White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  “That’s the impression I got,” Butler replied.

  It’s okay, Cheney said: “If he’s fired you I’ve hired you and I’m giving you a raise.” As with the two previous “firings,” however, Hartmann did not mention it again.

  The next day, appearing before the Pittsburgh Economic Club, Ford discussed U.S. foreign policy.

  On November 2, 1976, Jimmy Carter achieved a narrow victory over Ford, less than 2 million votes. Ford had closed a late July 33-point gap and almost pulled off the most remarkable comeback since Harry S. Truman in 1948.

  A number of factors contributed to Ford’s loss, the most important his pardon of Nixon. He also stalled his own momentum when in the second televised debate with Carter he made one of the great historical gaffes, declaring that “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” Ford had been trying to make a statement about the spirit of the Eastern Europeans, but it was widely played as a huge foreign policy blunder.

  The arc of Ford’s administration can be traced in his speechwriting and speechgiving. In many ways, Ford understood the importance of presidential communications. He was willing to endure ridicule over hiring a gag writer because he thought that Orben would make solid contributions. When Ford was able to make the process work properly and work well with his writers—the bicentennial speeches, the convention acceptance speech, the 1976 campaign—he benefited from it. But the internal staff warring that Ford allowed to linger crippled the speechwriting process. As counselor to the president, Hartmann was in a position to play a role akin to Clifford or Sorensen, but his effectiveness was undercut by the sniping between him and the Rumsfeld-Cheney camps, and by Ford’s unwillingness or inability to end it. The main speechwriting shop suffered the collateral damage from these fights, whether in terms of staffing, perks, or being cut out of the speechwriting process. Given chaos and civil war, it is not surprising that the process only worked in fits and starts.

  In early January 1977, Orben met with James Fallows, Carter’s incoming chief speechwriter. After Orben had run him through the pointers of the job, from the washrooms to the staffing process, Fallows inquired if there were anything else Orben could tell him. Orben paused. Could he properly explain the stress? Should he tell Fallows about how his gallbladder was removed the week after the election?

  “You’re on such a treadmill,” he recalled years later. “The last year I would say I got an average of four hours sleep at night. I would still have a gallbladder if it weren’t for two and a half years at the White House.”

  “There’s a lot of tension,” Orben told Fallows.

  EIGHT

  “Don’t Give Any Explanation.

  Just Say I Cancelled the

  Damn Speech”

  JANUARY 1977

  Jimmy Carter labored alone.

  Patrick Anderson, his campaign speechwriter, had supplied Carter with a first draft of an inaugural address, but the former Georgia governor wrote at least three more drafts himself, his precise, right-slanted handwriting filling every other line of a legal pad. As he sometimes did with important speeches, Carter had written a numbered outline of the points that he wanted to cover (forty-one in all). Each one consisted of two-or three-word summaries—“4. 3rd cent—consider—6”—that corresponded to brief sections of his speech.* Those sections, each on its own piece of paper, were spread in front of him on the large desk in his ranch-style home in Plains, Georgia. He was rearranging them, an engineer looking for the proper structure for his first presidential speech.

  “Carter thinks in lists, not arguments,” speechwriter James Fallows later wrote. Indeed, during his first year in the White House, Carter would instruct Fallows that in preparing speeches he should first “prepare simple list of points to be made in speech, arranged in proper order.”

  The final product was largely unfamiliar to Anderson, with “only a few sentences here and there” from his original draft. Anderson, a writer whose works included a novel called The President’s Mistress, had decided not to accompany Carter to the White House. Carter had never worked with a speechwriter before the campaign, and the early results were not good: his first speechwriter, Democratic political consultant Robert Shrum, quit in a billow of acrimony. Now Carter was preparing to enter the White House with Anderson’s deputy, Fallows, a twenty-seven-year-old former reporter, in the top speechwriting spot.

  Carter had studied his predecessors’ inaugurals, admiring John Kennedy’s, and especially Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 speech, which touched him “most of all.” Like Wilson, Carter thought, he was taking office at a time when the country “desired a return to first principles by their government.” He had discussed the themes with his wife, Rosalynn, who had read the drafts “over and over,” she said. He solicited ideas from friends, aides, and allies. “In simplistic terms, you could say that right now we suffer from a spiritual malaise…a crisis of the spirit,” Gerald Rafshoon, Carter’s television ad guru, advised in a January 4 memo. Carter opted for a more positive focus on a renewal of spirit.

  The president-elect sent a draft of the speech to Fallows, who suggested a new opening. So, on a cold and clear January 20, Carter, wearing a three-piece business suit that he had purchased the previous week in Americus, Georgia, for $175, began his inaugural address with a word of gentle praise: “For myself and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”

  The rest of the speech was understated—some said underwhelming. (Carter had been warned to speak slowly so as to minimize distortion from the loudspeakers, but he felt that he spoke too slowly.) He focused on the theme of a “new spirit” in the country, quoting from his high school teacher and from the biblical prophet Micah.*He spoke of limits and fallibility: “I have no new dream to set forth today, but rather urge a fresh faith in the old dream,” he said, adding: “Your strength can compensate for my weakness, and your wisdom can help to minimize my mistakes.”

  “With his sense of the moment, this first President from the Deep South in more than a century has chosen modest beginnings and has forsaken the traditional boldness of inaugural rhetoric that contributed to the now fallen mystique of the Presidency,” The New York Times reported in a front-page analysis.

  “The more familiar I am with the arguments and assumptions that lie behind your decisions, the more successful I will be in helping present them,” Fallows wrote Carter in a memo on January 21. “For that reason, I would ask that, without getting seriously underfoot, I be routinely included in as many staff meetings, Cabinet meetings, and other gatherings of the sort as possible. During the campaign, I found the ambience of the plane, and the frequent opportunities to talk with [Carter’s top aides]…were [a] great help in providing me that background.”

  A Philadelphia native who had grown up in Redlands, California, Fallows had worked a summer for the consumer advocate Ralph Nader and two years for the liberal Washington Monthly. Before joining the Carter campaign after the Democratic Convention, he had been freelancing in Texas, where his wife was getting her graduate degree. He took the White House gig because “it was clear to me this was the best job I could get in the administration,” he explained. “Speeches were not something I was especially fond of, but there was no area of policy where I had enough credentials to get an equivalently substantial job.”

  The word most often used to describe Fallows was “boyish,” as in “tall, slim, boyish-looking,” (Newsday) and “boyish-faced” (New York Times). “Fallows is bright and younger than most [upper-level staffers], a mere 27 years old, which is approximately 10 years older than he looks,” a Washington Post article reported.

  He headed a small staff. Jerry Doolittle had worked for the United States Information Agency in Laos and then covered the Vietnam War as a freelance reporter. Upon deciding that he wanted to join the Carter campaign, he drove from Connecticut to Georgia, and randomly met Carter’s spokesman, Jody Powell, in the men’s room at campai
gn headquarters. He ended up giving Powell and his wife a ride to the airport. He’s given as references all the people he’s lied to in Southeast Asia, Doolittle recalled Powell saying to his wife, so he’s got to be pretty good; we’ll hire him.

  Griffin Smith was a Rice University graduate who had dabbled in both politics and journalism. He had been the first full-time reporter for Texas Monthly.

  Hendrik “Rick” Hertzberg was a New Yorker who had worked, appropriately, at The New Yorker. Like Fallows, Rick was a Harvard graduate, and the two men knew each other through the informal network of Crimson former staffers. He had done some speechwriting in 1976 for New York governor Hugh Carey.

  The only member of the speechwriting staff who had known Carter before the campaign was a former journalist named Achsah Nesmith. The first woman hired in the newsroom of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Nesmith covered Carter’s 1966 gubernatorial run. Often she was the sole reporter on the trail, and sometimes the traveling party consisted only of Carter, Nesmith, and the campaign plane pilot. She noticed that when speaking to crowds, Carter would look above the heads of his audience. She assumed that it was a trick to help him not lock onto a single pair of eyes, but it gave the impression that he was searching for an exit. One day Carter asked her what she thought of his stump speech. She told him about his search for a door. “He looked hurt and I rather regretted it,” she recalled. But she never saw his eyes dart around the room again.

  Nesmith was also the only southerner on the speechwriting staff. And she was active in her Presbyterian church, making her the only speechwriter who was particularly religious. The speechwriters “were—for the most part, except for Achsah—a little band of secular humanist northern exotic lefties in the midst of this bunch of good old boys,” Hertzberg recalled, referring to Carter’s closest aides, who had come to Washington with the president and were also known as the “Georgia mafia.”*

  One of the first speeches the writers had to work on was a joke—literally. On January 26, Carter was scheduled to speak at the Washington Press Club Dinner, where he was expected to be funny. Humor has a special role in Washington—a politician can generate great goodwill with a witty performance—and it was the Carters’ first “social appearance” as first couple. The mantle of making Jimmy Carter funny fell to Jerry Doolittle.

  At the dinner, Carter started by recounting how after his inauguration he had walked down Pennsylvania Avenue. He “could hear the vast crowd saying, ‘Look, look, look,’” he remarked, “and I was feeling very good until they said, ‘There goes Billy’s brother.’”†Doolittle had studiously avoided jokes about the first brother in the material that he had drafted for Carter. “Oh shit,” he thought. Then Carter rattled off a slew of other unfamiliar jokes. Doolittle was so down afterward that he missed the motorcade back to the White House.

  “In an evening where tradition demands that seriousness never stands in the way of a good joke, [Carter] held his own,” The Washington Post reported the next day. Doolittle received plaudits from his fellow White House staffers, none of whom believed that Carter had written his own material. For the rest of his tenure at the White House, Doolittle was called upon when Carter had to be funny and it earned him, to his irritation, a reputation as Carter’s gag writer. A couple of days after the speech, though, Fallows got back the memo of the Doolittle jokes he had originally passed on to Carter. Carter had written a note on it: “Jim, Very poor—Next time do more work on it & don’t blame Doolittle. At last minute I had to write my own.”

  Fallows had been working on Carter’s first post-inaugural address to the nation—a fireside chat on the president’s legislative program. He included in an early draft of the speech the word “cynical,” which Carter excised with a stern lecture: average people, the president told his speechwriter, would not understand the word. Carter’s test of language was whether a man at a certain gas station in Georgia would understand a word. He replaced “cynical” with “callous.” “Working people understand calluses,” the president said. “They see their hands get hard.” While Fallows endorsed clarity of language, he thought Carter could take it too far, noting later that “When simplifying words Carter too often simplified ideas.”

  Carter was a precise editor in other ways, bracketing phrases for deletion and tightening wordy prose—for example, dropping the “it” in “Tomorrow it will be two weeks since I became president.” A small edit of his fireside chat proved an inadvertent omen to problems that would mar his administration. Discussing his upcoming energy plan, in a passage saying that he would “ask the Congress for its advice and help in enacting responsible legislation,” Carter bracketed and crossed out the “advice and.”

  The president was wearing a beige wool cardigan sweater as he dined with his family on February 2, the evening of the fireside chat. He kept it on when he went to the White House Library for the final rehearsal and asked image man Rafshoon and TV adviser Barry Jagoda what they thought of it. They told him to look at himself in the television monitor and he decided it worked. Later, when Carter’s presidency was faltering, the cardigan would become a symbol of nagging ineptitude, but with the president still enjoying a honeymoon, it was hailed as a sign of Carter’s mastery of modern presidential communications. Time called it “the most memorable symbol of an Administration that promises to make steady use of symbolism.”

  The speech was a pastiche. Carter covered everything from energy to federal government reorganization to his plans to host a live call-in radio show from the Oval Office. The address was modeled on FDR’s old fireside chats, but it lacked Roosevelt’s optimistic confidence (“I am sure to make many mistakes”), and Carter on television could not match the relaxed, informal combination of FDR and radio.

  The president was scheduled to give his first major foreign policy speech at the University of Notre Dame on May 22. As statements of administration policy, such speeches would become a focus of clashes between the hawkish, traditional Cold Warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski, the president’s national security adviser, and the more moderate Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance. The national security adviser would often cut the Secretary of State out of the editing and approval process. “Brzezinski tended to be more devious in his dealings with Vance than Vance was with Brzezinski,” Hertzberg recalled.

  Brzezinski had supervised the drafting of the Notre Dame speech, which would focus on the shortcomings of the United States’ position in the world. The New York Times was shown a copy of the speech, presumably by Brzezinski,* for a preview story running the day Carter was supposed to speak. “President Carter has concluded that the system of Western alliances established after World War II under American leadership no longer suffices to meet the challenge of international conditions,” the Times noted. “He intends to propose a broader international system.” In fact, Carter would give a different speech.

  Doolittle, the speechwriter who had worked as both spokesman and reporter in Southeast Asia, thought the Brzezinski draft reflected a harder-line Cold War view than the president—who had campaigned on withdrawing U.S. troops from the Korean peninsula and taken steps toward normalizing relations with Cuba†—espoused. “Carter seemed to me to have a more rational approach,” he recalled. “If you grew up as I did in the McCarthy era…you lived in this weird world where you expected at any moment to be bombed into oblivion and yet you could look at the empty shelves in the [Soviet] stores, you could look at the failure of the agriculture, you could look at everything they did except for the big show stuff like Sputnik. And you could feel like you’re living in two parallel worlds and one of them is completely blacked out. I thought—and Carter saw this too—and realized you were dealing with a very large and clumsy failed state that could only do nothing.” Doolittle wrote a memo to Fallows arguing that the Notre Dame draft failed to distinguish Carter’s foreign policy from that of his immediate predecessors. Where the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy focused on the pessimistic need to accommodate a strong Soviet Union, Carter pro
ceeded from an optimistic view of a triumphant democracy, Doolittle said. “In the past, our foreign policy was based on the implicit assumption that communism is superior to democracy. So powerful are they that if we give them an inch, they will take the globe. But the truth is that if we give them an inch, they are very likely to choke on it.”

  The speech should explicate what was different about Carter’s approach, Doolittle stressed. “When you are confident of democracy’s future, you are free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in our fear.”

  Fallows passed the memo on to Carter, who used it to overhaul the speech. Hertzberg got the impression that the hawkish Brzezinski—who saw nothing misplaced about fearing the Soviets—did not get to see the revised copy of the speech before it was distributed to the press. This did not stop the national security adviser from backgrounding it to reporters a few minutes later, presenting the “inordinate fear” formulation “as the end result of long cogitation and subtly suggesting it was a victory over Vance,” Hertzberg said. “And actually it had been the joke writer’s passionate memo to Carter and Carter keeping control of his own speech.”

  “Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear. I’m glad that that’s being changed,” Carter told the Notre Dame graduates. “For too many years, we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs. We’ve fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty.”