Finally, the talk turned to the growing political problem presented by the primary challenge he was facing from conservative commentator and former Nixon speechwriter Patrick Buchanan. His speeches should be nice to Buchanan, Bush told them, so that he would come back into the fold once the primaries were concluded. “He’s out there on a weird platform,” Bush said.
The next day, November 21, the Gallup organization would start a three-day poll that pegged Bush’s approval rating at just over 51 percent. It marked the last time he had majority approval in the poll until January 1993, when he was leaving office.
A week after Bush had lunched with his writers, Snow sent a memo to the group that underscored something the president had mentioned: the importance of getting across the message that he cared about people’s problems. “I know many of you have been wondering just how we ought to handle upcoming speeches on the economy,” Snow wrote. “We generally have three goals: First, to reassure people that the President knows what’s happening; Second, that he cares; third, that he has a plan for getting changes enacted; and fourth, in the interim he will do whatever he can unilaterally to prod the economy.”
December 7 would mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. Curt Smith and Mary Kate Grant wrote the speeches. Smith was assigned the address that Bush would give standing on the white, crescent-shaped monument to the USS Arizona officially commemorating the event, while Grant wrote the speech he would give in Honolulu to World War II veterans and their families.
Bush gave both speechwriters similar admonishments. “Now, look, I have to be careful,” he told Smith. “I don’t want to break down.” Smith did not tell him what he was thinking: Mr. President, I do want you to break down. “Because that’s the Bush that we knew [and that] I wanted more Americans to know,” Smith recalled. “In fact, I think one mistake we made was not showcasing Bush and showing America more of the human behavior that we were privileged to know…in the White House.”
When Grant and Demarest met with Bush in the Oval Office to discuss the Honolulu speech, he was in a lighter mood. As he talked, he tossed pieces of popcorn into the air and caught them in his mouth. Grant asked where he had been when he heard about Pearl Harbor. On the quad at Philips Academy in Andover, he said, a seventeen-year-old. He had decided to sign up as soon as he turned eighteen. He told her of being on the deck of an aircraft carrier when the person standing next to him inadvertently backed into a plane’s propeller. His leg landed in front of Bush. Do you want to talk about that in the speech? she asked. Oh my God, no, he replied.
Grant asked if he knew people who had died in the war, and did he want to mention them? Bush told her that he would not be able to do it without crying. “I remember seeing the look on his face and you could just see the wheels turning of him remembering these people and how difficult it still was for him,” Grant recalled. “It’s still very real to him, even after all these years.”
Flying on Air Force One to Hawaii, Bush summoned Grant to his cabin. He had been reading her draft, he said, and noticed that it said that over two thousand men had died in a matter of minutes during the attack. Didn’t any women die? he asked. She was back within ten minutes to report that in fact all of the Pearl Harbor dead on board the ships were male, but she was impressed that he had thought to ask the question.
Demarest meanwhile was lining up allies to make sure that Bush did not try to tone down the Pearl Harbor speeches as he had the Thanksgiving speeches in Saudi Arabia. He asked Scowcroft for help. He’s going to say it’s too over the top, Demarest told the national security adviser. When they went over the speeches with the president, Bush did hesitate over the Arizona address, and Scowcroft spoke up: This is a good speech, he said, you should give it the way it is. Bush agreed.
Bush spoke at 8:10 am on a morning much like the infamous one a half century earlier: bright sun in a mostly clear sky, a slight breeze. The water gleamed. And he spoke with unusual eloquence:
Think of how it was for these heroes of the harbor, men who were also husbands, fathers, brothers, sons. Imagine the chaos of guns and smoke, flaming water, and ghastly carnage. Two thousand, four hundred and three Americans gave their lives. But in this haunting place, they live forever in our memory, reminding us gently, selflessly, like chimes in the distant night. Every fifteen seconds a drop of oil still rises from the Arizona and drifts to the surface. As it spreads across the water, we recall the ancient poet: “In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair against our will comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” With each drop, it is as though God Himself were crying. He cries, as we do, for the living and the dead.
Bush did not cry during his remarks, but his voice cracked three times.
Sununu resigned as White House chief of staff in mid-December 1991 and was replaced by Transportation Secretary Samuel Skinner, in what was just the start of a year of churning that proved to be, as speechwriter Andrew Ferguson put it, “chaos.”
Skinner brought in a management consultant named Eugene Croisant (quickly dubbed “French Breakfast Roll Man”), who suggested that Demarest get axed. Early in January 1992, Skinner told The Washington Post that one of the administration’s “obvious” problems was a failure to communicate “a significant number of things the president has done” on the domestic policy front. (The story ran the same day that Bush vomited into the lap of the Japanese prime minister, with the photo running in all the newspapers.) Indeed, after three years of neglect, the speechwriters suddenly were being told that they were the key to the presidential reelection. Starting with the State of the Union address, campaign chairman Bob Teeter declared every major address Bush gave to be the one that would turn the campaign around.
Almost a year after ordering troops into combat in the sands of the Middle East, Bush made a foray into the snows of New Hampshire to try to rescue his faltering political fortunes. A mid-January Gallup poll showed for the first time that those disapproving of his presidency exceeded the number approving. The reason was, as the strategists for Democratic candidate Bill Clinton would put it, “The economy, stupid.” The nation was in the grip of the longest recession since the Great Depression, entering its eighteenth month with the New Year, sapping more than 1.2 million jobs, as well as the nation’s confidence. “In one of history’s most painful paradoxes, U.S. consumers seem suddenly disillusioned with the American Dream of rising prosperity even as capitalism and democracy have consigned the Soviet Union to history’s trash heap,” Time reported.
The speechwriters prepared remarks for the stops on the president’s January 15 campaign swing, tailoring each to the locale where he would be speaking. But Bush decided he would ad-lib. He told community leaders in Portsmouth that while he did not want to sound like “Mrs. Rose Scenario,” he thought the economy would soon recover. In a town hall–style meeting in Exeter, he told the crowd what he had been telling his staff for months, “Message: I care.” Speaking to voters in Dover, he said they should not feel bad for him—“Don’t cry for me, Argentina.”
The State of the Union address was the closely held product of Snow, Skinner, Darman, Teeter, and Bush. It was going to be brief and thematic, avoiding the standard laundry list approach. Unfortunately, when Snow produced it five days before the January 28 delivery date, Bush rejected it. Peggy Noonan was summoned from New York on Friday, January 24, and worked all weekend with Teeter, Darman, and Skinner, but to little avail.
“Rarely had a speech raised so many advance expectations,” The Washington Post reported the day afterward. “Virtually all of Bush’s political aides, watching in horror and gloom, acknowledge now that the strategy of the past 10 weeks of waiting until last night to offer a program to combat the recession was a mistake. ‘There’s no place to go but up from here,’ said one before the speech, referring to Bush’s poll ratings, which have skidded to the lowest of his presidency and put him in a category with the hapless Jimmy Carter
.”
Noonan was among those Skinner had sought out to replace Demarest, but she had passed, as had Reagan vet Tom Griscom, and Jim Lake, a veteran of the successful Reagan and Bush presidential campaigns. Skinner eventually convinced press secretary Marlin Fitzwater to take the communications director title, with Demarest becoming head speechwriter and Snow head of media affairs.
Bush’s speaking style, his unwillingness to practice and habit of ad-libbing continued to dog him. He gave a typical performance at the American Legislative Exchange Council on February 21. “He ad-libbed significantly—embracing some lines verbatim, but mostly opening his arms to his own words,” staffer Michele Nix reported to the speechwriters and researchers in a memo that day. “When he did look down to the lines on the cards, it sounded like bumper car met bumper car; lines ran head on into other lines, paragraphs into paragraphs. Transitions in almost every case were lost.”
A week and a half later, Dan McGroarty, who had become deputy director of speechwriting the previous year, sent the writers and researchers some notes about recent addresses. “The President, Mrs. Bush and senior staff continue to measure the success of a speech by the number of applause lines,” he wrote. “The President interprets long stretches of silence as a failure on his part to connect. From the podium, nodding heads may be nodding off. Let’s face it, applause lines are a kind of currency…. POTUS performs better when the next speech picks up the best lines from the last speech. If we keep feeding him New! Improved! language—we only out-smart ourselves.”
The creeping chaos of the White House was illustrated in an April speech to which Andrew Ferguson was assigned. Ferguson had been a reporter with Scripps-Howard when Snow hired him in early 1992. As the commentator and—for a few months in 1988, Reagan speech-writer—John Podhoretz put it, Ferguson had “a comically hangdog expression,” accentuated by his droopy mustache and bow ties. Ken Askew, a speechwriter who joined the staff in 1992, described Ferguson as “very studious, very methodical, a fierce thinker. He was very comfortable in the realm of ideas.”
Ferguson was told that Bush would be speaking before the Detroit Chamber of Commerce, but when a researcher called there to get more background information on the event, an official had no idea the president was due. In fact, the speech was to be given at an industrial automation plant in the Detroit suburbs. Next came the guidance problems: What should the speech be about? Depending upon whom Ferguson listened to, it was a speech on either government reform or job training.
Ferguson wrote a speech on reform at the instruction of Demarest and deputy chief of staff Henson Moore. It went through the staffing process and was ready for the president when Roger Porter of the Domestic Policy Council called Ferguson, saying how excited he was about the job training speech. Ferguson went to Porter’s office to try to explain that there was no job training speech, that the speech was about reform and was about to hit the president’s desk. More discussion resulted in a job training section getting shoehorned into the reform speech, leaving it a muddle that received scant attention.
On April 29, an all-white jury returned a verdict of not guilty in the case of four white Los Angeles police officers who had savagely beaten black motorist Rodney King. The decision sparked riots that lasted for nearly a week. On the third day of rioting, May 1, King himself asked: “Can we all get along? I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.”
Demarest was driving in to work that morning when he was paged to go see the president in the Oval Office. Bush wanted to go on the air that night to talk about the situation in California. He had made brief statements, but this would be a full-blown address. The key question was tone: Would this be a law and order speech or a speech focusing on the need for better race relations and racial justice?
“He clearly wanted to make the point that there can be no civil justice when there is the kind of lawlessness, the kind of chaos that was clearly occurring in Los Angeles,” Demarest recalled. “So in short it was going to be a law and order speech.”
Demarest consulted with members of the senior staff and then started writing. He was circulating a first draft by one o’clock in the afternoon. Snow came to see him: He had written a draft on his own, what one staffer later described to The New York Times as “a deep-think piece on racial problems in the United States.” It acknowledged that racism existed and exhorted the nation to come together to end it. He showed it to Demarest, Skinner, Moore, and Fitzwater, among others. It was the approach that Fitzwater favored, and after the midafternoon meeting of the communications group, Demarest got a call from the press secretary: We’re going with Snow’s speech, he said. Has the President seen it? Demarest asked. He had not.
Demarest went to Skinner, who told him to soften the tone of his speech slightly. The chief of staff then walked both drafts in to the Oval Office. He emerged quickly, handed Demarest his draft of the speech. The president wants to go with your draft, he said. Demarest was gratified but still amazed at how chaotic the process was.
“What we saw last night and the night before in Los Angeles is not about civil rights,” Bush said from the Oval Office that evening. “It’s not about the great cause of equality that all Americans must uphold. It’s not a message of protest. It’s been the brutality of a mob, pure and simple. And let me assure you: I will use whatever force is necessary to restore order. What is going on in L.A. must and will stop. As your President I guarantee you this violence will end.”
Bob Teeter, the campaign chairman, met with the speechwriters in the third week of June. He passed around an elaborate chart he had produced on his computer, laying out a structure that he wanted the speechwriters to follow in drafting speeches on such topics as education, values, jobs, and crime. The different topics each had a box in the chart, but one was empty. It read: “Theme/Slogan/Name”—“What I want from you, is to help fill this empty box,” he told the speechwriters.
On July 8, Skinner announced to a stunned White House staff that he had finally found a new communications director, a thirty-two-year-old spokesman for Kentucky Fried Chicken named Steve Provost. He had previously written speeches for former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, but he had never worked in the White House or in a presidential campaign. “This is absolutely ludicrous,” one anonymous official told The Washington Post. “I am sure the guy is fine, maybe great in what he does, but this is a presidential campaign. This is a crisis. You don’t go out and get a guy who’s never laid eyes on the president or tried to maneuver through this horrible White House bureaucracy to be your chief speechwriter and communications director. It is totally ridiculous.” The Post article ran with a picture of Provost standing next to a statue of Colonel Sanders, the founder of the fast food chain.
“This seals it,” a Bush political adviser told the Post. “This is the end of Skinner. I predict right here and now James Baker will be back and he’ll bring a team of professionals with him.”
A friend faxed Provost the Post article and it gave him pause as to the wisdom of taking the job. He called his wife and said he did not think he could go to Washington, but she talked him out of quitting before he had even begun. “Provost came from a totally different point of view of slogans and jingles and applause lines, and really, really understood speeches in a way that I didn’t,” Andrew Ferguson recalled. “Bush really liked that very pithy, idiomatic, PR language—slogans, as opposed to sentences and paragraphs and arguments.”
In some instances, Provost’s lack of experience in the ways of the White House proved a boon. Faced with a process for staffing speeches out and waiting—often too long—for comments from a couple of dozen people, Provost occasionally told his staff to bang out a dummy speech to feed to the bureaucracy while they worked on the actual address. But other times his political ignorance showed. In August, he shook up the staff, canning about half, while keeping on vets Smith, Ferguson, and McGroarty (the other original members of the staff were all long gone). It was standard procedure in
the corporate world: A new boss comes in, evaluates the staff, and shakes it up, but Provost was surprised by the stir it caused in Washington.
Provost had been on the job a little over a month when the next political temblor hit the White House. On August 13, James Baker, who had been Bush’s Secretary of State, did indeed make a reluctant return to the position of White House chief of staff, bringing with him aides Margaret Tutwiler and Robert Zoellick, who took charge of the communications operation, bumping Provost from communications director to chief speechwriter.
All the while Bush wallowed in the polls, never able to gain traction in the general election’s three-way race against Arkansas governor Bill Clinton and independent billionaire H. Ross Perot. The campaign concluded in Houston on November 3 at the Houstonian Hotel. Provost was tapped to write both a victory speech and a concession speech. “When you’re in the bubble…you feel momentum and the crowds are lively and you know in the outside world you’re behind, but in the inside world you’re thinking, ‘This is going to be 1948 all over again,’” he recalled. He passed in his drafts in the morning and waited. Late in the afternoon he ran into speechwriter Christina Martin, who had started four years earlier as a researcher in the speech shop. She was in tears. He asked what was wrong—no official word had come in. She told him to look around—“They had replaced the Secret Service detail, and the first detail was flying south to Arkansas so that they could guard [the new president-elect], and the sinking feeling of ‘Oh my gosh, we blew it,’ just sunk in at that time,” he later remembered.*
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 45
