*“Why a thousand?” Noonan wrote. “I don’t know. A thousand clowns, a thousand days—a hundred wasn’t enough and a million is too many.” (Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution, 312.)
*Bush admired and respected his predecessor, as did his senior advisers, but as this substance-over-style attitude filtered out from the inner circle, it became in some cases a “condescension that was stunningly unattractive,” speechwriter Curt Smith said. He would sometimes get speech drafts back in which a few sentences would be crossed out by a midlevel staffer with the notation “sounds like Reagan,” or “Too much like Reagan. Take it out.” (Author interview with Curt Smith.)
*Mayberry was the fictitious, idyllic small town that was the setting for The Andy Griffith Show; the dedication to Smith’s book on presidential libraries, Windows on the White House, reads: “To the America that is Mayberry.”
*Mess privileges for speechwriters had been an issue since the Ford administration. Rick Hertzberg left a message for his successor on the word processor in his office: “Get your mess privileges right away.” Ken Khachigian, Reagan’s first head speechwriter and a veteran of the Nixon administration, knew the importance—symbolic and practical—of mess privileges and quickly moved to secure them. (Carter speechwriters OH interview, Jimmy Carter Library, 118; author interview with Mari Maseng-Will.)
*There were also a number of telegrams. “What a great speech Tuesday night,” one said. “I’m a recovering addict with six years sobriety. What can I do to help with your war on drugs?” It concluded: “Your friend, Johnny Cash.” “We’ve got to get you involved,” Bush wrote back. (Johnny Cash telegram to the president and reply, September 8, 1989, “9/5/89 Address to the Nation on Drugs, 1st by Pres. Bush, Case No. 070721 to Case No. 071574” folder, WHORM files: SP-589, George Bush Library.)
*This historic event was, according to Bush and Scowcroft, the result of a clerical error: “On November 9, East Germany announced it was relaxing its border-control policy on all its frontiers with West Germany,” they wrote. “The announcement, through a bureaucratic oversight, did not exclude Berlin—which was usually given a special status. Crowds began to build along the infamous Wall dividing the city, demanding that the border guards open the checkpoints to West Berlin. After some hesitation on the grounds that they had no instructions, the guards gave in to the press of people and allowed free passage. In that brief moment, the Wall fell.” (Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 148.)
*The notes were often unsigned. No one warned speechwriter Mark Davis to expect them. This is horseshit, he thought of the mysterious notes, and threw them out—until someone explained where they were coming from. (Author interview with Davis.)
*Curt Smith, who worked on Bush’s August 20 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the “Just War” speech he gave on January 28, 1991, recalled that through his notes Bush was very involved with the composition of the war addresses. “I would come into the office day after day after day to find page after page after page of self-typed text from the president,” he said. Smith estimated that about half, “the important fifty [percent], was him.” (Author interview with Curt Smith.)
*According to William Safire, Vandenberg in 1950 defined “bipartisan foreign policy” as “a mutual effort under our indispensable two-party system to unite our official voice at the water’s edge….” (Safire, Safire’s New Political Dictionary, 860.)
*Demarest was jealous—he wanted to be the one helping the president write for history. Late in the day, he got a summons from Bush to the small study off the Oval Office. The president asked him about an inconsequential line in the speech. As Demarest glanced at it, the White House photographer walked in, took his picture, and left. Demarest realized that Bush had understood he would want to be part of the moment. (Doro Bush Koch, My Father My President, 349.)
*All of the speechwriters feared seeing “too much rhetoric” scribbled in the margin of a draft. (Chriss Winston, “State of the Union Stew,” Christian Science Monitor, January 28, 2002.)
*Bush did not avoid religious references altogether. In a “self-typed” note for a January 1990 speech introducing a lecture on Abraham Lincoln and the presidency, he instructed Curt Smith to “work in” that “I have President for less than a year, but I am now [“personally” written by hand] more cionvinced than ever that one cannot be President of this country without believing in God, without a belief in prayer…. Lincoln talked about spending timeso n one’s knees. Though not tested as lincoln was tested, I know nwo how true those words were.” (Bush note to Curt Smith, undated, private papers of Curt Smith.)
*Although the election of a new president does not mean a diminution in the size of the incumbent’s Secret Service detail, some senior elements will shift from the current to the incoming president after the election. This typically does not happen on Election Day, so whether that is what Provost and Martin saw is unclear.
*February 17 was chosen for the official unveiling of his plan because it would allow Clinton partisans to argue that his administration had produced his economic plan faster than had Ronald Reagan, who explained the details of his plan on February 18, 1981. (John Harris, Survivor, 19.)
*Waldman had been at the dinner, but was so nervous that he had left early, listened to speech in his car, and then driven away. (Author interview with Michael Waldman.)
*Speechwriters Jonathan Prince and Jordan Tamagni once discussed what was the optimal balance in a Clinton speech between how much came from the prepared text versus how much was improvised. “It’s clearly fifty-fifty,” Tamagni said. “Because if he only just reads yours that means he’s bored and he’s droning and if he doesn’t read anything of yours that means he’s rambling and he hated what you wrote…but if he does fifty-fifty then you know that he’s engaged and you feel that you’ve done a good job.” That’s not it at all, Prince replied, the optimal ratio is 150 percent—the speech you provided and another 50 percent of Clinton riffing. (Author interview with Jordan Tamagni.)
†Reagan speechwriter Clark Judge extends the musical analogy. Not only did Clinton’s style resemble jazz, he says; Reagan was “symphonic: every element of emotion, nuance, he could convey”; George H. W. Bush “was like rock’n’roll: simple, driving beats”; and George W. Bush “like country music…very strong structure, a kind of a moral message underpinning and a note of evangelical lyricism.” (Author interview with Clark Judge.)
*Michael Waldman, who succeeded Baer as director of speechwriting in 1995, did his own count: “In a typical year, Clinton spoke in public 550 times. In a similar year, Ronald Reagan spoke 320 times; Harry Truman, 88 times.” (Waldman, POTUS Speaks, 16.)
*“Large numbers of men abandoned Democratic candidates in Tuesday’s elections, a trend that gave Republicans an edge in races around the nation and one that Democratic leaders fear might be hard to reverse,” The New York Times reported after the election. According to exit polls, 62 percent of white men voted Republican. (Richard L. Berke, “Defections Among Men to G.O.P. Helped Insure Rout of Democrats,” New York Times, November 11, 1994.)
†Mrs. Clinton’s six guests at the 1995 State of the Union were the most since the 1990 State of the Union, when Barbara Bush’s four guests included Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.
*Without realizing it, Clinton was also imitating his hero, JFK, who had hand-copied portions of his inaugural address to hide Ted Sorensen’s role in it.
*In 1988, Clinton had delivered the keynote convention address. The speech was so long-winded and rambling that the loudest applause came when he said, “In conclusion…”
*The practice of alternative drafts continued even after Morris emerged. Writing Saturday radio addresses, Jonathan Prince would sometimes submit three versions, one based on Dick Morris’s direction, one on chief of staff Leon Panetta’s, and a hybrid. (Author interview with Jonathan Prince.)
*A term limits provision had failed, but the other nine elements of the Congress had passed the House.
> *Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a historian of FDR, was in the audience and unimpressed. “Clinton seems by temperament an accommodator,” he told The Washington Post. “Accommodation has its uses but it can easily become appeasement.” Clinton blew up when he saw the quotes. He wrote Schlesinger a letter disputing the idea that he did not relish a fight. Then he invited Schlesinger and other prominent liberals, including Ted Sorensen and Joe Califano, for lunch at the White House to win them over. (Harris, Survivor, 177.)
*Morris had wanted the speech to contain specific policy proposals, many of which were later incorporated into the USA Patriot Act after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “I felt that by offering just fluff, as I thought he did, and sympathy, that he was really squandering an opportunity to stake out an important program,” Morris said. (Author interview with Dick Morris.)
*“Reporters soon learned that the best way to know what Clinton thought was to listen, not just to his words during the workday, but especially to the ones that came after deadlines, when he spoke at night without prepared remarks to political supporters,” John F. Harris has noted. ( Survivor, 208.)
*The phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy,” which Hillary Clinton coined during an appearance on NBC’s Today Show several days after the Lewinsky scandal broke, quickly entered the political lexicon. It became a rallying point and conceptual frame, not unfounded, for Clinton’s defenders and a gleeful badge of honor for his critics. Mrs. Clinton had for several days been discussing with White House aide Sidney Blumenthal the efforts arrayed against her husband. Blumenthal prepared talking points for her and they spoke about ten minutes before she went on the air. But she ad-libbed “vast right-wing conspiracy.” “The phrase was hers, on the spot,” Blumenthal recalled. (Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars, 373–74; author interview with Sidney Blumenthal.)
†President Bush’s last budget had projected a budget shortfall of $292 billion in 1994 and a $305 billion deficit in 1997. (Robert Pear, “Clinton Backs Off His Pledge to Cut the Deficit in Half,” New York Times, January 7, 1993.)
*Schlesinger later testified before the House Judiciary against impeaching Clinton, arguing that gentlemen always lie about their sex lives.
*The need to excise potential double entendres did not end with the State of the Union; some speechwriters kept a running list of deleted lines that became “very, very long.”
*According to the Constitution, the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” There is no requirement that the State of the Union be delivered in the form of a speech or that if the president does give a speech it has to be in the House chamber.
*Ironically, Clinton was criticized for focusing too much on himself during the address.
*Sent Pollack’s résumé with the decision memo on his hiring, Clinton circled the pun champion notation and wrote: “Great!” (Author interview with John Pollack.)
*The Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute are located in the same building.
*Presidential adviser Karl Rove once showed one of Gerson’s pads to a reporter and said, “You know, when these go into the archives, future generations will be amazed that we let a crazy person this close to the President of the United States.” Another former colleague compared Gerson’s handwriting to the elaborate elvish script that J. R. R. Tolkien created for his “Middle Earth” stories. (David Frum, Right Man, 25.)
*Present at Camp David that weekend were Cheney, Rice, Hadley, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI director Robert Mueller, CIA director George Tenet, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and CIA counterterror chief Cofer Black. ( 9/11 Commission Report, 332.)
*Cheney’s being in a “secure, undisclosed location” became something of a national running joke after 9/11. It was later disclosed that the phrase was just a generic description but that most often he was at Camp David. (Stephen F. Hayes, Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President [New York: HarperCollins, 2007], 349.)
*Gerson relayed the story at a dinner of the Judson Welliver Society of former White House speechwriters. The anecdote brought a moment of uncomfortable silence that was deflated when a Clinton speechwriter audibly whispered, “God must really hate Al Gore.” Rick Hertzberg then rose to respond. I’m sure we’re all gratified to hear that your man was put in office by the almighty, he said; the rest of us had to make do with a plurality of the vote. (Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Believer,” The New Yorker, February 13 and 20, 2006; author interview with David Boorstin.)
*Scully would tease Gerson that on “compassionate conservative” related speeches, he too had a predictable structure. “We begin with great and inexorable ‘callings’ of history, then move on to hard moral ‘duties’ and ‘nonnegotiable demands’ of conscience, proceeding through the bramble patch of ‘temptations’—not to be merely avoided but actively confronted—arriving in due course at the solution, and with that the ‘confident hope’ of a better day,” he wrote. (Matthew Scully, “Present at the Creation.”)
*Gerson was asked in a C-SPAN interview broadcast in January 2007 who it was that wanted the word “evil.” “I did,” he said. “I think it’s a better-sounding phrase.” (Gerson on Q&A.)
*Nonetheless, Bush later described the Cincinnati address as “the speech that nobody listened to” except a few conservative commentators and “my mother.” (Draper, Dead Certain, 185.)
*Robert Joseph, the NSC proliferation expert, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the speechwriters had come up with the formulation citing the British government as the source of the information. However, Alan Foley, the director of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center, told the same committee that Joseph “came up with the idea to source the uranium information to the British during their conversation when he was attempting to come up with an unclassified way to use the uranium reporting.” ( Senate Intelligence Committee Report, 65–66.)
*By March 27, 2003, forty-eight countries had signed on to support Bush’s coalition to remove Hussein from power. Twenty-one countries contributed military forces to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but only Great Britain, Australia, and Poland sent significant numbers of troops.
†“My fellow countrymen, today the guns are silent,” MacArthur said, speaking on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay after the official surrender ceremonies that ended World War II. “A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain death—the seas bear only commerce—men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight. The entire world is quietly at peace.”
*Happy birthday, Peter!
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Coming of the “Literary Clerk”
ONE“Grace, Take a Law”
TWO“Missouri English”
THREE“Sometimes You Sure Get Tired of All This Cla…
FOURThe Age of Sorensen
FIVE“Now That’s What I Call a News Lead”
SIX“Concern for Image Must Rank with Concern for S…
SEVEN“Go Back and Give Me One Speech, Not Two Spee…
EIGHT“Don’t Give Any Explanation. Just Say I Cance…
NINEThe Musketeers
TEN“I’m Not Going to Dance on the Berlin Wall”
ELEVEN“No, No, No, This Is a Speech—I Just Want to…
TWELVE“The Troika”
Notes
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Photographic Insert
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 71