At the White House, Johnson and Valenti were making sure the spotlight remained fixed on the president. Valenti sent LBJ a memo explaining that he had told any inquiring reporters that the speech was a presidential composition. “He talked out what he wanted to say—and as drafts were prepared in response to his dictation, the President personally edited and revised.”*
Valenti refused even to disclose which aides had taken notes as Johnson dictated. “I mention this to point up the interest—and to caution our people NOT to mention names of anyone who had anything to do with the speech else they will take that as evidence of someone doing the principal creative effort.” The memo (presumably focused on one specific staff member) reflected Johnson’s belief that the White House ghost should remain unseen and unheard by the public. “Remember those assistants of FDR who had a ‘passion for anonymity,’” Johnson told speechwriter Robert Hardesty when he joined the staff. “That’s what I want you to have: a passion for anonymity. Speechwriters especially.”
“Send this to all staff members,” LBJ scribbled on the bottom of Valenti’s memo.
In the summer of 1965, the staff was starting to bleed. Horace Busby, Johnson’s longtime aide whose brief included speechwriting, was preparing to leave in the fall, as was Dick Goodwin. “Most of the stuff I am now doing is trivia,” Goodwin wrote in a memo to Moyers. “True, in speechwriting I make a unique contribution, but this has become mostly image-making. In foreign affairs, I have to write what Rusk, Bundy and others want to say; with little chance to reshape their views, or even be heard on them. I have much more scope on domestic affairs, but as you know, that has come almost to a standstill…. Essentially I am not a word man—but an idea man—and one who wants to put those ideas into action.”
Johnson reacted predictably, alternately flattering and threatening, cajoling and bullying. A bigger house outside of town? Johnson could make it happen. On another night the attitude was that if Goodwin wanted to leave, that was fine, Valenti and others would easily do his work. Then it was back to threats: LBJ had checked with the Pentagon, he could draft—literally draft—Goodwin to stay.
But not even the president could sway Goodwin, a snub the president would not forget. The White House was left with several senior aides who wrote speeches, but without a principal speechwriter.
Valenti, forty-two, had been a prosperous Texas advertising executive and newspaper columnist when he first met Lyndon Johnson in 1957. Watching the senator move among young supporters, Valenti was transfixed. LBJ made an impression on him “that lay somewhere between the fascination of watching a great athlete in motion and the half-fear, half-admiration of seeing a panther on a cliffside, silken, silent, ready to spring,” as he later wrote. “From that day forward, I was a Lyndon Johnson man.”
He had married Johnson’s attractive blond secretary, Mary Margaret Wiley, drawing him deeper into the Johnson orbit. The two couples socialized frequently and the younger man became a favored stepson to the veteran pol. Johnson had brought him on the November 1963 Texas swing as reward for helping to organize it. He would only be gone for two days, Valenti told Mary Margaret.
“Johnson chose me in Dallas to fly back with him, and any one of ten thousand guys could have done that job,” Valenti later said, “except I got picked.”
Like Harry Hopkins under FDR, Valenti lived in the White House for a time, becoming Johnson’s everything specialist, often the first to see him in the morning and last to see him at night. “With his small, flashing eyes, metallic suits, riverboat gambler’s drawl, and dogged attentiveness, Valenti…sometimes seems the caricature of the Presidential man Friday,” Newsweek reported. His brief ranged from policy advice to the mundane work of tallying delivery time, the number of interruptions for applause, and the length of those interruptions for major addresses. He was editor in chief and contributor.
Valenti wrote with pep, sometimes to his colleagues’ dismay. “He would seek to have the singing power of [Thomas] Macaulay and the energy of the Texas PR man,” remembered Harry McPherson, who ran speechwriting during much of the latter half of the administration. “And the combination was often just awful.”
Joining Valenti in the highest echelons of Johnson’s White House retinue was Bill Don Moyers. At twenty-nine, the youngest member of LBJ’s staff, Moyers hailed from tiny Marshall in the northeast corner of the Lone Star State. He was a true believer in every sense, having studied Greek in order to read the Bible and early Christian writings in their original texts, and having earned a bachelor of divinity degree from the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Forth Worth. He drank only a little bit, but had an affection for long, thin 25-cent Fiesta Brazil cigars, which he consumed at a clip of a half dozen per day.
As a fourteen-year-old, Moyers had seen Johnson for the first time. “I remember the sheer presence of the man,” he later recalled. “And I thought, ‘That’s what power is.’” He interned for LBJ and later worked for him in the Senate and presidential campaign. When the Kennedy administration took office, Moyers was installed as the number two man in the Peace Corps.
At the height of the Great Society push, it was Moyers who oversaw and drove the legislative agenda. He hung a framed Thomas Jefferson quote in his White House office: “The care of human life and happiness…is the first and only legitimate object of good government,” a phrase that he described as the administration’s “charter.” Moyers was a skilled bureaucratic infighter, and an inveterate practical joker. He once gave Goodwin a terrific scare by sending a fake news story to his office detailing harsh criticisms of LBJ that Goodwin had supposedly made to a reporter.
“Perhaps Moyers’s most striking quality is an immense self-assurance, an aura of moral and intellectual certitude that annoys some people but awes and persuades a great many more,” an admiring New York Times Magazine profile reported.
Joseph Califano, a thirty-four-year-old graduate of Holy Cross and Harvard Law School who hailed from Brooklyn, joined Johnson’s staff from the Pentagon in mid-1965. By the end of 1966, Califano became Johnson’s top domestic aide. To make sure his assistant was up on current events, Johnson had three televisions installed in Califano’s office—one for each network—and ordered wire copy delivered there every half hour. When Johnson telephoned Califano and could not reach him because he was in the bathroom, the president ordered a phone installed there as well.
“It was a very activist world. We weren’t waiting for someone to attack us, although many people were,” Califano recalled. “We were pumping, pumping, pumping.”
During his tenure in the White House, Califano—who as Jimmy Carter’s secretary of Health, Education and Welfare would declare smoking tobacco “public health enemy number one”—consumed between two and four packs of cigarettes a day. By 1967 he kept regular cigarettes in one pocket and menthol in the other—that way he could keep puffing when his throat grew raw. “Califano handled the domestic program with the exuberance of a kid who finally made railroad engineer,” Johnson press secretary George Christian wrote.
What these men had in common, besides an ability to write, was that it was not their sole or even main occupation. Indeed, excepting the Eisenhower era, that had been a fairly standard setup for presidents and their speechwriters for thirty years: The president’s top line aides would help him with his speeches. And it helped their craft for at least two reasons. “You know what he thought,” Califano recalled, and “you know where he thought the weaknesses were.”
But the push toward the Great Society caused a deluge of small to medium-sized writing assignments—“Rose Garden Rubbish,” as Moyers called it—that became an inconvenience for the senior staffers, who were too busy drafting the laws to also have to come up with something for the president to say when he signed them. And it was not just speeches: the Johnson White House also produced a steady stream of written messages, each requiring a surprisingly high rhetorical standard.
In 1965, Busby asked the Democratic National Commit
tee for the fifty best political speeches of the past couple of years and their authors. Forty of the fifty, he was told, had been composed by Bob Hardesty, now thirty-three, born in St. Louis, who was ghostwriting for the U.S. Postmaster General. Valenti hired him that summer, along with Will Sparks, who had been writing for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
The addition of Sparks and Hardesty marked a turning point for presidential speechwriters. It set a new level of specialization: writers in succeeding administrations would be less often in the mold of a Rosenman or a Sorensen, or even a Hughes or Larson back in the Eisenhower years. The Johnson White House was not the first to employ specialized speechcrafters, but before Sparks and Hardesty joined, it was the last not to. More than in many subsequent administrations, however, the Johnson specialists had opportunities to affect policy.
Sparks and Hardesty might roll out as many as five or six statements in a given day. “They were really running a printing press over there,” Califano said. Though they shared a suite in the Old Executive Office Building, they were leery of each other, suddenly thrust into the chaos and politics of the White House. Other staffers were bad-mouthing them behind their backs.
One night at eleven o’clock, Hardesty finished his final speech of the day and wandered across to Sparks’s office. Sparks had writer’s block. Hardesty retrieved a bottle of Virginia Gentleman bourbon from his office and made a proposal: You and I have been eyeing each other, but writers don’t compete, and we’ve got enough troubles anyway, so tell me what the problem is.
From then on, they worked together. One of them could get fired, they reasoned, but not both. They would write individually until they could do so no longer, at which point they would summon a secretary who would take their joint dictation.
The pressure was crushing. Waking in the middle of the night, Hardesty would realize that he had been editing a speech in his dreams. After a particularly stressful day, having caught Johnson’s wrath, Califano had, he confided, taken a tall glass of whiskey just to get to sleep. Oh Christ, Hardesty replied, I’ve been drinking three or four martinis every night when I get home.
“Brevity was the cardinal rule,” Hardesty recalled. “‘Four-letter words…four-word sentences…and four-sentence paragraphs.’ Keep it simple. You’ve got to write it so that the charwoman who cleans the building across the street can understand it.” None of the writers took Johnson literally—no one could follow those rules and come up with a serious speech. But they understood that he was exaggerating for effect, as he was prone to do, in an effort to get clarity and simplicity in his speeches.*
Johnson’s insistence on the rule of four became something of a running joke in the staff. Califano and Harry McPherson, who would run speechwriting for much of the second term, produced a dummy message to Congress consisting entirely of three-word sentences.
Ben Wattenberg, a Bronx native, freelance reporter and co-author of This U.S.A., a book which had used census data to analyze U.S. politics, joined the staff in 1966 and became so annoyed at the president’s claims to being a Texas farmer who required simplicity in his speeches that he wrote a long memorandum. Yes, the Gettysburg Address, for example, was less than three hundred words long, but the first sentence was neither short—thirty words—nor simple. At Moyers’s suggestion, he did not send the memo.
One Friday, Hardesty and Sparks realized that they were facing a rare weekend off. Sparks asked his friend how he planned to use the luxuriant free time. “I’m going to go home, drink whiskey, and do nothing for forty-eight hours but think in long, convoluted sentences,” Hardesty replied.
Another Johnson rule was that speeches must make news. There were three ways to get a news lead, he told Hardesty: Announce a new program, make a prediction, set a goal. He would frequently call the speechwriter at the last minute, Cater recalled, and ask, “Can’t you add something to it that will make it sexy or get us a headline?”
Johnson was obsessed with news, watching the three networks while monitoring the news wire that he had had installed in the Oval Office. When an assistant’s POTUS line rang, as often as not Johnson would be asking about a news story off one of the wires.
McPherson once gave Johnson a lengthy disquisition on a particularly knotty policy problem: no matter which course of action the president chose, he explained, disaster would ensue. Finishing his presentation, the aide sat back and awaited the praise that would undoubtedly follow his nuanced analysis of the situation. Johnson stared at him silently. Finally he said: “Therefore?”
“Therefore. That’s an important thing to have around Lyndon Johnson,” McPherson recalled.
“In an activist administration, certainly like Johnson’s in the Great Society, there’s a voracious appetite for ideas and the speech becomes an action-forcing event,” Duggan recalled. “If the president has to make a speech next Wednesday to a convention of teachers or professors…Johnson wanted to take some action and very often it would be the speechwriter who would come up with the action.”
Johnson had spoken at Johns Hopkins University in April 1965 on his Vietnam policy, but the issue had still not become preeminent. The president convened key Vietnam advisers in the Cabinet Room on the morning of July 21, starting an intense series of discussions on how to proceed. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara argued for a sharp escalation, while Under Secretary of State George Ball opposed him, alone. Subsequent gatherings focused not on whether to expand but on how to sell the decision.
Busby weighed in with a four-page memorandum. “What the U.S. is doing in South Viet Nam is not nearly so important as why it is being done,” he wrote, pointing up the need for greater public explanation of the issue. “But the available voices within the American Government are saying little, if anything, regarding the why…. On reflection, it seems clear to me one failing of our treatment of Viet Nam has been the attempt to de-emphasize it.”
The critical issue for Johnson was to prevent the growing war in Vietnam from consuming the Great Society. He “could see and almost touch [his] youthful dream of improving life for more people and in more ways than any other political leader, including FDR,” he later told the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “I was determined to keep the war from shattering that dream, which meant I simply had no choice but to keep my foreign policy in the wings.” On July 28, at an East Room press conference, Johnson announced that the United States’ forces in Vietnam were being increased from 75,000 to 125,000.
Advice was coming from all quarters. “People can take almost any amount of hardship and suffering if it is active and visible,” Steinbeck wrote Valenti on July 22. “What they cannot take is quiet and stalking hunger with no relief in sight…. Why not strike at the basic food factory, the rice paddys [sic]. I suggest that we bomb the paddys with methyline blue [a non-toxic dye] while the flooding is still on, and suggest by leaflet that it is harmless but that it will be followed on by weed killer, which, properly distributed, and it could be done from high altitude bombers, would destroy the basic food supply of the future.”*
Goodwin had left in the fall, but had promised to return for the 1966 State of the Union message. It was not a chip Johnson wanted to cash: when Valenti suggested in November that Goodwin write the speech, LBJ rejected the idea. But when he was unsatisfied with Moyers’s progress drafting the speech—which would come to be known as the “guns and butter” address because he argued that the nation could afford both domestic spending and a war in Southeast Asia—Goodwin was summoned in early January.
A ceaseless week of drafting drove Goodwin to his physical and mental limit in the predawn hours of January 12, the day of delivery. At the end of a thirty-six-hour jag, Goodwin could neither focus on his typewriter keys nor order his thoughts into complete sentences. Summoning the White House doctor, he begged for something to keep him going. “I only need a few more hours, otherwise there’s no way I can finish,” he said. The doctor produced a syringe partially filled with an unnamed red liquid and jabbed it into G
oodwin’s shoulder. Goodwin managed to finish the speech, sending it in at 4 am.
At 7:15 am, Johnson summoned Califano, Valenti, Moyers, and a handful of other key aides—but not Goodwin, with whom Johnson had refused to meet—to his bedroom. The speech was “getting there,” the president told the group, but it would have to be reorganized and cut by a third. Valenti and Califano locked themselves away and, with staffers banging on the door, they recast it. That afternoon, Johnson edited their new draft, reviewing it in the Oval Office with Abe Fortas and former Truman speechwriter Clark Clifford, shouting his revisions to Califano and Valenti over his speakerphone. The two aides were in Valenti’s office, next door, but Johnson would not invite them in.
Even so, he treated them better than he did Goodwin, who was shut out of the process entirely and made to get whatever information he could from his old colleagues. At day’s end, he went back to the Mayflower Hotel and collapsed on his bed fully clothed. When the White House operator called with a presidential offer of a ride up to the Hill for the speech, Goodwin said that he would have to call back. He pondered for a moment and then told the hotel operator not to put through any more calls. He would never again speak with Lyndon Johnson. “It was just too much,” Goodwin later told Califano. “I couldn’t go through with it. I was exhausted and disgusted with the way I was treated.”
Steinbeck’s advice continued. In a four-page letter on January 7, 1966, to Valenti, he suggested deploying shotguns (“12-gauge or, if you are man enough, 10-gauge”) in Vietnam, due to limited rifle accuracy in bush country: “At forty yards, one spread of [buckshot] will bring down several running men and with only casual aim.”
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 19
