White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  All sides gathered in the main lodge at Camp David for what Eizenstat described as the most acrimonious debate of the entire administration. Caddell, who had produced a 107-page memorandum about the country’s spiritual problem, favored a broader speech on that topic, an idea that Eizenstat, Rafshoon, and Mondale opposed. Rumors were spreading that Carter had had a mental breakdown, and they feared that if he went on television to talk about something ephemeral like a crisis of confidence it would play into that notion. Eizenstat argued that the president needed to give an energy speech that had a detailed plan for dealing with the gasoline problem. A spiritual crisis was a non sequitur, he said. People do not care about spirit, Mondale said. But Caddell was in tune with Carter, who had been ruminating about the broader question.

  Hertzberg worried that it would be Annapolis all over again: two speeches visibly jammed into one text. All the while Carter watched the debate unfold, keeping his own counsel.

  The meeting continued. Stewart kept baiting Eizenstat on the energy program—It’s not compelling, Stu—until Eizenstat exploded, rattling off an impassioned summation of the energy program that became the basis of that section of the speech. After that, Hertzberg and Stewart pulled most of the speech together in less than an hour; Carter supplied the rest with a self-critical opening. The disparate ideas in the speech would be fused: Carter could argue that there was a spiritual crisis in the country, and that it was so broad and pervasive that it could not be addressed all at once. Then it would pivot on energy: if the country could solve the energy crisis, it would help restore the people’s confidence and start rolling back the sense of despair. The solution “made it possible to pass this thing off as an actual, coherent speech, when it was actually a hodgepodge of different sensibilities,” Stewart recalled.

  Carter had a final meeting with his aides at Camp David. Concluding the meeting, he told the group to leave him alone in the room so that he could practice on the TelePrompTer in front of the camera. Stewart was working on the speech that Carter would give in Kansas City the day after the national address, so he was allowed to stay.

  Before joining the speechwriting staff, Gordon Stewart had split his time between politics and the theatre. A native of Chicago’s South Side, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Oberlin College, and had a master’s degree in European history from the University of Chicago, a certificate in theatre and music from the University of Vienna, and a master’s in fine arts from the Yale University Drama School. Hertzberg and he had met in New York in 1976 when Rick was writing for Hugh Carey and Stewart was working for Mayor John Lindsay. He had been directing The Elephant Man on Broadway when a collapsed lung forced him to withdraw from the production. Hertzberg recruited him to the White House, and the two lived in neighboring apartments in D.C.

  Listening to Carter rehearse his speech, Stewart’s directorial instincts took over. He muttered to himself, interrupting the president. Carter glared over at him. I’m sorry, Stewart said, I didn’t hear that. Carter started over, speaking louder. Stewart chatted out loud to an imaginary person sitting next to him: I don’t know what this guy is talking about, he said, something about a sickness. Carter was becoming noticeably angry.

  Mr. President, Stewart said, what I’m trying to suggest is that you are just not telling me to hear you. I am going to get up and start walking out the door, the speechwriter-cum-director told his boss, and I would like to see if you can stop me.

  Carter started reading again. Stewart sat and listened and then got up and wandered around the room, prompting Carter to raise his voice. Then, when Stewart headed toward the door, Carter put more authority into his delivery. Stewart turned—Now you’ve got it. He told the president: I don’t have to listen to you just because you’re the president; if I’m in a bar, I can and will change the channel. You have to care whether I listen to you.

  It was a basic director’s trick, the kind of thing employed in beginner’s acting class, and it worked.

  On the evening of July 15, Carter started his speech with a mea culpa, which he had written himself, a confession of presidential ineptitude that involved reading from the notes he had taken during his meetings at Camp David: “Mr. President, you are not leading this nation—you’re just managing the government.” Or: “Don’t talk to us about politics or the mechanics of government, but about an understanding of our common good.”

  Then he turned to the underlying problems the nation faced:

  The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

  After stressing the country’s historic but faltering confidence, he made the pivot:

  Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.

  He delivered the speech with force and passion. “The rhythm of his speech—the emphases and the pauses—made you think that in his mind’s eye Carter was not seeing the camera and TelePrompTer, but the faces of those early audiences [from the 1976 campaign]—waiting for the nod of the heads that told him they had understood and agreed with his last point,” The Washington Post’s David Broder wrote. “As a result, in this most critical speech of his presidency, he delivered his text more effectively than he has ever done before. He avoided the sing-song rhythm, the misplaced stresses, and the falsetto squeaks that have marred past performances. His voice was strong throughout, and, on occasions, ringing.”

  The voters responded: The White House received a record volume of mail, most of it positive, and Carter’s poll ratings shot up by 11 points overnight. Carter thought it his best speech ever.

  Two days later, however, he asked for the resignations of every member of his cabinet, saying that he would decide which ones to accept. He let five cabinet members go, including the Treasury and Energy secretaries and Attorney General Griffin Bell. He hoped this would mark a new beginning for his presidency, with fresh ideas and new faces recharging the government. But the move came across as weakness and sent the administration back into the polling darkness. “On an individual basis, each of the dismissals was not surprising; a few had been long expected,” Time reported. “But the sum total of them, and Carter’s wholesale slaughter approach, damaged the brave new leader image he is trying so hard to create.”

  Though Carter never uttered the word in the July speech, to this day it is known as the “malaise” speech. The word was in the air—Carter had used it in his meetings at Camp David, and then Caddell used it in a background briefing with reporters—and as the speech became a symbol of Carter’s futility, it stuck.

  Rafshoon left the administration in the fall of 1979. The speechwriters would again have a new boss. While it might have made sense to simply make Hertzberg senior staff and have him report directly to the president, the speechwriters ended up under Alonzo McDonald. McDonald was the White House staff secretary, which meant that he controlled the paper flow around the West Wing. “Of all the problems of the presidency, speechwriting is absolutely the worst,” Carter told him. “It’s a plague of this office.”

  The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library was dedicated in Boston on October 20, and Carter was on hand to speak. It was a moment fraught with meaning: A president damned for his lack of eloquence paying tribute to one immortalized by his words. (When Hertzberg suggested in a memo that Carter’s message should be that he was carrying out Kennedy’s legacy, the president wrote in the margin, “Rather, He & I both carry out legacy of America. I’m not carrying out his legacy.”) Carter sat on the dais a seat apart from Senator Edward M. Kennedy, brother of the fallen pr
esident, presumptive challenger to the falling one.

  It was a speech that Carter prepared in a manner more like JFK’s than was his norm: he got involved in the process early and worked extensively on it. He told Hertzberg, I know that I approach this like an engineer and I often edit out good rhetoric, and you just have to fight me on that.

  Carter opened the speech with the right humorous touch. “In a press conference in March 1962, when the ravages of being president were beginning to show on his face, [JFK] was asked this two-part question: ‘Mr. President, your brother Ted said recently on television that after seeing the cares of office on you, he wasn’t sure he would ever be interested in being President,’” Carter said, to general laughter. “And the questioner continued, ‘I wonder if you could tell us whether, first, if you had it to do over again, you would work for the Presidency and, second, whether you can recommend this job to others?’ The President replied, ‘Well, the answer to the first question is yes, and the second is no. I do not recommend it to others—at least for a while.’” There was more laughter and the Carter gave the kicker, which he had written himself: “As you can well see, President Kennedy’s wit and also his wisdom is certainly as relevant today as it was then.”

  Carter spoke eloquently about Kennedy’s presidency—his role as “not only a maker of history but a writer of history” (another Carter addition), his accomplishments, and the “things he set in motion,” both at home and abroad. Then he took an atypically personal turn:

  On that November day, almost sixteen years ago, a terrible moment was frozen in the lives of many of us here. I remember that I climbed down from the seat of a tractor, unhooked a farm trailer, and walked into my warehouse to weigh a load of grain. I was told by a group of farmers that the President had been shot. I went outside, knelt on the steps, and began to pray. In a few minutes, I learned that he had not lived. It was a grievous personal loss—my president. I wept openly for the first time in more than ten years—for the first time since the day my own father died.

  Hertzberg did not include in the speech the rest of Carter’s recollection: Going to a Georgia Tech football game in the days after the assassination, and being sickened when some of the spectators booed during a moment of silence for the late president. “I wish I’d put that in the speech and drawn the lesson that now it’s a golden glow and we look back in the past and everybody claims kinship with Kennedy and how much they all loved Kennedy—but they hated Kennedy, and they hated him for what he stood for,” Hertzberg said in 2006. “I wish we’d put that in.”

  The Iranian situation worsened. Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, the deposed shah, had been admitted to the United States for medical treatment on October 22. Slightly less than two weeks later, on Sunday, November 4, thousands of Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and seized as hostages the U.S. citizens there, plunging the Carter White House into an administration-defining crisis.

  Domestically the Kennedy challenge proved more potent in theory than in fact. Carter had stumbled out of the gate: When CBS journalist Roger Mudd asked Ted Kennedy why he wanted to be president, the senator’s answer was rambling and incoherent. Carter used a “Rose Garden strategy” to great effect, appearing on the job while declining to meet Kennedy in any debates. Americans were being held hostage in Iran and the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan—the kind of international crises that rallied voters to the president. Carter won a string of early victories, in the Iowa, Maine, and Minnesota caucuses.

  Achsah Nesmith went to New Hampshire to campaign for Carter. Canvassing door to door gave her a bad feeling: Carter had pro-gun voters on his side. He had anti-Kennedy voters, and disaffected voters. But she did not find a lot of pro-Carter voters. On February 26, 1980, Carter won 49 percent of the Democratic vote to Ted Kennedy’s 38 percent, but it was a hollow victory. “We won with the wrong people,” Nesmith recalled.

  Kennedy hardly contested Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, hoping that he could break through in Illinois on March 18, but the president drubbed him there. “As the first major testing ground in the industrial Middle West, Illinois was an important, perhaps decisive, prize for both President Carter and Ronald Reagan yesterday, putting the two front-runners well on the path toward a head-to-head race in the fall,” The New York Times reported in a front-page news analysis on March 19. While Kennedy ran off a string of primary victories after Illinois, Carter won enough delegates to sew up the nomination.

  Hertzberg was jarred awake around 1:45 am on the morning of Friday, April 25, by his ringing telephone. It was Caddell, calling from California. “What do you know? What’s going on?” the pollster asked. Hertzberg was groggy: About what? “Are you kidding?” Caddell was shouting now. An attempt to rescue the hostages had ended in fiery disaster in the Iranian desert when a C-130 tanker collided with a helicopter, killing eight. Caddell held the telephone up to his television so that Hertzberg could hear ABC News’s Ted Koppel discussing the tragedy.

  Carter is going to address the nation at seven am, Caddell said. You had better get into the office. Hertzberg lay in the dark in his bedroom, he later recorded in his diary, “thinking of the scene in the desert, in the pitch blackness, in the middle of nowhere, when the helicopter and the C-130 crashed—the flames, the screams, the terror, the sick disappointment and dread.”

  At the White House Jody Powell was a center of controlled calm amid shell-shocked staffers, many with tear stains on their faces. He told Hertzberg to revise the speech draft with Al Friendly, the associate press secretary for the National Security Council. “The ending of the thing was too despairing—it was just a bleak appeal for help from God,” Hertzberg wrote in his diary. He composed a new last paragraph and strengthened the emphasis on diplomatic ways to resolve the crisis.

  “We have been disappointed before,” Carter told the nation. “We will not give up in our efforts. Throughout this extraordinarily difficult period, we have pursued and will continue to pursue every possible avenue to secure the release of the hostages. In these efforts, the support of the American people and of our friends throughout the world has been a most crucial element. That support of other nations is even more important now.”

  “Paradoxically—despite the fact that this is on one level a metaphor for three years of Carter Administration fuckups—it has made me feel better about the Administration,” Hertzberg wrote in his diary the following day. “This was a rational, intelligent thing to have tried. It would have been a solution to the problem. There is all the difference in the world between this and blockade/mining. I just wish it had worked. I just wish it had worked.”

  When the Democratic Party met for its nominating convention in New York City in August, Kennedy gave a stirring address in defeat. Hertzberg was the nominal writer for Carter’s acceptance speech. “In reality there were many authors, and my main role was to do the suturing, like an emergency-room trauma surgeon after a gas-main explosion,” he recalled. A poor speech was helped neither when the TelePrompTer malfunctioned nor when Carter, partially ad-libbing, made a tribute to “a great man who should have been president, who would have been one of the greatest presidents in history—Hubert Horatio Hornblower! Er, Humphrey.”*

  As Carter entered the fall election against Ronald Reagan, the speech-writers typically got little direction. “All the political dinners and all the road shows we did, we had to come up with them [from] nothing,” recalled Chris Matthews, who had joined the speechwriting staff in the late fall of 1979.

  A Philadelphia native and former Peace Corps volunteer, Matthews had worked on the Hill, and for consumer advocate Ralph Nader, and had made an unsuccessful primary challenge against a Democratic member of Congress in 1974. He had worked on government reorganization, including civil service reform, on the White House staff, and had helped out on some previous speechwriting, including the 1979 State of the Union address. “Chris is no Sorensen, but he is a fast, solid writer and a hard worker,” Hertzberg wrote in October, pushing to hire Mat
thews. “He is politically very savvy, he has a firm grasp of the Carter program and record, and he is very good at working with people.”

  The speechwriters had sat down with Caddell a couple of times to talk about the campaign’s general themes. They would send someone to the campaign’s eight o’clock morning meeting at the K Street headquarters, but mostly they winged it. As late as the start of October, they were not getting the White House’s “Daily Political Report.” “We write the words the President speaks,” Hertzberg wrote to Jordan. “It makes no sense at all for us to have to do without information that would help us do our job better.”

  The opinion polls stayed close into the first days of November. The final New York Times/CBS Poll had Reagan winning 44 to 43, with 8 percent going to independent John Anderson, while the final Gallup Poll had Reagan ahead 46 to 43, with 7 percent to Anderson. But on November 4, Reagan won a crushing victory, tallying more than 50 percent of the vote to Carter’s 41 percent.

  Work on a farewell address began in November. For the final speech, Hertzberg and Stewart bypassed the regular clearance process: They did not circulate the speech to anyone else or send it through the bureaucracy for approval. “There was no longer anything to fight over,” Hertzberg recalled. “You could sit in the building and feel the power draining out.” They worked directly with Carter.

  On January 14, 1981, Carter spoke for the last time to the nation, about the atomization of society, the dangers of splitting into a country of special interest groups. He went on to discuss the dangers of nuclear war, the need to protect the environment, and the importance of human rights. It was, Stewart recalled, the only time that Carter accepted metaphor and vivid language from his writers: