Two days later, on June 6, the Reagans alighted from Marine One at Pointe du Hoc, a desolate cliff overlooking the French coastline that Allied forces had seized on D-Day. Forty years earlier, as Allied troops waded ashore on neighboring beaches, a group of Army Rangers had scaled the sheer walls of the cliffs and taken the German gun emplacements at their top. Of 225 who made the assault, 90 were still able to fight the next day. “We’re here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty,” the president said.
Noonan had been delighted and surprised when Elliott tapped her to write the D-Day speech. “I hired you to write this speech,” he told her. It was a daunting mission. She had been at the White House just long enough to know that such an address was sure to attract critics, especially since she was still an unknown quantity. She was “a little paralyzed” by the task—a condition not helped by bits of advice and exhortation that floated in over the transom: Make it like the Gettysburg Address—make people cry. Or: Deaver planned to use clips from the speech at the Republican National Convention in August.
She paced. She tried writing on weekends, at odd hours. She tried doing it as a letter to an aunt. She hoped the speech would just come. It took fifteen drafts before she had something that she could share. She gave it to Elliott, who made minimal changes and sent it out for “staffing.” The staffing process had grown since its bureaucratic formalization in the Ford administration. By Noonan’s estimate an insignificant speech would go to twenty people for approval, a major one to fifty. Suggested changes—how much “suggested” as opposed to “mandatory” depended upon the identity of the sender—would come back, and Darman had final say on what got in and what did not.
This process was “like sending a beautiful newborn fawn out into the jagged wilderness where the grosser animals would pierce its tender flesh and render mortal wounds,” Noonan wrote in her speechwriting memoir, What I Saw at the Revolution. “But perhaps I understate.” She was still figuring out which changes she could ignore and which she could not. “It was really awful for me because rhetoric is a form of communication between a leader and his people,” she said. “Anything that is art or part art is delicate. And anything that is delicate can’t survive the tinkering hands and mauling of twenty-five people.”
The problems were compounded by the facts of the speech. “It was controversial,” she recalled. “One reason was that a woman wrote it. I have to tell you I have learned about the military and how they think over in Defense…. And the idea that a woman wrote the speech and that I have never seen combat upset them beyond belief. Cliques tried to tear it apart, and I saw that what they were doing was without the intention of being helpful.”
Even the editorial comments that were intended to be helpful were only partly so. The “boom” of the cannon became the more graceful “roar.” But other suggestions were inelegant—coming either from wonks too busy with the trees of policy to think about the forest of form, or nonwriters trying to be poets. The NSC wanted a paragraph paying tribute to the Russian loss of life in the war. “I have not incorporated this suggestion because it is irrelevant (the subject here is Normandy, and the Russians weren’t at that party), unneeded (brings up the whole new topic of what losses each nation suffered in the war when we don’t talk about the millions of French, British, German and American dead), and…it has that egregious sort of special pleading ring that stops the flow,” she wrote to Elliott in a memo on May 30. “It sounds like we stopped the speech dead to throw a fish to the bear.”
She and Bud McFarlene, now the national security adviser, had a tug-of-war over changing words in the last sentence of the speech from “borne by their memory” to “sustained by their sacrifice.” He would change it and she would reject the change. “I prefer ‘borne…’ because it is more personal, more lyrical and more positive,” she wrote Elliott. “Better to be borne than sustained, I always say.” In the end, the sop to the Russian dead stayed in, but she was sustained by the survival of “borne…”
The crucial creative moment came when Noonan was talking to the head of the White House advance team, who was complaining that the speech still did not elicit tears. “But they’ll be there,” he kept telling her. It took her a few moments to realize that he meant the Rangers—the vets who had taken the cliffs would be in the audience, not scattered among the other guests but sitting as a group directly in front of the president.
On June 6, Reagan told their tale of heroism, of how they scaled and seized the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc. “Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs,” he said. “And before me are the men who put them there. These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc.* These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.”
Noonan watched the speech on television at 7:20 am East Coast time. There had been a fight with the French over timing: The French had scheduled a formal welcoming ceremony for Reagan at 4 pm French time, 10 am on the east coast. Deaver wanted Reagan to speak earlier so that he would be broadcast live on the morning shows back home. (An intended side effect of the timing was that it supplanted coverage of the California Democratic primary.) Sitting in her New York apartment, Noonan was disappointed with the speech: it was the twentieth draft and she knew that the eleventh was the best.
She met Ronald Reagan for the first time almost six weeks later, when the speechwriters had one of their meetings with him. It lasted half an hour. As they were leaving, he took her hand. “You know, a while ago I wanted to call you about something, but…” He could not remember what it was. Elliott stepped in: “Peggy wrote the Pointe du Hoc speech, Mr. President.” That was it. “That was wonderful,” he said, “it was like ‘Flanders Fields.’”
Later that month, Reagan was scheduled to address the U.S. Olympic team competing at the Games, which were to be held in Los Angeles that year. It was fluff: a patriotic pep talk to get the athletes and—not incidentally in an election year—the country jazzed. Rohrabacher got the assignment and wrote a talk ending with Reagan exhorting the athletes to “do it for the Gipper.”* It was a perfect Reagan line: a bit hokey, a bit inspiring, a bit humorous. The kind of thing that he would deliver flawlessly. But Rohrabacher had to fight for it. Word came back that it was too schmaltzy and ran the risk of reminding people of Reagan’s film career. “The senior staff, people who worked around Reagan, the ones who were not his Reaganites, were always embarrassed that they worked for a former movie star,” Rohrabacher said. “They shuddered at any mention of it. That was Ronald Reagan—and there was nothing to be embarrassed about.” Rohrabacher won that fight, and Reagan delivered the line perfectly.
Writing another set of remarks for the Games, Noonan wanted Reagan to refer to the “gaiety” of the event. She got a phone call. “You have him use the word gaiety,” an advance man admonished. “I think you better strike that.” Why? “It sounds like he’s calling them gay.”
“Listen,” an exasperated Noonan responded. “I want to tell you something from deep in my heart: No it doesn’t. No one will think, no one would ever think, that the president of the United States would hail our Olympic heroes by accusing them of being homosexual. I promise you this.” The advance man conceded the point, and then excised the word.
Reagan won a landslide reelection, carrying forty-nine states, the District of Columbia, and nearly 60 percent of the vote against the hapless Walter Mondale. The victory brought sweeping changes to the administration. During the first term, the White House had been run under the “troika” of chief of staff James Baker; Michael Deaver, who was ostensibly Baker’s deputy; and counselor Ed Meese. Baker traded places with Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, and Meese became U.S. Attorney General.
On January 14, 1985, Tony Dolan sent Donald Regan a four-page memo with suggestions on how to handle his new job and what to expect from the conservative camp. “The sing
le greatest mistake made by the current White House leadership—and the single greatest burden they have carried—is their inadequate understanding of the power of conservatism,” Dolan wrote. The memo was not only an invitation to Regan but a warning. “When some White House staffers began to encounter heavy flak on the right, most of the time they thought the fire was being orchestrated by personal enemies in their own camp. In fact, their own instincts had made them stumble into hostile territory and they didn’t know it. They had no idea they were bucking the tides of history; tides that were in large part the political creation of their own president.” If the moderates on the staff were attacked, in other words, it was their own fault for trying to stand athwart history as embodied by Reagan.
“The Conservatives didn’t expect to win every battle; but they grew concerned when they met White House aides who did not seem to understand that any final success in changing the ways of the past could only be won by going over the heads of the [encrusted] Washington oligarchy and appealing to the conservative instincts of the people,” Dolan noted in what could well have been a cri de coeur. “Instead, they found aides (some of whom had good motives) with a private agenda: to move—through slow calibration or fine-tuning—the President (who ultimately was not moved at all) into the old snares and traps of Washington politics.”
In the second term, the dynamics of the tensions between the speechwriters and the senior staff changed. The writers were, as a group, more uniformly Reaganite conservative. Not that Bakshian and Parvin would be considered liberals, but their roots did not lie in the Reagan revolution. By the start of the second term, true believers such as Dolan, Elliott, and Rohrabacher had been joined by Noonan, Peter Robinson, and later in 1985 Josh Gilder.
Robinson, an upstate New York native, had graduated Dartmouth and then spent two years studying at Oxford and a third trying to write a novel there. He gave up the book and looked for a job back in the United States, ending up as Vice President Bush’s speechwriter. A year and a half later, in 1983, Robinson joined Reagan’s staff. Gilder had succeeded Robinson on Bush’s staff. He was an unlikely Reaganaut: His grandfather had been blacklisted as a Communist in the 1950s and his mother, also a Communist, had raised him as one. He brought what he described as “a convert’s zeal” to his conservatism. “When you’re writing, don’t you feel as though you’re working on your soul?” he had once asked of Robinson. Gilder’s first assignment was a March 1985 challenge to would-be tax raisers in Congress. He borrowed from Clint Eastwood for Reagan: “Go ahead, make my day.”
Some tensions and problems the writers encountered were not ideological. Each dealt differently with the perils of the staffing system. “You pretty quickly understood there that writing the speech was a small part of your job,” Gilder said. Navigating a draft through the rounds of edits required political skills, negotiations, and compromises. “If you treated it as if these were your magnificent creations, you weren’t effective and I didn’t feel that you were doing your job,” he said. Dolan added, “Speeches could be yanked away from writers if they’d get [too] contentious because there was too much at stake.”
As important were the changes outside of the speechwriting staff. Elliott had developed a modus vivendi with Baker and Darman. But with Regan, the senior staff dynamic changed; he was shorter-tempered and more controlling than Baker had been. Access to the president was almost completely closed off. Pushback or end runs that might have been excusable in the first term were no longer so. Surrounding Regan were four aides unflatteringly dubbed “the Mice”: Dennis Thomas, Al Kingon, David Chew, and Thomas Dawson. They were loyal to Regan, dismissive of virtually everyone else, brusquely officious, and widely disliked. And they were editing speech drafts.
When Reagan took a ten-day trip to Europe at the start of May 1985, Noonan and Elliott saw an opportunity for him to give a frank, sweeping, philosophical address. In a trip that became known for Reagan’s widely criticized visit to Bitburg Cemetery, whose permanent residents included late members of the Nazi SS, Noonan and Elliott wanted his speech to the 434-member European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, to be memorable. The opportunity seemed ripe: The event would mark the fortieth anniversary of V-E Day, May 8, and Reagan would be the first U.S. president to address the assembly.
Noonan, in particular, wanted him to say “serious and thoughtful” things to the people of Europe. Though she had been hired for her skills as an impressionist writer, she was interested in substantive speeches that made serious arguments. “One of the things that has disturbed me about writing for the president in the modern White House is that in a way everyone wants a jazzy speech, and that mostly means they want sloganeering, they want a peppy line,” Noonan told an interviewer when she left the White House in 1986. “But they never want to be thoughtful about this stuff. This is true of the pragmatists, but the ideologues too. I’m not interested in lines like ‘Evil Empire.’”*
The State Department had sent over a version that discussed Europe in soothing beiges and dull grays, but Noonan wrote a draft in bright colors. “One odd thing about foreign policy professionals is that for all their sophistication, they tend to think the way to communicate with allies and potential allies is to compliment and soothe, compliment and soothe,” she noted in her memoir. “But that isn’t polite, it’s patronizing, and to patronize is to insult. Candor is a compliment, it implies equality, it’s how true friends talk.”
“I speak as a friend and admirer of the people of Europe, but I am disturbed by what is reported to me about trends in Europe that I have also seen in America,” Noonan’s draft said. It lauded the powers of the free market system. It condemned those who described the Cold War in terms that implied moral parity between the two sides. “We speak of ‘East-West’ tensions as if the West and the East were equally responsible for the threat to world peace today.” It identified the Soviet Union as the main destabilizing force in the world: “History has taught us a lesson we must never forget: Totalitarians do not stop—they must be stopped.”
“It was all unauthorized,” Noonan recalled. “But it was administration policy in that it was what the president thought. Having followed his statements and career for years, having seen him in speeches and give-and-take…I was clear about what he thought. Send it out this way; it will get changed, but the essential character may remain.”
There was a lesson here that she and the other speechwriters had learned: As Noonan told Lesley Stahl of CBS, “There were times when I would write a whole speech with ‘red meat,’ but I’d really layer it thick in the fourth paragraph. I would know that in staffing they would fixate on that and leave the rest.” Gilder recalled that the speechwriters wrote mentions of abortion into every speech, knowing that it and other hot-button issues would be taken out in the staffing process—mostly. “Within a speech you knew that ten of these lines were going to come out, so you put in eleven and that’s just how you did it,” he said.
In the first term, Darman had excised the hottest bits of “red meat” before passing a speech through to the staffing process. But he had joined Baker at the Treasury Department, and Regan had hired Pat Buchanan, the Nixon firebrand, as the communications director. Where Nixon was like an anxious honors student, Buchanan found that Reagan was much more relaxed and would make jokes before press conferences. Depending on Reagan’s level of interest he might read speeches as given to him, or “send down long things and a lot of material he wanted in the speech. He was very big on getting facts and figures in there.” Buchanan—who did not know that the red meat was often toned down and was sympathetic to the point of view expressed in the speech anyway—passed Noonan’s draft through largely unchanged.
Then the alarms started going off. Secretary of State George Shultz told Reagan that the speechwriters were trying to make policy—again—and had to be reined in. Biting memoranda shot around the White House complex: “The draft which has been circulated of the president’s speech in Strasbourg will be an unmitigated di
saster in Europe if it is delivered in this form,” one NSC aide said.
After several rounds of rewrites, a frustrated Noonan sent a caustic missive of her own, writing that under her bureaucratic foes’ tender mercies, JFK’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” would have be rewritten as, “We in the United States feel our bilateral relations with West Germany reflect a unity that allows us to declare at this time that further concessions to the Soviet Union are inappropriate.” She went on: “You would not have been serving your President well with this edit. But you would have made it because a) ‘Ich bin…’ was an inherently dramatic statement, and dramatic personal declarations serve as red flags to Committees (sorry I said ‘red,’ that must be the 11th communist reference in this memo); b) the Official Worrier on the Committee would have pointed out, ‘A statement that strong really paints us in a corner when it comes to negotiations down the road. The press’ll pick up on it and use it against us in the trade talks’; and c) the Literal Mind on your Committee would have pointed out, ‘The President isn’t from Berlin and everyone knows it.’”
The fight spilled over to the daily morning senior staff meeting, where Bud McFarlane exploded at Buchanan, who was befuddled by the whole quarrel. “Speech writers aren’t supposed to make policy,” McFarlane snapped. Staffers allied with McFarlane leaked the whole story to The Washington Post, explaining that he wanted a “thoughtful and reflective speech” on U.S.-Soviet relations. And, as a final irony, the unnamed officials held up Reagan’s 1982 speech at Westminster—in which he had said that freedom and democracy would leave the Soviet system on the “ash heap of history”—as the model of “presidential-type” non-confrontation.
In the end, McFarlane rewrote the speech, replacing the bulk of Noonan’s text with one of his own that was couched in mild diplomatic language. “The United States does not seek to undermine or change the Soviet system,” Reagan told the Parliament in what must have been news to anyone who had ever heard him denounce that system as “evil.” As witty, and justified, as her ripostes may have been, Noonan had lost control of the draft. Reagan ended up giving a speech that was more noticed for his TelePrompTer malfunctioning than for its content.
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 39
