White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2008 by Robert Schlesinger

  Illustration credits appear on Back matter.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schlesinger, Robert

  White House ghosts: presidents and their speechwriters/Robert Schlesinger.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographic references.

  1. Presidents—United States—History—20th century. 2. Presidents—United States—

  Biography. 3. Rhetoric—Political aspects—United States—History—20th century. 4. Political oratory—United States—History—20th century. 5. Speechwriting—United States—History—20th century. 6. Speechwriters—United States—Interviews. 7. Interviews—United States. 8. United States—Politics and government—1933–1945. 9. United States—Politics and government—1945–1989. 10. United States—politics and government—1989–. I. Title.

  E176.1.S+ 2008

  2008003127

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6535-2

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-6535-3

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  For Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a student and teacher

  of history, a writer of presidential speeches,

  and most of all a wonderful father.

  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 Clackety-Clack”

  FOUR

  The Age of Sorensen

  FIVE

  “Now That’s What I Call a News Lead”

  SIX

  “Concern for Image Must Rank with Concern for Substance”

  SEVEN

  “Go Back and Give Me One Speech, Not Two Speeches”

  EIGHT

  “Don’t Give Any Explanation. Just Say I Cancelled the Damn Speech”

  NINE

  The Musketeers

  TEN

  “I’m Not Going to Dance on the Berlin Wall”

  ELEVEN

  “No, No, No, This Is a Speech—I Just Want to Talk to People”

  TWELVE

  “The Troika”

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  Photographic Insert

  WHITE HOUSE GHOSTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Coming of

  the “Literary Clerk”

  When George Washington considered retiring in 1792 after a single term as president, he asked James Madison to help him draft a farewell address. Four years later, when the general did leave the presidency, he passed the Madison draft, which Washington had augmented and edited, on to Alexander Hamilton. Washington then polished and added to Hamilton’s effort. The result was the first and one of the best presidential farewell addresses. It was actually never orally delivered but rather was printed in Philadelphia’s largest newspaper, the American Daily Advertiser. As a spoken speech could only reach its immediate audience, such documents were prepared with readers in mind more than listeners. Washington warned against “foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues”; against “the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty”; against the party system; and in favor of the new federal government.

  During his presidency, from 1829 to 1837, Andrew Jackson utilized Amos Kendall, a former newspaperman and a member of his “kitchen cabinet,” for help in drafting his public statements—both written and spoken. Stooped, nearsighted, and poorly dressed, Kendall had a sallow complexion, a hacking cough, and prematurely white hair that made him look older than his forty-some years. Jackson would lie in his bed smoking and dictating thoughts. Kendall would smooth them out and read them back. Jackson would shake his head and try again, repeating the process until they arrived at a formulation that suited the president. One Jackson critic called Kendall “the President’s thinking machine, and his writing machine, ay, and his lying machine.”

  The historian George Bancroft, the Secretary of the Navy, helped write President James K. Polk’s message to Congress asking for a declaration of war against Mexico in 1846. Bancroft would later write messages to Congress for President Andrew Johnson.

  As Abraham Lincoln was working on his first inaugural, he planned to close by telling his “dissatisfied friends” in the South that they had the choice between “peace or the sword.” Incoming Secretary of State William Seward, who had vied with Lincoln for the Republican presidential nomination, suggested that the new president add a “note of fraternal affection.” He supplied a few lines, including the hope that “the mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts and hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.” Lincoln polished the thought into poetry for his inaugural address: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as they surely will be, by the better angels of our nature.”*

  If Judson Welliver, “literary clerk” to Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, was not the first aide to help a president compose a speech, he is recognized as the first ghostwriter in the modern sense—a White House staffer whose regular job description includes helping the president compose his remarks.

  A snub-nosed, soft-spoken Illinois native, Welliver had been a well-known reporter, writing for the Sioux City Journal, the Des Moines Leader, the Sioux City Tribune, and the editorial page of The Washington Times, before joining the Harding presidential campaign. Welliver was described even by the acid-tongued H. L. Mencken as “a journalist of the highest skill and [who] knows how to write simply and charmingly.” Mencken had no use for Harding, a former newspaperman himself. Harding, Mencken famously noted of the president’s own inaugural address, “writes the worst English that I have ever encountered.” He continued: “It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm…of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

  Is it any wonder that Harding sought help in drafting his public remarks? Welliver was not only speechwriter but press handler. During the campaign, he had written prepackaged news stories for reporters to send home. Harding died in August 1923, and Welliver stayed on with his successor, Calvin Coolidge, for more than two years, leaving on November 1, 1925, to become publicist for the American Petroleum Institute.*

  Harding was the first president to have a full-time speechwriter, but it is no coincidence that only one president after him—Calvin Coolidge—forewent such an aide. When Hard
ing was elected in 1920, the election results were for the first time broadcast on the radio, reaching a few thousand households in Pittsburgh. When the parties nominated their candidates four years later, there were nearly six hundred radio stations around the country and as many as 3 million receivers. The 1924 Republican and Democratic nominating conventions were the first to be broadcast.

  Politics was on the cusp of a revolution. Radio supplanted print as the dominant medium and was in turn replaced by television. Television evolved to include live, remote broadcasts, then fractionalized from three networks into a panoply of outlets, including twenty-four-hour news channels, a multiplication process that has grown exponentially with the Internet.

  The rise of mass media allowed a new, more intimate kind of communication between president and populace. Using the radio, Franklin D. Roosevelt would practically invent this modern style of presidential communication. And as the opportunities for exposure multiplied, and with them competing entertainment alternatives, presidents responded by raising their own profiles. In his only term, from 1929 to 1933, Herbert Hoover made an average of a little more than eight public appearances a month; in less than a full term, John F. Kennedy averaged nearly nineteen such appearances; in his first term, Bill Clinton made more than twenty-eight. As the importance of public communications has grown, so has the importance of the aides who help presidents speak.

  Presidential speechwriters are a group unique to the modern presidency, and as such they afford a unique lens through which to view the nation’s modern chief executives. Looking at how presidents prepared their speeches, the care they put into them, and the people they chose to aid them, we can learn about their views of the modern presidency.

  Clark Clifford, who helped write speeches for Harry S. Truman, used to talk about the speechwriters’ code. Speechwriters, Clifford would say, tell the world that they go in to discuss with their president the upcoming speech in Pittsburgh, and the president gives an outline—points he wants to touch on—and from this the writers produce a draft. In fact, Clifford continued, the president would say: I’ve never carried Pittsburgh, they’ve always been against me, and who set up this goddamn thing anyway? The reality, more complicated and more fun, lies in the middle.

  “Grace, Take a Law”

  JULY 1, 1932

  In Chicago, the Democratic Convention nominating speeches had given way to hours of seconding addresses. Around 3 am thunder rumbled and lightning crackled outside of Chicago Stadium. The first balloting did not start until 4:28 am and was bogged down by challenges.

  At the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, New York, Judge Samuel Rosenman was wrestling with the conclusion to a speech he was not sure would be delivered.

  He had passed the evening with Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and some members of his family—wife Eleanor, mother Sara, twenty-two-year-old son Elliott—and Mrs. Dorothy Rosenman, listening on the radio to the party proceedings. By the time the storm raged over Chicago, Elliott was stretched asleep in a chair and Dorothy Rosenman dozed, slumped against her husband’s seat. By morning the judge had sent to the closest delicatessen for hot dogs and retreated to a small, informal dining room to finish Roosevelt’s acceptance speech.

  Franklin Roosevelt and Rosenman had first met during FDR’s 1928 gubernatorial run. Fifteen years removed from his last experience with New York legislative issues, Roosevelt had sought an aide to travel with him, reeducate him on what faced the state, and help him write speeches. Although his ghostwriting experience was limited, Rosen-man, who had been a state legislator for five years and a member of the Bill Drafting Commission for three, otherwise qualified. Clean-shaven and slightly plump, Rosenman’s fastidious appearance reflected an ordered mind. “He was a neat man,” aide David Ginsburg recalled seven decades later. He “knew where things were and knew what he wanted.”

  When FDR won the 1928 election, Rosenman worked as his counsel, helping the governor deal with the New York City political machine and the state legislature, and aiding him in drafting speeches and political messages. For the last two years of Roosevelt’s term, Rosenman lived in the governor’s mansion—exposure that helped him learn the processes of his boss’s mind, especially how he wrote and spoke. Rosenman had in March suggested to Roosevelt that he bring university professors to Albany to discuss national problems that he would face as president—what would become known as FDR’s “Brains Trust.”

  Now, Rosenman was determined to finish the speech regardless of the outcome in Chicago: an incomplete project irked the ordered lawyer, and after all it only lacked a peroration. “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” he wrote.

  Like most such memorable political phrases, “New Deal” was not conceived in capital letters. When Rosenman handed FDR the new paragraphs, the governor glanced at them and apparetly gave them little more thought. Like other memorable slogans, this one had antecedents and echoed ideas already floating through the public consciousness. The issue of The New Republic presently on newsstands had a cover story by economist Stuart Chase entitled “A New Deal for America.” In 1933, FDR would tell a founder of the International Mark Twain Society that he had “obtained” the phrase from Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. Rosenman would dismiss speculation that the phrase was designed to echo FDR cousin Theodore Roosevelt’s “Square Deal” and FDR hero Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom.”

  Raymond Moley, who had been the principal drafter of the acceptance speech (per custom he had not written a closing), later claimed credit for the phrase’s origin, noting that he had first paired the words in a May 19 policy memo to the governor. But while his assertion is literally correct, he had used the words only in passing—“Reaction is no barrier to the radical. It is a challenge and a provocation. It is not a pledge of a new deal; it is a reminder of broken promises.”*

  Whether any of this entered into Rosenman’s choice is unknowable. But the phrase would have been lost to history if another close FDR aide had had his way.

  After Roosevelt forces secured the nomination on the fourth ballot on the evening of July 1, the candidate announced he would fly to Chicago to address the convention, a risky move—air travel was still a novelty—and a break with tradition. The throng that greeted Roosevelt’s trimotored plane in the Windy City on the afternoon of July 2 included a mismatched pair of Roosevelt aides, each with designs on the nominee’s speech.

  One was Moley. A Columbia University professor of public law, he had an incisive mind and grounded sense that distinguished him as a realist among the ivory tower set. He had piercing eyes, and smoked a heavy, dark pipe. He had first met Roosevelt in 1928 when he helped the candidate prepare a plan and a speech on simplifying the state’s justice system. In the 1920s, Moley had conducted studies of criminal justice in Cleveland, Ohio, and then in Missouri and Illinois. He had directed research for the New York State Crime Commission and had also done some work for a group called the National Crime Commission, of which FDR was a director.

  After Roosevelt was elected governor, he appointed Moley to a committee that helped overhaul the state’s parole system and to the Commission on the Administration of Justice in the State of New York. He also informally consulted with Moley on such matters, sometimes using him to help draft speeches. Rosenman had tapped Moley as the first member of the Brains Trust and he had become its leader, ferrying a stream of professors up to Hyde Park.

  Also awaiting the candidate in Chicago was a former reporter, Louis McHenry Howe, an aide of longer standing than any other in FDR’s orbit, having first met the young politician when Roosevelt was a one-term state senator more than two decades earlier. Sensing potential greatness, Howe had undertaken to teach him politics and had become an all-purpose political aide and confidant, acting as everything from surrogate to strategist to speechwriter. He stood five foot four inches tall, weighed less than one hundred pounds, and seemed chronically ill. His face cratered by a childhood bike accident, Howe was
known as “the medieval gnome,” an appellation that he embraced with grim humor. He was devoted to FDR, territorially jealous, snapping angrily at others who drew close to his Franklin.

  As a trio, Rosenman, Moley, and Howe did not mesh, getting along only as their common cause required. Rosenman later described Moley as “very devious in some of his dealings” but “an excellent writer…. He was sort of a hypochondriac, was quite morose, had a very limited sense of humor, and for that reason, he was not easy to work with.” Moley, in turn, viewed Rosenman as “patently on the smug side, a trifle obsequious if you were ‘important,’ a shade highhanded if you weren’t.” Roosevelt did not need them to get along so long as he could employ their talents.

  When during the convention Howe saw a copy of the acceptance speech in Chicago, he flew into a rage. “Good God, do I have to do everything myself?” he exclaimed. “I see Sam Rosenman in every paragraph of this mess.” By the time Roosevelt landed in Chicago, Howe had produced his own draft, to Moley’s great alarm. The professor fought his way through the chaos to Rosenman. “You’ve got to do something about this,” he told Rosenman, explaining Howe’s intention to switch the speeches. “I have tried to tell him how foolish that would be, but it’s no use; he is over there talking to the governor about it now.”

  Rosenman approached the open car that would carry Roosevelt to Chicago Stadium (already two and a half hours late, he had no time to rest) in time to hear Howe arguing with Roosevelt. “I tell you it’s all right Franklin,” Howe said. “It’s much better than the speech you’ve got now—and you can read it while you’re driving down to the convention hall, and get familiar with it.”

  “But Louis, you know I can’t deliver a speech that I’ve never done any work on myself, and that I’ve never even read,” Roosevelt responded. “It will sound stupid, and it’s silly to think that I can.”

  Howe would not be put off. The governor agreed to peruse the alternative text en route to the convention hall. For years to come, FDR would recount with relish how, his car speeding through the crowd-lined streets of Chicago, he had smiled, waved, and tipped his hat to the crowd while sneaking glances at the Howe speech in his lap.