White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  The previous week, he had composed a speech to be given at the convention by a voter independent of the two parties, extolling Eisenhower. It was now suggested that Hughes give the speech. He and Jackson spoke on Monday, August 20. Jackson “expressed surprise at Emmet’s being in San Francisco,” according to Jackson’s notes from the conversation, and suggested that his appearing at the GOP convention might not be a great idea. “I don’t want to, and have no right to, say what you should do,” Jackson said. “But my radar on this one indicates a collision course, and that if Emmet Hughes, no matter how billed, delivers this one, there will be a ruckus.” Hughes agreed that it would require close scrutiny and then asked about the nature of the problem. It stemmed, Jackson explained, from “a carefully thought-through desire of [Time/Life] over the last several months to disengage from being a house organ, and a captive publisher.”

  By August 22, when he appeared before the GOP convention, Hughes had taken another leave of absence from journalism and was officially on Eisenhower’s staff, where he remained through the second inauguration. He was drawn back by his diminished but lingering hope of helping Eisenhower forge a new, moderate Republican Party. Like Larson, he argued with Eisenhower about civil rights. “The text on civil rights signaled the playing of a kind of rhythmic game between us, accepted but unacknowledged—I toughening every reference, he softening it,” Hughes later wrote. “I rephrasing upward, he rewording downward.”

  Hughes helped Eisenhower write his second inaugural and contributed to one other speech in the second term, but increasingly he felt that he was losing the battle for the president’s political soul. Like Raymond Moley, he would publish a critical insider account of his White House experiences. (He would also go on to write a column for Newsweek—while Moley was still an editor there.)

  “An indictment of Eisenhower…for allowing himself to be a meek creature of traditional Republican conservatism, rather than a bold creator of a new Republican liberalism, must start from the premise that Eisenhower was not, in fact, a conservative,” Hughes wrote wistfully in The Ordeal of Power (1962). “The passage of years proved this premise largely false.”

  He added: Eisenhower’s “purpose was the invigoration and rejuvenation of the Republican party. This purpose ended in defeat.” On foreign policy, his assessment was as damning: “And so the years inscribed a record, not stained with the blots of many foolish or reckless acts, but all too immaculate. All the acts of omission signified a waste of something more than briefly enjoyed military superiority. The great waste could be measured only by the vastness of the unused political resources at the command of the most powerful and popular leader of any free nation in the world.”

  Hughes’s books—Ordeal and his 1959 America the Vincible—widened the split between writer and president. Working on his memoirs years later, Eisenhower gleefully gave credit elsewhere for his dramatic 1952 campaign declaration, which Hughes had written, that a victorious Eisenhower would “go to Korea” to personally survey the situation there.

  “My position is desperate,” the president told Arthur Larson. It was nine o’clock in the morning on October 6, 1957. Two days earlier, the Soviet Union had electrified the globe, and shocked much of the free world, by launching a 183-pound, basketball-sized object into orbit around the earth. They called it Sputnik, and every ninety-eight minutes, as it circled the planet, terrestrial listeners could hear the shrill series of beeps that were its telemetry.

  Eisenhower did not personally share the sense of crisis that Sputnik instilled in so many of his fellow countrymen, but he knew that as president he would have to react. He arranged for a series of four major speeches meant to address the issue, and needed someone to help write them. So he turned to Larson, whom he had appointed head of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in December 1956.

  Larson had been thinking about presidential speeches—their preparation struck him as haphazard and reactive. He envisioned a television-age counterpart to FDR’s fireside chats. Instead of waiting for a crisis—whether Sputnik or school integration problems—and then having to rush a response, Larson thought the president should take the initiative with a series of televised speeches planned far in advance, tackling issues before they matured into emergencies.

  Larson drew upon his own experience producing television at USIA to sketch for Eisenhower a vision of televised addresses that used film clips, props, and other visuals to spice up the show.* Ike immediately agreed. Larson put together an ambitious agenda of thirteen speeches for 1958 on topics ranging from “Education” to “Achievement and Juvenile Delinquency” to “The Arts” to “Every Man a Capitalist.”

  Larson was the most hardheaded of Eisenhower’s speechwriters, willing to push an argument well beyond the point anyone else would take it. “In my long hours of working the President in his Oval Room study, crouched over manuscripts with our heads practically touching, and usually working under considerable pressure against some deadline, I would soon forget that the man at my right elbow was the President of the United States and would insist on my own ideas of style and arrangement, and perhaps even sometimes of content, much longer than was seemly,” he later wrote.

  Larson recorded in his journal on November 4, 1957: “I had quite a few items on which I argued with the President today.” And again the next day: “I had quite an argument on a number of things with the President—lost some, won others. Once he said ‘Dammit Arthur, if you don’t let me write this in, I’ll extemporize it anyway.’” Three days later, Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, told Larson that the president enjoyed their collaboration but, Larson recorded in his journal, “the President wished I wouldn’t argue so much with him. After all—it’s his speech. I should try to get his ideas and incorporate them. I told Adams I realized that I got worked up and forgot I was talking to the President.”

  These sessions could sometimes be relaxing for the president—he might pull out foot-long desk shears and start trimming his nails. Age had caused his nails to get brittle and start to split, he once explained. “I’ve tried every vitamin there is, and the only thing that helps is ladies’ clear nail varnish,” he said. “I put on three coats.”

  As part of his plan to take a more structured approach to the president’s public communications, Larson expanded his speechwriting staff. He considered the writer Gore Vidal and eventually did hire a Johns Hopkins University political scientist named Malcolm Moos. He also arranged for Frederic Morrow, who had been doing “special projects” on the White House staff, to move over to speechwriting. The grandson of a former slave, Morrow was the first African-American to serve in an executive position on a president’s White House staff. Now, in November 1957, he became the first black presidential speechwriter.

  The son of a minister, Morrow had graduated from Bowdoin College and earned a law degree from Rutgers University. Before World War II, he had worked at the Urban League and at the NAACP, and in public affairs at CBS after the war. He found his White House colleagues to be “correct in conduct, but cold.” But he was capable of wry humor: Asked to speak at a celebration honoring him at the White House mess, Morrow got up, said, “It’s a great day for the Irish!” and sat down.

  Morrow was torn about taking the job. “This opportunity of service to both a President and a race has never before come to a Negro American,” he wrote in his diary on October 29. “It may be a long time coming again. To put personal difficulties above even a little good that might flow from this relationship is cowardice. But the real clincher in the decision is this—it was a struggle to get there and the opposition was severe. It is quite possible that if I resign, no similar appointment will be made…. For a minority member in this kind of a spot anywhere, there is always the haunting specter that to quit gives delight and comfort to your enemies and oppressors. It indicates that you could not take it.”

  He had enjoyed his special projects work and did not want to leave it, but was told “that it has been decided a
t the highest possible level that I will take the job,” as he recorded in his diary on October 21. “I move into this new post with great trepidation, and can only hope that I will be pleasantly surprised by the outcome.” It was not to be.

  On November 26, Morrow noted in his diary: “This is an anxious day as we await the latest bulletin on the President’s health. He suffered a chill on his return from meeting the King of Morocco at the airport yesterday, and his doctors ordered him to bed immediately.”

  In fact, Eisenhower did not have a chill. “The latest bulletin on the President’s health has just confirmed our worst fears,” Morrow wrote later that day. “He apparently suffered a slight stroke.”

  On the afternoon of November 25, 1957, Eisenhower had summoned Ann Whitman, his personal secretary, into the Oval Office and started speaking gibberish at her—recognizable words were coming out but not in any order that made sense. He would recover with remarkable speed and maintained a regular public speaking schedule, but Larson’s plan for a series of new-style fireside chats never regained the momentum it had that fall.

  Larson met with Adams on December 12 to discuss a short draft of the 1958 State of the Union that he had put together. Ike did not like it very much but had not said what he wanted. “The process of preparing the President’s speeches so as to reflect his ideas is rather like trying to construct a dinosaur skeleton out of a fragment of ankle bone,” Larson later wrote in his journal. “If I get even a word as a clue—I can take it from there, but without that clue, I never know if I’m on the right track…. For the State of the Union message, all I have is the general idea that we as Americans do indeed have greater resources to bring to bear.”

  Larson asked Sherman Adams if Eisenhower had indicated any specific ideas he wanted in the speech. “Adams, with great tenderness, said, ‘This man is not what he was,’” Larson related in his diary. “At almost this point I began to accept the idea of a sort of protectorate, an idea I have resisted until now.” But he had become convinced that “we have on our hands the problem of maintaining the world’s greatest figure of peace—although he is getting crotchety unpredictable [sic] and rather unsure of his footing.”

  Morrow was unsatisfied with the progress of the annual address for entirely different reasons. He had handled minor speeches, but since helping to sift through the various departmental State of the Union proposals in November had been left out of the process. Friends and staff members would daily ask him how the big speech was going, he noted in his journal on New Year’s Eve, and “it is very embarrassing when I have to reply that I have no knowledge of its status.”

  “The performance on the part of Mr. Larson has been almost incredible,” Morrow recorded on January 7, 1958. “This man went to great efforts to get me assigned to him as assistant, and yet at no time have I been taken into his confidence, or informed as to what was going on.”

  On his own, Larson kept working on the State of the Union. In an effort to spare Eisenhower from pressing too much in such a high-profile setting, the staff planned to keep the speech to no more than twenty minutes. Eisenhower had different ideas. He called Larson from his home at Gettysburg on New Year’s Day, 1958, to talk about the economic and defense organization portions of the speech. “Don’t tell the damn staff this, Art, but I don’t mind if the speech goes to thirty-five or forty minutes,” Ike said.

  On January 9, Eisenhower gave his State of the Union address: it ran forty-four minutes, and while he stumbled a handful of times, it was not more frequent than usual. “When the President today finished reading to Congress his message on the State of the Union a heavy burden of proof rested on those who have called into question his will to lead the country, and his possession of the physical and mental vigor required,” The New York Times reported. “So far as this occasion was concerned, he rose to it.”

  Five days after the speech, Jackson went to see Eisenhower and found him looking “extremely well, clear bright blue eyes, splendid color, full firm cheeks, and easy relaxed speech,” as he recorded in his daily log. Conversation eventually turned to the stroke’s lingering aftereffects. Jackson commented that he had not noticed any stuttering or stumbling. “It is not a question of stuttering, or even stoppage,” Eisenhower told Jackson. “What happens is that the nerve in the brain that brings the right word to your mouth to express what you are thinking about doesn’t work right, and sometimes a completely incorrect word shows up in your mouth.”

  The speechwriters did notice other problems. For example, Stephen Hess, who served as a speechwriter toward the end of Eisenhower’s tenure, tried to write speeches that avoided s sounds, with which the president seemed to have trouble.

  By March, Morrow had reached the end of his patience. When Larson “confided to me that things had not worked out as he had dreamed,” Morrow wrote in his journal on March 10, 1958, it “seemed a masterpiece of understatement.” Morrow asked out of the speechwriting job and was liberated from it the following month. Not until January 27, 1959, after nearly five years working in the White House, was he formally given his commission as a staffer. The president usually attends such ceremonies, but that would mean the press as well. “To handle this in the usual manner now could open a Pandora’s box of questions and difficult answers,” such as why it had taken so long, Morrow wrote in his diary.

  Eisenhower did not attend the ceremony.

  “By the way, Malcolm, I want to have something to say when I leave here, and I want you to be thinking about it,” Eisenhower said. “I’m not interested in capturing headlines, but I want to have a message and I want you to be thinking about it well in advance.”

  The president and Malcolm Moos were chatting in the Oval Office in late 1958. Moos, recently promoted to the top speechwriting spot, had been showing Ike a book on great presidential speeches and George Washington’s Farewell Address had spurred Ike’s remark.

  Moos had flitted through various aspects of public life, spending time as a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University starting in 1942, and as an editor at the Baltimore Sun from 1945 to 1948, where he befriended the legendary journalist H. L. Mencken. Moos first met Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican Convention. When the future president found out that Moos taught political science, he told the professor, “I am going to be one of your first students.” From 1954 to 1958, Moos was chairman of the Maryland Republican central committee.

  Wispy at five foot ten and only 130 pounds (“you’d think that a good puff of wind would blow him away—but he sure had a lot of character and a lot of strength,” recalled one assistant), Moos was described by Time as “an energetic mixture of egghead author and practical politician.” A self-described “full-blooded Bull Moose Republican” (referring to Teddy Roosevelt), Moos was viewed with suspicion by conservatives, one telling The New York Post, for example, that he was “no better than a Democrat, and a New Deal Democrat at that.”

  Nevertheless, under Moos’s guidance, Ike’s 1958 congressional campaign speeches took on a tough new tone. The reluctant partisan disappeared for the campaign season and the press started talking about a “new” Eisenhower whose speeches featured a punchier, staccato style. “The excitement in town this week has been provided by the ‘new Eisenhower’—that gloves-off Republican partisan who talks about Democrats the way Harry S. Truman talks about Republicans,” The New York Times reported in late October.

  “Curiously, however, no one seems to attribute his new bellicosity to the President himself. Instead, the assumption is that he is only speaking words put in his mouth by someone else, and the question tantalizing the capitol [sic] is: Who really put them there? One suspect is Meade Alcorn, Republican national chairman. Another is Dr. Malcolm Moos, his new speech writer.” This did not mean Moos had given up his liberal attitudes: During the Little Rock crisis of September 1957, for example, he had suggested to Milton Eisenhower that the president personally go down to Little Rock and walk with the black children into Central High. (The sound bite pr
actically writes itself: “I will go to Little Rock.”)

  In at least one instance, it was Alcorn who supplied lines for the president. Campaigning in California in October, Eisenhower referred to his opposition as “the Democrat Party,” a GOP epithet that dated to Thomas Dewey and had been popularized by Joseph McCarthy in the early part of the decade. Moos thought dropping the “ic” was “an insane notion,” and for that matter Eisenhower had not used it before and did not again (asked in 1956 if he would use the shortened title, Ike said, “if they want to be known as the Democratic Party, it’s all right with me”). But as he had done in 1952 regarding Marshall and McCarthy, and in 1954 on the question of endorsing a GOP Congress, Eisenhower—who disclaimed partisanship—deferred to the professionals on a political matter.*

  Though he might be willing to bend on some partisan matters, Eisenhower remained a stringent editor. But whereas he had worked closely from the start on speech drafts during the early years of his administration, he entered the process somewhat later by the end. “He liked to have a draft that he could chew on,” Moos said. Ike’s editing had not lost its acuity. “Usually his first brush with a speech was a full-text version sent in by Mac [Moos],” speechwriter Ralph Williams recalled. “Then he would lock into it like a target-acquisition radar, throwing out paragraphs, changing sentences, fiddling with words, re-writing whole pages, until by the tenth draft he’d probably put more time into it than both of us combined.”

  Working in the East Wing, Moos had two assistants. Stephen Hess had been a Moos pupil at Johns Hopkins before being drafted into the army (and would later become a distinguished scholar of the American presidency). In later years he joked that he had gotten out of the army as Private First Class on a Friday and by Tuesday was a presidential speechwriter with a sergeant driving him around.