Neither was practicing speeches. Davis asked Bush once whether he read speeches out loud before delivering them, and Bush said no. Davis asked if the president thought about how he wanted a speech to sound when he delivered it, and again Bush said no, that that would take too long.
The composition of the speechwriting team was also an intentional departure from its Reagan counterpart. As a public affairs official at the Department of Labor during the Reagan administration, Demarest had concluded that Reagan’s speechwriters were out of control: leaking to the press, having too high a profile, and worst of all trying to drive their own policy agenda. For Bush, he had put together a group of writers that would not run amok or push their own agendas.
The staff was headed by Chriss Winston, with whom Demarest had worked at Labor. Winston had held a variety of political communications jobs, including on Representative James Leach of Iowa’s staff and during the Reagan administration at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, before joining Labor. She did little writing but assigned speeches and edited drafts. She was the first woman to head a presidential speechwriting office.
Mark Davis, a former reporter, had written speeches for Republican National Committee chairman Frank Fahrenkopf. Davis quickly figured out that Bush would engage more on foreign policy because he found it more interesting than domestic matters. A foreign policy speech would often begin with a meeting with the president, but domestic policy speeches almost invariably began with a meeting with a policy aide. Davis resolved to focus on foreign policy addresses. Davis’s turn of mind tended to run toward conspiracies, and as a writer he was fastidious: he would sweat over each word, at times wandering the halls with the text until Winston corralled him and forced him to give it up.
Curt Smith had written for Richard Schweiker at the Department of Health and Human Services and “Silent” Samuel Pierce at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He was the most conservative member of the writing staff, envisioning an America of the Saturday Evening Post (where he had been an editor), baseball (about which he had written several books), and “Mayberry, USA,” which he would refer to in speeches, until Winston edited them out—“I’m not going to have the president of the United States quote Barney Fife on my watch!” she would say.* Smith specialized in speeches that appealed to the conservative base of the GOP—rallying-type addresses that touched on values issues and conservative philosophy.
Dan McGroarty, who in the Reagan years had written speeches for Secretaries of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci, had previously worked at Voice of America. The Defense background helped him write many of the Persian Gulf War speeches. And he was a natural leader: He was, recalled speechwriter Ken Askew, who joined the staff in 1992, “the guy you want to be captain of the baseball team. Brainy—he’d be the catcher.”
Also at the meeting with Bush on January 21 was Mary Kate Grant, who wrote magazine articles for Bush. She had studied foreign affairs at the University of Virginia and had expected to pursue a State Department career, but in between passing the Foreign Service exam and actually getting a diplomatic job, she ended up working for the Bush presidential campaign. She had joined when he trailed in the polls and thought that she could resume her career track once the election was over. Instead, she ended up in the White House. By the start of March, she would be writing speeches as well and eventually joined the staff officially.
Two men who were not at that first meeting joined the staff within a few weeks. Ed McNally had worked on Bush’s presidential primary campaign in 1980. Eight years later, he was a federal prosecutor in New York when he contacted Winston about writing speeches. “He had a real writing gift for writing unlike a lawyer,” Demarest recalled. “He was somebody that I think really saw it as a wonderful craft. And he had a very strong ego to go with it. He’d really argue for his approach in language—very effectively.” And he was the staff bon vivant: he had the Irish blarney, would roller-skate to work and through the halls of the Executive Office Building, and wore sunglasses around the office.
Like Bush, McNally was a Yale graduate, and had been a member of the school’s mysterious Skull and Bones Society. Members are required to leave the room at the mention of the group’s name, so Davis enjoyed occasionally mentioning it just to drive McNally out of the room. Later in the administration he would return to practicing law, becoming the chief federal prosecutor in Alaska, and eventually the general counsel to the White House’s Office of Homeland Security in the George W. Bush administration.
Another recruit, Mark Lange, had written for Ann McLaughlin and Elizabeth Dole, both secretaries of Transportation under Reagan. Lange had voted for independent candidate John Anderson in 1980 and had written speeches for Colorado governor Richard Lamm, a Democrat. He was hired to focus on business and economic addresses, but like Davis he quickly discovered that foreign policy speeches were more appealing. He rode a motorcycle to work every day.
The speechwriters were made acutely aware that they were not on a par with the Reagan speechwriting staff. Fairly or not, word quickly spread around the White House and around Washington that they did not have the clout of their Reagan predecessors. Some of the gossip was overblown (Demarest called “a bunch of bullshit” the idea that the speechwriters’ pay had been cut—it was adjusted down to entry levels after eight years of salary creep, he said), but some was not. They did not have mess privileges, which were not only a high-profile perk, but as Mari Maseng had said, “very important because that’s where we’d sit and do our lobbying and get our ideas and become part of the team.”* Similarly, Bush’s writers’ access to the West Wing was curtailed. They had to share the passes that would allow them to walk through there without escort—whether to hear the president deliver their speeches or to meet with him to discuss them. “There never seems to be enough of these passes at the right time and [it] is continually causing delays,” Demarest wrote in an April 11 memorandum.
“It was a signal to the rest of the staff that we’re in this box and that we’re not to be taken seriously,” Davis recalled. The treatment of the Bush speechwriters was the visible demonstration that the Bush administration did not care as much as its predecessor about public communications. “Are they important in terms of the political pecking order?” Peggy Noonan was quoted as saying in The New York Times. “They’re just above the people who clean up after Millie [the Bush family dog].”
The USS Iowa was doing combat exercises roughly three hundred miles northeast of Puerto Rico on April 19 when an explosion tore through its number two gun turret. The Iowa, a battleship, had the largest guns mounted on any ship in the world. The explosion killed forty-seven men.
Five days later, Bush addressed three thousand mourners, including a thousand from the battleship, in the largest hangar at the Norfolk naval station. “They all were, in the words of a poet, the men behind the guns,” Bush said. “They came from Hidalgo, Texas; Cleveland, Ohio; Tampa, Florida; Costa Mesa, California. They came to the Navy as strangers, served the Navy as shipmates and friends, and left the Navy as brothers in eternity. In the finest Navy tradition, they served proudly on a great battleship, USS Iowa.”
The line was from the poem “The Men behind the Guns,” by John Jerome Rooney. Davis, who wrote the speech, used the phrase as a refrain. The emotional pinnacle of his initial drafts came with the president talking about his own naval experiences—he had been a U.S. Navy pilot in World War II, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross—and how he knew what it was like to return from a mission to find the neighboring bunk empty. But Bush kept editing that section out of the speech: I can’t say this, he told his speechwriter; if I say this, I’ll just break down in front of everybody. “We underestimated how visceral this was for him and how hard it was for him to do it,” Davis recalled.
Chriss Winston watched the speech broadcast on CNN in her office in the Executive Office Building. As Bush spoke, she realized that he was starting to choke up—she was not sure he was go
ing to get through the speech. “Your men are under a different command now, one that knows no rank, only love, knows no danger, only peace,” Bush said in Norfolk, his eyes filled with tears. “May God bless them all.” He swallowed hard and abruptly turned, leaving the speech unfinished.
“I kept rehearsing and reading my speech aloud,” he wrote in his diary. “I did pray for strength, because I cry too easily, so I read it over and over again. I tried not to personalize it when I gave it. I tried not to focus on a grieving parent or a grieving spouse; I tried to comfort individually in the speech; but then I got to the end, I choked and had to stop.”
Less than a week later, Bush was addressing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, speaking at the DAR Constitution Hall a few blocks from the White House. He was discussing the budget deal his administration had reached with congressional Democratic leaders on April 13. “One word more about the budget agreement for 1990,” the president said. “We’ve agreed to $5.3 billion in new revenues as part of the deal. And let me say a word about that $5.3 billion. I mean to live by what I’ve said: no new taxes.”
Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post mentioned that Bush had repeated his campaign pledge. There was no reason to: it was the tenth time the president had publicly reiterated or referred to the pledge—it was a standard part of his speeches, and, with the budget settled for the year, it was not newsworthy. But inside the administration, it was an issue. Winston started getting drafts back from the Office of Management and Budget with “no new taxes” scratched out.
Finally, after the fourth or fifth time this happened, Winston got a call from a superior in the West Wing. Stop putting it into speeches, she was told. She was dumbfounded. Are you telling me we’re going to renege on this pledge? she asked. Surely they could not be so stupid. It had been the heart of the campaign. It would be political suicide. The reply was: I’m not saying that. Just don’t put it in anymore.
“No new taxes” disappeared from Bush’s speeches.
Events were moving quickly in Eastern Europe as the Cold War neared its abrupt conclusion. The Polish government agreed in April 1989 to hold free elections in June. In May, Hungary started dismantling the fence along its Austrian border. Bush made a pair of trips to Europe that spring and summer trying to foster the liberalization without angering the hard-liners behind the disintegrating iron curtain.
The president was scheduled to speak in Mainz, Germany, on May 31, to discuss the United States’ unfolding Eastern European strategy. Davis worked on the speech for two weeks and fine-tuned it on the trip. He and Demarest went through a line-by-line edit of it with White House chief of staff John Sununu and national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. As Davis was putting the final polish on it the day before Bush was to speak, his foot bumped the power supply button for the computer and the screen blinked off. The speech disappeared: there was no trace of it on the computer. All of the hard copies had gone into burn bags. The president asked to see the speech so that he could read it through. As Demarest, deputy chief of staff James Cicconi, and deputy national security adviser Robert Gates looked on, Davis had to explain to Bush that his speech had been accidentally erased. Fine, Bush told them, unfazed, I’ll look at it in the morning.
Demarest had a plan: They would all go out to dinner, have a few bottles of wine to relax, and then return to the hotel and reconstruct the speech from scratch—which is what they did. “The Cold War began with the division of Europe,” Bush said the next day at the Rheingoldhalle in Mainz. “It can only end when Europe is whole. Today it is this very concept of a divided Europe that is under siege. And that’s why our hopes run especially high, because the division of Europe is under siege not by armies but by the spread of ideas.”
Bush was scheduled to visit Poland and Hungary in July to spur the Cold War thaw and to encourage cracks appearing in the Soviet bloc. At Gdansk, the Polish shipyard, Bush would make remarks and participate in a wreath-laying at the monument for workers from Solidarity, the anti-Communist labor union movement that had been critical to ending totalitarian rule in the country.
On June 26, a researcher named Bob Simon sent a four-page memo to McNally, who had been assigned the speech. “The President is speaking at a place and at a time that could be one of the turning points in world history, assuming the Polish move toward democracy flourishes,” Simon wrote. “By giving a good speech, I think we can make that moment even more dramatic. My greatest hope is that the press and the public will look back on this speech in two or three years and say George Bush helped inspire the people of Europe without provoking a Soviet backlash—something that just a few months ago most people thought was impossible.”
But the drama was provided by the setting and the crowd. Solidarity leader Lech Walesa seemed overwhelmed by the quarter million people who jammed into the square on July 11. “Oh my God, oh my God,” he kept muttering, speaking in English, as he and Bush drove through.
The crowd waved American flags and hand-painted placards and flashed the “V” sign. “Your time has come,” Bush told the throng. “It is Poland’s time of possibilities; its time of responsibilities. It is Poland’s time of destiny, a time when dreams can live again.” His speech was interrupted first by chants of “Lech Walesa,” and then by chants of “President Bush!”
“Just before I left a few days ago, I was asked in my beautiful Oval Office in the White House by one of your journalists if I would leave Poland and go to America, were I a young Pole,” Bush recounted. “And I answered that in this time of bright promise, of historic transition, of unique opportunity, I would want to stay in Poland and be a part of it, help make the dream come true for all the Polish people.” The crowd started a chant in Polish that neither Winston nor NSC staffer Condoleezza Rice, with whom she was standing, could understand. So Rice walked over to one of the local State Department officers and asked what it meant. “Stay with us!” was the reply. “Stay with us!”
Bush and his party flew on to Budapest, but were delayed by a summer thunderstorm. Thousands gathered in Kossuth Square in the city center, waiting in the rain for the American leader. When Bush arrived, Hungarian president Bruno Straub plodded through his full, fifteen-minute introduction as the rain fell. Bush finally approached the microphone, and, holding his text over his head, said: “I’m going to take this speech, and I’m going to tear it up. You’ve been out here too long.”
Curt Smith had written the remarks. At that moment he was sitting in his office in Washington listening to Bush with researcher Stephanie Blessey, who had helped him prepare the speech. He tried to hide his surprise. Her head hit the table in shock. Later, Bush sent him a picture of the scene with the inscription: “It’s raining in Budapest. I’ll wing it.”
By the fall, Bush had still not yet given a nationwide Oval Office address. There was concern among his senior aides that he had not achieved presidential stature in the public mind, which a prime-time address from the White House could remedy. Drugs had been on the public’s mind that summer. College basketball star Len Bias’s June cocaine-related death had underscored the issue, and a Washington Post–ABC News poll in late May found that 36 percent of respondents identified drugs, crime, and violence as their primary concern—more than double the response for any other issue.
The speechwriters and Demarest were brainstorming when Winston asked if anyone had ever actually seen crack cocaine. She doubted whether most Americans had, and she had heard that it looked like innocent rock candy. If they could get some crack from an arrest that had occurred somewhere in Washington—the closer to the White House the better—it could make a powerful visual for the speech. The key, everyone agreed, was that the cocaine would have to come from existing evidence; they specifically did not want a bust arranged for the speech. If that happened and something went wrong, it would be a disaster.
The drug prop first appeared in the speech’s fifth draft—by Davis—dated August 17, as having been “seized…just ten blocks from where I’m sitt
ing now.” That formulation stayed in for the rest of the month. The request had meanwhile reached James Milford, executive assistant to the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). On August 25, Milford called William McMullen, the number two man in the DEA’s Washington office. “Do you have anything going on around the White House?” Milford asked. McMullen replied no. With a permanent police and Secret Service presence, the neighborhood of the White House was not a smart place for drug dealers to ply their trade.
McMullen said, though, that his agents were arranging a drug buy four or five blocks from there. “Any possibility of you moving it down to the White House?” Millford asked. “Evidently, the president wants to show it could be bought anywhere.” When DEA agents asked eighteen-year-old drug dealer Keith Jackson if they could make the deal near the White House, his tape-recorded reply was, “Where the [expletive] is the White House?” Nevertheless, they were able to lure him into Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, and at about 11:30 am on September 1, he sold them three ounces of crack cocaine for $2,400.
That same day, Davis produced two new drafts of the drug speech, numbers 10 and 10A. The prop was dropped from the former, but the drugs were still said to have been purchased ten blocks away from the White House in 10A—until someone crossed out “just ten blocks” and wrote in “just across the street.”
On the evening of September 5, the president, speaking from the Oval Office, held up a plastic bag. “This is crack cocaine seized a few days ago by Drug Enforcement agents in a park just across the street from the White House,” he said. “It could easily have been heroin or PCP. It’s as innocent-looking as candy, but it’s turning our cities into battle zones, and it’s murdering our children. Let there be no mistake: This stuff is poison. Some used to call drugs harmless recreation; they’re not. Drugs are a real and terribly dangerous threat to our neighborhoods, our friends, and our families.”
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 42