White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  Feldman directed research in the 1960 campaign, compiling the “Nixopedia,” which encompassed the Republican vice president’s statements, votes, and positions from throughout his career. In the White House he handled policy on a wide swath of domestic issues—“Ted Sorensen and I kind of divided the cabinet in half,” he later recalled. Sorensen took the more important cabinet departments like State and Defense, and Feldman the lesser ones, Commerce and Labor. “Whenever [cabinet department officials] wanted to see the president, they’d go through us,” he said. He also handled Middle Eastern policy issues and was a secret liaison to Israel. He kept such a low profile that in 1964 The New York Post dubbed him “the White House’s anonymous man.”

  Less anonymous was Richard Goodwin, who joined Kennedy’s staff in 1959 fresh from investigating the “quiz show” scandals for the House’s Legislative Oversight Subcommittee. In the late 1950s, television quiz shows—The $64,000 Question and Twenty-One, in particular—achieved cult status akin to shows like American Idol today. Winners became nationwide celebrities, with Columbia University professor Charles Van Doren making the cover of Time magazine and becoming a “cultural correspondent” on NBC’s Today Show. An eager young lawyer endowed with the power of congressional investigation, Goodwin had over several months pieced together the quiz shows’ dark secret: that big winners like Van Doren were given the questions and (mostly) the answers ahead of time.*

  In the midst of the investigation, in 1959, Sorensen called to ask Goodwin if he would be interested in writing speeches for Kennedy. Goodwin had met Kennedy a couple of times, when the young law student was clerking for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was no fan of JFK or his father. (“I wish you a great deal of success and happiness in your own career,” Frankfurter wrote upon learning that Goodwin was going to work for Kennedy, “but not in the main thing”—the presidential contest.)

  Goodwin had been the latest in a string of ghosts tried out in an attempt to alleviate Sorensen’s writing burdens, which the looming presidential campaign was multiplying. Nearly a dozen were tested, but only Goodwin could capture JFK’s voice.

  “Some, especially in those early years, found [Goodwin’s] personality, in a favorite Washington word, abrasive. He was certainly driving and often impatient; those whom he overrode called him arrogant,” Schlesinger wrote. “But he was a man of uncommon intelligence, perception and charm. Above all, he had immense facility, both literary and intellectual.”

  Goodwin, riding on the campaign bus in West Texas on September 12, 1960, had coined the name for JFK’s Latin American policy. As the desolate countryside rolled by, Goodwin was searching for a slogan to encapsulate the candidate’s plans for the United States’ southern neighbors. Kennedy spent the campaign hammering the Republicans—never the personally popular Eisenhower—for “losing” Cuba, but he wanted to express a more expansive policy.* With revolution simmering across the southern continent, a Kennedy-led United States would ally itself with non-Communist leftists in favoring democratic reform and social justice. The idea was to project a sense of partnership, not paternalism.

  Goodwin’s eye landed on Alianza, a magazine published by the Tucson-based Alianza Hispano-Americano. The word clicked for Goodwin, and at the next stop he called Karl Meyer, a Washington Post editorial writer and friend who had Latin American expertise, to make sure alianza did not have any inappropriate alternative meanings (as would, for example, “liaison”).

  Alianza was fine, Meyer said, but it should be for something. Development—desarrollo in Spanish—was discarded as beyond the limits of the Kennedy tongue, but progreso was acceptable. Kennedy excised the phrase—“let’s not waste this one”—because he knew it would be overshadowed by a speech he was to give later that day to Protestant ministers in Houston defusing the issue of his Catholicism.

  The “Alianza para progresso” (later, at the insistence of government grammarians, “Alianza para el progresso”) became one of the cornerstones of Kennedy’s foreign policy, symbolizing his new approach to international affairs.

  Although both Sorensen and Goodwin could write effectively for Kennedy, they were an ill-matched pair personally. “I learned a lot from Ted about the craft of politics and political speechwriting,” Goodwin later wrote. “And he always appeared grateful at having found someone to share the burdens of his work, even if he seemed to look upon me as less a discovery than a creation.” Given Sorensen’s own disregard for or lack of interest in personal relationships, a clash was almost inevitable. “Goodwin and Sorensen did not get along,” Feldman recalled. “Goodwin was always trying to substitute himself for Sorensen, which he couldn’t do, but the very actions he took would irritate Sorensen.”

  When, just before the administration started, Sorensen tried unsuccessfully to have Goodwin and Feldman designated as his assistants, Goodwin decided it was time to escape his old boss’s purview. He was interested neither in being a speechwriter per se nor in being in Sorensen’s shadow. He sought to escape by landing a job in the State Department, a search that ended abruptly when word got back to the president. “I don’t think I can work well with Ted,” Goodwin told Kennedy. He was persuaded to stay in the White House and would no longer receive his assignments from Sorensen, who grew distant. It would be many years before the two became friends again.

  Goodwin specialized in Latin American policy from the West Wing, angering the staid State Department with his manner and energy. He was the principal writer when JFK formally announced the Alliance for Progress in March, and would continue writing speeches on Latin American affairs. But despite Kennedy’s insistence that Goodwin stay close by—“You know how we do things. I think you better stay on here for a while”—he landed in the State Department when Kennedy shook up the administration in November 1961. “I was saddened” at being sent away by Kennedy, a man whom he admired greatly, Goodwin later wrote. “Not stunned, but suffused with a milder melancholy more like that of a rejected lover.”

  With Goodwin’s departure, Schlesinger assumed a larger role.* Though he and Kennedy had been undergrads at Harvard at the same time in the late 1930s, it was not until 1947 that they first met. “Kennedy seemed very sincere and not unintelligent, but kind of on the conservative side,” Schlesinger recorded in his diary then. By 1960, Schlesinger had won a Pulitzer Prize in history; had joined Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, and John Kenneth Galbraith in founding Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal lobbying group aimed at rallying the anti-Communist left; and was a veteran of both of Stevenson’s presidential campaigns, among other things writing speeches. He helped JFK informally in 1960, publishing a brief book, Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?

  After the 1960 election, Robert F. Kennedy broached the possibility of Schlesinger joining the White House staff. In the administration, Schlesinger was an adviser of broad portfolio, focusing especially on Latin America but also on cultural issues, and serving as a bridge to the liberal, intellectual, and artistic communities. He was a lone voice in opposition to the Bay of Pigs invasion. (After which he had received a telegram from Cambridge, signed “Graduate Students,” which said: “Nixon or Kennedy: Does it make a difference?”)

  “Arthur has minimal operational responsibilities,” one unnamed White House staffer told Harper’s. “He serves as a general gadfly.”

  Schlesinger was a political half-generation older than Sorensen and Goodwin, a difference he felt. In 1952, Stevenson had dispatched Schlesinger to New York City to pick up speech drafts from Samuel Rosenman and Robert Sherwood. Already working on his multivolume Age of Roosevelt series, Schlesinger was delighted for the opportunity to consult FDR’s ghostwriters. Rosenman thought the speeches they submitted were as good as their Roosevelt work—a view neither Schlesinger nor Stevenson shared. “Could this team really have written the glorious FDR speeches?” he wondered.

  “I learned a lesson from this experience: absence made drafts tepid and banal,” Schlesinger recalled in 2007. “T
he response to daily crowds and politicos, the changing moods, the vital rhythms of the presidential campaign: all this atmosphere made the speeches penetrating and persuasive. Rosenman and Sherwood had not lost their talents; they had lost the atmosphere.” They were also trying to write speeches from afar for a speaker with whom they were not intimate.

  “I learned later a second lesson: the disillusion visited upon absent writers with a high reputation derived from previous campaigns,” he added. “In 1952, John Kenneth Galbraith and Schlesinger were critical of Rosenman and Sherwood. In 1960, Ted Sorensen and Dick Goodwin were equally critical of Galbraith and Schlesinger. Could this team really have written the eloquent and witty Stevenson speeches?”

  While JFK thought Schlesinger’s writing was too Stevensonian, he still occasionally called upon the professor to rewrite a Sorensen draft or pen a speech of his own. Schlesinger was taken aback at the informality with which these assignments were given. “As usual, I was overwhelmed by the utter casualness of the speech-writing process,” he recorded in his diary at one point.

  Assignments for other writers spurred Sorensen. After a meeting about Latin American affairs on Monday, January 5, 1962, Kennedy handed Schlesinger Sorensen’s draft for the State of the Union address, saying it was too long and wearisome. He asked Schlesinger to produce a new version. Schlesinger did so, staying up most of that night to produce it. Sorensen in turn spent all of Tuesday night writing a competing draft. JFK handed both to McGeorge Bundy, his national security adviser, with the Rooseveltian instruction: “Weave them together.” Even in the final moments before the speech, Sorensen argued against a Schlesinger insertion, prompting Kennedy to quip to Bundy, “Ted certainly doesn’t go for additions to his speeches!” When a line from the inserted material was The New York Times’ “quotation of the day” the next day, JFK told Schlesinger, “Ted will die when he sees that.”

  Kennedy used the “weave” instruction again in March. He asked Schlesinger to write the speech he was going to give at the University of California at Berkley on March 23, 1962. “I am tired of the headlines,” the president said. “All they describe is crisis, and they give the impression that we have our backs against the wall everywhere in the world. But this is an optical illusion.” The world had changed a great deal in the previous decade, JFK added.

  Schlesinger wrote a speech about the inevitable triumph of pluralism in the world. Sorensen quickly composed a competing speech, about the contrast between the “age of knowledge” and the “age of hate.” “I am genuinely fond of Ted, and he has been invariably pleasant to me, but he cannot abide any one else doing important speeches for the President,” Schlesinger recorded in his diary. When Kennedy told Schlesinger to “weave them together” (he liked the triumph of pluralism and the “age of reason,” but neither the words nor the idea of “the age of hate”), both writers protested that they were separate speeches. JFK said he was reminded of when his father would reject memoranda proffered by subordinates. “They would ask what he wanted, and he would say, ‘That’s up to you,’ and walk out of the room,” the president told his aides. “That’s what I am doing now.”

  “The pursuit of knowledge itself implies a world where men are free to follow out the logic of their own ideas,” Kennedy told the Berkeley students. “It implies a world where nations are free to solve their own problems and to realize their own ideals. It implies, in short, a world where collaboration emerges from the voluntary decisions of nations strong in their own independence and their own self-respect. It implies, I believe, the kind of world which is emerging before our eyes—the world produced by the revolution of national independence which has today, and has been since 1945, sweeping across the face of the world.”

  The speech was a great success. Walter Lippmann told Bundy that it was Kennedy’s best speech since the inaugural.

  On Tuesday, October 16, 1962, McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, started Kennedy’s morning with news that the Soviets had secretly set up nuclear missile bases in Cuba, a mere ninety miles from Florida.

  Cuba had become an annoying theme for the administration. While JFK had hammered Nixon and the Republicans for “losing” the island nation, all he had accomplished thus far was the Bay of Pigs disaster. At the Justice Department, Robert F. Kennedy was overseeing Operation Mongoose, the CIA’s largest covert program, designed to use a variety of different schemes ranging from espionage to low-grade terrorism to counterfeiting to rid Cuba of dictator Fidel Castro.

  Cuba was also a public focus of both the United States and the USSR. On September 11, the Soviet government had stated that its nuclear arsenal had such reach and power that there would be no reason for arms to be based in any other countries, “for instance, Cuba.” The statement had added that shipments of arms to Cuba—recently increased—were “designed exclusively for defensive purposes.” In addition, Khrushchev had recently used private channels to assure JFK that his country would undertake no actions that would affect the upcoming U.S. midterm congressional elections.

  For his part, Kennedy had drawn a strategic line. If Cuba were to “become an offensive military base of significant capacity for the Soviet Union,” he warned at a September 13 press conference, “then this country will do whatever must be done to protect its own security and that of its allies.”

  All the while missiles moved onto the island. And now U.S. spy planes had discovered them, presenting Kennedy with both a problem and an opportunity. On one hand, this was a dangerous and provocative act on the part of the Soviets. While the missiles made little practical strategic difference in the global balance of power, once unveiled they would be a potent challenge to U.S. prestige.

  But the Soviet secrecy gave Kennedy room to maneuver. Hours after learning of the missiles, he convened in the Cabinet Room what came to be known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or simply the Ex Comm. The group consisted mainly of predictable persons—in addition to Bundy, Kennedy, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson were Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; Secretary of State Dean Rusk and their aides; Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Maxwell Taylor; representatives of the CIA; and the U.S. Attorney General, Robert Kennedy.

  But Sorensen also was a regular and important member of the Ex Comm. Though his portfolio was domestic policies and politics, he had become increasingly involved in foreign affairs since the Bay of Pigs. His presence in the key meetings was important not simply for his role as Kennedy’s top adviser on the White House staff. Whatever action Kennedy settled on, he would have to explain it to the American people and the world. It would be Sorensen to whom he would turn for that explanation. And as the week progressed, the speechcrafting itself shaped the policy decisions.

  Early on, with the shock and anger of the discovery of the missile bases still fresh, the policy debate focused primarily on military means to eliminate the missiles. During the first Ex Comm meeting, JFK summarized the possibilities open to the United States: a “surgical” air strike to destroy the missile sites alone; a broader air strike, which would eliminate any Soviet ability to counterattack; a full invasion of Cuba; or a military blockade to prevent any additional Soviet forces or matériel from reaching the island.

  An air attack on the missile bases is “what we’re going to do anyway,” Kennedy told his advisers. “We’re going to do number one. We’re going to take out these missiles.” The concept of a blockade gained support, especially with the president, over the course of the week—but as quickly as a consensus seemed at hand, it would disappear. “Each of us changed his mind more than once that week on the best course of action to take—not only because new facts and arguments were adduced but because, in the president’s words, ‘whatever action we took had so many disadvantages to it and each…raised the prospect that it might escalate the Soviet Union into a nuclear war,’” Sorensen later wrote.

  Try as they might, collectively or individually, a course of action with an airtight case eluded the group. To do
nothing would signal weakness. An air strike could not guarantee complete destruction of the missiles, but would raise the probability of a larger confrontation with the Soviets—possibly escalating to nuclear war. An invasion would make such a conflagration even more likely.* A blockade might—might—prevent new missiles and equipment from arriving on the island, but would do nothing about those already there. And none of these options provided an answer if the Soviets compared the missiles they were trying to move into Cuba with the ones the United States had in Turkey and Italy.

  “Having some pride in my own ability with words, I tried, I recall, to draft a message to Khrushchev which I thought could be as airtight as possible and require his immediate withdrawal of the missiles,” Sorensen later explained. He envisioned a letter that would be delivered to Khrushchev personally by a special presidential envoy who would be instructed to wait in the Soviet premier’s presence for an answer.

  His draft of the letter said the United States faced an “inescapable commitment” to take military action against the missiles. “Consequently, the purpose of this note is to inform you that…I have no choice but to initiate appropriate military action against the island of Cuba.” Only Khrushchev’s personally assuring the presidential envoy then and there that he would withdraw the missiles could forestall the attack. After such a promise was made, the letter continued, Kennedy would be willing to discuss the U.S. nuclear forces deployed in Italy and Turkey (which, by the way, “are in no way comparable in the eyes of history, international law, or world opinion”).

  But Sorensen was unsatisfied. “I had to admit on completion of that effort that even I could not make one that would stand the light of logic and history.” Later in the week, summarizing on paper the unanswered objections to an air strike, Sorensen wrote: “Inasmuch as no one has been able to devise a satisfactory message to Khrushchev to which his reply could not outmaneuver us, an air strike means a U.S.-initiated ‘Pearl Harbor’ on a small nation which history could neither understand nor forget.”