As he had four years earlier, FDR hid the fact of other hands in the speech. But this time Moley was the deceived, as the president told him that he himself had made some changes to add “fire” to the talk.
Roosevelt and Moley went through the motions one last time in Hyde Park in September, on the writer’s fiftieth birthday. As an absurd hide-and-seek went on—Rosenman, Corcoran, and High, who along with Cohen became the 1936 campaign speech team, were squirreled away on another part of the estate—Roosevelt made a halfhearted attempt at recruiting Moley. The writer declined. After Roosevelt’s reelection he sent a polite telegram of congratulations. “And there the story of personal relations ends,” Moley noted in 1939. “There was no ‘break,’ no trouble, no recriminations, no bitterness.” The two friends met only once more, and Moley quickly became one of the president’s most pungent and vocal critics.
During the first term, the Supreme Court had struck down various elements of the New Deal. In response, Roosevelt had made one of his few major political errors, proposing in February 1937 a “reorganization bill” that would, among other things have added a new justice to the Supreme Court for every one that had reached the age of seventy years and six months, with a total possible limit of fifteen. When the Senate Judiciary Committee convened its first hearings into the Court plan in 1937, Moley was the first witness to testify in opposition. Years later he told an interviewer that when he dreamed of FDR, it was always of their reconciling.
Roosevelt marked up no other speech as much as his second inaugural address. Richberg had written a first draft, but as he was a better lawyer than speechwriter, Rosenman and Corcoran reworked it before sending it to Roosevelt. Then the four men edited, tightened, worked, and reworked the speech to the president’s satisfaction.
FDR’s skill as an editor lay in his ability to pare sentences and punch up tired rhetoric. He would usually produce the sort of homely analogy that so often illustrated his public pronouncements. Between the second and third drafts, a section was inserted outlining the problems the country faced, each proceeded by “I see…” For example, “I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day.” FDR produced the capstone to this series, giving the speech its signature line. Rosenman had penciled a summary line into the text, but Roosevelt erased it and wrote: “I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.”
This kind of moment was not uncommon. Roosevelt would stop, lean back in his chair, and stare up at the ceiling. Sometimes minutes passed in silence. Then he would dictate a passage that more often than not remained in the speech’s final draft. He sometimes prefaced this by turning to his secretary, Grace Tully, and saying, “Grace, take a law”—a nod to a George M. Cohan Broadway musical, I’d Rather Be Right, in which Roosevelt, during the Hundred Days, would dictate laws to Congress.
Sometimes FDR’s dictations would nail the point. At other times he would ramble, eventually losing steam and finally saying breezily, “Well—something along those lines—you boys can fix it up.” Sometimes his inserts were never meant for the speech at all, but were simply an opportunity for the president to vent, confident that his aides would know better than to leave the bile in the next draft. If his writers were united in disagreement with him, he might turn to Tully or LeHand and say with mock plaintiveness, “They won’t let me say anything of my own in my own speech.” He often overruled his aides at these times, though he might tell them they could remove an offending section, adding, “I’ll just ad-lib it”—and he would.
When a final text was produced, FDR marked it up for ease of reading—underlining words to emphasize or noting pauses. “Hardheadedness will not so easily excuse hard-heartedness,” the second inaugural said, a neat bit of phraseology too easily transposed, as FDR did while reading the draft out loud to himself. To ensure that no such mistake occurred during his actual delivery, the president drew a small circle (the head) over “headedness” in his reading copy and a small heart over “heartedness.”
The president’s phone rang at around 3 am on Friday, September 1, 1939. Both the hour and the fact that the call went directly through to Roosevelt indicated its gravity. It was William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador to France, calling from Paris. He was relaying a message from Anthony Biddle, the U.S. ambassador to Poland, who had been unable to reach Washington directly. Biddle’s message: German bombs and shells had started falling on Poland.
The years between the outbreak of war and the United States entry into the conflict presented special problems for Roosevelt, who had to lead an electorate that had competing opinions about how to handle the international situation. ‘Stay out of war.’ ‘Help England and France.’ Anybody who wants to understand the American people today must take those two desires into full account,” the pollster George Gallup wrote in The New York Times on April 30, 1939. The strains of these competing impulses found voice in increasingly vocal isolationist and interventionist movements, the former arguing that Europe’s problems were of no concern to the United States, while the latter advocated U.S. aid to Britain and France—for example, by repealing the neutrality laws that forbade the United States from selling arms to belligerents.
The trick for Roosevelt during these years was to orient the country to resist the Fascist menace without getting so far ahead of public opinion as to lose it. It was a time of transition and tension in terms of his speechwriting: whether in building a new speechwriting staff or in pushing his own government rhetorically farther than its diplomats preferred.
On Sunday evening, September 3, Roosevelt was giving his first fireside address since June 1938.* He aimed to calibrate American reaction to the war, warning that an ocean separating the United States from the fighting did not place the nation beyond the conflict’s reach, while also pledging that the country would remain officially neutral. “This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well,” he said. “Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience.”
Roosevelt had himself added that qualification during the initial editing process of a draft that originated in the State Department. The occasion also illustrated a shift in FDR’s speeches. From 1939 onward, his focus was increasingly international and war-related, away from domestic issues. And it would not be the last time that Roosevelt—or any president—punched up a State-drafted speech to point the country in the proper international direction.
When Roosevelt gave the commencement address at the University of Virginia on June 10, 1940—the day that Italy declared war on France and Great Britain—the State Department prepared a lengthy insert for his speech. But Roosevelt himself—picking language from a cable sent by French premier Paul Reynaud—again found a cutting image to dramatize the occasion. Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles argued that it would be diplomatically imprudent and got Roosevelt to remove the phrase. But the president reconsidered and on the train ride down to Charlottesville handwrote the line back into his speech: “On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.”
By the end of that summer, the list of former Roosevelt speechwriters well outnumbered the roster of available talent: Howe was dead; Moley had become an FDR critic, as had Hugh Johnson; High was expelled from the New Deal ranks in early 1937 after committing the cardinal sin of using his insider status and information for an article in the Saturday Evening Post; Corcoran had offended too many people to maintain his utility (“Nearly all the Democratic national political leaders in the country had become bitter at him,” Rosenman later wrote); and while Cohen would occasionally contribute, he was not as effective without his partner. Rex Tugwell and Don Richberg had long since left the administration.
Bullitt contributed briefly during the summer and fall of 1940 but, preferring to work alone, was never part of a speechwriting tea
m. Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish contributed occasionally, starting that year. Rosenman had been a fixture since the 1936 reelection campaign and would remain through the balance of Roosevelt’s presidency.
But one key aide had joined the speechwriting group: Harry Lloyd Hopkins. Iowa-born, he had worked in New York State social services before joining the administration in March 1933 as head of federal relief efforts. He had moved into the president’s inner circle (and for a time into the White House itself), and was for FDR’s last five years his most important aide. He was in a sense a bookend to Howe, though whereas Howe had taught Roosevelt, it was the president who instructed Hopkins in the arts of politics. Like Howe, Hopkins was territorial about his boss and also almost constantly sick.
Hopkins had no truck with formality and relished cutting through ceremony or meandering chatter. Winston Churchill once told him that when the war was over, the British government planned to give him a noble title. When Hopkins responded that nobility was not something he sought, Churchill said, “We have already selected the title: You are to be named, ‘Lord Root of the Matter.’”
Hopkins’s greatest strength as a speechwriter lay in criticism: he had a keen eye for weaknesses in an argument, and would deftly tear up sub-standard drafts. But he had other duties, and the advent of the 1940 campaign prompted Rosenman and him to have an emergency meeting about their speechwriting. They needed one more collaborator—a liberal who could write and, as important, was sympathetic to the president’s foreign policy. Their first choice, a radio commentator named Raymond Gram Swing, was unavailable, as was their second choice, a newspaper commentator who was on assignment in India.
They finally lit upon a choice with a touch of glamour: Robert Emmet Sherwood, the playwright, who had already won two Pulitzer Prizes. He had a bright wit and quick humor and was something of a bon vivant. An activist who had rallied aid for Great Britain, Sherwood had known Roosevelt at least casually for a number of years. “Those of us who voted against you have caused [sic] to be ashamed of ourselves,” he wrote Roosevelt in May 1933.
Sherwood and his wife visited the Roosevelts in January 1940, and the president expressed an interest in a pair of speeches that Abraham Lincoln gives in Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois. The playwright sent these along with a note that said: “I saw Harry Hopkins and told him that I wish with all my heart to offer my services, for whatever they’re worth, to you in this crucial year and to the cause which is yours as surely as it was Lincoln’s.”
Hopkins ran into Sherwood one Sunday that summer in Long Island. “What are you warmongers up to now?” Hopkins growled, referring to Sherwood’s work with William Allen White’s Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, a pro-interventionist political group. Sherwood lost his temper when Hopkins called the playwright and his friends “pro-British fanatics” who were undermining the president by pushing too hard for U.S. aid to Britain. When Sherwood finished an impassioned defense of internationalism, Hopkins, no isolationist, grinned: “All right then—why do you waste your breath shouting all this at me?” he asked. “Why don’t you get out and say these things to the people?”
Sherwood would get his chance to do more than that. Hopkins brought him to see Rosenman in early October at the judge’s Central Park West apartment to discuss the president’s speeches.* Rosenman and his wife shared an amused glance when the playwright said that the president must draft all of his speeches himself. “If there had been substantial assistance there would have been a mélange of style and quality which would have shown it right away,” Sherwood said.
Talk turned to a foreign affairs speech the president was to give on Columbus Day, October 12. The men passed around and critiqued a draft that the State Department had produced. Satisfied not only that Sherwood’s foreign policy ideas were in sync with FDR’s but that he could express them with clarity and force, Rosenman slapped a pencil down on the table. “Boys, there comes a time in the history of every speech when it’s got to get written—that time for this speech is now,” he said. “So let’s get to work.”
He turned to Sherwood and suggested he put into writing some of the points he had been expounding. The playwright looked mystified, as if wondering, What in the world is the use of my writing a couple of paragraphs here in this apartment in New York City? How is that going to do any good in a speech the president is writing in Washington?
Roosevelt’s final speechwriting team was now in place. Virtually every major FDR speech over the next five years would be written by some combination of Rosenman, Hopkins, and Sherwood—usually all three.
Work on the speeches generally took place after the regular work day, a reflection of the informality retained even through the war years. Perhaps a half-dozen evenings a month, the writers gathered in the Oval Office at the cocktail hour, while the president mixed drinks and held court. He displayed more enthusiasm as a bartender than skill: his bourbon old-fashioneds were first rate, but his martinis—with two kinds of vermouth and, occasionally, absinthe*—were less well received.
Dinner—the White House kitchen was surprisingly mediocre—was served at seven forty-five and only afterwards would the real work commence. Roosevelt sat on a couch near the fireplace in his office, his feet propped up on a custom-built stool. He often pulled from his pockets little scraps of paper on which he had noted down ideas, phrases, or specific points to make.
The president would retire by eleven; the speechwriters then retreated to the Cabinet Room to finish the draft and often another. White House stenographers, security guards, and—perhaps most important—kitchen staff quickly became used to the odd hours. These late work nights often involved plates of sandwiches, pots of coffee, bottles of soda, beer, and bourbon: Rosenman drank Coca-Cola and coffee to keep himself up; Sherwood and Hopkins insisted that bourbon had the same effect on them.
The three men were gathered around Roosevelt’s desk on such an evening preparing for the 1941 State of the Union address, which he was scheduled to give on January 6. It was coming at a critical moment: The Fascist plague had darkened most of Europe, with Great Britain barely holding out under Churchill’s stalwart exhortation six months earlier that, “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
The truth was that Great Britain was rapidly running out of cash with which to pay for arms (Roosevelt had prevailed in 1939 in amending the neutrality laws to allow weapon sales). So, in mid-December 1940, Roosevelt had hit upon the idea of lending weapons to Britain, selling the plan (in a metaphor of his own creation) as being the equivalent of lending a length of hose to a neighbor whose house was on fire. “If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help to put out his fire,” Roosevelt told reporters on December 17. “Now, what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.”
Twelve days later, Roosevelt gave a fireside chat on the subject (“This is not a fireside chat on war. It is a talk on national security”), telling his countrymen that the United States must be—in a phrase coined by French diplomat Jean Monnet—“the great arsenal of democracy.”
The 1941 message, then, was the next crucial step in selling the plan, and in preparing the country for war. Hopkins, Rosenman, and Sherwood were revising the third draft with the president when he announced that he had a thought for the peroration. He leaned back in his swivel chair and stared at the ceiling. And stared. The silence became uncomfortable.
FDR’s hesitation had less to do with an epiphany than phrasing and refinement. Speaking to the press in July, he had outlined what he called the five freedoms that were the objective of U.S. foreign policy—freedom of information, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom from fear, and freedom f
rom want. Now, merging freedom of information and expression, he was ready to introduce the concept on a broader stage.
He finally leaned forward. “Dorothy,” he said to his secretary Dorothy Brady, who would sometimes relieve Tully during long speechwriting sessions, “take a law.”
“The first is freedom of speech and expression everywhere in the world,” his message would say.
The second is the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—which translated into international terms means economic understandings which will secure to every nation everywhere a healthy peace time life for its inhabitants. The fourth is freedom from fear—which translated into international terms means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation anywhere will be in position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor.
Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” were a stirring expression of foreign policy ideals that both elevated the immediate argument and provided an enduring conception of U.S. policy. The Four Freedoms would become a central piece of Allied propaganda once the United States entered the war. Sixty years later, President George W. Bush’s speechwriters would study the speech as they worked on their president’s remarks to Congress in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Harry Hopkins remained unconvinced. “That covers an awful lot of territory, Mr. President,” he said. “I don’t know how interested Americans are going to be in the people of Java.”
“I’m afraid they’ll have to be some day, Harry,” Roosevelt replied. “The world is getting so small that even the people in Java are getting to be our neighbors now.”
Indeed, the eyes of the United States would focus on the South Pacific sooner than even FDR likely anticipated.
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 3
