White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  In 1974, Benchley wrote a book about a great white shark that terrorized a New England resort community. It was called Jaws. One of the shark’s first victims was named Kintner.

  Perhaps the writers’ biggest problem was that they could not write to LBJ’s speaking strengths. He was most effective in relatively small settings, speaking extemporaneously. Lady Bird would say that he was the last of the courthouse square politicians—meaning a crowd that could fit into a small-town courthouse square was the ideal size for Johnson.

  “He is one of the last spellbinders,” said Charles Maguire, the Valenti assistant who would himself help run the speechwriting operation by the end of the LBJ’s tenure. “He has within himself a forty foot shelf of anthologies, thesauruses, dictionaries, histories, lexicons, all of which he can draw up by the virtue of his magnificent memory and deliver with great effectiveness.” He generally made ad-libs, almost always more effective than his prepared remarks, on smaller and mid-sized speeches rather than big ones.

  “I always considered myself successful when Johnson liked what he was saying so much that he’d start ad-libbing,” Hardesty said. If Johnson simply read it through, it was a sign that the speech had not engaged him. “When he started ad-libbing he could just be wonderful and really himself.”

  Johnson once was explaining to a roomful of aides the kind of emotional connection he wanted to make with an audience, Ervin Duggan recalled. “I want to get my hand up their dresses,” he said, mildly shocking his audience. Johnson paused for a moment. “Now somebody is probably going to eventually leak to the press that I said this and there’ll be a story about the barnyard humor or LBJ’s crude way of expressing himself. But I’ll tell you one thing: None of you will ever forget it.”

  Johnson’s problems speaking from a text were compounded by the fact that television had become the dominant medium. He had been one of the first television station owners in the country, but he was never able to adjust himself to the camera’s unblinking lens. Johnson rarely allowed himself to flash his witty, gregarious private side. Harry Truman faced a similar situation: he had succeeded a popular and eloquent president from whom he had to find a way to distinguish his rhetorical style. And like LBJ, Truman was less effective when tethered to a written text than when he ad-libbed and showed his winning, informal side. But whereas Truman allowed his speechwriters to help him develop that strength, Johnson was unwilling or unable to do so.

  Kintner sent Johnson a steady stream of memoranda suggesting ways to improve his television performance, but they did little good. After virtually every appearance LBJ would get feedback from other friends in network television. “No matter how much he was told or how much television was explained to him, he could never acclimate himself to the new media,” Kintner recalled. “He treated it like an old time southern orator, rather than Jack Kennedy’s conversational treatment.”

  Johnson broke through once. His 114th press conference, on the morning of November 17, 1967, started normally, with the president taking questions from behind a podium in the East Room. But eight minutes in, when a reporter asked about his having completed four years in office, LBJ took off his glasses and stepped out from behind the podium. A military aide quietly plugged in the small portable microphone Johnson wore under his jacket. Johnson prowled the stage, displaying the relaxed, engaged, folksy side familiar to aides and small groups. “He waved his arms, chopped the air, drew imaginary lines with his fingers, clutched his glasses, scowled, laughed and ran his voice through a range of sound from high-volume anger to quiet, self-deprecating gentleness,” The New York Times reported the next day. The courthouse steps had finally been brought to life for the cameras.

  His staff was ecstatic after the performance and told him so, justifying their own conclusions with telegrams and phone calls from a public amazed by this new, unfamiliar president. One anonymous Republican congressman told the Times that LBJ was “pretty darned effective.” Representative Richard Bolling, a Missouri Democrat, told the paper, “he can’t be Ronald Reagan. The only way is to be himself. And he was himself today.”

  Kintner told him that he had to do it more often. Goddammit, Johnson said, unimpressed, I’m not in show business. He never used the lavaliere microphone again, saying that it was insufficiently “presidential.”

  A number of factors were likely at work: one was Johnson’s sense of how a president should act when the nation was watching, especially in measuring himself against his predecessor. Also at work may have been LBJ’s sense of himself. On November 17, Johnson the courthouse pol strutted around the stage in his glory. But repeat performances could have brought out the petulant, angry, or self-pitying Johnson. Not all of his ad-libs were effective—it was when departing from the text that LBJ started denouncing “nervous nellies” and “cussers and doubters.”

  “I think he was especially good that day because he was in a certain kind of balance within himself,” McPherson recalled. “He was at ease with himself. There are times when I frankly would not like to see Lyndon Johnson being Lyndon Johnson. I can imagine him a week later, having had this great success, doing it again, and I can imagine him spending the entire thirty minutes berating the press and the Eastern Establishment and all the rest of it, and all the worms would come out just as all the attractive qualities came out in that particular session.”

  “And so, my friends of many years, my colleagues, my fellow countrymen in your homes tonight,” Johnson said, “I have come before you to announce that in this year of nineteen and sixty-eight, I will not, under any circumstances, be a candidate for reelection as President of the United States.”

  In his mind’s eye, Johnson was speaking to a packed House chamber and nationwide television audience, offering a surprise ending to his 1968 State of the Union address. In reality he was in his pajamas, lying in his memorandum-and newspaper-covered bed on a damp, dreary January Sunday, performing for an audience of one: Horace “Buzz” Busby.

  It was January 14, three days before he was to give the State of the Union address, and, dissatisfied with the progress made thus far under McPherson’s careful hand, Johnson had characteristically called in a raft of other advisers and draftsmen to throw their perspectives into the rhetorical stew. “This goddamn draft they’ve given me wouldn’t make chickens cackle if you waved it at ’em in the dark,” Johnson had told Busby on the phone earlier in the day. “It’s too long, too dull, too flat, too bureaucratic—every little two-bit bureau in the government has managed to get at least one line in on their pet project.

  “I get the best minds in Washington together, and what do they come up with? Vomit,” he said, angrily spitting out the words. “Fifty pages of vomit.”*

  LBJ had summoned Busby, among others, to try to get “a little Churchill in this thing.” But when Buzz arrived, LBJ revealed his real reason for summoning his old aide: “I have made up my mind,” he declared with surprising force. “I can’t get peace in Vietnam and be president too.”

  As Busby tried to absorb what he had just heard, Johnson went on. The Vietnamese, he said, “won’t let me have both,” while the Congress “doesn’t want me to have either.”

  So he envisioned for Busby the scene on the coming Tuesday when he would read through his report to Congress, and as the final applause thundered on, he would pull two extra pages out of his jacket and drop his political bombshell.

  “That ought to surprise the living hell out of them.”

  Busby’s job was to compose this fare-thee-well. He was a logical choice for the assignment—and not just because, as Johnson said, as a former White House aide he could be relied upon to keep it a secret.

  Buzz had first joined Lyndon Johnson’s staff in 1948, finding his new desk in room 504 of the Old House Office Building (today the Cannon House Office Building) surrounded by stack upon stack of books—dozens of them—all by or about Winston Churchill. His first brief for Representative Johnson was to learn to write as Churchill spoke. More broad, he was �
�to read, think, and come up with new ideas.” He would spend much of his seventeen years working for and around Johnson in similar capacities.

  Square-faced and quiet, Busby was a graduate of the University of Texas and had worked as a reporter for a year before joining Johnson’s staff. A heavy smoker, he sometimes held his cigarette in his mouth at such an angle that, lost in concentration, he would singe his eyeglasses. Middleton, who not only went on to run the Johnson Library but also worked with the president on his memoirs, described Buzz as the writer to whom Johnson felt closest over the years. “You feel each other,” Hugh Sidey had once asked Busby. “Yes,” he replied, “especially in the silences.”

  “Ultimately I had fitted into his life in such a way that I sometimes knew more what he wanted to say than he did,” Busby told an interviewer in 1981. “Now that’s not a grandiose statement. I think that’s true in any good relationship between a public figure and a person who writes speeches…. You are close enough to the individual that you are really in their mind and in their life, and you know more what they want to say than they do because they don’t have time to stop and think about what they want to say.”

  It was not the first time that LBJ had entertained thoughts of leaving the White House. One morning in June 1964, he told Valenti that he had dictated a withdrawal statement and felt better for it. He would be able to pursue his agenda without accusations of politics. In October 1967, Johnson had summoned White House press secretary George Christian to the ranch and sounded him out about a withdrawal. When Christian was supportive (surprising himself), Johnson dispatched him to confer with Texas governor John Connally, a longtime friend who also supported withdrawal. The two men composed a statement on which Mrs. Johnson signed off.

  Like those two statements, the one Busby drew up for the 1968 State of the Union address went unused. Explaining to Christian afterwards why he did not make the dramatic announcement, LBJ told a story likely more humorous than truthful: Hours before the State of the Union, he showed Busby’s draft statement to Lady Bird, who approved. Standing in the House chamber, reaching the end of the speech, he told Christian, he had felt his pockets for the statement. “This is a hell of a note,” he thought to himself. “The President of the United States can’t quit because his wife’s got the papers in her purse.”

  The other explanation he proffered seems more plausible: “It just didn’t fit,” Johnson had said. “I couldn’t go in there and lay out a big program and then say, ‘Okay, here’s all this work to do, and by the way, so long. I’m leaving.’”

  The problem, of course, was the tension between an elusive victory in Vietnam and the big program he continued to push at home. In the 1966 State of the Union Johnson had declared, in effect, that it was not necessary to choose between guns and butter, that the country could have both. Now he was faced with the reality that he had been wrong. As a member of the U.S. Senate, Johnson had watched a conflict in Asia consume and destroy Harry Truman’s presidency. Korea and accusations of losing China killed Truman and the Fair Deal, Califano recalled Johnson saying. “We’re not going to let that happen to the Great Society,” he would add.

  McPherson’s early drafts of the State of the Union address had contained a long section on Vietnam that Johnson removed. He preferred to focus on that in a separate speech, he said. With so much opposition to the war in the House, he did not want to dwell on it there. He instructed McPherson to start drafting a stand-alone address.

  At the end of January, the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong launched a coordinated, nationwide surprise attack that coincided with the Tet holiday. Though militarily a failure, it was a devastating propaganda blow to the United States, whose forces had been caught off guard.

  As McPherson consulted and wrote through February and March—to what extent should the speech defend the status quo? should it include an announcement of a pause in the bombing?—Johnson dwelled on his retirement. He brought up the subject at Sunday lunches in the residence with his family, though they would not take him seriously.

  On March 12, Minnesota Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy, who had been trailing Johnson badly in polls, took 42 percent in the New Hampshire primary. Like Tet, it was a victory in name only for Johnson. He told McPherson and Califano at a mid-March lunch that he was considering withdrawal. When McPherson tried to argue that Johnson was the only one who could get anything done, Johnson told him that he had it backwards: any of the leading presidential candidates—former Vice President Richard Nixon, McCarthy, or Senator Robert Kennedy—could get their programs through Congress because they would be fresh faces and get honeymoons. “Congress and I are like an old man and woman who’ve lived together for a hundred years,” he said. “We know each other’s faults and what little good there is in us. We’re tired of each other.”

  Through February and most of March, the developing speech had essentially been a status quo document—defending the war and rallying support for it. But at a meeting of McPherson and top foreign policy and national security officials in Rusk’s office on Thursday, March 28, Clifford, named Secretary of Defense on March 1, argued that the address would be out of step with the country. McPherson was charged with preparing an alternate draft that instead of attempting once again to rally support for the war, sought negotiations with North Vietnam. He sent two drafts in to Johnson: the original, and the alternative, marked “1A.”

  When LBJ called McPherson the next morning, he started straight in on edits: “Now, I don’t want to say that on page three…” McPherson glanced through both drafts—Johnson was referring to the alternative. He had elected to change course on Vietnam. McPherson did not know just how much Johnson was shifting course, though he soon got a hint. Johnson and his senior staff spent Saturday, March 30, poring over the speech, discussing the bombing halt, replacement troops, and the like. At the end of the session LBJ asked McPherson where was the peroration? McPherson had pulled it because it had been a remnant of the more truculent original drafts and no longer fit the tone. He promised to draft a new, short one quickly.

  “That’s OK,” Johnson said with a smile. “Make it as long as you want. I may even add one of my own.” McPherson turned to Clifford after the president had left. “Jesus, is he going to say sayonara?” Clifford, on the job only four weeks, looked at McPherson as though exhaustion had sapped the White House aide of sense.

  But Johnson had already called Busby and asked him to “write out for me what you and I were talking about in January.” Busby was summoned to the White House on Sunday, March 31, to keep reworking and revising the statement. “You and I are the only two people who will ever believe that I won’t know whether I’m going to do this or not until I get to the last line of my speech on the TelePrompTer,” Johnson told his old aide.

  Johnson hid him in the residence, away from the prying eyes of the regular White House staff. When LBJ left him to go back to West Wing, Busby retained the draft peroration. “You’d better keep this,” he said. “I’m going over to the West Wing for a while and it might fall out of my pocket. I don’t want this falling into the hands of the enemy.”

  Even in the residence, Busby was not safe. “If this happens, I’ll never have a chance to vote for Daddy,” Luci Nugent, the president’s youngest daughter, just of voting age, plaintively told assembled family and friends, including Buzz.

  Even without its bombshell ending, the speech was a shock: “Tonight, I have ordered our aircraft and our naval vessels to make no attacks on North Vietnam, except in the area north of the demilitarized zone where the continuing enemy buildup directly threatens allied forward positions and where the movements of their troops and supplies are clearly related to that threat,” Johnson began.

  But this was just prelude.

  With America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of
my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office—the Presidency of your country. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.

  Even as Johnson was still on the air (his dramatic announcement came at around 9:38 pm), White House staffers were calling key political figures and close friends to spread the news. Democratic National Committee chairman Larry O’Brien, reached at 9:11 pm by White House staffer Larry Temple, reacted matter-of-factly. “Okie doke,” he said quickly. “Thanks for calling.”

  Former Defense Secretary McNamara, reached at 9:17 pm by staffer Marvin Watson, said that it was nice of the president to have him called with the news. Orville Freeman, the Secretary of Agriculture, was “obviously distraught,” according Temple. “Good Lord!” Freeman said, reached at 9:18 pm. “I’m astounded. Thank you for giving me this advance call.”

  Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley was also not calm: “He will not,” Daley said, reached at 9:21 pm by Watson. “By God. Oh oh. OK. Thank you.”

  Johnson had stopped in to see Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey on his way home from church that morning. According to Humphrey’s autobiography, Johnson had shown his vice president both possible endings to the speech, saying that he had not decided which to use. Reached by Watson at 9:22 pm, Humphrey reacted somewhat oddly: “I thought this is what he tried to talk to me about this morning,” Watson’s memo has Humphrey saying. “Tell him I am 100 percent for him whatever he does.”

  Attorney General Ramsey Clark, reached by Temple at 9:29 pm, was practically struck dumb, pausing for a long moment before answering almost inaudibly, “OK. Thank you for calling me.” Speaker of the House John McCormack “appeared stunned” and “speechless,” White House aide Barefoot Sanders recorded. Other top Democrats in the Congress were also astonished. An unhappy Senator Richard Russell, who had mentored Johnson but sharply disagreed with him on civil rights, thought the move was “a helluva mistake,” according to Sanders’s memo. “Great mass of American people are for him. All this hurrahing comes from a small minority,” Sanders recorded.