White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  Prince had written the last line to read that the country would not be “intimidated by cowards”—Clinton had added the “evil.”

  The memorial service in Oklahoma City was set for four days later, Sunday, April 23. Curiel produced a first draft, and on Saturday Baer gave it to Prince to work on. He punched it up and integrated some other material, including a suggestion from Clinton’s speech coach, Michael Sheehan, which became “You have lost too much, but you have not lost everything. And you have certainly not lost America, for we will stand with you for as many tomorrows as it takes.” Prince specialized in Old Testament material and recalled a line from Proverbs about inheriting the wind. Clinton added an opening to the sentence about teaching children: “Let us teach our children that the God of comfort is also the God of righteousness,” he said. “Those who trouble their own house will inherit the wind. Justice will prevail.”

  Typically, Clinton had edited until delivery, scratching and scribbling on his reading copy. He scratched out “deed” from a promise to “bring to justice those who did this evil deed.” At the conclusion, he scribbled in the margin, at an angle from the text, “Belong to God/Until we are with them/Let our lives be their legacy.” In the speech he said, “Those who are lost now belong to God. Some day we will be with them. But until that happens, their legacy must be our lives.”

  “It was the first time that he was able to articulate national emotion and give it focus and give it vent and he was able to be healing balm, and I think it was very effective and very important,” Morris said. “I learned from it, because I didn’t really appreciate that that’s what he could do.”*

  Oklahoma City was a key moment in Clinton’s, and his administration’s, grasping the power of the communications tools available to a president. “It changed dramatically,” Prince said. “In Oklahoma City he really was able to give voice to what the country was feeling. And I think that helped him. You know, he grew, he changed. Oklahoma City completely changed him…. It was just as if the weight of the office kind of descended on him like chain mail and he grew large enough to support it.”

  Baer was named White House communications director in August. Waldman, the policy aide who had been dragooned into writing numerous speeches, succeeded him as director of speechwriting. A lawyer, Waldman had been special assistant to the president for policy coordination. His speechwriting staff affectionately called him “Marshall Tito,” in the sense that he was the first among equals, and because of his ability to keep potentially conflicting personalities at peace. When new speechwriters joined, Waldman carefully instructed them in the wiles of the staffing process.

  The Clinton administration was a throwback to LBJ’s. There was more crossover between the speechwriters and policy aides than in any presidency since. Waldman had a policy background. Domestic policy adviser Bruce Reed—who had preceded Kusnet as 1992 campaign speechwriter—and Gene Sperling often co-wrote major speeches.

  Clinton preferred to work on speeches with aides who could answer substantive questions about policy. After leaving speechwriting in 1997, Prince became senior policy adviser at the Domestic Policy Council. The NSC’s Liu was deputy domestic policy adviser in the administration’s last two years; NSC speechwriting chief Tony Blinken eventually became the top man in the council’s European directorate; Daniel Benjamin became director of transnational security threats after three years as an NSC speechwriter.

  “Often the speeches were written by writers working with the president and policy people who were also integrally involved with it,” Baer said. “Certainly when he could find a writer who understood that stuff better, I think he found that [to be] more of a one-stop shop.”

  The staff that Waldman took over in 1995 had almost completely turned over. Kusnet, Wilkie, and Stone were gone. Curiel, Shipley—the former reporter whose first speech was supplanted by the “Pile of Vetoes Speech”—and Prince were still on the staff. They had been joined by Terry Edmonds, an African-American who had grown up in the inner city of Baltimore. He had written speeches for Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala and he was an aspiring poet. Clinton once told him, “Every time you write something for me, it makes me want to sing.” Jordan Tamagni, a lawyer from New York whom Morris had recruited, would also join the staff, first as a kind of office manager but working her way into speechwriting within a few months.

  Waldman’s first big speech was the 1996 State of the Union. It was especially important because it would kick off the election year, and because the likely GOP nominee, Kansas senator Bob Dole, would give the Republican response. Morris polled everything: Should the speech be long, like the detail-packed 1995 State of the Union, or a brief “tone poem,” as White House press secretary Mike McCurry suggested? Morris’s surveys, conducted by New York–based pollster Mark Penn, showed that people liked substance, even if it took time. Lines, themes, and ideas were thrown into the polling machine to see what stuck. Bruce Reed thought all of the programs in the speech smacked of pandering. “America was built on challenges, not promises,” he told Waldman, recalling a line he had written for Clinton years earlier that echoed JFK. “Challenges, not promises” went into the poll and came back a big winner.

  Americans were concerned “that their values were under threat—not by the forces of ‘secular humanism,’ as the religious right would have it, but by an increasingly coarse and commercialized culture,” Waldman recalled. “If we could answer this concern, then we could win the suburban vote.” Issues such as school uniforms, tobacco, TV violence, and medical leave were introduced under this banner. Policy development, Morris said, started with a poll-tested sound bite. Then the cabinet departments would be checked to see if any policies were percolating to fit the sound bite. Once everything was vetted, an event would be put on the calendar. “I would write the sound bite and go to the speechwriters and say, ‘Your job is to make the rest of the speech so boring that it is not covered, and heaven help you if there is a line in the speech that is so quotable that it overshadows the sound bite,’” he recalled.

  Waldman and company stuffed the State of the Union, but Morris wanted still more. Three days before Clinton was due to speak, Morris faxed over a rewritten version that Waldman thought was tighter, more “tabloidy”—and brilliant. “In contrast to the stately pace of my prose, Morris’ was staccato, condensed,” Waldman recalled. It was “urgent, clipped, [with] ellipses instead of transitions. No idea was carried more than a sentence or two.” One change particularly stuck out. Waldman had written that “the past thirty years has taught us that big government is not the answer, and the past twelve months has taught us that no government is not the answer.” Morris condensed this to read: “The era of big government is over. But the era of every man for himself must never begin.”

  It would be a startling announcement for a Democratic president. It could easily be interpreted as a renunciation of the faith in government that had been the party’s hallmark since the New Deal. And it would come at a time when the debate about the size and reach of the federal government had led to a pair of shutdowns of the government, one in November 1995 and the second in December into January 1996, because of budgetary wrangling between the White House and the Republican Congress.

  The end of “the era of big government” may not have been merely a speechwriter’s interpolation. Addressing a National Italian-American Foundation dinner on October 21, 1995, Clinton had called “the era of big government” a “myth,” saying that the size of the federal government as a percentage of the civilian workforce was smaller than at any time since FDR. Nine days later, in a morning address to the White House Conference on Travel and Tourism, he made the same observation, concluding, “The era of big government is done. The era of smart government is here.” Three days later, speaking to the National Jewish Democratic Council on the evening of November 2, Clinton said, “The era of big government is over, but the era of good government and strong government cannot be over.”

&nb
sp; The “era of big government” being “over” was a developing thought buried in three minor speeches, two of which had been given after reporters’ deadlines.* It received no press attention. Baer, Waldman, and Morris don’t even recall Clinton using the lines, and Baer is certain that “era of big government” was not in the prepared text of any of those speeches. It was not uncommon for Clinton to use speeches to develop arguments or refine phrases. In the summer of 1996, Waldman would originate the campaign theme of building a bridge to the future after listening to Clinton riff on the image through the spring. Morris said Clinton’s use of the phrase in the months before the State of the Union was a “coincidence.” It may be; or the writers may have picked up on their boss’s evolving thinking.

  The speechwriters expected that the president declaring an end of the “era of big government” would trigger a philosophical debate within the administration. But what they got was a complaint from campaign spokeswoman Ann Lewis that “era of every man for himself” was sexist. The men thought this was political correctness run amok: the balance and contrast of repetition might have made the whole line memorable, but a weak second sentence would be forgotten. Every person for himself would violate Clinton’s strict grammar, so they would have to find something else. It was “the death of liberalism at its own hands,” Waldman commented to Stephanopoulos.

  “The era of big government is over,” Clinton told the Congress on January 23, 1996. Republicans, sensing the surrender they had waited for since they took control of Congress, leaped to their feet and applauded. Clinton waved them quiet. “But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.” The end of the “era of big government” made headlines the next day. The rest of the thought was ignored.

  “Clinton Embraces GOP Themes in Setting Agenda; ‘Era of Big Government Is Over,’ Clinton Tells Nation,” was the headline in the January 24 Washington Post. “House Republicans are muttering that Clinton hijacked their agenda,” Time reported. “But to paraphrase T. S. Eliot’s line about poets, good politicians borrow, great politicians steal. Now Republicans are finally learning what Bill Clinton means by common ground: your land is my land.”

  Not everyone was pleased. It proved “that we had won some battles but lost the larger war, that we were the prisoners of conservative rhetoric,” Stephanopoulos later wrote. “Even if the phrase reflected reality…the triumphalist tone of the declaration felt dishonest and vaguely dishonorable, as if we were condemning Democrats from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson to the trash heap of history for the sake of a sound bite.”

  The State of the Union gave Clinton a 53–36 lead over Dole in Morris’s polls, which held for nine months until the contest tightened slightly in November. “The reason lies in the president’s unveiling of a ‘values’ agenda in the State of the Union speech,” Morris noted in his White House memoir. “His elaboration on that theme in speeches and [television] ads throughout 1996 and the emphasis on it in his speech at the convention increased his lead and enabled him to do it.”

  Clinton often spoke extemporaneously on the stump. Tom Freedman, Morris’s right-hand man, traveled with Clinton, and whenever the president riffed something new off his standard speech, Freedman sent it to Morris for polling. The next morning, Morris would send a memo to Clinton telling him what worked and what did not. On August 8, Clinton was in Salinas, California, talking about the community’s efforts to crack down on gang violence. “You think about it; we all want to belong to a gang,” Clinton told the crowd. “We just want to be in good gangs…. Every church, every synagogue, that’s a good gang. If you like your school, it’s a good gang. People have a need.” Comparing churches and synagogues to gangs did not test well—“we polled it and it blew up,” Morris said—he made sure Clinton did not say it again.

  After his speeches, Clinton would linger with the crowd, shaking hands and enjoying brief snatches of conversation as Secret Service agents watched intensely. Afterward, backstage, he would tell his staff the stories he had heard: people who had benefited from family and medical leave, or more police on the streets, or had served in Ameri-Corps, a domestic community service organization. The aides would slip out and make sure the details were correct—they knew that Clinton would weave them into his stump speeches.

  Late in the evening of November 4, 1996, at the last campaign stop before his last election, Clinton addressed a crowd at Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He opened the folder that Jonathan Prince, the speechwriter traveling with the campaign, had given him with his speech for the stop. His text had the standard heading: “President William J. Clinton, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, November 4, 1996.” Then the entirety of the speech: “DITTO.”

  “There is no person living in this country today who has been given more gifts, who feels more humble on this night than I do,” Clinton said. “Fifty years ago, when I was born in a summer storm to a widowed mother in a little town in Arkansas, it was unthinkable that I might have ever become president…. We just need to run our country the way we want to run our lives. That is what I have learned in twenty-three years, and that is what I ask you to vote for tomorrow as we build our bridge to the 21st century.”

  “I loved your speech,” Clinton told Prince afterward.

  The next day, he won 49.2 percent of the popular vote—8.5 percent more than Dole—and 379 electoral votes.

  For the Clinton administration, 1997 was a relatively quiet year. New White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles kept things running smoothly on an essentially centrist course. The president continued to try to use his pulpit, with mixed success, on a number of fronts, most notably his “race initiative,” an effort to explore and heal the country’s lingering legacy of racial discord. On May 28, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that sitting presidents can be sued for actions outside the scope of their official duties—meaning that a civil lawsuit brought against the president by former Arkansas State employee Paula Jones, who alleged that Governor Clinton had propositioned her, would go forward.

  The Clintons and his administration had been dogged by allegations and scandals of varying degrees throughout his term in office, from circumstances surrounding the Whitewater land deal when Clinton was still a governor to the firing of the White House Travel Office staff to bizarre allegations regarding the suicide of White House aide Vince Foster. Some of the scandals were fueled by conservative activists and publications like The American Spectator, which later prompted Hillary Clinton to blame a “vast right-wing conspiracy” for the claims against her husband.*

  A December 1993 Spectator story would prove the greatest threat to Clinton’s presidency. The article quoted former state troopers from Clinton’s Arkansas security detail saying that they had arranged trysts for the governor, including with a woman named Paula. She turned out to be Paula Jones, who then filed a sexual harassment suit against Clinton. She said that when she was working at a state jobs fair he had arranged for her to be brought to his hotel suite, where he had propositioned her. Clinton’s lawyers had argued that presidents were immune to civil suits while in office, else the legal system become a venue for tying up a president’s time with nuisance suits. Now the Supreme Court had said no, that the suit could go forward.

  Perhaps the biggest news of the year was economic. The economy grew at 8.2 percent in 1997, and the budget deficit was only $22 billion.† When Clinton’s senior team met in the Cabinet Room on December 1, 1997, to discuss the agenda for 1998, the economic news had gotten even better: budget surpluses as far as the eye could see.

  Waldman and domestic advisers Bruce Reed and Gene Sperling worked out the contours of the 1998 State of the Union speech over the next few weeks. The three had become, Waldman wrote, “like a basketball team: I could throw the ball to a precise spot down the court, without even looking, and know that one of them would be there to catch it.” Gone were the days when policy and speeches were developed on separate tracks. A major speech would start with Baer or Waldman writing an
outline and then sitting around the computer with Sperling and Reed filling in the details.

  With the Treasury suddenly flush, Clinton would propose a number of initiatives in the 1998 State of the Union more expensive than anything he had proposed in the previous two years. It “would be a far-reaching attempt to persuade the public that government could do big things again,” Waldman recalled.

  January 1998 was also Paula Jones month. Jones’s lawyers would depose the president on January 17, ten days before the State of the Union. Waldman would have to finish the first draft early so Clinton would see it before he was distracted. Also on the Jones’s lawyers’ witness list was Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern and then staffer who had secretly had several sexual encounters with the president over a span of months starting during the first government shutdown.

  On January 21, Jeff Shesol was at his gym when he opened The Washington Post. “This looks bad,” he thought. He was a former Rhodes Scholar and cartoonist—his Thatch ran daily in more than 150 newspapers. The previous September, Shesol had published Mutual Contempt, a history of the Lyndon Johnson–Robert F. Kennedy feud. Clinton had sent him a congratulatory note about it, and the next thing Shesol knew, Waldman was interviewing him for a speechwriting position. A mid-January meeting with Clinton lasted five minutes; they did not even sit down. A job offer seemed imminent. Now there was this, spread across the Post’s front page: CLINTON ACCUSED OF URGING AIDE TO LIE; STARR PROBES WHETHER PRESIDENT TOLD WOMAN TO DENY ALLEGED AFFAIR TO JONES’S LAWYERS.

  Kenneth Starr was the independent counsel who had been appointed in August 1994 to investigate the Whitewater land development deals in Arkansas. The woman was Lewinsky, the former White House intern. A Lewinsky confidante had tape-recorded the young woman talking about her trysts with Clinton and the president coaching her on her testimony in the Jones case. Informed of the relationship, Jones’s lawyers had repeatedly asked Clinton about Lewinsky. He denied having sexual relations with her. Starr’s lawyers were informed of the tapes and Clinton’s testimony, and Starr expanded his investigation to include whether Clinton had lied or told Lewinsky to lie in the Jones civil suit.