Clinton’s pace also wore down his writers. “If you were running against an incumbent president in a campaign, that’s the way you’d campaign,” Kusnet remarked. “Pretty much the same people who had run the campaign were running the White House in the first year, and so that was sort of a campaign-type schedule…. There’s always a sense of ‘let’s do one more event.’” Campaigns ran on adrenaline continously for a few months, while a presidential administration, though high energy, had to maintain a pace that could last four years. “Many of us were being asked to work on a campaign schedule, while many others weren’t and it didn’t quite mesh all the time,” Kusnet said. The cumulative result was an unhappy speechwriting staff that was burning out.
When he joined the staff in March 1994, Baer looked at the number of speeches the president had given during the year’s first quarter and extrapolated for the coming year. Clinton was on pace to deliver 496 speeches—more than one per day.* “It was meatball surgery,” Baer said. And there was little thought given that they were crowding the schedule and that the president was drowning out his own message. “There are few voices that can drown out a president’s voice—but his own voice can,” Kusnet said. “Instead of having an echo chamber that would last that same day, he was competing with the echoes of his own voice.”
“We are the children of your sacrifice.” The line had come to Baer while he reflected on the generational themes of the Passover celebration. He was thinking about Clinton’s upcoming European trip to commemorate D-Day’s fiftieth anniversary and the fact that the president would stand atop the same cliff at Pointe du Hoc upon which Reagan had so eloquently spoken a decade before. Baer saw the Normandy events—Clinton was to give four sets of remarks on June 6, 1994—as a great opportunity.
Baer knew that Clinton needed a short line. He had gone back and counted the number of words in Reagan’s “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc” and had been thinking about an equivalent. “We are the children of your sacrifice” had some poetry. His headline-writing instincts taking over, Baer weighed the elements of the phrase: “children” was problematic—it might imply that the world’s leaders were too young. “Sacrifice,” though, struck the right chord. Around such a phrase one could build an elegant speech. And it could pivot that address, he thought, turning it from an elegy for a great generation to a challenge for a new one.
Now Baer had to sell it to the NSC. He started with Rosner, who was preparing to leave the White House. He liked it, and with the approval of Lake and Berger, brought Baer into the process. It helped form a bridge between the operations—from then on, Baer too weighed in on major foreign policy speeches. Baer and Rosner worked with deputy NSC speechwriter Eric Liu, a former Senate staffer whose parents were Chinese immigrants and who had joined the NSC the previous fall. Rosner and Liu had learned to speak in a shorthand, finishing each other’s thoughts.
The three writers had an extended session with the president, who spoke about his father, who had died in a car accident months before Clinton was born, and about an uncle who had served in the war. He remembered the stories he had heard from veterans. He talked of being the first baby boomer president—not only the first to be born after World War II but the first to take office after the Cold War. It was a chance not only to pay homage to the G.I. Generation but to articulate a vision for twenty-first-century Europe.
The president hosted a dinner at the White House for World War II historians and veterans, including members of Congress who had fought in the war, some who had taken part in the D-Day invasion. Stephen Ambrose, whose D-Day was just being published, delivered an impassioned speech about the boys who had gone ashore that day. Those young men saved the world, the historian said, looking at the president. The sessions were helpful, Baer thought, because they focused Clinton on the idea of saluting “the great devotion and personal sacrifices” of the people who had stood for basic principles of freedom and liberty and were now “beginning their passage from the stage.”
Baer, Rosner, and Liu spent days working on the speeches. They were ghosts wrestling with ghosts, trying to honor the spirits of the World War II generation, trying to overcome the challenge of Reagan and Peggy Noonan. Work continued on the speeches on the flight across the Atlantic and into the night of June 5 on the USS George Washington in the English Channel. The next morning, Clinton spoke briefly on the deck of the ship. He and his entourage were scheduled to fly by helicopters to Pointe du Hoc. A thick fog enveloped the Channel and the decision was made that one helicopter would go. The three speechwriters squeezed in with the Clintons, skimmed across the water and up the cliff face, landing by Pointe du Hoc.
“We look at this terrain and we marvel at your fight,” Clinton said to the veteran Rangers and their families assembled before him.
Here are the generations for whom you won a war. We are the children of your sacrifice. We are the sons and daughters you saved from tyranny’s reach. We grew up behind the shield of the strong alliances you forged in blood upon these beaches, on the shores of the Pacific, and in the skies above. We flourished in the nation you came home to build.
D-Day presented a rare opportunity for the speechwriters: along with the King speech, it was one of the few times Clinton allowed his speeches to soar. “He both liked rhetoric and also distrusted it,” said Tom Malinowski, who headed the NSC speechwriters in the second term. “He wanted to inspire people, he wanted to get that reaction from the audience. He saw a good line, he said, ‘I like that.’ At the same time, he sometimes just said, ‘Man, this is just rhetoric. I just don’t want to go out there blowing smoke about this stuff. Sometimes can’t we just make a serious argument?’” He could be more blunt, scribbling “WORDS, WORDS, WORDS” in the margin next to a particularly high-flying paragraph.
Speaking at the cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, Clinton talked about the thousands of G.I.s who did not return home. “They were the fathers we never knew, the uncles we never met, the friends who never returned, the heroes we can never repay,” the president said. “They gave us our world. And those simple sounds of freedom we hear today are their voices speaking to us across the years.” It was a line that Rosner had written, and which had special meaning for him: His uncle had died when his bomber was downed, by friendly fire, over Germany.
It was a powerful generational moment for Clinton as well. The baby boomers, many of whom had struggled with the moral ambiguities of the Vietnam War, had an opportunity to honor their parents.
“You’re going to lose the Senate and House,” consultant Dick Morris told the president four days before the 1994 midterm elections.
“Not the House, no way,” Clinton replied. Democrats had controlled the House for forty years.
“And the House,” Morris said. “And by significant margins.”
“No way, no way,” Clinton said. “Not the House. Not the House. You’re wrong. You really think so? You’re wrong.”
Morris and Clinton went back to Arkansas in the 1970s. A New York native, Morris was a practitioner of negative advertising. He helped get Clinton elected governor in 1978. Clinton fired Morris after the campaign, but brought him back in the last days of his failing 1980 reelection campaign. Though it had been too late to win that race, Morris worked for Clinton for the remainder of the decade, starting with his 1982 victory, and he moved away from negative advertising, developing an issue-focused style. The two men’s relationship was tense, each drawn to the other’s political acumen but disdainful of their personality. By 1994, his clientele was almost exclusively GOP and included Senate Republican whip Trent Lott of Mississippi.
Morris had spoken to Clinton from time to time since his inauguration, and more frequently with the first lady. “You can say things that you don’t propose to Congress,” Morris recalled telling Clinton. “You don’t have to have a legislative program behind every speech—you’re president…. You’re acting too much like a majority leader or a prime minister, whose speaking is only to carry a legislative
program, as opposed to a president, who can talk about anything.” Morris was struck by the fact that there was no separate focus on speechmaking and communication—it was all a subset of legislating.
In his first two years, Clinton had worked closely with congressional Democrats. But they were more liberal than he was, pulling him to the left. “When he spoke, too often it was as a legislative leader, worrying about subcommittee votes and the details of bills,” Waldman wrote. “He would need to learn how to speak as president—both as head of state, for the whole nation, and as sole chief of the executive branch.”
The president and his aides were also the source of self-inflicted wounds, from a two-hundred-dollar haircut Clinton had at Los Angeles International Airport to such blunders as the health care fiasco. The economic plan had passed by a single vote, and now hung around the necks of Clinton and vulnerable Democrats. So did the assault weapons ban, which had been the centerpiece of an anti-crime bill that Congress passed in September. The electorate saw Clinton as in over his head. They were in no mood for the government to take their money or their guns.
Leading the charge was Newt Gingrich, the House Republican whip. Gingrich, from Georgia, had been elected to Congress in 1978 after a failed bid in 1974. He had long plotted a GOP ascension, developing an attacking style that was feistier than was the norm for his party, which he thought had grown complacent in the minority. The GOP was running on a ten-point platform, Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” that promised, among other things, a balanced budget, a tougher crime bill, tax cuts, term limits, a general scaling back and reform of the federal government. Republicans were promising all would be voted on within their first hundred days.
By the time Clinton reached out to Morris in mid-September 1994, his approval rating was hovering in the high 30s and low 40s. They spoke a lot in private in the weeks preceding the election. Morris offered polling data. Stephanopoulos picked up “an unfamiliar frequency in Clinton’s monologues,” but did not know its source. And Clinton still could not bring himself to believe the magnitude of what was coming. “Just in case what you’re sure won’t happen happens, I’ll fax you the statement I think you should give when the returns come in,” Morris told him. Clinton grunted and hung up.
November 8 produced a fifty-four-seat GOP gain in the House and eight more seats in the Senate. Every Republican seeking reelection won. And on the state level, the GOP picked up hundreds of local legislative seats and seized a majority of governorships, including the Texas statehouse with George W. Bush’s victory. Clinton maintained an air of near detachment on election night, dispassionately analyzing the results for stunned staffers. Walking with Baer close to midnight, he smiled and said, “This could be liberating.” Morris’s phone rang early on November 9. “You saw I gave your statement,” Clinton said. “What should I do?”
Clinton and Morris started meeting, secretly, away from the White House staff. The “Republican Revolution” was dominating Washington. Some Democrats thought Clinton’s White House tenure had effectively ended, that he would serve out his term ineffectually. “Party leaders wonder whether Clinton can or should seek a second term,” Time reported. Calm on election night, Clinton now retreated in gloom, emotionally and physically checking out. He worked more often now in the residence, away from his staff, as he and Morris grappled with how to deal with the setback.
Clinton could neither parrot the congressional Democrats, flatly opposing whatever the Republicans favored, Morris argued in early December, nor could he accept the Contract With America and a GOP agenda of dismantling the federal government, from environmental regulations to whole cabinet departments, like Education. “Triangulate,” Morris said. To illustrate, Morris used his hands to form a triangle. Clinton would be the apex, between and above the political parties. “Identify a new course that accommodates the needs the Republicans address but does it in a way that is uniquely yours.”
Morris faxed suggestions, sometimes at a clip of a half dozen per day, and talked with Clinton deep into the night. That December, he started meeting with the Clintons in the residence on Wednesday nights. But he remained in the shadows. To the extent White House staffers knew about him, it was under his pseudonym: “Charlie.”
Speechwriting became, as one writer put it, Morris’s “beachhead. That’s where he invaded Normandy.” The assault started in mid-December, when Clinton gave his first address to the nation since the election, aimed at appeasing an angry electorate and politically reasserting himself.
Morris suggested that they work as they had in Arkansas: Clinton would tell him what he was thinking of proposing, Morris would polltest it, and then send him a speech draft. Clinton was not the flip-flopper or poll slave that some charged him to be. Rather, Morris compared him to a sailboat moving toward a fixed destination through a series of tacks. “He asks the pollster to help him determine which current he should try to harness to move him closer to his destination,” Morris later wrote. These tacks should not be confused with “the zigzag of a flip-flop. These zigs and zags bring you ever closer to the place you want to be.” At the time, Morris was in Paris on a scheduled trip, so he faxed drafts back and forth with Clinton through the president’s personal secretary, Nancy Hernreich. Morris’s wife conceived of the idea that became the focus of the speech, a “Middle-Class Bill of Rights,” playing off the post–World War II G.I. Bill of Rights.
“Who came up with this language on the middle-class bill of rights?” Stephanopoulos asked the Clintons. The president ignored him. Hillary wore a Cheshire cat grin so he assumed it was she. Baer, who with Bruce Reed had been the ostensible speechwriter on the speech, did not know about “Charlie.” He first saw the Clinton-Morris draft of the speech on the morning of December 15. He called it the “Immaculate Conception” because it had apparently come from nowhere.
Morris advocated cutting taxes—the discarded middle-class tax cut—and spending. “I know some people just want to cut the government blindly, and I know that’s popular now,” Clinton told the country. “But I won’t do it. I want a leaner, not a meaner government, that’s back on the side of hardworking Americans, a new government for the new economy—creative, flexible, high quality, low cost, service oriented—just like our most innovative private companies.”
The address was seen as a sop to the GOP. “Just about everybody in Washington jumped on the tax-cut bandwagon last week,” Time reported. “But Bill Clinton was the only one who had to do a backflip while eating his words. Such are the contortions of political reincarnation.” New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis noted: “A democracy also needs leadership—leadership that speaks to citizens in terms of reality, not popularity. On that score Mr. Clinton’s speech was a disaster, for the country and for him.”
The speech contained the essence of the strategy that would bring the president back to the center ideologically and politically: addressing issues the GOP had raised, but doing it with a Democratic slant. If it was an indication of Clinton’s final course, however, it was not a turning point. It was the first signal that the Clinton administration’s ideological battle was resuming, with the president reestablishing a centrist path.
Clinton was to give his State of the Union address on January 24, 1995, and the question was should it be a partisan attack or a humble note of conciliation? A competing national vision? The quandary occupied the speechwriters, senior aides, and consultants. Clinton’s December address had signaled a possible new tone for his speeches, but Morris remained behind the scenes, and there was no strategic guidance from the president or anyone else. Clinton “did not regard the people who worked for him as reliable instruments of his will,” John F. Harris writes in his history of Clinton’s presidency. “It was as if his staff was simply one more constituency with which to be reckoned.” The speeches in early 1995 were episodic struggles for control of the administration’s direction.
Preparing for the State of the Union, Clinton riffed, trying to imagine what the voters wh
o elected a GOP Congress must be feeling. “These white guys thought they were working harder for less money, sleeping less, couldn’t even afford a vacation and now the damn guy—he didn’t give me a tax cut and now he’s coming after my gun,” he said.* He needed to acknowledge the electorate’s anger, he told his aides, but make people see that the GOP plan “would be law of the jungle”—everyone fending for themselves. “So maybe you’d have sixty percent of the people that would be happy as clams, but they’d be living behind fences,” he said. He wanted to illustrate that the “law of the jungle” was contrary the nation’s values by featuring in the first lady’s box ordinary citizens who did public service around the country. † And, he told his aides, he wanted a short speech. “My gut is, we ought to try to do this in half an hour—no more than half an hour.”
A first draft came to Clinton on Thursday, January 19. The writers heard nothing. They did not know that Clinton was huddling with Morris. The president had commissioned “the mother of all polls,” as Morris termed it, a 259-question marathon that tested the GOP offensive. The Republicans, especially in the House, had mistaken the anti-Clinton mood for a blanket endorsement of their anti-government philosophy. Morris’s poll gave Clinton a road map on where to compromise and where to hit back: he spent five hours briefing the president on Thursday.
White House ushers found a typewriter, a “green monster” of an IBM, dusted it off, and put it in the Treaty Room on the second floor of the residence. With Clinton occasionally standing over his shoulder, Morris wrote a draft of the State of the Union. He was using the typewriter because a White House computer document would have appeared on the inhouse network. The president, sitting in his yellow dressing room off his bedroom, chewing on an unlit cigar, copied the pages, writing the new lines onto the speechwriters’ draft. As FDR had done six decades before, he wrote out the speech to conceal a helper from prying eyes.*
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 48
