White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

Fallows was leaving, however, and as Rafshoon did not like the idea of a theme—he thought it would be artificial—no one mentioned it to him and it disappeared.

  Fallows’s departure also portended a larger shake-up for the speech-writers. Bernie Aronson, a former official with the United Mine Workers union who had spent the first half of the term as Mondale’s speechwriter, was named as Fallows’s replacement in November, though in a circumscribed capacity: Rafshoon and his deputy, Greg Schneiders, would keep a tighter rein over the writing staff, with Schneiders handling speech assignments.

  Fallows was not the only one on the way out. Doolittle was shown the door, as was another writer, Caryl Conner. Doolittle, who would go on to become a mystery writer, had an irreverent sense of humor and it rankled some of the senior Georgians. He had, the Boston Globe reported, “a reputation for making wisecracks about Carter himself. This is considered improper conduct by members of Carter’s inner circle.” Rafshoon denied that it was a purge, but he and Schneiders were indeed remaking the staff. As early as the previous summer, Rafshoon had told the press, “We need to get some people out of the speechwriting business and some people in.”

  Schneiders in particular had little patience for the speechwriters. “I’ve had it with these people,” he wrote to Rafshoon in November in a note marked “Confidential.” “They may be the ‘fine arts’ division of our operation here, but I think their sensitivities have already been indulged too long.”

  On December 12, Pat Caddell, Carter’s pollster, sent him a memo about the upcoming State of the Union address. The electorate was becoming “volatile…hostile, suspicious, and in many cases, bitter,” he warned. “We must candidly address the damage of past events [such as Watergate and other upheavals from the previous decade and a half]. The country, just like an individual, needs that catharsis. In addition, we need to address the present condition of psychological drift, estrangement from the political process and disbelief in personal efficiency.”

  Carter read the first draft of the State of the Union at Camp David during Christmas week, and did not like it. He summoned Mondale, Eizenstat, Jordan, Rafshoon, Schneiders, and Aronson to an Oval Office meeting on January 2, 1979, to discuss the speech. They met for thirty-seven minutes, from 2:53 pm to 3:30 pm. Talk kept returning to the complex, intractable nature of the problems the country faced—inflation, energy, government inefficiency—and how, because the solutions were all long term, there were no political dividends in addressing them. Afterward, Rafshoon, Aronson, Schneiders, and Hertzberg huddled in Rafshoon’s office, where they resurrected “New Foundation.”

  “The New Foundation does actually sum up Carter’s methodical approach, his tropism for ‘comprehensiveness,’ his fussing over procedural and process reforms like civil service reform and reorganization,” Hertzberg wrote in his diary. “The New Foundation also suggests that nobody should expect a building, because we’re just putting in cinder blocks for some hypothetical future. Cynical but true. Also, on an emotional level, it addresses itself to the fact that people have a sense that the basis of things is crumbling—the family, the community, etc. Everybody’s watching TV, and there’s nothing good on.”

  He added: “Nobody liked the New Foundation idea when I first talked it up, but now it’s filling a vacuum.”

  The theme stayed in the speech. When Carter addressed Congress and the nation on the evening of January 23, he mentioned “foundation” thirteen times. “The problems that we face today are different from those that confronted earlier generations of Americans,” Carter said. “They are more subtle, more complex, and more interrelated…. The challenge to us is to build a new and firmer foundation for the future—for a sound economy, for a more effective government, for more political trust, and for a stable peace—so that the America our children inherit will be even stronger and even better than it is today.”

  Hertzberg had lunched the day before the speech with William Safire, the Nixon speechwriter, now a New York Times columnist, and explained the “New Foundation” concept to him, even drawing him a diagram. “The idea of a ‘new foundation’ is fitting for this President, since the metaphor helps get across the idea of a return to fundamentals, and also helps explain why so few achievements are apparent after two years,” Safire wrote in his column two days after the speech. “The building metaphor helped pull the speech together.”*

  Rafshoon geared up the administration for a big “new foundation” publicity push; the slogan was gaining cultural traction: the political comic strip Doonesbury even devoted a week to ridiculing it. Then Carter brought it to an abrupt halt. At a press conference on the afternoon of January 26, a reporter noted that for two years Carter had avoided an administration slogan. Did he think this one would stick? “I doubt if it will survive,” Carter said. “We are not trying to establish this as a permanent slogan. It was the theme that we established because of extreme logic…for one State of the Union speech.”

  Carter’s discomfort with slogans foisted upon him reflects his larger issues with speechwriting. Once, in an attempt to illustrate the sheer volume of federal regulations that Carter had eliminated, Rafshoon arranged for Carter to have a huge stack of paper sitting on the table during a June 30, 1978, Cabinet Room session with editors and news directors. He was supposed to dump all of the paper into the trash can—providing the evening news with a nice visual. Instead, he carefully explained that the stack of paper, which he described as a “prop,” “happens to be blank” but represented regulations. The evening news led with something else that night. “He regarded the whole process of a cooked-up impression prepared ahead of time with suspicion,” Hertzberg said. “If there was anything that sort of smacked of that kind of calculation he was suspicious of it.” And that suspicion extended to the speechwriters themselves. “My personal guess is that he always felt that what I did was wrong in some way ideally and he was probably wrong for having somebody like me there doing it, that this was somehow a deception being practiced on the American people,” said Gordon Stewart, who joined the speechwriting staff later that spring.

  The drafting of the 1979 State of the Union was also a turning point for Bernie Aronson. Rafshoon and Schneiders could not make up their mind what they wanted from the top speechwriter. In the midst of writing the State of the Union, they told Hertzberg, who had also vied for the spot, to prepare a separate draft. That set up the tragicomic scene of two speechwriters, sitting in their offices across the hallway from one another, each drafting a State of the Union address. “It was a bad scene from a human point of view,” Hertzberg recalled. “It was an unpleasant period.” With little fanfare Rafshoon increasingly favored Hertzberg, who ended up assuming the duties and eventually the title of chief speechwriter. Aronson eventually became a deputy to London Butler, Jordan’s assistant who handled labor relations.

  In mid-April, Fallows published an article, “The Passionless Presidency,” in The Atlantic—the first installment of a two-part indictment of Carter and his staff. He criticized the president for running a flat, bureaucratic administration without vision. “For certain aspects of his job—the analyst and manager parts—Carter’s method serve [sic] him well,” Fallows wrote. “He makes decisions about solar power installations and the B-1 [bomber] on the basis of output, payload, facts, not abstract considerations. But for the part of his job that involves leadership, Carter’s style of thought cripples him. He thinks he ‘leads’ by choosing the correct policy; but he fails to project a vision larger than the problem he is tackling at the moment.”

  Fallows was not malicious: he was trying to jolt the administration out of bland lethargy before it was too late. But his choice of a public forum backfired. “It was very, very accurate,” Hertzberg recalled. “It was a very, very, good piece…. We were glad that he wrote that piece, but not that he published it.”

  In early April, Hertzberg espied an early copy of the article in Powell’s office on which Carter had written a note: “We all have to make a living.
”

  “Do not begin so many sentences with ‘I think,’ ‘And,’ or ‘But.’” In a nine-point, handwritten note dated May 3, Carter was giving his speechwriters basic drafting tips. “Do not overuse ‘decade.’” Much of it was remedial grammar: avoid split infinitives, avoid ending sentences with prepositions. “It is not ‘with Jerry and I.’ Minimize the use of commas.” It was emblematic of Carter: down in the weeds, focused on process. Gordon Stewart, who started that spring, stopped using commas entirely, just to see if Carter would notice. A couple of days later he got a terse note back saying it was okay to use them.

  Rafshoon had larger issues on his mind, such as how to salvage the Carter presidency. By mid-May 1979, the president’s approval ratings had dipped into the low thirties. He trailed Senator Edward M. Kennedy in a potential Democratic primary match-up for the presidential nod. Inflation was at 13 percent annually—a four-year high. In January, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi—with whom Carter spent the 1977–78 New Year’s Eve—had fled from Iran into exile, allowing Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini to return to the country from France and seize control, eventually establishing a theocracy. The revolution had caused a spike in gas prices and lines of cars were starting to stretch out from gas stations.

  “In politics—or at least 1980 presidential politics—style is everything,” Rafshoon wrote Carter in a memo that summer. The problem, Rafshoon argued, was not that Carter had failed to provide leadership, but rather that “you don’t look like you’re providing leadership…. You’re going to have to start looking, talking and acting like more of a leader if you’re to be successful—even if it’s artificial. Look at it this way: changing your position on issues to get votes is wrong; changing your style (like the part in your hair)* in order to be effective is just smart and, in the long run, morally good. I know you think it’s phony and that you’re fine the way you are but that pride is, by far, your greatest political danger.”

  Specifically, Rafshoon argued, Carter needed to improve his speaking style. “Your ability (or lack of it) to move an audience and a nation by your words is no longer a minor matter of personal concern to you. It is the single greatest reason (under our control) why your Presidency has not been more successful than it has.”

  By the time Carter departed for a seven-nation economic summit in Japan on June 23, the domestic situation was melting down. Gas lines were growing longer and tempers shorter, independent truckers were on strike, and inflation remained stifling. It was Carter’s second foreign trip in less than a week: He had returned on June 18 from a four-day summit * in Vienna with Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev that had produced another SALT Treaty. His senior advisers had discussed a fireside chat between trips, but no one could come up with a compelling message.

  Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s chief domestic adviser, was not sure that Carter and the others with him in Tokyo understood the gravity of the situation. When he and Vice President Mondale briefed members of Congress on the Japanese summit for two hours on June 27, all the legislators wanted to discuss were domestic issues. They spent the whole time talking about gasoline-related problems and how much they feared—“members are literally afraid,” Eizenstat told Carter—going back to their districts to face their irate constituents.

  “Back home everything is going down the drain,” Hertzberg wrote in his diary in Japan on June 27. “We are out of touch with the country to a frightening degree. How else is it possible that we left on this trip without doing something, anything, any appearance of anything, about the gas lines?”

  On June 28, Eizenstat sent Carter a memo on energy. “Since you left for Japan, the domestic energy problem has continued to worsen,” he wrote. Gas lines were spreading from the East to the Midwest, causing tempers to flare and instances of violence to crop up; gas station operators were threatening to strike and the price of gas had risen 55 percent since the start of the year. “I do not need to detail for you the political damage we are suffering from all of this,” Eizenstat added. “It is perhaps sufficient to say that nothing which has occurred in the administration to date…[has] added so much water to our ship. Nothing else has so frustrated, confused, angered the American people—or so targeted their distress at you personally.”

  That day, Carter canceled a planned three-day stay in Hawaii on the return trip. Instead, he would fly directly back to Washington to consult with aides on the gasoline crisis. On June 29, the speechwriters who remained in the White House sent Rafshoon and Hertzberg a four-page “eyes-only” memorandum on the situation. “The mood in the country is grim,” they wrote. “People are mad—fighting mad. The situation has deteriorated alarmingly since the President left for Japan.” The public does not understand what is happening or what the administration is doing about it, the speechwriters said. “We strongly advise against another televised energy speech—unless the President has a bold, new, and ambitious policy to announce. People want action on energy. They do not want Presidential preaching or the administration piously saying, ‘We told you so, but you didn’t listen to us.’”

  Carter returned to Washington on Monday, July 2, and plunged into a series of meetings on the crisis, including a 2:30 pm gathering in the Roosevelt Room that was so crowded Hertzberg sat on the floor and had to be alert not to get hit in the head when the door opened. Rafshoon, Jordan, Powell, Eizenstat, cabinet secretary Jack Watson, and Hertzberg met with Carter in the Oval Office for an hour at 4:15 pm, sitting in a semicircle around the president’s desk. They were exhausted. Carter mentioned that he had had trouble staying awake during some of the day’s meetings. The group debated back and forth whether he should give a speech. Carter was not inclined to.

  Though Eizenstat was opposed, he was so intent on being an honest broker that he made too strong a case in favor. Powell and Rafshoon chimed in that Carter should go on television just to show the people that he was doing something. Carter said he did not like the idea of conning the voters. But no one made a strong case against a speech, and Carter agreed to speak on Thursday, July 5. He would spend a day resting at Camp David, he said, and then wanted to see a draft. It would be his fifth speech to the nation on energy, and he was aware that each succeeding speech had drawn a smaller and smaller audience.

  Hertzberg and Rafshoon then went to Eizenstat’s office to discuss the speech. In a moment of bravado, Rafshoon picked up the telephone and asked for the television network press pool. “The president will address the nation at 9 pm on Thursday night,” he said, adding after a pause, “He wants to talk about nationalizing the TV networks.” Then after another pause: “Energy of course.” Hanging up, he explained that the person on the other end of the phone had said, “I was wondering when you were going to call.” They had the airtime—but there was no speech yet, and in their exhausted state Hertzberg doubted one of any quality could be produced. Gordon Stewart, who actually wrote the draft, agreed—“I was just feeling worse and worse about it,” he later said. “I never felt worse about anything, and I knew it was not going to fly.”

  Two days later, at Camp David, the speech draft in hand, Carter shifted course. In a fifteen-minute conference call with Vice President Mondale, Rafshoon, deputy press secretary Rex Granum (filling in for Powell), and Jordan (with Hertzberg, having dismantled the mouthpiece on the extra phone in Rafshoon’s office, listening in), Carter said that he was not going to give the speech. He said he did not want to “bullshit the American people.”

  Granum asked if he could tell reporters that Carter had not liked the draft he was given, and the president said no, that the speech was fine—it was just more of the same. “Don’t give any explanation,” he said. “Just say I cancelled the damn speech.” Mondale, Carter recalled, “almost lost control of himself” about the decision. “I felt a remarkable sense of relief and renewed confidence after I canceled the speech, and began to shape the thoughts that I would put into next week’s work,” Carter wrote in his diary.

  His confidence was not widely shared. “President Cart
er has reached the low point not only of his Administration but perhaps of the postwar Presidency,” The New York Times’s Tom Wicker wrote. “Mr. Carter’s celebrated cancellation of his energy speech may well have been the worst public relations blunder since Richard Nixon’s ‘Saturday Night Massacre.’”

  The president remained at Camp David, with no word forthcoming on why he had cancelled the speech or what he planned to do. Over the next ten days, he brought more than one hundred people from all walks of life—members of Congress, religious leaders, labor leaders, governors, mayors, county supervisors, and ordinary Americans—to the mountain retreat. The country wondered what was going on in the Maryland mountains, with most of the news coming from reports by returning guests. Though the crisis was energy-related, Carter was discussing a broader, more diffuse set of problems. “He said he had a lot of time to think, during his recent travels,” said Clark Clifford, the former Truman speechwriter and Johnson Defense Secretary, now a Washington wise man. “He had the feeling that the country was in a mood of widespread national malaise.”

  Hertzberg and Gordon Stewart were summoned to Camp David on Monday, July 9, to start preparing a speech. “We were off in some cabin in a sweatshop,” Hertzberg recalled. “Every once in a while you would look out the window and see some Time magazine cover subject wandering around.”

  The administration was split as to what kind of speech the president should give. “For the last several days, I have been compiling speech suggestions from everyone connected with this problem—from the extreme optimism of the Vice President to Stu’s [Eizenstat’s] desire to have a very substantive speech to Pat’s [Caddell’s] apocalyptic first draft,” Rafshoon wrote to the president on July 10. “People don’t want to hear you talk about their problems and they certainly don’t want to hear you whine about them. They don’t want to hear you talk about hope and confidence. They don’t want to hear you talk about leadership. They want to perceive you beginning to solve the problems, inspire confidence by your actions, and lead. You inspire confidence by being confident. Leadership begins with a sense of knowing where you’re going.”