The draft of the concession speech came back from Bush, more heavily edited than anything Provost had seen before from the president—much shorter, and much more to the point. Bush said that he wanted to make clear that any mistakes made were his, that he wanted the transition to be smooth and, he said, if it’s okay with you, Steve, I don’t want to speak very long. “We got in the motorcade,” Provost recalled, “we went in and he gave it that night and—ah—it hurts just even talking about it.”
In 2000, while moderating a panel on leadership at his presidential library, ex-President Bush summarized the problems he had had with speechwriters:
My problem, very frankly, was that I wasn’t articulate. I didn’t feel comfortable with some of the speechwriters’ phrases, so I would cross them out…. And I think it was maybe a mistake—because part of being seen as a visionary is being able to have flowing rhetoric and…you know, coming out of the clouds and being quoted all the time. My vision was for a kinder and gentler nation, my vision was for more freedom, more democracy around the world. My vision, as it turned out in the war—stand up against aggression and let some able people do the job. So I feel comfortable with what I felt was a vision.
Bush felt comfortable with it, but he never learned to properly communicate it, or to use his speech staff properly. They had had other problems. In the best of times they were ignored and in the worst of times they were alternately blamed for the administration’s political collapse or ordered to reverse it. But they had gotten steady exposure to him and were genuinely fond of their boss.
After Bush left office, several of the speechwriters realized that he would have to go on giving speeches. Curt Smith organized a volunteer effort, and he, McNally, Lange, Grant, and another former speechwriter named Beth Hinchliffe offered their services as an ongoing speechwriting staff, gratis. Demarest and McGroarty had already done so.
“The answer, before you change your minds: I accept your offer!!!” Bush wrote Smith and the others on June 14, 1993. He invited those on the east coast up to Maine “to get things moving. Inasmuch as Ed [McNally] and Mark [Lange] are out West maybe you and Les Girls, make that politically correct—‘Les Women,’ could come up here first,” he wrote. “If that makes sense let me know and the plane tickets will be in the mail.”
ELEVEN
“No, No, No, This Is a
Speech—I Just Want to
Talk to People”
JANUARY 20, 1993
Vice President–elect Al Gore’s head drooped down and then bobbed back up. Down and up—he was fighting a losing battle with sleep. The ceremony that would make Bill Clinton the forty-second president of the United States was hours away, but, amid friends and aides, Clinton was still editing and rewriting his inaugural address.
Work on the speech had begun in Little Rock weeks before with communications aide George Stephanopoulos filling a three-ring binder with drafts, memos, and suggestions from staff and luminaries, including JFK speechwriters Ted Sorensen, Richard Goodwin, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Clinton had selected two aides to write the address: Michael Waldman, a dark-haired, deep-voiced policy staffer, had worked as a public interest lawyer and lobbyist before joining the campaign. He suggested focusing the speech on renewing American democracy. Clinton paired him with campaign speechwriter David Kusnet. Kusnet, the incoming White House chief speechwriter, was “shy and gentle, with studious glasses,” Waldman said. He was a veteran of the Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis presidential campaigns, and had written a book in 1992, Speaking American, about how liberals could communicate with ordinary Americans. “Our job was to capture [Clinton’s] thoughts, feed him ideas, try to wrestle it into some sense of structure and organization,” Waldman later wrote. They produced at least twenty drafts of the speech, by Kusnet’s estimate.
Kusnet, adapting a slogan that Clinton had used on the campaign trail—“Every problem in America has been solved somewhere…”—conceived the signature line: “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” From the late Father Timothy Healy, a past president of Georgetown University, Clinton’s alma mater, they drew the idea of “forcing the spring,” or speeding the cycle of renewal. Healy died before sending his notes to Clinton, and they were found on his computer.
Clinton dictated a call for political reform: “This capital, like every capital since the dawn of civilization, has been a place of intrigue and calculation,” the draft said. “Powerful and wealthy people come here and maneuver with an obsessive concern about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, often forgetting about the people to whom it belongs.” (Final version: “This beautiful capital, like every capital since the dawn of civilization, is often a place of intrigue and calculation. Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.”)
Clinton and his staff had decamped from Little Rock to Washington, arriving four days before the inauguration. Work on the speech continued, with a growing pool of contributors that included Clinton’s college roommate, Tommy Caplan, and Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of Martin Luther King, Jr. Branch brought a King quote that inspired the peroration, Clinton’s exhortation to Americans to “begin anew with energy and hope, with faith and discipline. And let us work until our work is done.” But work on the speech was not done. “He’s never met a sentence he couldn’t fool with,” Hillary Rodham Clinton later observed. After a gala inaugural eve celebration, the president-elect had a final rehearsal at Blair House, the governmental guest quarters across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Rehearsal meant more revisions. “Clinton never knew exactly what he wanted to say until he heard himself say the words,” Stephanopoulos later wrote in his White House memoir.
Acutely conscious of his reputation for long-windedness, Clinton cut words, lines, paragraphs, even whole pages. He was finally satisfied around 4:30 am, and the group broke up in the early morning to grab a bit of sleep.
The speech was well received. “Bill Clinton was equal to the occasion,” Time reported. William Safire gave the address a “B+”. The New York Times’s R. W. Apple, Jr., portended some administration problems, however. “Even at their moment of triumph, many of the Clinton people seem acutely aware that their margin for error, never great, has been reduced by the conflict, the disorganization and the resultant tardiness that marred the transition,” Apple wrote the day after the inauguration. “When a reporter complained this week to George Stephanopoulos, the White House communications director, that his answers to her questions were flat and unilluminating, he replied, ‘I can’t afford to be colorful.’”
It was the economy, stupid. Clinton’s presidential victory had been fueled by the perception that he was in tune with the suffering of working-class voters. Where George H. W. Bush had declared, “Message: I care,” Clinton had bit his lip and expressed empathy. He promised that as president he would “focus like a laser beam on the economy.” So Clinton’s first major speeches would unveil his economic plan. He would do it in two stages: a February 15 Oval Office address previewing the unpalatable portions of the program—tax increases—and then a State of the Union address two days later revealing the rest of the plan.* The hope was that the initial backlash against raising taxes would spend itself in time to give the rest of the program a fair public hearing.
The speechwriters, armed with what Waldman called “ambitious, wide-ranging and indiscriminate” instructions from Clinton, prepared the talks while the president and his economic team hashed out the actual plans in the Roosevelt Room. Only occasionally did the two efforts intersect.
Clinton’s advisers were split. Deficit hawks, such as economic adviser Robert Rubin and budget director Leon Panetta, argued that impressing Wall Street with fiscal discipline was of paramount concern because it could lead to lower interest rates and increased economic growth. Aides su
ch as Labor Secretary Robert Reich, Stephanopoulos, and Rubin deputy Gene Sperling favored increasing spending to stimulate the economy. Clinton split the difference with a strong tilt toward deficit reduction, with two dollars of cutting for every one of new spending. The middle-class tax cut upon which he had campaign was dispensed with.
The debate was emblematic of the early days of the administration. Clinton had run for office as a “New Democrat.” He was a former chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and portrayed himself as a southern governor who was willing to break with his party’s liberal orthodoxy. But he was a philosophical dabbler. His advisers reflected both this impulse and the fact that much of the Democratic establishment was still “old Democrat.” Much of the first term was spent working out the tensions between the two wings of the party.
Campaign consultant Paul Begala and deputy communications director David Dreyer, both veterans of House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt’s office, composed the first Oval Office address, while Kusnet and Waldman wrote the second speech, to Congress. Only Kusnet was technically on the speechwriting staff. None of them had a background in economics, and none knew where the deliberations by the president and his team were heading. “Was the budget to be sold as investment or deficit reduction?” Waldman was wondering. “How strongly should the arguments about fairness be made? Were we still putting people first?” (“Putting people first” had been a Clinton campaign theme.)
Like Jimmy Carter, Clinton had never worked with speechwriters before his presidential campaign. “You know, I never had a speech-writer before I was president,” he would tell his writers. “Gave three speeches a day when I was governor, never needed a speechwriter.” He would say that, recalled second-term writer Jeff Shesol, “as if he was just making small talk—with someone who had a thing against speechwriters.” “No one looked to the Carter experience as a successful presidential experience, so to find a winning Democratic team you would have to go back to the Kennedy-Johnson people,” Kusnet said.
Clinton spent most of Monday, February 15, working on the Oval Office speech. He scrawled all over the pages with a black felt-tip marker. One speechwriter described his handwriting as looking like a “string of cursive ‘u’s.” The deadline for getting an advance copy to the media came and went. The final draft was loaded onto the TelePrompTer at 8:48 pm, leaving Clinton time for one read-through.
Clinton attacked a dozen years of Reaganomics and bragged about his tenure as governor of Arkansas. “Those who profited from the status quo will oppose the changes we seek,” he said. “Every step of the way they’ll oppose it. Many have already lined the corridors of power with high-priced lobbyists. They are the defenders of decline. And we must be the architects of the future.”
Clinton, Stephanopoulos, and the senior staff were pleased with the speech. Later that evening, Stephanopoulos was disabused when he was the surprise guest at a meeting of the Judson Welliver Society, the association of former presidential speechwriters. Gathering in the basement of ringleader William Safire’s home, former ghosts from the Truman administration onward had eaten dinner and watched the speech. The reviews were not good. Ted Sorensen had said that he did not like to talk about Democratic speeches that he could not praise. Stephanopoulos’s appearance brought an uncomfortable silence, which was broken when Sorensen rose: Mr. Stephanopoulos, he said, I thought the speech was wonderful!* The room cracked up.
The laughter loosened the group. They told Stephanopoulos the speech was strident and the delivery rushed. Safire asked Stephanopoulos to describe the speech-drafting process and jaws dropped as he recounted it. “You mean,” Patrick Buchanan asked, “he didn’t practice for the first time until ten minutes before nine?” Tony Snow of the Bush administration exclaimed: “George, you guys are bungee jumping without a rope.” “What’s bungee jumping?” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., asked Tony Dolan. When Dolan explained that it involved people tying a rope around themselves and jumping off a cliff, Schlesinger stared at him for a time and then made a “harrumph” noise.
The speechwriters’ assessment was on target. Time described the address as “one of the worst speeches” of Clinton’s life. The stock market fell nearly 83 points the following day. White House chief of staff Thomas “Mack” McLarty worried to Waldman that businesspeople and legislators had heard too much class warfare. But there was little strategic guidance regarding the next speech two days later to Congress.
The speechwriters did get some detail help from Sperling, though he was feverish and groggy with the flu. As Waldman, Dreyer, Begala, and others worked through Tuesday night on the State of the Union in Dreyer’s office, Sperling sat propped in a chair, covered in blankets and coats, half-conscious. “Hey Gene, how much does a surcharge on millionaires pick up?” Dreyer would shout. His eyes never opening, Sperling would mumble the answer after a few seconds and then slip back into his stupor.
On Wednesday morning, the speech was still pitching economic stimulus, even though the plan now was emphasizing reduction. Domestic policy adviser Bruce Reed and National Security Council speechwriter Jeremy Rosner wrote a new centrist opening to the address, which Clinton liked. A furious Hillary Clinton convened an editing session in the Roosevelt Room where the speech was revised paragraph by paragraph. The final text had to be to the printer by noon to get advance copies up to the Hill, another deadline that blew right by.
When Clinton arrived at the family theatre in the West Wing at 6:30 pm, he had time for one rehearsal, and he revised as he went. “We never received anything but a finished draft from Bush,” one Army Signal Corps TelePromtpTer operator told Taylor Branch. “We put it in, and he read it.”
The speech was still in disarray when Clinton ascended to the rostrum in the House of Representatives that evening. As he spoke, he saw “lawmakers stir and respond to points and fall silent for others, [and] he began to feed off their response,” Waldman wrote. “He began to riff—to ad-lib, to revise entire paragraphs.” Clinton improvised roughly a quarter of the speech. Jammed in the well of the House, Waldman and Sperling high-fived each other. “He’s ad-libbing the State of the Union!”
They should not have been surprised. Clinton speeches were often a dialogue: he could read a crowd and adjust accordingly, seamlessly departing and returning to the prepared text. The analogy most Clinton speechwriters use is a jazz musician. “The job of the speechwriters, especially on the domestic side, but also on the foreign policy side, was to try to establish what the main theme was and give him then the freedom to riff,” National Security Council speechwriter Tony Blinken said.*
And Jazz does not mean chaos or randomness, argued Don Baer, a Clinton chief speechwriter. Jazz is a “very structured, disciplined form…. But it is the very structure and discipline that actually allows it to have the appearance of spontaneity and to open the door for the emotional component to sort of breathe through where otherwise you might not feel it,” he said. “Riffing is not just free and easy—there’s a purpose and a direction to it…. It’s controlled in such a way that you lose sight of the controls.”†
Waldman and Sperling cheered during the 1993 State of the Union, but the president’s speechwriters were often exasperated when he discarded a text that they had toiled over. Clinton knew it was frustrating too, once telling Terry Edmonds, his last chief speechwriter, that it was just his style and that he did it with his own writing. “It’s when he gets up there, he sees people he knows, stories come to his mind, connections are being made from past experiences,” Edmonds said. “So then he’s off, he’s off doing his own thing. He uses the speech, of course he knows the policy nugget that’s in there, he studies it, and makes sure he gets it out. But he’ll do it in his own style.”
Clinton’s speechwriters would eventually learn to boldface the crucial talking points in a speech so that the president would include them. Mostly he did, though if he thought a sentence too rhetorical or too banal he might skip or rephrase it. Speechwriter Jordan Tamagni
called this the “that’s the way the cookie falls apart syndrome,” for how he would interpolate a hoary phrase like “that’s the way the cookie crumbles.”
Returning to the White House on the evening of February 17, after the State of the Union, Clinton told Begala to bring “the kids,” as he called the younger staffers, to the solarium in the residence for a celebration. Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting was served, and then cherry pie. At evening’s end, Bill and Hillary turned on a C-SPAN rerun of the speech.
National security adviser Anthony Lake and his deputy, Sandy Berger, fought to get a foreign policy speech onto the schedule. Each had speechwriting backgrounds, and they placed great stock in the importance of presidential communication. Lake had written drafts for the NSC under Nixon before he resigned in protest over the 1970 invasion of Cambodia. They had recruited Jeremy Rosner as an NSC speech-writer. Rosner had worked for Gary Hart, and at the Democratic Leadership Council. He had helped with national security speeches during the campaign, and was “a tremendous writer with force and punch,” Don Baer said. Speeches are written by the White House speechwriting shop, Rosner pointed out to Lake. Not anymore, Lake replied. He told Rosner to tell Kusnet that the NSC would be handling national security speeches.
Rosner and Kusnet had worked closely on the 1984 Mondale campaign. When Rosner told Kusnet that national security speeches would be written in the National Security Council, Kusnet just looked at him, and said, okay. “And that was it,” Rosner recalled. “It was the biggest turf grab in White House history. It was huge.”
NSC staffers had long produced initial drafts for presidential speechwriters, and this writer-expert relationship had always been strained. Henry Kissinger with Nixon and Zbigniew Brzezinski with Carter had both suggested bringing foreign policy speeches entirely inside the NSC. Now Lake had done it. “The reason for doing this was simply efficiency,” Lake recalled. It made sense to have the speeches drafted “in the NSC by a speechwriter who knows the substance of foreign policy so that you’re not then getting behind and trying to fight over nuances.”
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 46