White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  A second idea, Steinbeck added, had been “bugging me for some time.” He called it “the Steinbeck super ball.” It would be a napalm grenade shaped to the exact size and weight of a baseball. Napalm, in Steinbeck’s estimation, was “the most terrifying modern weapon.” And “there isn’t an American boy over 13 who can’t peg a baseball from infield to home with accuracy. And a grown man with sandlot experience can do much better. It is the natural weapon for Americans.” It would be valuable for rooting out snipers and clearing out tunnels. “Besides,” he wrote, “the kids would love it.” The answer came back that the Pentagon had since 1962 been trying to introduce more shotguns into Vietnam and that the notion of a napalm grenade had been “thoroughly investigated. Unfortunately, there is not enough napalm in anything a man can throw to be as effective as the current incendiaries (white phosphorous and thermite).”

  Advice from Johnson’s aides focused on the question of when and how to talk about Vietnam. “We have to, simply, logically and honestly, tell the people why we fight, and how enormous are the stakes in their future,” Valenti wrote to the president that January. “One reason for some unpopularity of the war is the queasy notion that we ought not be there since our vital interests are not really involved.”

  Valenti pressed Johnson on the importance of using the presidency to educate the public on the stakes in Southeast Asia. He encouraged LBJ to do a series of ten-minute television appearances—one every six weeks or so—laying out why the United States was in Vietnam, what were the objectives, what kind of progress was being made. Johnson never declined to do it, but never agreed. “I must confess I was never certain why he was so fearful (perhaps that is not the word) or uncertain about television,” Valenti admitted.

  Decades after the end of the Johnson presidency and the Vietnam War, some of his top aides could not explain LBJ’s failure to lead the public with greater care on the issue. “He never felt comfortable with Vietnam,” Valenti said in 2006. “I don’t think he ever felt comfortable talking about Vietnam. The answer is, I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows.”

  “Why didn’t Johnson do a better job? One of the hard things, one of the real answers to that, painfully, might be that it was almost impossible to make the case,” McPherson commented.

  The guns-and-butter balance made the whole exercise trickier. Johnson could not push too hard selling the war lest it drown out his domestic priorities. “What he was trying to bring off in the American public is something like a semi-satisfactory sexual experience,” McPherson argued in January 1969. “It’s like necking, a hard neck, you know, but not going to bed. He knew that if he really did stomp them up and say, ‘Kill the little slanty-eyed bastards over there, let’s go get them,’ that the demand for really winning the war would be overpowering.”

  Bob Hardesty was dining at home on a March night in 1966 when he received a call from the White House around 9 pm. Johnson was the next day to receive the prestigious Robert A. Goddard Trophy for his work on the space program. He had initially planned on accepting with a perfunctory thank-you, but had decided at the last minute to make a speech—and Hardesty would draft it. Hardesty drove to his office, wrote some remarks, and sent them in to Johnson’s night reading. The speech was sitting on his desk the next morning when he arrived at the office, with a presidential note attached: There’s not a news lead within five miles of this.

  Johnson was to speak at shortly past noon, so Hardesty had a few hours to fix the remarks. He called around to NASA and the National Aeronautics and Space Council, checking the status of the Apollo program. Where do we stand? Will we beat the Soviets to the moon? Hardesty had included standard language reaffirming President Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, but he and the other writers had always been careful not to promise to do it first—the Soviets had, after all, beaten the United States into space, and had achieved the first unmanned soft lunar landing in February. The previous week, NASA administrator James Webb had said, “There is more chance than I thought a year ago that Russia will be [on the moon] before 1969.”

  Now Hardesty was being told—unofficially, off the record—that winning the moon race was feasible if the country were willing to spend the money. It was a big if. The initial luster of the moon project had worn off, its worth was increasingly questioned, and Congress had underfunded the program. “We intend to land the first man on the surface of the moon and we intend to do it in this decade of the sixties,” Hardesty wrote into Johnson’s speech. The president would see the pledge and excise it, he reasoned, but at least he could no longer complain about not having a news lead.

  Shortly before he was to speak, Johnson interrupted a meeting with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and Ambassador “Chip” Bohlen to watch on television as the Gemini VIII rocket launched in Florida. Perhaps it inspired him.

  The hairs stood up on the back of Hardesty’s neck when, listening to the one o’clock news on his desk radio, he heard the newscaster talk about “a dramatic announcement at the White House.” Johnson must not have read the speech through before giving it, he thought. His phone started ringing. Ed Welsh, the executive secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, wanted to know what the hell Hardesty thought he was doing. Do you know you’ve thrown the entire U.S. space program into chaos? (“I’ll bet that’s not half what I’ve thrown the Soviet space program into,” Hardesty thought.)

  At day’s end he got a summons from Valenti and made what he assumed was his parting walk across to the West Wing. But Valenti merely talked about the upcoming speech schedule. Leaving Valenti’s office, Hardesty fancied himself home free—until he saw a tall figure silhouetted in the door to the Oval Office. “Robert, aren’t you even going to stop long enough to shake hands with your president?” Johnson asked. Enveloping his aide’s hand in his own, Johnson smiled. “That speech you wrote for me this morning,” the president said, “now that’s what I call a news lead.”

  In a front-page story the next day, The New York Times reported that “because of budget cuts, space officials have recently expressed concern over the chances of meeting the deadline,” but Johnson’s speech “seemed today to be telling the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to get on with the lunar landing job regardless of the difficulties.” Far from having forgotten to take out the pledge to win the moon race, the president put his prestige behind the program, laying a challenge to both NASA and the Congress. (That very night, the country was reminded of the program’s dangers: After docking with an Agena satellite—the first outer-space docking in history—the Gemini VIII capsule and satellite started a dangerous tumble, which continued after the astronauts detached their ship from the Agena. They returned home safely, but the incident shook a public that had started to view space missions as routine.)

  Not everyone approved of such attempts to generate news. “You damned speechwriters spend more money than all the rest of the Executive Branch put together,” Charles Schultze, Johnson’s director of the Bureau of the Budget, once told Hardesty.

  But the speechwriters were not the only offenders. Swearing in Robert Bennett as commissioner of Indian Affairs on April 27, 1966, Johnson communed with the predominately Indian audience and went on an ad-lib tear. “Commissioner Bennett, your President thinks the time has come to put the first Americans first on our agenda,” Johnson said. “I want you to put on your hat and go back over there to that Bureau and begin work today on the most comprehensive program for the advancement of the Indians that the government of the United States has ever considered.” The audience hollered their approval. An aide on the Council of Economic Advisers spied Sparks and Hardesty standing at the back of the room. “Holy God,” the aide said. “Someone run over to the Budget Bureau and get Charlie Schultze. He’s giving the country back to the Indians!”

  Here was the rub. These programs were not free. “The real menace to a balanced budget around here isn’t the departme
nts, it’s the speech-writers,” Schultze complained to Sparks. This, Sparks wrote in 1971, was shortly after he and Hardesty “had solved a speechwriting problem at two o’clock in the morning by creating a new ‘program’ with a sexy title which could be used in a Presidential bill-signing ceremony the following morning in the East Room. The last time I looked at that ‘program’ it carried a price tag of $140,000,000. It was and is a good program for which I make no apologies…. But how many chances does a writer get to commit that kind of money to a worthy cause with three paragraphs on a single sheet of paper?”*

  Looking for a news lead for a May 1966 Johnson speech at a Democratic Party dinner in Chicago, Hardesty stumbled on the neglected issue of occupational health. “If we can reduce sick leave in this country by only one day per worker every year, we can add $3 billion to our gross national product,” Johnson said in the speech. Develop that idea, he told Hardesty. He did, and six days later, speaking to the International Labor Press Association, Johnson directed the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare to conduct an “intensified study” of all occupational health. The results of that study led to the introduction of the Occupational Safety and Health Act—and the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration or OSHA.

  Valenti left the White House on May 15, taking the job as head of the Motion Picture Association of America.† Johnson had not been pleased with the idea (“I choose not to accurately recount what he said because even at this distance I still shudder,” Valenti later wrote. “I will say that the nicest thing he called me was ‘Benedict Arnold’”), but Valenti was more skilled at handling the president than Goodwin. When he left the staff, it was with LBJ’s blessing. “I guess I just didn’t want to admit that a man should need another man quite so much,” Johnson wrote him.

  The speechwriting operation also needed Valenti. The level of controlled chaos that Johnson nourished in his White House grew in the scramble to fill Valenti’s duties. In theory, speechwriting would be run by Robert Kintner, an ex-reporter and a former president of NBC News who had joined the administration at the end of March. He had known Johnson since the 1930s; at fifty-eight, he was the oldest of Johnson’s aides, but he could not cope with the president’s mood shifts. “When the president blew up and said, ‘I don’t like this!’…Valenti would just say, ‘Oh, it’ll pass,’” Hardesty recalled. “But Kintner…was terrified of the president. Absolutely terrified.”

  At the same time, Moyers moved to bring the writing operation under his control. “Looking at the fact instead of the theory, the writing operation continued as it had under Valenti, only without Valenti it continued unhappily,” Charles Maguire, a Valenti deputy who continued in the same position under Kintner, said later. “Kintner and I continued to assign speeches, receive the writers’ work, send it to the President, talk with the President about speeches, plan speeches in advance—but Bill Moyers seemed to be running the writing operation. It was all very confusing.”

  Moyers would get hold of the speech drafts and with the help of a new deputy, Ben Wattenberg, would edit, rewrite, or replace them. The addresses that Hardesty and Sparks produced “were really dreadful,” Wattenberg thought. “Stuff came out that was just inane, didn’t say anything, empty-headed, wooden kind of prose.”

  “The material that is being developed for [the president’s] consideration is not adequate, fresh enough or sufficiently significant,” Kintner wrote in a confidential memo to the senior staff on May 17. “This is because Messrs. Sparks and Hardesty have had to dream up the ideas with some help from the departments, but not much.”

  Kintner tried to lessen the pressure on Hardesty (who shortly left speechwriting for congressional relations) and Sparks by beefing up the staff. He hired news veterans, political operatives, and professional speechwriters. Jack McNulty, William Schoen, and Walter Coyne served in the speechwriting staff at various times. In February 1967, he hired an editor from Newsweek named Peter Benchley. Harry Middleton, who later became the director of the Johnson Library, also joined in this period.

  But Johnson—ever aware of JFK’s “glistening shadow,” as Valenti called it—complained about the speeches. “As you know the President has been anxious to improve the quality of his speech material,” Kintner wrote to Hardesty and Sparks in July 1966. “The President wants simple sentences; easily understood prose and relatively short addresses.” Kintner later said that Johnson was “always angry” about the drafts he was getting. “He always felt they were inferior to Kennedy’s,” he said. “I’ve never known him to be satisfied with a speech, either before, after, or at any point.”

  The third and most important change in the speechwriting operation in the summer of 1966 was the entry of Harry McPherson into the process. A Hill veteran who had joined the administration in 1965, McPherson had ascended to the special counsel job in 1966. McPherson was a lawyer, though rather by accident. Upon graduating the University of the South in 1949, he went to Columbia University to get his master’s. He aspired to become a teacher and a poet but exams showed he did not have the aptitude. After serving in the military during the Korean War, he got his law degree at the University of Texas Law School.

  McPherson would ultimately run speechwriting in the last years of the Johnson administration. “McPherson is one of the few lawyers…who does not write as if he were riding bareback on a tractor,” Valenti noted. A burnt-out Moyers left at the end of 1966, telling the press that “after you’ve worked with LBJ, you can work with the Devil.” Kintner left in the summer of 1967 for health reasons.

  The lower-echelon writers, who were the principal target of Johnson’s ire, started a complaint that would become common among speechwriters in future administrations: lack of exposure to the president, and for that matter to his top advisers. How could they write for their boss if they were cut off from him and cut out of the policy development process? The writers were doing their job blind, without guidance even from the assistants to the president, Sparks complained to McPherson in a March 1967 writers’ meeting. Things would improve immeasurably with more guidance, he added. “That’s the ideal world,” McPherson shot back. The writers should “try a little adventurism,” he said; something “quirky, angular, conscientious.”

  “There shouldn’t be quite the proximity” that a writer would like, Peter Benchley later conceded. But “there should be a great deal more than there is [because it is] difficult to get to know the boss if you don’t know whether you’re writing to what he wants.”

  Sometimes the writers took their complaints to the president. They thought in one meeting that they had scored a victory. “All right, damn it,” LBJ exclaimed. “I want you to come to every meeting I go to, I want you to talk to everybody I meet, I want you to just see me.” The writers were ecstatic at the prospect. The idea was never mentioned again.

  Benchley, a former Newsweek editor, was a particularly problematic speechwriter. Handsome—“movie star handsome,” recalled Middleton, with whom he shared an office—and young, Benchley seemed to operate on his own wavelength. He was “a sort of a different cat,” Middleton remembered. “I don’t know how to describe Peter but he was a sort of a golden boy.” “I was the least competent, most incompetent, least capable person imaginable for that job,” Benchley said years later. “He is somewhat [shy], diffident, and young but I believe he could be developed well,” Kintner wrote Johnson in February 1967.

  He could be funny: along with Wattenberg, Benchley was one of a half dozen or so White House aides whom Liz Carpenter would gather in her office every week or so. They would sip scotch and try to come up with jokes for Johnson’s upcoming speeches. Carpenter called it “the White House humor group.”

  And Benchley could be unintentionally funny: Writing a toast for Johnson to welcome King Mahendra of Nepal for a state dinner on November 1, 1967, he phoneticized all of the foreign names—except that of the country. Johnson, as Benchley recounted it, welcomed the king of the great kingdom of “Nipple.” />
  “I was convinced that Peter was the worst writer I had ever read,” McPherson recalled. Tired of rewriting Benchley’s “Rose Garden Rubbish,” McPherson repeatedly tried to have Benchley fired, but Kintner would always intervene.

  One night in 1968, Middleton recalled, Benchley was tracked down by the White House switchboard at a party in Georgetown with an emergency assignment from Califano. But Benchley did not think it a crisis and said he would deal with it in the morning. The next day, Califano summoned Benchley and suggested that he would be happier working for Betty Furness, Johnson’s special assistant for consumer affairs.

  Are you trying to fire me? Benchley asked.

  I wouldn’t put it that way, but yes, Califano responded.

  Joe, you didn’t hire me, Benchley said. He added: If the president wants to fire me, he can do it.

  Benchley returned to his office. Califano, according to Middleton, relayed the situation to LBJ. The president summoned McPherson. Every time I pick up The Washington Post, Johnson said, I read about how Joe Califano is the second most powerful person in Washington, but he can’t fire a writer. You’re in charge of the writers, Johnson told McPherson, you take care of it.

  McPherson had the same conversation with Benchley. “So Peter came back to the office and the upshot of it was that for the rest of the administration…he got no more assignments,” Middleton recalled. “He got guitar lessons and he would come back and practice his guitar.”

  Califano disputes Middleton’s account, though he acknowledges that Benchley did linger in his office for a few months: “He didn’t get paid,” Califano recalled. “The thing about security in those days—we didn’t take the badge away from him…. He stayed around for a couple of months.”*

  McPherson laughs and adds: “I don’t remember that very much. I think [Middleton] may be exaggerating that a little…. I did try to get[Benchley] fired because I just thought he was a bad writer, but I never could do it because of Kintner.”