White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  The speechwriters had produced drafts for a fireside chat on the treaties as early as August 1977, but Carter had not given a speech on the subject. With the Senate set to begin debating the treaties in February 1978, he decided to speak on February 1 to frame the issue and push for ratification. In late January, Doolittle and Fallows produced several drafts of a speech that set up and then knocked down the objections to the treaty, dismissing them as the product of misinformation. Carter’s guidance to Fallows had been to keep the speech simple and to make it tough. “He asked me to make it ‘mean,’” Fallows told Rosalynn Carter.

  Carter hated the speech. “Having made 20 or so speeches/statements on Panama, I was aggravated this weekend to have your draft of completely different emphasis & language,” he wrote Fallows sternly on January 30. He attached a nineteen-page handwritten draft and told Fallows to use it. He also attached his previous statements and a handful of other materials to compose a new version.

  The Carterized version—assembled as instructed from his notes and especially from his previous ad-libbed remarks on the subject—was choppier and less forceful. Where the early Doolittle/Fallows drafts addressed critics head-on, the new version was like a one-man Q&A, with the president asking and answering “common questions” about the treaties. It was a small change, but one that drew some of the conflict and tension from the speech.

  Nevertheless, the Senate ratified the two treaties in March and April, marking a pair of high-point victories for the Carter presidency.

  When the president was invited to address the Los Angeles County Bar Association in early May 1978, Fallows pitched the event as an opportunity to reprise the themes of a speech Carter had given four years earlier as governor of Georgia. Given off the cuff and on short notice—Nesmith, the Georgian speechwriter, thought it was the reason Carter had so much confidence in his ability to speak extemporaneously—the 1974 address was considered a landmark Carter speech.* He had spoken about the need to find solutions for racial and income-related inequities in the justice system: “In every age or every year, we have a tendency to believe that we’ve come so far now, that there’s no way to improve the present system. I’m sure when the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, they felt that was the ultimate in transportation. Well, we haven’t reached the ultimate. But who’s going to search the heart and soul of an organization like yours or a law school or state or nation and say, ‘What can we still do to restore equality and justice or to preserve it or to enhance it in this society?’” Carter liked the idea of making a similar speech now and signed off on an outline. The most important thing about the speech, he told his speechwriter, is that no lawyers work on it (“That made me almost uniquely qualified among the whole staff here,” Fallows observed).

  Fallows sent successive drafts to Carter. Finally, the day before the speech was to be given, the president told him that it was too shrill and did not reflect the judgment that had been put into it. “He hated it,” Fallows recalled. Nevertheless, Carter gave the speech almost exactly as Fallows had written it. “A child of privilege frequently receives the benefit of the doubt; a child of poverty seldom does,” he told the Los Angeles County Bar audience. “We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth—one for every five hundred Americans…. We have more litigation, but I am not sure that we have more justice. No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills. Ninety percent of our lawyers serve ten percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented.”

  The president decided that he wanted the speechwriting process revamped: For major addresses in the future, the speechwriters should canvass authorities on the topic in advance and send their ideas to him. He would select the ones to go into the speech. Hertzberg viewed the change as a potential bureaucratic victory for the beleaguered speech-writers. “One of our biggest problems has been a simple lack of clout,” he wrote in his journal. “Carter simply doesn’t take us as seriously as he takes Stu [Eizenstat] or Hamilton or Jody or the rest. We aren’t in a position to ride roughshod over them or even to get their attention until the last minute. We can send in ideas, but they are, after all, our ideas, and can therefore be ignored. But if the ideas we send in have the names of Famous Authorities on them, they will be treated seriously.”

  Another major change came in the middle of May when Carter asked Jerry Rafshoon, the consultant who had produced his television commercials during the campaign and had remained an informal adviser, to join the White House staff. Rafshoon later recounted that Carter had told him that 90 percent of his advice was good, and that since the other 10 percent did not work because he did not know what was going on in the White House, he should officially join the administration. As part of his new role—which he described to The New York Times as “developing the themes of the presidency and getting them out”—Rafshoon would be in charge of speechwriting.

  The new consult-the-experts scheme got its trial run in Carter’s June 7 commencement speech at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, from which Carter had graduated in 1946. The speechwriters solicited ideas from a list that included former diplomats (Averell Harriman, George Kennan, Dean Rusk), retired military (CIA director Stansfield Turner—a Naval Academy classmate of Carter’s—and retired Admiral Elmo Zumwalt), and a novelist (Alex Haley of Roots), among others.

  On Thursday, June 1, Carter summoned Doolittle (Fallows was out of town) to the Oval Office and took him into the small adjoining study. He thanked Doolittle for the excellent material that the speechwriters had collected, said that it was exactly what he was looking for—but that he was changing the speech. There was a misperception, he told Doolittle, that his foreign policy was in disarray or that there was disharmony between Brzezinski and Vance, when in fact there was none. The speech was going to make clear that everyone in the administration was in perfect agreement. (In his memoirs, Carter noted that the purpose of the speech was to “spell out more clearly the overall relationship between” the United States and the Soviet Union.)

  In fact, the Vance-Brzezinski feud was well known both inside and outside the administration. Reporters would often label Carter pronouncements or policies as having the mark of Brzezinski or Vance. More broad, after giving the conciliatory Notre Dame speech in May 1977, Carter had given a strongly anti-Soviet address at Wake Forest in March 1978. The thrust of his foreign policy was unclear and, to some, confusing.

  Carter gave Doolittle a ten-page, single-spaced typewritten letter from Vance to the president—marked “Top Secret/Nodis [No Distribution]”—recommending a thoughtful speech about U.S.-Soviet relations, aimed at ending the swings between gloom and euphoria. Without naming him, it took several slaps at Brzezinski. Carter told Doolittle that he could borrow the letter and show it to Hertzberg, who would work with Carter on the address, but that while they could take notes, they could not make copies. (He had written: “No copies—return to me,” on it.) Carter said that he would use the Vance letter and opinions that he had solicited from Brzezinski and Turner, and would write a draft over the weekend (the first weekend of June) at Camp David. When Brzezinski’s contribution came in, Doolittle thought it was typical Cold Warrior boilerplate—the opposite of the Vance approach.

  Carter spent the weekend composing in longhand. He again numbered and wrote out the points he wanted to make, determined the proper order in which to arrange them, and then wrote out the speech, which, with some additional rearranging, was substantially the talk he ended up delivering.

  On Wednesday, June 7, Carter strolled the grounds of his alma mater, showed his wife the room in which he had lived as a plebe. He then delivered a speech to the class of new naval officers that he thought would clarify his foreign policy.

  The first part was straight from the Vance letter:

  We must avoid excessive swings in the public mood in our country—from euphoria when things are going well, to despair when they are not; fro
m an exaggerated sense of compatibility with the Soviet Union, to open expressions of hostility. Detente between our two countries is central to world peace. It’s important for the world, for the American public, and for you as future leaders of the Navy to understand the complex and sensitive nature.

  The president talked about his desire for a peaceful world, and about the need to show the Soviets that cooperation was preferable to conflict. “I’m convinced that the people of the Soviet Union want peace,” he said. “I cannot believe that they could possibly want war.” He talked about how the prospects for a SALT II treaty were good. “Beyond this major effort, improved trade and technological and cultural exchange are among the immediate benefits of cooperation between our two countries,” he said. “However, these efforts to cooperate do not erase the significant differences between us. What are these differences?”

  Fallows was watching with the reporters, who had been given advance copies. At this point, one of the newspapermen who had read ahead said, “And now—war!”

  With the next line, the mood swung:

  To the Soviet Union, detente seems to mean a continuing aggressive struggle for political advantage and increased influence in a variety of ways. The Soviet Union apparently sees military power and military assistance as the best means of expanding their influence abroad. Obviously, areas of instability in the world provide a tempting target for this effort, and all too often they seem ready to exploit any such opportunity.

  Carter had essentially taken the Vance letter and the Brzezinski memo and poured them side by side into the same speech. “It had an obvious break in the middle, like the splice in a film,” Fallows recalled.

  No one missed the seam. “Mr. Carter’s speech had aspects that often seemed contradictory,” reported The New York Times, which quoted a pair of unnamed State Department officials, one of whom was “pleasantly surprised” that the speech was not a “Brzezinski-like blast,” the other who was stunned by its “jingoism.” The headline of The Washington Post’s news analysis read: “Two Different Speeches.” Another Post story cited unnamed White House, State Department, and Pentagon officials as saying that since Carter had written the speech himself, it “should not be subjected to rigorous diplomatic analysis” because it “contained ambiguities, ‘oversimplifications’ or ‘mistakes’ in precise phrasing that might be misinterpreted by the Soviets.”

  “It is precisely because our problems have been so constant, not to say repetitive, that we feel some outside force—such as you—is necessary to put things in order,” Fallows wrote to Rafshoon in a five-page memo on June 8, the day after the Annapolis speech. To demonstrate the point, he attached other memos he had written along the same lines over the nearly year and a half the administration had been in office.

  Fallows listed a half-dozen problems with speechwriting, starting with lack of guidance from the president. “In all but the most unusual cases, we end up working in the dark, without any clear instructions about what he wants his speech to say,” he noted, adding that even when Carter gave guidance, he tended to be unsatisfied with the drafts that came back. “Fundamentally, the problem is that the President has not taken—and perhaps never will—the step of looking on us as his extensions, his tools, for saying what he wants to say.”

  That problem was compounded by the fact that the speechwriters’ lack of a relationship with Carter was well known throughout the administration. “The policy staff have a bias toward encyclopedic thoroughness (to avoid leaving anything out), toward hedged and cautious statements (to avoid offending anyone),” Fallows explained. “They also have a bias toward mushy-mouthed language, since that is the way they think and write.” And unless the speechwriters were empowered, these tendencies would continue to muddle the speeches.

  This was more than a catalogue of complaints; it was also a handoff. Fallows sent Carter a letter on June 21 explaining that he wanted to return to journalism and would resign after the fall elections. He would take a job at The Atlantic Monthly. He had joined the administration hoping that his role would allow him to influence the formation of policy—“I had always been interested in one way or another working my will upon the world,” he told an interviewer—but never had the opportunity. He had spent his first few months firing off memoranda on various subjects, from tax policy to smoking to the volunteer army—not to mention things specifically in his purview like speech staff operations—but got virtually no response and eventually gave up. “The mistake was in failing to see that this was a bureaucratic organization, in the sense Max Weber defined: interchangeable people performing strictly limited tasks,” he later noted. “Everyone was safe within the confines of his organization box; few were welcomed outside.”

  “It is precisely because I want to have more influence over public events that I am leaving; to stay here any longer would be to choose the appearance of influence over the reality,” Fallows wrote to Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy. “I have seen that those who write from the outside…can have a far greater impact than those who, on the inside, are supposed to confine themselves to their organizational niche.”

  He did not, Fallows told friends and colleagues, intend to write about his administration experiences.

  Fallows made his first trip to Camp David on Saturday, September 16,1978. Carter had been sequestered there for eleven days with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, trying to forge a peace accord. In November 1977, Sadat had visited Jerusalem and addressed the Knesset, marking the first break in implacable Arab hostility to the Jewish state. But little progress toward a formal agreement had been made since.

  Hoping the quiet of the Maryland woods—not to mention his own ministrations—could spur a breakthrough, Carter had invited the two leaders to his presidential retreat. He was risking his political prestige on an historically intractable problem. Little news had been forthcoming from the summit, and when Fallows arrived he found the mood grim and the outlook bleak. He spent most of the day preparing closing statements for a failed meeting.

  Then, as Fallows later put it to Hertzberg, “Carter broke Begin.” An agreement was reached.

  It was the high point of the Carter presidency—and an opportunity to turn around his faltering political standing. “If Jimmy Carter looks out over the White House fence these next few days through those weary eyes of his, he may find out that America just loves it when a President succeeds, no matter what party he is from or how his brother behaves in public,” Time’s Hugh Sidey wrote. “A successful summit in the Maryland mountains is not a cure for Carter’s leadership problem. But surely it is a kind of achievement at the critical time needed to bring people a little closer to their President, to silence for the moment a lot of petty grievances that grew bigger than they should have because of Carter’s fumbling.”

  Carter addressed the Congress on Monday, September 18. “Finally, let me say that for many years the Middle East has been a textbook for pessimism, a demonstration that diplomatic ingenuity was no match for intractable human conflicts,” he said. “Today we are privileged to see the chance for one of the sometimes rare, bright moments in human history—a chance that may offer the way to peace. We have a chance for peace, because these two brave leaders found within themselves the willingness to work together to seek these lasting prospects for peace, which we all want so badly. And for that, I hope that you will share my prayer of thanks and my hope that the promise of this moment shall be fully realized.”

  Vice President Walter Mondale, in charge of producing the speech, had convened a speech meeting with Fallows and the principal foreign policy advisers. “Jim wrote a very good speech for Carter to give at a joint session of Congress Monday night,” Hertzberg noted in his diary. “It was good for a reason. Instead of being written in the usual way, it was written in a sensible way.”

  The first planning meeting for the 1979 State of the Union address took place in Fallows’s office (he was still ten days from his depart
ure) on November 14. He had just come from playing tennis and was still in his whites. Hertzberg, speechwriter Robert Rackleff, Labor Department officials Walter Shapiro and Paul Jensen (Jensen also in tennis whites having just played with Fallows), and Fallows brainstormed about the big upcoming speech.

  Carter had been interviewed on PBS the night before by Bill Moyers, the Lyndon Johnson aide turned reporter. Moyers had pointed out that Carter’s administration lacked a theme or vision and asked if the president hoped to mold one during the balance of his term. “Well, I think it was also Kierkegaard who said that every man is an exception,” Carter said. “And the multiplicity of responsibilities that a president has, the same issues that our nation has to face, I think, causes some lack of a central focus quite often.”

  The writers assembled in Fallows’s office were persuaded that the State of the Union would be the logical place for Carter to unveil a theme. It would need two words, they decided, the first word almost certainly being “New,” à la “New Deal” or “New Frontier.” (They toyed briefly with “Improved” but quickly returned to “New.”) “New Groundwork?” “New Building Blocks?” Hertzberg—who had pressed hard for a slogan in the 1978 State of the Union address—played around a bit with a Jensen idea and suggested “New Foundation.” The group liked it, though Shapiro, who would do a stint as a Carter speech-writer for several months in 1979, wondered, “Can’t we do better?”