Butler, twenty-five, had watched a Ford speech the previous October that he concluded was the worst presidential address he had ever heard. He wrote Hartmann a letter and enclosed a draft of a speech that Ford could have given during his first appearance to a joint session of Congress, back in August. Once he joined the administration, he was struck that the speechwriting staff had a kind of “pick-up team quality” to it. There had been no election campaign to forge the group, so it was Ford vets Hartmann and Friedman and whoever else was added along the way. Other writers had been detailed over from other departments or hired on temporary bases only to leave or be let go after a few months.
Butler spent his first few months handling “Rose Garden Rubbish” and the like, before getting his first bigger speech on a Ford trip to Ohio in early July. He assumed that his first road speech would bring a briefing or guidance on what was expected, where they were going, what were the objectives and themes of the speech, and so on. “What I got was: ‘We’re going to be in Cleveland next Tuesday,’” he recalled. “So you would find yourself with actually quite a lot of flexibility and freedom that I didn’t know we would have.”
Butler learned that he had a political flair. As the 1976 presidential election campaign heated up, he would increasingly be the man called upon when the president needed red meat for sympathetic audiences. “What we really need in this country, in this decade, and the rest of this century, is not a New Deal,” Ford told the 1,300 faithful GOPers on the evening of July 3, “but a fresh start.”
The speech played well and Butler was pleased, until he saw the front page of the next day’s Washington Post. “The President’s speech was viewed by his supporters and strategists as a rehearsal of the themes he will attempt to develop in his campaign for his first full term,” the story read. The implication was that “a fresh start” and the rest of the speech were the product of a long-simmering, carefully thought out political strategy developed at the highest levels. Butler, who knew better, was irate and then bemused.
Aram Bakshian left at the end of August 1975, severing the writing shop’s last link with the Nixon White House. Coyne had left in February. Hartmann’s ongoing quarrels with Cheney and Rumsfeld were causing him to lose influence, and “I had the feeling that as Hartmann’s last fiefdom, the speechwriting department was losing connection with the senior level,” Bakshian said. “Some of the people that were coming in might have been called ‘old hacks.’ Before, you always felt you were part of, I won’t say ‘the best and the brightest,’ but there was some unit pride. There was a little less of that. There was very little reason to want to just hang on and stay there for the duration.”
The speech team’s mood was eroding as fall arrived—ground down by the Hartmann-Praetorian feud. “We’ve got a morale problem here in the Editorial/Speech Office,” Theis wrote to Hartmann on September 18. “It has been developing for nearly a year now.” At issue were the perks that many White House staffers took for granted: the right to dine in the White House mess and to park close to the Executive Office Building. Neither veteran speechwriters Jack Casserly and Kaye Pullen nor Patrick Butler had been granted mess privileges, while other more recent additions to other portions of the White House staff (presumably Rumsfeld allies) had gotten such privileges immediately.
“I understand that Bob Haldeman used to employ White House Mess and parking privileges to reward some staff members and punish others,” Theis concluded. “Obviously, this isn’t the case today, I’m sure.” Even if Theis was sincere in giving Rumsfeld the benefit of the doubt, not everyone was as forgiving. “The speechwriting staff is not anti-Rumsfeld, but we are aware it is his fine hand that blocks accreditation to the White House Mess for some, better parking for others,” Casserly had recorded in his journal on September 9. “He is a person of detail but, it strikes us, a petty individual.”
“Mess privileges were invaluable,” Butler recalled, because they helped the speechwriters stay informed about what was going on in the administration.
Ford’s October 6 speech to the nation on tax policy darkened the mood among members of the writing staff. They had not written it. Rumsfeld and Cheney had summoned David Gergen to the White House late on Friday night, October 3. Gergen met with Ford and then spent the weekend working closely with Rumsfeld and economic advisers. When Hartmann learned about the speech on Sunday night (it was not publicly announced until Monday morning), he prepared a draft, but Ford mainly used Gergen’s. The rest of the speechwriting staff found out about the speech along with the public on the day it was delivered.
Insult compounded injury a week later when a front-page story in the Chicago Tribune described the speechwriters’ embarrassment. “The president himself is bored by the speeches, so why shouldn’t his listeners be?” an anonymous White House official complained. An unnamed speechwriter said that the administration was gaining a reputation for having “no social conscience.” Hartmann set Theis out to discover the source of the leak.
Rumsfeld and Cheney brought in Gergen for alternative drafts. When New York City officials pleaded for a financial bailout—the city was on the brink of bankruptcy—Ford decided to give a speech explaining why he opposed it, and what his alternative was. Gergen’s draft included some rough paragraphs that he assumed would be tempered before going to the president, so he was taken aback when they ended up, unedited, in the final presidential text of what turned out to be a very tough speech. The following day’s New York Daily News headline read: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”
On October 25, a Saturday, Ford summoned Rumsfeld and Henry Kissinger, who held both the positions of Secretary of State and national security adviser, to the Oval Office and told them of sweeping changes he planned for the administration: James Schlesinger would be fired as Secretary of Defense, to be replaced by Rumsfeld; William Colby would resign as head of the CIA, to be replaced by former House member George H. W. Bush; and Kissinger would give up the National Security Council, with his deputy, Brent Scowcroft, succeeding him. In the White House, Rumsfeld’s deputy, Cheney, would fill the chief of staff position.
Three days later, at a private lunch, Ford told Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, whom he had appointed in 1974, that he was a drag on the ticket among GOP conservatives. Former California governor Ronald Reagan, a favorite of the right wing, was contemplating a primary challenge. Ford had declared for reelection in July, but his aides had pointedly noted that the president was seeking a return to the White House on his own, not as part of a team with the former New York governor. Rockefeller had tried to become more palatable to the conservatives, but he only ended up offending his liberal GOP constituents. By the summer of 1975, polling showed that one in four Republicans would not support a ticket with Rockefeller on it. “I came here to help the President, not to complicate his life,” Rockefeller said on November 6, three days after officially withdrawing from the ticket.
The decisions were uncharacteristic of Ford in their decisiveness and sweep. For once he was not satisfied to try to balance people’s feelings and acted aggressively.
The next morning, November 4, Hartmann told the president that the moves inspired him to shake up the speechwriting staff, cutting out poor performers and taking a greater hand in the writing. Hartmann and Cheney had a congenial lunch. The wildcat speechwriting will end, Cheney assured Hartmann. There would be no more circumventing the process or the speechwriting shop for presidential addresses. In December, Cheney asked Hartmann if he would object to Gergen coming in to handle television-oriented communications. “I have nothing at all personally against Gergen, I hardly know the guy,” Hartmann responded. Cheney was soothing: “Well, the president told me I’d have to check with you,” he said. “But I assure you Gergen will have absolutely nothing to do with speeches…. We won’t interfere with your speechwriting business at all—I’ll see to it.”
As 1975 closed, Hartmann executed the promised staff shake-up. Theis left for the Department of Agriculture. Pullen moved
to Betty Ford’s staff at the end of January 1976. Casserly took a job at the Department of the Interior. Orben, to his surprise, was promoted to Theis’s position as head speechwriter. Orben’s job had evolved. Brought on to provide jokes, he had become the one who punched up other writers’ speeches. And he had become Ford’s informal performance coach, sending memos to Hartmann rating the president on delivery and timing. Eventually he was writing whole speeches, which he found easier than writing jokes. “People will clap at the end of a speech, but if they don’t like a joke they won’t laugh,” he said.
Butler became Orben’s number two. Friedman also survived the purge, but as the speechwriting staff entered the election year it was still short-handed. Orben’s first order of business was to try to bulk it up. He approached the Praetorians without success. President Ford had mandated that White House staff be cut, and Orben was told that there were no more slots available to augment the speechwriting staff. My God, Orben said, Can’t we let a gardener go?
Hartmann had begun to work on the bicentennial year’s State of the Union in the final months of 1975. In early October, the president started sending Hartmann handwritten notes—lists, outlines, suggestions—on yellow lined paper. “An image of an ‘embattled President fighting against the ‘evil forces’ in Washington,” Ford suggested in one such note. “Again, a crack at [former California governor Reagan’s] buddy allegations. This is difficult, but a thought.”* Hartmann, meanwhile, traveled with the president on foreign trips—one to Europe and one to China—and he used the time to think about what approach and themes might be developed for 1976.
“Mr. President,” he said in a memo written in Beijing, “There is nothing more certain in my own mind than that we are going to lose the 1976 election unless you make a dramatic breakthrough in the perception of your qualities of leadership and do so very soon.” He noted that Ford’s biggest mistake “has been your retention of and reliance on Nixon Administration figures from a past you are trying to put behind you.”
When Hartmann returned at the beginning of January from his holiday vacation to St. Croix, a handwritten note was waiting: “In case you get back before I do on Monday you might start right away on the most important project of 1976—SOTU [State of the Union],” the president wrote. “I want you to concentrate 100% on that + can call on any resources immediately. Isolation at Camp David with a group is a possibility.”
Hartmann was enthusiastic about the idea of a Camp David retreat to kick off the writing, and he was determined to retain control of the speechwriting process. “I have heard that there are a number of people working on their own State of the Union drafts,” he wrote to Ford on January 6. He wanted the president to make clear to the staff that he, Hartmann, was in charge.
When Ford called a staff meeting on January 7, he handled the situation in classic fashion. He said that Hartmann was in charge of the process, but did not say that any attempts to bypass him or cut him out would be dealt with harshly.
Camp David was occupied, so Hartmann decided that Colonial Williamsburg would be the place to capture the spirit for Ford’s address. He led a group that included assistant to the president for public liaison William Baroody, domestic policy adviser James Cannon, and the OMB’s Paul O’Neill, among others, down to Williamsburg’s historic Lightfoot House. They arrived on Thursday, January 9, ten days before the State of the Union.
With a fire crackling in the hearth, they gathered in a room where Patrick Henry and other revolutionaries had plotted treason against their king. Hartmann saw contemporary plots. “It soon became clear that new sedition was brewing,” he wrote. “Half the participants made it obvious they were not there to draft a good speech but to prevent mine from being drafted.” The group broke apart on Friday, and Hartmann and Friedman stayed until Saturday working up a first draft, which they showed Ford and others early the following week. Hartmann’s draft included the assertion that Americans were losing confidence in their government because “it is too big and bumbling.” Perhaps feeling the sting of comedian Chevy Chase’s Saturday Night Live portrayal of him as an inept klutz, Ford crossed out bumbling and substituted “impersonal.”
Hartmann worked all of Wednesday night, taking an hour’s nap while waiting for his typewriter, whose keys had started to stick, to be replaced. He gave Ford a final first draft—its theme “common sense,” reprising the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine—on Thursday, January 15, twenty-two minutes before his noon deadline.
Cheney had dismissed Hartmann’s initial draft as a laundry list of stale legislative proposals; he asked Gergen and Greenspan to write up a more thematic address, with an emphasis on an overarching vision for the nation for the remainder of the decade. The Gergen-Greenspan speech—which Hartmann and his crew dubbed “Roman Numeral Two”—arrived on Ford’s desk at roughly the same time as Hartmann’s. It focused on the idea that the relationship between the government and the private sector had gotten out of balance and that a new balance had to be established in American life.
The president was not expecting, yet again, to have competing drafts, but if he was upset, he did not show it. He took the two speeches and, after dinner and a swim on Thursday evening, dictated a new mishmash version to his secretary, Dorothy Downton. “Go through theirs once more and see if I missed anything good that can be incorporated into ours,” Ford told Hartmann. “But I’m satisfied this is about ninety-nine percent done, and I don’t want a lot more changes.”
Ford “was unwilling to come down hard on those who had tried to undercut the established procedure,” Hartmann recalled. “So he sat down with his secretary and he plucked little morsels from all these different texts and put them together like a string of beads. He thought that was pretty dandy. Nobody was willing to tell him how terrible it was. He gave it to me and I went home and virtually rewrote it. I threw enough of the other people’s words in there to make them happy and so [Ford] wouldn’t balk.”
The showdown came on the afternoon of Saturday, January 17, in the Cabinet Room. Except for the timing, it could have been 1975 all over again, with the two camps squabbling over the message. Three hours into a second consecutive year of petty infighting among his top advisers late in the process—and determined not again to find himself mediating his staff until hours before he was to speak—Ford finally lost his temper.
“Damn it,” he said, slamming his hand down on the table so hard that it shook. “We’ve got to stop this bickering over these little details. I want a final draft by noon tomorrow.”
Hartmann took charge, and after three and a half hours of haggling, the group broke up, leaving Hartmann, Friedman, and Orben to produce a near-final draft, which they did around midnight. In the end, the majority of the speech was drawn from the Hartmann version, with a couple of sections from Gergen-Greenspan. The rest was anticlimax, and the speech, like most State of the Union addresses, was forgettable.
There were enduring repercussions. Cheney, who had promised that Gergen would have nothing more to do with speeches, was now firmly entrenched on Hartmann’s enemies’ list. This bothered neither Cheney nor Gergen, who would perform as a shadow speechwriting department for the rest of Ford’s term.
Hartmann and Orben brought on a new writer in February 1976. David Boorstin, twenty-five, the son of Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin, had been writing for Editorial Research Reports, one of the galaxy of Washington niche publications that cover every gear in the federal machine. Boorstin had spent three years working in theater in London, and he found that that background with the spoken word, combined with his journalistic experience of having to master new subjects quickly, helped him learn speechwriting.
But Boorstin also had to learn politics. “Insofar as I was anything at that age, I was a liberal Democrat coming out of the radical college days,” he recalled. “I said to them, ‘I’m not a Republican…I don’t even know what the party line is, much less that I would hew to it.’” By his own admission, he was “not a political
person.” “It never remotely occurred to me I would ever be working in the White House, much less for a Republican.” He was told not to worry about it, that he would not have to write anything he was not comfortable with.
Boorstin was another odd choice for a speechwriter—especially for a president facing a stiff primary challenge from his party’s burgeoning conservative wing. Ronald Reagan was indeed challenging Ford in the primaries, rallying conservatives against the president by painting him as part of the Washington establishment. And while Ford publicly predicted that former Vice President Hubert Humphrey would bear the Democratic standard in the fall, one-term Georgia governor Jimmy Carter had emerged as a dark horse for the nomination in a field of a dozen serious candidates.
Other would-be writers were less lucky. Orben hired Al Parsons of Tallahassee, Florida, as a speechwriter, but when Parsons showed up for his first day of work in March, he was not allowed into the building. Journalist Michael Johnson of Galesburg, Illinois, quit his job and rushed to D.C. to take a ninety-day trial job as editor of Ford’s written messages, but he encountered a similar problem. Cabinet Secretary James Connor, a Cheney ally, had sat on their paperwork, apparently as part of the ongoing internecine squabbling. And a pay increase promised to Orben for becoming chief speechwriter had not yet materialized.
How long Ford would be in the White House remained an open question, but things started out looking bright: He won a narrow victory in the New Hampshire primary over Reagan on February 24—the first election he had ever won outside of Michigan’s 5th congressional district. On March 9, he won the Florida primary with 53 percent of the vote. A week later, Ford bested Reagan in the Illinois primary with 59 percent of the vote. The tide turned on March 23, when Reagan beat Ford in North Carolina with 52 percent of the primary vote. It was only the third time in U.S. history that a challenger had defeated an incumbent president in a primary, and the previous two incumbent losers had ended up withdrawing from their nomination races.*
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 29
