Jackson persevered. “Big meeting in Foster Dulles’ office” regarding the speech, Jackson noted in his daily log on November 25, 1953. “Red lights started blinking all over the place. Joint Chiefs and Defense have laid their ears back.” Another meeting in Dulles’s office two days later brought this entry: “Real problem is very deep and goes beyond any disagreements on wording or technical details. Real problem is basic philosophy—are we or are we not prepared to embark on a course which may in fact lead to atomic disarmament? Soldier boys and their civilian governesses say no. Foster Dulles doesn’t say yes or no, but says any atomic offer which does not recognize ultimate possibility is a phoney and should not be made. Strauss and I say we won’t be out of the trenches by Christmas, or the next Christmas or the next one, but let’s try to make a start and see what happens. Foster considers this mentally dishonest (he should talk!)”
Draft after draft was circulated, with proposals and language added and dropped. One draft proposed to build nuclear plants “as quickly as possible for two cities which have a special right to know the force for good that man has found. Those two cities are Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
The speech had been tentatively scheduled to be delivered before the UN General Assembly on December 8. On Friday, December 4, Eisenhower flew to Bermuda for scheduled meetings with French and British leaders. Inside the American delegation, debate over the speech continued. It was not until Sunday, December 6, two days before the address, that the final decision was made to give it.
Three more drafts were produced in Bermuda, with a fourth edited on the silver four-propeller Lockheed Constellation Columbine, the president’s personal plane, as it flew to New York City.* Eisenhower, Jackson, Dulles, and Strauss worked on the speech sitting in swivel chairs around the table in the president’s compartment. As they made final tweaks, they handed the finished paragraphs to Marie McCrum, Jackson’s secretary, who then read it aloud to Ann Whitman, the president’s personal secretary, who was at the special typewriter that produced the oversized text suitable for reading copy. Another secretary, Mary Caffrey, typed the speech up for distribution, cutting mimeographed stencils of each page. As they were finished, the stencils were rushed to the rear of the airplane, where an army staff sergeant was producing five hundred copies on a hand-cranked machine.
As the Columbine arrived over Manhattan, the tedious work of collating and stapling was still going on, so the plane circled for fifteen minutes and then taxied slowly on the La Guardia Airport runway as its passengers scrambled to finish. The president sat quietly, underscoring lines of the jumbo copy for emphasis. Dulles wandered into the area where copies of the speech were being collated and stapled. “You can’t sit there, Mr. Secretary—we’re busy,” Whitman snapped. And with that, even the starched Secretary of State lent a hand in the final push. The work continued in the limousine on the way into Manhattan, the ink still wet on the copies.
The speech retained some remnants from Operation Candor, describing the extent of U.S. nuclear testing, noting the threat of Soviet forces. But it had the hope Eisenhower wanted: If the United States and the Soviet Union each make contributions from their stockpiles of fissionable materials into a UN-established International Atomic Energy Agency, it could bring the virtues of nuclear power to developing parts of the world that lacked electricity.
“The United States would seek more than the mere reduction or elimination of atomic materials for military purposes,” Eisenhower told the diplomats. “It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers. It must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace. The United States knows that if the fearful trend of atomic military buildup can be reversed, this greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boon, for the benefit of all mankind.”
Uninterrupted as he spoke, Eisenhower was met with a thunderous applause the likes of which the United Nations had never before seen. As the historian Stephen Ambrose wrote later: “Eisenhower’s proposal of Atoms for Peace was the most generous and the most serious offer on controlling the arms race ever made by an American President.” Unfortunately, though Eisenhower’s proposal was met with acclaim, the Soviet reaction was muted and long coming. By the time the International Atomic Energy Agency was created in 1957, the Cold War had moved to new levels.
Eisenhower selected Bryce Harlow, an Oklahoma native and former Hill staffer who had been working in the Congressional Liaison Office, to replace Hughes. Powered by a stream of cigarettes and coffee (lots of cream, one small pill sweetener), Harlow, a former captain of the University of Oklahoma tennis team, worked eleven or twelve hours a day, six days a week and half a day on Sunday. He was “short and walked very fast to make up for the length of his legs,” recalled Stephen Benedict, who worked with him on the Eisenhower staff. “You had the impression that he was in motion all the time.”
Harlow had resisted taking over the speechwriting shop, and only agreed on the condition that he get to spend a great deal of time around the president so as to best understand how Ike liked to express himself, what his concerns were, how to capture the man’s voice.
In many ways, Hughes and Harlow were opposite images of each other. Where Hughes was tall and lean, Harlow was five foot four and slightly stocky. He was balding, and where Hughes had sharp features, Harlow had a round, cherubic face. “In manner they were so different, so very, very different,” recalled Kieve, who worked for both men. Hughes was “impatient, insistent whenever he could be on doing things his way. Bryce was the exact opposite. He was courteous, very thoughtful about the feelings of other people and tried very, very hard to satisfy them.”
And while Hughes wrote prose that soared—“humanity hanging from a cross of iron”—Harlow had a straightforward, meat-and-potatoes style that was more suited to the president. “His greatest aversion was the calculated rhetorical device,” Hughes noted of Eisenhower. “This meant more than a healthy scorn for the contrived and effortful. It extended to a distrust of eloquence, of resonance, sometimes even of simple effectiveness of expression. All oratorical flourishes made the man uneasy, as if he feared the chance that some hearer might catch him trying to be persuasive.”
As Harlow saw it, the president’s voice had so much natural amplification that a ghost had to underwrite for him. “The president must understate his case, because the fact that he is saying it, in itself, overstates it,” Harlow said. “He wanted the word to convey the thought and convey the substance of what he was saying but get lost,” William Bragg Ewald, Harlow’s assistant, said.
Harlow’s writing and editing style was known as “Harlowizing”—writing “as though you’re arguing with somebody.” Interior Secretary Fred Seaton once said that Harlowizing could result in “blood flowing in the gutters, virgins raped on every street corner, rockets fired off, purple in every sentence.”
Arthur Larson, a second-term speechwriter in the administration, would write in his journal of Harlow: “He tries to sound like Hemingway, and ends by sounding like McGuffies’ first reader. ‘What is this? It’s a house.’”
Harlow was “ardent Republican,” Ewald recalled years later. “He would throw the knife all the time at the Democrats, all the time, and Ike didn’t like that, really. It wasn’t his style.” Eisenhower was not interested in gut-fighting politics. Larson noted in May 1956 that “He is really not partisan at heart—doesn’t want to paint Republicans all white and Democrats all black.” In 1958, looking over a draft from Larson, Eisenhower struck out a line about the upcoming congressional campaign. “Frankly, I don’t care too much about the congressional elections,” he told Larson.
This partisan tension came to a head during the 1954 congressional campaign. As the Columbine cut through the September skies toward Los Angeles, Harlow and other top aides huddled on how to convince their boss to endorse his own political party. They were speeding to a September 23 rally at the Hollywood Bowl, which would feature
not only Republican groups but “Democrats for Eisenhower.” “Try to write your way down the middle of that one,” Eisenhower had told his writers. But his continued partisan reticence had prompted some talk that, as former President Harry S. Truman put it, “President Eisenhower should be secretly wishing for a Democratic Congress.” Harlow and other aides were determined to quash the talk.
There was precedent for swaying Eisenhower on political matters. During the 1952 campaign, he had been scheduled to give a speech in Wisconsin praising retired General George C. Marshall, an Eisenhower mentor, and a favorite target of the Red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy, who was from the Badger State. The speech would have been a slap at McCarthy, but Eisenhower let himself be talked out of it.
On September 17, 1954—the same day that Truman made his remark about Eisenhower and the congressional contest—Harlow sent Eisenhower two drafts of the Hollywood Bowl speech; one, as he put it, was “almost devoid of politics,” while the other had “a dash of nonpartisan Republicanism.” The biggest sponsor of the event was the National Federation of Republican Women, he wrote, so there might be a “need for more than perfunctory reference to the GOP.”
Harlow had crafted an Eisenhower-approved, pro-GOP speech that still had a crucial hole: It lacked an explicit endorsement of a GOP Congress. White House lobbyist Jack Martin was selected by his colleagues to walk forward to the president’s cabin. “Mr. President, I’ll leave the door open so that you can throw me out,” Martin said. “We think the speech ought to include an outright call for the election of a Republican Congress.” He showed the president a draft insert that they had worked up, and, grumblingly, Ike accepted it: “If you want it in there, here’s where it should go, not where you have suggested it.”
“When, unfortunately, the Congress is controlled by one political party and the executive branch by the other, politics in Washington has a field day,” Eisenhower told the crowd. “The conduct of government tends, under these conditions, to deteriorate into an endless round of contests for political advantage—an endless round of political maneuverings, of stagnation and inaction—of half measures or no measures at all. These are the reasons—the compelling reasons—why the completion of your great program requires the election of a Republican-led Congress.”
As the campaign progressed, Eisenhower loosened up and became more comfortable stoking partisan fires, but his resentment at having to do so grew as well. After giving a radio address to the country on the eve of the election, he could be heard muttering, “By golly, sometimes you sure get tired of all this clackety-clack.”
By the end of the 1954 campaign season Ike had given almost forty speeches, exhorting voters to return a Republican-controlled Congress to Washington. He had wearied of the whole process. And when he finally lost his temper, it was Harlow, the lusty partisan, who caught the brunt.
“I don’t see how you write a goddamned thing with so many people telling you what to do,” Eisenhower exploded at his aide toward the end of the campaign.* He was talking about Harlow’s propensity for thoroughly and widely consulting on each draft of a speech. “I used to write speeches for MacArthur out in the Philippines,” Eisenhower went on. “And one thing I know: If you put ten people to work on a speech, they’ll kill anything in it that has any character. Now the next time you write something that has any character, you bring it right here. Don’t you show it to anybody.”
Leaving the Oval Office, an ashen Harlow walked back to his office in the East Wing and, crestfallen, relayed the story to Ewald, his assistant. “I’ve just been eaten alive,” he said. It seemed to Ewald that Harlow never quite got over Ike’s attack. It was years before he wrote another speech for Eisenhower.
Replacing Harlow was an old comrade-in-arms, Kevin McCann, who had first written for Eisenhower in the army in 1946. He had been brought into the White House as a part-time consultant in 1953 and joined the staff full time in 1954. “You know, Kevin, I’m like an old cat,” Eisenhower told him years later. “I like familiar faces around. Strange faces scare me.”
Tall, gaunt, gray, tense, Irish-born and Jesuit-educated, with, as Ewald wrote, “bright pig eyes,” McCann among all of Eisenhower’s speechwriters understood him best, knew him the longest, and shared his positive disposition. In his years at the White House he had a sign on his office door that said: “Both Southern and Yankee spoken here,” an allusion to the fact that he could get along equally well with either of the president’s two key aides, Alabama-born Wilton J. Persons and Sherman Adams, the former governor of New Hampshire. He liked to dictate or write in longhand—and would wander the corridors of the White House mumbling to himself whilst in the throes of composition.
But while Eisenhower liked his old friend, he and Sherman Adams thought him “neither technically nor emotionally up to the job,” C. D. Jackson, now back at Time, wrote to publisher Henry Luce in April1 956. “Apparently anything outside of ‘I Like Ike’ gives him ulcers, and what he should really be doing is going back to Defiance College to be a good Christian college president.” When Adams asked Eisenhower who he wanted as a collaborator for the campaign, his immediate one-word answer was “Emmet.”
Although “I think that we do want to help get Eisenhower elected,” Jackson wrote to Luce, he was concerned that allowing Hughes to return to speechwriting “would tie the sheets down on us even tighter in the Administration bed, which is something we are seriously worrying about.” Jackson wrote Adams on April 20 that a Hughes reprise would be impossible, a conclusion with which Hughes apparently agreed.
For the convention acceptance speech, Eisenhower called in Arthur Larson, a former dean of the University of Pittsburgh’s Law School who had served as Under Secretary of Labor and had written a book in 1956, A Republican Looks at His Party, in which he argued that Ike’s GOP occupied the center of the American political spectrum. Eisenhower read the book and was sufficiently impressed to tap Larson for the big speech.*
Larson quickly learned that Ike had a set of rigid guidelines for his speeches. He liked to talk in such a way that “the words don’t call attention to themselves,” for example. In addition, “every speech must have a Q.E.D.”—a point. He did not, he would tell Larson, “want to give a speech just to hear my voice.” Also, he demanded brevity. Twenty minutes was the rule of thumb. Finally, Eisenhower had a strong sense of dignity in presidential speeches. He cited Lincoln as an example of a president who maintained an appropriate level of rhetorical style.
His edits ranged from structural—rearranging an entire draft—to word substitution. His admonitions could be pedantic and were exacting: Do not use the word “merit” as a verb; never use the pronoun “I” in consecutive sentences; do not use the phrase “warm best wishes”—either give warm wishes or best wishes, but not both. He tried to avoid the use of the phrase “foreign aid,” opting instead for the perhaps more domestically appealing “mutual aid.”
Writing speeches in the late 1930s for the flamboyant MacArthur—who constantly tossed off sweeping statements like “Never before in history has an operation of such magnitude…”—had instilled in Eisenhower a dislike for superlatives. He also wished to avoid unqualified statements of fact. He would, for example, take a draft that spoke of the American citizen as being “expected to understand everything from the effects of change in the Federal Reserve discount rate to a boundary dispute in the Sudan,” and qualify it to read: “He is seemingly expected to understand…”
He had “the best American English–teacher kind of language,” Stephen Benedict said. “A stickler on grammar. The correct syntax—he could spot anything right away that wasn’t right.” All of this added up to Ike’s plainspoken, low-key speaking style. He was “very direct, very un-flowered, very unornamented,” Benedict recalled.
And he made sure his rules were followed—he was a careful, relentless editor. He would substitute “futile” for “fatuous,” “devout” for “passionate,” and “paternalistic regimentation” for “paternalistic wand
-waving.”*
Larson also learned that Eisenhower was not as moderate as he had believed. When on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court—led by Eisenhower appointee Earl Warren—declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional, Eisenhower had maintained a studied silence. During their summer 1956 drafting sessions, Eisenhower and Larson fought a tug-of-war about how to handle the issue of civil rights. Larson’s first draft had a reference to “that ugly complex of injustices called discrimination,” a passage that Eisenhower eliminated. He did not like the word “discrimination,” he said, and, it seemed to Larson, he was not wild about the word “racial.” Ike explained that just as the Brown v. Board of Education case was based on the inner feelings of black children, so too must the inner feelings of southern whites also be considered. He wanted to make it clear that political and economic equality would not mean social equality—“or that a Negro should court my daughter.”
Larson tried formulation after formulation. “Racial discrimination” became “equal justice,” and eventually “social justice.” The final speech contained exhortations regarding “various kinds of discrimination” and “all existing kinds of discrimination.” The only reference to race came in the observation that the Republican Party “is again the rallying point for Americans of all callings, ages, races and incomes.” And on October 1, a week after the president federalized the National Guard to integrate the Little Rock Central High School, he told Larson that he had been careful not to take a position on the merits of the 1954 Supreme Court decision. “As a matter of fact, I personally think the decision was wrong,” the president said. (Eisenhower changed his tune in his memoirs, saying that he supported the decision.)
As Larson was helping draft Eisenhower’s convention speech, Emmet Hughes was composing one for himself. On Friday, August 17, McCann made a frantic series of calls to Hughes to discuss the fall campaign. The next day, Adams called and said that Hughes should catch the next plane out to San Francisco, the site of the GOP national convention, which was convening in a few days—Eisenhower wanted his help redrafting Virginia governor Arthur Langlie’s keynote address. Hughes answered the summons.
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 10
