could judge his own performance. Ford’s gestures were too exaggerated. He had a tendency to shift side to side on his feet. He did not smile enough when on TV, Betty Ford pointed out. Sometimes Ford would stand in his hotel suite practicing for pace, timing, and emphasis. Jack Marsh would listen in an adjoining room, within earshot but out of sight, because Ford would feel self-conscious speaking to a visible audience of one.

  At 5:30 pm on the day of the speech, Ford summoned Cheney and Marsh to his hotel suite to spring the surprise he had already shared with Hartmann. He showed them a paragraph he had written on a yellow legal pad: “And I will tell you one more thing. This year the issues are on our side. I am ready, I am eager to go before the American people and debate the real issues face to face with Jimmy Carter. The American people have a right to know firsthand exactly where both of us stand.”

  The promise energized the campaign. These would be the first presidential debates since Kennedy and Nixon in 1960. The speech was a huge success, and the speechwriters identified the lesson to be drawn: sufficient time for preparation, do not step on the message. They argued that repeating the success would require time and focus—a few great speeches as opposed to a campaign crammed with hastily produced ones.

  Butler argued in an August 24 memo to Hartmann that “fine craftsmanship is always sacrificed when quantity is a more important consideration than quality. That is why Rolls-Royces are better cars than Chevrolets, and why the President’s acceptance speech was better than his campaign speeches in Texas.” He added: “Making speeches ‘by the gross’ will inevitably debase the currency of the Presidential address.”

  Butler was not alone in this advice. The speechwriters were pondering an idea that Hartmann had thought idiotic. On the same day that Butler sent in his memo, David Boorstin suggested that Ford confine himself to “a limited number of important speeches.” George Denison, a Michigan native and lawyer who had written for Reader’s Digest before joining the speechwriting staff in April, suggested—on the same day—that Ford be limited to two major policy speeches per week. And that same day, Orben sent Hartmann a memo advocating “one major speech a week. This would allow for sufficient lead time for a well thought-out and constructed speech to be written, learned and rehearsed.”

  Thirty years later, neither Butler nor Orben recollected any coordination in the flurry of like-minded memoranda. “As I recall, it wasn’t a coordinated response but rather a common belief that the president had been speaking publicly so often—without saying much new—that his currency was being devalued and people were simply tuning him out,” Butler said. What they were grasping for was a technique that would become common political practice within a decade.

  “A few years later, President Reagan and Mike Deaver perfected ‘the message of the day’ approach to presidential communication wherein the president would make at most one major statement so as to preserve the impact of presidential speeches and avoid confusing the public (and journalists) about what was important to focus on,” Butler recalled. “That’s what we were all trying to get at in 1976. Our specific recommendation was just a tad too extreme.”

  A typical campaign day in late October started in San Diego with the release of a radio address on inflation. At 8:32 am, Ford announced the creation of a regional economic development zone. Then it was on to Seattle, Washington, where he made remarks at the airport about noise pollution at 10:45 am, and downtown at 12:46 pm on national defense, taxes and spending, economic growth and national pride. An hour later Ford appeared at a Veterans Administration hospital to speak about the importance of keeping the peace and providing health care for veterans. From there it was back to the airport and south to Portland, Oregon, where he spoke about the greatness of America before a crowd at the airport at 3:21 pm. At 4:24 pm at the Sheraton-Portland Hotel, Ford participated in a question-and-answer with the National Association of Broadcasters. At 5:20 pm he took questions from reporters one more time before boarding the plane for a cross-country flight to Pittsburgh.

  There were advantages to such a pace. Perpetually on the move, the campaign speechwriters did not have to circulate their drafts to the usual litany of staffers, so there were fewer people trying to dull down
or, ineptly, punch up the talk. “Ford was in real control of his subject matter and he became quite comfortable on the stump,” Butler recalled. “The secret of our success was that we went through fewer editors in the relative isolation of the campaign plane.” But that did not put the speech-writers out of reach of the Hartmann-Praetorian battles.

  Ford was scheduled to speak at the Pittsburgh Economic Club the next morning, October 26, and David Boorstin had written a speech focused on the economy for the occasion. Butler edited it and was taking it up to Hartmann in the VIP cabin on Air Force One when Cheney intercepted him and asked where he was going.

  When Butler said that he had the president’s speech for the Pittsburgh Economic Club, Cheney responded that in fact he had it, a Gergen-written foreign policy speech. Butler wanted no part of the staff warfare: he said he would give the Boorstin version to Hartmann and the two senior aides could work it out.

  No dice. Cheney insisted, and as Butler was handing over his draft, Hartmann appeared. What are you doing? he growled.

  I’m giving the president’s speech to the chief of staff, Butler explained.

  Who do you think you work for? Hartmann asked.

  I work for you, Bob, Butler said.

  “The hell you do!” Hartmann sputtered. This was the third time Hartmann fired Butler. A screaming match erupted between Cheney and Hartmann. The young aide slunk back to his seat. He was 40,000 feet in the air, flying east on Air Force One, and now unemployed. It was his twenty-seventh birthday. When the yelling up front quieted, Cheney came back, sat next to him, and patted him on the knee. “I think he’s serious this time,” Cheney said.