White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  Buchanan sensed a “potentially serious problem” in Reagan’s speeches, he wrote to Regan in a December 9 memo marked “Administratively Confidential.” Reagan’s speech on November 14, 1985, before leaving for the Geneva summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, had elicited 150 phone calls and 42 telegrams, “an astonishing expression of public nonchalance about a Reagan address to the nation just prior to the most important summit of his presidency,” Buchanan wrote. A talk Reagan gave at Fallston High School in Maryland had not been interrupted for applause once.

  “Stated simply, both speeches were crashing bores,” Buchanan wrote. He cited two problems. While Reagan and McFarlane had settled on a theme of “optimism, tempered by realism, hope modified by caution,” he wrote, “the ‘realism,’ the ‘caution,’ have been consistently carved out to such an extent that not only is the President puzzling his audiences…but he is also beginning to elicit a measure of ridicule.”

  The problem lay in the speeches having been hijacked not only by NSC interference on substance and tone, but by stylistic tinkering by the Mice. The pre-summit speech had been originally drafted as a tough, traditional Reagan, anti-Communist address. Regan’s aides had rewritten it in a lower key, with the president talking about cultural exchanges, envisioning “Soviet children watching ‘Sesame Street’”—an image that prompted the conservative Washington Times to describe it as being full of “infantile hopes.”

  “Now, admittedly a couple of fairly competent house painters can tell you why Michelangelo’s work is cracked and peeling,” Buchanan wrote. “Still, you don’t want a pair of house painters re-doing the Sistine Chapel.” In the future, he suggested, all of the usual suspects should be consulted, but they should “leave the word-smithing to folks who do that for a living.”

  Buchanan’s memo made little impact, as staff conflicts built to a crescendo in the run-up to the 1986 State of the Union address, which the president was scheduled to deliver on January 28. Elliott and Gilder submitted a first draft on January 15. The Mice thought the speech was disjointed and overly ideological. “It didn’t meet the specs,” Regan complained. After two days, they sent out a “Draft Revised.” Long sections of the original on the march of freedom, the importance of free markets, the evils of communism, and praise of family values were diluted, reduced, or eliminated. An early applause line in the original draft, “America is ready,” was changed to “America is back!”—which Reagan had used in the 1984 State of the Union. Banality or gibberish was inserted: “We cannot perpetuate these problems no longer,” the revised draft read. “I believe the President is being badly served by such high-handedness,” Elliott wrote in a note. Buchanan called Regan at home, furious.

  “This speech doesn’t read like a Ronald Reagan speech,” domestic policy aide Jack Svahn wrote in a memo to Elliott, mistakenly thinking that the speechwriters had produced the revised draft. “There isn’t that quick, sharp, crisp approach. It looks almost as if it gets started in some places and then mushes down or loses a few sentences…. Clearly I’m not a great speechwriter and you are, but this just doesn’t sound like a Reagan speech, it doesn’t hang together and flow the way it should.” Elliott passed the memo on to Regan’s aides with a note written in the corner saying that the authors of the redraft deserved Svahn’s “kudos. You have done a great disservice to the President.”

  Buchanan, Elliott, and Gilder rewrote the speech, but the row over the drafting spilled into the media. The two sides “have resorted to name-calling,” The New York Times reported, “with aides to Mr. Buchanan suggesting that the Regan associates lack political courage, while Mr. Regan’s aides call Mr. Buchanan’s speechwriters politically naïve hard-liners.” Newsweek said that “the very tone of the Reagan message” was at stake. Would it be “conservative evangelism or boardroom bromides?”*One “insider” told the magazine that the Mice “don’t trust the speechwriters. They say everything they write is about abortion and right-wing stuff. And the speechwriters think Regan’s men are philistines.”

  The president was typically removed from the fray. He lightly edited the “Draft Revised,”—changing “American is back!” to “America is moving!”—and subsequent drafts. Ever the movie buff, he inserted a line quoting from the current popular Back to the Future that “where we’re going we won’t need roads.”

  Reagan was in the Oval Office with spokesman Larry Speakes on the morning of January 28, preparing for his scheduled lunch with the network anchors—a routine on the day of the annual address, to spin them for their coverage—when Vice President Bush rushed in, followed by Buchanan and new national security adviser John Poindexter. “Sir, the Challenger just blew up!” Buchanan said, interrupting the vice president. Reagan, standing by the fireplace, looked at his aide and asked, isn’t that the one the teacher is on? Christa McAuliffe, the first civilian astronaut, was indeed a passenger on the flight. The men moved into the small office off the Oval and watched on TV as debris fell from billowy smoke into the ocean off the Florida coast.

  Noonan was on the phone when Elliott’s assistant rushed in and gave her the news. Elliott’s seven-year-old daughter was also in the office and asked if the teacher was all right. Noonan, reporter training taking over—“handle the horror by writing the show”—started typing. NSC spokeswoman Karna Small had been with Reagan when he got the news and had taken notes on his reaction. She sent them over to Noonan. “What can you say? It’s a horrible thing. I can’t rid myself of the thought of the sacrifice of the families of the people on board,” Reagan said. Asked what he wanted to say to the children, he said: “Pioneers have always given their lives on the frontier. The problem is that it’s more of a shock to all as we see it happening, not just hear something miles away—but we must make it clear that life goes on.”

  Noonan worked quickly and was soon with Buchanan, the Mice, Speakes, and Regan in the chief of staff’s office. No one except Buchanan liked the speech. “Did you see how he held it?” Buchanan later said of one of the Mice. “Like a dog had relieved himself on it!” Noonan was depressed, but on the up side there was also no time for a full round of staffing. She had concluded the remarks by quoting from John Gillespie Magee’s poem, “High Flight,” saying that the astronauts had “‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’” One pudgy young NSC staffer, apparently inspired by the old telephone jingle, tried to rework the line to read that the astronauts had slipped the surly bonds to “reach out and touch someone—touch the face of God.” Noonan thought that it was the worst edit she encountered at the White House.

  “The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives,” Reagan said, closing his brief televised remarks to the nation that evening. “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”

  Reagan gave his State of the Union address on February 4. Not too long afterward the speechwriters met with Regan in his office. Pollster Richard Wirthlin briefed them on which words and phrases had tested well, and then talk turned to the editing process: Some of the speeches were being rewritten after the president had signed off on them, the writers complained. The integrity of the process was being compromised, one said. Regan was on his feet—and screaming: You’re questioning my integrity! “It was a non sequitur,” Rohrabacher recalled. “I was shocked that someone who held so much responsibility was acting in an irrational, arrogant, egotistical way. But that reflected his whole approach to people.” Noonan thought it was all an act—“his voice was hot but his face was cool.”

  Act or uncontrolled outburst, it signaled Regan’s boiling point ire with the writers. In March, he instructed Buchanan to fire Elliott, whom he viewed as a troublemaker. Buchanan liked Elliott and delayed until Regan told him again in early April. The specific cause was a mystery to the speechwriters, who mostly came to believe that El
liott had slipped one draft too many past Regan and into the Oval Office. Talking to a New York Times reporter, Elliott pointed to the long string of speech conflicts that, the paper reported, “had surfaced on almost all of Mr. Reagan’s major policy statements.” Administration officials denied to the paper that Elliott had been sacked, though one of Regan’s aides told The Washington Post’s Lou Cannon that Elliott had been fired because he was troublesome.

  “Every time Ben fought the bureaucracy to get the right draft to Reagan—to get the president’s own conservative views to him—Ben made an enemy,” Noonan wrote years later. “He faced a million swords, and without bureaucratic protection. In politics, friends come and go but enemies accumulate. By the time the bad guys got him, Ben looked like a human pincushion.” She seethed at his callous dismissal and laid the blame not only outside the writing shop but inside, blasting colleagues she viewed as disloyal and incompetent. “There’s no doubt about it, the speechwriting shop, our shop, always had its own problems inside it and tensions there,” Buchanan recalled. He pushed Noonan to replace Elliott, but Regan vetoed it. She departed the staff shortly thereafter as well. Elliott’s departure left the staff chastened: For all of the squabbles they had been in, none of their number had been fired, and some thought that as keepers of the ideological flame they had been protected.

  Most suspected that the president did not know about Elliott’s dismissal. When Elliott had his farewell photograph with Reagan in May, he resolved to tell him. “Mr. President, it’s a great honor to work for you, I’m not leaving of my own accord,” Elliott said.* He told Noonan that the president replied, “Oh,” and recoiled as if Elliott were brandishing a weapon. Elliott later told Lou Cannon that Reagan had responded, “I didn’t know that.”

  Writing in his diary, Reagan betrayed no knowledge of the firing. “A photo with the speechwriters & staff,” he wrote on May 22. “They’re a great bunch. Ben Elliott—head man is leaving. We’re thinking of giving the job to Jim Brady [severely wounded during the 1981 assassination attempt] whose Dr. says it would be good for him to have more to do.” In early 2006, Nancy Reagan telephoned Landon Parvin and asked whether he had known about Elliott’s dismissal. When he said yes, she replied that she and Ronnie had had no idea, and asked Parvin to relay the message to Elliott.

  “The Groundhog saw his shadow!” Reagan wrote in his diary on February 2, 1987. “Pat [Buchanan] is leaving us and I’ve told Don R. to see if we can augment the speech writers by bringing back Landon Parvin.” Two days later, Reagan personally called Parvin to discuss the idea.

  Parvin did not rejoin the White House speechwriting staff, but he would return for specific speeches. He got another phone call around February 26, when the Tower Commission report examining the Iran-Contra affair was released to the public. The president wanted Parvin to come back and work on the speech he would give to the nation on March 4 explaining his role in the scheme that had sold arms to a hostile country, Iran, in the hopes of springing hostages in Lebanon, and had then used profits from the sales to illegally fund the Contra revolutionaries in Nicaragua.

  Parvin thought that perhaps Nancy Reagan, for whom he had written some speeches and with whom he had a good relationship, was responsible for his summons.* He thought that she wanted someone she could trust from outside the White House because “There were shades of Watergate [in terms of] who knew what on the White House staff and when,” he recalled. Parvin telephoned her and asked who he could trust. She told him David Abshire, the former U.S. ambassador to NATO who had recently been appointed as White House counselor coordinating the response to the Iran-Contra scandal. At some point, he told the first lady, he would need to talk to the president.

  Parvin started consulting with people inside or close to the administration and with those whose judgment he respected: White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater (who had replaced Speakes); Treasury Secretary Baker; pollster Wirthlin; deputy national security adviser Colin Powell; and even Richard Cheney, the former chief of staff to Gerald Ford, who was now a member of Congress. At day’s end on Friday, February 27, Parvin went to the White House to meet with the president.

  Parvin and Stuart Spencer, Reagan’s longtime political adviser, rode up the elevator together to the White House residence. John Tower himself was awaiting them when the elevator doors opened—he had been snuck into the White House because he was more knowledgeable than anyone else about the contents of his commission’s report. The three men would have to convince the president of the gravity of his situation—and Parvin would have to figure out what Reagan should say in the speech. The three huddled with the president in the residence sitting room. Mrs. Reagan floated in and out.

  “At one point Tower was just very straight with him about the problem he was facing and advised him to get counsel because it could have been impeachment,” Parvin recalled. Reagan said that it was not until he started reading the footnotes of the report that he realized how much was going on without his knowledge. When the president started to thank Tower for his work on the report, Tower began to weep.

  Parvin’s biggest problem, however, was that Reagan could not accept the fact that his administration had traded arms for hostages. Parvin struck upon a formulation that matched both the facts as Reagan saw them, and as everyone else did: “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages,” Reagan said on March 4. “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

  Reagan edited the speech lightly, making small deletions or insertions. Over the course of his two terms, the amount of his own writing inserted into speeches and the level of editing that he did had diminished. There were exceptions—he substantially wrote his speech upon returning from the October 1986 Reykjavik summit—but the scope of speeches that inspired Reagan to his previous level of engagement was narrowing.

  There are a number of explanations. Rohrabacher argued that the speechwriters had learned to write in Reagan’s style and that “If the President had to add in a lot of stuff or had to correct things and put it in another style, we felt that we were failures.” And Bakshian argued that it was a function of having moved through much of his agenda. “That’s just the natural progression of a presidency,” he said. “That is, setting the tone and articulating your basic thoughts and goals happens at the outset for the most part, especially with a man who had chosen some fairly basic objectives that were coherent and were fairly easily articulated if you were articulate…. Part of it is getting disengaged, but part of it is gettingsucked into the daily routine of a presidency.” The extent to which his age and health played a role in this process is unknowable.

  “Our wedding anniversary,” Reagan noted in his diary on March 4. “Nancy says my speech tonite is her present from me.” After the speech, he recorded that there were more phone calls than for any other speech and that they had run 93 percent positive. “Even the TV bone pickers who follow the speech with their commentaries said nice things about it,” he commented.

  The United States and Soviet Union had made lurching progress toward détente in the mid-1980s. Reagan met Mikhail Gorbachev at the Vienna summit in late 1985, which was viewed as a success. The summit at Reykjavik in 1986, however, was seen as a failure after Reagan broke off talks over his cherished anti-missile system. But negotiations were moving forward over an Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty;* and, more broad, Gorbachev was starting to push reforms of the Soviet system.

  In late April, Peter Robinson traveled to West Berlin. Reagan would be going there as part of an early June European trip, and Robinson had gotten the assignment of writing the remarks he would give in front of the Brandenburg Gate and Berlin Wall. He went over with the advance team to get a feel of the setting. Robinson’s first stop was a meeting with John Kornblum, the ranking U.S. diplomat in the city. He struck Robinson as being anxious over the prospect of Reagan visiting Berlin. He gave the speechwriter a list of things the president
should not say. There should be no chest-thumping or truculent language. And don’t say anything about the Wall, Kornblum warned, the locals were long accustomed to it.

  That night, Robinson dined at the home of a local couple, Dieter and Ingeborg Elz, a pair of German retirees. Dieter had worked at the World Bank in Washington. They had invited other Berliners over so that Robinson could get a sense of local sentiments. Discussion covered an array of topics, according to Robinson’s notes, including the economy (unemployment was a problem, one guest said, adding that the United States should try to make the city more attractive for American companies), attitudes toward the United States (“Anti-Americanism in universities is long gone”), and the East-West atmosphere (“Lack of enthusiasm, compared to J.F.K., shows, in a way, normalcy, success,” he wrote in his notes. “Difference between J.F.K. and now: No immediate danger. This gone compared to ultimatum of Khrushchev”). A guest named Strauch said of the division of the city: “750 years [the age of Berlin] a long time in German history. 45 years of separation is almost nothing. The division is one we do not recognize.”

  Robinson asked about the Wall directly, he later wrote, and brought the conversation to a stop. “Then one man raised an arm and pointed. ‘My sister lives twenty miles in that direction,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen her in more than two decades. Do you think I can get used to that?’” Others chimed in. Each morning on his way to work, another guest related that he passed the same soldier atop the Wall. “That soldier and I speak the same language,” the guest said. “We share the same history. But one of us is a zookeeper and the other is an animal, and I am never certain which is which.” Finally the hostess, Ingeborg Elz, red-faced, pounded her fist into her open palm. “If this man Gorbachev is serious with his talk of glasnost and perestroika,” she said, “he can prove it. He can get rid of this wall.”