Bush’s edits on the speech demonstrate a dry wit and a sense of propriety. The third draft said, “Saddam will fail.” He circled the name and wrote in the margin: “1st name??” In the final speech he said, “Saddam Hussein.” The same page had the sentence: “We cannot permit a resource [oil] so vital to be dominated by so ruthless and unprincipled a power.” Bush wrote “dictator” over power and underlined the “so” before “ruthless” three times, querying in the margin whether a lesser dictator could be permitted to dominate the resource. He conceded on that point as the final text read: “We cannot permit a resource so vital to be dominated by one so ruthless.”
Further down, the draft contained a transition from foreign to domestic topics. “I also want to use this occasion to say some things to the American people,” it stated. Bush wrote in the margin: “What’s rest of speech been doing?”
“We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment,” Bush told the Congress on September 11, 1990. “The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times…a new world order—can emerge: a new era—freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace.”
Watching Bush deliver the speech, Davis thought that he had reached a personal high point—it could not get any better. The next day, he gave in his resignation.
The president was scheduled to address the UN General Assembly at the start of October, and McNally made one last appeal for officially ending the “Cold War.” “The U.N. speech also marks our last opportunity—and our best opportunity—to say that ‘the cold war is over’—a predictable ‘headline’ likely to resonate on into [election year] 1992,” he wrote Bush in a September 28 memo covering the seventh draft of the speech. He argued that such a declaration would match Bush’s vision for a new world order, and that it would be “the last opportunity because most observers will mark German reunification on Oct. 3 as the formal end of the cold war era. And it’s the best opportunity because it’s before not only ‘a’ world forum, but the world forum.”
Bush agreed. “We are hopeful that the machinery of the United Nations will no longer be frozen by the divisions that plagued us during the cold war, that at last—long last—we can build new bridges and tear down old walls, that at long last we will be able to build a new world based on an event for which we have all hoped: an end to the cold war,” he told the UN General Assembly.
Two days from now, the world will be watching when the cold war is formally buried in Berlin. And in this time of testing, a fundamental question must be asked, a question not for any one nation but for the United Nations. And the question is this: Can we work together in a new partnership of nations? Can the collective strength of the world community, expressed by the United Nations, unite to deter and defeat aggression? Because the cold war’s battle of ideas is not the last epic battle of this century.
But with all attention focused on the crisis in the Persian Gulf, the moment had passed. The president’s declaration that the Cold War was over was little noticed in the press or by the public.
The agreement to flip on “no new taxes” and the subsequent budget agreement—which sent GOP conservatives into fits—were the subject of debate within the White House through the summer and into the fall of 1990. Someone came up with the analogy that the budget deal was like a dead cat you found on your front steps: No one liked it but something had to be done about it. Some argued that Bush should say that the budget deal was an unhappy necessity. Others argued that Bush should make a mea culpa speech and renounce the deal. Any speech dealing with the budget agreement became known as the “dead cat” speech.
Bush was getting hammered by both Democrats and conservatives, the latter under the leadership of House Republican whip Newt Gingrich. A budget agreement was announced on September 30, but with Gingrich rallying the opposition, conservatives and progressives joined to vote it down in the House on October 5. “There’s a story in one of the papers saying that I am more comfortable with foreign affairs, and that is absolutely true,” Bush wrote in his diary on October 6. “Because I don’t like the deficiencies of the domestic, political scene. I hate the posturing on both sides.”
The month of October careered toward the 1990 midterm elections with budget negotiations and preparations for war. Consequently, Bush’s stump speech had him explaining that he had only reluctantly accepted the budget deal (dead cat) and deplored the Democrats’ taxing and spending ways, but then invoking the late GOP senator Arthur Vandenberg’s remark that politics stops at the water’s edge,* and praising the cooperation he had gotten from leaders of both parties. “We had a total mixed message,” Demarest recalled.
Toward the end of October, the anti-budget agreement forces appeared to have the upper hand: Bush was going to make a campaign trip starting November 1 and would use it to rid himself of the “dead cat.” He would come out swinging and declare the agreement a mistake. The speechwriters wrote a half-dozen speeches for him, decrying the agreement.
On Halloween, Chriss Winston was about to leave work to take her two-year-old son, Ian, dressed in a mouse costume, trick-or-treating, when her phone rang. There had been a meeting that morning and the budget deal was going to be defended, not renounced. No one had bothered to tell the speechwriters. Winston rewrote all half-dozen iterations of the “dead cat” address as her son, the mouse, nodded off on her couch. She finished well past midnight and decided then that the job was not worth the hassle. Though she stayed on through the war, her decision to quit was made that night.
Bush spent Thanksgiving Day with the U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia. F-15 Eagle fighter jets escorted Air Force One. With the day’s remarks drafted ahead of time, mostly by McNally, who was not on the trip, Demarest felt home free. He was proud of the speeches: the writers had worked in quotes from soldiers’ letters from home and other devices to tug the heartstrings. On the flight he showed them to General Norman Schwarzkopf, the head of U.S. Central Command. The remarks brought tears to the general’s eyes.
A steward told Demarest that the president wanted to see him. The commander in chief looked up at him as he entered the cabin. “Dave, what are you trying to do to me?” Bush asked. “These speeches…” Demarest was startled and did not understand. “Sir?” he asked. Bush repeated himself. “You’d like me to tone them down a bit?” Demarest queried. “Has Schwarzkopf seen these?” Bush asked. “Yes, he got teary,” Demarest replied. Bush flashed him a look that said: You see what I mean? “I’ll take care of it,” Demarest said, hurrying from the cabin. The speeches had succeeded too well—the president was worried that he would not be able to keep his own emotions in check.
Demarest rushed back to his seat to cut out chunks and try to tone the speeches down. Even after he had done his job, Bush kept cutting. The first stop was in Saudi Arabia, at Military Airlift Command at Dhahran International Airport, where he met with air force personnel. “This is a real world situation, and we’re not walking away until our mission is done, until the invader is out of Kuwait,” Bush told the cheering crowd. On his reading card, he had bracketed the next section, which he skipped: “I think of Lt. Mary Danko, a flight nurse who volunteered for Saudi Arabia. Her husband, a C-130 navigator, was already flying in support of Desert Shield. When asked if leaving their baby with relatives was a hard thing to do, Mary said: ‘It’s the right thing to do. We’re needed.’ When asked: ‘But what about the kid?’ Mary explained: ‘We’re doing it for the kid.’”
From Dhahran, Bush flew by helicopter to an army base in the desert. Once again, he cut more from his remarks than Demarest had already taken out. From there, he flew to the USS Nassau, to participate in a Thanksgiving Day service with the sailors. “What is so remarkable about the first Thanksgiving is that those hearty souls were giving thanks in an age of extreme adversity, recognizing the Lord’s bounty during extraordinary hardship, unde
rstanding that his bounty is not in things material but more importantly in things spiritual,” Bush said. He had scratched out the next two paragraphs on his speech cards, reflecting his dislike for talking about himself: “You all bring back thoughts of a Thanksgiving I spent 46 years ago on a carrier, the San Jacinto, off the coast of the Philippines during WWII,” the speech would have had the president say. “I found that the Lord provides many blessings to men and women who face adversity in the name of a noble purpose. They are the blessings of faith and friendship. Strength and determination. Courage and camaraderie. Dedication to duty. I found that the Lord allows the human spirit the inner resolve to find optimism and hope amidst the most challenging and difficult times.”
The final stop of the day was at a Marine base in the desert. Bush significantly shortened his speech there, too. “It started to dawn on me that he understood this situation a whole lot better than I did,” Demarest recalled. “The power of him being with the troops really was the message, and that the words that he used were less important because the emotion was all there.” The Marines crowded around Bush. It seemed to Demarest that they just wanted to touch him—one would reach over the shoulder of another. “It was something out of ancient Rome that if you touched the emperor you’re going to be safe in battle,” he said.
“The debate has become simplified,” Bush wrote in his diary on Sunday, January 13, 1991. “You are for war, or you are against. Who is for War? I am against it.” January 15 was the United Nations–set deadline for Hussein to withdraw his troops from Kuwait. “It is my decision—my decision to send these kids into battle, my decision that may affect the lives of innocence [sic],” he wrote. “It is my decision to step back and let the sanctions work. Or to move forward. And in my view, help establish the New World Order…. And yet I know what I have to do this Sunday night. This man is evil, and let him win and we rise again to fight tomorrow….”
“There is no way to describe the pressure,” Bush wrote on January 15 as the deadline ticked closer. He did not sleep well that night and the next day his lower gut hurt—“nothing like when I had the bleeding ulcer”—so he took a couple of Mylantas. The bombing would commence at 7 pm Washington time and Bush would address the nation two hours later. He wanted to do this speech himself. Dan McGroarty had written drafts on January 14 and January 15. Bush appears to have had McGroarty’s draft at hand when he wrote his final text himself. And he had McGroarty sitting in the outer office by the Oval Office, on hand in case he needed help with a line or to check a fact.*
The president retained bits and pieces of McGroarty’s draft, most notably a refrain answering: “Why act now?” “While the world waited, Saddam Hussein systematically raped, pillaged, and plundered a tiny nation, no threat to his own…. While the world waited, Saddam sought to add to the chemical weapons arsenal he now possesses, an infinitely more dangerous weapon of mass destruction—a nuclear weapon,” Bush said. “And while the world waited, while the world talked peace and withdrawal, Saddam Hussein dug in and moved massive forces into Kuwait.”
Typically, Bush did not use one line McGroarty suggested: “As a young man—like millions of Americans—I was there: I’ve seen the face of battle—I know what it’s like to lose a friend, to see a comrade fall.”
“Five months ago, Saddam Hussein started this cruel war against Kuwait,” Bush said. “Tonight, the battle has been joined.”
Bush wrote in his diary again at 10:45 pm: “I am about to go to bed. I did my speech to the nation at 9 o’clock. I didn’t feel nervous about it at all. I wrote it myself. I knew what I wanted to say, and I said it. And I hope it resonates.”
The press took note of a new, sharper tone to Bush’s domestic speeches when he gave the University of Michigan’s commencement address on May 4. The Gulf War was over—Bush had addressed the nation on February 27 to announce that the United States and its allies would “suspend” combat operations. His approval ratings had topped 90 percent in March and were still comfortably north of 70 percent.
A conquering hero abroad, Bush still needed to communicate—some would argue formulate—a domestic agenda. Commencement speeches had long been a good venue for such major announcements: It was at the same University of Michigan twenty-seven years earlier that Lyndon Johnson had formally unveiled and defined his “Great Society.”
The University of Michigan had been one of more than a hundred schools across the country that had enacted speech codes to try to eliminate hateful language from college life, though its rules had been struck down as an unconstitutional infringement upon freedom of expression. “Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States, including on some college campuses,” Bush told the crowd. “The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land…. What beganas a crusade for civility has soured into a cause of conflict and even censorship. Disputants treat sheer force—getting their foes punished or expelled, for instance—as a substitute for the power of ideas.”
The speech drew front-page play in The New York Times. “The speech to Michigan graduates reflected the influence of the President’s new head speech writer, Anthony Snow…who was hired to bring a harder edge and ideological spirit to Mr. Bush’s speeches as he moves toward the 1992 election,” Neil A. Lewis reported.
“People were concerned about the PC bit” in the speech, Snow told Washington’s City Paper, an alternative weekly. It was kept in because he had told the president about the Michigan speech codes and gotten his early buy-in on the thrust. It was an early, and ultimately rare, victory for the new head speechwriter.
Snow, thirty-five, had been the editorial page editor of The Washington Times, the city’s conservative broadsheet, since 1987. The paper’s editorials had not always been kind to Bush. “George Bush and his people came to Washington untarnished by dreaminess,” one had said. “They skipped the idealistic phase and jumped directly into an Imperial Presidency. There, gatekeepers control access to the leader of the Free World. They seal off leaks and fresh air. And in the president’s case, they have created sort of a yuppie regency, complete with a vigorous, intelligent, decent and utterly removed head of state.”
Chief of staff John Sununu had brought in Snow as Winston’s replacement without consulting David Demarest, which created some tensions. Snow brought energy and good cheer to the writing department, trying to lift its chronically low morale. He instituted regular seminar-style meetings with conservative thinkers. And he mandated that the president’s speeches must consist of complete sentences—putting an end to a practice of trying to write in the fragmentary bursts that were Bush’s natural style. “It went too far,” Snow told The Washington Post. “If he wants to end up talking in fragments, that’s fine. But we’re going to give him complete sentences.”
“Prodded by a new chief speech writer, Tony Snow…Bush has also begun road-testing more hard-edged speeches,” Kenneth Walsh and David Gergen of U.S. News & World Report observed in June.
There were ominous signs for Snow, however. In August, he would run afoul of Scowcroft when a line of his in a speech delivered in the Ukraine about “suicidal nationalisms” was interpreted by the press as a discouragement to the newly independent former Soviet states not to stray too far from Moscow’s orbit. (William Safire dubbed this the “Chicken Kiev” speech, to Bush’s enduring irritation.) And having his name appear in the Times did not help him.
More worrying for Bush and his administration was the coverage that The Washington Post gave to the Michigan speech. The paper devoted a 262-word sidebar to his attack on political correctness. It ran next to a 746-word story headlined: “Bush Hails ‘Power of Free Enterprise.’” “President Bush today hailed the free enterprise system in a commencement speech to thousands of graduating University of Michigan students who are embarking into the worst job market in a decade,” the story said.
The speechwriters lunched with Bush at noon on November 20, 199
1. Chicken salad and tuna salad were on the menu, along with cottage cheese on lettuce surrounded by fruit. Cappuccino frozen yogurt with cream and shaved cinnamon on top rounded out the meal (Bush took off the cream and ate only the yogurt). The president, wearing a blue shirt and presidential tie tack, put Tabasco sauce on his tuna and mixed both sweetener and thyroid medicine into his coffee.
Bush started out by telling the writers that while they may not realize how much he appreciated them, they were doing a great job. They talked about the campaign: Congress would be a major theme, he said. “We need a formulation for placing the blame without losing support,” read the notes of one researcher from the speechwriting shop. “In the next few weeks, POTUS wants to let the people know he is concerned, he cares, and is in touch with the American people.” The economy was sagging badly and Bush was being charged with spending too much time on foreign affairs.
“JFK got away with a lot of intellectual stuff; POTUS doesn’ [sic] feel comfortable doing that,” the notetaker added. Bush emphasized strongly that speeches should be short and have more jokes. He told the group that he didn’t like “high-flying” rhetoric, that he did not think it natural.* “You can’t undermine who you are and what you believe,” he said.
Bush told them not to overdo religious and biblical references in his speeches. While he believed in the Bible, he said, he viewed religious beliefs as personal, not something he wanted to wear on his sleeve. In particular, he said that he was not comfortable discussing abortion. “We made our view clear, and we stand with that decision,” he said. Although he had campaigned in favor of abortion rights in 1980, by 1988 he had embraced an anti-abortion rights position.*
Bush talked about how much he admired Reagan’s speaking abilities. He knew that he could not match Reagan—he blamed it on his “genes”—though he had tried to learn from the master. He cited Reagan’s D-Day speech—“These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc”—as something that he could not have pulled off. Unlike Reagan, he said, he could not “separate the words from his heart.” He talked about his personal interests: he genuinely liked country music, naming his favorite artists—Reba and Crystal—by their first names. And he played golf to get away from reporters: “It’s the only thing I can do to relax,” he told the writers.
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 44
