Noel Koch wrote a “barn-burner” of a speech that eschewed the usual litany of administration pro-labor accomplishments in favor of a discussion of where Nixon and the labor movement had differences and where they agreed. Word came back that the president wanted the speech rewritten—he wanted a laundry list speech detailing the administration’s labor record.
On Wednesday, November 17, Nixon decided to go to Florida and the trip was slotted in for Friday morning. Meany made sure there was no band in the hall to play “Hail to the Chief” when the president entered. In fact, there was no announcement of his arrival. The president sat in the second row of seats on the stage.
Nixon started by announcing that while he had a prepared text, he was not going to read it. “You like it straight from the shoulder,” he told the crowd. “I am going to talk to you about our differences, and I am also going to talk to you about some areas where we agree, and there are several of both, as you know.”
Nixon’s talent for planned-libbing offers an insight into his appreciation of the twin audiences of his presidential appearances. On the one hand were “folk,” or “Joe six-pack,” as he liked call them, the silent majority who wanted it “straight from the shoulder.” On the other hand were the elites—the media, the politicos, the eggheads. “In one breath, Nixon would dismiss a politician with ‘He’s not “folks,” he’ll never understand,’ but in the next breath, he could be one of them, telling a speechwriter who was getting too verbose, ‘we sophisticates can listen to a speech for a half-an-hour, but after ten minutes the average guy wants a beer,’” Safire later noted.
At the start of December, Nixon was on about the speechwriting staff again. “It’s not simply writing for the ear,” he told Haldeman in a December 2 telephone conversation. “Also they still are not going back and reading how I speak, how you build up a line or something like that. They don’t get in tune with the people enough.” “Writing for the ear” rather than for the eye was a concept he continued to stress. After saying in one speech that he would not be “cooped up in the White House,” he told Safire, “that’s the kind of word-picture my mother would have used back in Indiana. You can just feel the chicken coop, with the wires pressing down on the chickens all jammed together in the pen.”
Perhaps recognizing the success of the “silent majority” speech, Nixon toyed with the idea of making that process the norm. “I may decide to go very, very hard the other way here now, as to frankly leave the Price group in there to make up statements and the rest and I’ll have to do the speech stuff myself,” he said. “The speeches they send over to me, there’s no fire in the belly…. I think that I may have spoiled them myself by taking their remarks over and over again” and using bits and pieces of them.
The State of the Union process had set Nixon off. “He’s really concerned about the speech writing problem because Ray blew the fourth draft of the State of the Union, and he thinks we really have trouble on that score,” Haldeman wrote in his diary.
A second major speech was also in the works, though it was a secret—or was supposed to be. On January 16, 1972, Safire was enjoying warm sunshine at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, watching the Dallas Cowboys dismantle the Miami Dolphins in the Super Bowl, when the stadium’s public address system paged him to call his office. When he phoned the White House, Larry Higby told him, “This has to be absolutely top secret, but get back here fast.” When Safire questioned how secret something could be when announced at the Super Bowl, Higby said that the announcement had been picked up on television for 60 million home viewers. They agreed that no one would suspect a summons for a secret assignment to be so ineptly relayed.
Safire returned to find a memo from Nixon (“Top Secret/Sensitive/Exclusive Eyes Only”):* The president wanted to talk about the peace offers that the United States had made over the years. Kissinger had been making secret trips to Paris to conduct negotiations with the Vietnamese but had met with no progress. In his memo, Nixon explained that Kissinger’s staff had produced a draft which was fine on substance, but had “too much turgid prose and too much complex discussion.” Nixon told Safire to fill out an outline. He wanted to speak on January 25, five days after the State of the Union.
The problems with the “turgid prose” included too many repetitions of the phrase “I asked Dr. Kissinger”—which Nixon replaced with “I directed.” “All the way through, it said ‘Dr. Kissinger did this,’ ‘Dr. Kissinger did that.’ I mean it was every third sentence!” Nixon told Haldeman on January 17 in the Oval Office.
Nixon called Haldeman on January 18 to say he was pleased with Safire’s effort: the writer had improved on his outline and had gotten the speech in on time. Meanwhile he was holding the draft of the State of the Union closely—so much so that some of the speechwriters asked Haldeman when they would get to see the latest version. “I dunno,” the chief of staff said, slumping in his chair and running a pencil through his crew cut. “This may be the first extemporaneous State of the Union in American history.”
Nixon had thought of another innovation. He carried two texts with him to the lectern in the House of Representatives at 12:30 pm on Thursday, January 20. The first was the speech, which weighed in at slightly under 4,000 words. The second was a 17,000-word written message with the detailed programmatic list. He hoped to use the system to get the best out of the State of the Union: a briefer, thematic—and television-friendly—speech, but also a document that laid out his agenda and could serve as a map and a discipline for the bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, the January 25 speech had become not only a tale of secret diplomacy but the subject of hidden maneuvering within the White House. Kissinger and Secretary of State William Rogers had a long-running feud as to who should be Nixon’s top foreign policy adviser, a squabble that often manifested itself in the creation, editing, and polishing of speech drafts. Kissinger would cut Rogers out of the process, so in this case, Nixon made sure that all drafts were typed by Rose Mary Woods. That way he could oversee distribution of the drafts and make sure that Rogers was not out of the loop.
He instructed Safire, who was consulting with both sides in the drafting, not to take sides. “We were [Nixon’s] personal extensions in expressing himself, and could weave in and out as neutrals in his behalf between other, more important appointees,” Safire recalled. Safire’s neutrality was rendered moot the day before the speech. After a private meeting, Nixon gave Kissinger free rein on the flow. Kissinger called Safire and told him that no more drafts would be forthcoming to either the speechwriter or the Secretary of State. “Isn’t that for the president to decide?” Safire asked. “I’m telling you what the president said,” Kissinger replied. In this domestic battle over foreign policy, he had won out.
A mid-April speech to the Canadian Parliament precipitated another Nixon blowup. The president was scheduled to address the Parliament on April 14, and two days earlier had gone “into quite a blast” to Haldeman and John Ehrlichman about the speechwriters and having to rewrite the Canadian speech in its sixth draft. “It was the usual tirade,” Haldeman noted in his diary. Lee Huebner had rewritten some NSC-supplied passages that Nixon did not want touched.
As usual, the president was more temperate with the writer. He called Huebner and said that because of those stickler foreign policy specialists it would have to be changed back. “The littler you were, the more courteous he would be…he was always overly solicitous; you felt badly,” Huebner remembered. Nixon invited Huebner up to Camp David for the evening—the only such trip Huebner made—so that he would be on hand if any further changes were required. Of all the speeches that Huebner had worked on, Nixon was the least engaged in this one—surprising for a speech to a foreign legislature.
After dinner that night with the senior staff, Alex Butterfield, Nixon’s appointments secretary, suggested that he and Huebner walk the latest draft over to the president’s lodge, Nixon having dined alone. They entered the cabin and found the president sitting by himself in the dar
k, staring out a picture window at the far end of the living room. The scene struck Huebner as spooky. Then Nixon came alive and started trying to make small talk. Are you having a good time at Camp David? he asked. Would you like to go bowling, skeet shooting? No, he added, it was nighttime—skeet shooting would not work. Perhaps a movie?
It was a bizarre and oddly endearing performance. What Huebner did not find out until later was that while he was putting the fine points on the Canada speech, Nixon was overseeing a renewed buildup of air and naval power off the coast of Vietnam, and also pondering a stepped-up bombing campaign, along with the mining of Haiphong Harbor in North Vietnam. And all of this was occurring within weeks of the president’s scheduled trip to the Soviet Union for a May 1972 summit. The section Huebner had tried to rewrite, regarding the responsibilities of great powers to act with restraint, had been designed, he later thought, as a message to the Soviets not to let Nixon’s new strategy interfere with the trip.
Nixon did not always hide his profane side from his writers. John Andrews, the young Christian Scientist who had been hired in early 1971, was called in to help Nixon and Kissinger draft the address to the nation on May 8 announcing the mining of the North Vietnamese ports. Mindful that the trip to the Soviet Union was now less than two weeks away—Nixon would leave on May 20—Andrews said that he supposed the president would want to send a careful signal to the Soviets that this was a measured response and not meant to upset the summit. Nixon startled him with his response. “I don’t give a shit what the Soviets think,” he said.
It was not the first time Andrews had heard such language from Nixon. He helped draft the eulogy for J. Edgar Hoover, who died on May 2. The liberals are out there pissing on Hoover’s grave, Nixon told him. We’re going to go against the grain and tell everyone what a great American he was. “That popped my eyes,” Andrews recalled.
The first time that David Gergen, a young naval veteran who had joined the staff as Price’s assistant in 1971, heard Nixon cursing, he asked press secretary Ron Ziegler what in the world was going on. “Don’t worry,” Ziegler replied. “He can get like that. That’s a signal that he trusts you when he starts talking like that in front of you.”
June brought more writing reinforcements for the gear-up to the reelection campaign. A handful of junior writers were brought in, including a former reporter named Vera Hirschberg, who was the first female presidential speechwriter. Also joining was Aram Bakshian, a self-taught expert—he had not graduated from college—in military and European history who had been writing speeches for Republican National Committee chairman Bob Dole. Bakshian smoked cigars constantly, and played classical music while writing. As one colleague in a later administration described him, he was “brilliant, eccentric—knew everything about history. [He was] born in the wrong place in the wrong century—he really deserved to have been a London gentleman.”
On November 7, 1972, Richard Nixon won one of the most lopsided victories in presidential history. He garnered more than 60 percent of the vote, winning forty-nine out of fifty states.
The second term brought the dissolution of the big three speech-writers. Buchanan had remained involved in communications and strategy, but his speechwriting had eased after the Cambodia speech. Price took on a free-floating “house philosopher” role. He tapped David Gergen as his successor, with Huebner as Gergen’s deputy. Possessing a great, boisterous laugh, Gergen had a facility for making the office run and was something of a perfectionist. “Gergen was a very smooth broker of projects or viewpoints, self-assured and penetrating, and turned out to be a very good writer himself,” Andrews recalled. “He was an excellent editor; he could take a piece of copy and bring it to the next level of polish or succinctness in just a few minutes.”
A week after the inaugural, The New York Times announced it had hired William Safire as a conservative columnist for its op-ed page. “H & Buchanan—Safire a conservative? Be sure to inform Human Events!” Nixon scrawled on that day’s news summary. Safire’s last day in the White House was March 21. He shook hands with a Secret Service agent stationed outside the closed door to the Oval Office. “You want to say goodbye to the Old Man?” the agent asked. “He’s inside there with his lawyer.” Safire paused. Nixon was not happy about his new job, and he was not much for small talk. And he was probably busy. To hell with it, Safire thought, and walked out to his car.
The lawyer Nixon was sequestered with was his White House counsel, John Dean. “We have a cancer—within, close to the Presidency, that’s growing,” Dean told Nixon that morning. “It’s growing daily. It’s compounding, it grows geometrically now because it compounds itself.” A great deal of money had already been paid to E. Howard Hunt and the Watergate burglars, and now they were asking for more. Their continued silence would require a million dollars over the following two years. “We could get that,” Nixon told Dean.
“Had I gone in, Nixon would probably have told me to listen to the lawyer’s worrisome story,” Safire later reflected. “He might well have asked me, a former PR man, to make some suggestions about how to handle it, and perhaps to draft a statement in his style, which was my specialty. The fateful Nixon-Dean meeting, of course, was secretly taped, and whatever I would have said would have ultimately made me a grand jury witness, possibly a target of hot-eyed prosecution…. But I walked on past that dark confabulation and out into the sunshine of a spring day. That was some break for me.”
Two days later, Judge John Sirica read in open court a letter from Watergate burglar James McCord alleging that he and the other burglars had been subjected to “political pressure” to cop a guilty plea and remain silent. There had been perjury, McCord said, and a broader conspiracy. “We are now forced to some sort of a position on Watergate,” Nixon, in Key Biscayne, wrote in his diary.
Price reluctantly sent an “eyes-only” memo to Haldeman urging his resignation. It was a wrenching memo to write—he liked Haldeman and thought that he had done a good job. But Watergate was growing and Price thought the only way to stem it was for someone high up to fall on his sword. Whether Haldeman was involved in any wrongdoing was be-side the point, Price argued; they needed to “divide the presidency in order to save it.” Haldeman should assume responsibility for whatever had gone wrong. Haldeman did not respond to the suggestion.
Buchanan weighed in with Nixon directly. “Anyone who is not guilty should not be put overboard,” he wrote. “However, presidential aides who cannot maintain their viability should step forward voluntarily…. There is a Titanic mentality around the White House staff these days. We’ve got to put out the life rafts and hope to pull the presidency through.”
By the middle of April, Haldeman and John Ehrlichman’s viability was ebbing. On April 15, Nixon broached the idea of their taking leaves of absence, but they resisted. Nixon would give his first Watergate speech on Monday, April 30. He would announce that the two aides had resigned, along with John Dean and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. He brought Price back into speechwriting for the talk. Price would remain Nixon’s main writer for Watergate speeches and statements.
Nixon passed the speechwriting marching orders through Ron Ziegler. He was worried that Price might try to write too accommodating a speech. “Look, if we went in sackcloth and ashes and fired the whole White House staff, Price must realize that isn’t going to satisfy these Goddamn cannibals,” the president told Ziegler on April 27. “They’d still be after us. Who are they after? Hell, they’re not after Haldeman or Ehrlichman or Dean; they’re after me, the President. They hate my guts.
“Tell him make it strong, not cross, not apologetic,” Nixon went on. “Just say this is the fact. I assume the responsibility. Be a president and not a peon. You tell him that. Goddammit, Price does not usually understand this. He normally—you know, sometime he doesn’t, but he thinks that you’ve got to be in sackcloth and ashes.”
Price and Ziegler went to Camp David on Saturday morning and spent the day hammering out a draft for the
president. They debated over coffee or double scotches—depending upon the time of day—the necessity of the resignations. They collaborated with the president in an indirect and isolated way: they would send speech drafts over to his cabin and he sent them back, marked up.
“Oh, hell, as far as sackcloth, I would be willing to go a lot further,” Nixon said to Price on the phone on the morning of April 30. “I always had this weak[ness], I’m one of the few men in Washington that never blames the secretary when the poor damned secretary misspelled a word. I mean sometime the boss is always to blame, so the boss did it, hell, I appointed [John] Mitchell [U.S. Attorney General during the first term and head of the Committee to Re-Elect the President] and I appointed Haldeman. I appointed Ehrlichman. I appointed Dean. Christ, these are all my people. [Charles] Colson [White House special counsel in the first term]. If they did things, they did them because they thought—they thought that’s what we wanted. And so I’m responsible…. If you go too far in terms of saying, well, I take all the blame, and I don’t blame these poor fellows and all that, then you think well, Christ, this poor damn, dumb President why didn’t he resign? Which might not be a bad idea.” Price had to chuckle as Nixon added that the problem with resignation would be President Spiro Agnew. “You want Agnew?”
Talk of resignation was more serious when they met face-to-face that afternoon. Price had never seen Nixon so unmoored. The president was listless and had trouble concentrating. At one point he dropped some pages and they lay on the floor, apparently without Nixon noticing that they had fallen. His mind wandered, as did his gaze, and he spoke in a flat, defeated tone. “Maybe I should resign,” Nixon told Price. “Do you think so? You’ve always been the voice of my conscience. If you think I should resign just write it into the next draft, and I’ll do it.”
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 25
