Bush called in the troika to prepare brief remarks for a speech to the nation. He took a telephone call from his father, who had years earlier been targeted for assassination by Hussein. The mood among the president and his aides that Sunday was businesslike, Scully recalled. “There was no false confidence even then,” he said. “They knew it was a good day for the cause in Iraq, but there was no sense that this was going to turn everything around and this was the decisive moment. There was no kind of personal vindictiveness, none of that, no undue relishing of the moment. President Bush—I can truly say that he was always above that.”
“The capture of Saddam Hussein does not mean the end of violence in Iraq,” Bush said, speaking to the nation from the Cabinet Room. “We still face terrorists who would rather go on killing the innocent than accept the rise of liberty in the heart of the Middle East. Such men are a direct threat to the American people, and they will be defeated.”
After the speech, everyone reassembled briefly in the Oval Office. Bush put on a white cowboy hat—Scully had never seen it before—and went on his way.
Bush won reelection on November 2, 2004, defeating Democratic senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts. The president collected over 50 percent of the popular vote and 286 electoral votes, 16 more than needed. Two days later, he held a cabinet meeting to discuss plans for the second term. Afterward, he pulled Gerson aside to chat briefly about his second inaugural address. “I want this to be the freedom speech,” Bush said. Almost a month later, on the morning of December 3, Bush called Gerson in to discuss the speech further. “The future of America and the security of America depends on the spread of liberty,” the president told his aide.
It would be an ambitious address, and Gerson was excited. Bush and he shared “a belief in the power and importance of idealism, to set out historic goals and ideals. He is an ambitious person,” he recalled. “He is disdainful of what he calls ‘small ball.’ He likes big goals and to set out leadership ideals. You saw that for example in the process of the second inaugural where he wanted to set out in stone this new foreign policy approach that was quite controversial, but it fit his approach.”
Gerson rose early—usually at 4:30 or 5 am—and powered himself through the day with a steady stream of coffee. On the morning of December 17, downstairs in his home, he felt numbness in his hands, a cold sweat and then was on the floor and could not get up. He called out for his wife and was able to wake her up. Within ninety minutes he was in surgery at Alexandria Hospital—it had been a heart attack. “In a certain way it was not a disastrous heart attack, not a whole lot of serious, long-term damage,” he said. But it was a grim warning for Gerson, then thirty-nine, whose father had died of a heart attack before he was sixty and whose grandfather had died from one younger than fifty. “A lot of this is just genetic,” he told an interviewer, an air of resignation in his voice.
Gerson managed to keep a sense of humor. He had been arguing the day before with OMB director Joshua Bolten about the upcoming budget. Gerson e-mailed him from the intensive care unit: “I told you that budget was too extreme and shocking,” he wrote. “I couldn’t take it.” Bush started calling. “I’m not calling to see if the inaugural speech is OK,” he said. “I’m calling to see if the guy writing the inaugural speech is OK.” But, Gerson said, “he was really asking about the speech.”
Gerson knew that his work habits would have to change. Nevertheless, within a week and a half he was back at work on the inaugural. He and McConnell wrote the speech over three days.
On the morning of January 20, 2005, the president told Gerson, “I can’t wait to give this speech.” Unlike four years earlier, Gerson watched the speech in person, among those on the inaugural platform. “No longer running for anything other than history’s judgment, George W. Bush delivered his second Inaugural Address under a cold sky to a sea of hats—fur and knit and 10 gallon,” Time reported.
“There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment and expose the pretensions of tyrants and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom,” Bush said after taking the presidential oath of office. “We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” He declared that the tension which had long existed in American foreign policy—between the demands of idealism and the requirements of practical, real-world considerations—was no longer operative.
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. This is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary.
The speech echoed both Harry S. Truman—“I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free people…”—and John F. Kennedy—“Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need…”
It met with mixed reviews. William Safire placed it “among the top five of a score of second-inaugurals in our history.” Peggy Noonan, who had written for both Bush’s father and his presidential model, Ronald Reagan, blasted it. “The inaugural address itself was startling. It left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike,” she wrote. “Rhetorically, it veered from high-class boilerplate to strong and simple sentences, but it was not pedestrian. George W. Bush’s second inaugural will no doubt prove historic because it carried a punch, asserting an agenda so sweeping that an observer quipped that by the end he would not have been surprised if the president had announced we were going to colonize Mars.”
“It is for historians to judge how well Mr. Bush’s actions have fit, or may yet fulfill, his words,” a New York Times news analysis reported. “There remains a wide gulf between his eloquent aspirations and the realities on the ground, from Capitol Hill to the Middle East. Executing his ideas will not be easy, at home or abroad.” Even Bush’s own aides undercut his message by stressing pragmatism over soaring rhetoric. “Bush Speech Not a Sign of Policy Shift, Officials Say,” was the headline of a front-page Washington Post story two days after Bush was sworn in. “White House officials said yesterday that President Bush’s soaring inaugural address, in which he declared the goal of ending tyranny around the world, represents no significant shift in U.S. foreign policy but instead was meant as a crystallization and clarification of policies he is pursuing in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East and elsewhere,” the Post reported. “Nor, they say, will it lead to any quick shift in strategy for dealing with…allies in the fight against terrorism whose records on human rights and democracy fall well short of the values Bush said would become the basis of relations with all countries.”
Whether Bush wanted it to or not, the tension between declared ideals and practical realities still held sway. “Two and a half years after Bush pledged in his second inaugural address to spread democracy around the world, the grand project has bogged down in a bureaucratic and geopolitical morass, in the view of many activists, officials and even White House aides,” Peter Baker of The Washington Post reported in August 2007. “Many in his administration never bought into the idea, and some undermined it, including his own vice president. The Iraq war has distracted Bush and, in some quarters, discredited his aspirations. And while he focuses his ire on bureaucracy, Bush at times has compromised the idealism of that speech in the muddy reality of guarding other U.S. interests.”
Bush remained frustrated that his declarations had far outpaced his ability to move government and nation. He told an Egyptian resistance leader in June 2007 that he too was struggling against an oppressive government regime. “You’re not the only dissident,” Bush said. “I too am a dissident in Washington.”
The troika had broken up before the end of the first term. Scully left the White House for good i
n the summer of 2004, moving to California with his family, though he would occasionally return to help out on major speeches. After his heart attack, Gerson was told by his doctor that he needed to cut back on his work. “I’m a worrier,” Gerson said. “I put a lot of pressure on myself. I know people think it’s funny, but these aren’t charming eccentricities.”
So, at the start of 2005, Gerson dropped his official speechwriting duties and became a presidential assistant for policy and strategic planning. He would work on major addresses, but divested himself of the day-to-day pressures of producing speeches. McConnell turned down an opportunity to succeed Gerson, so William McGurn, a former editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal whom Gerson had twice before recruited to join the speechwriting staff, succeeded him as chief speechwriter. McConnell continued writing for Cheney and, as McGurn assembled his own team, wrote less frequently for Bush.
Michael Gerson’s departure from the White House in the summer of 2006 prompted another wave of adulatory profiles and articles. “The man whose words helped steady the nation after the ‘deliberate and massive cruelty’ of Sept. 11, 2001, is no longer at George W. Bush’s side,” a USA Today article gushed.
The profiles of Gerson—both in print and on television—continued to paint him, either explicitly or by inference, as a solitary writer laboring in communion with his president. He was typically credited as “author of nearly all of [Bush’s] most famous public words during the past seven years,” as one 2006 Washington Post story put it. After innumerable “death marches” and countless days huddled in John McConnell’s office with Gerson sharing laughs, stress, and writing, Scully decided a year later to set the record straight.
In a scathing piece in The Atlantic for September 2007—the same journal that James Fallows had used to score Jimmy Carter nearly thirty years earlier—Scully lambasted his former colleague. “He allowed false assumptions, and also encouraged them,” Scully wrote of Gerson. “Among chummy reporters, he created a fictionalized…version of presidential speechwriting, casting himself in a grand and solitary role.” Typical was a December 2002 appearance on ABC News’s Nightline. Asked “physically” how he writes a speech, Gerson talked about how he liked to do the initial work at Starbucks because “it breaks the solitude of writing to be around the buzz of people.” Eventually, he said, he does “go to a computer screen.”
Scully accused his former colleague of self-absorption (“I think they look at my writing as the fine china, to be taken out on special occasions,” Scully recounted Gerson telling his two colleagues) and manipulation. Gerson, Scully wrote, had led the press and other White House staffers to believe the solo speechwriter story line. “The artful shaping of narrative and editing out of inconvenient detail was never confined to the speechwriting,” he wrote. “(The phrase pulling a Gerson, as I recently heard it used around the West Wing, does not refer to graceful writing.)”
Gerson told The Washington Post that he was shocked by Scully’s portrayal. “I wasn’t out there looking for attention all the time,” he said, his voice filled with emotion. “They’re the president’s words, and I was the chief speechwriter.”
Scully’s article set Washington abuzz. It illustrates clearly how the role of speechwriters has evolved in the early twenty-first century. “For me, the poignancy of Scully’s story is that speechwriting is supposed to be the opposite of what Gerson stands accused of doing,” Bruce Reed, the Clinton domestic adviser who had helped craft numerous speeches, wrote in Slate. “By definition, it’s a profession based on self-denial, not self-promotion. Far from taking credit for the work of others, a speech-writer’s job is to write words that others can stand to claim as their own. Most speechwriters soon learn the basic pleasure-pain principle of the craft: Satisfaction comes from finding words the boss can use, but taking credit for those words can only embarrass the very person you’re supposed to be helping.”
Yet, as the Scully-Gerson contretemps—and the press attention Gerson received over the course of the Bush campaign and presidency—demonstrates, that was an old-fashioned view of the White House speechwriter. For better or worse, the White House ghosts had come fully into view.
Notes
NOTE ON SOURCES: The author interviewed more than ninety current and former White House speechwriters and other aides over a two-year period. The interviews were performed in person, on the telephone, and via e-mail, and in several cases some combination thereof. For simplicity’s sake, they are referred to below as author interviews.
Except where noted, quotations from presidential speeches and other public utterances come from the public papers of the presidents, as put online at the American Presidency Project, John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online]. Santa Barbara, CA: University of www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/.
INTRODUCTION
Stooped, nearsighted: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945), 70.
One Jackson critic: Robert V. Friedenberg, Communications Consultants in Political Campaigns: Ballot Box Warriors (Westport, CT: Praeger/Greenwood, 1997), 14.
The historian George Bancroft: Henry Franklin Graff, The Presidents: A Reference History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), xxviii.
As Abraham Lincoln: William Safire, Safire’s New Political Dictionary (New York: Random House, 1993), xxvi–xxvii.
“literary clerk”: Ibid., 738.
A snub-nosed, soft-spoken: “Encyclopaedia,” Time, April 8, 1929.
Welliver had been: Hendrik Hertzberg, Politics: Observations & Arguments, 1966–2004 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 114.
“a journalist of the highest”: H. L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 132.
“writes the worst”: Ibid., 42.
Welliver was not only: John W. Dean, Warren G. Harding (New York: Times Books, 2004), 73.
When Harding was elected: Russell D. Buhite and David W. Levy, eds., FDR’s Fireside Chats (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), xiii.
The 1924 Republican and: “The First Convention Broadcast: Radio at the 1924 Conventions,” PoynterOnline, September 2, 2004 (updated Dec. 22, 2004).
In his only term: Lyn Ragsdale, Vital Statistics on the Presidency (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1998), 183, quoted by the American Presidency Project, Santa Barbara, CA.
Speechwriters, Clifford would say: Author interview with William Safire.
1. “GRACE, TAKE A LAW”
In Chicago: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 305.
He had passed: Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (New York: Harper & Bros., 1952), 70–71.
Franklin Roosevelt and Rosenman: Ibid., 13–14.
Clean-shaven: Author interview with David Ginsburg.
For the last two years: Samuel Rosenman oral history, Columbia University, 1960 (cited hereafter as OH), FDR Library, 51–52.
Rosenman had in March: Rosenman, Working, 56–57.
Now, Rosenman was determined: Ibid., 71.
In 1933, FDR: Typed-up copy of Cyril Clemens letter to the editor in The Washington Post, June 16, 1952, “Working with Truman—Rosenman, Samuel” folder, Papers of Kenneth Hechler, Harry S. Truman Library (HSTL).
Rosenman would dismiss: Rosenman, Working, 71.
Raymond Moley, who: Raymond Moley, After Seven Years (New York: Harper & Bros., 1939), 23n.
A Columbia University professor: Schlesinger, Crisis, 399–400; Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 95.
He had first met: Raymond Moley, The First New Deal (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 11–12.
After Roosevelt was elected: Ibid., 12.
Also awaiting the candidate: Schlesinger, Crisis, 340; Alter, Defining Moment, 36.
“very devious”: Rosenman, OH, 112–13.
“patently on the smug side”: “Roo
sevelt Sets His Cap,” Saturday Evening Post, June 24, 1939.
When during the convention: Moley, After Seven, 29.
The professor fought: From the plane landing in Chicago, the account comes from Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt, 76–77.
Moley always bristled: Moley, The First, 96.
“My job”: Moley, After Seven, 55.
The topic of the inaugural speech: Except where noted, the account from the train ride through Moley burning his draft comes from Moley, The First New Deal, 99–114.
“the Inaugural Address”: Handwritten draft of inaugural address with March 25, 1933, cover note, “March 4, 1933 [Inaugural Address]” folder, FDR Speech Files, FDR Library.
“a keen sense”: Moley, The First, 114.
the absence of any extant copy: For his 2006 book on FDR’s Hundred Days, Jonathan Alter conducted a thorough study of Moley’s papers, concluding, “When he threw his draft into the fire at Hyde Park, [Moley] apparently immolated any proof of his authorship of the speech” (372).
He edited it himself: Moley, The First, 115.
Like the phrase “new deal”: Alter, Defining Moment, 211.
A 1931 edition: “Business to Make Stabilization Study,” New York Times, February 9, 1931.
but that advertisement has disappeared: Jonathan Alter and his research assistants conducted “an exhaustive search of newspapers in New York and Washington that Howe might have read—and searched several databases and department store archives—but failed to find any such advertisement containing the ‘fear itself’ line or anything approximating it.” (372).
Howe, appointed as Roosevelt’s: Rosenman, Working, 94; Moley, After Seven, 18; Rosenman OH, 113–14.
Moley took a nominal position: Moley, After Seven, 275–80.
“in this instance”: Moley, The First, 515–16.
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 56
