White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  Lake and Berger finally got a foreign policy speech scheduled for February 26, when Clinton was to speak on globalization and economics, leading up to the push to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), at American University’s centennial celebration. Rosner sent several drafts to Clinton and got little response. That morning, Rosner, Lake, and Berger joined a scrum in the Oval Office to go over the speech. Things were running late. Clinton was not working from the most recent draft, so Rosner gave the president pages from the current version. The two versions got jumbled. Rosner was panicking. During the campaign, he had never dealt with Clinton in person. Then an aide told Clinton that it was time to leave for American University. Come on Jeremy, Clinton said, get in the car.

  The motorcade wound along the Rock Creek Parkway. Pages from the two drafts, covered with Clinton’s scribble, were everywhere. The president, eyeglasses down on his nose, edited. What was that line we wanted to add? We should move this section over here. Which of these pages is from the new draft? Rosner answered while holding Clinton’s coffee cup as the car traveled a well-worn February road. Oh my God, he thought, the speech is screwed up, we’re about to hit a pothole, and I’m going to spill coffee on the president and lose my job. It occurred to him that it was his son’s third birthday. Even if he avoided scalding the president, he was sure the speech was doomed: Clinton had not focused on the substance, which was still all over the place.

  Rosner did not spill the coffee but watched with trepidation as Clinton took the jumble of papers to the podium and told the crowd an anecdote about his Georgetown University days and dating a girl from American University. Then he launched into the speech. “It was perfect,” Rosner recalled. “He ad-libbed some sections, he found the key paragraphs. And it was this gorgeous speech…much better than anything we wrote.”

  Evoking memories of JFK’s peace speech at the same school thirty years earlier, in which he appealed for peace on the grounds that “We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal,” Clinton said that managing globalization was the major challenge of the age and that the United States could not withdraw from a post–Cold War world. “Washington can no longer remain caught in the death grip of gridlock, governed by an outmoded ideology that says change is to be resisted, the status quo is to be preserved,” he said. “Will we repeat the mistakes of the 1920s or the 1930s by turning inward, or will we repeat the successes of the 1940s and the 1950s by reaching outward and improving ourselves as well? I say that if we set a new direction at home, we can set a new direction for the world as well.”

  Rosner felt calmer about the whole process on April 1, when the same last-minute scene unfolded. Clinton was scheduled to lunch with midshipmen at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and then speak to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on his plans for dealing with Russia in a post–Cold War world. Again the NSC had sent drafts in to the president and had got little response. Once again Rosner ended up in the presidential limousine, this time with Lake as well, trying to put the final touches on the speech. Clinton held his own coffee cup, clutching it in his teeth as he rewrote.

  Then the car hit a bump and the coffee spilled down the front of Clinton’s shirt. Oh man! Clinton yelled. What am I going to do? This is my first visit to a military academy and my shirt is ruined! He instructed the Secret Service to divert the motorcade into Annapolis to stop at a department store, and was informed that this sort of security nightmare was impossible. Lake offered Clinton the shirt off his own back, but the president declined—his national security adviser was too small. The Secret Service agents radioed up and down the motorcade until an agent whose shirt size matched Clinton’s was found. At a hastily arranged stop, the president donned the agent’s shirt in the back of his limousine.

  Rosner was drawn into domestic speeches as well, as when the president was to speak to a joint session of Congress on September 22, 1993, to unveil the health care plan that Hillary Clinton had spent months crafting behind closed doors. The official domestic speechwriters were led by Kusnet, but the president dismissed their draft of the speech as “pedestrian.” David Gergen, who had joined the administration in May, called Rosner at around 11 am on Tuesday, September 21. The Clintons do not like the draft of the health care speech, Gergen told him; they want you to rewrite it.

  Rosner said that it would be unfair to his domestic speechwriting colleagues. What he did not say was that he was overburdened, drafting a major speech for Lake as well as Clinton’s September 27 address to the UN General Assembly. He agreed on the condition that David Dreyer, the deputy communications director, be enlisted.

  Rosner and Dreyer were close friends from working for Gary Hart in the mid-1980s. Rosner was Dreyer’s best man. With his ponytail, earring, and colorful ties, Dreyer was the kind of young Clinton staffer who sent conservatives into fits. They were an intense team. They asked Hillary Clinton what she wanted in the speech and locked themselves in Rosner’s office, unplugged the phone, and said they were not to be disturbed. They had what Rosner told Washington Post journalists Haynes Johnson and David Broder was a typical session: “He’ll suggest something and I’ll yell at him, and then he’ll suggest something and I’ll yell at him again, and we’ll yell at each other for about ten minutes and then come up with a great sentence,” Rosner said. “We’ve got great creative tension.”

  The Clintons spent Tuesday night reworking the Rosner-Dreyer draft. When the president’s senior aides assembled in the family dining room of the residence on Wednesday morning, the president was scribbling on the text with his left hand while chewing on his right thumb. His wife stood behind him, rubbing his shoulders. Clinton wrote all over it in shorthand notes: “—6—Dislocation—uncertainty—Future w/Fear—in trust gov’t.” Rosner and Dreyer had written that the American story started more than 350 years ago, which Clinton changed to “Our forebears enshrined the American Dream: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Every generation of Americans has worked to strengthen that legacy….”

  Rosner and Dreyer had detailed the benefits of a part of the plan, before acknowledging that there would be some drawbacks. “And [Clinton] said, ‘No,’” Rosner recalled. “He said, ‘Start with the bad news. If you lead with all the gumdrops people are going to get, everyone’s going to say bullshit. But if you start at the very start with here are the things you’ve got to accept are going to be true, people go, Jeez, this guy’s being blunt with us. And then they’ll be more receptive to the good news later.’ At one level, that’s a nice little rhetorical trick—but that’s a big rhetorical trick.”

  Rosner and Dreyer left to incorporate the edits and were soon joined by, it seemed, everyone else: senior aides, political consultants, forming what Rosner called a “little frenetic knot of people that was following the speech.” One White House staffer told Johnson and Broder that when the group—“the pack”—assembles, “everyone becomes the speechwriter, everyone has an opinion, everyone has an equal say.” As the pack worked, pages of Clinton suggestions or comments were faxed over and incorporated.

  Rehearsal extended past 8 pm. One group of aides listened as Clinton rehearsed and rewrote, while another entered changes. Corrected pages were run from one group to the other. Dreyer made the last edits and dashed for the motorcade. On the ride down Pennsylvania Avenue, Clinton was editing.

  At the rostrum in the House Chamber, Clinton surveyed the legislators, cabinet members, and aides. Then he looked at the TelePrompTer screens. His February economic speech was loaded. He had a hard copy of the health care address, but it was not in the large-type format and he did not have his glasses. As the applause continued, Clinton turned back to Al Gore, sitting as president of the Senate, and told him to get Stephanopoulos to fix the problem. Stephanopoulos scrambled to get the proper text loaded as Clinton, as he later put it, “just sort of whipped back and did it.” “I knew what I wanted to say anyway, so I wasn’t too worried, though it was a bit dist
racting to see all those irrelevant words scrolling by on the TelePrompTer,” he wrote in his memoirs.

  My fellow Americans, tonight we come together to write a new chapter in the American story. Our forebears enshrined the American dream: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Every generation of Americans has worked to strengthen that legacy, to make our country a place of freedom and opportunity, a place where people who work hard can rise to their full potential, a place where their children can have a better future…. If Americans are to have the courage to change in a difficult time, we must first be secure in our most basic needs. Tonight I want to talk to you about the most critical thing we can do to build that security. This health care system of ours is badly broken, and it is time to fix it.

  After the longest seven minutes in Stephanopoulos’s life, the correct text flashed onto the TelePrompTer screens.

  The theatrical high point came when Clinton held up a blue card emblazoned with the United States seal and “Health Security Card” written on it. “Under our plan, every American would receive a health care security card that will guarantee a comprehensive package of benefits over the course of an entire lifetime, roughly comparable to the benefit package offered by most Fortune 500 companies,” Clinton said. “This health care security card will offer this package of benefits in a way that can never be taken away.”

  The speech was generally positively received. Clinton’s approval rating moved up 10 points in the Gallup Poll. “He gave a thoroughly grown-up, sometimes stern, sometimes passionate and sometimes even angry speech about health care, with a direct and forceful demeanor and few contrivances,” The New York Times reported. But a second Times piece portended the problems the plan would encounter: “Members of Congress registered strong support tonight for the outlines of President Clinton’s plan to recast the nation’s health care system, but many lawmakers immediately began to pick fights with details relating to expected increases in taxes and costs.”

  Hillary Clinton had produced legislation that totaled 1,342 pages. The plan consisted of interlocking proposals that aimed to use the best aspects of regulation and the free market to guarantee universal health care. But such a sweeping and complicated plan had several political flaws. It was hard for proponents to describe simply, but easy for critics to skewer as being too complicated. And even potential allies could find some flaws in a plan so sweeping, making it hard to hold together a coalition broad enough to support it.

  The plan’s political and substantive problems were exposed, exploited, and compounded by a massive lobbying effort with different special interests spending around $100 million to lobby the Congress. In addition, tens of millions of dollars was spent on television advertising, including the devastating series sponsored by the health insurers’ association in which a fictional couple—“Harry and Louise”—sat at their kitchen table and fretted at how complicated the plan was.

  In his 1994 State of the Union address, Clinton vowed to veto any health care bill Congress passed without universal health care coverage. It seemed a political master stroke at the time, but it only closed off avenues of compromise. The underlying assumption—that Congress would pass some health care bill—seemed reasonable when he made the declaration; but by the time he and Hillary Clinton were willing to cut a deal, in the summer, the GOP leadership had concluded that there was no reason to throw Clinton a lifeline. When the health care effort died, a scant five weeks before the 1994 midterm election, it had become a symbol of liberal overreach and political ineptitude.

  In November 1993, Clinton’s pursuit of passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement was at full steam. On Saturday, November 13, he flew to Memphis, Tennessee, to give a pair of talks, one of them at the Church of God in Christ—sacred ground both literally and as the house of worship where Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his last sermon.

  Carolyn Curiel, the first Latina presidential speechwriter, suspected Clinton would not closely follow a text for the church speech, so she gave him three pages of talking points and a Washington Post article about an eleven-year-old girl who was so afraid of gang violence that she planned her own funeral. Clinton jotted his own notes: “MLK didn’t die A 13 yr old the freedom to get semi auto shoot 9 yr old…A teenage girls freedom to have children & watch father of their child walk away…A young freedom destroy lives w/drugs or bld pers. fortunes destroying lives of others.”

  At the church, Clinton spoke briefly about the importance of trade, but quickly moved on to what he called “the great crisis of the spirit that is gripping America today.” His notes had helped him order his thoughts, but now he discarded them. He imagined what King would say were he before them. He would praise them for making progress in expanding political power for minorities and for creating a black middle class. But he would scold them as well: “I did not live and die to see the American family destroyed,” he would say. “I did not live and die to see thirteen-year-old boys get automatic weapons and gun down nine-year-olds just for the kick of it. I did not live and die to see young people destroy their own lives with drugs and then build fortunes destroying the lives of others.”

  Clinton told tales of violence and sadness, including that of the eleven-year-old girl. “How would we explain it to Martin Luther King if he showed up today and said, yes, we won the Cold War,” he said. “Yes, the biggest threat that all of us grew up under, communism and nuclear war, communism gone, nuclear war receding. Yes, we developed all these miraculous technologies…. How would we explain to him all these kids getting killed and killing each other? How would we justify the things that we permit that no other country in the world would permit? How could we explain that we gave people the freedom to succeed, and we created conditions in which millions abuse that freedom to destroy the things that make life worth living and life itself? We cannot.”

  He concluded:

  So in this pulpit, on this day, let me ask all of you in your heart to say: We will honor the life and the work of Martin Luther King. We will honor the meaning of our church. We will, somehow, by God’s grace, we will turn this around. We will give these children a future. We will take away their guns and give them books. We will take away their despair and give them hope. We will rebuild the families and the neighborhoods and the communities. We won’t make all the work that has gone on here benefit just a few. We will do it together by the grace of God.

  “The Memphis speech was a hymn of praise to a public philosophy rooted in my personal religious values,” Clinton wrote in his memoirs of his most eloquent speech. “Too many things were falling apart; I was trying to put them together.”

  I understand that you’re not altogether happy with the speechwriters and the speeches, Don Baer told Clinton in the winter of 1994. I don’t know, Clinton said; up until a year and a half ago, I didn’t have a speech-writer and I did all my own things.

  The administration’s ongoing attempts to master presidential communications had brought Baer to the verge of becoming Clinton’s speechwriting director. He had grown up a “nice Jewish boy in Fayetteville, North Carolina,” had a law degree from the University of Virginia and a master’s in international relations from the London School of Economics. He’d had, in his word, an “eclectic” career: The summer after his third year of law school he had worked at a New York City law firm where a young litigation partner recently out of the Ford Justice Department, Rudolph Giuliani, was a mentor. (Even as Baer was negotiating with Clinton administration officials about joining the White House staff, he was declining a job offer with Giuliani, who had been elected major of New York City in 1993.) Baer had also worked on North Carolina governor James Hunt’s 1984 senatorial bid against conservative Jesse Helms. He had settled on journalism, working for American Lawyer magazine and then for U.S. News & World Report. In 1991, he assigned himself a story on the two up-and-coming southern Democrats who might run for president: Arkansas governor Bill Clinton and Tennessee senator Albert Gore, Jr. He interviewed Clinton on a long flight from W
ashington to Memphis as the weather caused the plane to circle for an hour. David Gergen had first approached Baer in the summer of 1993 about joining the administration.

  “I don’t think [Clinton] liked the idea that someone else thought they were going to put words in his mouth, basically,” Baer recalled. The president would be more willing to accept speech advice from pollsters, Baer said, because they could back up their arguments with data. “That’s got something that has a faux-scientific bent to it,” he said. “Speechwriters—typically it’s just a choice of style, and I think he felt like he had a better grasp on his style than others.”

  Part of the problem also lay in Clinton’s speechwriters’ political bent. In addition to Kusnet, the speechwriting staff in the first year included Curiel, who had come from a journalism background that included The Washington Post, The New York Times, and ABC News, and Alan Stone, a veteran congressional staffer who had joined the Clinton campaign from the failed bid of liberal Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa. They were later joined by Carter Wilkie, a former aide to Boston mayor Thomas Menino. They did not, as a group, share Clinton’s centrist views.

  Kusnet saw Clinton with some frequency but it was rarely if ever one-on-one. Neither Kusnet nor his colleagues got the time to learn Clinton’s style. Their efforts tended to be more liberal substantively and more rhetorical stylistically than Clinton favored. They saw him in speech-editing scrums. Reagan’s writers had succeeded with limited access to their boss because he had a clear, simple message that never varied.