“Sorensen knew Kennedy’s mind because he’d been with him so long,” Feldman said. “Sorensen knew where Kennedy stood and he could phrase what Kennedy’s ideas were better than Kennedy could do himself.” They were Kennedy’s ideas. And the words were ones that Kennedy worked over himself thoroughly. Indeed, to assume that Kennedy (or any other president) was a vessel for someone else’s words underestimates the efforts required of Sorensen, Goodwin, Schlesinger, and others who were writing not in a vacuum but in a specific style and cadence.
“I always felt that it was more a reflection of him than me,” Goodwin said in 2007. Indeed, one measure of a president’s success in terms of preparing a speech is his ability to aid his writers by providing a clear tone and style and set of beliefs.
These issues occupied Sorensen in the days after he left the Johnson administration in early 1964. “A few days before he left for Cambridge, Ted called me and asked about his own original drafts of Kennedy speeches—for example, the inaugural address,” Schlesinger recorded in his diary. “Should he destroy them? Might they not damage JFK’s historical reputation? I said that he should destroy nothing—that his historical reputation rested on many other things besides speeches, and that in any case a President deserved credit for the writers he chose and the texts he approved.”*
Sorensen has for decades fought anything that would diminish the credit Kennedy receives for speeches he gave. “I maintain with good reason that John F. Kennedy was the author—in the true sense of that word—of all of his speeches,” Sorensen said in 2006. “By that I mean all the ideas, policies and decisions conveyed in every speech were his, not mine. I also mean that he was putting his name and reputation at stake. If a speech backfired or antagonized a lot of people…he would suffer for it—I wouldn’t suffer for it. So that’s why I say he’s the author.” He added: “If a man in a high office speaks words which convey his principles and policies and ideas and he’s willing to stand behind them and take whatever blame or therefore credit go with them, it’s his.”
A great speech cannot simply be measured by its words. “If I was writing a speech for someone now and…[had them say] ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’ they’d laugh me off the stage,” Goodwin said. “But on the other hand in Virginia in pre-Revolutionary times, that was a pretty fiery speech. So it all depends on the context at the time…and the person.” This is especially true for presidential addresses because those words have the power of policy. If in May 1963 Ted Sorensen had announced that the time had come for the United States and Soviet Union to reconsider the Cold War, it might be a compelling and eloquent statement, but little else. When the president said it, it helped shift international relations.
There is a distinction between authorship of a speech and ownership. Ferreting out the specific author of a memorable line can be an interesting exercise (enough to write whole books about), though often a fruitless one. But of greater importance is not who first set specific phrases to paper, but the care with which a president adopts them as his own, and how well those words express that president’s philosophy and policies. The president must ultimately have ownership of his words—for good or ill—not only because he will be held responsible for them, but because to suggest otherwise risks the possibility that he may not.
“Now That’s What I Call
a News Lead”
NOVEMBER 22, 1963
“The president is dead and the vice-president has been looking for you,” Lyndon B. Johnson’s chief political operative told Jack Valenti. “He wants you to come out to Love Field and get aboard the airplane.” Cliff Carter and Valenti were standing in a basement stairwell of Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Valenti, Carter, Johnson aide Liz Carpenter, and a Secret Service agent commandeered a car and careered toward Love Field and Air Force One. They squeezed into the office midplane with several Texas Democratic congressmen. When Johnson came in, they rose. “Mr. President, we are ready to carry out any orders you have,” Representative Albert Thomas said. Soon Valenti was on the phone to the Justice Department, making sure that they had the exact wording for the presidential oath of office.
Valenti can be seen in the photograph of Johnson taking the oath, the stricken Jackie Kennedy standing next to the forlorn LBJ. To the new president’s immediate right is his wife Lady Bird, to her right Representative Thomas, Valenti hunched next to him. Standing at the back of the cabin, eyeglasses catching the camera’s flash, is Johnson protégé Bill Moyers.
At 12:42 that afternoon, Moyers was with state representative Ben Barnes and University of Texas regent Frank Erwin at the toney, all-white 40-Acres Club in Austin when he was called to the telephone. Minutes later, Moyers told them: “The president has been shot and is believed dead. The governor has been shot and is critically wounded. The vice president is believed to have been wounded.”
The call was from the Secret Service. Johnson had summoned Moyers. Barnes called the head of the Texas state troopers about a plane, and when he dropped Moyers at the Austin airport, a state-owned twin-engine Cessna was waiting.
At Love Field, Moyers boarded Air Force One but was barred from the presidential cabin. “I’m here if you need me,” he wrote in a note to LBJ and passed it through. He was quickly ushered in, and at 2:40 pm stood quietly in the back of the cabin as Johnson took the oath.
Johnson had reached out for a pair of trusted friends and advisers. Moyers and Valenti would be key administration players, each with a critical role in shaping the rhetoric of the Johnson presidency. Once the flight was airborne, Johnson turned to Valenti, Moyers, and Carpenter, to prepare some brief remarks for him to give upon his arrival at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington.
With Carpenter doing the writing, they put together a brief statement. “This is a sad time for every American,” it read. “The nation suffers a loss that cannot be weighed. For me it is a deep personal tragedy. I know the nation, and the whole free world, shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy bears. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for God’s help—and yours.”
Johnson scrawled on it. “Every American” became “free men” and then “all people.” He struck “the nation suffers” in favor of “we have suffered.” He trimmed “the nation, and the whole free,” leaving the more economical “I know the world shares…” Finally, he inverted the last sentence, finishing with the request for God’s help.
At Andrews, Johnson had to raise his voice to be heard. Insecure about his speaking abilities, probably mindful of his predecessor’s great skill, Johnson thought he sounded strident and harsh. Almost immediately he regretted making the statement.
Johnson had a more important statement to make five days later before a joint session of Congress. He wanted the speech to make clear, he told Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, that his administration’s goal was to move past the tragedy, to promote justice, equality, and plenty, to look forward and start to move on.
Johnson asked Ted Sorensen to write the speech, and John Kenneth Galbraith to contribute. Sorensen and Johnson met on the evening of Monday, November 25. Johnson said he liked Galbraith’s draft, but quickly reversed himself when Sorensen said that he did not. “I didn’t think it was any ball of fire,” Johnson said, secret recorders picking up the conversation. “I thought it was something that you could improve on.”
When Sorensen’s draft came in the next day, only a handful of Galbraith’s sentences were left, including a couple in the contrapuntal style that Kennedy and Sorensen had favored: Galbraith’s “The strong can be just. But the defense of justice requires strength” became the assertion that “the strong can be just in the use of strength—and the just can be strong in the defense of justice.” He also kept “In this age when there are no victors in war, but when there can still be losers in peace” almost intact. This sentiment would get a small but key tweak before the final draft, becoming “In this age where there can be no losers in peace and no victors in war…”
Johnson took t
he draft back with him to his home, a French chateau–style house called The Elms in the Spring Valley neighborhood.* He fiddled over it with Valenti and his friend Abe Fortas.† Fortas told Adlai Stevenson that he had “corned it up,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., recorded in his diary. “The corn is, so far as I am concerned, alien.”
Used to having the final pen on a presidential address, Sorensen was displeased. “He is very hurt,” Katharine Graham told Johnson some days later. “This is of course a new experience for him (though not, as Feldman and Dick Goodwin somewhat grimly remarked, for others in the White House who used to have to turn their manuscripts over to Ted),” Schlesinger noted in his diary. Sorensen did not see the speech again until it was set and thought it repetitious and poorly organized.
On the car ride down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to deliver the speech, LBJ turned to Kennedy aides Larry O’Brien and Pierre Salinger, who were in the car along with Sorensen. This is a fine speech, Johnson said, and it’s 90 percent Sorensen, only 10 percent Johnson. Sorensen demurred: No, sir, that’s not accurate, not more than 50 percent Sorensen.
Johnson replied that Sorensen’s 50 percent was best. On that point, Sorensen told the president, they agreed. (“We spent the whole time [going up to deliver the speech] arguing,” Johnson told Katherine Graham.)
They should have split the difference: roughly two thirds of the given speech (1,170 of 1,630 words) can be found in Sorensen’s first draft, including its mournful opening: “All I have ever possessed I would have gladly given not to be here today.” (This was changed slightly in the final speech to become the simpler, more elegant “All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.”) Sorensen’s draft followed the sentence, “For the greatest leader of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our time,” with “—and I who cannot fill his shoes must occupy his desk.” This latter clause was crossed out.
Overall, the speech was true to the Kennedy-Sorensen style. “In this age when there can be no losers in peace and no victors in war, we must recognize the obligation to match national strength with national restraint. We must be prepared at one and the same time for both the confrontation of power and the limitation of power. We must be ready to defend the national interest and to negotiate the common interest. This is the path that we shall continue to pursue. Those who test our courage will find it strong, and those who seek our friendship will find it honorable. We will demonstrate anew that the strong can be just in the use of strength; and the just can be strong in the defense of justice.” One of the speech’s signature lines, “Let us continue,” appeared in Johnson aide Horace “Buzz” Busby’s November 26 draft.
Sorensen stayed on into January, and helped draft the 1964 State of the Union, but resigned to work on his Kennedy memoir. Schlesinger did much the same thing. Mike Feldman ascended to Sorensen’s special counsel position, but did not assume his speechwriting responsibilities. As Johnson started his first full year in the White House, he had to assemble a new team.
Dick Goodwin, having feuded with Sorensen all the way out of the White House in the early Kennedy days, had come to bureaucratic rest in the Peace Corps and was contemplating his next move. One afternoon in mid-March 1964, he was in the White House when he encountered the president, who drew him into the Oval Office. Soon Goodwin was writing a statement to help extricate Johnson from a diplomatic spat of his causing with Panama.
“He’s got good sentence structure,” Moyers, who knew Goodwin from the Peace Corps, had told Johnson days earlier, when they were contemplating bringing Goodwin in. “He’ll balance it, weigh it, make it rhyme here and there…. Not as good as Sorensen, of course, but pretty good.”
The Panama speech a success, another assignment followed, for a Democratic Party event. By the end of the month, Goodwin was reinstalled in his old West Wing office as the president’s principal speech-writer. He saw an opportunity, in the tradition of Rosenman, Clifford, Hughes, and his mentor and rival Sorensen, to help influence not only how but what the president communicated. “The two roles—writer and policymaker—were symbiotic,” he later wrote. “Active participation made accurate articulation likely; personal contact with the president made it far easier to ensure that his public statements reflected his thoughts and philosophy, the natural cadences of his voice, and his distinctive mannerisms of expression.”
Goodwin became skilled and dogged at controlling speech drafts. He later advised one new speechwriter to wait until the last possible moment before submitting a text: that way you can make your ideas a fait accompli. There would be no time to secure an alternate draft.
Johnson admired and appreciated Goodwin’s skills as both writer and ideas man, but was uneasy with him. “Almost from the outset the president had an instinctual kind of recoiling from Goodwin,” Valenti recalled. “He had a feeling fixed neither in specifics nor fact that Goodwin was not the best influence and that Goodwin might at some time turn on him. He was unable to put this in more specifics, but it was that occult instinct of the president working overtime. He searched out Goodwin’s character through some dimly lit passageways that I wasn’t able to navigate.”
Goodwin, though, was delighted to be back in the fray and to be working for Johnson, a president whose political views seemed to match his own. “Nor were any of my ambitions modest,” he later wrote. “Naturally, writing this or any speech would not make me a world-historical figure. But it was a chance to help make history.” And from the simple point of view of a writer, he enjoyed working with Johnson more than he had with Kennedy. “It was great working for Johnson. I didn’t feel bound by any of the kind of stylistic imperatives of the Kennedy style,” he said. “All [Johnson] wanted was a kind of forceful, eloquent, straightforward [speech] and a lot of that was easier to do.”
Not immediately. Goodwin sifted transcripts of the speeches that the president had been giving and realized that whoever had written them was trying “to make Johnson a rhetorician, a turner of ornate phrases.” Goodwin resolved to strive for something simpler.*
“There’s no question about that. Johnson was always intimidated by Banquo’s ghost, this specter of Kennedy, this urbane, cool, witty, marvelously elegant man,” Valenti recalled. “Johnson always knew he would live under that glistening shadow and it did have some effect on him.” The problem was compounded by Johnson’s conflicted, contradictory personality. He admired a well-turned phrase and yearned to achieve that level of presidential eloquence. But he portrayed himself as a simple Texas farmer. “While he did not speak that way personally, he wanted his speeches to have sentences…march in serried ranks with movement, emotion, feeling,” Valenti recalled.
The struggle to find the right balance in Johnson’s rhetoric would go on for the course of his term. His insecurities and moods, skills as an extemporaneous speaker and deficiencies with a text, and his inability to adapt to television had push-pull effects on the speechwriting process.
As the remains of the Kennedy legislative agenda gave way to the flood that was the Johnson program, the president was looking for a phrase to encompass the rising flow of proposals moving down Pennsylvania Avenue. Sitting for a television interview with reporters from the three major networks to mark the conclusion of his first hundred days in office, Johnson was asked if he had settled on a slogan to encapsulate his burgeoning legislative program, à la New Deal, Fair Deal, Crusade, or New Frontier. “I have had a lot of things to deal with the first 100 days and I haven’t thought of any slogan, but I suppose all of us want a ‘better deal,’ don’t we!” he replied.
Johnson had been “badgering” Goodwin to come up with something. Goodwin had consulted with Eric Goldman, a Princeton historian who had replaced Schlesinger as White House professor-in-residence. Goldman later recalled to Robert Dallek that he suggested to Goodwin the title of Walter Lippmann’s book, The Good Society (1937).*
There was no small irony in the suggestion: Lippmann’s Good Society was not only a broadside against
Johnson’s hero, FDR, but against the New Deal and activist government generally, which he equated with fascism. “Men deceive themselves when they imagine that they take charge of the social order,” he wrote. “A directed society must be bellicose and poor. If it is not both bellicose and poor, it cannot be directed.” Society could have “no blueprints,” Lippmann noted, but should instead be guided by “the really inexorable law of modern society”—the free market. Lippmann’s “good society,” with its emphasis on the market and disdain for activist government, bore little resemblance to the raft of legislative proposals for which Johnson was seeking a name.*
Goodwin tweaked Goldman’s suggestion, and produced a draft for the March 4 presentation of the first annual Eleanor Roosevelt Award to Judge Anna Kross that included what he described as a “fragment of rhetorical stuffing”—“great society” (which had not yet achieved capitalization). The phrase immediately caught the attention of both Johnson and Valenti. “It was evident that there was meaning in this phrase far beyond just the phrase ‘Great Society,’” Valenti said. “You could fit a lot of what we were trying to do within the curve of this phrase.”
As had happened to another Goodwin invention four years earlier—Alliance for Progress—“great society” was held for a more important moment. In the meantime, Goodwin built a whole speech around it: a public expression of the philosophy underlying the Johnson program.
The University of Michigan’s commencement address on May 22 was selected. But in the meantime, Johnson could not resist “fondling and caressing this new phrase,” as Valenti put it. Starting with Rose Garden remarks to the Montana Territorial Commission on April 17, he used the phrase twenty times before the Ann Arbor speech. The press began to notice. “Johnson Pledges ‘Great Society’; Will Visit 4 Needy Areas Today,” The New York Times reported on April 24. And on May 10, the paper ran a story headlined: “President Urges ‘A Great Society.’”
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 17
