White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  The president spoke with “obvious intensity and feeling,” Time reported, adding that one listener said afterward, “This is either a very important speech or a prayer.”

  The “inordinate fear” line became one of Carter’s best remembered,* though the sudden switch of speeches caught some White House insiders by surprise. “President Carter has left many of his administration’s own officials wondering how literally to take the soaring rhetoric of his foreign policy speech at Notre Dame University,” The Washington Post reported. “It clearly was the President’s intention to have the address serve as a major guidepost for the future, associates say. However, even enthusiasts cannot foretell precisely what the speech foreshadows in specific policies, for it was cast, as one admirer noted, in ‘rather Delphic terms.’”

  Critics had no problem forecasting the problems to which the speech would lead. Former California Republican governor Ronald Reagan warned that the Soviet Union was too dangerous for the United States to start criticizing allies. New York Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned against being distracted from “the reality of the military and ideological competition with the Soviet Union which continues and, if anything, escalates.” Henry Kissinger, who had received withering criticism from candidate Carter, warned that the president was underestimating Communist forces in Western Europe.

  The speechwriters sometimes used less conventional ways to get their thoughts to Carter.

  He had been invited to address the Urban League’s national convention on July 25, and had declined. When Nesmith joined his staff, Carter had told her to let him know if he was doing something wrong. She wrote him a six-page memorandum arguing in favor of League appearance. “All the recent policy statements have dealt with bombs and bombers, policy, reorganization, budget-balancing, energy—all things that either seem far away from the lives of the poor and minorities and the problems of cities or which, if they reach them at all, seem to vaguely threaten jobs and other opportunities,” Nesmith wrote.

  When, even with Fallows’s support, staff secretary Rick Hutcheson dismissed Nesmith’s concerns as a “scheduling complaint,” she took matters into her own hands. “You can arrange to be in the basement corridor when he was going to be passing through, there were ways a lot of times that you could have a minute or two with him,” she recalled. She passed Carter a note saying that he should address the Urban League and that her message to him had not been allowed to get through. He made the speech.

  But often the speechwriters were frustrated by the remoteness of their boss. “He had not gotten used to using speechwriters, didn’t much like the idea of using them, ever,” Nesmith recalled. “He saw it as a kind of necessary evil.” Hertzberg added: “He did not particularly value or see the importance of [speechwriters]…. He essentially had become the president without a speechwriter. So how important could a speech-writer be—and the speeches that had made him president were this heartfelt, off-the-cuff stuff.”

  Especially in the first year, Carter often eschewed prepared remarks, believing that he could speak off the cuff just as successfully. “The President believes it is much more effective to appear unprepared than to seem to be well-prepared,” an anonymous longtime aide told The New York Times. In October, Carter took a six-state swing to promote his energy program, which was stalled in Congress. But his ad-libbed remarks were so diffuse that the message failed to punch through. “Carter Campaigns in Iowa,” the Des Moines Register reported. “Carter, on Six-State Trip, Defends Policies, But Avoids the Jobs Bill,” read The New York Times headline.

  Fallows took the issue directly to the president. “As you know, I share your belief that you should speak extemporaneously whenever you can,” Fallows wrote to Carter. “But the results of last weekend’s trip suggest to me that sometimes we must choose a different approach. Specifically, I think that when we are trying to sell a substantive program—the energy plan, the Canal,* tax reform, SALT [ongoing negotiations for a second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty]—we have to prepare texts, release them in advance to the press, and have you use them.”

  Without proper emphasis and guidance, Fallows argued, the media was unlikely to pick up the specific story line that the administration wanted. “One phrase from your Notre Dame speech—about outgrowing our ‘inordinate fear of communism’—has turned up all over the place in columns and editorials about your foreign policy,” he wrote. “If you had given the speech extemporaneously, you and your audience might have felt more elated about your delivery, but it is far less likely that journalists would have dug up the recorded transcripts of the speech to find phrases to quote.”

  He added: “I am not talking about anything illicit, underhanded, corrupting, or unfair. This is not a matter of trying to trick the press into doing our work for us. The only weapon we need in these matters is our ideas, and I think we must do a better job of giving our ideas a chance to speak for themselves.”

  Doolittle sent in a memo along the same lines, arguing that though Carter might be more comfortable extemporizing, it did not work on all occasions. “While Arthur Ashe would no doubt feel more comfortable on the golf course with a racket in his hand, he would do better with a nine-iron,” he pointed out.

  The ineffective energy trip revealed another communications problem: Carter had given a pair of major speeches in April unveiling his energy plan, one broadcast nationwide in which he declared, in a passage he wrote himself, that the country’s effort to combat the looming energy crisis must be the “moral equivalent of war,”* and then an address to a joint session of Congress two days later. And then his administration had moved on to other things. “There’s a real aversion to planning for effect,” one of the speechwriters anonymously told a reporter. “There’s no news management. No follow through. Look at energy—there’s an example. We put out an energy program and then there’s no follow through for months.”

  In mid-October, the presidential focus moved back onto energy and a speech was set for November 8, as the House and Senate prepared to try to merge into a single bill the energy legislation that each had passed. Richard Goodwin, the Kennedy and Johnson speechwriter, was brought in for a week to work with Fallows. Not pleased with the results, Carter wrote his own version of the speech in a single day.

  It was a disaster. “In the unwritten book of presidential records, many entries are clustered under the heading ‘Worst Speech Ever Given,’” Time’s Hugh Sidey wrote. “So it is inevitable that Jimmy Carter will make a run at the record. He probably did not break it in his televised energy talk last week, but it was a commendable warmup…. He said nothing new. He smiled as he described an energyless catastrophe. He issued this clarion call: ‘All of us in government need your help.’ And he explained further. ‘These are serious problems, and this has been a serious talk.’”

  Syndicated columnist Nicholas von Hoffman was even tougher. “The talk around town is that President Carter is going to be a one term president, but the question is when is he going to start serving it,” von Hoffman wrote. “His energy speech of the other evening was so poor it had to have been made by someone who hopes to be president some day, not by one who is…. Either the people who hand Carter these texts should send away to the Great Writers’ School, or, heaven forefend, the president is writing his own stuff.”

  The speech marked a turning point, as Carter began to accept that he could not do everything himself. “There is a silver lining in this abysmal speech,” Fallows wrote to his staff. Carter had sent a caustic note to Fallows and press secretary Jody Powell, saying that since his workload on the speech had been “tripled” by having to write it himself, he wanted ideas on how to revamp the system. “I figure this is our opportunity to suggest such novel ideas as him letting us know what he wants before we write the speech,” Fallows added.

  Fallows spent the rest of the month devising and getting Carter to okay a new, formal system of approval, which would involve getting the necessary sign-offs from senior staff, br
inging Carter into the process earlier to shape the speech, and getting him a finished product in plenty of time to put his own finishing touches on it. It would be the first of several such procedural reorganizations. “From time to time the president would be dissatisfied with something done at the last minute and he’d get Jim and Jim would come back with yet another plan of how we were going to do it and the next time a major speech came up we would follow the plan and it would get shot down in flames,” Doolittle recalled. “It never worked in any explainable fashion, it just sort of grew.”

  “Morale in this department isn’t exactly low, it’s just sort of sluggish,” Hertzberg wrote in his journal on December 2.

  That same day, Fallows sent a three-page, five-point memorandum to his immediate boss, Jody Powell, summarizing the problems plaguing the president and his speeches. Carter was stuck in campaign mode, he said. Before the election and during the initial months of the term, the challenge had been to sell the president as a person; but now “the President will be judged as a leader, not a candidate, and the function of his public appearances is to educate the people and explain his policies.” The White House staff arranged campaign-style events that had no larger purpose—or when they did have a specific policy to unveil or message to push, it would get drowned out by the other Carter events. “We can always round up a crowd to listen to the President at short notice, but we can’t afford to have him appear too often with little to say,” Fallows urged.

  Finally, he implored: “No speechwriter can do a decent job if he or she doesn’t know what his employer thinks. The earlier the President can let us know his wishes, and the more we’re allowed at least to observe the first stages of policy making, the better job we can do explaining the policy that’s finally decided.”

  It was good advice, and reads like basic communications planning, but it went largely unheeded.

  Part of the problem the speechwriters faced was illustrated when Newsday reporter Martin Schram wrote in December about visiting the speechwriters’ office. He noticed that the writers kept referring to the senior administration staff as “they.” “That is part of the difficulty,” he wrote. “The Carter speechwriters are outsiders within. They were never part of the inner circle of the Carter campaign and they are not advisers who are consulted with respect by the President or his handful of policy and image makers.” Schram mentioned to the speechwriters that he had just met with Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s top aide,* with whom he discussed the Panama Canal—a subject for which the speech-writers had prepared several drafts without any indication as to when a speech would be given. “You actually spoke to him?” one writer asked. A second writer: “Then you know more than we do.” And a third: “What’s going to happen?”

  Carter was scheduled to take a trip around the world to close out 1977, stopping in Poland, spending New Year’s Eve in Tehran, and on to India before heading back west through Saudi Arabia, France, and Belgium. Hertzberg, who had developed a specialty in foreign affairs, was assigned to write Carter’s address to the Indian Parliament. He drafted it in consultation with a National Security Council staffer, but accidentally discovered that Brzezinski deputy David Aaron had heavily rewritten the speech—not simply policy-related changes, but also stylistic ones. When the irate Hertzberg went to Brzezinksi’s office to complain personally about the situation, he found the national security adviser and his team sipping champagne and some Russian vodka that had been a gift from Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko.

  Hertzberg knocked back a shot of the vodka in the spirit of collegiality, but talk quickly turned to the speech and Hertzberg vented: The speechwriters were supposed to be the experts on stylistic matters and should be consulted when changes were made to their work. Brzezinksi affected the attitude that such disagreements were easily ironed out. Hertzberg left feeling somewhat mollified. “The idea of me sitting around arguing with people like Brzezinski about what the President should say is so absurd, and yet it happens,” Hertzberg marveled in his diary. “What a quirk. Playing with the big boys.” Nevertheless, he remained skeptical of Brzezinski, whom he said could be “bland, disingenuous and a double-dealer.”

  The next day, December 22, Brzezinski urged Carter to abolish the speechwriting staff and instead create a foreign policy speechwriting spot in the National Security Council and move the other speechwriters into the domestic affairs office. The idea went nowhere. Ostensibly, the incident ended well all around: Hertzberg eventually conceded that the modifications by the NSC staff worked, while Brzezinski sent him a cable the day after the speech reading, “Your speech the highpoint of the trip so far. Congratulations.”

  But the run-in was one in a series of skirmishes between the speech-writers and Brzezinski. “We were kind of allied with Vance because Zbig wanted to control when Vance would see it and how long he’d have to look at it and he wanted it to be as messy and irritating as possible,” Hertzberg said. The speechwriters eventually developed a backchannel to Vance to make sure that his views were incorporated into speeches.

  Two days after Hertzberg’s run-in with Brzezinski, on December 23, Fallows and he were in a meeting with Stuart Eizenstat, who was another member of the “Georgia mafia” and Carter’s domestic policy adviser, plotting out the 1978 State of the Union address. The Carter program needed a catch phrase, Hertzberg argued, a slogan akin to “New Deal” or “New Frontier.” The administration, he said, was almost as innovative as Roosevelt’s and might be more so than JFK’s. A successful slogan would not only serve public relations purposes but could also act as a guide for bureaucrats and others within the administration and galvanize them.* Carter would strongly resist something like this, Eizenstat warned—an assertion with which Hertzberg could not disagree, but he thought it worth trying.

  Hertzberg hit upon a phrase within two weeks. A friend told him that the civil rights activist John Lewis talked about building a “beloved community,” and Hertzberg was immediately taken with the phrase: It nicely summed up everything Carter was trying to achieve. “I worry that the picture people are getting of the Administration is getting to be a very cold one,” Hertzberg noted in his diary. “Carter was elected on warmth and love, and now he’s looking cold.”

  Hertzberg sent a nine-page, single-spaced memorandum to Fallows on January 5, 1978, pitching both the general need for a slogan and specifically Jimmy Carter’s “Beloved Community” (“I’m beginning to think of it in capital letters,” he noted two days later). “Every reforming President of this century has adopted a brief, evocative phrase summarizing his program and approach,” Hertzberg wrote. “Three of these phrases were adopted after the Administration identified with it had been in office for some time…. There must be a vocabulary of common feeling between leader and led—a vocabulary based to some degree on what people are thinking. But it must go far beyond merely telling people what they want to hear. It must embody the people’s inchoate yearnings and combine them with the President’s own vision of where he wants to take the country.”

  The phrase was worked into the opening and peroration of drafts of the State of the Union. On January 10, Carter sent a handwritten note to Fallows admonishing him that the latest draft of the speech “needs a lot of work…. Your draft has a real need for a) memorable lines b) applause lines.” Fallows had put in thematic material at the start of the speech, where Carter would compare himself with Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Harry Truman as presidents who made great reforms without acute crises menacing the country. The president kept taking most of this thematic material out.

  “Whenever he edited a speech, he did so to cut out the explanatory portions and add ‘meat’ in the form of a list of topics,” Fallows recounted. Like Eisenhower before him, Carter avoided flashy rhetoric. “If you sent a speech to Carter and it had some sort of grandiloquent, lofty piece to it and if it wasn’t substantive, he would cross that out, then there would be a quote or some poetry and he would cross that out,” said Bernie Ar
onson, who would succeed Fallows as top speechwriter. “And [after] you’d crossed all that out, you’d have an engineer’s treatise.”

  Nesmith suspected that Carter’s aversion to such oratorical style was rooted in his southern background. “He distrusted rhetoric in a way because southern politicians had used rhetoric so much to bring out the worst in people,” she said.

  Over the next nine days, “Beloved Community” was in and out of the speech, as was Eizenstat’s favorite—and the inaugural theme—“New Spirit” (“yes, he capitalized,” Hertzberg noted in his diary). At one point Eizenstat quipped that he would accept “New Spirit of the Beloved Community.” When Carter delivered the speech on January 19, “new spirit” was mentioned twice, and “beloved community” once. Neither won much notice.

  Carter was scheduled to give a nationwide address at the start of February 1978, pushing for ratification of the Panama Canal treaties that had capped fourteen years of international negotiations. Rioting in Panama in 1959 and 1964 had cost three American soldiers and twenty-one Panamanians their lives, and after the latter incident President Johnson had started work on a new treaty governing the canal. By the time Carter entered the White House, the negotiation was a hot political topic—coming so soon after Vietnam, the fate of the canal was in some quarters a point of national pride and strength. Ronald Reagan had battered Gerald Ford in the 1976 GOP primary by painting the potential treaty as a threat to national security interests. “We bought it. We paid for it. We built it. And we are going to keep it,” Reagan repeatedly said on the campaign trail.

  The August 1977 agreement with the Panamanian government only sharpened the criticisms. Two treaties had been signed: one covered U.S. administration of the canal for the balance of the twentieth century, and the other transferred control over the canal to Panama in 2000 while stipulating U.S. rights of access. Ford and all living former secretaries of state endorsed the treaty, and it enjoyed majority backing in public opinion polls. But the Republican National Committee voted in 1977 to oppose it, and conservatives saw it variably as a sign of U.S. weakness, a threat to national security, or a massive giveaway.