White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

by Robert Schlesinger

  Speaking to reporters on April 5, Clinton added the new aim, saying that Milosevic could end the conflict by, among other things, “making it possible for all refugees to return.” “Mr. Clinton’s aides said that his remarks today—some of his sharpest words yet—were meant to warn Mr. Milosevic that a return of the refugees had become a precondition of any end to NATO’s assault,” The New York Times reported the next day in the eighteenth paragraph of its story on the war. A new condition had been added to ending the war, and it scarcely raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m not saying that this whole thing was triggered by me putting that line in, people were already thinking along these lines, but it probably clarified the choice,” Malinowski recalled. “I’ve always been amazed by this: It was not noted as a major change in policy even though it was. It was a huge change in policy.

  By early June, with air strikes having limited effectiveness, Clinton was preparing to take the next step. Berger recommended that the president immediately deploy 100,000 U.S. troops to the Balkans. Then it was suddenly over: Milosevic announced that he would accede to the allied demands and withdraw from Kosovo. NATO had won.

  Terry Edmonds, the speechwriter who also wrote poetry, returned to the White House in August 1999, succeeding Waldman as director of speechwriting and becoming the first African-American to hold that position. He and Paul Glastris, who had joined the administration from U.S. News & World Report during the summer of Lewinsky, did the initial draft of Clinton’s speech for the Democratic Party Convention speech in August. Clinton half dictated and half scribbled a new draft, and Jeff Shesol and speechwriter Josh Gottheimer pulled it together.

  It was originally conceived as one third retrospective, looking back at Clinton’s two terms; one third about where the country stood in the year 2000; and one third painting Vice President Al Gore as the man of the future and where he would take the nation as president. Gore’s senior advisers vetoed the outline—because of the scandals they did not want Clinton talking up their candidate. The move raised eyebrows among the Clinton staff, who questioned the wisdom of Gore trying to distance himself. And it required a significant reorientation of the speech.*

  The speech became a full-throated celebration of Clinton’s administration, going through what Shesol called “the litany,” the burgeoning list of its accomplishments. Clinton labored furiously on it. “No, no, no,” he said, “this is a speech—I just want to talk to people.” He kept asking for more detail, down to inane levels of the mundane. At four o’clock one bleary morning, Shesol decided that he could not be party to a president uttering the word “salmonella” at a major party convention. He removed a section on food safety.

  “What happened to salmonella?” Clinton asked later that day. Gene Sperling, the national economic adviser, stepped in: “Mr. President, that one’s just a little too much detail.” Clinton looked crestfallen and shook his head. “I loved that salmonella,” he said.

  Edmonds was in his office in December with Glastris and John Pollack, a former Hill staffer, pun champion,*and the last speechwriter hired, when word came that the U.S. Supreme Court had halted the recount of presidential election ballots in Florida, ensuring that Texas governor George W. Bush would be the next president. The writers each drafted a statement, melded their work, and faxed it to Clinton, who was at prime minister Tony Blair’s country residence in England, on his final trip abroad as president.

  The draft was faxed back to them a few hours later. It was black with Clinton’s edits. They pored over the pages and slowly realized how much he had rewritten. Three words remained from their original draft: “Vice,” “President,” and “Gore.”

  “I want to say I am profoundly grateful to Vice President Gore for eight extraordinary years of partnership,” Clinton said on December 14. “Without his leadership, we could not have made the progress or reached the prosperity we now enjoy and pass on to the next administration.”

  TWELVE

  “The Troika”

  SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, 9:03 A.M.

  “Did you see that?” Vice President Dick Cheney asked his speech-writer, John McConnell. The two men were in the vice president’s West Wing office, discussing an upcoming speech. Cheney had ABC News on, and they had been staring at the TV in silence as smoke and flames poured from the North Tower of the World Trade Center when the second plane hit. Cheney’s office quickly filled up: national security adviser Condoleezza Rice; White House deputy chief of staff Josh Bolten;I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff; and Richard Clarke, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism coordinator. Cheney was on the phone, trying to reach President Bush, who was in Florida. McConnell slipped out. No one had questioned his presence, they all knew him, but he figured that it was better to leave than be told to leave. And anyway, he wanted to call his mother.

  Matthew Scully was in his office in the Old Executive Office Building, placing the last pages on a stack in front of him. He was a presidential speechwriter, but this manuscript was his passion and the fruit of more than two years’ work: Dominion, a book on the moral and theological case for animal rights. He had come in as usual around five that morning, carving out time to work on his book. His phone rang. It was Pete Wehner, the deputy director of speechwriting. Turn on your TV, Wehner said, a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center. “A commercial airliner?” Scully asked. Scully’s grandfather, a New York City politician named Robert Moran, had been in the Empire State Building on a July 1945 Saturday morning when a B-25 bomber slammed into it. On television he heard that the White House was being evacuated. Then he heard someone walking through the halls giving the same order: Everyone out. He stuffed his manuscript in a bag and joined the flow out of the building.

  Michael Gerson, the director of speechwriting for President George W. Bush, was working at his Alexandria, Virginia, home that morning when Wehner called. Gerson got into his car and headed to the White House. At around 9:37 am he was driving on Interstate 395 near the Pentagon when he saw a commercial airliner flying by too fast and too low. He could see the windows on the plane. An overpass prevented him from seeing it hit but he saw smoke start to rise. Traffic ground to a halt. Police on the highway turned Gerson around and he headed home, but not before he had written on his notepad: We are at war.

  David Frum, another presidential speechwriter, had been late arriving to work and got the news from his wife, writer Danielle Crittenden Frum, just as he reached his desk. He was scheduled to lunch at the Pentagon with a friend that day, so he called to cancel. “They’re evacuating this building,” the friend’s assistant said. “I cannot talk. We must leave.” The television news was now reporting the Pentagon strike, along with unconfirmed reports of a car bomb at the State Department and fires on the National Mall. Frum’s wife called again: “The White House will be next! You have to get out of there—don’t wait, please hurry!”

  “No!” he said angrily. His ears felt hot. “No! I am not leaving!” He clicked off his cell phone. That was when the Secret Service agent stuck his head through the doorway. “You! Out—now! Now!” Frum joined the White House staffers flowing out into the clear, beautiful morning.

  On the far side of Lafayette Park, Frum ran into McConnell. “We’re just a couple of blocks from the American Enterprise Institute,” Frum said, referring to the conservative think tank. “They’ll have land lines and television sets. And maybe we’ll be able to think of something useful to do.” Frum and McConnell finally reached Gerson at his home. He told them that the White House staff was gathering at DaimlerChrysler headquarters (a White House staffer was married to a DaimlerChrysler employee) eight blocks away. They set out again. “There are going to be thousands and thousands of funerals in this country over the next week,” McConnell said to Frum. “Everybody is going to know someone among the dead.”

  Scully had wandered north from the White House. He saw Tony Snow, a speechwriter from the first Bush administration and now a Fox News anchor, standing ou
tside the Mayflower Hotel talking on his cell phone. The two had worked together years earlier at The Washington Times. They waved hello. Scully finally heard from his wife, Emmanuelle, who told him that the White House staff was gathering at The Weekly Standard, the conservative weekly opinion journal.* There he learned that everyone had already moved on to DaimlerChrysler. It was only when he arrived at the auto company’s office that he found out that the World Trade Center towers had collapsed.

  The Bush speechwriters started working on a statement for the president, who was making a circuitous journey by air back to the capital. Scully, McConnell, and Frum, with Gerson on the telephone, tried to write. Frum, Scully recalled, “was trying to crack the whip and get us focused,” with limited success. On speakerphone, Gerson tried to explain to Scully a concept that Rice wanted included in the remarks, but there was too much going on. Scully picked up the receiver so he could hear him. Rice wants to include the idea that the United States would deal with terrorists and the nations that aided them in the same manner, Gerson said. Scully produced the line: We will make no distinction between the terrorist groups and the nations that aid them.

  They sent their text to Gerson for a quick edit, and he passed it on to Karen Hughes, Bush’s close adviser and White House communications director, who was assembling the brief address. She used practically nothing from the speechwriters’ draft. At Bush’s instruction, she took out a passage that read: “This is not just an act of terrorism. This is an act of war.” Speaking to her by phone during the day, the president explained, “Our mission is reassurance.” There would be time later for war talk.

  Hughes’s pastor had e-mailed her a message of support that mentioned the Twenty-third Psalm—“The Lord Is My Shepherd”—and she decided to include a passage from it in the remarks. She was waiting on the patio outside the Oval Office at 6:54 pm when Marine One, the president’s helicopter, touched down on the South Lawn.

  Standing between the White House and the Old Executive Office Building, on the other side of the West Wing, McConnell could hear the whup-whup-whup of the helicopter blades as the president arrived. Just for a moment he had a lump in his throat as he considered the possibility that the terrorists’ plan had included destroying the White House and the president with it, but that both still stood. Scully, Frum, and he had slowly made their way back to the White House, impeded by ever tighter layers of security. Despite having their White House badges, they had had to wait half an hour outside the Northwest Gate. “There were men with long guns on the lawn,” McConnel recalled. Once inside, they went to the White House mess and got hamburgers. McConnell was not sure if the mess stewards had ever left.

  At some point, Hughes, Gerson, and Dan Bartlett, a communications aide whose Bush service went back to Texas, had decided to ask the president to revisit including “This is an act of war.” None wanted to broach it with Bush, who disliked late changes to speeches, and Bartlett had finally gotten the duty. Edits are over, the president said. Now, as airtime approached, Bush and Hughes gave the remarks one last look. The translation of Psalm Twenty-three was unfamiliar and Bush did not like it. “You need to get a good translation,” he said. And he tweaked the phrase Scully had produced about not making a distinction between terrorists and the countries that helped them—the only line from the speechwriters’ draft that made it into the final speech. Bush inserted the word “harbor.”

  “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them,” he told the nation that evening.

  Tonight I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve, for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened. And I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us, spoken through the ages in Psalm 23: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me.”

  Gerson thought the speech was “unequal to the moment—too much sentiment, not enough resolve, too much forced word play.” Bush looked “stiff and small.” Frum, listening with Scully and McConnell, was not impressed either. Bush looked weak and tentative, he thought. “At the center of the speech, where Bush ought to have explained who the enemy was—and then pledged to destroy him utterly—the public was offered instead a doughy pudding of stale metaphors,” he wrote. Someone on the White House staff would nickname the speech “the Awful Oval Address.” It was not a strong start.

  Gerson drove in before dawn the next morning. Passing the Pentagon, he could smell the building burn through his open car window. He, McConnell, and Scully gathered in McConnell’s office. The president would be speaking at the National Cathedral in two days at a day of prayer and remembrance. Working from an outline prepared by Gerson, they set to writing. At a time when the world around them had changed, the three men were returning to a familiar routine.

  Bush called them “the troika,” “the lads,” “the team,” or sometimes “the A-team.” Almost every prepared speech Bush had given since the start of his campaign for the presidency bore the fingerprints of Gerson, Scully, and McConnell. If they had not composed the speech, then they had likely sat around McConnell’s computer editing a text written by one of the other speechwriters. It would start with an outline from Gerson—“the Scribe,” as Bush sometimes called him. Gerson had neatly combed hair that exposed a high forehead and circular glasses that gave him, as one reporter put it, an “owlish” appearance. He would scribble on a yellow legal pad in his wild handwriting.* “One of his great talents is the ability to put together an intellectual construct for a speech,” McConnell said. “He would think about these things for great lengths of time and go off and read and think and pick people’s brains and very often he would come in with a speech outline.”

  Gerson was born in Belmont, New Jersey, but his family moved to St. Louis when he was ten. His father was a Nixon Republican and his mother a Kennedy Democrat. At age twelve, Gerson was a Jimmy Carter supporter, debating for him in school and handing out literature. He thought that Carter “represented a contrast to the moral bankruptcy of the Nixon era,” and he also liked the former Georgia governor’s openness about his religious beliefs. Gerson, an Episcopalian evangelist, split with the Democratic Party over abortion, which he viewed as a social justice issue.

  Gerson studied briefly at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, but left when he had “sort of a crisis determining what I really believed,” he later said. He transferred to Wheaton College, outside Chicago, where he studied theology. He was planning to enter the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, when a friend introduced him to Charles Colson, the former Nixon counsel who had started a prison ministry after spending time in jail for Watergate-related crimes. Colson asked Gerson to put off Fuller and come work for him as a researcher. Gerson never made it to the seminary.

  After Colson, Gerson worked for various political figures, writing speeches for Indiana senator Dan Coats and then for Senator Robert Dole, on whose 1996 presidential campaign he first met Scully and McConnell. He went on to work as a senior editor at U.S. News & World Report, where he covered the Clinton impeachment trial. One day in 1999 he got a call from Texas governor George W. Bush’s office—the governor was going to be in Washington and wanted to meet.

  Gerson was reportedly so nervous before the meeting that he was spotted in the hallway of the J. W. Marriott Hotel in Washington hyperventilating. He later said he had no recollection of the panic attack. “I’ve read your stuff,” Gerson recalled Bush saying. “This isn’t an interview. I want you to write my announcement speech, my convention speech and my inaugural.” There was, Gerson thought, “an infectious confidence there.” Bush talked about how he wanted to transform the GOP’s domestic agenda by promoting education and welfare overhauls and faith-based initiatives. Within weeks Gerson had moved to Austin to work on the campaign.

  Gerson developed what one staffer called “a mind meld” with Bush. “When you
bring the West Texas approach to the heavy debates of the world, there has to be a translator,” explained Dan Bartlett. “Mike is the translator.” In the White House, Gerson had a reputation for intensity. It was not unusual for him to ignore staffers he passed in the hallway, lost in thought. He might chew on a pen until it exploded in his mouth (it was, Frum said, a box-a-week habit). He won plaudits for the eloquence of many of Bush’s speeches. He also assumed policy-related duties beyond speechwriting, dealing with promotion of democracy, international development, and disease prevention, focusing especially on AIDS and Africa. He had a cramped office in the West Wing, but would often retreat to a Starbucks coffee shop to work on his outlines.

  In Austin, in April 1999, Gerson had invited Matt Scully to join the Bush staff. Scully had just started writing his book and figured that he could use the income while working on it in his spare time. And his parents lived in Houston. Anyway, he had always enjoyed Gerson’s company, so he accepted the job.

  Born in Casper, Wyoming, Scully had never graduated from college, but had built a successful career on his graceful writing. McConnell described him as “the best writer in the English language that I know of.” He had been a literary editor of The National Review and had worked at The Washington Times. He had written speeches for Vice President Dan Quayle during the first Bush administration, where he met McConnell.

  Scully kept a Ziploc bag of peanuts in his office which he fed the squirrels on the White House lawn. Thoughtful and soft-spoken, he gained attention when his book was published not only for making a conservative case for animal welfare, but for being a strict vegetarian in an administration of carnivorous Texans. He “is the most interesting conservative you have never heard of,” columnist George Will noted. “He speaks barely above a whisper and must be the mildest disturber of the peace. But he is among the most disturbing.”