White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  Goodwin pored over policy papers and proposals, consulted with Johnson, Moyers, and anyone else who might have something to contribute. His goal was not to produce a list of programs but an overarching “assertion of purpose.” “The country was alive with change: ideas and anger, intellectual protest and physical rebellion,” he later noted. “Without this ferment the formulation of the Great Society would not have been possible, not even conceivable.” Reading over the final text in the Oval Office the morning he was to deliver it, Johnson’s reaction was that it was satisfactory. “It ought to do just fine, boys,” he told Goodwin and Moyers. “Just what I told you.”*

  Standing before a crowd of 80,000 at the University of Michigan’s stadium, Johnson outlined his vision for the United States:

  Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

  The Great Society, he told the students, would emphasize quality of life, starting with equality and justice for all and extending to all aspects of life. “But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”

  For better or worse—with conservatives deploying the phrase as a term of derision—Johnson’s Great Society endured, becoming a symbol of ambitious and well-intentioned government programs.

  Weeks after the Ann Arbor address, Hugh Sidey of Time asked the president about Goodwin’s role in drafting the address.

  “I can tell you, the Ann Arbor speech came as the result of a book I read by Barbara Ward,” Johnson said, referring to The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations. “Dick Goodwin, as far as I know, never saw it. It doesn’t make any difference, but I just want to show you that somebody is trying to appear important to you, and I resent that to hell. People on the outside, on the edge, they want to appear that they know something that they don’t know.” To drive home his point, Johnson drew an organizational chart for the reporter. The name “Goodman”—an intentional misspelling of Goodwin—appeared at the bottom under “Miscellaneous.”

  The torrent of new programs also increased the need for presidential words. Johnson had demanding standards for his speeches, whether they were given to a commencement audience of 80,000 or a bill-signing crowd of 80.

  Douglass Cater was a soft-spoken reporter from Montgomery, Alabama, who had spent fourteen years as an editor at The Reporter, a weekly newsmagazine. In 1963 he was at a party at the Women’s Democratic Club in Washington when Vice President Johnson pulled him aside.

  “Doug, I want you to come ‘thank’ for me,” Johnson said.

  Cater replied: “What’s that? Thank?”

  “T-h-i-n-k!” Johnson said, perhaps regretting his offer. “Don’t you know the word?”

  Cater declined. The following February, he was about to have lunch with Moyers when Johnson invited them both to swim—sans bathing suits—in the White House pool and have lunch. This time Cater was receptive to Johnson’s overture, and he started in the administration in May 1964. “Nothing compares with my waterlogged birthday-suit interview with the president,” Cater said later. He became Johnson’s top education adviser, overseeing the various initiatives in that area, and also in health. A writer with a knack for clear prose, he was involved in virtually all education speeches. He told people that he was a journalist, while speech composition was a job for playwrights.

  When possible, Cater passed the work on to one of his assistants, often Ervin Duggan, a former Washington Post reporter who joined the staff in 1965. Duggan was particularly good at capturing Johnson’s rhetorical voice “because I was from the South and had kind of a wave link—I didn’t know the president, but he reminded me…of an uncle I had,” he recalled. “And in a Method acting way, I could get inside his head…. There’s a kind of subculture of the South that has to do with the King James Version of the Bible and all sorts of things that southerners at that time were steeped in, and Johnson started recognizing those resonances.”

  “Get Doo-gan,” Johnson would say (mispronouncing his name, which sounds like “Dug-in”) when he wanted that southern touch.

  The process of helping Johnson find his style moved haphazardly into the 1964 election year. Horace Busby sent a memorandum to Johnson in September fretting about the direction of his speeches. They used to be straightforward arguments for a proposition, but “this approach has been frequently jettisoned or compromised in favor of language uses which read rhythmically but do not always come through effectively or persuasively to the ear…. The concept of the words in a speech must fit the man—and personalize the man.

  “The people are not nearly as responsive to ‘sophistication’ in Presidential oratory as Washington has come to assume and believe in the last three years,” he went on, and appealed to the president through his political hero. “FDR won his hold on the American people not as an old-school orator, but as a President ‘explaining things simply’ in his broadcasts from the White House or elsewhere. In this day of complexity, simplicity would be welcomed in this campaign.”

  Days later, W. J. “Bill” Jorden, a former New York Times reporter who had joined the State Department, sent similar advice to Cater. “Too often there is a Kennedy or pseudo-Kennedy tone in prepared remarks,” he noted. “I recognize that the President undoubtedly has looked over and approved the message I refer to. This does not change my opinion that the authentic Johnson often is not coming through to the listeners and readers of his words.”

  Johnson occasionally reached beyond the White House for help with speeches. John Steinbeck, whose novel The Grapes of Wrath had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and who had received a Nobel Prize for literature in 1962, had written a Johnson pamphlet for the 1964 Democratic National Convention. He was solicited for a draft of LBJ’s 1965 inaugural address. Valenti passed Steinbeck’s draft on to Goodwin, who was composing the address, but when he produced his first draft, there was no Steinbeck. “Tell Goodwin that either Steinbeck is in, or Goodwin is out,” Johnson told Valenti.

  “The Great Society, as I see it, is not the ordered, changeless and sterile battalion of the ants,” Steinbeck had written. “It is the miracle of becoming—always becoming, trying, probing—falling, resting and trying again—but always gaining a little—not perfect but perfectible.” Goodwin included that phrase.

  And while this would prove the extent of Steinbeck’s participation as a presidential ghost—Valenti later told a prospective speechwriter that Steinbeck “fell flat on his face”—it did not mark the limit of his relationship with the administration. He would continue to send Valenti, and by extension Johnson, a stream of policy advice on a range of subjects.

  A five-page handwritten letter on April 20, 1964, for example, focused on the problem of “the drop outs, the delinquents, the unemployed and uninterested boys who are flooding the market with directionless misery, with restlessness and in many cases with destructiveness and violence.” “It is far from a small problem,” Steinbeck stressed. “There is a terrible unspent energy present in the destructiveness of these boys. They are bored, cynical and hopeless.” Steinbeck proposed creating “Disaster Units,” which would be populated by boys between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, some voluntarily and some at the instruction of the courts and other legal authorities who deal with delinquents. These units would deal with the aftereffects of not only natural disasters but “civic difficulties having to do with civil rights, poverty, and other misfortunes.” They would be “the President’s Own,” a sort of juvenile, disaster-oriented Praetorian Guard. “The strongest of these boys are drawn to violence,” Steinbeck pointed out. “Alright, then let’s give t
hem or some of them some real violence, but creative violence, not the causing of it but the control of it.”

  And he was full of foreign policy suggestions. On May 19, he suggested testing Cuban antiaircraft batteries with drones or high-altitude balloons carrying a large square of aluminum. “It makes a lovely picture on the radar screen.”

  As for Southeast Asia, he suggested that because Red Chinese troops had aided North Korea, Taiwanese leader Chiang Kai-shek (“a rascal,” but “our rascal”) might deploy troops to assist in Vietnam.

  Johnson’s initial public communications strategy on Vietnam had essentially been to ignore it. Goodwin had drafted dozens of foreign policy speeches in the 1964 campaign but none focused on Vietnam. The 1965 State of the Union spent a total of 132 words on the issue.

  On February 9, 1965, Moyers sent Johnson a memorandum suggesting that the president devote his first speech outside of Washington since the inaugural—an address at the University of Kentucky—to Vietnam. “It will be difficult—in light of all that has happened in the last few days—were you not to mention Vietnam,” Moyers noted, probably referring to a Northern Vietnamese attack two days earlier that had killed seven U.S. soldiers and wounded eighty others. Moyers advocated for a “White Paper”–type speech, which would lay out the situation in detail. “Here is a chance to use the Office as an instrument of education, not just as a means of inspiration…. I honestly believe it would reinforce your hand, be a source of renewed energy to freedom-loving peoples around the world, and give the American people a rare glimpse into the real nature of the struggle in which we are involved in Southeast Asia.”

  Speaking at the University of Kentucky on February 22, Johnson discussed the importance of the United States engaging with the rest of the world. He did not mention Vietnam.

  Five days later, Busby weighed in. “I have some concerns about continuing public silence on Vietnam,” he wrote in a memorandum. “If the people could hear you speak to the small groups at the White House, I am certain the confidence and support they would extend to you would be overwhelming—and would be effectively felt in the Congress itself. The consequences of the public not hearing you speak in this manner and spirit disturbs me.”

  The images charged the nation: Peaceful marchers, many in their Sunday best, trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge out of Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965. They were confronted by vicious thugs in law enforcement garb. There was the tear gas, the frenzied swinging of clubs, and the sickening noise of wood slapping into flesh. These shattering scenes focused the nation’s attention once again on the civil rights struggle.

  Alabama governor George Wallace met with Johnson in the Oval Office on Saturday, March 13, at Wallace’s request, to discuss how best to maintain order in his state. Gripping his guest’s arm, Johnson led him to a low-slung couch by the fireplace, taking for himself a high rocking chair. Having achieved the physical high ground, Johnson leaned in close, lowering his six-foot-four bulk over the governor. “Well, governor, you wanted to see me.”

  This was the “Johnson treatment,” the president’s full-body persuasion technique. An accomplished debater and tactician, Johnson was adept at physical persuasion as well—invading personal space, literally putting his interlocutor in uncomfortable positions—whatever it would take to keep the other person off balance. Matching the physical treatment with alternating flattery, persuasion, bullying, Johnson would wear his target down.

  In intimate settings, Valenti recalled, Johnson “was like an avalanche: irresistible.” Wallace received the full treatment for hours that day. “What do you want left after you when you die?” Johnson asked the governor. “Do you want a Great…Big…Marble monument that reads, ‘George Wallace—He Built’?…Or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine board lying across that harsh, caliche soil, that reads, ‘George Wallace—He Hated’?”

  “Hell, if I’d stayed in there much longer, he’d have had me coming out for civil rights,” Wallace would tell the press.

  The upshot was that Wallace asked the federal government to intervene. Johnson had decided that the moment had come to press the attack on voting rights. He summoned congressional leaders to the Cabinet Room on Sunday, March 14, to consult with them on the timing for a voting rights bill—an exercise designed to elicit an invitation to speak before a joint session.

  Dick Goodwin and his wife were at dinner at Arthur Schlesinger’s Georgetown home when word arrived that the president was going to address the Congress the next day. Goodwin was apprehensive upon his return home. Would he be summoned? But no word came.

  Valenti was camped outside Goodwin’s second-floor West Wing office when he arrived the next morning. “He needs a speech from you…right away,” Valenti said.

  Horace Busby had been preparing a written message to accompany the legislation up to the Hill, going through five drafts from late February into mid-March. Valenti had selected Busby to draft the statement, but when Johnson found that out Monday morning, LBJ sat bolt upright in his bed: “The hell you did. Don’t you know a liberal Jew has his hand on the pulse of America? And you assign the most important speech of my life to a Texas public relations man? Get Dick to do it. And now!”

  Goodwin would have to complete the speech by midafternoon to get it onto the TelePrompTer. He locked himself in his office, telling Valenti that he must not be disturbed. He was interrupted once, around 3 pm. Speaking softly, calmly, Johnson reminded Goodwin of his youth teaching Mexican-American schoolchildren in Cotulla, Texas. “I thought you might want to put in a reference to that,” the president said.

  Goodwin knew that he was participating in an historical moment. “There was, uniquely, no need to temper conviction with the reconciling realities of politics, admit to the complexities of debate and the merits of ‘the other side,’” he recalled. “There was no other side. Only justice—upheld or denied. While at the far end of the corridor whose entrance was a floor beneath my office, there waited a man ready to match my fervor with his own. And he was the president of the United States.”

  Goodwin borrowed from Johnson’s past statements and from Busby’s draft, but mostly he drew on his own knowledge of Johnson, built up over almost a year of close collaboration. “Although I had written the speech, fully believed in what I had written, the document was pure Johnson,” Goodwin would write. “My job was not limited to guessing what the president might say exactly as he would express it, but to heighten and polish—illuminate, as it were—his inward beliefs and natural idiom, to attain not a strained mimicry, but an authenticity of expression. I would not have written the same speech in the same way for Kennedy or any other politician, or for myself. It was by me, but it was for and of the Lyndon Johnson I had carefully studied and come to know.”

  As each sheet was torn from his typewriter, Goodwin handed it off for presidential review. Valenti and especially Moyers gave the speech a careful edit, as did other presidential aides, likely at Johnson’s direction. When Goodwin finished the final page, he looked at his watch and saw to his astonishment that it was six o’clock. He had not made the TelePrompTer deadline. Johnson would have to read the first dozen pages from his looseleaf binder while Valenti crept across the House floor to the machine. “I almost died a thousand deaths getting it here,” Valenti whispered to the TelePrompTer operator.

  “I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” Johnson began. He fixed the civil rights struggle, and specifically the recent Selma confrontations, as historical turning points, like Lexington, Concord, and Appomattox. Framing the battle as neither partisan nor sectional but a moral fight that bore into the soul of the country, Johnson made a moral appeal. “This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose,” he said. “The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: ‘All men are created equal’—‘government by consent of the governed’—‘give me liberty or give me death.’”

  These words and
their underlying ideas—that all men should enjoy the benefits of liberty and democracy—had been sanctified by generations of Americans who in many cases died defending them, he reminded his audience. A failure to apply them evenly, he said, “is not only to do injustice, it is to deny America and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom.”

  Passage of a voting rights bill would not be the end of the struggle. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice,” he said, pausing. “And we shall overcome.”

  There was a single clap and then a torrent as the realization washed across the room that the president of the United States had adopted the slogan of the civil rights movement (the spiritual hymn the protestors sang) as his own.

  The speech’s signature line arrived organically, Goodwin recalled in 2007. “It flowed naturally from the language of the preceding sentences,” he said. “It’s not like it was deliberately put in there, stuck in there, it just came out of the writing…. Did we say we’re going to put in a civil rights anthem? No. But that’s how it came out and of course that was all on all our minds. How do you know what controls or contrives? What is deliberate or what’s accidental? That was in everybody’s mind.”

  The country was electrified. Martin Luther King, Jr., told aides that while he had never before been moved by a white man’s speech, he now felt that the cause would succeed. Johnson would sign the 1965 Voting Rights Act into law on August 6.

  Letters and telegrams poured in to the White House in the days following the speech. “Perhaps more than any other Negro American, I have reason to rejoice over your historic and eloquent Civil Rights message to the congress and the nation on Monday night,” former Eisenhower aide Frederic Morrow, the first black presidential staffer—and speechwriter—wrote Johnson two days later. “It is hard to describe the feeling that came over me as you spoke. It was like hearing the Star Spangled Banner played, or seeing the flag raised somewhere, far away from home.”