*The Pearl Harbor comparison was itself a step down in tone for Clifford—in his original outline, he described the crisis as the most serious “in the history of this country.” (“1946, May 24, Railroad Speech [re strike]” folder, Papers of Clark Clifford, HSTL.)
*In the press release announcing the new presidential flag and seal, Elsey noted that the head of the eagle in the seal had been turned to face right because it was the direction of the olive branches of peace clutched in one talon, as opposed to the arrows of war in the other. In fact, he had turned the eagle’s head for obscure heraldic reasons—left indicated illegitimacy, while rightward was a direction of honor. (Elsey, An Unplanned Life, 93–94.)
*Other State of the Union firsts: Calvin Coolidge’s 1923 address first to be broadcast on radio; George W. Bush’s 2002 address first to be Web-cast from the House Web site. (www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/RS20021.pdf.)
*The report was first made public in 1968 in Arthur Krock’s Memoirs, where he credited Clifford with its authorship. Margaret Truman revealed Elsey’s role in her Harry S. Truman (1973). “The report,” Elsey wrote in his own memoirs, “is a good example of the old Washington adage: ‘No one signs a paper that he writes, nor does he write a paper that he signs.’” (Elsey, An Unplanned Life, 144.)
*One change softened an early summation of the domino theory: “Collapse of free institutions and loss of independence would be disasters not only for them but for the world. Discouragement and possibly failure would quickly be the lot of neighboring peoples engaged in a struggle to maintain their freedom and independence. A chain reaction of this sort would very quickly undermine our national security.” (Revised draft of President’s Message to Congress, March 9, 1947, “1947, March 12, Speech to Congress on Greece [re aid to Greece and Turkey]” folder, Papers of Clark Clifford, HSTL.)
*Kenneth Hechler assumed the job of producing whistle-stop material during the 1950 and 1952 campaigns. “Truman told me to subscribe to the local weekly newspapers and find out what people are talking about,” he recalled. “He said also put in a call to not only public officials of the town but see if you can get a hold of taxi drivers and beauty shop operators and if they have a statue in the town square, why is it there and what are the people proud of?” (Author interview with Hechler.)
*In this regard, he resembled modern presidential candidates.
†While modern presidents would not pass up what is oftentimes the only opportunity to speak to the entire nation, in-person delivery did not become a fixed tradition until 1934. All told, of 219 annual messages delivered by presidents through 2008, 75 were spoken. (www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/RS20021.pdf.)
*The 1955 Austrian State Treaty established Austria as an independent, neutral state.
*Eisenhower noted that Hobby was in charge of a brand-new government department. “It has to do with the welfare and the education and the health of our people,” he said. “And so as you would imagine it is headed by a woman because that’s the woman’s job in the home.”
†On this occasion Ike kicked the presentation off with a letter from a “housewife with four children” in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, asking about the problems of balancing the federal budget. “The sums are so huge I really find it almost impossible to grasp them,” wrote Mrs. John Glover. What Eisenhower did not know—and remarkably no reporter thought to check—was that Mrs. Glover was fictitious. Stephen Benedict, who occasionally wrote speeches, had not been able to find a letter asking the right question among the thousands mailed daily to the White House, so he wrote one up himself. (Author interview with Benedict.)
*The term Air Force One had not yet entered common usage. The plane was named for the official flower of Mamie Eisenhower’s home state, Colorado.
*Eisenhower had a powerful temper. “You sometimes thought the varnish was going to peel off the desk, you know, he’d get so furious,” recalled Malcolm Moos, Eisenhower’s last chief speechwriter, who added that these outbursts would blow over quickly. Once, hours after blowing up at him, Eisenhower sent Secret Service agents to fetch Moos from bed. “Bring Malcolm down, I want him to have a couple of drinks with me,” Ike said. (Malcolm Moos Columbia University oral history interview, November 2, 1972.)
*Eisenhower was in fact so impressed that at a meeting with local political leaders in Seattle, he suggested Larson might make a promising presidential candidate in 1960. (Hughes, Ordeal, 175.)
*Eisenhower’s performance in press conferences gave him a reputation for linguistic ineptitude. Once, on the way into a press conference, Ike was warned by press secretary James Hagerty about a developing situation in the Formosa Strait. “Don’t worry, Jim, if that question comes up, I’ll just confuse them.” Ike said with a laugh. He answered with syntax so mangled that years later he would still chuckle about Chinese and Russian intelligence analysts trying to translate the comments. (Ambrose, Eisenhower, 384.)
*Larson’s love of props proved unintentionally comical when he arranged to bring in the nose cone from a Jupiter rocket that had successfully entered space and returned to earth—not realizing that the piece of machinery was bigger than the president’s desk. “The object here in my hand is a nose cone that has been to outer space and back,” Eisenhower read in the dry run of the speech. (Larson, Eisenhower, 155.)
*The “Democrat” epithet stayed on Republican tongues for decades, gaining renewed currency when the GOP, led by Newt Gingrich, who placed special emphasis on precisely polled words and phrases, took control of the House for the first time since the Eisenhower administration. It gained extra notoriety in January 2007 after Democrats retook control of the House, when President George W. Bush used it in his State of the Union address, enraging Democrats, who thought it a partisan swipe.
*Williams’s second point disappeared in the drafting process. “Over the past year there has been a world wide tendency for orderly societies to break down into mob ridden anarchies, e.g. student riots. It is easy to wave banners to riot, to protest, but the difficult thing is to work a constructive change so that society is strengthened rather than weakened and divided.” Looking back decades later, Williams regretted the excision. In its stead, little remembered, Eisenhower’s farewell address also warned about government domination of scientific research. “Considering what happened in the next decade, I feel that the latter warning was a good deal more prescient than the caveat about the scientific-technological elite,” Williams said. (Ralph Williams memo to file, October 31, 1960, “Chronological [1]” folder, Williams, Ralph E.: Papers, 1958–60, Dwight Eisenhower Library; Ralph Williams letter to Patrick J. Haney, April 6, 1988, “Letters 1985–88” folder, Williams, Ralph E.: Papers, 1958–60, Dwight Eisenhower Library.)
*Born in 1890, Eisenhower was the last U.S. president who had lived in the nineteenth century.
*That same afternoon, Galbraith had already submitted his own thirteen-page, presumably unsolicited, draft of the inaugural in a face-to-face meeting with Kennedy in Florida. (Tofel, Sounding, 41–48.)
*Galbraith—an eager ghost here—had made his suggestions by way of a second proposed draft. Stevenson, whose relationship with Kennedy was complex and at times strained, had initially written Sorensen that “your wire arrives at most difficult time for me. I will do what I can”—and then provided ten pages of “hurried paragraphs” and another eight pages of explanation. (Tofel, Sounding, 43–50; Adlai Stevenson telegram to Ted Sorensen, December 28, 1960, “Inaugural Address, 1/20/61, Memoranda, Speech materials + correspondence, 12/10/60–5/23/61 + Undated” folder, Theodore C. Sorensen Papers, JFK Library.)
* At another point in the flight, JFK noted to Sorensen that a recently discovered early draft of FDR’s first inaugural had fetched close to $200,000 at auction. Months after he took office, the White House supplied a photograph of the first page of the handwritten draft for a book on Kennedy’s first hundred days, along with a caption describing it as “The President’s first draft of the inaugural address.” Kennedy
was copying Roosevelt more than he knew. Raymond Moley’s involvement in drafting the address—and Roosevelt’s transcribing their draft before Moley burned the original—did not become public until after JFK’s death. (Clarke, Ask Not, 101; Sorensen, Kennedy, 243; Tofel, Sounding, 71.)
† Robert Dallek, who examined the supporting materials for Profiles, including audiotapes of Kennedy dictating chapters of the book, concluded: “The tapes of these dictations, which are available at the John F. Kennedy Library, provide conclusive evidence of Jack’s involvement. Jack did more on the book than some later critics believed, but less than the term author normally connotes. Profiles in Courage was more the work of a ‘committee’ than of any one person.” (Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 199.)
*A second, more dramatic insertion on race was rejected. It would have followed the call for a global alliance to combat tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself with a challenge: “Are you willing to demonstrate in your own life—in your attitude toward those of other races and those here from other shores—that you hold these eternal truths to be self-evident?” (Undated “CHANGES IN INAUGURAL SPEECH—TO BE READ AND APPROVED BY SENATOR,” “Inaugural Address, 1/20/61” folder, President’s Office Files, Papers of President Kennedy, JFK Library.)
*Though correct about Falkland, JFK was an inveterate quote-mangler. Ralph Keyes has noted that “the young president launched any number of misworded, misattributed or completely mystifying quotations into the public conversation that have stuck around to this day.” Perhaps most notably, JFK attributed to Edmund Burke the aphorism that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” an elegant expression judged the most popular quotation of modern times by the editors of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. “Even though it is clear by now that Burke is unlikely to have made this observation, no one has ever been able to determine who did,” Keyes noted. (Keyes, “Ask Not Where This Quote Came From,” The Washington Post, June 4, 2006.)
†In September 1962 JFK asked Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to prepare remarks for a dinner before the America’s Cup sailing races and suggested including a fact that he had heard somewhere that human blood has the same percentage of salt as seawater. The historian was skeptical, but the president was correct. “All of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears,” Kennedy said at the dinner. “We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea—whether it is to sail or to watch it—we are going back from whence we came.” (Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 691.)
*Harry McPherson, a Johnson speechwriter, summed up the mixture of admiration and anxiety Sorensen’s legend inspires in many White House ghosts: “I thought Sorensen, whom I admire enormously, was both a terrific writer and had poisoned the well for presidential speeches because he had sort of invented presidentialese. He sort of developed the antipodal sentence: You march up to the middle, you turn around and march back down.” (Author interview with Harry McPherson.)
*The story was dramatized in the 1994 feature film Quiz Show.
*“Of course we never say how we would have ‘saved’ Cuba,” the candidate said, after reading over one such draft, then laughed. “Oh what the hell, they never said how they would have saved China,” he said, referring to GOP attacks against the Democrats for “losing” China after that country became Communist. (Author interview with Richard N. Goodwin.)
*Schlesinger and Ken Galbraith had also surreptitiously contributed to speeches during the 1960 campaign. They had had to meet with JFK in secret, the candidate explained, because “otherwise it would upset Ted too much.” (Schlesinger journal, October 6, 1985.)
*It was even more likely than Kennedy and company knew: nine short-range nuclear-armed rockets had been deployed to the island and the Soviet troop commander had authority to use them, retired Soviet general Anatoly Gribkov told a 1992 conference on the crisis. (Don Oberdorfer, “Cuban Missile Crisis More Volatile Than Thought,” The Washington Post, January 14, 1992.)
*Beschloss continued with a point worth remembering in the age of mass communications: “Kennedy’s six days of quiet deliberation were a gift that no American President in a similar quandary will probably ever enjoy again.” (Beschloss, Crisis Years, 470.)
*The pun apparently stuck in Sorensen’s head. Despite rumors to the contrary, he would joke in later years, he had never collaborated with his friend, Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan. “I did not have textual relations with that woman, Miss Noonan.”
*Two weeks later, Khrushchev commented that reading the American University speech and then the West Berlin address, one would think them given by two different presidents. (Beschloss, Crisis Years, 608n.)
*In April 1962, Sorensen told Time that when he had run into Nixon at a Junior Chamber of Commerce luncheon recently, the former vice president maintained he wished he had said some of the lines from JFK’s inaugural. “That part about ‘Ask not what your country can do for you…?’” Sorensen asked. “No,” Nixon deadpanned. “That part that starts, ‘I do solemnly swear…’” (Time, April 27, 1962.)
*Sorensen told Richard Tofel that the first draft of the inaugural address, which he quoted in Kennedy, no longer exists. “Finally, when asked if he destroyed the first draft of the Kennedy inaugural address, Sorensen declines to comment. Noting that some have claimed, over the years, to have the first draft of the speech, he rejoins, ‘I know they don’t.’” (Tofel, Sounding, 53.)
*“Every time somebody calls it a chateau, I lose 50,000 votes back in Texas,” Johnson once sighed. (“Ormes & the Man,” Time, November 17, 1961.)
†Fortas was an occasional but regular contributor to LBJ’s speeches, a habit that continued even after Johnson put him on the Supreme Court in 1965. This later helped undo LBJ’s bid to make him chief justice.
*Goodwin was not always successful. He was startled, one day, when Johnson draped his long arm around his shoulder and said, “No more of that Ivy League crap, huh?” (Kenneth Hechler, “These Folks Know the Funny Things at the White House,” Herald-Dispatch, April 23, 1987.)
*Lippmann’s book, in turn, appears to have been named in honor of Graham Wallas’s The Great Society (1914). Wallas, of the London School of Economics, had been a visiting professor at Harvard when Lippmann was there. Lippmann later described him as one of the great influences on his life. Wallas dedicated the book to Lippmann. While this has led to speculation that Wallas’s book was the immediate source of Goodwin’s phrase, he had not heard of it. (Henry Brandon, “A Talk with Walter Lippmann, at 80, About This ‘Minor Dark Age,’” New York Times Magazine, September 14, 1969; “Wallas’s ‘Great Society,’” letter to the editor by Herman Finer, New York Times, December 19, 1964; Safire, Safire’s New Political Dictionary, 302.)
*By the 1960s, Lippmann’s political views had evolved again. He supported Johnson in 1964, writing a series of withering columns about GOP nominee Barry Goldwater. Like so many, he would break with Johnson over Vietnam.
*Valenti maintained for the rest of his life that “we shall overcome” was, as he put it in his memoir, a “personal touch that Johnson had inserted in the speech.” (Valenti, This Time, This Place, 187.) Nevertheless, the phrase appears in Goodwin’s first draft, which is on file at the LBJ Library in Austin.
*The secret to writing speeches for Johnson, Sorensen told Schlesinger in January 1964, is “Just make every sentence a new paragraph—and the real triumph is to divide each sentence into several paragraphs.” (Schlesinger journal, January 18, 1964.)
*Steinbeck’s instincts were on target: The U.S. military had been using herbicides in Vietnam since January 1962. (William F. Warren, “A Review of the Herbicide Program in South Vietnam,” Scientific Advisory Group [Navy], August 1968, available online at http://stinet.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD779797&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf.)
*A speechwriting joke: The origin of “Great Society” was that at three in
the morning Goodwin could not come up with the subject for a speech, so he invented a phrase…and it ended up costing the country $600 billion.
†Over a year earlier, Johnson had been pushing Sorensen for the same job. (Beschloss, Taking Charge, 183.)
*In future years Califano would make Benchley the main character in another speechwriting joke: A long-suffering speechwriter promised one last address for his ungrateful boss. The first page of the speech says: “Some say we can’t save the cities, improve the military and balance the budget—I say we can, and I’m going to tell you how right now. Some say you can’t have environmental protection and economic growth—I say we can and I’m going to tell you how right now.” The politician flips to the second page of the speech, which simply says: “OK, now you’re on your own.” (Author interview with Joseph Califano.)
*McPherson, who had produced this “vomit,” later described the experience as “the worst” he had ever endured. “Every State of the Union speech has been a trauma for President Johnson,” he recalled. “He gets into an incredible mood, horrible mood, and things start flying out. Other people get brought in, everybody but the cook get brought in to make it more personal or human or whatever. I gave up in the last two days, I just couldn’t bear it any more.” (McPherson OH, LBJ Library, 8.)
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