White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  Baer got a call early Sunday afternoon: Clinton wanted him to come to the residence, alone, to work on the speech. Using his usual felt-tipped pen, Clinton had struck out sections and written in new ones. “Here, listen to this,” he said, and read them to Baer, who approved of most. Some language seemed overblown, unlike Clinton’s. “In November, we not only heard America singing, we heard America screaming,” said one (it would be softened to “We didn’t hear America singing, we heard America shouting”). Baer was unaware of Morris, but he sensed something. It was like astronomers discovering celestial objects through their effects on other bodies. “You couldn’t see the planets, but there were these other gravitational forces,” Baer said.

  Baer’s role the next day, Monday, was shuttle diplomat. Morris was hidden in the residence. Baer would bring pages, which he assumed were Clinton’s, to the West Wing, where he entered the changes and circulated the new draft. Suggestions he got from the writers and senior staff were taken back to Clinton.

  Stephanopoulos joined him on one trip to the residence. A line about “tax cuts for the wealthy”—a classic of Democratic talking points—had been dropped, and Stephanopoulos questioned that. Hillary Clinton cast him an irritated look. “It’s your speech, Bill, you should say what you want,” she told the president. That’s weird, Stephanopoulos thought, she usually likes a good pop on the Republicans.

  The speechwriting “pack”—writers, staffers, consultants—were hunkered in the pizza box–littered Roosevelt Room. “It was coming down to the president’s new draft versus the one we had written under staff and consultant direction,” Baer said. “Don’t you understand?” one of the consultants told Baer. “We like your draft better than this.” Baer’s recollection is that the disputes focused mainly on the speech’s opening.

  Morris remembers more substance to the disagreement: “Theirs was the standard Democratic rebuttal to the Contract With America, focusing on the cuts and not indicating any desire to work with the Republicans,” Morris said later. “Ours was our first effort to articulate the options for the third way.”

  That night, Clinton sent a copy of the speech to Al From, the head of the Democratic Leadership Council. From was another participant in Clinton’s effort to reemphasize his “New Democrat” roots. From collaborated with domestic policy adviser Bruce Reed, to suggest more New Democrat–style language to Clinton.

  On Tuesday, January 24, the pack assembled in the family theatre for the president’s rehearsal. He never came down. He was in the residence, rewriting. Al Gore left.

  Tonight we must forge a new social compact to meet the challenges of this time. As we enter a new era, we need a new set of understandings, not just with government but, even more important, with one another as Americans…. I call it the New Covenant. But it’s grounded in a very, very old idea, that all Americans have not just a right but a solemn responsibility to rise as far as their God-given talents and determination can take them and to give something back to their communities and their country in return. Opportunity and responsibility: They go hand in hand. We can’t have one without the other. And our national community can’t hold together without both.

  The “New Covenant” went back to the campaign, and it signaled a return to the “New Democrat” ideas he had run on. Clinton laid out areas where he was willing to cooperate with the Republicans and drew lines as to how far he would go. The speech was “by turns conciliatory and studded with pointed delineations of difference,” The New York Times reported. “We all agree that we have to change the way the government works,” Clinton said. “Let’s make it smaller, less costly, and smarter; leaner, not meaner.”

  Clinton’s thirty-minute limit went by the boards. At 5,800 words, the final draft would have run just under an hour if he had spoken at his regular clip of 100 words per minute and no one applauded. But with nearly 100 interruptions for applause, the speech—9,200 words after ad-libs—ran a record eighty-one minutes. It was, in effect, two speeches. There was Morris and Clinton’s prepared text, which tried to sap the GOP momentum by agreeing to their most popular agenda items while putting Clinton’s spin on it—make government “leaner, not meaner.” And then there was the president extemporizing. “In those final thirty minutes, the public saw Clinton at his best, without artifice or pretense, genuinely enjoying his chat with them,” Morris wrote. “The informal language, the familiar style, his obvious enjoyment at having a chance to speak with them was deeply comforting to the American people, no matter how tedious it seemed to me.”

  And Morris was not alone in sensing tedium: For those “who hoped for signs of a new political acuity and a new personal discipline in the White House, it must have constituted a disappointment—almost an hour and a half long and a reminder of Mr. Clinton’s seemingly endless nominating speech at the 1988 Democratic convention,” The New York Times’s R. W. Apple, Jr., wrote the next day.* But if the diagnosis was on the mark, the prognosis was not. Baer was at the White House post-speech reception, when deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes brought news from the White House pollsters: the reaction was off-the-charts positive.

  The State of the Union gave Clinton a bump in the polls, but overall he continued to founder. Gingrich was running the House with drilled effectiveness, passing the items of the Contract With America in fewer than the promised one hundred days. Problems were starting to emerge as the Speaker grappled with his newfound celebrity, as well as with members of the new class of Republican legislators who felt more obligated to their conservative principles than to their party leadership. The Senate, under the leadership of crusty veteran Bob Dole, a front-running potential presidential candidate, was moving at a more leisurely pace.

  The White House remained a picture of inefficiency. Clinton might have thought that the State of the Union would set a new ideological tone, but there had been no follow-up. Morris remained a secret to most of the staff and the president was still withdrawn.

  Clinton had changed playbooks but had not informed the team. Many of the regular staff favored a Trumanesque confrontation with Congress. Morris continued to advise a careful selection of battles. Part of the problem was practical: the White House staff had still not learned the lessons of how to plan a message strategically. “Every presidential event, each radio address, had become a battleground,” Stephanopoulos wrote. “One draft would be prepared by the staff, a second would whir through the president’s private fax.”*

  Clinton was frustrated by the staff texts, which drew on the congressional Democrats’ oppose-the-Republicans playbook. “I get up there, and all I have in front of me is liberal, populist, partisan stuff,” Clinton complained to Morris. “I need more balance back in those speeches.” Why are we doing this? he would yell at Baer. “As Newt Gingrich was orchestrating House passage of the Contract with America, we were responding with a symphony of mixed signals,” Stephanopoulos recalled.

  In January 1995, Hillary Clinton had stopped attending the Wednesday strategy meetings and other senior staff members had joined. By March, the attendees included Vice President Gore and his chief of staff, Jack Quinn; pollster Doug Schoen; Leon Panetta, who had been appointed chief of staff the previous July and who disliked Morris; deputy chief of staff Erskine Bowles; and deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, who knew Morris from New York politics and really despised him.

  Morris’s polling had shown a bump from the State of the Union, but with no follow-through the numbers sank through February. By March, the GOP Congress was heading south as well. Their roll-back-the-government agenda was frightening the public. “Our ratings and Dole’s and Gingrich’s are joined at the hip,” Morris wrote in a meeting agenda for a March 16, 1995, weekly strategy session. “We go up or down together.” Legislative gridlock would encourage an anti-incumbent mood, Morris argued, endangering Clinton’s prospects for 1996.

  Morris proposed a “Pile of Vetoes Speech,” to be given “with drama and flair to mark [an] important point” of new cooperation. Clinton would l
ist the Contract With America items on which deals could be made and those on which they could not. The key line would be: “I was not elected…to produce a pile of vetoes or a stack of issues for the next election.” And a tougher passage: “Ideological purity is for dictatorships, compromise…and negotiation are the substance of democracy.” (When Clinton finally gave the speech this became “Ideological purity is for partisan extremists. Practical solution, based on real experience, hard evidence, and common sense, that’s what this country needs.”)

  “Be sure all White House staff is on board for new line.” This was a problem. Liberals like Ickes and Stephanopoulos opposed searching out areas of agreement with the GOP. Centrists Baer and Reed were natural Morris allies before they even knew of his existence. In the middle was Panetta, who had tried to instill order on the chaotic Clinton White House. He had not approved of Stephanopoulos and Begala’s free rein in the first half of the term and was as unhappy with the notion of Morris operating without constraint now. And while he was no liberal, Panetta came from Congress and was disinclined to triangulate away from his old colleagues.

  The opponents of a “Pile of Vetoes Speech,” led by Panetta, argued that the unified Democratic opposition to the GOP was working; this was no time for Clinton to break with the congressional wing of the party. The argument played out inconclusively over several weeks. Clinton was scheduled to address the American Society of Newspaper Editors on Friday, April 7—the end of the GOP’s first one hundred days. Clinton’s top staffers achieved rare unanimity, agreeing that he should speak on education. He would challenge the GOP Congress not to cut federal education funding. He would kick off an administrationwide week of education-related events. David Shipley, a former editor at The New Republic who had recently joined the speechwriters, wrote the address, which was finished and had gone through the staffing process by Wednesday night, April 5.

  Harold Ickes called Baer at home early the next morning and told him to come into the office. At 7:15 am, Ickes told Baer that the speech was now not on education. Baer should head to the office of Democratic consultant Bob Squier. Someone named Dick Morris would explain. Baer should tell no one. The only people on the White House staff who knew about Morris were the senior staff who attended the weekly strategy sessions.

  At Squier’s office, Morris pulled out his draft of the address with a flourish. It was the “Pile of Vetoes Speech”—listing the areas of the Contract With America where deals could be cut—that had been secretly debated in the Wednesday night meetings for weeks. Baer liked it: “It had bite, it made a point, it wasn’t some sprawling policy thing, which was what we were doing,” he recalled. Morris wanted Clinton to “try to use the moment to turn the tables on these guys and I was all for it.” But Morris had not learned how to write for a president. He wrote in short, rapid-fire sentences and the speech had too snipey and combative a tone. The line about America “screaming” instead of singing had returned.

  Baer made the speech more presidential and took it to Clinton. What do you think? Clinton asked. It’s pretty good, Baer said. His colleagues were calling: What does the president think of the speech, the education speech? they asked. When will we see him? Baer tap-danced. “I was having to mislead my colleagues about what was really going on,” he said. He started to feel as if there were two White Houses: The one he went to work in every day and another where the decisions were really being made.

  Morris had one more idea: Clinton should extemporize from talking points. I can do that, he replied.

  The next day, as Waldman was giving his college roommates a West Wing tour, he caught bits of the speech on TVs in staff offices. “That’s odd,” he told them. “I don’t remember that.”

  “In the first 100 days, it fell to the House of Representatives to propose,” Clinton was telling the newspaper editors. “In the next 100 days and beyond, the President has to lead the quiet, reasoned forces of both parties in both Houses to sift through the rhetoric and decide what is really best for America.”

  Clinton had already signed two elements of the contract into law: one applying to Congress the safety and workplace laws that it passed for businesses; the other limiting the government’s ability to impose unfunded mandates on states. He threatened to veto six of the remaining seven items that had passed unless they were changed to his specifications.*

  “We stand at a crossroads,” Clinton said. “In one direction lies confrontation and gridlock; in the other lies achievement and progress. I was not elected president to pile up a stack of vetoes. I was elected president to change the direction of America. That’s what I have spent the last two years doing and that’s what I want to spend the next 100 days and beyond doing. Whether we can do that depends upon what all of us in Washington do from here on out.”

  Stephanopoulos walked by Waldman. “How’s the speech?” he asked.

  “I don’t think it’s an education speech,” Waldman said. “He’s about halfway through the Contract With America, saying what he’ll sign and what he’ll veto. Right now he’s up to tort reform.” Stephanopoulos ran down the hallway as if, Waldman recalled, he had been told his office was on fire.

  “Um, it’s not always like this,” Waldman told his startled friends.

  “Mr. Clinton for the first time in months put Speaker Newt Gingrich on the defensive by delivering his speech hours before the House Republican leader was to give a televised address summing up his party’s first 100 days,” The New York Times reported.

  April 12, 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of FDR’s death, would be commemorated at the cabin in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he had died. Baer had argued unsuccessfully that it was a natural event for Clinton: Gingrich and the Republican revolutionaries were rolling back the government that Roosevelt had helped build. It was a chance for the president to wrap himself in Roosevelt’s aura. Morris agreed, and it got on Clinton’s schedule.

  Air Force One flew into Fort Benning and Baer rode in the press bus forty miles to Warm Springs. Shooting the breeze, Chris Matthews, the Carter speechwriter turned political commentator, threw out an idea about what Clinton’s message ought to be. FDR’s coffin was placed on a train that traveled from Georgia to Washington, he said. At every crossroads, poor people, white and black, waited in tears. That was FDR’s contract with America and that’s the contract with America we ought to be honoring.

  When the presidential party arrived at Warm Springs, Baer caught up with Clinton and Harold Ickes, whose father had been in FDR’s cabinet, as they toured the Little White House. Baer leaned in to Ickes’s good left ear and whispered that he had a line from Matthews and that it was good. Ickes agreed and told him to run it by Clinton, who told Baer to write it down.

  “And just remember this: President Roosevelt died here, and they took his body on the train out and America began to grieve,” Clinton said.

  Imagine what the people looked like by the sides of the railroad track. Imagine the voices that were singing in the churches. They were all ages, men and women, rich and poor, black, white, Hispanic, and whoever else was living here then. And they were all doing it because they thought he cared about them and that their future mattered in common. They were Americans first. They were Americans first. That was his contract with America. Let it be ours.*

  Six days later, on April 18, Clinton held his first prime-time press conference since the midterm election. One reporter noted that the Republican-controlled Congress had dominated the political debate. “Do you worry about making sure that your voice is heard in the coming months?” he asked. Clinton made his voice heard in a way that made his staff squirm. “The Constitution gives me relevance,” he said. “The power of our ideas gives me relevance…. The President is relevant here, especially an activist President.” Politicians are trained to answer not the question asked but the question they would have preferred be asked. But in this case Clinton answered a question he had not been asked and gave the wrong answer: A president who has to assert his relevance und
ermines it.

  The next day, Baer was talking with speechwriter Jonathan Prince when news flashed on television—a bomb had destroyed part of a federal office building in Oklahoma City.

  Prince was one of Baer’s additions to the speechwriting staff. During the first year of the administration, he had worked on communications strategy for the economic plan, the crime bill, and the assault weapons ban, and had periodically helped with speechwriting. He joined the writing staff after the 1994 elections. Resembling John Cusack, Prince had, as his colleague Jordan Tamagni put it, “style in the absence of all style.” He wore three-button suits—Waldman called them “zoot suits”—and stylish shoes. He was cocky, but smart—he got a law degree while working at the White House—a fast writer who could perform under pressure.

  With Baer standing over his shoulder, Prince wrote. Soon they were running over to the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing. No one had called—no one on the senior staff had thought to alert the speechwriters. The administration was in its third year but communications was still a secondary concern.

  Prince’s first clear memory of the day is standing in the Situation Room, a warren of office and cubicles in the White House basement. The statement was short—he was ready to argue if anyone said it was too short. But Clinton approved: This is good, he said. “He was very serious,” Prince recalled. “We were fast-paced but not frenzied.”

  Clinton stepped into an office and made a quick phone call, Baer thought it was to Hillary, to run the remarks by her. Then he addressed the press. “The bombing in Oklahoma City was an attack on innocent children and defenseless citizens,” Clinton said. “It was an act of cowardice, and it was evil. The United States will not tolerate it. And I will not allow the people of this country to be intimidated by evil cowards.”