White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  *Nixon had made a cameo on Laugh-In on September 16, 1968, delivering the show’s signature line in the form of a surprised question—“Sock it to me?” The producers tried to get Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey to make a similar appearance—saying, “I’ll sock it to you, Dick!”—but he declined. Humphrey later said that not doing the show might have cost him the election. (Elizabeth Kolbert, “Stooping to Conquer,” The New Yorker, April 19, 2004.)

  †Kissinger submitted: “To those who, for most of the postwar period, I have opposed and, occasionally, threatened us, I repeat what I have already said: let the coming years be a time of negotiation rather than confrontation. During this administration the lines of communication will always be open,” which became “After a period of confrontation, we are entering an era of negotiation. Let all nations know that during this administration our lines of communication will be open.” (Price, With Nixon, 43–44.)

  *Safire once got a lengthy speech draft back from Nixon, with each page crossed out. “Now I know what he doesn’t want to say,” he quipped. (Author interview with John Andrews.)

  *Given that Truman’s greatest oratorical strength was his off-the-cuff, extemporaneous style, Rosenman’s comment is surprising. He may have meant that Nixon had a sharp grasp of the nuances of policy, whereas Truman’s strength was stylistic, not substantive.

  *Multiple Independently targetable Reentry Vehicle, an intercontinental ballistic missile that carries multiple warheads capable of hitting separate targets. The question of whether to build MIRVs was under debate at the time.

  *The Air Force Academy speech “has produced only a few really outraged reactions,” including from Fulbright, Buchanan noted to Nixon in his June 6 memo analyzing the reaction. (Pat Buchanan memorandum for the President, June 6, 1969, private papers of Patrick Buchanan.)

  *It was a neat trick: October 15, 1969, was a Wednesday—not typically a football evening.

  *Safire notes that John F. Kennedy wrote in Profiles in Courage: “They were not all right or all conservatives or all liberals. Some of them may have been representing the actual sentiments of the silent majority of their constituents in opposition to the screams of a vocal minority, but most of them were not.” (Safire, Before the Fall, 708.)

  *At least one viewer noticed the mistake. “Like the reviewer for Field & Stream who concentrated on the gamekeeping passages in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I read the President’s Vietnam speech from my own nutty viewpoint,” Richard Hauser of Larchmont, New York, wrote, making the same correction that Safire had. Subsequent research also disclosed that the desk from which Nixon spoke—the Wilson desk—was named not for Woodrow Wilson but for former Vice President Henry Wilson.

  *During one of the campaign rallies in 1968 a teenager had held aloft a banner saying: BRING US TOGETHER. Nixon used that sign and sentiment as the focus of his victory remarks the morning after the election.

  *Winston Lord, a National Security Council staffer under Kissinger, sometimes wrote drafts of foreign policy speeches before they were sent over to the main writers. Kissinger repeatedly rejected drafts of one speech, asking each time if it was the best Lord could do. Finally, exasperated, Lord said that yes, it actually was the best he could do. “In that case, now I’ll read it,” Kissinger said. (CNN interview with Ambassador Winston Lord; transcript on National Security Archive Web site at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-15/lord1.)

  *“I don’t think it was common,” Price added of speechwriters using amphetamines. “I did a lot. It was legal then.” (Author interview with Ray Price.)

  *Safire learned his lesson about classification when working on an October 1970 Vietnam-related speech. Feeling somewhat pompous at handling classified information, he wrote: “Top Secret/Eyes Only, NoForn” (no distribution to foreigners) across the top. When for three days he did not see the draft with the president’s edits, he asked Haldeman about it. I’m very sorry, Haldeman said, you’re not cleared for Top Secret/Eyes Only material—I can’t show it to you. (Author interview with William Safire.)

  *In retrospect, Safire said in 2007, he should have noted in his column that Nixon had picked up on a theme that he suggested. “I had on the occasion of my memo forgotten that I had crossed the street from insider to outsider. This mistake was driven home to me afterward by A. M. Rosenthal, then executive editor of the Times, when I showed him a copy of my memo to Nixon. ‘The next time you give advice to a politician,’ he said, ‘be sure you write it in the Times.’ I took Abe’s admonition to heart for the subsequent thirty years.” (Author interview with William Safire.)

  †Buchanan had prepared the briefing book for the appearance before the Associated Press editors. When he got it back, Nixon had made a notation on the front: “I am not a crook.” “It was obviously spontaneous, but he had prepared to say it,” Buchanan said. (Author interview with Pat Buchanan.)

  *McLaughlin refused to leave, despite repeated announcements of his imminent departure. In fact, when terHorst resigned early in September, McLaughlin was still on the White House staff. He did not leave until terHorst’s successor Ron Nessen forced him out in early October.

  *This was a pale echo of Bob Mead’s more elaborate vision, which contemplated Ford starting at one end of the room, perusing (and possibly quoting from) a book, and then moving to the desk which he sat at, leaned on, or stood next to—the very definition of forced informality. (Memo from Bob Mead to Ron Nessen, January 7, 1975, Subject File Speeches, Box 1, 10/1/74–2/28/75 folder, Gerald R. Ford Library.)

  *Reagan, challenging Ford for the GOP presidential nomination, had used the phrase “buddy system” to describe Washington’s insider culture.

  *Harry S. Truman lost to Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver in 1952; Lyndon B. Johnson lost the Wisconsin primary to Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy in 1968, after Johnson had already withdrawn from the race.

  *Smith was also told by other speechwriters to avoid certain words with which Ford would have trouble: “Judgment,” for example, which Ford tended to pronounce judge-a-ment. Other such words included “guarantee” (garn-tee), and “monorail” (mona-rail). (Author interviews with Pat Butler, Robert Orben, and Craig Smith.)

  *The 6 is the scientific symbol for change, so this point, number 4, was: “As we begin our third century it is well to consider what we have been and what we ought to be. We have provided both governmental continuity and a framework for constant and dramatic political change.” (Handwritten inaugural draft, undated, “[Inaugural Speech Drafts—Notes and Suggestions] [1]” folder, Office of Staff Secretary, Jimmy Carter Library.)

  *Carter ordinarily shunned quotes. “He would not quote things unless they were a part of his own experience,” Achsah Nesmith recalled. “If he hadn’t read a book, he wouldn’t quote it, essentially. He felt as if he hadn’t experienced it…. If you put in three quotations he nor mally would take out two just as a matter of course.” (Carter speechwriters OH, Jimmy Carter Library, 110.)

  *“We used to joke that it was no accident that the man’s initials were J.C.,” Hertzberg wrote. “It seemed like one of those odd coincidences that make you think maybe there is a God after all and that He has a pretty good sense of humor.” (Hertzberg, Politics, 54.)

  †Carter’s younger brother, Billy, had become a punch line with a reputation as a beer-swilling (and endorsing) redneck. “Yes, I’m a real southern boy,” he told reporters during the campaign. “I got a red neck, white socks, and Blue Ribbon beer.” (www.pbs.org/wgbh/ amex/carter/peopleevents/p__bcarter.html.)

  *“The address, as outlined, carried many marks of the thinking of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the President’s national security adviser,” the paper reported. (David Binder, “President to Ask Broader System of U.S. Alliances,” New York Times, May 22, 1977.)

  †On March 15, Carter had issued a secret presidential directive ordering that “we should attempt to achieve normalization of our relations with Cuba,” and mandating direct, confidential talks with the Castro gov
ernment regarding reestablishing diplomatic relations. (National Security Archive, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20020515/cartercuba.pdf.)

  *The phrase and underlying reasoning had historical ripples. “We neocons were a small group of political thinkers who broke with fellow liberals during the war in Vietnam,” Joshua Muravchik wrote in The Washington Post in 2006. “Most liberals came to believe that the United States had gotten into Vietnam out of what President Jimmy Carter later called an ‘inordinate fear of communism.’ By contrast, neocons held to the conviction that communism was a monstrous evil and a potent danger. For our obstinacy, we were drummed out of the liberal camp and dubbed ‘neoconservatives’—a malicious gibe to which we eventually acquiesced.” As John Patrick Diggins noted in 2003, “Particularly upsetting to the neoconservatives was Carter’s commencement speech at Notre Dame University in May 1977.” (Muravchik, “Can the Neocons Get Their Groove Back?” The Washington Post, November 19, 2006; Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, eds., The Public Intellectual: Between Philosophy and Politics [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003], 105.)

  *Carter had signed a pair of treaties to give control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanian government.

  *Carter did not originate the phrase “moral equivalent of war,” which dates to the philosopher William James in 1910. It was Carter’s use, however, that prompted New York Times columnist Russell Baker to observe, devastatingly, that the phrase’s acronym is “MEOW.” (Stefan Kanfer, “Moral Equivalents and Other Bugle Calls,” Time, May 2, 1977; William Safire, Safire’s New Political Dictionary, 461.)

  *Of Jordan, one administration staffer told Time: “He is everywhere because of his access to the President. He is nowhere because he has no line of responsibility and can put himself in or take himself out as he—and the President—want.” (“The President’s Boys,” Time, June 6,1977.)

  *Observing from afar, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.—no Carter fan—also noted the absence. “It is, I think, more than a public relations point,” he wrote in his journal. “It reflects the evident facts that (a) he is not an innovator and (b) he has no vision to project, no underlying pattern or unifying purpose behind his random proposals. I do not suggest, of course, that if Pat Caddell or Jerry Rafshoon could come up with a label, this would solve Carter’s problem.” (Schlesinger journal, November 12, 1977.)

  *Hunter S. Thompson witnessed the speech and was so impressed that he got a tape recording of it that he would listen to at all hours of night. (“Jimmy Carter’s Big Breakthrough,” Time, May 10, 1976.)

  *Not everyone was impressed. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote to The Washington Post to point out that “new foundation” appeared in the first stanza of the Communist Internationale—the Soviet Union’s national anthem until 1943. (“An Old Refrain,” letter to the editor, Washington Post, January 28, 1979.)

  *Carter had shifted the part in his hair from right to left. (“‘He Can Catch Fire,’” Time, May 7,1979.)

  *In 1976, the Carter campaign staff had scornfully nicknamed their rival for the nomination after the hero of C. S. Forester’s tales of naval adventure. (Hertzberg, Politics, 138.)

  *“Of, by and for” is the order Lincoln used at Gettysburg.

  *Reagan wrote in his diary that Nine to Five was “Funny—but one scene made me mad. A truly funny scene if the 3 gals had played getting drunk but no they had to get stoned on pot. It was an endorsement of Pot smoking for any younger person who sees the picture.” ( Reagan Diaries, 4.)

  *“The reason I’ve done international speeches…is because I’m not as hard-core,” Landon Parvin, who was more of a political moderate, told an interviewer on leaving the White House in late 1983. “They were reluctant to give such speeches to Tony Dolan and Dana Rohrabacher because of their rhetoric.” (Parvin, OH exit interview, Ronald Reagan Library.)

  *The “zero option” was a Defense Department proposal that had been designed by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle to be unacceptable to the Soviets (though Reagan’s interest in disarmament was sincere). Nevertheless, it eventually led to the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated ground-based ballistic and cruise missiles whose range was between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. (Cannon, 302–03.)

  *“Star Wars” tropes were popular: The “evil empire” speech was also sometimes referred to as the “Darth Vader” speech. Together, the two addresses prompted The Washington Post to headline one story: “Writers of Speeches for President Claim Force Is with Him.”

  *The MX missile was a controversial intercontinental ballistic missile that the Reagan administration favored.

  *This was not a universally held complaint: though the weekly meetings were never restarted, Elliott gives Jim Baker credit: “He allowed us to see the president. He opened the avenues of access so that we could speak to the man and present what we thought he wanted, and he had the opportunity to say yea or nay.” (Author interview with Bentley Elliott.)

  *Noonan had just finished reading Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, about the Brooklyn Dodgers. “O happy steal,” she thought. (Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution, 87.)

  *In 1940, Reagan had played Notre Dame running back George Gipp in the movie Knute Rockne—All American. Gipp, known affectionately as “the Gipper,” had died during his senior year in 1920. According to school legend, on his deathbed he had told his coach, Knute Rockne, that when the team needed inspiration during a big game, he should tell them to “Win just one for the Gipper.” Rockne did so eight years later, the story goes, and the team won.

  *It was an ironic comment given that the March 1983 speech to the evangelists from which “evil empire” came was the kind of broader philosophical exposition of which Noonan was speaking. Her friend Lesley Stahl, the CBS reporter, dubbed Noonan’s first draft of the Strasbourg speech “Evil Empire Revisited.” (Stahl, Reporting Live, 231.)

  *The Newsweek story was written by Walter Shapiro, the former Carter speechwriter. “For five years the White House speechwriters have loyally labored in obscurity,” he wrote with some sympathy. “Their words have been the glue that helps bind Ronald Reagan with the American people. That’s why the flap over the State of the Union Message cannot be dismissed as much ado about adverbs.” (Shapiro, with Margaret Garrard Warner and Thomas DeFrank, “Of Mice and Metaphors,” Newsweek, February 3, 1986.)

  *Peggy Noonan quotes him as being more blunt: “Mr. President, I hope you know I was fired.” (Noonan, What I Saw, 293.)

  *On other occasions, most notably Reagan’s May 31, 1987, speech on AIDS, Parvin was brought back for ideological reasons. “It was the first time the president ever spoke about AIDS,” Parvin recalled. “Mrs. Reagan was worried that it might go too far right [if written in the speechwriting office], so I was brought back to do that.” (Author interview with Landon Parvin.)

  *The treaty would be signed in December at a summit meeting in Washington, D.C.

  *There was internal administration discussion about whether to include German in the speech—Reagan might mispronounce and it would require a great deal of rehearsal, communications director Tom Griscom recalled. The final speech did contain some German. (Author interview with Tom Griscom.)

  *When Gilder’s speech was staffed out, it came back from the State Department with the section entirely crossed out. Upon asking why, he was told that it was inappropriate to use so much language about God. “So much language about God?” the incredulous speechwriter replied. “The President will be talking to the Pope.” Told that the verbiage had come straight from the president, the State bureaucrat relented, but added that he wanted State to be “on the record” as objecting to the speech. (Author interview with Josh Gilder.)

  †Dolan and Tom Griscom have slightly differing memories of the origin of “Tear down this wall.” Dolan recalls that he, Griscom, Robinson, and Colin Powell met with Reagan in the Oval Office in April, before Robinson had written any drafts, possibly before Robinson had
gone to Germany. Before Robinson could suggest the Wall coming down, Reagan, asked what he wanted in the speech, said, “Well, tear down this wall.” The Reagan Library has a Dolan memo to Reagan dated June 15 where he writes: “We’re grateful for your kind words about the Berlin draft which I’ve passed along to Peter Robinson. In view of all you told us about what you wanted in Berlin—including the outline and the killer lines you gave us—it was particularly generous of you.” However, neither Robinson nor Griscom remembers Reagan originating the line. “There was prompting,” Griscom said. His recollection of the May 18 meeting was that Reagan had not yet seen a draft of the speech, that at most there was an outline, but probably it was all verbal. (Author interviews with Dolan, Robinson, and Griscom.)

  *Concern about Soviet sensitivities could reach absurd levels. Josh Gilder recalled that descriptions of the Soviets as “Communist” were often edited out of speeches. “That was always a struggle, even to say ‘Communist’—even in the Reagan administration. But in the culture at large it was just something that wasn’t done—needlessly provocative. And of course they called themselves Communists and knew pretty exactly what they were about.” (Author interview with Gilder.)