Nuclear weapons are an expression of one side of our human character. But there’s another side. The same rocket technology that delivers nuclear warheads has also taken us peacefully into space. From that perspective, we see our Earth as it really is—a small and fragile and beautiful blue globe, the only home we have. We see no barriers of race or religion or country. We see the essential unity of our species and our planet. And with faith and common sense, that bright vision will ultimately prevail.
We know that democracy is always an unfinished creation. Each generation must renew its foundations. Each generation must rediscover the meaning of this hallowed vision in the light of its own modern challenges. For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival; liberty is human rights; the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.
Carter inscribed a copy of the speech for Hertzberg: “Rick—not bad for a 10th draft. Maybe we should have been more careful on earlier speeches, & saved this one 4 more years. Jimmy Carter.”
The Musketeers
JANUARY 1981
As was his long custom, Ronald Reagan had had his speech printed out on nineteen index cards, and now, as the time to speak approached, he made final edits, marking up the speech for ease of reading. He drew lines separating each sentence, giving him easy reference points for pausing and finding his place. When a sentence ran from one card onto the next, he would complete it in block letters on the first card. And though he and others had been working on the speech for months, he made at least thirty-three last-minute changes to the cards. It was a long-ingrained process, and the fact that this was his inaugural address was no reason to do anything differently.
Work on the speech had commenced shortly after Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter. He collaborated with Ken Khachigian, who had written speeches during the campaign. Khachigian had learned the trade in the Nixon White House, where he worked his way up from being Pat Buchanan’s assistant. Now he was poised to join the White House staff for what he said would be a brief stint as Reagan’s chief speechwriter.
Reagan had handed Khachigian a six-inch-high stack of four-by-six index cards from his speeches over the years. In a sense, though, he had given one speech over his entire career. During the 1950s, Reagan hosted the weekly General Electric Theater on television and spoke at GE plants around the country. There he had developed what came to be known as “The Speech”—his standard statement of a philosophy that favored country and business and opposed government and communism. He had debuted it to a national stage in October 1964 on behalf of GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. The Speech would be standard reading among his White House speech-writers.
Khachigian had sent Reagan a batch of memos with suggestions for the inaugural, but the president-elect had hardly glanced at them. He wanted themes from The Speech and from his 1967 inaugural address as governor of California, a speech he had written by hand and in which he had declared “We the people” to be the most meaningful words in the Constitution.
“This ceremony itself is evidence that government belongs to the people,” Khachigian wrote in notes from an inaugural meeting. “Want optimism and hope, but not ‘goody-goody.’…There’s no reason not to believe that we have the answer to things that are wrong.” And Reagan had a Hollywood thought: There was a World War II movie about Bataan, he told Khachigian and image adviser Michael Deaver, in which an actor named Frank McHugh said something like, “We’re Americans. What’s happening to us?” Khachigian spun this thought into a line in his first draft—“We have great deeds to do…. But do them we will. We are after all Americans”—which in turn evolved into the delivered speech’s closing, in which Reagan said that the country had to believe that it could overcome the crises it faced. “And after all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are Americans.”
Khachigian gave Reagan a first draft of the inaugural on January 4, 1981, and the president-elect started to seriously edit it four days later flying from Washington back to California. He thought it too flowery. “As God watches over us and guides us in our time of renewal, I shall pray to him for the sustenance given by this moment and this panorama,” Khachigian had written, referring to the view upon which Reagan would gaze while speaking. Reagan had decided to break with tradition and be sworn in on the Capitol’s west front steps—facing the Washington Monument, with the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials arrayed beyond it, and in the distance Arlington National Cemetery—rather than the east front.
Reagan did want to mention the monuments and particularly the cemetery, but in a way that personalized them to a greater degree. Scrapping his attempt at editing, he pulled out a yellow legal pad and started his own draft, incorporating elements of Khachigian’s text. For the peroration, he took his listeners to Arlington Cemetery, and to the grave of a World War I soldier named Martin Treptow. Reagan had read Treptow’s story in a letter from a friend: That he had been killed in action and that found on the flyleaf of his diary were “My Pledge,” and “America must win this war. Therefore I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone.”
When Khachigian asked for a copy of the letter so as to check the tale of Treptow, Reagan flashed a pained look. Khachigian—with the aid of Nixon and Ford speechwriter Noel Koch, then working at the Pentagon—discovered that Treptow had indeed been killed in action in France but was buried in his hometown of Bloomer, Wisconsin. Reagan told Khachigian to leave the story in the speech.
In his final edits on his speaking cards, Reagan cut out extraneous words, wrote in additions in careful block letters, rearranged words with tangles of arrows—changing “of, by and for the people,” for example, to “for, by and of the people.”* His edits tightened thoughts and smoothed transitions. And it was a process he continued as he spoke, making changes during the delivery. One was substantive: Reagan thanked Carter for the smooth transferral of power, which, he said, helped maintain “the continuity which is the bulwark of our Republic.” His speech card had that continuity as the “hallmark of the Republic.”
“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem,” Reagan said. “Government is the problem.” (This was a rewrite on speech card number five, which read, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution; it is the problem.”)
The president closed with Martin Treptow. He talked about the rows of markers in Arlington National Cemetery, which “add up to * only a tiny fraction of the price that has been paid for our freedom.” Introducing Treptow, Reagan described him as lying “under one such marker”—though he was careful not to explicitly place him in Arlington. “Ronald Reagan has a sense of theater that propels him to tell stories in their most theatrically imposing manner,” Khachigian told Reagan’s biographer Lou Cannon. “He knew it would break up the story to say that Treptow was buried in Wisconsin.”
Reagan closed as he always did: “God bless you, and thank you.” Then he slipped the cards into his Bible—where they would remain undisturbed for four years until the next time he was sworn in.
On Friday, February 13, 1981, the Reagans went to Camp David. It was a working weekend for the president, who, after sleeping in on Saturday, spent the afternoon working at his desk, including on the speech pitching his economic plan that he would deliver to a joint session of Congress the following Wednesday. He did not finish it that day, and that night he and his wife, Nancy, celebrated Valentine’s Day—they managed to surprise each other with secretly purchased Valentines—and watched the movie Nine to Five with the White House physician and others.*
The president spent Sunday working on the speech, finishing by bedtime. Writing in his rounded, cramped script on Camp David stationery, he produced a twenty-one-page draft that consisted of seventeen Reagan-written pages and four Reagan-edited pages from a Khachigian draft. Especially for major addresses at the start of his pr
esidency, such heavy speech drafting on his part was standard. Working with a speechwriter’s first drafts, he had already produced handwritten drafts of his inaugural and a February 5 Oval Office address.
Reagan’s Camp David draft was substantially the speech that he gave on Wednesday night, February 18, though it still had some spaces to be filled in with the proper numbers. “We will fill in the blanks with figures, won’t we?” Reagan wrote on the top of a February 17 draft. “This was the big night—the speech to Cong. on our ec. plan,” he wrote in his diary on the evening of the 18th. “I’ve seen Presidents over the years enter the House chamber without ever thinking I would one day be doing it. The reception was more than anticipated—most of it of course from one side of the aisle. Still it was a thrill and something I’ll long remember.”
Reagan laid out his program that night: slowing the growth of both wasteful spending and taxes, and increases in military spending that he said would be partially offset by savings from ferreting out Pentagon fraud and abuse. “I’m here tonight to…ask that we share in restoring the promise that is offered to every citizen by this, the last, best hope of man on Earth,” he said, the last phrase borrowed from Lincoln and used in The Speech.
In the senior staff meeting the next morning, Khachigian jotted down the early returns on the speech: 961 calls—three times the normal volume for a first such speech—95 percent favorable. The following day, a Washington Post/ABC News Poll showed that two thirds of the country supported Reagan’s plan.
The president spoke on March 30 to the AFL-CIO’s Building Construction Trades Department at the Washington Hilton, a little over a mile from the White House. Speechwriter Mari Maseng, who had drafted the talk and who, at twenty-eight, was the youngest writer on the new staff, walked out a little bit ahead of the president as he left the building’s side entrance. She later realized that she had walked past the spot where John Hinckley, Jr., waited with a handgun. She was getting into her car in the motorcade, perhaps twenty-five feet ahead of Reagan, when she heard a popping noise. “I can still see it all,” she said twenty-five years later. “It was such a traumatic event: the popping, the race to the hospital…. It still upsets me even when I think about it. It was the first time I’d seen any violence.”
Less than a month after being shot, Reagan made his first public appearance, before a joint session of Congress on April 28. He received a hero’s welcome. Two days later, White House staffers held a farewell soirée in the Roosevelt Room for Ken Khachigian, who was making good on his promise not to stay long into the administration. He had planned on leaving earlier but had delayed his departure when the president was shot. “It’s time for Ken to go away,” the invitation for the party read. “Let’s get together so we all can say—goodbye, good luck—come back in May!”
In mid-June, under a general White House staff reorganization, former Nixon speechwriter and Ford shadow speechwriter David Gergen assumed the newly created position of communication director. Gergen had helped with the preparation for the Carter-Reagan debates and had conceived Reagan’s devastating question: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” One of Gergen’s first tasks was to find a replacement for Khachigian.
Running the speechwriters on an interim basis was a former reporter, Anthony Dolan, the only one of the staff who would stay through all eight years. The child of Democrats who had concluded that their party was insufficiently tough on communism—Tony was raised on National Review—Dolan had been a “Reagan-bopper” since age thirteen when, volunteering at the Citizens Anti-Communist Committee of Connecticut, he came across a handout called “Losing Freedom on the Installment Plan,” featuring The Speech. A graduate of Yale and a disciple of conservative luminary William F. Buckley, Jr., Dolan had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for a Stamford Advocate series exposing mafia corruption in the municipal government in Stamford, Connecticut. He had worked for William Casey, the campaign manager, but had not done any speechwriting until he drafted Reagan’s election eve remarks.
Directly upon leaving college, Dolan had spent time as a conservative folk singer, performing compositions like “Join the SDS.” A proud Irishman, he now clomped around the Executive Office Building in cowboy boots and smoked seven or eight Partagas No. 10 cigars daily, which created what one colleague called an “industrial cigar-haze” in his office. “It was like going into a bat cave, because it was dark and there was smoke in the air, cigar smoke, and Tony’s this kind of mysterious person with this anti-Communist view and papers piled up, and so it was like this mysterious world when you went into Tony’s office, and his mind was working [in] the same Machiavellian way,” speechwriter, Landon Parvin, recalled.
Dolan was a fan of Whittaker Chambers, the former Soviet spy who had a religious conversion and renounced communism. Like Reagan, Dolan had devoured Witness, Chambers’s book detailing his disillusionment with communism. Dolan was a movement conservative, who viewed communism in the same deeply moralistic, philosophical terms that Reagan employed. “Tony was able to flesh out the moral dynamics of the battle with totalitarianism, with Communism, in a way that nobody else could,” recalled second-term colleague Josh Gilder. “Tony had a deep understanding also of the spiritual dynamics of evil.”
This proved a double-edged sword in the Reagan White House. After besting more moderate adversaries such as former CIA director and former Republican National Committee chairman George H. W. Bush in the primaries, Reagan had quickly moved to bring Bush (as vice-presidential nominee) and his aide James Baker III into his campaign, helping to unite the party and bringing an added element of political savvy to his team. In the White House, many of Reagan’s senior aides were ideologically in the Baker mold, including Gergen. This set up a dynamic of internal discord between the “pragmatists” and the “true believers,” with each side certain that it was carrying out Reagan’s wishes.
Nowhere was that tension more pronounced than in the relations between the senior staff and the speechwriters. “We considered ourselves like the Musketeers who were guarding the royal jewels,” said speechwriter Dana Rohrabacher, who matched Dolan’s conservatism. “The senior staff was constantly trying to basically browbeat us into putting things in the speeches that would moderate the President’s stand on this or that or move him in a direction other than that which he had stated publicly.
“You know they called them pragmatists—the pragmatists versus the ideologues—as if we didn’t think that what we were doing could work, we were just someone who was interested in some ideology that was not attached to reality,” added Rohrabacher.
The senior staff viewed the conservative speechwriters as a necessary nuisance. “We took periodic heat from fellow centrists for harboring so many red hots as speechwriters,” Gergen wrote. “Their drafts were often scorching, and flares would then go up around the administration. The National Security Council staff and the State Department were particularly apoplectic at the prospect of Reagan saying some of the things these writers drafted. But Baker and I and [staff secretary Richard] Darman thought it important that Reagan have writers who were in sync with his views. We could fight out policy choices and take disputes to the President, but if he were going to govern in bold colors, as he said, his writers shouldn’t be composed in plaid.”
But the pragmatists were leery of leaving a hard-charging true believer in charge of the speechwriters. “Sometimes, I wondered if even Reagan thought he [Dolan] could be a pain in the ass,” Gergen noted.
The situation lingered into the fall, with Dolan running the speechwriting shop and the pragmatists trying to figure out what to do. One White House official described Dolan to a reporter as “the wild-eyed, mean dog you use when you don’t want them wondering what you said.” A solution crystallized during the preparation for Reagan’s first major foreign and defense policy speech, which he was scheduled to deliver at the National Press Club on November 18.
Although Dolan took a special interest in foreign policy speeches, the
senior staff often tried to keep them out of his hands for fear of what he might produce.*But Nixon veterans such as Gergen knew that there was another capable speechwriter in the White House. Aram Bakshian, who had written for Nixon and then been one of the few holdovers in the Ford administration, was working in the Reagan administration Office of Public Liaison doing outreach to the arts and humanities community.
The State and Defense departments had each produced drafts, and the National Security Council had tried to knit together a compromise text. The address was going to present an arms control proposal to the Soviets a dozen days before negotiations were set to resume in Geneva. Soviet deployments of intermediate-range missiles throughout Eastern Europe had prompted the Carter administration to promise to deploy U.S. intermediate-range missiles in Western Europe while also pursuing negotiations to limit the weapons. Reagan had committed to the same course and would unveil his proposal in the Press Club speech.
The State Department and Defense Department could not agree on the terms of a proposal. And while Reagan would ultimately have to resolve the substantive issue—settling on a “zero option” proposal for the Soviets to withdraw their intermediate-range missiles in exchange for the United States not deploying its missiles*—the senior staff in October asked Bakshian to translate the competing drafts from the ponderous language of foreign and defense policy bureaucrats into a single, Reaganesque speech.
Reagan reworked Bakshian’s draft, creating a new opening that excerpted from a letter to Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev, which he had written while recovering in the hospital from his gunshot wound. The president now crossed out whole paragraphs, rewrote or tightened sentences, and merged it into four pages of his own creation, two of them handwritten and two typed from his letter.
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 36
