Speechwright : an insider’s take on political rhetoric

Speechwright

Speechwright a n inSiDer ’S ta K e On POLitiC a L rhe t OriC

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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Gavin, William F. Speechwright : an insider’s take on political rhetoric / William F. Gavin. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-61186-017-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Communication in politics—United States—History—20th century. 2. Rhetoric—Political aspects—United States— History—20th century. 3. Speechwriting—United States—History—20th century. 4. Gavin, William F. 5. Speechwriters—United States—Biography. 6. United States— Politics and government—1945–1989. I. Title. JA85.2.U6G38 2011 808.5092—dc22 [B] 2011006439

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To Bob Michel and Jim Buckley

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[ peechwriters] can be a great help to the speaker, but only if used properly. Generally, the speech writer is a better wordsmith than speaker. But since he is probably an intellectual, he relates better to the written word than to the spoken word. . . . [A] speaker can avoid this dilemma only by taking the time to make the speech his own. He should select the message, making the basic outline, and provide the key ideas and phrases. Richard Nixon In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat, and Renewal

Contents

preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi chapter one. A Speech at the Beach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 chapter two. A Speechwright’s Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 chapter three. Becoming a Speechwright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 chapter four. On the Campaign Trail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 chapter five. The White House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 chapter six. A Brief Bureaucratic Interlude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 chapter seven. Jim Buckley and Ronald Reagan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 chapter eight. Bob Michel, Man of the House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 chapter nine. Working with the Gipper, Again . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 chapter ten. Getting the Job Done . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 appendix. Richard M. Nixon, Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech, Republican National Convention, Miami Beach, Florida, Thursday, August 8, 1968 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

Preface

For almost thirty years I made my living writing political speeches of all kinds: contributions to national convention addresses, Rose Garden remarks for a president, presidential greetings of dignitaries, college commencement addresses, Arbor Day celebrations, and senatorial and presidential campaign speeches, not to mention presidential letters, magazine articles, newspaper columns, press releases, one-liners, slogans, jokes, remarks for the floor of the House and Senate, and so many speeches praising Abraham Lincoln that I once thought of affecting a stovepipe hat. Working for President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, Senator James L. Buckley, and Representative Bob Michel, then–minority leader of the House of Representatives, I learned some things about my craft along the way. What this book lacks in scholarly rigor (I am innocent of theory, not to mention footnotes) will be made up for, I hope, by evidence of practical experience. I learned my craft a long time ago, during a time when IBM electric typewriters were the latest technological innovation for writers, when I had sideburns (indeed, when I had hair) and wore double-knit suits. The cold war, riots in American cities, the shutting down of American campuses by demonstrators, and the war in Vietnam were all going on at the same time. Popular culture was changing dramatically. In political and social terms, it was eons ago. But some things in politics are eternal, and one of them is how speech drafts are turned into speeches. So although I am now retired from speechwriting—a friend says •  xi

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I am in the Former Speechwriters Protection Program—and spend my time writing novels, I am still interested in political rhetoric. If there is some disinterested philosopher-king who looks on political rhetoric with no preconceptions, I have never met or heard of him. Given that fact, I owe it to my readers to tell you, as we used to say, where I’m coming from: I believe writing speeches is something less than an art but more than a mechanical exercise. It is not, strictly speaking, a profession. I prefer to think of it as a craft, and that is why I prefer the word “speechwright” instead of the usual “speechwriter.” A wright is someone who puts things together. A speechwright puts together a speech out of separate pieces (introductions, one-liners, policy statements, jokes, exhortations to action, contributions made by policy experts or other writers, the boss’s additions and deletions to the drafts, and pious political memories), the way a wheelwright puts together a wheel. I think “wright” has a nice blue-collar ring to it while “writer” does not. Authors of books and essays write to make something lasting and beautiful; speechwrights hammer, drill, saw, and otherwise push around words to craft something ephemeral but useful. •    •    • There have been many, in academia and in media, who have argued that hiring speechwrights is wrong, root and branch, perhaps even immoral in a sense, because it is a form of fraud or deceit on the electorate. This argument is not made much anymore. I think this is because there is a better-informed, more sophisticated understanding among the electorate, scholars, and reporters of exactly what goes on in the speechwriting process. But there are still, no doubt, hard-liners who feel deeply about the subject, so I will try to briefly address the question here. Division of Labor. As the responsibilities of high office have become more complex, an office-holder finds himself having to rely on expert advice, usually from people he has on his own staff, although outside consultants have become ubiquitous in recent decades. No office-holder (or office-seeker) can be expected to know everything about every issue, and he therefore comes to depend on administrative aides to run his office and specialists to consult on esoteric political subjects (such as farm policy or nuclear weapons). So if we take for granted that it is a good thing to hire policy and administrative aides in this age

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of specialization, why not hire an aide to write speech drafts? The usual answer of critics is this: a politician should not be told what to say by a speechwright. He should know what he wants to say. I am amused by those who criticize politicians for being conceited, overbearing, dominating scoundrels but then accuse these same monsters of ego of being slaves to speechwriters who, it is alleged, control the politician and make him say every word they write. As I try to show in this book, a good speechwriter is neither Uriah Heep, cringing, bowing, and scraping before his boss, nor Dr. Frankenstein, creating his very own monster out of his boss, ready to do his bidding. He is writing to serve a purpose, and a person, but he cannot do this well unless he is true to himself and his own judgments and willing to disagree with his boss when necessary. In thirty years I have never worked for a politician who merely took what I wrote and spoke my words obediently. Use of Time. If presidents wrote all the words they are expected to speak, they would spend all day in the Oval Office doing nothing but writing draft after draft. This, of course, would not be a bad thing in the case of some of our presidents, but that’s another story. Information Overload. The public is bombarded with messages of all kinds, commercial, institutional, governmental, plus network and cable television, radio, the Internet, and the various cell-phone gadgets that have become necessities of daily life for so many. At no time in history has the written or spoken word been subjected to more of a challenge than now, when everywhere we turn there is a picture telling us more than words can. In order to get across a spoken message in such an environment, a politician needs a professional writer to help him cut through other speeches and images and get media attention by crafting messages that catch the ear of the media. Out of the scores, and sometimes hundreds, of speeches that are made in Washington every day by the president, senators, congressmen, cabinet members, or executive branch officials, only a fraction get noticed in the national media, and only a fraction of those get more than a few lines of exposure. Most Americans never listen to or read the full text of a speech. If you watch C-SPAN, you know why—most political speeches are boring or are about subjects that are of importance only to special interests. All we get, if we are lucky, are little snippets here and there. Rhetoric has to address problems, but only a small part of the rhetoric will reach a wide audience. It is the job of the boss and his

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speechwright to see if by language alone the boss can cut through the noise. So I think and I hope speechwrights are here to stay. •    •    • I believe politics is a positive good, in and of itself, despite the manifold difficulties inherent in its successful practice and the ease with which it can be perverted by malicious or stupid people. Yes, I know that John Adams once wrote, “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, architecture, music, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” I admire the cantankerous Adams, but I believe that here he was dead wrong. Politics in a democracy is one of the glories of the human race and does not need to take a backseat to the arts or sciences. Yes, politics can be and often is made up of horrors, abominations, crimes, and misdemeanors. But religion, ideology, journalism, academia, science, art, and in fact any creation of fallible human beings, even with divine guidance, can also be perverted because of the apparently unfathomable depths that human follies and appetites can reach. The seven capital sins will be with us as long as the human race exists, and since this is the case, condemning politics for its faults without appreciating its great virtues seems to me to be shortsighted. •    •    • For the purposes of this book, my most important belief is that rhetoric and its skillful crafting by speechwrights are important in a democracy. I say this with no illusions about how awful some political rhetoric can be. Often, as a congressional aide, standing behind the back railing on a very late night on the floor of the House of Representatives, listening to some inarticulate congressional hack give us yet one more tired variation on some twice-told tale of appropriations or authorizations, or, seated at my typewriter (or, now, computer keyboard), bone-weary with election-campaign fatigue, writing yet one more speech about the quiddities of farm supports, I have found myself remembering what Marianne Moore said about poetry: “I too dislike it: there are things that are more important beyond all this fiddle, / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it, after all, a place for the genuine.”

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These are exactly my feelings about rhetoric. Listening to it, writing it, at times with a perfect contempt for it, I still can find in it a place for the genuine and, at its highest moments, a kind of integrity and power without which our democracy would perish. It does not have to be eloquent. It does have to be persuasive. So when I use the word “rhetoric,” it is in a descriptive sense, meaning the words politicians use when speaking publicly on political issues, not the kind of flowery, empty, glittering phrases that usually come to mind when we use the word. But I have learned that words alone won’t do the job in a speech. Edmund Wilson once wrote of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, “It makes every mistake but one. It doesn’t fail to live.” The same holds true about political speeches. No matter how well crafted or carefully researched, if the speech lacks authenticity and coherence, if the speaker doesn’t fit the words, and the words, no matter how beautiful they may look on a page, don’t seem to come from some inner core of the speaker, the speech dies. •    •    • I have serious doubts about eloquence, or, at any rate, the pursuit of this quality by politicians, whether it is in the form of moving language expertly delivered or what I call thrill-talk, rhetoric intended to excite the crowd. Please don’t get me wrong. I, too, know the joy of listening to an exciting speaker, and, yes, I could not resist Ronald Reagan (and not just for the lines I wrote for him). So I do not want to suggest I stand above the rhetorical fray and observe with Olympian detachment the frenzied responses of the mob. I am not immune to the seductions of thrill-talk. I am in fact a firm believer in downing a few shot glasses of Old Uncle Demagogue’s One-Hundred-Proof Visionary Thrill-Talk Elixir at Republican Party conventions. So I am not saying eloquence has no place in rhetoric. I am only saying that concentration on writing and delivering speeches that make good arguments is more useful than trying to come up with eloquent passages that sound good at the time but are often divorced from the complexities of reality. Robert W. Cherny, in A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, writes: “John Peter Altgeld, governor of Illinois . . . immediately called [William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech] ‘the greatest speech I have ever listened to,’ but soon asked his friend Clarence Darrow, ‘What did he say anyhow?’”

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Bryan’s speech, with its famous peroration, “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,” thrilled those in attendance at the Democratic convention of 1898 and won for Bryan the presidential nomination of his party. It was a great speech, of a certain kind. But as Altgeld said, once he had escaped from the spell cast by Bryan, what had the orator really said, anyway? What did all of that righteous oratorical eloquent indignation mean? The question is as relevant in our own time. The argument against eloquence has an ancient lineage. To paraphrase Saint Augustine, in The Confessions, “Ideas are not better just because they are better said, not necessarily true because eloquent, nor is a speaker’s soul necessarily better because he is handsome.” In the seventeenth century, Thomas Sprat, member of the Royal Society, and later to become a bishop, wrote about “ the ill Effects of this Superfluity of Talking,” in his History of the Royal Society: “when I consider the means of happy Living, and the causes of their Corruption, I can hardly forbear . . . concluding that Eloquence ought to be banished out of all civil Societies, as a thing fatal to Peace and good Manners . . . nothing may be sooner obtain’d, than this vicious Abundance of Phrase, this Trick of Metaphor, this Volubility of Tongue, which makes such a noise in the world.” These stern thoughts seem strange in our own time, when we take for granted that eloquence is a necessary quality for leadership. The modern cult of thrill-talk began, I believe, with President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address in 1961. When I began writing speeches, in 1968, his speeches were considered the very model of rhetorical excellence. Who can forget: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” The marching cadences, the sheer music of the thing, and the absolute commitment to basic principles are irresistible even today. This is thrill-talk eloquence in its pure form. But seen from the vantage point of realistic, achievable American foreign policy goals, what Kennedy said was Inaugural Oratory, the successful, admired brother of that old reprobate Campaign Oratory. Granted, a new president should not be held to facts and figures in his inaugural address. Inspirational words are always welcome, and if those words sometimes have more

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music than sense, so be it. But we all cheered Kennedy’s absolute statement about foreign policy. Among those who cheered the loudest were influential members of his own party who, just a few short years after his tragic death, showed that they, at least, were not ready to pay any kind of price or endure any kind of hardship to support the Vietnamese who fought to avoid becoming victims of Communist aggression. And subsequently, over the past decades, we have been told, again and again and again (to use FDR’s phrase), that there are prices that should not be paid, hardships that ought not be endured, and friends who will not be supported to “assure the survival and the success of liberty.” In other words, Kennedy’s thrill-talk had a good beat, it was music you could dance to, and in its way it was magnificent, but it wasn’t true, because it wasn’t achievable. The big problem with thrill-talk like this is that it must be absolute in its claims and does not recognize ifs, ands, or buts, exceptions, qualifications, nuances, or ambiguities (for instance, George H. W. Bush’s “Read my lips: no new taxes” in his 1992 acceptance speech). In my lifetime I have heard presidents, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, speak of a world without war, of an end to poverty, of full employment, of “bringing us together,” of economic growth without unintended side effects, and many more such visions (including “a bridge to the twenty-first century,” whatever that was supposed to mean), couched in eloquent phrases, almost all of them alluding to the American Dream. Each time the vision was offered, most Americans cheered, because the president, by his rhetoric, had thrilled us, inspired us, touched our hearts, even made some of us weep. But after the rhetoric had faded away and reality set in, each time the inevitable disappointment came—the impossible dream that inspired the eloquence was, of course, just that, a dream, and impossible. Robert Hartmann, President Gerald Ford’s longtime confidant and adviser, wrote, in Palace Politics: An Inside Account of the Ford Years, “From a President, we demand many gifts, perhaps too many, but eloquence ought to be fairly low on the list.” That is exactly my feeling on the matter, although the insatiable lust for eloquence that has for too long dominated American political rhetoric makes such a commonsense claim seem heretical. Granted, Gerald Ford was not an eloquent speaker (although his forceful delivery of his 1976 acceptance speech was a triumph of sheer determination over natural endowments), so Mr. Hartmann’s line of argument might seem self-serving. But his point has merit,

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because judgment, courage, prudence, leadership, and integrity do not depend on eloquence. Because eloquence thrills us, does that mean it always gets to the heart of the matter? Isn’t demagoguery the evil identical twin of eloquence? How can we tell them apart? Indeed, do we always want to tell them apart, despite our protestations of only desiring to hear the truth? The demand for thrill-talk is a form of political aestheticism, the belief that in political speeches, beauty is more important than truth; emotional inspiration is more desirable than logical persuasion; and the ability to produce, on demand, cheer lines and, God help us all, “vision” is the sine qua non of leadership. But the desire to be inspired, to be uplifted, to be made to feel deeply, to be swept away, and thrilled is the mark of jaded citizens who have forgotten that the major goal of political rhetoric should be to make good arguments, clearly and honestly, and to make necessary distinctions, not to blur them as most attempts at eloquence do. In short, what American rhetoric needs is an insistence on our part that politicians stop trying to get us to stand up and cheer during the speech and start persuading us to sit down and think after the speech. Let me offer two examples of how thrill-talk can distort the political process. Governor Sarah Palin’s vice presidential nomination acceptance speech during the 2008 Republican convention was a great success. Even among some of her harsh critics there is a grudging admission that the speech was well-delivered and that it energized a previously lethargic Republican Party. Granted, judged from a literary point of view, the speech was lacking in grace and elegance, a series of one-liners and innovations on the themes of “I’m an ordinary hockey mom”; “Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, is a great man”; and “Barack Obama isn’t up to the job.” Even by the broadest definition of eloquence, her speech was singularly lacking in that quality. The speech was yet another variation on the same old convention-oratory stuff. But it was well crafted, after a fashion, and had one great virtue: it didn’t fail to live. Governor Palin brought those words to life as she spoke them, they were hers alone, her personality infused the unexceptional words with her own spirit. The partisan Republican crowd could tell as soon as she began speaking that something extraordinary was happening, and she took her cue from the enthusiastic response by punching home every line. This electrifying rhetorical effect had a short shelf life, however, although no one knew it at the time. As soon as the speech ended, while the Republican

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delegates were still roaring in delight, Palin’s campaign magic was already beginning to lose its power, despite the enthusiastic crowds that would later flock to hear her on the campaign trail. Governor Palin never quite made the successful transition from being a terrific speech-giver to being a media-savvy national candidate. But she proved that a speech has to live if it is to succeed, and that it is a perfect blending of words and persona that give it life. Her many critics mocked—and continue to mock—what they see as her contrived folksiness, her hockey-mom persona, and her lack of intellectual depth, sophistication, and even good taste. But she taught a lesson that every politician should learn: if it comes to a choice between false, if pleasant-sounding, eloquence or authenticity, choose authenticity. And yet, having said all this, a question remains: what did she say, anyhow? I watched the speech on television, and I was, yes, thrilled. For the first time, the McCain campaign came alive, and as Governor Palin belted home her cheer lines, I was exhilarated. But even granting the fact that acceptance speeches are not to be judged by the highest standards of content and argumentative power, there was something lacking in the speech. Governor Palin had given us her exciting, attractive persona, but she had not given us any good reason, aside from youthful energy and high spirits, to think she would make a good president if, God forbid, something happened to President McCain. She thrilled me by her delivery of some good lines, but she didn’t offer any sustained argument; she didn’t demonstrate the ancient virtue of gravitas, that quality of solidity, of seriousness, of depth. And this is exactly what her speech had to do if it—and her candidacy—was to have life beyond the convention hall. This is perhaps asking too much for an acceptance speech, but she could have eliminated a few cheer lines and devoted the time to showing us how her mind worked instead of how her delivery worked. But at least she avoided attempts at false eloquence, and that is a blessing. Perhaps nowhere did eloquence—or attempts at it—show its vulnerability more than in the presidential nomination acceptance speech by Senator Bob Dole in 1996. Rarely has a speech text more greatly failed to reflect the personality of the speaker than in this case. Senator Dole had built his national political reputation on his partisan feistiness; a wry, sometimes acidic, sense of humor; a quick wit; and a down-home Kansas small-town boy’s persona, someone who has not succumbed to the temptations of Washington, by gosh. But his acceptance

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speech text sometimes reads as if it were meant to be delivered by a college professor of creative writing reading to a seminar on the novels of Proust. Here are some of the lines plain old Kansas Bob Dole had in his speech text that night: • As my voice echoes across darkness and desert, as it is heard over car radios on coastal roads, and as it travels above farmland and suburb, deep into the heart of cities that, from space, look tonight like strings of sparkling diamonds. • And the first thing you learn on the prairie is the relative size of a man compared to the lay of the land. And under the immense sky where I was born and raised, a man is very small, and if he thinks otherwise, he is wrong. • Must we give in to the senseless drive to break apart that which is beautiful, and whole, and good? • History is like that. Whenever we forget its singular presence, it gives us a lesson in grace and awe. • And I am content and always will be content to see my story subsumed in great events, the greatest of which is the simple onward procession of the American people. Eloquent? Beyond any doubt, although it is perhaps more suited to the printed page than a speech. But is this the corn-fed, what-you-see-is-what-you-get Bob Dole whom we had all come to admire or dislike, depending upon party registration? Not at all. “Strings of sparking diamonds”? “Subsumed”? “A lesson in grace and awe”? It sounds as if he is channeling the ghost of Adlai Stevenson or some other patrician orator of the past. But even in passages that are not trying to be eloquent, there is something amiss with the rhythms, the beat, the essence of the speech. It sounds like the kind of thing someone might deliver in the hope of “sounding presidential.” It is not only the attempt at eloquence that is jarring. It is the speech itself, because it doesn’t live—not on the page and certainly not coming out of the mouth of a combat veteran and a funny, sardonic, political infighter. Dole became a victim of the lust for eloquence. So this book is not about great orations, memorable quotations, and declamations whose rhetorical thunder shake the earth. It is instead concerned with what I call working rhetoric, the kind spoken practically every minute of every day, somewhere in this country, from the Oval Office to the local level,

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words uttered in public by politicians who seek to get some political problem clarified or explained or solved through rhetoric and do not care if posterity notices or not. Working rhetoric—sometimes dull, but always addressing the problem at hand, as opposed to ornamental rhetoric, spoken with the express purpose of someday being carved into monuments (just think of most inaugural addresses)—concentrates on the present, thereby keeping politics from falling completely apart in the future. •    •    • When speaking or writing about rhetoric, perhaps no other word is more often used than “demagoguery.” I refrain from using it in this book not because I doubt its existence, but because there is no general agreement as to exactly what it means. A certain passage from Jack London’s The Sea Wolf might provide the start of a working definition. A crew member of a ship listens to his crude, unlettered shipmates argue: “Their method was one of assertion, assumption, and denunciation . . . then following it up with an attack on the opposing man’s judgment, common sense, nationality, or past history.” Assertion, assumption, denunciation, and personal attacks: these are the four marks by which, in my view, true demagoguery may be known, even if the speaker is just thrilling us to death with his eloquence, charm, brilliance, and charisma—and even if the speaker is one of our guys. Again, I am willing to grant leeway to acceptance speeches made at national conventions, where the job of the speaker is to get the partisan crowd feeling, not thinking. That is all I am going to say about demagoguery. •    •    • Inescapably, this is a book at least in part about Richard Nixon, although I spent only three years writing for him and little more than two years as his campaign aide and presidential staff assistant. But he changed my life by his improbable, indeed quixotic, decision to hire me, because at the time I was a high school teacher who had never before written a speech. What I learned writing for Nixon became the foundation of my career as a speechwright. So although I spent more time working for others, the brief time I worked for him takes up a disproportionate part of the book because it had such a disproportionate impact on my life, and because Nixon himself was such a fascinating character.

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Of the original five Nixon speechwriters to come to the White House in January 1969—Ray Price, Pat Buchanan, Bill Safire, Lee Huebner, and myself—I am the only one who after White House service continued to practice the craft, with a few brief breaks, in government service for almost thirty years. Indeed, so far as I know, I am the only White House speechwriter ever to stay in government and write speeches for that long. Given my former colleagues’ subsequent and well-deserved success in so many fields, it might appear I am a case of arrested development. This may well be, but far from being dismayed by my jobs, I have been constantly surprised by the joy of knowing I was making my living and taking care of my family by doing something I do well, and that I like to do, and serving political causes I feel passionately about. In a sense I owe the idea for this book to President Barack Obama. Agree with him or disagree, he singlehandedly brought rhetoric back to politics as a major force. His influence as a speaker made me rethink many of the things I had taken for granted about speechwriting and speech-making. Thank you, Mr. President.

Speechwright

Chapter One

A Speech at the Beach

On Thursday, March 8, 1990, twenty years since I had last seen President Richard Nixon, he visited Washington, DC, to give a speech to the Republican Conference, meaning all the Republican members in the House of Representatives. Although most conference meetings consisted of weekly members-only sessions (sometimes excluding staff), occasionally an outside speaker would be invited, and this time it was the former president, once a member of the House himself. My current boss, House Republican Leader Bob Michel, for whom I had been working for thirteen years, designated me to be the official greeter. At the appointed time, I left the House minority leader’s suite, in the second floor of the Capitol Building, and walked down the same narrow, uneven, winding stairs that British troops had used when they came to burn the Capitol Building in 1812. I waited outside, at the Document Room entrance to the Capitol. I was eager to see Nixon again, but just a bit uneasy. I was going to meet not just a former president but a legend—a controversial, admired, hated, strange, enigmatic man who had changed the direction of my life when he hired me in 1968 as a campaign staff writer. After leaving the White House in 1970, I had lost contact with him. But then, unexpectedly, in 1979 I received a copy of RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, inscribed: “To Bill Gavin, with appreciation for his service to the nation, from Richard Nixon, 3-6-79.” After that he sent me inscribed copies of some of his other new books. I wrote thank-you notes, but these were my only communication with him. What would I say to him this •  3

4  •  cha p te r one

morning, after all these years and all that had happened to him? He had been through a dozen kinds of hell, his reputation forever tarnished, his dreams shattered, his enemies triumphant, and many of his truly great accomplishments either forgotten or obscured by Watergate. How could anyone endure all of that and be the same confident, bold leader I had once served? And, of course, I had also changed. When I worked for Nixon in the White House, I was thirty-three, inexperienced in practical politics at any level, caught up in the wonder of it all, and not in any way a full-service speechwright, just a guy with a skill—a rare gift among speechwrights, Nixon believed—for writing a certain kind of emotionally charged prose he thought he needed occasionally. But now my hair, headed northward in its inexorable march to baldness, was gray, and I was a few months away from becoming a grandfather. Since the last time I had seen Nixon, I had established a solid reputation in Washington. I was no longer the ardent amateur I had been on the 1968 campaign. I was an accomplished speechwright—and proud of it. My life had gone in one direction and his in another. I feared that the Richard Nixon I was about meet again would be merely a ghost of Washington scandals past. I did not want to greet such a man, especially a man I still admired. I wanted to see him leap out of his limousine and give that awkward, Nixonian, V signal with his arms. I wanted what I could not have: the wish that history had not happened. A limousine drove up to the Document Room’s outer entrance. The driver got out, went to the rear door, and quickly opened it. Richard Nixon got out. He had changed, of course, visibly older, a bit stooped, his hair gray, and his famous jowls larger. But it was unmistakably Richard Nixon, not a ghost, not an obviously beaten man, but the old unconquerable Nixon, establishment outsider, survivor, enigma, his intelligent eyes lively, his smile the same one I remembered. Oddly enough—because until that moment I had been steeled for whatever was to come—when I saw him, a quick, unexpected rush of emotion came over me. This wasn’t only Richard Nixon I was looking at; it was part of my past standing there before me, reminding me of a brief period in my life when so many things seemed possible, for Nixon and for me. John Taylor, his assistant, gestured to me to come up to Nixon. I walked over and we shook hands. “Mr. President,” I said, “it’s been a long time.” “Hello, Bill, how are you?”

a s p e ec h at the beac h  •  5

With John, we walked to the Document Room door and strode the few paces to the elevator. I noticed Nixon was limping. When we got off on the second floor, Bob Michel’s staff and many others lined the narrow hallway and applauded Nixon. Bob shook hands with him. “I see you have your old writer with you, Mr. President,” Bob said. “Yes,” Nixon said. “Bill helped us on that acceptance speech. Good stuff.” He turned to me, smiling, and put his hand on my shoulder as he had done the day after his 1968 acceptance speech in Miami Beach, the day when everything changed for me. “Gavin?” he said to Bob, but still looking at me. “Why, Bob, we raised Gavin!” We went to Bob’s office, overlooking the National Mall, with a great view of the Washington Monument. A House photographer took pictures as the three of us exchanged small talk. “Are you still a conservative?” Nixon said to me, smiling. “Yes, Mr. President. More than ever.” Bob said something nice about my writing, and Nixon said, “Oh, I know, I know. He writes with heart.” We walked with him to one of the large House committee rooms where the conference was being held. He received a raucous, cheering, stomping, standing ovation from the assembled Republicans. Bob introduced him, using remarks I had prepared. Nixon then offered a tour d’horizon, covering topics such as post–Soviet Russia, the Middle East, and other international hot spots. He delivered his remarks flawlessly, for about forty minutes, with no notes, not missing a beat or dropping a word. Later Bob and I accompanied him down the steps of the Longworth House Office Building. His limousine was waiting. As he began to get in, he thanked Bob for the nice introduction. Then he said, “Bob, my speech wasn’t too intellectual, was it?” Bob assured him it had been just right. He began to get in the car, but suddenly turned and, poker-faced, said to Bob, nodding to me, “I leave that intellectual stuff to Gavin.” He got in the car and it sped off. It was the last time I ever saw him. At his funeral in Yorba Linda, California, in 1994, I saw an old friend, then–California attorney general Dan Lungren. Dan’s father, “Doc” Lungren, had been Nixon’s personal physician, and as a teenager, Dan had been in Miami Beach during the 1968 convention.

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We talked for a few moments, and then Dan said, “Last night a bunch of us were talking about the 1968 convention. And we all remembered how you were the only one Nixon talked to privately the morning after the speech, in the ballroom. That was one thing we all remembered.” The eulogies began. Like most speechwrights who listen to oratory by politicians, I wondered who had written the remarks. I made every effort to listen intently, but my mind kept coming back to what Dan Lungren had said about the 1968 convention. I sat there in the unexpectedly cool California air, trying to listen to speakers saying nice things about Nixon. But I wasn’t hearing their words. I was instead hearing applause, cheers, from a distant time, another place, long ago. Friday morning, August 9, 1968, the day after the acceptance speech . . . the American Scene Room of the Hilton Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach. Nixon thanking campaign workers for our hard work . . . applause, shouts, the room filled with hope and joy and triumph. I heard again the blaring trumpet sound of political victory, a sound like no other in the world. We all knew Nixon would win the presidency and would be a great president, we just knew it. His time at last had come. He was, as they said, tanned, tested, and ready. Last night he had been given the presidential nomination of his party and . . . And, as I sit at the eulogy, I am back there again, in Miami Beach, 1968. I am standing next to Richard Nixon. He puts his arm around my shoulder—a most uncharacteristic gesture by this most private of men—and, smiling broadly, guides me away from a cheering, whistling, applauding crowd of admirers (his, not mine). The night before, he had delivered his nationally televised acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach. I had made a small, but significant, contribution to that speech. This was why he sought me out in the crowd, to my great surprise, and walked with me to a deserted part of the big room to chat. My fellow campaign aides, still applauding and cheering, looked on in amazement and, I suspect, incomprehension. Why was the brand-new 1968 presidential candidate of the Republican Party, a world-class political figure, talking privately with this guy? The few who recognized me knew I was a high school English teacher. Beginning with a letter I wrote to Richard Nixon in 1967 urging him to run for president, I had gone from the payroll of my high school to the payroll of the Nixon for President campaign—four months before the convention—and would (although of course I had no way of knowing this)

a s p e e c h at the beac h  •  7

go on the White House payroll in January 1969. It was as if some clueless kid from Nowheresville showed up one day at a practice session of, say, the Los Angeles Lakers and made the team after taking a few lucky shots. A dizzying, near-incredible climb, indeed. It was even stranger because although I was hired as a speechwriter, I had never written a speech for anyone, let alone a presidential candidate. As one reporter would later write of me, “He is still very much an amateur among the pros.” A piece in the New York Times would describe me as “the greenest in the group [of speechwriters],” which was exactly right. Now, as we stood together near an exit of the room, Nixon kept his right hand on my shoulder and said, with a big smile, “I just want to thank you for your contribution last night. You could tell I used your themes. After the speech I was looking for you, but we couldn’t find you.” I didn’t tell him that the reason I could not be found was that I had not gone to the convention hall. I had stayed in the hotel, disconsolate, ready to go home to Abington, Pennsylvania, if not in ignominy, at least as a failure. For a week in Miami Beach I had wandered through the campaign headquarters, looking for something to do. But I was never asked to write anything and never contacted by any of the campaign hierarchy. It had never occurred to me that a convention wasn’t a place to start writing—all the speeches should have been written by then. On the night of the acceptance speech, I had my pity party in the Nixon hospitality suite of the hotel with my campaign pal Jack Caulfield, a New York City detective, who had been doing security work for Nixon. Nixon started off his speech with a pledge that this time (as opposed to 1960) he would win. A few minutes into the speech I heard a little contribution I had made, just a phrase, nothing big. But I was surprised and delighted. So Nixon had read the material I sent in at the last minute, before the staff flew from the New York campaign headquarters to Miami Beach, and he had thought my words worth using. A triumph. A minor triumph, of course, but as a speechwriter, you take what you can get. The speech moved along quickly, with Nixon on the attack. In his 1960 acceptance speech, he had to defend the eight-year record of the Eisenhower administration, allowing John F. Kennedy to go on the attack. But in 1968 Nixon had the luxury of blaming the Democratic administration for everything, including what was euphemistically called by Democrats “urban unrest.” “As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” Nixon

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said. “We hear sirens in the night. . . . We have had enough of big promises and little action. . . . I see a day when Americans are once again proud of their flag . . . when we will again have freedom from fear in America and freedom from fear in the world.” He offered a long passage about “the quiet voice” of those he called “the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators,” and he made sure they all understood Dick Nixon was on their side. It was good stuff, exactly what an acceptance speech should be: relentless in pursuit of a politically wounded opposition, confident, inspiring to the party faithful, hitting every topic from Vietnam to crime in the streets, reminding television viewers of the mess the Johnson-Humphrey administration had left, and telling everybody that he, Dick Nixon, was the guy to set things straight. In retrospect, however, seeing the speech through what we know about Watergate, some of the best lines have a tragic, or perhaps comic, irony: • The time has come for honest government in America. • And if we are to restore order and respect for law in this country there is one place to begin. We are going to have a new attorney general of the United States of America. • Time is running out for the merchants of crime and corruption in American society. • I see a day when the president of the United States is respected and his office is honored because it is worthy of respect and worthy of honor. Ouch. But in August 1968 what Nixon said about the failures of the Great Society was true. The United States of America did have major cities, including the nation’s capital, in which neighborhoods had been burned and looted, not by foreign invaders, but by the people of those neighborhoods themselves. Academic freedom, the very heart of the American educational enterprise, was suspended in many of the nation’s elite institutions of higher learning (Columbia University, for example) in order to placate mobs of rioting students. The New Left, once seen as the brightest hope of the best and brightest generation, had degenerated

a s p e e c h at the beac h  •  9

to such an extent that it had spawned terrorists who planted bombs, robbed banks, and called for bloody revolution. President Lyndon Johnson was widely seen as a man not to be trusted, by Democrats as well as Republicans. Nixon had plenty of material with which to work. Jack and I sat at the hotel hospitality suite listening to the speech. I knew, just by the way Nixon was punching home those cheer lines, that he was really enjoying this, feeling the words, not just saying them. And then, toward the end of the speech, he said: “And tonight, therefore, as we make this commitment, let us look into our hearts and let us look down into the faces of our children. In their faces is our hope, our love, and our courage. Tonight I see the face of a child. He lives in a great city. He’s black. Or he’s white. He’s Mexican, Italian, Polish. None of that matters What matters, he’s an American child. That child in that great city is more important than any politician’s promise. He is America. He is a poet, he’s a scientist, he’s a great teacher, he’s a proud craftsman. He’s everything we ever hoped to be and everything we dare to dream to be. He sleeps the sleep of childhood and dreams the dreams of a child.” “Jack,” I said, arising from my chair, “that’s my stuff!” I let out a yell that must have been heard on the beach. This was my stuff, about children. Nixon had taken the risk of using my emotional, thoroughly un-Nixon-like, atypical material that, with bad delivery, or just one misstep, could turn into sentimental mush and make him a laughingstock. But he was in control of the material all the way. The changes he had made in the few muddled paragraphs I had sent to him gave my words deeper meaning, because he had taken what I had written and made it his own. He had developed the children theme, speaking of the blighted lives of some American kids: And yet when he awakens, he awakens to a living nightmare of poverty, neglect, and despair. He fails in school. He ends up on welfare. For him the American system is one that feeds his stomach and starves his soul. It breaks his heart. And in the end it may take his life on some distant battlefield. To millions of children in this rich land, this is their prospect for the future. But this is only part of what I see in America. I see another child tonight. He hears the train go by at night and he dreams of faraway places where he’d like to go. It seems an impossible dream. But he is helped on his journey through

10  •  cha p t e r one life A father who had to go to work before he finished the sixth grade sacrificed everything so that his sons could go to college. A gentle Quaker mother with a passionate concern for peace quietly wept when he went to war, but she understood why he had to go. A great teacher, a remarkable football coach, an inspirational minister encouraged him on his way. A courageous wife and loyal children stood by him in victory and also in defeat. In his chosen profession of politics, first there were scores, then hundreds, then thousands, and finally millions worked for his success. Tonight he stands before you—nominated for president of the United States of America. You can see why I believe so deeply in the American Dream.

Years later I went to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, to watch a TV tape of the speech, recorded by NBC. In 1968 the network had two news anchor stars at the convention, David Brinkley and Chet Huntley, neither of whom were Richard Nixon fans. Seeing the speech after all those years, I was immediately struck by Nixon’s physical movements, sparing but effective. He gestured that speech, in his own way, as much as spoke it: • both hands extended from his side, palms up, to punctuate a question • a raised index finger of his right hand when he says the words “listen to the answer” when he is about to speak about those who would come to be known as the “silent majority” • the idiosyncratic Nixonian head movement, like that of a bobbing and weaving prizefighter, to emphasize rhetorical points, a movement beloved by mimics of Nixon. It was a kind of stutter-step of the head, a characteristic movement: aggressive, with a little twist of his large head as he looks up from the text. He appears to be standing on tiptoe when he does it • slightly extended arms with clenched fists to emphasize a point • a curious movement of his right arm, upward and outward from the side, quintessentially his, a bit clumsy and out of sync • a karate-chop-like motion of his right hand • hands clasped in front of him as he talks of Vietnam In short, Nixon was not just reading the speech, but delivering it with all he had, bringing it to the audience, hitting the cheer lines with a change of

a s p e e c h at the beac h  •  11

inflection or tone. He was giving it his all, and that is what it took to make the speech a success. There is one immediate and startling fact that leaps off the screen when Nixon is delivering the long passage about his childhood: the attentive silence of the convention delegates. As he begins the passage, there is a camera shot of his daughter Tricia, but for the most part the camera stays on Nixon. He says the words with precision, with conviction, and, most importantly, he has a propulsive rhythm going, the words moving inexorably forward, no hesitations, no glitches, until he reaches the culminating line about the American Dream. There is an instantaneous roar from the crowd. The sound builds, it grows, and, as it continues, Chet Huntley says, “This convention likes what it has just seen and heard.” The camera stays on Nixon. There is a slight smile on his face, but it is not one of triumph. Instead, he has the contended look of a professional who knows he has completed a tough task and done the job well. It is the kind of look one might see on the face of a baseball slugger after a home run, a kind of calm acceptance that this is the way things should work. He doesn’t have to smile. He was proud of what he had written about the train in the night, building on the material I had provided him. For a man with a reputation for cold-blooded political decision making and an obsession with the gritty details of political maneuvering, he had taken a risk in talking about something deep beneath the surface of political programs and policies, a place where dreams and fears and longings live—in short, precisely what Nixon had avoided speaking of during his career. His heart was not a place he liked to visit publicly, and he offered no guided tours. But he had taken the chance, and everyone who heard the speech knew that the boy who once lay in the dark listening to a train in the night had seen his wishes come true. Was it a great speech? Not at all. But great speeches are rarer in politics than we think and are almost always connected to either unique circumstances or great national or world events. They are usually remembered because of a few lines in the speech, not the speech in its entirety (remember “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” or “I have a dream”?). Like all acceptance speeches, Nixon’s was disjointed and tried to cover too many subjects. He stitched it together from various sources, including material written by great speechwriters like Pat Buchanan, Bill Safire, Ray Price, and Lee Huebner, taken from his own speeches

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during the primaries. The patchwork quality was evident throughout. But the speech worked. It did not make history, but it made Nixon’s argument well. It was “working rhetoric” at its best, blue-collar rhetoric, doing the job, now. In RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, Nixon says about that “train in the night” passage: “I had written the conclusion of the speech as a personal testimony to the political and social opportunity we have in the United States. It was intentionally dramatic and it was completely true.” Jonathan Aitken is his book Nixon: A Life writes: “Nixon’s acceptance speech was not one of his finest performances, but it contained many good lines. . . . [the speech] was full of dreams, most of them introduced as the antithesis of the current nightmares afflicting America. . . . the best of the dreams was the most personal. . . . after commiserating with . . . unfortunate children, he concluded with a moving passage which went back to his own roots . . . The words of the acceptance speech may not resonate in cold print today, but at the time their symbolism struck home with millions of voters.” But it was Theodore White, in The Making of the President 1968, who captured both the man and the moment: “Mr. Nixon, in public or private, has several styles of speech. . . . at unprepared stump rallies or in public question and answer, his prose runs to the meat-and-potatoes, regular fellow, let’s-all-get-on-the-teamtogether style. Or it can be . . . a powerful system of straightforward declarative sentences which reach their eloquence by simplicity and force.” It was simplicity and force—and, yes, some hearts and flowers—that made Nixon’s acceptance speech work so well. Nothing flashy, nothing mystical, no reaching for conventional eloquence, just declarative sentences that, cumulatively, brought about a simpler kind of eloquence. It was good speechwriting, good speech editing by Nixon (aided by Ray Price, I imagine), and great speech delivery. There are a number of things that may seem strange to us today in the “train in the night” section of the speech. Nixon, by our standards, is politically incorrect—the child he sees is a “he,” never a “she.” Today “Mexican” would be “Hispanic.” But what is remarkable about the passage is the way Nixon himself worked on it to bring it to perfection. The earliest speech draft, dated “7/19,” does not contain the train passage, although it does have a line in which a child is mentioned. The typed version of this draft says: “I want to see a day when every child, whatever its color, whatever its family status, has the best education that our wisdom and skill can

a s p e e c h at the beac h  •  13

provide and an equal chance to use what he learns.” On the manuscript page, Nixon drew a line through the words from “family” to “learns” and then wrote “background—has the chance to go as high as he can.” This handwritten change is the embryonic version of the final expanded version he used. Nixon changed the idea from one of education providing an “equal chance” to one of education helping someone “go as high as he can”—the emphasis now on achieving success rather than just on having equal opportunity. The speech drafts show that as Nixon wrote and rewrote, he paid particular attention to this part of the speech. In another draft (8/4), where the passage first appears, he crossed out the word “at” and replaced it with “into” in the sentence: “None of the old hatreds mean anything when we look down at the faces of our children.” It is small but significant change—looking at a face is impersonal; looking into a face is a human act. Nixon chose the better word. The same draft says of the child in the city: “He lives in a great city. He is black. He is white. He is Mexican, Italian, Polish. He is Protestant, Catholic, Jewish. All of this is unimportant. What is important is that he is an American child.” Nixon drew a line through all the words beginning with “He is a Protestant” and wrote above them: “None of this matters. What does matter is that he is an American child.” Again Nixon made the right choice. If he had mentioned religion, he might have thought he would have to add economic status or any number of other particularities. He stayed with “Mexican, Italian, Polish” and let it go at that. He had established the fact of the universality of the child. He knew what all good speakers know: enough is as good as a feast. •    •    • Researchers research, advisers advise, speechwrights write, experts kibitz, but finally someone has to speak the words in public, or as Bill Safire expressed it to me, “say it with his own lips.” Even before the speaker begins to speak, just standing there enjoying the welcoming applause, he is telling us something, reminding us of who he is and, more importantly, who he has been and who he wants to be. In 1968, as Nixon campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination, he knew that his rhetoric, directly or indirectly, would have to solve or at least alleviate some of his major problems having to do with the way he was perceived. His acceptance speech was the tool he used to refurbish

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and even perhaps rehabilitate that image. And if ever there was an image that needed constant remedial work, it was Richard Nixon’s in 1968. Early in his career, Nixon had made powerful, influential, and unforgiving enemies in the Democratic Party, in the press, and in academia, by exposing Alger Hiss as a Communist agent. Hiss, no mere bureaucratic functionary, was the very beau ideal of what a certain kind of New Dealer should be: attractive, charming, well-bred, well-connected, brilliant, and progressive. Nixon’s exposure of Hiss as a perjurer and a spy enraged many on the left. They never forgave Nixon for being right about Hiss, and their insatiable hatred was part of Nixon’s problems, because many of his enemies were in positions to hurt him, in the media and in politics. After election contests for the House and the Senate in California, in which Nixon gave as good as he got (and sometimes more) when it came to rock ’em, sock ’em campaign rhetoric, he was successfully labeled by his enemies as “Tricky Dick”: unscrupulous in methods, deceitful in tactics, and amoral in political infighting. The description was of course a caricature, as is any description made by political opponents, but, like any caricature, it was based on troubling aspects of Nixon’s public persona that bore more than a passing resemblance to the grotesque distortions. And, unlike many caricatures, this one had moved beyond the insider’s view of the Nixon haters into the common parlance of politics. “Tricky Dick” had the kind of simple, school-yard-taunting, rhyming quality about it that made it catchy and therefore memorable. It was one of those things that “everybody knows” about him, even those who did not pay much attention to politics. To refer to Nixon as Tricky Dick was to show that one was au courant, no one’s fool. In politics as in life in general, words often bypass the intellect and go directly to the emotions. The words “Tricky Dick” were words like this. They were not an argument—they were more like a myth, with all the great power a myth possesses. In 1968 Nixon had another image problem. There were those in his own party who believed he was a sure loser, not an unwarranted assumption, given that he had lost the presidential race in 1960, if only by an eyelash (and some dubious Democratic votes in Chicago and Texas), to the charismatic John F. Kennedy and then, improbably enough, lost to Governor Pat Brown of California, a glad-handing political hack of the old school, in 1962. Nixon’s 1968 acceptance

a s p e e c h at the beac h  •  15

speech had to radiate a kind of inner confidence that would bring suspicious Republicans to his cause. And yet another problem existed: ever since his “Checkers” speech in 1952—when in a desperate, nationally televised address to save his place on the Republican ticket with Dwight D. Eisenhower he spoke of Checkers, the family dog, and of his wife Pat’s “Republican cloth coat” to successfully defend himself against smears of financial irregularities—he had the reputation of using cloying—or, to use one his favorite words, “corny”—rhetoric, babbling bathos. He would have to be very careful at the convention about not being seen as corny. And, finally, there was another aspect of Nixon’s public image that was beyond the power of words to solve: he had to transcend the way he looked and moved. Seen at his worst, Nixon was jowly, had that trademark sloping nose and five-o’clock-shadow beard. He was physically awkward, with out-of-synch movements that were angular, abrupt, and often disconcerting. But especially when he was smiling, he was not an unattractive man. Sex appeal is the last idea that would come to mind in describing his attractiveness, but there was something in the fierce intelligence in his eyes and the mixture of political combativeness and, as his intimates and staff knew, personal kindness that might be called a rough charm. He had to make certain that image was the one television viewers would see. And so at Miami Beach, Richard Nixon had to give a speech in the form of a sustained argument for himself and against the Democrats and, in a sense, be the man he was capable of being at his best. What he said would be important, but how he looked and how he moved were equally important. He had to persuade television viewers that he was ready to meet the numerous crises, foreign and domestic, that were tearing apart the country. He had to present reasons, rational and emotional, for people to trust someone who had been labeled “tricky.” And even if he did a perfect job in his speech, or as close to perfection as politics allows, the people who thought he was a monster would not change their minds about him, because it was psychologically necessary for them to demonize him as the Other. But the speech wasn’t aimed at changing the minds of full-time Nixon haters. He had to convince millions of undecided voters watching him on television that he—a two-time loser; a strange, inscrutable man; a political infighter—was exactly the president the divided, wounded, war-weary country

16  •  cha p t e r on e

needed. It was a tough sell. He was betting that his intelligence (a quality even the most rabid Nixon hater would not deny he possessed), his knowledge of the issues, and his ability to give a good, rousing, “working” political speech would make up for any doubts about him. All of this in roughly forty minutes. Fortunately for him, he had two great strengths as a speaker. First, he had the ability to deliver a speech well, a talent honed in decades of speech making all over the country, on the Republican political “rubber chicken” circuit. Second, he had a good voice, maybe even a great one for a politician. It had a solid, slightly dark tonal base with subtle, lighter overtones. Time magazine once called his unique sound “ a buttery baritone,” smooth, rich, and masculine. His voice had no discernable regional accent—“California neutral,” one might say—but there was a personality in its coloring, unlike the flat, lifeless, bland, homogenous local television news anchor sound. I believe his voice was superior to that of any president in my lifetime, including Ronald Reagan’s and Barack Obama’s. A good voice doesn’t necessarily make a great speaker, but a bad voice (Jimmy Carter’s wheezy, floating-on-air tone) is a great handicap. John F. Kennedy’s success as a public speaker owed much to his speechwriter, Theodore Sorenson, but it was really a triumph of Kennedy’s undeniable personal charm over the braying Massachusetts nasality of his voice, his Bostonian pronunciations, and the Kennedy family, uh, verbal tic of, uh, using uh too much. •    •    • Now, the morning after at the Hilton Plaza, here was Nixon, aglow from last night’s success, talking with me about the speech. He asked if I had known where he was going when he began the passage about children. I said yes. He looked disappointed, and it was clear he had wanted to surprise everyone by using material like this. I told him that I knew where he was going—his conclusion to the passage spoke of hearing “the train go by at night” as he lay in bed as a child—only because I already knew his life story so well. He seemed pleased. He complained (Nixon being Nixon) about the media coverage of his speech. We talked about that for a while. And then he said, “Now, Bill, I know I haven’t been using a lot of your stuff recently, but I can’t overdo it or else I’ll sound corny. I don’t want to sound corny. But I want you to make the campaign tour. You’ll be on the plane with Buchanan and Price and Safire, the Tricia [the Boeing 727 plane Nixon named

a s p e e c h at the beac h  •  17

after one of his daughters]. You write with heart. There aren’t many who can write with heart.” This would not be the last time Richard Nixon told me, or others, that I write with heart. But I was never quite clear exactly what he meant by the word. Did he mean warm, fuzzy feelings? That didn’t seem to me to be what Richard Nixon would ask from his writers. I think “heart” meant to him a quality of writing that evoked aspects of myth, what I came to think of as “depth rhetoric,” words and images that are derived from and speak to the imagination rather than the intellect. Heart is not necessarily thrill-talk, because its object is not to provide a quick ecstasy, but to take the listener away from the surface of politics, into the hidden word of myth and mystery that lies just below. Then he left the large room with his entourage. I stood there alone and saw that just about everyone in the room was looking at me, not in awe, but in puzzlement. Who is this guy? I was asking myself a similar question: How did this all happen? How did I make the jump from high school teacher to one of the campaign speechwriters for the man who had a good chance of becoming the next president of the United States?

Chapter Two

A Speechwright’s Education

My introduction to the magic, manipulations, and Machiavellian machinations of political rhetoric came in 1948, when I was thirteen, a freshman in St. Michael’s High School in downtown Jersey City. One day our history teacher, Mr. Furlong, told us a story of a then-well-known local politician—the irrepressible, rotund (he weighed, it was said, 350 pounds) raconteur and oratorical master T. James Tumulty, who would later become a one-term congressman. Tumulty, as I recall, had committed some sort of sin against mayor-for-life Frank Hague’s Democratic political machine that had ruled the city for forty years. His error was no doubt some form of political heresy, probably saying something negative about Hague in a public place, with intent to think for oneself. This was less than a felony in Jersey City politics, but more than a mere peccadillo. Tumulty was coming under heavy criticism from the party faithful, and he was asked, or ordered, to appear before a meeting of Hague partisans and try to explain himself, if he could, the miserable miscreant. Mr. Furlong’s story went like this: When Tumulty walked into the ward club, the crowd came to its feet, booing and shouting, demanding that he try—just try!—to get out of this one. As he stood before them, the assembled faithful returned to their wooden folding chairs but kept on yelling. Tumulty stood quietly, his head bowed, enduring the insults and the not-too-veiled threats. Gradually, hoarse with shouting,

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the crowd became almost silent except for a few isolated catcalls. Still, Tumulty did not speak. Tumulty, not talking? Tumulty was known as a compulsive speaker, born with the gift of gab. It was said the Blarney Stone kissed him. Yet here he was, the silver-tongued orator of Hudson County, silent. It was against nature, Tumulty with his mouth closed. He remained silent for a few beats more and then, lifting his head, and with a slight wave of his hand, as if beckoning the crowd to come forward, said one word: “More.” The word was said in a low voice, with no sign of the exuberance that usually marked his platform style. The room became silent. He said it again, making that beckoning gesture again. “More,” he said. “C’mon, give it to me. I deserve it.” There was shuffling of feet and general consternation. What was going on here? “I was wrong, “Tumulty said. “Completely wrong. Dead wrong. Like Mayor LaGuardia of New York, I rarely make a mistake, but when I do, it’s a beaut. But I have no excuses. So I want to thank you for inviting me so I can say to your faces: I failed you. And I came here to take my punishment. You are right to condemn me. So give it to me as long and as loud as you can. I deserve it.” The crowd was not ready for this. They had hoped for defiance, denials, and demagoguery. They had expected—wanted—an argument, a plea, a display of the oratorical fireworks Tumulty was noted for. The near-silence continued, and Tumulty, sensing his opportunity, and with a born politician’s instinct for the main chance, began to speak, seemingly casually, just conversing with friends and neighbors, describing, but not defending, what he had done. And every now and then he’d punctuate his remarks with “But I was wrong, of course” or “That was my fault,” even though his reasons for having committed the political error seemed, well, reasonable. He wasn’t begging for forgiveness, just telling them how he had acted and why. Gradually he began to drift away from describing his sins and started building his rhythms, telling an Irish joke, or a funny anecdote about some local character, reminiscing about the old days. He spoke to them about his local background and his loyalty to the mayor (it was rumored Tumulty had once been a Republican, God bless the mark). After a few minutes, some in the crowd were laughing at his jokes and nodding in agreement with the points he made. When he finished, some of the faithful applauded. It wasn’t thunderous

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applause, and it wasn’t prolonged. But it was applause. Tumulty had charmed them, and as he left the club, some of those who only a short time ago had been screaming for his head were shaking his hand. Mr. Furlong, who was coach of the high school forensics team (of which I was not a member) and a student of Jersey City politics as well as the oratorical arts, had been present at the meeting. He said Tumulty had really given two speeches. The first was a deliberately dull and almost plodding recitation of the facts of his case, nothing to arouse the crowd once more. To the contrary, at that point an emotional response was the last thing he wanted. But once he had lulled them into complacency, only then did he begin to appeal to their emotions, evoking ancestral loyalties, talking about Ireland, Mother of Priests, with perhaps just a wee touch of the brogue, and about the Holy Mother Church, and the old neighborhood, and the sacred myths that sustained the faithful (the political faithful, that is). Mr. Furlong laughed uproariously as he told us the story. He said that in all his life he had never seen such a display of pure blarney, not even in Jersey City, where blarney was not unknown. The scene had been a wonder to behold. Tumulty had come into the room an object of scorn and had then done just what was least expected of him. A man of wit and words, and a nonpareil debater, he had not attempted to talk his way out of his problems or raise a defense of his conduct. He had instead played against his debating strengths and avoided oratorical flourishes until he knew he was safely past the place where even the slightest misstep could bring back the full-throated roar of his detractors. The performance was masterful, said Mr. Furlong, a great tribute to the seductive power of personality and the shrewd use of just exactly the right kind of oratory at exactly the right time. And T. James Tumulty was perhaps the only politician in the state who could have brought it off. I would like to be able to say that the story inspired me to join the forensics club, or that it raised my interest in politics. But such is not the case. Politics meant little to me at the time, except that I knew, even at that age, that the Hague machine had never been hampered by adherence to the good, the true, and the beautiful in its pursuit of total power and as much money as Hague and the boys could stuff into their pockets. I had relatives on the city payroll, and they kicked back two percent of their salary every year, like every other city employee, for the honor of serving the mayor. But, like most kids, I just took for

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granted that this was the way things were. I had other problems, big ones, such as my tendency to shy away from hard-hit ground balls and trying to understand Latin and algebra, not to mention girls. But Mr. Furlong’s story intrigued me. It had a nice twist to it. The angry crowd was expecting one thing, but Tumulty gave them something else, like a pitcher throwing a change-up when the batter is ready for a fast ball, getting them off balance with his plea for more criticism, allowing them to get all the initial rage out so that he could then get a little edge and exploit it. Then he had used soothing words as a safety measure, cooling things down with a hypnotic recitation—but not a defense—of what he had done, every now and then reminding them of his contrition. Then, gradually, he used his plentiful supply of stories and jokes and anecdotes to please his audience, give them a warm glow, and get the hostile crowd to feel sympathetic because of his appeal to shared loyalties. A great show, begorra. This was the first time I had ever thought about someone using words not just to say something but to do something, to make words work for him in such a way that the very people he was talking to didn’t know what he was up to. Of course back then I didn’t have the sophisticated grasp of what had happened that my words here suggest, but I knew Mr. Furlong’s story had taught me some things, and I never forgot them: a speaker’s words do not always convey his intentions. Sometimes by saying less you can get more. Words can show things or hide things. Words can convey feelings that are the opposite of what words mean, depending on the speaker’s motives. In my sophomore year, I once again was taught by Mr. Furlong (he was, by the way, a great teacher), this time in English. We read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and when we got to Marc Antony’s oration, I realized that what Tumulty had done with words was an old trick, going back centuries. As Antony speaks, he keeps on telling the mob he is not defending the fallen Caesar, but every time he brings up Caesar’s faults, they somehow sound like virtues. Say one thing, mean another. Don’t attack, agree, but agree in a way that is a subtle form of counterattack. A speech is not just words—it is the person speaking, and the audience hearing, and the slow dance of intention and interpretation that goes on between them. In my Jersey City, in Shakespeare’s London, and in ancient Rome, the same old dance went on. That discovery was not the beginning of political wisdom for me, but it was the beginning of my understanding that human nature—and political

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rhetoric—has certain aspects to it that transcend time and space. Just think of it: those guys back in the old days were as shrewd as we are. Who would have guessed it, especially in Jersey City? Everyone in my family, on both sides, was a Democrat. I never met an avowed Republican until I was drafted into the army in November 1955. Some of my relatives worked for the city, either in city hall or on the police and fire departments, or, in my paternal grandfather Tim’s case, in the sanitation department, as a city street sweeper. My earliest views of politics were formed on the street corners of Jersey City, where the mayor was king and anyone challenging him, either in an election or in print, was considered by the party faithful to be an enemy of the people, and probably of the church. The fact that Hague had retired and appointed as mayor his nephew, Frank Eggers, did not change the reality that this was still Hague’s town (although in 1949 his machine was thrown out by a coalition led by his one-time lieutenant, John V. Kenny). After high school in 1953 I went directly to work as a file clerk in the blueprint room at the Westinghouse Elevator plant on Pacific Avenue with not even a thought about higher education, because no one on either side of my family had ever attended college. By then I knew I could write pretty well—the nuns and Mr. Furlong had told me so—but I had no idea how to make money out of that talent. In the autumn of 1955 my union went on strike, and I walked a picket line until I was drafted into the army in November. I was an enlisted man in the army medical corps until 1957. Upon discharge I entered Jersey City State Teachers College (later Jersey City State College, now New Jersey City University). For many reasons, the school was a perfect fit for me, and I owe very much to the great teachers whose learning and patience helped me so much. During this time I was doing a lot of reading, with no particular goal in mind—I just loved to read—and I later discovered that my catholic (as well as Catholic at times) approach to reading gave me the foundation for a life of writing, because there are no good writers who aren’t great readers. But—and I think this is important to any writer—at the heart of my nonformal education was fiction, great, mediocre, and bad. I have loved fictional narrative from the time my mother used to tell me bedtime stories. I am a member of probably the last generation of Americans to look upon fiction as (in critic Alfred Kazin’s phrase) a way to discover how to live. From the classic writers of the day—James T. Farrell, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John O’Hara (in Appointment

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in Samara)—to best-selling books like Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (in my view, still an inexplicably undervalued novel), and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, I read omnivorously. From Dostoevsky to S. J. Perelman, and from mysteries to science fiction, I devoured books. I also read fiction and nonfiction by Catholic authors—Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain. I might add that I learned a lot in 1960 from Father John Courtney Murray’s We Hold These Truths, an examination of the philosophical foundation of the United States, seen from a sophisticated, balanced, scholarly understanding of the Church’s teaching on the philosophy of natural law. I knew and cared more about antitotalitarian writers of the left like George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Andre Malraux, and James T. Farrell than I did about conservative icons like Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Ludwig von Mises. I had—and still have—a soft spot in my heart for H. L. Mencken, and about the time I entered college I had just read two collections of Mencken’s inimitable prose. I disagreed with almost everything he said, but that style, that imperturbable sense of superiority, that well-wrought literary persona won me over. I also admired literary critic Edmund Wilson, whose unhurried, assured style and clear way of explaining complicated literary and political issues (even if I disagreed with his views) impressed me. One of his books that had a big impact on me was To the Finland Station, a highly sympathetic, but at points critical, history of socialist thought and action culminating in Lenin’s arrival by train at the Finland Station in Petrograd in 1917. The other Wilson book I admired was a collection of his literary criticism, Classics and Commercials. I have had the paperback editions of these books on my shelves for fifty years and still dip into them. I have not mentioned the influence movies had on me, only because it would probably take another book to do so. Some of my earliest memories are of seeing movies, and I am as susceptible to their unique magic as anyone. No doubt a lot of my imaginative powers, such as they are, can be traced to the form and substance of the movies. It is easier for me to say how reading influenced me, because the process is more obvious, to me at least. But movies have been a major influence in my life, as has music, especially jazz and classical music, including opera. As I continued my reading outside of college class assignments, one night, quite by accident, I came upon William F. Buckley Jr. being interviewed on

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television. I had never heard him speak, although I was vaguely aware he had written a notorious book, God and Man at Yale. What could a Yale snob who talked like Little Lord Fauntleroy have to say to me? At first I found him affected and slightly ridiculous, but as the interview continued I began to listen to what he was saying in that unique aristocratic drawl. I liked what I heard. The wit, the easy manner, the civility, the reasonable, if not always persuasive, arguments were all quite captivating. In the days and weeks that followed I began thinking about things I had hitherto taken for granted, such as the idea that Catholics simply must be Democrats and liberals. Could it not be that the party of my forefathers was no longer the party it had been? I subscribed to National Review and in 1960 had my first paid article published in the magazine, a satire on Japanese student riots called “Rave, New World.” (Oh, well, it sounded clever at the time.) I began telling people I was conservative, although I was not yet at all sure what that meant. This is as good a place as any to describe what conservatism means to me and how I learned about it, because it has played such an important part in my life and in my education as a writer. I came of political age during the late 1950s, and my brand of conservatism is rooted in, if not completely defined by, the principles of cold war antitotalitarianism, the efficacy of the free market (not always the same as being “pro-business” or being a champion of “laissez faire”) and philosophically based conservative principles enunciated between 1955 and, say, 1965, by National Review, under the editorship of Bill Buckley. It is difficult to explain how important that magazine was to me in its early, scrappy, confident, irreverent, tough-minded, underdog, happy-warrior days. Every two weeks I awaited the newest issue and read it straight through, learning about conservative principles, not in some textbook fashion but in the slam-bang, head-on collisions of clashing ideas and current controversies that constituted NR’s unique glory. Those ideas and controversies were not always about the magazine’s differences with liberalism. Many of the most fervent arguments were among conservatives themselves as they tried to define and explain conservatism from differing viewpoints. So National Review was not simply a by-the-numbers catechism of conservative principles but an intra-family battleground where arguments over freedom and virtue and libertarian and traditional values were fought. There was a lot I had to learn, and NR proved to be my postgraduate school of political and cultural education.

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I did not become a conservative—that is, I did not adopt a new ideology to replace an old ideology. In fact, before National Review I had no conscious, articulated ideological or philosophical underpinning to my beliefs about politics or anything else. I was just a young man from a blue-collar, Irish Catholic background and upbringing, what I later called a “street corner conservative,” what would someday be called a Reagan Democrat. I discovered I was conservative. Bill Buckley and National Review revealed to me that many ideas and beliefs I took for granted had a distinguished intellectual and philosophical history and that some of the greatest minds in western civilization had in various ways, over the centuries and today, written and spoken in defense of those ideas and beliefs. I was already a practicing conservative, but National Review taught me what that mean intellectually. The simplest answer as to why conservatism appeals to me (and did when I was young) is that it just feels right to me, it makes a kind of sense that other ideologies or worldviews do not. This is not to say that I believe there are no philosophical arguments for the conservative point of view, but only that I am not able to elucidate them with the necessary clarity and force they deserve. Besides, I am a member of the camp that holds the idea that conservatism is more a tendency to look at the world in certain ways rather than a full-blown ideology with answers to everything. Having said that, there are two aspects of conservatism, as I have come to understand it, that have direct connection with political speechwriting. The first is that at its heart is the belief of the founding fathers that there are “selfevident” truths, which are attainable through reason, not faith (although faith can support the view). At first this might seem obvious. After all, our nation was built on exactly this intellectual premise. But in fact the predominant intellectual view of truth in our time, in institutions of higher learning, is that there are no self-evident truths and that all truth is relative. I leave to philosophers the difficulties of arguing whether the founding fathers were wrong about this central point of one of our nascent documents, and how we, having abandoned their view about self-evident truth, can say we are following the path laid out for us by them. But if political rhetoric is going to aim for truth, there must be some belief that basic truths about human beings are self-evident and attainable through reason. Second, while tradition is a source of great wisdom, a conservative view of

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the world teaches that all human institutions, including political, economic, and cultural systems and ideologies, are, by the fallible nature of human beings, liable to error and from time to time in need of reexamination, renewal, repair, and reformation. In short, contrary to the caricature by its enemies and the misunderstanding of some of its adherents, conservatism is a philosophy that is dependent on change, not permanence. It is in fact the art of how ancient truths deal constructively with change. The essential element is how, when, and where change is realized; how the process unfolds; how the argument is conducted; and how the permanent essence of a truth is retained. G. K. Chesterton, a great conservative, once wrote that if we want a fence to remain a fence, we have to constantly make little changes, replacing nails, doing some painting, and so forth. In his paradoxical way, Chesterton had a great point: if we want to conserve what we value, from time to time we have to make changes. American conservatism has never meant lack of change. It has meant prudent, gradual change rooted in and guided by the cumulative wisdom of human experience, not by populist rage or the latest social, economic, or political fads, and by values and virtues that are ancient, time-tested, and universally applicable. No system of politics can once and for all claim perfection, momentary or eternal, in either its principles, its claims, its methods, its actions, or its goals. This means that for true conservatives, political dogmas, right or left, are always dangerous, and that humility and prudence and caution—not known as virtues that delight and excite masses of voters—should inform all political rhetoric. That we conservatives do not always apply this view to our rhetoric is all too obvious. We, too, are susceptible to delusions and the madness of crowds. But when such misleadings occur, they are failures of the will, not of the philosophy. At least we know what the guidelines ought to be. There was another basis to my recognition that I was conservative, and that was the Roman Catholic Church, to which I belonged, and still belong. I do not refer to its theology, organization, or dogmatic teachings. In fact, I believe one of the good things about belonging to a religion that has dogmatic teachings is that it can free your mind from believing in current ideological, political, economic, literary, or cultural dogmas or dictators. Belief in the doctrine of the Trinity or the Incarnation, for instance, leaves little room in the mind for dogmatic belief in man-made institutions or ideas, or in political leaders like, say, Joseph Stalin, who was adulated by some of the best and brightest and otherwise most

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skeptical minds in America and in Europe. The need to believe is not limited to those who believe in God. I took from my Catholic background ideas about the need for community and the importance of what in Catholic social teaching is called “the principle of subsidiarity,” which means that higher and more developed institutions should not perform duties better undertaken by smaller ones. This is one way of describing the principle of federalism enshrined in our Constitution. As I learned more about American conservatism, as it was elucidated in National Review, some of my Catholic sensibilities came into conflict with the libertarian individualism that was so strong a part of the conservative movement back then. Since those days, libertarianism has carved out its own ideological niche, and its differences with conservatism are deep and irreconcilable on many points. But modern conservatism, in its first decade (counting from NR’s birth in 1955), could not have endured and prevailed without the contribution of libertarian philosophy. I have learned much from libertarianism, but I do not believe it adequately answers economic and social questions that ordinary people ask about politics. In college, meanwhile, I had the good fortune to take a theater class with a marvelous teacher, Mrs. Margaret Williams, who had been a Broadway actress. Her class gave me an idea of how to talk on a stage before an audience and how realistic dialogue sounds, which are no small things to a speechwriter, because so much of successful political rhetoric consists of projecting a persona to the audience. I am indebted to Mrs. Williams for many reasons, not least of which because she gave me the plum role of Reverend Hale in the college production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. But among her most memorable gifts were two sayings that she repeated so we would never forget them. First was the “million-dollar offer”: “I have a job for anyone in the class,” she would say. “It pays a million dollars a year, tax free. All it consists of is this: at the start of the Broadway season, when the schedule of plays appears in the New York Times, simply pick out the plays that will succeed and the plays that will fail. But you have to be absolutely accurate. If you can do that, you are worth a million dollars.” I need not emphasize that these were the days when a million dollars was serious money. But her “million-dollar offer” taught me a lesson I later found useful. In politics everyone (especially political consultants) is wise and shrewd and knowing after the fact. A scandal occurs? “Oh, I could see that coming.”

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An economic downturn? “ I knew it was going to happen.” Sure. The trick is to have those same qualities before events occur. Since most of us do not have the gift of magic prescience, hindsight criticism does not help matters. There are few things more disheartening—or more predictable—in politics than wisdom after the fact. When disasters occur, deal with them, but avoid after-the-fact judgments. I once knew a man who explained patiently to me for two hours how to guarantee that Senator James Buckley, for whom I worked, could win his reelection bid in 1976. His argument was airtight, his facts were solid, and there was only one thing wrong: he told me all of this three weeks after Jim Buckley had lost the election. Second, Mrs. Williams had her own definition of a play: “A play is a story told on a stage by actors before an audience. If one of those things is missing, what you are seeing is not strictly speaking a play. If actors are on a stage before an audience but don’t tell a story, or if the actors do tell a story but there is no audience, or if the actors and the audience are there and the story is told but there is no stage to focus attention, there is no play. A play is a joint endeavor. There is not only teamwork among the players, the directors, and the producers; there is also a kind of teamwork between the actors and the audiences.” In similar fashion, I learned years later that a political speech is an oral argument made by a political figure in a specific place and time before one or more audiences for the purpose of political gain of some sort. The speaker and the audience work together in mysterious ways. The setting can give new meanings to the words spoken. The audience out front may hear one thing while the audience watching on television, or the audience that gets only a few lines of the speech from the television news or the newspapers or online, hears another. A political speech is a communal undertaking, it is dynamic, it has a life of its own. It is much more than spoken words before one passive audience. In September 1961 I moved to Abington, a northern suburb of Philadelphia. On a full scholarship, plus a small but useful monthly stipend, I earned my master’s degree from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. After a mercifully brief stint as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, where I discovered I lacked the reporter’s necessary virtue—obsessive inquisitiveness—I joined the faculty of Abington Senior High School. I taught writing and English lit, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, to college-bound seniors. It was a wonderful job. I enjoyed teaching, liked the subject I taught,

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and enjoyed the kids. I loved to read and write, and I now had a job in which I could make a reasonably comfortable living doing what I loved. I had neither the temperament nor the discipline to get the doctorate in English necessary to teach at the college level, so high school fitted me perfectly. And, quite frankly, I was a good teacher, a quality that helped me get my next job. In 1965 something happened that, in retrospect, looks as if it were part of some celestial scheme to give me a big hint as to what I should be doing with my life: I heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak, from up close and in a memorable setting. That summer I was teaching a summer-school class titled, as I recall, “Modern Man and His Search for Meaning.” It was an upscale, extra-credit course for smart, aspiring kids trying to get into good colleges. The students read Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, among other works that in one way or another talked about angst, grief, existentialism, tragedy, dread, and other jolly topics bright teenagers love to discuss. One day a student told me that Dr. King would be speaking to a small group of admirers and financial contributors at the home of his uncle. Would I like to come? The uncle, it turned out, was a Philadelphia merchant prince, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and his guests would no doubt also be wealthy. I had no money beyond whatever change I had left from my meager monthly paycheck, so I gathered I was not expected to donate. I accepted the invitation. On the appointed evening my wife, Katherine, and I hired a babysitter for our two daughters and drove in our maroon Ford Falcon to a mansion in the exclusive (in any event, it excluded young teachers without money) Huntingdon Valley section of Abington. We joined about seventy-five to a hundred big-bucks types in a beautiful garden at the rear of the estate. We were briefly introduced to the host and then mixed and mingled among the moneyed class, nibbled hors d’oeuvres, and sipped excellent wine (I assume it was excellent—I am not a connoisseur). We chatted with guests, with whom we had little in common, and waited. And waited. Twilight became dusk and then nightfall. No Dr. King. Finally he arrived in a convoy of cars, escorted by staff, very late. A receiving line formed. My first impression was that he was chunky and much shorter than I had thought. Famous people always seem to come across larger than life on television. I can’t remember what I said to him as we shook hands in the receiving line—not much, I suppose—but I remember the southern softness of his voice.

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My most startling impression, however, was that he was probably the most obviously exhausted man I had ever seen. He looked bone-weary with red-rimmed eyes as he stood there, smiling, meeting, and greeting strangers in a rich man’s softly illuminated garden on a beautiful night. Katherine took a scrap of paper from a notebook in her purse and asked King to sign it. I am not certain what the protocol is on such occasions, but King was gracious, signed his name, and we moved on. As the receiving line ritual continued, soft murmurs of greeting, a chuckle or two, and some muffled conversation floated on the night air to where we were standing. Each guest had something to say to King, and I could hear the sound—if not the sense—of his words in that soft, low, southern voice. It was by now very late, and I thought King might fall asleep on his feet. Finally the line ended, the last guest had his or her face time with King, and he stood alone, his entourage off to the side. No podium. No speech text in his hand. The guests stood in respectful silence. Here is what I had been waiting for—the chance to hear the most famous public speaker in the world give an oration. But he did not orate. He did not reach for eloquence. He did not try to thrill us. Maybe he was just too tired. He talked quietly, as if conversing. He thanked the host, thanked everyone for their help and said how much he appreciated it. His brief little talk did not go beyond generalities about how important it was for good people like those gathered here to help his cause. Then he just stopped talking. He had not raised his voice. He not tried to exhort us to action. He stood there for a few moments in silence. There was applause. He turned and was escorted to his car by his aides. I was disappointed. I felt let down. The event hadn’t been . . . what? It hadn’t been . . . thrilling. That was it. I had come there to be thrilled and it hadn’t happened. But what had I expected? Oratorical fireworks at midnight? A calland-response black-church sermon in which the white financial heavy-hitters would shout out? Some inside news scoop as to where the civil rights movement was headed? I don’t know. But I just felt I had missed something. Three years later, when I was writing speeches for Richard Nixon, the events of that summer night came back to me, because King had taught me something about rhetoric that I was, at the time, too ignorant or lazy to understand. It was a lesson about eloquence and its limits. You don’t always have to thrill an audience or reach for eloquence to be effective. Sometimes you just have to be yourself or the

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public projection of the self you want your listeners to hear and see. A speech isn’t just about eloquent words. Oratorical thrills don’t always do the job. Sometimes you just have to let your argument speak for itself by being yourself. King’s appearance that night was a quiet triumph of personal charisma over rhetorical eloquence, although I may not have put it in those words. King himself had provided a kind of eloquence by his very presence. This may seem a strange judgment, since Dr. King is, of course, legendary for his oratorical powers, for inspiring thousands of people gathered by the Lincoln Memorial, or a few hundred in a black church. But that night he wasn’t in his oratorical, prophetic mode. The measured cadences of his speech, the way he stood, the sound of his voice, and his presence all bore the unmistakable stamp of authenticity and authority. His words did not make King eloquent; his persona gave his ordinary words a quiet eloquence. You didn’t have to agree with him—I didn’t agree with his views on the war in Vietnam—in order to know that his public utterances were sincere and that he really believed in what he was saying. And that sense of personal truth-telling may well be the beginning of wisdom for a speechwright. You are writing the words, but the words have to come to life through the speaker’s personality, not yours. So I had unconsciously learned an important lesson as a speechwright, years before I became a speechwright.

Chapter Three

Becoming a Speechwright

In 1966, while still teaching at Abington High, I was asked to become a member of the master teachers program at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. I would continue to be paid by my high school, but for two years (if my option was picked up by Penn, which it was) I would be teaching a course in the methods of teaching English at Penn and, most importantly, evaluating Penn student teachers of English, on-site, as they did their practice teaching in Philadelphia and suburban high schools. At the end of two years I would be returning to my high school. I was looking forward to becoming a classroom teacher again, because, as I have said, I loved teaching, but the experience of being a master teacher was something I never regretted. It was while I was working at Penn that one day in April 1967 I was in the university library reading a copy of New York, which at that time was the magazine of the World Journal Tribune, the last gasp of three once-great New York newspapers that had joined together in the hope that survival could be found in an uneasy union of opposites. An article I read, “The New New Nixon,” written by a reporter named Nick Thimmesch, portrayed Nixon as a serious contender for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. This was not exactly a consensus view at the time, despite Nixon’s personal triumph as a Republican spokesman in the congressional elections of 1966, in which Republicans in Congress made a startling comeback after the Goldwater debacle of 1964. Although Nixon was held to be ritually impure by most activist conservatives, •  33

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I had always found him intriguing. In fact, I had cast my vote for him in 1960, a decision frowned upon by members of my family who took their Democratic politics straight, no chaser. Some relatives, I believe, may have suspected that college had warped my mind, and I think there was a general feeling I was a bit eccentric. After all, this was 1960, and John F. Kennedy was running for president, an Irish Catholic, like us. My view was that, yes, he was Irish; yes, he was Catholic; yes, he was handsome and charming; but, no, he wasn’t “like us” at all. He had never hung around on a street corner or bar, swept streets, or worked in the blueprint room in his life. He was the son of a very rich man. This is not to take anything away from his abilities. The same points could be made about Bill Buckley, but no one ever claimed Bill, another rich man’s son, was “like us.” Everyone I knew was crazy about Kennedy, but I voted for quirky, uptight Nixon and never looked back. The more I read Nick Thimmesch’s article, the more likely it seemed to me that Nixon not only should win, but could win. He was smart, he was tough-minded, the left hated him, and his tough anti-Communist stance was admired by many Catholics. When I got back to my office at the Graduate School of Education, I quickly typed a letter to Nixon on University of Pennsylvania office stationery that was on my desk. I urged him to run for president. I mailed the letter to his New York law office address (which, as I recall, was included in the New York article), and promptly forgot about it, expecting no reply. Here, in part, is what the letter said: Dear Mr. Nixon: May I offer two suggestions concerning your plans for 1968? 1. Run. You can win. Nothing can happen to you, politically speaking, that is worse than what has happened to you. Ortega y Gasset says in “The Revolt of the Masses”: “. . . these are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost, is lost without remission. . . .” You, in effect, are lost. That is why you are the only political figure with the vision to see things the way they are and not as leftist or rightist kooks would have them. Run. You will win.

The letter then went on to give him some advice on how to appear on television, as if I knew anything about the subject. It ended with: “Good luck,

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and I know you can win if you see yourself for what you are: a man who has been beaten, humiliated, hated, but who can still see the truth.” Today the letter seems remarkable to me for a number of reasons, chief of which was my innocent belief that such a letter would ever be read by the man to whom it was addressed (that is what political aides do, screen the boss from unimportant letters), or that in the unlikely event Nixon ever saw it, it would be taken seriously (the use of the word “kooks” gives the letter a pleasant touch of yesteryear). But on rereading it today, I can see the letter has the virtue of brevity and directness and a certain boldness, not bad things in a writer, a kind of knuckle-headed, naive straightforwardness. Of course, in hindsight my judgment that nothing worse could happen to Nixon than his previous political defeats was, shall we say, a bit premature. I was still ignorant of the depths of anguish and humiliation into which human beings can fall, jump, or be pushed. But all in all, I said what I meant and sent the letter off. Near the end of May I received a formal acknowledgment from Nixon. He had just come back from a world tour, and he wanted to thank me for my letter. I proudly showed his reply to my family and friends. Think of it, Richard Nixon answered my letter. A week later I received a letter from Leonard Garment, a lawyer in the Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander firm: “Dear Mr. Gavin: Your recent letter to Richard Nixon has been brought to my attention by his staff. What you wrote him struck me as having certain rare qualities from the standpoint of directness and sincerity. If you get up to New York sometime soon, I hope you will give me a call. I should like very much to meet you and have a talk, at lunch, or over a drink.” If I get up to New York? I made sure I was going to be in New York, as soon as possible. On June 21, 1967, I took the train to New York and met Len Garment. He was about ten years older than I was, fast-talking, witty, and friendly, not at all the idea I had of a Wall Street lawyer. He took me to lunch at Whites, a Wall Street area restaurant, and we immediately hit it off. We both loved jazz (he was an accomplished tenor sax player and had once briefly played with the great, swinging Woody Herman band) and were fans of jazz immortal Charlie Parker. Len was a birthright Brooklyn Jewish nonideological liberal. I was an Irish street corner conservative Catholic from Jersey City. We were outsiders among WASP Republican insiders. At the time we met, Len was getting bored with his law firm

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duties and was doing some talent scout work for Nixon. At the end of the lunch he suggested I send him anything that came into my head—slogans, one-liners, idea, gimmicks, anything. In December 1967 my wife Katherine and I received an invitation to a Christmas party at Nixon’s Fifth Avenue apartment. When we walked out of the elevator, which opened to the apartment itself, Nixon was standing amid a crowd, unmistakable, even with his back toward us. He was wearing a maroon brocade jacket, what used to be called a smoking jacket (a bit theatrical, Katherine thought), the kind of garment Noel Coward might wear in a drawing-room comedy. The first thing I noticed was his head, which seemed a size and a half too big for his body. Someone—it must have been Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s personal aide—asked for our names and introduced us. Nixon shook hands, looked me in the eye, grinned, and said, “Oh, yes, Bill Gavin, the one-liner man.” If I hadn’t been hooked before that remark, that did it. He knows who I am. I was not then aware of two facts of political life: (1), major political figures are briefed about those who will attend a meeting or a social function, and (2) Richard Nixon had one of the great retentive memories in American politics. He may well have remembered my name even without a briefing. So here I was, sipping wine at a party given by Richard and Pat Nixon and meeting celebrities like Richard and Joan Whalen. Dick had written The Founding Father, a groundbreaking best-selling look at the life and times of Joseph P. Kennedy, President Kennedy’s father. Dick was advising Nixon on a number of issues at the time. Far from being an unapproachable author of a best seller, he was, along with Joan, warm and friendly and eager to talk with us. The Whalens have remained friends all these years. Katherine and I also met Mrs. Nixon, Julie Nixon, and David Eisenhower, all of them charming. Being a study-hall monitor in Abington High School was nothing like this. After the holidays were over, I kept sending material to Len. I did a long, emotional—one might say overwrought—piece on the death of Martin Luther King, using a lot of rhetoric about the view of the promised land from the “mountain top.” Nixon used some of it in primary campaign speeches. In April 1968 two things happened: first, Len told me to go to Washington to meet Bob Ellsworth, a former congressman and now a Nixon adviser, to discuss the Youth for Nixon campaign, which was headed by a capable and very nice guy, Mort Allin, who later would do a superb job of putting together the daily

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press summary at the White House. Working with the idea “Nixon’s the One,” and drawing from the theme I had used in my original letter to Nixon, I wrote a little piece that appeared on the back of a Youth for Nixon campaign giveaway: our nation is suffering a crisis of the spirit A crisis of the national spirit cannot be met by rhetoric or posture or fantasies. It cannot be met by demagoguery. It cannot be met by factionalism It can be met only by a man who is beyond faction, a man whose goal is reconciliation and not division, by a man who refuses to play the image game because he knows that substance and not shadow is needed. As we enter the last third of the 20th century, our Nation has been losing its identity. We have forgotten who we are and how great we can be.

I don’t know what I meant by being against “posture” (it looks as if I am in favor of slouching) , but I think it had something to do with political posturing. In any event, the brochure went out with my little screed on the back. I have no idea how “youth” reacted to it. Later in April, Len called and told me Nixon wanted me to come to New York full-time and work on the Nixon for President campaign. I made certain my master teacher work was finished, and then a few days after Len’s call I talked with the dean of the Graduate School of Education. I told him I was resigning. “Resigning? I’m sorry to hear that. Whatever for?” “I’m joining Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign.” There was a brief silence. Then the dean, his face showing evident concern (he was a nice, caring man), said, in incredulous tones, “Nixon? Mr. Gavin, you’re joining the Nixon campaign? Why in the world would you ever want to do something like that?” I offered some reasons. But he sat there stunned, silent, obviously dismayed, as if I had just told him my doctor had informed me I had only a few months to live. It wasn’t so much the idea that I was leaving that troubled him, but the reason I was leaving. In academia, Nixon was not the most popular of names, then or now. On Monday, April 22, 1968, I took the train from Philadelphia to New York City and then a taxi to Nixon’s national campaign headquarters at 450 Park Avenue. It had previously been the Bible Society Building. (Oh, the irony.)

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The first thing I did was sit in a cubicle on the fifth floor reading through what was called the “mini-book,” a loose-leaf folder divided into sections labeled by issues, such as urban issues or Vietnam, in question-and-answer format, giving the campaign’s line on the problem. (I might add here that at no time before, during, or after the campaign did Richard Nixon say, imply, suggest, or otherwise communicate that he had a “secret plan to end the war,” although his critics are absolutely certain he did have such a plan.) Len had arranged to get me a hotel room at the Peter Cooper Hotel, within walking distance of 450 Park Avenue. I settled in, commuting by train from Abington every Monday morning and coming back on Friday evening. The first thing I learned about campaign life was that, seen from a certain angle (mine), it is chaotic. At Nixon’s campaign headquarters no one seemed to be in charge. Nixon was on the road, contending in primaries. Len was busy on the phone most of the time. I was introduced to any number of people, but I had no way to sort them out. What relationship did they have to Nixon? I discovered that in some cases it didn’t matter, because I never saw them again. Campaigns are notorious for the transient nature of titles, positions, and people, not to mention political strategies and promises. Well, if no one was around to give an assignment, I’d do what all writers with time on their hands do: I’d write, in this case memos. In one I suggested to Len that the campaign organization create “an ideological style-sheet” for all those involved in communicating the Nixon message—speechwriters, TV consultants, press aides—so that we’d all be doing improvisations on the same basic themes, using the same words. “I think there can and should be,” I wrote, “four or five basic, standard, strong, simply worded ideas that must be given the entire campaign, and within those ideas all kind of things can be created. . . . I feel we should push Nixon as the only real chance of change.” Len sent the memo to Nixon, who read it and wrote in the margin: “Len—it makes good sense—get Trelevan, Safire and Gavin together on this.” (Harry Trelevan was a key media adviser at the time.) I cannot recall ever discussing the idea with Safire or Trelevan or anyone else during the campaign, but I still think it was good idea. I was fortunate enough to meet Nixon’s head of research, a bespectacled thirty-two-year-old Columbia University professor, Martin Anderson, who was

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the author of The Federal Bulldozer, an influential book about the errors of city planning by Great Society liberals. He was a year younger than I was, but light years beyond me in knowledge of policies and politics, and certainly on how to survive and prosper in a political environment (he was, after all, a full-fledged academic and used to fierce infighting). Later I met Marty’s wife, Annelise, a scholar and writer of formidable intellect. Both of them have remained good friends through the years. With nothing else to do, I began to help Marty with research. For a time I worked side by side with a friend of Marty’s, a pleasant, soft-spoken man. He and I cooperated on drafts of speeches about what were to me incomprehensible economic issues. He would provide me with facts and figures and theories, and I would try to translate all of this into speakable prose. The man’s name was Alan Greenspan. Yes, that Alan Greenspan. So far as I know, these Greenspan/Gavin drafts were rarely used by Nixon, but at least I was getting some idea of how a political speech is put together and that it is usually a collaborative effort. I ghosted a piece for Nixon on, of all subjects, computers. Labor columnist Victor Riesel had asked Nixon to do a column about the computer age. Computers were then in embryonic form as far as the public was concerned, and I knew nearly as much about computers as I did about Albanian folk dancing, but a speechwright (this time in the guise of a ghostwriter) is nothing if not resourceful. I got the available material, wrote a draft, putting Nixon in the vanguard of nerds who surf the Net before the Net existed. So maybe it was Dick Nixon, not Al Gore, who can lay claim to inventing the Internet. “Indeed, in my opinion [wrote Gavin/Nixon] the theme of the last third of this century will not be man vs. the machine, but, instead, man and machine as partners, not adversaries. . . . [computer technology] . . . is a horn of plenty out of which can flow a better life.” Gavin, cliché-monger! Nixon, proto-hacker! By this time everyone at 450 Park Avenue was talking about the forthcoming convention in Miami Beach. I had no hope of being asked to travel there with Nixon’s crew of advisers. One day Len, busy as usual, poked his head into my cubicle and said, “Where’s your acceptance speech material?” “No one told me to send anything in.” “Stop waiting for somebody to tell you. Write something. You’re late,” he said. “Just send me some stuff by this afternoon and I’ll try to get it to him. He’ll

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be going out to Montauk to be by himself and write the speech. But he wants contributions from all of his writers.” That afternoon I wrote the first things that came into my mind: images about American children. I was just riffing, placing the campaign in the perspective of its importance to American kids. I sent it to Len’s office across the street on Park Avenue. Two days before the chartered plane was scheduled to leave for the convention, I mentioned to Len that no one had said anything to me about going down to Miami Beach. He quickly made a phone call and I was part of the flight. In Miami I was booked at a small hotel called, as I recall, the Rio, far, far removed from the row of luxury hotels where the senior members of staff were staying. But there was a Nixon hospitality suite at the Hilton Plaza, so, on acceptance speech night, there I was, watching the speech on television with Jack Caulfield. Twelve hours later, Nixon put his arm around my shoulder and told me I was going to make the campaign tour.

Chapter Four

On the Campaign Trail

Nineteen-sixty-eight was a weird year in American politics; a mean, ugly, desperate year of war and assassinations; a year without pity; a year of angry words in the streets of burning cities, shouted by rioters and by hundreds of thousands of college students protesting the United States’ involvement in trying to help the people of South Vietnam escape a Communist takeover. There were angry words by politicians, but also inspirational words, words that pleaded or threatened or cajoled, fiery denunciations, blistering adjectives, furious phrases, unwarranted claims, personal attacks, folksy little anecdotes, zingers, chanted slogans, one-liners, and barbaric yawps. There was the cold intellectual irony of Senator Eugene McCarthy; the hot, growling, raspy, embittered, dark words of Governor George Wallace, filled with the anger of the forgotten white working people who supported him, not always because of his racial views but because he was the only candidate who spoke out for some of their legitimate grievances. There were, for a while, the fighting words of Bobby Kennedy and the sometimes disenchanted words carried along by the rolling black church cadences of Martin Luther King. There were the fervent, pleading words of Hubert Humphrey in the fall campaign, trying to make the political comeback of the century. And then there were the smooth, well-written, well-phrased, but cautious words of Richard Nixon. I was hearing all of those voices, and writing for one of them. A writer for Life magazine, Brock Brower, referred to the Nixon 1968 campaign tour as “ high-gleam and humless”—in other words, near perfect in its logistics •  41

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but lacking in passion and fun, buttoned-down and buttoned-up. As one who made the tour, I agree with Brower’s view in part, but I don’t share his feeling that the lack of passion was a bad thing or that we had no fun. Being ahead in the polls and having a good chance of winning is the best kind of fun you can have in politics. Nixon was trying to hold on to his big lead coming out of the convention. That meant we weren’t playing offense as much as preventive defense, and defense, in politics as in sports, is never as flashy or entertaining as offense, although it can win for you. Toward the end of the campaign this hold-on strategy was increasingly appearing to have been a mistake as our lead dwindled. But there was no panic. I doubt there has ever been a presidential campaign tour that has run as smoothly as Nixon’s in 1968, or one in which a sense of strategic caution was more evident. Logistically, the campaign moved straight ahead, always on schedule; politically we were treading water. This meant, for the speechwriters at least, that we stayed on the attack, but the speeches and remarks we wrote, while hard-hitting, had to be error-free and gaffe-free and not give Hubert Humphrey or George Wallace any gifts. The campaign took us to seventy-nine cities and was, by the reckoning of United Airlines, exactly 50,083 air miles. From Springfield, Missouri, to Springfield, Ohio; from Fort Lee, New Jersey, to Forth Worth, Texas; from Paoli, Pennsylvania, to Peoria, Illinois; from the (always first-rate) hotel to the plane to the rally, again and again. Raleigh, Charlotte, New Orleans, Indianapolis, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Anaheim, Santa Barbara, Key Biscayne, the Philadelphia suburbs, Boise, and Louisville—the campaign tour never missed a beat, never a hitch, never a glitch, and so we glided on, in our humless way. I was told by reporters who had previously covered the George Wallace campaign that they had feared for their lives, never really believing the old Wallace plane would land safely at each stop, because no one in the Wallace camp was certain where the next stop would be. But the Nixon tour just went along in its smooth, cool perfection. If you listened carefully, however, you could hear Hubert Humphrey, far behind, moving inexorably forward, plodding step by step by step. When we reached the hotel in a new city, there was always an IBM electric typewriter in my room, so I could get to work if I had an assignment. On the night before departure, I would put my luggage outside the hotel door, my bags marked with a red and white plastic nixon tag. The bags were gone by the time

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I awoke the next morning, and I didn’t see them again until I reached the next hotel, where they would be waiting for me outside the door of my room. If the campaign was perfect in its movement forward, so, for the most part, was Nixon himself. He had vowed never again to make the mistakes he had made in 1960, when he tried to do too much, such as visit all fifty states, and when he tried to personally control every angle of campaign tactics. This time he had created the best campaign operation available, from advance men to baggage handlers, from political advisers to writers and policy experts. His job was to be the candidate, and he did it superbly and indefatigably. Seen as a whole, in retrospect, a presidential campaign is exciting because of what is at stake. But day-to-day operations can induce boredom as well as thrills and exhaustion along with high spirits. One day late in September we flew from Milwaukee to Sioux Falls, from there to Bismarck, then to Boise, and then to Seattle. At each stop Nixon would speak to a partisan crowd and give them the stump speech, the basic talk a candidate gives at every rally, made up of bits and pieces of speeches tested during the primaries, filled with promises of good things to come, condemnations of the other party’s policies, and inspirational slogans. The only new part in the speech was some kind of local “lead” dealing with an issue dear to the hearts of the people of, say, Sioux Falls, or a paragraph quickly inserted to take advantage of late-breaking news. I can now remember only two lines from the stump speech. The first was: “And when I’m elected, we’re going to have a new attorney general.” That line, stating the obvious, for some strange reason got some of the best responses during the entire tour—cheers, applause, whistles, roars of approval. President Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general, Ramsey Clark, was very unpopular, with Nixon’s audiences at least, and even without mentioning Clark’s name, Nixon would get a cheer just because he promised to choose a new attorney general. I often wondered if Nixon ever thought of just dumping his writers and going around the country saying equally obvious things like, “When I’m elected, I’ll be the one in the Oval Office,” or “When I’m elected I promise you’ll have a new vice president,” gaining wild applause. Campaign rhetoric is something like dialogue on a stage: you can never tell what’s going to get a reaction until you say it before an audience. And every audience is different. A line meticulously crafted to elicit applause may generate very loud silence, but a stupid throw-away line may send the crowd into ecstasy.

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The second memorable line Nixon used was, improbably enough: “Sock it to me?” Sock it to me? Richard Nixon? There is a story behind his use of this phrase. In 1968 NBC’s Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In was one of the biggest television hits of the year. It starred the comedy team of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin and gained great popularity for its then-innovative use of brief one-liners or sight gags in swift-moving montage sequences. Paul Keyes, a producer of the show, had convinced Nixon to make a one-line appearance. How Keyes managed to pull that off remains a great mystery, because the word “laugh” is not one of the first things that come to mind when you think of Nixon’s public persona. In any event, Nixon agreed to do this. One of the popular young stars on the show was the zany Goldie Hawn, who, wearing a bikini, often appeared in two-second snippets saying “Sock it to me!” which was very funny (you had to be there). Nixon, in his two-second appearance, looked into the camera and said, “Sock it to me?” I’m not certain if his reading of the line was suggested by Keyes, but making the statement into a question was, oddly enough, funny, in the way unexpected words from unexpected people can be funny. During the campaign, Nixon used “sock it to ’em,” and it always got a laugh and a big cheer. By the time the campaign was a few weeks old, everyone on the tour—Nixon, his aides, the traveling press, and even the United Airlines stewardesses aboard the Tricia—was bored silly by hearing the same lines every day. But we all forgot that people in Sioux Falls or wherever had not heard those lines. In 1968 there wasn’t an all-news-all-the-time information overload, and we did not have the instant, ubiquitous, and varied communication devises we have today, so if a candidate had a few good lines, he continued to use them at every campaign stop—sort of like vaudevillians in the old days who could make an entire career going from small town to small town doing the same act. •    •    • Traveling on the Nixon campaign plane was an experience unlike any I had ever had before. As the tour began, I quickly noticed that in such a hectic journey, where all is ephemeral and transient in nature, campaign aides look for any sign of permanence. One of the signs of territorial possession is claiming a certain seat on the plane as yours, every day. “Excuse me, you’re sitting in my seat” was

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the first, polite reminder to an interloper, followed by more direct language if the seat stealing continued. (Twelve years later, when I was chief speechwriting coordinator for the Reagan campaign, I made one trip on the campaign plane, sat, and was immediately reprimanded. “That’s my seat,” an aggrieved Reagan staffer told me. How quickly we forget.) I began to sit in the first row, window seat, in the main body of the Boeing 727, just in front of the curtain that separated Nixon’s private section from the rest of the plane. One morning I was sitting there and turned to see that an elf had just sat next to me. On second glance I realized it was not an elf, but a very small man, bald and smiling. He was, I guessed, in his forties. He offered his hand and told me his name (which I didn’t quite catch), and we began to talk about the campaign as the plane flew toward our next destination. He was a pleasant, friendly person, and he said little about himself. He wasn’t wearing a press identification card, so I knew he was not a reporter. But I didn’t remember his face from the innumerable staff meetings I had attended. He asked me what I did on the campaign. I told him I was one of the speechwriters. “Well, that’s just great, “he said, beaming. “How do you like your job?” I began to instruct him on the fine points of speechwriting, about which I so far knew very little. But I have always been able to talk a good game. As we chatted, Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s personal aide, or Herb Klein, his longtime press assistant, would poke his head through the curtains of the front cabin inner sanctum and beckon to one of the political aides to come forward. I had not yet been called to meet with Nixon, but I hoped my time was coming soon. As I continued explaining the intricacies of speechwriting to my seatmate, Dwight suddenly appeared from behind the curtain, looked our way, and said, “The boss would like to see you.” At last. The call I had been waiting for. Bill Gavin, advising the next president. I arose from my seat and began to step across the friendly little man seated next to me. I was standing there, awkwardly straddling my seatmate as I tried to get into the aisle, when Dwight grinned and said, loud enough for others to hear, “Not you, Gavin,” and then, looking at the little guy, said, with respect, “Bryce, he wants to talk.” I stood there in embarrassment and watched the little guy go into the cabin.

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Then I quickly sat back in my seat, gathering about me whatever dignity I had left. I asked someone sitting across the aisle who the little guy was. “Bryce Harlow; don’t you know Bryce?” No, I didn’t know Bryce. Or at least I did not know that the man who had been sitting next to me was Bryce. But I had already heard about him. He was a lobbyist for Procter and Gamble, but he had been a key Republican aide in the Senate, a dedicated, talented, self-effacing public servant, and a speechwright for President Eisenhower (who had been a speechwright himself, for General Douglas MacArthur, back in the 1930s). If Ike was dubious about a writer’s draft that was big on poetry but never got to the point, all vision and no substance, he would say, “Get me a draft of this by my meat-and-potatoes man,” meaning Bryce, who had a gift for writing in clear, concise English. This is not to say he was incapable of spinning out a pretty line or two, but only to emphasize that he knew a political speech is a working document. He was now one of Nixon’s most trusted advisers. I was so new to the game that I had not recognized him. And I had been advising him about how speechwriting is done! In the years ahead, Bryce became a mentor and a friend, and we often had a good laugh about our first meeting. One day he gave me a piece of advice I have never forgotten. “Bill,” he said, “a good speechwriter gives the boss what he wants. But a very good speechwriter also gives the boss what he needs. The two aren’t always the same, and sometimes you have to tell him what he needs.” •    •    • A few days after I met Bryce I finally made my way to the front cabin. The plane was on the ground—in Illinois, as I dimly recall—refueling or engaged in some other airplane maintenance ritual. This time Dwight said, “Bill, will you please see the boss?” I looked around to check whether there were any other Bills in the area and, satisfied I was the one, arose and parted the curtain. (And, yes, the Wizard of Oz analogy had long since occurred to me.) Nixon was seated in an oversized, comfortable-looking blue airline seat all his own, with another swivel chair next to him and other seats to his right. Dick Moore, a white-haired, jovial, and canny Nixon veteran, who was a communications consultant and a television expert in particular, was already on the seat across from Nixon. I sat next to Dick.

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Nixon, relaxed, legs crossed, was wearing a blue-checked sports coat (where did he get those things?) and a blue tie with a white shirt. He was twirling a pair of eyeglasses in his left hand. I had never seen him wear glasses in public. He nodded to me and then began to talk about the need for better endings for his stump speech. “What I want,” he said, “is little anecdotes, little parables, something with heart. You can do that, Bill; you write with heart.” The three of us talked about the problem for a few minutes. The anecdotes could not be “corny,” Nixon said, but had to have heart, “bring home a point.” As we continued talking, Dwight came in and told Nixon that Senator Everett Dirksen wanted to speak with him sometime that day. “Get him on the phone now, then, Dwight,” Nixon said, grinning. Dirksen, the legendary Republican leader of the Senate was a party stalwart, a sly old fox known for his foghorn voice, his shrewd sense of what was politically doable, and his ability to charm just about anyone, even members of the press. He was up for reelection, and there was no chance he could lose. After a few minutes, as we chatted, Nixon picked up the phone and said, “Hello, Ev,” and that was all he said for a long while, because Dirksen evidently was doing most of the talking. The conversation—or, rather, Nixon’s part in it, which was all Dick Moore and I could hear—was about nuclear proliferation. Nixon assured Dirksen he had checked out his position with an expert, and it was sound. Nixon then smiled at us and said, “Ev, tell me, how’s the race going in Illinois?” The state was absolutely vital to Nixon’s success, as it had been in 1960, when, as many unbiased observers claimed, Chicago mayor Richard Daley’s machine provided the necessary votes for John F. Kennedy through means that would not withstand scrutiny by anyone searching for election fraud. So Illinois was always on Nixon’s mind. I watched his face as he listened to Dirksen’s reply. A couple of times he tried to interrupt, but Dirksen kept on talking. Nixon’s neutral expression began to turn to one of dismay, and finally he said in mild exasperation, “Ev . . . Ev . . . I know you’re doing well. But what I’d like to know is how the hell am I doing?” Dirksen’s reply seemed to please Nixon, and the conversation was ended with a pleasant word or two. Nixon, grinning, turned back to us. “I know they say I’m corny, but that doesn’t bother me,” he said, in what I would soon discover was a familiar pattern. “They” meant liberals or intellectuals

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on the left or people who had Nixon on their enemies list—didn’t like him, hated him. But that didn’t bother him at all, and in fact he was glad they didn’t like him. He welcomed their scorn, and if they thought he was corny, so be it. He didn’t realize using the word “corny” was itself corny. “ But I know what works, goddamn it,” he continued. “The speeches need heart, anecdotes, parables.” The “goddamn” surprised me. Remember, although 1968 was a year of dramatic change in everything from morals to manners, our country had not yet come to the point—and never has—where a president can swear an even mild oath in public, and we were years from the Nixon tapes revealing that in private, he, like some other presidents, from what I have heard and read, was not above some just-us-guys, locker-room, tough-talking vulgarity. At this point I made a suggestion (“tell him what he needs”): “If the problem is that your critics say you don’t have heart, why not pick up on the passage from the acceptance speech and have a kid, or a group of kids, come up on the platform with you at one of the rallies? You don’t speak to them, but while they are there, you talk about all kids everywhere, their future, the way you did in Miami.” There was a long moment of silence. No, a long, long moment of silence. Dick Moore cleared his throat and said, “Well, Bill, I don’t know . . .” Nixon said, “Bill, I couldn’t do that.” He looked out the scratched plastic window next to him and then turned back to me. “It’s not me,” he said. “Besides, they’ll say I’m using the kids.” They. Always the They people. We talked just a bit more, and then Dwight came in and said we were going to take off. I went back to my seat (on this day Bryce was not with us) and sat in gloom. I had made a fool of myself before the boss, maybe the only chance I would have to talk to him personally for I didn’t know how long. I should have thought out what I was going to say. I should have just kept my mouth shut. I should have done this. I should have done that. Tell him what he needs. Oh, yeah? But in retrospect I think I did the right thing. I can see now that Nixon was amused by my naiveté. God only knows he had enough—too many?—hardbitten political pros on his campaign, so maybe my inexperience once again worked in my favor. After all, my suggestion wasn’t that bad. But it also wasn’t useful. Nixon knew—or thought he knew—he couldn’t get away with such a

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gimmick. “They” would say he was using children as props, and it could have been interpreted that way. I guess he was right; it could be seen as exploiting children. But if used sparingly, it would have added a bit of color to the stump speech and might have worked. One day I was in my seat, waiting for the plane to take off, and a stranger sat next to me. We began to chat. His name was Brock Brower, a name I recognized because he had written a piece about Bela Lugosi, the actor who memorably portrayed Dracula back in the 1930s. (Brower would go on to write a fine novel, The Late Great Creature, about a character partly based on Lugosi.) I was a horror film fan, and Brower and I talked pleasantly about the genre. He was doing a campaign piece for Life magazine, and he began to ask me questions about what I did on the tour. We talked for a while until it dawned on me that he was a writer and he might use what I was saying. I had no fear of divulging secrets—I didn’t know any. But I had never been interviewed before, and I was afraid of making some idiotic blunder. •    •    • Brower did indeed use what I said. The October 11, 1968, issue of Life carried his long story, “Inside the Humless Machine a Longing for Poetry,” and I was prominently featured. He quoted almost all of the letter I had sent to Nixon in 1967. I have no recollection of having given him a copy of the letter or how I would have found a copy, since I wasn’t carrying it with me on the tour. But he quoted it at length, gave a brief summary of how I came to Nixon’s attention, and then wrote: “[Gavin] is almost apolitical, but what he writes—musings, impressions, effervescences, ‘word patterns’—the candidate wants. ‘I write what I feel,’ Gavin shrugs, still a little surprised. ‘I set him up with words.” But what words, what kind of words? An even bigger shrug. ‘Emotions.’ . . . [Gavin] is a minor but feeling part of the organizational effort.” Rereading the piece today I am impressed by Brower’s professionalism, his fairness, his accuracy in quoting my mumbling, and also by his prose, which has the virtue of clarity, quiet wit, and incisive analysis. But when the article appeared I was worried that the campaign hierarchy might not be pleased by the interview, because I was not a campaign spokesman and had not cleared it with anyone. On the day I got a copy, Ron Zeigler, later to be Nixon’s press spokesman at the White House, came out from behind the curtain, looked at

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me, and said, “So, Gavin, now you’re the campaign poet?” and went back inside. I never heard another word, good or bad, about the interview. One day we were touring the south, and I was sitting with Bryce in our usual seats. A reporter came from the back of the plane and said, “Bryce, I’ve been delegated by my colleagues—many of us are city boys—to ask you a very important question.” “And what’s that, my friend?” Bryce said. “Well, we have this speech insert about fire ants,” the reporter said, holding up a release given to the press earlier in the day, since Nixon was going to use it on the next stop (possibly Atlanta, although I’m not certain). “We all have just one question—what in the hell is so important about fire ants?” Bryce laughed and gently walked the reporter through the Byzantine intricacies of agricultural policy and instructed him (and me) about the scourge of fire ants, so harmful to the good farming families of the south. I cannot recall what was said about the fire ants in the text, or what Nixon proposed to do about them, but you can bet Dick Nixon took a fearless, no-compromise stand against these dastardly villains (the fire ants, not the press). •    •    • The campaign became a blur of motion: on the plane, off the plane, on the bus, to the hotel, to the rally, back on the bus, and then back on the plane. But a few stops remain in my mind. On October 9 we flew from California to Moline, Illinois. Why Moline? I forget. We arrived at 11:00 at night, and we were weary from the campaigning we had done in California and then the flight halfway across the country. All we wanted to do was get to the hotel. But when we got off the plane there were what seemed to be thousands of cheering, applauding people, one of the most enthusiastic rallies we had seen. It was a thrill to see and hear all those people, near midnight, coming out to the airport to see Nixon. Two weeks later we were on a train, touring Ohio cities from Cincinnati to Toledo, and although the whistle-stop tour concept was what Nixon might have called corny, the event itself was exciting, as we stopped in places like Dayton and London and Marion, where we were greeted by enthusiastic crowds. At one point in the campaign, all the writers got a memorandum (“From: RN”), outlining what he wanted for the rest of the tour: “I don’t think we are yet hitting the mark,” he wrote, “an excerpt should be no more than 1 to 1½

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pages long. It should be meaty and quotable and should be material I can easily work into a stump speech, even if I am speaking outdoors without a podium.” He then instructed us on the importance of giving the local press something to write about: “More often than not a statement dealing with a local subject and zeroing in on a local problem should be dropped off at most stops. This will give enormous local coverage, and since it will not require me to include the material in my speech, it imposes no burden on me. . . . a case in point was the statement Pat Buchanan prepared reacting to the Yippies that broke up the Catholic mass in Milwaukee. As a matter of fact, that statement even deserved national play.” And, as always, the need for good excerpts: “If we scatter-gun too much we are not going to have an impact. That is why I repeat we must have at least two excerpts a week which hit some aspect of the law and order theme and one or two a week which hit some aspect of the spending theme and one, two or three a week which hit the foreign policy, respect for America theme.” He went on to remind us to use his own words about Hubert Humphrey being the “most expensive member of the Senate”—in other words, no one introduced more bills calling for more spending than Humphrey. We should be “hammering him hard and regularly on the spending theme . . . and hammering on the fact that he defends the (law and order) record of the Administration. Does he agree with Ramsey Clark? In . . . not going after organized crime—in not enforcing the Narcotics Act. Demand replies. Put him on the defensive just as he is trying to put us on the defensive.” He then offered some general guidelines for our writing: “Don’t be cute or gimmicky—just hit hard with crisp one-liners whenever they are appropriate . . . most of our excerpts suffer from not being current and livelier. This could be corrected by simply spending a little more time reading the daily news summaries and zeroing in on some of those problems. . . . we should drop in regular statements, about two a week from now on, that are meaty, substantive, they will not have any impact on voters but they will impress the press.” Nixon’s memo can still serve as a handbook for political speech writers, especially during a campaign: Hitting the mark. Meaty. Quotable. Hit hard. Be crisp. Zero in. Don’t be cute or gimmicky. Be current. Put your opponent on the defensive. Try to shape press coverage. Tactical. Direct. Doable. Pure working rhetoric. Pure Nixon.

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None of these qualities has anything to do with eloquence. Nixon believed that eloquence, although it had its time and place in rhetoric, had to take a backseat to forcefulness, directness, timeliness, brevity, and, especially, “zeroing in”—saying precisely what was needed, no more no less. He wanted to make arguments with his words and make history with his decisions. Long ago I came across a quotation that has for some reason stayed with me all this time. The source given was Balzac, but I have no idea where in the French novelist’s many works it appears. It goes like this: “Power is not revealed by striking hard or striking often, but by striking true.” That idea was reflected in Nixon’s reminders to his writers that beautiful words and rolling cadences are fine, and he welcomed them, but the heart of campaign rhetoric is persistent, accurate, precisely targeted delivery of hardhitting attacks and denunciations. Not just punches delivered on the offensive, but counterpunches—swift, accurate retaliatory responses to attacks. I was learning things about writing from Nixon. A good speechwright, ideally, has to be two people at once: a speechwriter and a speechwriter. The speechwriter knows that writing speeches isn’t to be confused with belles lettres and that a speech must stand or fall on its own peculiar rules for oral communication. His job, as he sees it, is to get a draft done in as good a shape as time will allow, and then get it to the boss for his perusal and, inevitably, changes. The language may be simple but usually has pacing, clarity, and vigor, if not beauty. The strength of a speechwriter is in his ability to see speechwriting as a partnership, to be willing to listen to others whose literary taste may be limited but whose political savvy or technical expertise is priceless. His weakness lies in his inability to give to a political speech the kind of outside help it needs, the kind that comes only from an association with and a love for literature and language. The speechwriter, on the other hand, loves language, has a feel for nuances and cadences, and has the true writer’s ability and willingness to write and then rewrite. Unfortunately, speechwriting doesn’t generally allow enough time for the kind of care a true writer needs. The speechwriter can grind the stuff out by the yard, and most of it will be pretty good; the speechwriter doesn’t work as well on demand but can come up with phrases that are alive, jumping up and down on the page waiting to become sounds. A lucky politician has one of each on his staff. A really lucky politician has one writer who is also two writers. (I

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began as a speechwriter and learned how to be a speechwriter only after I left the White House.) Even if you have the talent and temperament to become a speechwriter, be prepared for disappointments, because no matter what kind of speech draft you come up with, someone, somewhere is going to find something wrong with it. Fill your speech with one-liners and zingers and attention-grabbers, and your boss will be accused of speaking in slogans. Avoid these attention-getters, and the speech will be called dull. Point out your boss’s opponent’s faults, and you’re too negative. When an opponent points out your boss’s faults and you decide to take the high road and not answer the criticism in a speech draft, your boss is criticized as unwilling to fight. Prepare carefully, write the speech drafts with precision, go over each draft with the experts to make sure the facts are right, develop an argument with grace, and hear your boss deliver it with force, and you have achieved success, right? Wrong. If one line, one phrase, one word in the speech is controversial, the political opponents and the media will seize on that gaffe. Everything else you have written will be forgotten. All anyone will remember is that you goofed. Prepare the same speech and don’t include the offending part, and you are a success, right? Wrong. The media won’t give the speech time or space, because it has no news value (that is, there’s nothing sensational or scandalous in it). Does your boss speak too often? He is a windbag. Does he speak too little? Then he is trying to hide something or is clueless. During an election campaign, give the basic speech (usually referred to as “The Speech”) wherever you go, with slight modifications for local circumstances, and you bore the media. Fail to deliver the basic text, and you are accused of having an inconsistent message. Follow your party’s line, and you are a party hack. Fail to follow it, and you are a maverick and not to be trusted. Does your boss specialize in one aspect of government? Too narrow. Or is he familiar with many aspects of government? No depth. “Going negative” is universally decried by pundits, editorial writers, and goodcitizenship activists, but it is universally practiced by politicians, and for good reasons. The Declaration of Independence is one of the most negative pieces of political writing ever created, a memorable introduction followed by twenty-seven consecutive negative paragraphs blasting poor old King George III. Sometimes in politics, as in life in general, pointing out what’s wrong is the best way to go about setting it right. Be negative. But don’t be dirty. There’s a difference.

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•    •    • Nixon never forgot the basic truth of politics: campaigns are contests, and everything that happens in them must be seen from the vantage point of staying in the contest and winning it. This sounds like elementary common sense, but many candidates go into a race to make a point, espouse an ideological idea, or to show the party flag, not to see victory as the only rational, desirable goal. But doesn’t that mean “anything goes” or that the “end justifies the means”? I don’t think so. In any contest—political, athletic, legal—there are rules, both written and unwritten, which, if broken, may gain one side in the contest a temporary advantage but can also discredit the side that gained the advantage, causing harm. Even if you think all politicians are scoundrels, remember that even a scoundrel has a good idea of what is best for him and will forgo the immediate gain that breaking the rules can give, not because he is a nice guy, but because he knows that in the long run, breaking the rules can work against you. That is not an ethically sound reason for staying within the rules, but it has certain pragmatic wisdom about it. Nixon’s view of campaign rhetoric was based on his view that politics is a struggle and that campaign rhetoric should be a weapon, not an ornament, in that struggle. This does not mean every word, or every paragraph, or every speech has to be on the attack. Far from it, because even in real warfare there are more methods of getting your way than by direct frontal attack. Some speeches need to be conciliatory, others analytical, still others exhortatory. But these are also weapons. I do not mean to impute to Nixon the belief that politics is a Darwinian struggle, red in tooth and claw (Tennyson’s words, not Darwin’s), although this is what his critics believe about him. If that were the case, he would have fought to the end in 1960, demanding investigations of undoubted Democratic vote fraud in Chicago and Texas. But he chose not to do this, because a prolonged legal fight over votes counted or uncounted would tear the country apart. He was right to do so, as the events following the election of 2000 showed us. Punch, counterpunch, the campaign was winding down. The traveling press was sick to death of Nixon’s stump speech and his refusal to say or do anything that might conceivably eat into his dwindling lead. Something had to be done to keep the press busy and to show that the Nixon campaign, far from being without ideas or passion, still had plenty left to say.

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On Columbus Day weekend, little less than a month from Election Day, the writers and a few other aides gathered to meet Nixon at his house on Key Biscayne, Florida. Jim Keogh, a former Time magazine writer and editor who was the calm, genial, savvy head of the speechwriting team, Buchanan, Price, Safire, and I were driven to the house from our hotel, where the campaign had stopped for a little rest and recreation before the final push. When we got to Nixon’s house we met Bryce Harlow, Marty Anderson, and Nixon’s longtime friend and confidant Bob Finch, former lieutenant governor of California. Nixon had decided to deliver a number of radio addresses, each covering a major topic. Each broadcast would have to be reported (give the media something to do!), because each would have some news angle. The speeches would then be gathered in a paperback book that would give the traveling press something to write about, just in case they missed the radio broadcasts. Radio was the perfect medium for Nixon. He could prerecord the speeches at his leisure and not have to deliver them in person, saving him time and effort, and, of course, he had a great radio voice. At our meeting, Nixon laid out a division of labor. Ray Price would handle foreign policy, Harlow another issue, Buchanan would write about law and order. The list of important topics—foreign policy, the economy—was dwindling fast. Nixon was looking at some papers in his lap, checking off each topic as someone received an assignment. I had not yet been given a topic. I thought he had forgotten me. I looked at Bryce, and he nodded and said something to Nixon, who looked up and, seeing me, said, “ Oh, right, there’s Gavin. Let me see . . .” He consulted the list. “Here’s one for you, Bill, you do the speech on . . . let me see . . . conservation. You can handle that one.” I was thrilled. My first full-speech assignment after months of one-liners and poetry. But there was a slight problem. I didn’t know anything about conservation (which was the term used then to describe what only a year or so later would be called “environment”). I was a city boy. I knew nothing about the great outdoors. But here it was at last, an assignment for a full-blown, honest-to-God speech, not an excerpt, not a one-liner, not a grace note, but an entire score. I sure as hell wasn’t going to say, “I’m afraid not, because it lies outside the scope of my expertise.” I had no expertise. I was given a tight deadline for a draft. We returned to the road, and at one stop I stayed in my hotel room and worked on a draft through the night,

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referring to dozens of memos and position papers and other material that came from the New York campaign office, over what was then called a “Twix,” as I recall. I believe it was some kind of ancestor of the fax machine. It was a long night. But I finally emerged from the hotel room the next morning, groggy, bleary-eyed, but with the makings of a first draft. On the plane I snipped and clipped and taped excerpts of new memos, wrote an introduction, added some transitions, organized the material once again, and gave it an upbeat ending: “Americans, every one of us, must be able to look at all of America and say: This is my country, not only in its material power but its natural glory”—you get the idea. After typing a clean draft, I showed it to Bill Safire, who quickly and expertly showed me a dozen different ways it could be improved, most of them involving cuts. I wrote another draft, incorporating Bill’s suggestions (he was always generous with his help, witty, but tough-minded, and clear in his comments, just as he was in his prose). I gave the draft to Keogh, who would put it into the process, which meant he would first read it and make necessary cuts or additions and then give it to an expert to read for substance. After that the next-to-final draft would be sent to Nixon, who, of course, would edit it himself. On October 18, 1968, CBS Radio broadcast “America’s Natural Resources.” Nixon delivered the prerecorded speech fairly close to the version I had given to Keogh. I had finally written a speech that was heard, I guess, by millions. Or at least hundreds of thousands. Or at least thousands. Whether or not that made me a full-fledged speechwriter, I was not sure. But it felt good. It turned out that my speech draft on conservation proved to be the only major statement on the topic made by Nixon during the campaign. In fact, according to Nixon aide John C. Whitaker in his 1976 book, Striking a Balance: Environment and Natural Resource Policy in the Nixon-Ford Years: “Nixon staff members [in 1968] do not remember even one question [by the media] to the candidate about the environment.” Thus, in a presidential campaign, in which every word counts, an apprentice speechwriter was given an assignment, almost as an afterthought, about a subject hardly at the center of the debate and about which he knew nothing. But the topic quickly proved to be among the most important political issues of the rest of the century and into the new century. Go figure.

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On the night before Election Day, we were in the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. We had a farewell party for the press, but I cannot say I was particularly in a party mood, because the polls had been slip-sliding away from Nixon. On election morning, I went down to the coffee shop and sat at the counter between Len Garment and Bryce Harlow. Each of them had a copy of a Los Angeles newspaper. One of the papers had a headline saying the race was tied. The other had Nixon up by two. We flew across the country into the darkness, headed for New York City and the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. I wrote one last one-liner for candidate Nixon and gave it to Jim Keogh. He read it and said, “Why would he want to say this?” “Because we might lose. If we do, I want him to at least have this.” Jim said, “Let me think about it.” At the Waldorf Astoria we waited all night and into the morning. No network would confirm a victory for either major candidate. But then one commentator said Nixon had clinched it. The results were so close that if the election had been held a day later, we might have lost it. But we had won. Katherine and I made our way downstairs to the crowded ballroom, waiting for Nixon to appear. He entered, smiling broadly, to roars and cheers, manifestations of pent-up anxiety at last free from care. I forget what he said, except for one thing. He went out of his way to say nice things about Hubert Humphrey, who had come so close, as Nixon himself once had. And then Nixon used the line I had given to Keogh, intended for Nixon himself if he had lost: “It has been said that a great philosophy is not one without defeat, it is one without fear.” The line is from the French Catholic socialist/philosopher/poet/journalist Charles Peguy, although I’m not certain Nixon knew that, because my attribution may not have been given to him. So my contributions to the beginning and the end of Nixon’s campaign came from two twentieth-century philosophers, one Spanish, one French—not the kind of people one would expect Nixon to be interested in. But he knew what he needed at certain moments, and if two European intellectuals did the job, so be it. I returned to Abington unsure of what my future would be. I was back where I started, except now I had no job, and no expectation of one, because the school district had not, of course, left my position open. The excitement, the strangeness, the tension of the past few months quickly began to fade as I tried to figure out what to do.

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Just before the end of November I got a call from Jim Keogh. Nixon wanted me to be one of his speechwriters. Did I want the job? I played hard to get. No, not really, although I did ask for a salary a wee bit higher than the one they had in mind. Jim called back two days later and said the deal was done. The New York Times Sunday Magazine did a piece on the Nixon speechwriters. There was a photo of me, seated at an electric typewriter, left hand to my face in a pensive gesture, looking very much the literary type, lacking only the obligatory pipe to show that I was real writer (at least that’s the way Hollywood would have done it). The caption read: “‘Bard of Abington, PA.’—The fourth speech-writer on the Nixon team, William F. Gavin, functions as a kind of staff poet, specializing in what he calls ‘emotional writing.’ He is a former English teacher.” So at age thirty-three I was a presidential speechwright, complete with a photograph in the New York Times Sunday Magazine (“Gavin . . . freckle faced and very Irish looking . . . [is] the poet in residence,” wrote William H. Honan. Still, lingering in the back of my mind was the thought that I had not yet learned the basics of the craft. I would have to learn on the job.

Chapter Five

The White House

On Tuesday, January 21, 1969, I stood between Bryce Harlow and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the shortest and tallest Nixon White House staffers, and was sworn in as assistant to the president of the United States. My office was room 118 on the first floor of what was then called the Executive Office Building (EOB), to which the speechwriters had been assigned (or was it consigned?). The building was, and remains today, a marvelous granite grotesque of pillared and porticoed Victorian fantasies next door to the White House, a monument to a lost age of conspicuous consumption. It is a piece of overdone, overstated, and over-the-top architectural splendor, and I still love it. My office, a subdivision of a once larger one, was small, but high-ceilinged, as befitted a room in a building erected when more, not less (pace Mies van der Rohe) was more. It had two large windows (one of which had an air-conditioning unit) looking out on the traffic on Seventeenth Street. Not a great view, admittedly, but what an address—location, location, location. The tall, massive doors had ornate brass doorknobs bearing military insignias, a relic from the days when this used to be the State, War, and Navy Building. I was given parking space 89 in the West Executive Avenue official White House parking lot. I could, if I wished (and, yes, I wished), get my hair cut by the White House barber, and I dined every noon at the White House Mess. To quote Ira Gershwin, a great master of the English language, who could ask for anything more? •  59

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Looking back at those early White House days, the odd thing was that I had no doubt I could write anything and everything the president might want, a confidence based less on experience than on the fact that my entry at the top of national politics had been so improbable and my success (thus far) so sudden that it seemed inevitable to me that this was the way things were supposed to be. This proved to be a false assumption, the bogus confidence of a sleepwalker, but I have subsequently found that sometimes we make gains based on optimistic ignorance of the true facts, which, if we knew them, would discourage us. Ignorance may not be bliss, but it can be a great motivator. I started off well, making a one-liner contribution to Nixon’s swearing-in of Walter Hickel as secretary of the interior. Hickel’s Senate hearings had been contentious, long, and drawn out, and the fact that he said he did not believe in “conservation for conservation’s sake” did not help matters. At the swearing-in Nixon said: “I am sure that enough editorial note has been taken of the fact that his confirmation has taken a little longer than some of the other members of the cabinet. If I may paraphrase him, however, we are not interested in confirmation for confirmation’s sake.” Time magazine found in that line evidence of what it called “Nixon’s newfound humor.” At least once a week, at eleven o’ clock, the writing staff, headed by Jim Keogh, would meet in his large office at the end of the first-floor EOB hallway. After getting assignments from Jim, we would exchange gossip, try to come up with ideas to get the president good media coverage, and, in general, commiserate with each other, because under the new organizational system imposed by H. R. Haldeman, the previous close, informal relationship between Nixon and his writers had been replaced by a technically more efficient—but, in my view, ultimately less satisfying—process. What we made up in flow-chart organization we lost in human contact. On the campaign trail the writers could be called to the front cabin of Tricia at any time. When a candidate has people like Bill Safire, Pat Buchanan, and Ray Price close to him all day, he can’t help but learn something worth listening to, even if it is not about a speech topic, even in casual conversation. I think it would have been a good thing for the president if every few days the three of them had met with Nixon late in the day, just to chat for a few minutes. But here I’m speaking as a writer, not as someone with the responsibility for controlling paperwork in and out of the Oval Office. Haldeman did a good

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job of making the system work so that the president was not overburdened. The new flow-chart process worked something like this: Jim Keogh attended morning meetings in the White House and would be told about forthcoming events at which the president wanted to speak. Back in his office, Jim would give out writing assignments to us based on what he had been told at the morning meeting. After a writer had completed a speech draft, at a given date, Keogh would read it and either send it on to Haldeman’s operation in the White House, which handled the mechanics of setting priorities in the near-infinite demands on the president’s time, or else call in the writer for another draft, make minor changes in the draft himself, or, if he felt the draft did not work at all, assign it to another writer. I do not know if this procedure was always followed. As I recall, Ray Price, whose talents the president depended on for heavy, major speeches, particularly those dealing with foreign policy, had access to the president, as did Bill Safire and Pat Buchanan. But the process worked most of the time, and in effect the speechwriters were placed a step away from direct contact with the president. •    •    • I believe it was Daniel Patrick Moynihan who once said there are only two things that should matter to a presidential staff aide: proximity to the boss and access to the boss. This rule of thumb is especially important for speechwriters. But in a large, formal, tightly controlled operation like the Nixon White House, not everyone who wanted to could have proximity. There is, after all, only one Oval Office, and that is in a building with limited office space. But more people can have access—the ability to work with the boss on a project-to-project basis, face-to-face, and avoid going through an intermediary. For all I know, to this day I may have been the only one of the original Nixon writers without access (none of us had proximity), but as it turned out in my case, the kind of writing I was doing did not require face-to-face meetings with the president, although it would have stroked my ego considerably if I had been granted access. But such meetings must be confined to only a few, because a president has limited time, and an unlimited number of people want to talk with him, or at least listen to him. It is hard to communicate to outsiders the central, overwhelming importance of a president to his staff. Every public event, even those not directly political in nature, and a lot of private events, are seen from one viewpoint: how will it

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help or harm the president? Everything that is done in the White House is done with his survival, success, and reelection in mind. After a month or so, one day I was sitting in my office at the EOB with the large door open, and suddenly the president was in the hallway, walking by hurriedly, followed by Bob Haldeman, some Secret Service men, and a few others I didn’t recognize. Something familiar must have caught his eye, because he came back and stood in my doorway. It was the first time I had seen him so close since we had come to Washington. “How’s the house poet?’ he said, grinning and stepping inside the room. I was by now standing, and I mumbled something inconsequential. He pointed at the White House security pass I wore. “Why do you have that thing around your neck?” he said seeming to be genuinely puzzled. Before I could answer, he was back in the hallway, on his way to God knows where. Perhaps Haldeman had never informed him about the security requirement for us to wear the passes. Yes, the organizational chart had changed from the less formal campaign days, but one thing remained the same: Nixon’s insatiable need for anecdotes for his speeches. At one of our weekly meetings Jim Keogh told us that Nixon wanted all of us to watch the Rev. Billy Graham on television. Graham, Nixon believed, was a master of the telling anecdote, the little story that made a point come alive. I am not certain if any of us actually tuned in to Reverend Graham (I didn’t), but I cannot recall any of the writers saying he had learned anything from watching the great evangelical preacher. During the time I worked for Nixon, his demand for anecdotes never ended and, I learned later, continued long beyond my stay. A few years ago I was looking through The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House. On Friday, February 26, 1971, Bob Haldeman made notes on some of Nixon’s remarks for the official hanging of a portrait of John Quincy Adams. Haldeman’s notes are worth quoting because they offer an insight into how Nixon approached public speaking: Nixon “did a superlative job of reciting some obscure John Quincy Adams history and reading a poem written by Adams while he was in Congress. All this came out of Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln, which [Nixon] had been reading and found a couple of pages on Adams, which gave him some material that none of the writers had come up with, and that none of the other speakers on the program offered, so he did very well on that.”

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Reading that passage, I can almost see the smile on Nixon’s face, a craftsman among craftsmen, showing his speechwrights how a real pro works: a serendipitous discovery of an obscure fact about Adams, found in a book about Lincoln, polished and burnished until it became the centerpiece of remarks about Adams—now that’s speechwriting! Nixon was right about anecdotes. Little stories can have big rhetorical payoffs. The right anecdote can provide more than a hundred statistics and can bring cold statistics down to a human level. But through the years I found that there can be a creeping (and sometimes creepy) sentimentalization about such stories, and the speaker winds up falsifying often complicated economic and social phenomena by trying to substitute warm tales for cold facts. •    •    • While we were churning out stuff for Nixon, suddenly out of nowhere (well, actually out of Maryland) came a new star of political rhetoric: Vice President Spiro Agnew. His diatribes against the media, Congress, and the Democrats created an uproar. For a brief period he was the single most reported-on political speaker of the late 1960s and early 1970s. An exception to the rule about the power of persona, Agnew wasn’t a good speaker, didn’t have an imposing platform persona, and rarely changed the droning tone of his voice. But speechwriters, including Buchanan and Safire doing a little moonlighting on the side, made him a star. On the day after Agnew’s first controversial speech criticizing the national media—the speech that made him a national figure on his own and not just as Nixon’s vice president—the speechwriters had a meeting. I remember Jim Keogh saying, “I can’t tell you what was said at the daily morning meeting at the White House, but let me put it this way: somebody very big across the street is not pleased with Agnew.” But by the end of the day, the overwhelming favorable response among grassroots Republicans to Agnew’s speech changed everything. That unnamed someone “across the street” now saw in Agnew what he had been looking for—somebody who could do what Nixon used to do and loved to do but could no longer do as president: be on the attack. A highly improbable rhetorical star, Spiro Agnew, was born. •    •    •

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In order to say more about Agnew, I now have to jump ahead just a bit. In 1972 I took a temporary leave of absence from Senator Jim Buckley to fill in for an Agnew speechwright who had fallen ill. My brief experience with the vice president was generally uneventful, and he proved to be pleasant to work for. He was open to different ways of saying the same old things, didn’t get all that angry about minor errors in drafts, and was kind enough to call and compliment me on some drafts I had written for him. But his good humor may well have been more of a sign that the Nixon-Agnew reelection campaign was on its way to a historic, crushing victory. After all, every politician is pleasant when he’s up by many points in the polls. He was always courteous, a bit stiff, and very official as we sat in his office in the Executive Office Building going over a draft. I am not quite certain what it has to do with his political importance, but I must say he was the neatest man I have ever met in my life, from the exact amount of cuff showing on his cuff-linked shirts, to his slicked-back hair, his crisp blue shirts, and his perfectly knotted striped ties. After the election he thanked me and I returned to Jim Buckley. There were two unexpected bonuses for my work with Agnew. He invited me to be part of his group going to see the takeoff of Apollo 17, an unforgettable thrill since it took off at night. The entire sky was suddenly bright as the rocket began to blast out unimaginable power as it rose, shaking the stands in which we sat a mile away, awed by it all. As we flew back to Washington, I thought, Scientists are capable of things like that, but that rocket never would have taken off unless John F. Kennedy had not inserted a few words about going to the moon in a speech to Congress. Rhetoric, after all, can be mightier than technology. My second Agnew benefit was being invited to a dinner in his honor after the great election victory in November. I was standing in the hotel ballroom with Katherine when she said, “Bill, look!” Frank Sinatra was standing there, by himself. I believed then and believe now he was a uniquely gifted artist, the greatest popular singer of the Great American Songbook ever; nobody else is even close. Katherine and I walked over to him. I did not extend my hand, because I recalled reading somewhere that he did not like to shake hands. I knew he had a reputation for being mercurial and that he had a hair-trigger temper, so I had a great opening line prepared: “Mr. Sinatra, I bet the three of us are the only people in the room who know what the corner of Clerk Street and Claremont Avenue in Jersey City looks like.” He smiled. As a young, unknown singer, just

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married to Nancy Barbato, he had once lived near Clerk Street. We talked for a few minutes about music, especially about a forgotten but great recording of “Sweet Lorraine” he had made decades before with a group of jazz all-stars. He was impressed that I remembered it. He was charming and polite and didn’t punch me, even once. Every political speaker can still learn something from listening to Sinatra about how to put over a line, how to phrase, how to make written material your own, and, most importantly, how to speak to people and not just at them. •    •    • Looking over the notes I took in 1969, what strikes me about my time as a White House speechwright is that my contributions, almost without exception, had little to do with the exciting times in which I was working. It was a year of unprecedented and unrelenting crises, around the world and in the United States: student protests against the war and the draft, moratorium marches on Washington, bitter partisan opposition in the Democratic-controlled Congress to administration policies in Vietnam, equally determined opposition to those policies from the national media—this is what confronted the administration. Aside from all this, there was Nixon’s failure to place Judge Clement Haynsworth, a highly qualified, decent and honest man, on the Supreme Court. It was a bitter struggle in which Democratic senator Birch Bayh of Indiana ultimately defeated Nixon in a long and often savage political battle, a defeat Nixon never forgot or forgave. To add to all of these major issues, there was the debate over deployment of an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system, which the president favored and Democrats did not. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. At Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, a young women suffered a horrible death by drowning in a submerged car that had been driven into the water and abandoned by Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. The Woodstock festival ushered in the Age of Aquarius. And, oh, yes, the cold war was raging. All in one year. All the turmoil of that year had great impact on my psyche, but hardly any on my work. A president is asked to make so many speeches, write so many articles, compose so many letters of congratulations and condolence, comment on so many events, and analyze so many quickly changing developments at home and abroad that it is as if he lives in two different worlds at once: the world of events, where his decisions are important, and the world of responding to

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requests or carrying out nonessential, yet necessary, presidential duties. While the country and the world were going through radical changes, I found myself doing the kind of writing that did not make headlines or history books but had to get done, and I tried my best on each one. The generic name for this kind of thing is, or was, “Rose Garden rubbish,” for the remarks a president makes in the White House Rose Garden, meeting and greeting various groups, announcing the signing of bills, doing the things and saying the words that day-to-day political office demands. None of this is earth-shaking, but a president has to do it, and someone has to write the stuff. I composed a Saint Patrick’s Day proclamation, the inscription on the certificate Nixon gave to Duke Ellington in honoring the great jazzman with the Medal of Freedom, and many drafts of letters to citizens on various topics. I wrote a piece for Mrs. Nixon that appeared in the Ladies Home Journal. I did this and that, words not only forgotten by history, but no doubt forgotten by Nixon immediately after he uttered them. In June, Bob Haldeman sent a memo to Jim Keogh: “The President feels that Gavin could be used productively to a greater degree in handling high-level correspondence. . . . he felt that Gavin has some unique ability in this area and should be utilized. . . . One of the things he is particularly interested in using Gavin for is the letters that we originate to people who perform unusual feats of heroism, etc. These have great news value if they are very well done and thought through properly, and he thinks Bill would be ideal for this kind of assignment.” So I also started writing special letters for the president’s signature, but I cannot remember the specifics of any of them or whether they were ever sent. I kept on churning out the stuff, actually enjoying myself, trying to make something good out of topics that were not inherently inspirational. Take, for example, presidential travel overseas. A president is expected to make brief remarks when he arrives in a country, when he leaves, and during the various diplomatic meetings he attends, and also to make gracious, just-right remarks and toasts and replies to toasts at state dinners. These are just the formal, planned activities; if important news breaks, he must comment, and if there is time, a writer must provide a draft for such occasions. If the president’s journey involves visiting more than one country, all of these things must be repeated, and most of the drafts for these remarks should already have been written before the journey begins.

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•    •    • Why does a president need all of these speech drafts? Why doesn’t he just “speak from the heart,” improvise, at the airport or at the meetings or the state dinner? Well, sometimes he does, but in an age of instant communication (even back then), he cannot afford to make one slip of the tongue, say one word that appears or actually does deviate from the message he intends to convey. No matter how good a president may be at extemporaneous remarks (certainly President Bill Clinton was a master of this), he must have some kind of solid, prepared and vetted (by policy experts) rhetorical base on which to rely, because every word he says, every look on his face, and almost every gesture he makes is under intense scrutiny. His message may be couched in the bland, noncontroversial language of diplomatic niceties, but somewhere, buried beneath the smooth, silken words of State Department bureaucrats and national security gurus, there has to be a point he wants to make, even if inferentially, and it is the task of his speechwriters to make certain the point is not lost amid the circumlocutions, euphemisms, and jargon that so often make up diplomatic communications. •    •    • Among the first official words I wrote at the White House, then, were some drafts for Nixon’s visit to France in February 1969. I wrote a toast for Nixon to give at a dinner with President Charles de Gaulle, and in one of the other remarks (for Nixon’s arrival in France, I believe) I included a quotation: “Every man has two countries, his own and France.” I attributed the words to Thomas Jefferson. Nixon used the quote, but the New York Times called the press office to check the source. The press office called Ceil Bellinger, our formidably competent fact-checker, a veteran of Time magazine’s fact-checking department, asking for the source. Looking into it, Ceil discovered there was some question as to exactly who said it. It may not have been Jefferson as we had originally thought. Mortified, I thought my job was at stake. I had goofed on the international level. The president used a quotation I gave him, and the quote was wrongly attributed. I was finished. But nobody noticed. The president successfully made his European tour, came home, and no one said a word. At the time, I didn’t know if I was more upset about the fact of my error or the fact that it didn’t make

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one bit of difference to anybody. (Scholars or trivia experts are directed to the useful collection of quotations Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service. This book, published by the Library of Congress, traces the quote to a 1909 play, La Fille de Roland, by Henri de Bornier. The French historian Jules Michelet attributes an almost similar phrase to an unnamed American “philosopher” (perhaps Thomas Paine?) and finally to Jefferson. In his autobiography, Jefferson wrote that his second choice of a country to live in was France.) •    •    • White House staff duty had its benefits. Katherine and I were invited to the post-dinner reception and entertainment (duo pianists Arthur Whittemore and Jack Lowe) given in honor of the visiting president of Colombia. And in October I attended a meeting in the marvelously ornate Indian Treaty Room in the EOB to hear a Republican governor talk about how to get rid of holdovers in a new administration. The notes I took immediately after his talk included the following: “He looks surprisingly old: his face is wrinkled, the tops of his hands are like those of an old man. It was shocking to say the least. He looked tired and his speech was not the customary rouser he is known for. He was folksy, direct, and mildly entertaining.” An old man. Mildly entertaining. Tired. His appearance shocking. The governor was Ronald Reagan. So much for my political judgments based on superficialities. So much for my prescience. At one point I had an idea about a presidential artistic achievement award, recognizing artistically gifted high school students. I was given the go-ahead to pursue the project. For various reasons, chief among which was my inability to understand the complexities of the bureaucratic process in the Executive Branch, the program never got past the planning stage. But I had the chance to meet with the distinguished, prizewinning American composer and educator Howard Hanson to discuss the plan. Dr. Hanson was a wonderfully open, kind, and pleasant man, eager to help in any way he could. One day he told me about a meeting he had attended with other artists of his stature to discuss plans for the Kennedy Center, which was then under construction. I was interested to discover what a roomful of brilliant, talented men and women talked about. “Did you discuss the meaning of art, its place in our society?” I asked.

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Dr. Hanson smiled and replied, “No. We spent most of our time discussing the question of parking for the Kennedy Center.” •    •    • In mid-November, Nixon called all of the writers to his “hideaway” office in the EOB to discuss January’s State of the Union Address. He looked great—smiling, upbeat, in charge, wearing a blue suit and a blue tie with small dark stripes. The writers followed him through an entrance room lined with framed cartoons of his political career, into his inner sanctum, where he would go occasionally when he needed to be alone or write something on his yellow legal pads. The office had a warm, comfortable look to it: the typically high-ceilinged EOB room, the red drapes on the tall windows, a large old desk, and a leather chair for him—quite cozy. When we were all seated, after some pleasantries Nixon began to talk about what he wanted in the State of the Union message, of which Ray Price would be the chief writer: I don’t want go fifty-five or sixty minutes . . . most of [the State of the Union speeches] do, you know. I’d say about forty-five minutes. Five thousand words. Why do we have to have all that dull stuff about Indians and agriculture and cesspools? I want an idea speech rather than a programmatic one. Let’s get the dull subjects out of the way in one paragraph toward the beginning. Let’s direct this one to the television audience. Keep it short on foreign policy and foreign aid; it’s a losing battle. A brief but strong reference to Vietnam. New directions. The Nixon doctrine.

Bob Haldeman entered the room silently and sat on a couch, his yellow pad and his pen at the ready. “Apart from the State of the Union,” Nixon continued, “I want to do the New Cities program separately. I need a good lead for the State of the Union, though. Pat Congress on the back.” At this point Nixon placed his left hand over his eyes, rubbed his forehead, and then pinched the flesh between his eyes. Then he said, “I want to do a speech about the decade of the seventies, before the decade begins, at the end of December. I want a thirty-minute talk, not a gabfest.”

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Jim Keogh asked if Nixon had any forum in mind for this speech. Nixon smiled. “You don’t want to speak to some half-assed group. Public forums are an utter disaster. You couldn’t pay me go to a publishers’ meeting. Hell, let Agnew go.” This evoked laughter, even from Haldeman, who generally did not laugh much. Nixon returned to his “seventies speech” idea. “I don’t like the connotation of a five-year plan. Let’s talk about ten years. If you spend a billion dollars in one year, pollution won’t be stopped. But if we talk about ten years . . . we have to raise the sights of the nation.” He leaned back in his chair, placed his feet on the desk, and returned to the subject of State of the Union speech. “Good God,” he said, frowning, “agriculture in a State of the Union isn’t worth a damn. And you lose your audience if you talk about inflation. A State of the Union has to have hope in it.” Then, without a transition, he jumped to world affairs. “It’s the nations with guts that are going to make it. Japan is going to make it. France and the British have had it.” With that prediction, the meeting was over. Ray Price ended up writing the lion’s share of the State of the Union speech. •    •    • The new year brought bad news. Nixon’s hasty, angry decision to nominate Judge Harold Carswell to the Supreme Court after the defeat of Clement Haynsworth proved to be a total disaster, and Nixon lost again. Given Carswell’s subsequent personal problems, it was all for the best that he was turned down, but it did not look that way at the time. On April 30, 1970, the invasion (“incursion” was the official word of choice) of Cambodia was carried out. On May 4 the Kent State tragedy occurred. All the while, I was still doing Rose Garden rubbish. By June 1970 I decided to leave the White House. I was restless. I was bored. I found myself working on too many one-liners and not enough—in fact, not any—speeches. I was beginning to do 1970 versions of assignments I had done in 1969. I knew that with the fearsome threesome of Safire, Price, and Buchanan in front of me, there was simply no chance to get a shot at anything good. And Lee Huebner was more than capable of picking up my load. I was beginning to feel sorry for myself. Boo-hoo.

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In one way I was, of course, a fool in wanting to quit. I had one of the most coveted jobs in Washington, in the nation, or, for that matter, the world. And here I was complaining (to myself) because I wasn’t getting assignments that in all probability I could not have handled at that time. All of sudden the office in the EOB, the breakfasts and noonday meals at the White House Mess, the prized parking space, the pride in being introduced to strangers as one of the president’s writers were no longer enough. Looking back, I am stunned at the egocentricity of my attitude, but there was another angle to my desire to leave, one that makes some sense. I had no way of knowing then that I’d have a career in speechwriting. I thought that because I had been a teacher, and a good one, my future would be in education and that I could better carve out a space for myself in that field, and get a new start, by leaving the White House. So in theory, at least, my decision wasn’t as dumb or egocentric as it looked at first glance. I spoke to Jim Keogh, who asked the White House personnel office to find out if there were any interesting spots still open in the administration for someone with my background in education. Well, yes, in fact, there was just one good spot still not filled, an assistant for public affairs slot, in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), now headed by Elliot Richardson, who had replaced Bob Finch. I said I’d take it. But Pat Buchanan, when he heard about my plans, said, “Are you sure you want to do this? Work at HEW? The whole place is full of liberals. That’s no place for you.” “Maybe it is,” I replied. “I’m a teacher, and maybe I can do some good over there.” Pat said no more, but in fact he was the only one on the writing staff—or in the White House—to try to dissuade me. I paid my last bill from the barber ($9.00), and the final statement from the White House Mess showed I was owed $8.45 because my refundable deposit was more than my balance due. On my last day, I parked my car for the final time on West Executive Avenue. The president was on the West Coast, but there was a going-away party for me in Jim Keogh’s office. During the festivities, such as they were, Jim handed me a telephone and told me the president was on the line. Nixon was not, of course, on the line. Presidents do not hold, at least not for me. But I finally heard that familiar, unmistakable voice. “Bill? Well, you’re leaving us, I hear,” he said. “Now, I don’t want you to let those liberals at HEW change you. You won’t let them do that, will you?”

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“No, sir.” “Good. I just want you to know we’re thankful for all you’ve done. You write with heart.” “Thank you, Mr. President.” There were a few more words and it was all over. A week later I received a big, White House–framed photograph of a smiling Nixon with the written inscription: “To Bill Gavin, a man who has heart, with appreciation and best wishes, Richard Nixon.”

Chapter Six

A Brief Bureaucratic Interlude

For as long as I can remember, my mind has worked best when I am dealing with a situation that can be understood in narrative form. Tell me a story and I’ll know what you want and where you’re going. In the decades since I left the White House, I have often thought of what story form would best suit my brief stay at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Melodrama? Bill Gavin, an average guy, as in Hitchcock movies, is suddenly caught in a trap, desperate to get out, but how can he manage it? Tragedy? Gavin, a poet, sensitive as only a man with heart can be, has his delicate spirit crushed by events beyond his control and ends in failure because of a fatal flaw—stupidity—in his character. No, I think not. I think farce would best tell my story, the kind of thing that a skilled farceur—say, Jack Lemmon at the height of his fame, or maybe even Cary Grant—might pull off. A quick, funny series of misunderstandings, missed cues, and mistaken identities, culminating in confusion confounded. Well, to be honest, it would have to be Lemmon—I am not the Cary Grant type. On July 5, 1970, I began my new job at HEW. No, that is wrong. I did not begin a job—in reality, I quickly discovered, I had no job. All I had was a title. Within a few days, in which hardly anyone spoke to me, I suspected that I had perhaps, just perhaps, made the wrong move. Within a week I was certain. I had definitely made a colossal blunder. And there seemed to be nothing I could do about it. •  73

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My sojourn at HEW was, in short, a fiasco. Secretary Elliot Richardson and his team believed I had been forced upon him by the White House. It turned out—I learned all of this later from one of his aides—that when Richardson discovered the White House had filled the assistant for public affairs slot without first clearing it with him, he was not pleased, and, in my view, rightfully so. I thought such clearances were automatic, the usual thing to do. But apparently not in this case. My fate was sealed from the moment I stepped into the HEW building. I learned later that at least one of Richardson’s aides thought I was a White House spy sent to HEW to report on Richardson’s loyalty to the president, mistakenly attributing to me a cunning I do not possess. Bill Gavin, whose only connection with martinis, shaken or stirred, led to a massive hangover, cast as James Bond? I don’t think so. But I must say that such a suspicion was not necessarily irrational on the part of Richardson or his aides. In every administration there is tension between the White House and certain departments whose missions do not promote the president’s views on some policy matters. Liberal presidents may have problems with the Department of Defense. Conservatives have trouble with HEW, or, as it is now called, Health and Human Services (HHS). That is just the nature of politics. Very often a cabinet official is more ideologically to the left or the right of a given president and finds himself more than comfortable with the views of his department’s permanent bureaucracy and its clients—special interests and lobbyists. And just as often, a new secretary finds himself “captured” by the permanent staff and its ideological supporters and becomes more Catholic than the pope in carrying out an ideological agenda that may be the opposite of what the president wants. After his 1972 electoral triumph Nixon did indeed seek to rein in those departments he mistrusted by sending White House aides to, in effect, ideologically direct the department while the secretary served as a figurehead. For the record, I see nothing wrong with this policy. If the secretary is not carrying out the president’s program, has become a captive to special interests, or is dragging his feet, the president can of course fire him and hire someone else. In fact, that is exactly what the president should do. But in politics the case is not as simple as it looks. It may be desirable to avoid the flap involved in firing a secretary by placing ideologically simpatico appointees at key spots in the department. So the idea that I had been sent to HEW as the White House snitch was not a crazy

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thought as such, since Elliot Richardson was a Massachusetts Republican—that is, ideologically liberal—and Richard Nixon was . . . well, he was Richard Nixon, and I was a Jersey City street corner conservative. In reality, of course, I had no ability or desire to direct HEW by proxy, and anyone who knew me would fall down laughing if told I had been sent to HEW to clean out the joint. But I knew nothing about all these suspicions when I arrived at the HEW building, which looked as if it could have served as the model for George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, a big, drab, utilitarian government building, plain and ugly, just down from Capitol Hill, near the National Mall, but a universe away from the White House. I met Richardson’s secretary, a nice lady. I then met two of his aides. But that was that. So I sat there in my new office. No high ceilings. No brass doorknobs. A square and plain room, like scores of other such offices in the building. Days passed. Still no meeting with Richardson to see what he’d like me to do and for me to let him know what I’d like to do. After a week or so of this I wondered if I had, er, perhaps acted a bit hastily in leaving the Nixon White House. Even little things tipped me off. The HEW cafeteria was good for its kind, but it lacked a certain, how you say, je ne sais quoi found only in the White House Mess. One day, bored, I went to the basement of the building—I had a lot of free time on my hands—to hear Rennie Davis, of the antiwar Chicago Seven, speak to a group of mostly young HEW employees. The room was crowded, hot, and airless. At that time a star of the antiwar movement, Davis proved, in manner at least, to be far from the raging radical that typified most of the antiwar leaders. He was a soft-spoken, somewhat listless young man, looked almost frail, and he droned on and on and on. Humorless, vague, tunnel-visioned, he sat there and talked in a monotone about the war in Vietnam (very bad), Nixon (far worse), and some kind of monstrous conspiracy involving, among others as I recall, Clark Clifford, a Washington insider (and Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of defense). Davis received enthusiastic applause. His young HEW audience was enchanted, thrilled. Walking upstairs to my bleak office, I had two thoughts: (1) Hmmmm . . . could it be I am in a hostile environment? Could it be that Pat Buchanan had been correct in his assessment that I would not fit in at HEW? Hmmmm? Could be. And (2) Rennie Davis, by no means a great speaker or, so far as I could tell, a charismatic personality, had mesmerized his audience not by what he said but by, (a), the way

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he said it, soft-spoken but utterly assured of his message and, (b), who he was, a media-made radical hero. Again, as in the case of Dr. Martin Luther King’s brief remarks made in Abington, effective rhetoric is about who you are as much as it is about what you say. When I asked Richardson’s secretary why I had not met with him, she said he did not like to work on his speeches until the last minute. That in itself was a bad sign. Anyone who cares about rhetoric knows you have to find time to edit and rewrite. Maybe rhetoric wasn’t that important to him. Richardson was not known as captivating orator. A year or so after I first met him, Time magazine (Aug. 9, 1971) would write that his “speeches are known for a certain meticulous dullness.” Richardson, unfazed by his reputation as a walking, talking soporific on the platform said, “As you descend in eloquence, you get closer to the money.” That is not a bad one-liner for a guy not known as a wordsmith (although I’ve read he had once drafted remarks for Vice President Richard Nixon). Seeking something to do, I set up a series of meetings with HEW officials, trying to get across an idea of mine: government should pay as much attention to blue-collar, working youth who don’t go to college as it does to antiwar college demonstrators. The officials listened politely. Nothing, of course, happened. I finally met Richardson to discuss a speech draft. Now, please recall I had left the White House to get away from speechwriting. I had already been a speechwright in the biggest league of all. I came to HEW in the hope that I could branch out, get involved in education policy, since I had been a teacher, and a master teacher at that, just ask the Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Secretary. But the first thing that came up, as far as my working for Richardson was concerned, was a speech he was going to give very soon. So my first meeting with him was about a speech I didn’t want to write, a speech he didn’t want or need me to write for him. I wanted our first meeting to be about my new job, but it was really about my old job at a new place. Our meeting was marked by a kind of calm, polite—he was always courteous—but puzzled curiosity on his part and my own feeling that the man in front of me wasn’t quite certain who I was, why I was there, or why, as I told him, I had been sending him memos about education policy, memos he never acknowledged because he probably had never seen them. Now, at this point some context might be helpful. As we met, Richardson had been secretary for only a short while and was feeling his way. The last thing

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he needed was a pointless meeting with an unwanted outsider now on his staff, without his agreement, who desired to instruct him on educational policy. God knows there were enough education experts at HEW. So he sat there in a high-backed blue leather chair with an HEW seal on the headrest, trying to be polite, but obviously uncomfortable. He was wearing a bow tie, and his famous uncanny resemblance to Clark Kent was striking. I half expected him to excuse himself to find a phone booth in which to change clothes. When he began to discuss the forthcoming speech (I forget the topic), I took notes. But he talked in monosyllables, meandered, and often didn’t look directly at me. After a while he asked me if I understood what he wanted in the speech. I said no. In fact, I had no idea what he was talking about. His thoughts were given in cryptic utterances and I couldn’t get the drift. Finally he showed me a comment that one of his aides had written on a draft I had already sent in. The aide had pointed out—quite correctly, alas—that I had failed to make the vital distinction between the words “equal” and “equitable.” Damn. I know the distinction, and in fact insisted on it when I was a teacher, but I had been sloppy, and this was Richardson’s first impression of me. A rookie mistake. A bonehead play. Me, a former White House speechwright. With heart. The meeting soon ended, mercifully. I went back to my office and rewrote the draft, still not knowing what he wanted to say. I sent the revised draft in to him and never heard from him. In the event when he made the speech, it was not my draft. So by this time even I was beginning to see which way this job was going. I went to see Richardson’s chief aide, who explained to me the facts of life. Richardson had never officially cleared my appointment. And, the aide added, not unkindly, it would have been better if I had personally checked out the situation before making the move. I had not done due diligence. But I thought the White House had clinched the deal. I had not used my head, only my heart, which kept on telling me I was taking the first step to a brilliant teaching career. For a master teacher, it seemed, I still had a lot to learn. Of course, the aide said, I could always stay at HEW if that’s what I wanted, now that I was there. And do what? Well . . . So all of my White House credentials, all of my heart, all of my talent, all of my dreams of bringing street corner conservative wisdom and frontline, inthe-classroom experience to HEW did not mean a damned thing. I had made a

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big mistake—no, multiple mistakes—which led to the following situation: I did not have access. I did not have proximity. I was not ideologically attuned to the man for whom I would be working, or to the ideological slant of HEW. I had no “public affairs” background, whatever that may have been, and no special expertise except writing, which I did not want to do for Richardson and he did not want from me. My dilemma brings up a question I have been asked over the years: should a speechwright work for someone whose ideas or policies the writer does not agree with? There are gradations of seriousness in a question like this. If you are given an assignment that truly offends your conscience on some matter of deep ethical beliefs, just say no. That’s easy. But once you get past the question of conscience, there is an all but infinite number of gray areas in which your judgment, not your conscience, is involved. Here, the best practice is to go along with your boss’s judgment call. But if these close calls start to accumulate, maybe you are working for the wrong person. In my own case, with Elliot Richardson, I had two excuses for my folly of thinking I could be a speechwright for someone whose ideology was not simpatico with mine. First, I thought my HEW job would involve shaping policy, not doing much speechwriting. Second, even if I wrote speeches now and then, they would be for a cabinet member in the Nixon administration. How much could Richardson deviate from Nixon’s wishes? I can see now I was wrong. It never could have worked out, and no amount of rationalizing on my part could have made it work. For the rest of my career I was a conservatively oriented writer—an ideologue, if you wish—not just a writer who happened to work for some conservatives of various kinds. While I did not always agree with specific decisions of my bosses, I shared a generally conservative (somewhat broadly defined) viewpoint. So I cannot say just how other writers might handle the issue of writing for someone whose political or ideological views are antithetical or even abhorrent to those of the writer. I can understand how a writer (let’s say a liberal) who is freelancing can write a speech for a hard-lining conservative if the subject isn’t overtly ideological. But in matters of conscience, it is inconceivable to me that any writer can consistently write for a politician whose views are antithetical to his. But such deep thoughts were not on my mind after I found out I had walked into a dead end at HEW. How could I get away from this? At lunchtime every

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day I would walk across the mall to the National Gallery of Art and sit in the inner court, where the gallery orchestra held Sunday evening performances. I’d sit there thinking, thinking. Then I’d walk around, see the pictures—that, at least made me feel better—and think some more. I decided I had to get out of HEW. But where? Who would have me? Not the White House, certainly. Maybe downtown. But doing what? I would be a terrible lobbyist. Desperate, I made a few phone calls to old campaign friends. They were all very kind, but there was nothing I was quite fit to do downtown. And then I remembered a good guy I had met on the campaign, Frank Shakespeare. Frank, once a wunderkind top-executive star at CBS, was now director of the United States Information Agency (USIA). I called his office and got an immediate callback. I told Frank my story. Frank, ever pleasant, ever upbeat, a deeply devout man and great principled conservative, said, “Funny you should call. I have two openings, and you’d be perfect for either one of them. When can you come over here?” USIA’s headquarters was at 1776 Pennsylvania Avenue, a block from the White House. “I’m on my way, Frank.” And that is how I left HEW to become assistant director for public affairs at the United States Information Agency. It turned out to be a great job, traveling around the world, doing interesting work, being one of Frank’s confidants. God protects, it would seem, sleepwalkers, children, and puffed-up, self-deluding speechwrights. I resigned from HEW and received a note, dated September 11, 1970, from Richardson: Dear Bill: I accept your resignation as my Assistant for Public Affairs with regret. I am pleased, however, that you will be remaining in government service and that your new role in USIA is one affording ample scope for the use of your talent. With very best wishes for your success.

I wondered who wrote the draft. For the record, Secretary Richardson was always personally courteous to me, and it was not his fault that the fiasco occurred. I didn’t write speeches at USIA. Frank Shakespeare was more comfortable speaking off the cuff or with a few notes, and he was very good at it. So, since

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my time at the agency was not spent practicing my craft, I will skip over the nearly two years I spent there except to say I traveled around the world, from Rome to Vietnam, from Munich to Trinidad, from Uruguay to Belgium, visiting USIA branches in all of those countries and reporting back to Frank. But since the job of USIA was “telling America’s story to the world” (what some people called propaganda), I did learn a few things that later helped me to be a better speechwriter. And one of the most important things I learned was not by writing, but by listening—to jazz. Since the late 1950s, a man named Willis Conover had been the host of programs sent around the world by the Voice of America (VOA, or, as it was called by insiders, “The Voice”), which was then the broadcasting arm of USIA. Willis was called the second best-known American around the world, just after the president, because his programs were heard by millions. To give an example of the effect Willis had on audiences behind what was then called the Iron Curtain, let me jump ahead a few years. In 1990 I accompanied my boss, House Minority Leader Bob Michel, on a congressional delegation visit to Russia. At a reception in St. Petersburg, I was standing amid the crowd and struck up a conversation with a Russian physicist, dignified and rather quiet, who spoke good, if heavily accented, English. We chatted the way people do at events like this, about current affairs and, in this case, about the promise (at the time bleak) and the problems (many) of the new Russia. For some reason or other I said, “ I have a friend whose name you might know, Willis Conover, and—” I didn’t get a chance to complete my sentence because the physicist, all dignity forgotten, let out a joyous shriek. “Veel-us? You know Veel-us?” He said something in Russian to a couple of men who were standing close to us. Their faces brightened. The next few minutes were filled with praise of Willis, with the physicist translating for his friends. And finally the physicist said something I have never forgotten. “Please, tell Veelus this: he was everything to us. Everything!” And how did Willis gain such a devoted audience over the decades? By playing recordings and talking about American music. Jazz has long since lost its special place in American music, but when Willis began broadcasting, in the mid-1950s, it meant something wonderful to many people living in the USSR and Soviet-dominated Europe. Classic jazz, from New Orleans–style to swing and bebop, combines freedom (improvisation) and order (certain chord

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progressions and melodies) that, aside from the greatness of the music, had symbolic meaning to those who suffered from too much order and no room for improvisational freedom. VOA programs, electronically jammed in the Soviet Union, were forbidden by law to be broadcast in the United States, although shortwave radios could pick them up. This provision against USIA material being disseminated in the United States came about because Congress did not want any administration to be propagandizing the American people with tax dollars—a good idea, but one that stopped the taxpayers from finding out where their money was going when it came to USIA. I should add here that the word “propaganda,” which has had bad connotations ever since Joseph Goebbels’s “Big Lie” techniques, is not necessarily a bad thing. All political parties, all institutions, and all nation-states engage in propaganda in one form or another. But, anyhow, when I joined USIA I got the chance to know Willis and hear his radio programs, and this is where I learned a lesson about rhetoric. On his programs, Willis never uttered one word about geopolitics or foreign policy or anti-Communism or about how great America is and how bad Communism is. All he did was talk about music, mostly jazz, and play recordings. That’s it. No foreign policy message. No talk about the consumer paradise of the United States versus the drab existence of people subjected to Communist dictatorships. In all the years I knew him—and I am proud to say he was my friend until his untimely death from cancer in 1996—I never heard him talk about politics. Never. Not in private, not in public. Willis was in love with America and American music, and these were the things he cared about the most. So, far from being what most people would call a “propagandist,” Willis was an expert on an American art form, and in his programs he introduced jazz to people all around the world. No one who has ever heard his deep, rich, intimate voice as he talked about the music he loved can ever forget it. The lesson he taught me—or should I say reinforced, because I had earlier discovered it with Dr. King—was this: in rhetoric or in geopolitics, you can make your point indirectly. You don’t have to hammer away at some idea in order to get it across to people. You don’t have to yell. In fact, you don’t even have to talk at length about the policy or the program you wish to discuss. The manner in which you speak, the sound of your voice, and the way you are, are often more important than what you talk about and often convey more than a recitation of

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facts. The way you make your argument can be just as important as the point you are trying to get across. Willis knew that his meticulous attention to presenting the best of American music, his careful preparation of each program, the pains he took in making sure each piece of music somehow complemented all the rest on a particular program was the best he could do to help further VOA’s mission of telling America’s story to the world. He didn’t have to figuratively wave the American flag or talk about our standard of living, and, in fact, if he did, his propaganda value would have diminished. All he did was let Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Mary Lou Williams, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, and—Willis’s favorite—Duke Ellington, and so many others tell one important part of the American story through their artistry, without commentary from him unless it was about the music. Listening to Willis, I also learned it helps if, when you talk, you convey to your audiences that you are interested not only in your message but also in how you can help your audience understand it. Willis was an expert in his field, but he didn’t think like an expert or speak in the jargon of an expert. He knew personally many, perhaps most, of the great musical artists whose records he played, and he talked about them, showing how they fit into the grand scheme of jazz, and often he simply interviewed a musician (pianist Bill Evans is one great example) and talked about nothing but music at length. So in propaganda, in teaching, and in rhetoric, know what you are talking about. Care what you are talking about. Give the audience not just a speech, but a person—you. Someone once said, the best propaganda is success. But the second best propaganda is to be so confident in your message that you don’t need to shout it—or, at times, even mention it. Every speechwright, every politician, and every teacher should learn this. The other lesson valuable for speechwriters that I learned at USIA is that consistency in truth is vital. The international news services of VOA were operated under strict guidelines: tell the truth the same way any reputable American journalistic enterprise would tell the truth. United States government policy (called “the freight” by VOA professionals) was presented on VOA, but not as news—it was clearly labeled as an official policy statement. It was the job of VOA’s news division to attract listeners by adherence to good journalistic practices. Why did I leave USIA? Well, like many of my conservative friends in 1972, I was concerned that President Nixon’s trip to China to make nice with Mao,

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the greatest mass murderer who ever lived, would sell out Taiwan. I was very upset. I was also, of course, dead wrong. Nixon’s China opening turned out to be one of the great diplomatic, national security, and geostrategic acts of the twentieth century. And Taiwan survived and prospered. Sorry, Mr. President. I got that one wrong. But it turned out all right for me. Just at this time when I was thinking about China, I got some feelers from people in the office of Senator James L. Buckley. He was looking for a speechwriter. Would I be interested? I made sure I had access and proximity (in a Senate suite, proximity is all but guaranteed), talked with Jim Buckley, and went to work for him. Or, as I should correctly say, with him. For the first time, I would be writing for someone in the conservative movement, the brother of the man whose personality and message made me realize I was conservative without knowing it, like the man in the Moliere play who found out, to his surprised delight, he had been speaking prose all his life.

Chapter Seven

Jim Buckley and Ronald Reagan

The most important aspect about my work for Jim Buckley from 1972 to 1976 is that it took place not just in a senatorial office but also in what he and his staff saw as a besieged outpost of the conservative movement. In the pre-Reagan age, conservatism was looked down upon by the liberal establishment (yes, it does exist, and it was then even more powerful and more contemptuous toward conservatism than it is today in politics, academia, and media). Conservatives were seen as either malicious, crazy, or just incurably stupid or all three—depending on one’s point of view. I think it might be useful at this point to remind readers, many of whom may not recall what it was like, what the ideological situation was back then. Liberalism was looked upon by its adherents as thoroughly nonideological, the position God would take on political, economic, and social questions if He were in possession of all the facts. It was, to use W. H. Auden’s phrase about Freud, a “climate of opinion,” presented as the political default position that all decent, intelligent, informed, humane, compassionate, tolerant human beings take without thinking, as a reflex action. Since that was the case, how could conservatism be taken seriously by serious people? One might condescend to conservatives, ignore them, or tolerate their eccentricities up to a point, but beyond that there was no reason to pay attention to their bogus claims but every reason to fear them. Conservatism, you see, was not respectable. It could, in fact,

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be dangerous. Incipient fascism and that sort of thing, you know. Thunder on the right. Nazis under the bed. Can’t be too careful. Not our kind at all. I have a little story to illustrate the point, told to me by Frank Shakespeare. Frank had once been a rising star at CBS and was the only political conservative among the executives there. At that time, the early 1960s, CBS produced a series of prime-time “conversations” with the then-dean of American political columnists, liberal guru Walter Lippmann, who was interviewed by Howard K. Smith and, as I recall, Eric Sevareid, two of the big names in the CBS news division at the time. The shows were critically applauded and gained even more prestige for CBS, which was already known as “The Tiffany Network” for its classy programming. One day, in conversation with one of the top executives at CBS News, Frank suggested that the network do an interview along the lines of the Lippmann shows, with a prominent conservative spokesman. The executive agreed, in principle. But, he asked, what conservative could possibly do the job of holding an audience for an hour? “What about William F. Buckley?” said Frank. The executive said, “Well, er, no, I don’t think that would work out.” “But why?” Frank asked. The executive replied as if speaking to a not-too-bright eight-year-old: “Frank, Frank, don’t you understand? William F. Buckley is not a respectable person.” Jim Buckley’s staff may not have been respectable in the eyes of the media, but we were an unabashedly ideological outpost and proud of it, and this fact influenced every word that came out of the office. Every speech Jim made, every constituent letter he sent, his remarks on every bill before every committee he served on, his votes on every piece of legislation, were all rooted in his conservative views. Congressional offices quickly take on aspects, good or bad, of the boss’s style, and Jim Buckley—even-tempered; a bit shy; charming; with a quick, ready sense of humor; smart; and the soul of civility—was and is the least rigid, least ideologized (to use his brother Bill’s term) person I have ever known. He did not—again quoting Bill—force “every passing phenomenon into his ideological mold.” He instead recognized, as a true conservative should, that there are aspects of reality—religious truths, fundamental human relations such as family, and settled principles of self-government under law—that cannot and must not be subjected to the Procrustean bed of ideology of any kind. He believed, with the founding fathers—and with the accumulated wisdom of

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the ages—that there are indeed inalienable truths about the human condition that are “self-evident” (a philosophical view the liberal left rejects absolutely). His conservatism did not seek to fit reality into his philosophy, but to use his philosophy, rooted in human experience, to identify, clarify, and then, if possible, prescribe workable solutions for the infinitely complex problems that afflict human beings. These solutions should only rarely involve government action, not because government is in itself evil or because government should never get involved in social or economic matters, but because invoking government’s help brings into play the coercive power of the state, something of which lovers of freedom should be very aware. Jim’s example taught us that the very best way to go about convincing people that conservatism should be taken seriously was always to make sound arguments, solidly based on conservative principles and backed up by the best available research. His job, as he saw it, was not to thrill the crowd, but to present a case to each individual in the crowd; not to leave the audience thinking, “Wow, what a good speaker Buckley is!” but “Wow, what a good argument Buckley made.” When he spoke on the floor of the Senate, he had to avoid making conservatism seem to be a mystery, a cult, or a rigid ideology based on dogmatic abstractions. His conservatism was based not on the abstract theories so often found in ideologies, but on the principles that human beings have learned over millennia about the difficulty of protecting and preserving what is good and the comparative ease with which we can lose what is good through laziness, fear, ignorance, pride, prejudice, or ephemeral social and intellectual fads. Such a view is suspicious of utopian endeavors and promises and of sudden, popular enthusiasms and the madness of crowds. It is also leery about demands for drastic changes rooted in ideological fanaticism, right or left. His view of the Constitution’s separation of powers and the Bill of Rights, as expounded in his book If Men Were Angels is based on a conservative view of what it means to build a good nation: The Founders of this nation understood that these safeguards constitute only part of the equation of freedom; that it requires more than a diffusion of power . . . more than the protection of the individual from the aggressive and arbitrary acts of the state. They understood that freedom also depends to a critical degree on the citizen’s capacity for self-discipline and self-reliance,

88  •  cha p t e r s e ve n on the extent of his reverence for the law, and on his continued insistence on personal freedom as his first political goal.

This isn’t conservative boilerplate or the kind of stuff you tell the crowd at the annual Conservative Party dinner in Queens. In Jim’s view the kind of governmental structure our Constitution provides is essential to peace, prosperity, and progress. This differentiates him from those who dwell on the farther shores of principled antigovernment libertarianism. But he also believes that unless citizens are committed to virtue and freedom, no constitutional safeguards can save us from peril, thus rejecting the dogma of the left that the state is the first and the ultimate resort in most political difficulties. Every member of the Buckley staff worked as hard as possible so that Jim could become not only a good senator, taking care of his constituents’ needs, but also the most effective and influential conservative spokesperson in Washington. And for six years that is exactly what he was, although, as he would be the first to admit, his influence did not go far in a Senate dominated by liberals. By the time I came to work for him in 1972, my conservative views were set, and they coincided with his on almost every point. •    •    • I quickly found out that writing speeches and remarks for a senator was different from writing for a president. There is only one president, and when he speaks, everyone listens. But there are one hundred senators, all theoretically equal in dignity, but some (committee chairmen, party leaders) are more equal than others, and their remarks have a much better chance of getting reported than those of a first-term senator. When a president speaks, he speaks to the nation, even though the remarks may be made to a specific audience. But senators spend most of their time speaking to other senators in debate on the floor or in committee. Of course many remarks are made to an empty floor, since the idea of great debates between senators has long since been abandoned, because they are too busy in committee meetings, or meetings with constituents or lobbyists, to stay on the floor all day. But senators will come to the floor when time allows or when some serious topic is to be discussed. This means that a floor speech made by a senator can be interrupted, politely, by a colleague—“Will the senator yield for a question?”—and the interruption can lead to a whole new

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series of questions, the kind of thing a president never has to worry about. The only time a president is challenged—and even then, not much—is at a news conference, and any president who can’t easily handle the White House press corps shouldn’t be in office. Getting questioned—civilly, politely, graciously, but still questioned—by a colleague on the floor of the Senate is part of the game. For a speechwright, this means that the prepared floor remarks should cover all contingencies and that questions should be answered before they are asked. All of this in turn means, almost always, that the speechwright is going to have to work closely with the staff or committee expert on the topic being addressed. Thrill-talk doesn’t work in Congress, either in the House or the Senate. The colleagues you are talking to have said it all and heard it all. If they suspect you are giving them generalities, or if your argument isn’t well-made, or if you demonstrably don’t know what you’re talking about, you can almost be sure someone will ask you to yield just for a question. Or two. Or more. The busy senatorial schedule, however, meant that Jim was denied the one thing he needed most in order to do the job as he saw it: time to think, time to edit remarks, time to read position papers. He once wrote of a typical day in the Senate and how he had to make choices about how to use his time: “I . . . had time to discuss with one of my legislative assistants, John Kwapisz, the language of proposed amendments I was working on with Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island. . . . I also found time to work on a floor statement I was to make in support of the Jackson Amendment . . . [and] to redraft a speech I was to deliver two days later and to make small dent in the mound of accumulated correspondence.” If Jim had to make statement about a topic and wanted support from a colleague, he could ask another senator to join him in a floor colloquy. In a colloquy, two or more senators would ask for time to be put aside and then go to the floor and speak—almost always to an empty chamber—on the topic. The point was not to convince colleagues, but to place views into the Congressional Record. I recall that at one point Jim was having difficulties with Irish American constituents in New York City who felt he had not been strong enough in denouncing British actions in Northern Ireland. Jim needed a comprehensive statement on the situation. I gave him a draft, and he joined in a colloquy with Senator Ed Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts, who had very little in common with Jim’s politics, but, representing Massachusetts, had a large and

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vocal and active Irish American constituency. He, too, wanted them all to know how much he cared about the troubles in Belfast and other places in Northern Ireland. Brooke and Buckley spoke, asked each other leading questions, and, when the remarks were in the record, let their constituents know how much they cared about the Irish. •    •    • To get back to differences between writing for a president and for a senator: writing for Nixon, I never abandoned my conservative views, but Nixon was not and did not pretend to be an activist (or “movement”) conservative, and, besides, I found very few opportunities to use my views in writing Rose Garden rubbish or Arbor Day statements. But now I was in an office that wanted to be the conservative equivalent of a “shining city on a hill,” a place where we would prove that clearly articulated conservative principles can—and indeed must—take part in the robust give-and-take of legislating. As I began to work in an ideologically driven office, I discovered that conservatism, like rhetoric, has two aspects. Just as there is “eloquent rhetoric” and “working rhetoric,” so there is “theoretical conservatism” and “practical conservatism.” Jim Buckley’s conservatism was of the practical variety, which does not mean he sacrificed principle to political expediency (there were times I wished he would, just a bit!), but that he realized his ideas were not shared by most of his colleagues. Therefore, the expression of his beliefs must be couched in language that was not defensive, angry, rigid, or beset by philosophical abstractions. Jim wanted conservatism to succeed, yes, but he realized that in the Senate he was in the minority, which meant he had to make every speech principled but understandable, if not always persuasive, to those who did not share his beliefs. Conservatism, in that time and place, demanded the utmost care and skill in its communication. And Jim Buckley took care that every word he spoke in public was first of all carefully written and then carefully edited. Time magazine (Oct. 18, 1976) described his rhetoric as “sparing and precise,” which was exactly right. Thus, I went from writing for Richard Nixon, whose view of rhetoric was essentially pragmatic, to Jim Buckley, who saw his public utterances as what we now would call “teaching moments,” ways of presenting an argument that not only discussed a certain topic, but also informed the audience of the principles

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he relied on. His personality—genial, gentle, serious but not solemn, and, above all, civil—and his understanding of his role made him uncomfortable with thrilltalk and one-liners. He would rather take two paragraphs to explain a necessary distinction, thereby risking losing his audience, than resort to a one-liner that would get applause but leave ideas muddled. (Once when he addressed a meeting of makers of frozen desserts, I gave him a one-liner: “In speaking about desserts we must always remember that many are cold but few are frozen.” He liked it, and so did the frozen dessert folks.) So, Jim, as a speaker, was not a fiery orator of the old school and did not try to be. If the rabble needed rousing, Jim Buckley was not your man. As his speechwright I discovered he would not tolerate anything even close to a personal attack and preferred precision to “heart,” as Nixon understood it. When I handed in a draft of a speech, he would read and change, read and change, keeping the essence of my remarks, but always searching for points that needed more clarification. I used to tease him because often just before he was introduced at a speaking event, he’d still be jotting down changes in the text. By the criteria of conventional eloquence, he was not an electrifying speaker. By the criteria of sincerity, intelligence, civility, and the ability to make a good argument in a good cause, he was excellent. We worked well together, and if he cured me of my habit of trying to drag emotions into everything, I tried my best to make sure his carefully constructed arguments had the clarity he demanded but also the forcefulness they deserved. But wait—wasn’t his position too rigid to be effective? Wasn’t his reliance on conservative principle simply a way of making him feel better, but getting nothing done? In If Men Were Angels he answered these charges: There are those who have particular talent for brokering a compromise between differing positions, and in the process they get things done. They play a vital role. But so do those of us who help define the positions to be reconciled, for they are the ones who define the limits of possible actions and the reasons for taking one course or another. Moreover, I have found in the Senate that those who earn a reputation for well-reasoned positions are respected, and that respect is in itself a source of influence, if not of mass conversions At any rate it is in this role . . . that I have sought to serve both my constituents and my country.

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I believe it was Senator Everett Dirksen who once said, jokingly (I think), “I am a man of principle, and my first principle is compromise.” Jim Buckley didn’t believe that. He believed they also serve who do not always create compromises but set the limits within compromises can be made. To compromise for the sake of compromise is to abandon principle; not to compromise at all, for any reason, at any time, is a fairly accurate description of fanaticism. Political wisdom lies in knowing how best to set the limits of debate and where and when and what to compromise. Here allow me to make another digression that has a connection with my later work for another principled conservative, Ronald Reagan. In 1970, when I was with USIA, I wrote an article for National Review called “Confessions of a Street Corner Conservative,” about people from my background who, ten years later, would be called Reagan Democrats. In 1975, when I was with Jim Buckley, little more than a year before I met Ronald Reagan, I wrote a little book, Street Corner Conservative, based on the article. It was published by the conservative publisher Arlington House and became a co-selection of the Conservative Book Club. Like so many conservative books written during that era, Street Corner Conservative, outside of a few nice notices in conservative magazines like National Review, was for all practical purposes ignored, particularly in the mainstream press—with one bright exception. Roderick Nordell wrote a favorable review in the Christian Science Monitor, “Gavin Speaks for the New ‘invisible man.’” The review was remarkable for two reasons: first, because it appeared at all in such a prestigious newspaper, and, second, because Mr. Nordell immediately grasped the essence of my argument: Mr. Gavin’s own conclusion is that the urban conservative has been as much of an ‘invisible man’ as the black American in Ralph Ellison’s novel of that name—and that he must be seen whole by those who would win his allegiance. He should not be pigeonholed as an “ethnic” or a “Catholic” or a “whitey”—there are many differences within each of such categories. But there is a shared urban conservatism summed up as wanting to be left alone to raise a family and leave the children a little better off than their parents. Big government and big business are both bad guys if they get in the way of this simple aim. Change in religious ritual is no more welcome than in social structure. Strong national defense, resistance to communism, resistance to busing—these are some of

j i m b u ck le y and ronald reagan  •  93 the stances in support of conditions for being left alone. Other Americans see things in different proportions. But none should be or feel invisible—and Mr. Gavin’s brotherhood is becoming less and less so with the aid of street corner conservatives like him.

No one, conservative or liberal or otherwise, caught the essence of the book better than Mr. Nordell. Years later, in her best-selling book What I Saw at the Revolution, Peggy Noonan wrote: Gavin is a bluff, gruff Irishman, generous and quick-talking who wrote something in the early 1970’s that had strong impact on young incipient conservatives: Street Corner Conservative, a memoir of how a working-class kid from a Democratic home, who made it over to the other side and why. It was the first time anyone in national politics spoke directly to the up-and-coming constituency of young, ethnic Catholics who were, in the early seventies, forming political views and trying to figure out where they fit in.

On Tuesday, December 9, 1980, Jeremiah O’Leary, a top political reporter for the now, alas, defunct Washington Star of happy memory, wrote a piece about president-elect Ronald Reagan titled “Reagan, in New York, Will Hold Cabinet Announcement for D.C.” O’Leary wrote that on the flight from California to New York the president-elect made phone calls to Rep. Bob Michel and Rep. Trent Lott “to congratulate them on their election to the Republican posts of House minority leader and House minority whip.” “Otherwise,” O’Leary continued, “Reagan busied himself on the plane reading transition task force reports and a book entitled ‘Street Corner Conservative’ by William Gavin.” I often wondered what Reagan thought of my little book and, equally important, why, with all that he had to do during the transition, he spent precious time reading it. But I never learned, and it is one of the disappointments of my life that I never found out. I would guess that the fact I was not named his chief political adviser suggests he did not find it that overwhelming. •    •    •

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In the four years I worked with Jim Buckley, I wrote floor speeches, orations for Republican Party and Conservative Party events, innumerable remarks on various legislative topics, inserts for the Congressional Record, drafts of constituent letters, and many other pieces. But I did not write the most memorable statement he ever made in his six years in office. I refer to his remarks at a news conference on Tuesday, March 19, 1974, when he called for the resignation of embattled President Richard Nixon during the Watergate crisis. Politics often has a short memory, and today Jim’s speech is of interest only to political junkies, but for a brief moment it was the biggest and most widely reported political news in the nation. National Review columnist James Burnham, a good friend of Jim’s and revered by all conservatives, provided a first draft, which Jim then revised, repeatedly. I learned this only after the speech was drafted, and I had no suspicion anything like this was on Jim’s mind. The first draft was Mr. Burnham’s, but the tightly reasoned argument, quietly effective presentation, painstaking distinctions, and civil, more-in-sadness-than-in-anger tone were pure Jim Buckley. Of all the things he ever said as a senator, this statement had the most immediate impact and got the most—and most frenzied—coverage and response. It might be asked: if you didn’t write the statement, why refer to it, since this is a book about your speechwriting? Good question. But I think Jim’s statement deserves comment because my reaction when I first read it, and Jim’s reaction to my comments, say a lot about how a politician and a writer work with, or often against, each other. So what I write here is less about the techniques of writing speeches and more about the relationship between the boss and a political aide. Aside from his defeat by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1976, Jim’s call for Nixon’s resignation was the most gut-wrenching, agonizing event in his alltoo-brief, one-term senatorial career. And yet, in a way, despite all the pain the speech caused many of his admirers and the unrestrained jubilation of those who despised his political conservatism, I believe it was perhaps his finest moment as a public figure, although for me it was a case of delight and dole in equal measure. His decision wasn’t just a profile in courage, it was the very definition of political courage, because Jim not only “spoke the truth to power”; he did something infinitely more difficult: he spoke an unpleasant, hurtful truth to his friends and allies—and to Richard Nixon, a man he generally supported. In politics that takes real guts.

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It is not necessary for me to repeat here the bizarre, complex, often unconnected series of illegal, immoral, and criminal events we now refer to as “Watergate.” Suffice it to say that by March 1974 the Nixon White House was under siege, the Republican Party was undergoing a nervous breakdown, and the country was riveted by almost daily reports in the press of yet another disclosure of malfeasance and unethical behavior in the Nixon administration. In those days, before the age of nanosecond-fast electronic reporting of events, morning newspapers did most of the heavy lifting when it came to scandals, and, as is well known, the Washington Post was often in the lead. I can remember mornings when I would open the front door to our house in Arlington, Virginia, bend to pick up the Post from the stoop, and see yet another photo of a friend or former colleague or acquaintance plastered across the front page. This was one of those situations in which political rhetoric could not change perceptions or alter the inexorable course of events. By this time, Nixon didn’t need rhetoric and he didn’t need heart. He needed direct divine intervention. The term “Great Satan” was not yet current, but Nixon’s many enemies would have enjoyed using it at the time, because the man they had said for decades was the personification of political evil had delivered himself into their hands. Now that they had him, they would never let him go. All that remained to discuss was how he would be drawn and quartered. For all their moralistic rhetoric about the need for compassion, many of Nixon’s enemies were pathologically sadistic in their undisguised glee at his disgrace. In Jim Buckley’s office, as in every office on Capitol Hill, the Watergate story permeated the political air we breathed. Oh, yes, life went on, bills were debated, deals were made, meetings were attended, committees held hearings, but the Watergate story was always there, everywhere you went. For the Republican Party, it was like watching a horrendous auto accident in slo-mo, or (choose your cliché) being the proverbial deer in the headlights, unable to look away from the oncoming doom but too stupefied to do anything about it. I cannot recall that we had any debate in Jim’s office as to how to respond to events. What possible response was there except the agonized yowl being made by the man (or is it a goblin?) in Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream? On Monday, March 18, Jim asked me to come to his office. He opened a folder and handed me some sheets of paper from it. “I want you to read this, Bill,” he said.

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I began to read. As I got deeper into the text, I realized that what I was holding in my hands was not a speech draft, but high explosives: “I speak out reluctantly. . . . Watergate has expanded on a scale that has plunged our country into what historians call a ‘crisis of the regime,’ . . . a disorder, a trauma, involving every tissue of the nation conspicuously including its moral and spiritual dimensions. I speak of a perception of corruption. . . . There is one way and one way only by which the crisis can be resolved. . . . In order to preserve the presidency, Richard Nixon must resign as president.” At this point I will let Jim himself tell what happened, from his book If Men Were Angels: [Bill Gavin] sat on the couch, reading silently. He finally looked up and told me that while arguments could and perhaps should be made for Nixon to resign, this action would destroy me politically. He argued that some of the points in the draft he was reading would not hold up under the grilling I would get from the press. More importantly, he said, my arguments, no matter how nicely phrased, no matter how detailed and precise, would be lost in a torrent of emotion that would inevitably follow. It would destroy my political base in New York state. It would crush the spirits of thousands of men and women who had worked to elect me to the Senate. It was blunt, candid analysis, strong medicine. . . . I told Bill I was standing by my decision. Finally, he said, “OK, if you’ve really made up your mind to go ahead, the only thing to do now is to make the best of it.” He recommended some final changes in the statement and we invoked tight office security while it was typed in final form.

When I read that passage today, a voice inside my head yells: How could you have been so damned insensitive? Jim was already distraught about the effect this statement would have on his friends and allies. The statement was to be delivered the next day. What good did it do to tell him this was, in your view, a disaster? Didn’t he already have enough troubles without you kicking him when he was down? But I also hear another voice, that of Bryce Harlow, telling me I should give the boss what he needs and not just what he wants. And at the time I felt that what Jim needed was to be reminded of the political facts of the matter. Of course, he already knew the facts. But he wanted me to read the remarks, because he trusted my judgment. So I told him what I thought he needed to

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know. As always, he listened. As always, he did not get angry when I told him what I thought. And, as always, he did what his conscience told him he had to do. There were and are bosses in Washington who would not have shown me or anyone else the draft, once the decision to deliver it had been made. There were and are bosses in Washington who would not have tolerated dissent at the eleventh hour. But Jim Buckley, as always, wanted the truth, because he wasn’t simply the junior senator from New York. He was also a spokesman for a not-yet-triumphant point of view embraced by millions, someone who could deliver the conservative argument clearly and effectively, without demagoguery, and without resort to thrill-talk. The only defense he had against attack was his own integrity, his own need to know and speak the truth as he saw it. After he made his statement, our office was deluged with letters, phone calls, and telegrams, 99 percent of them damning Jim to hell. One of them was a telegram from a man in Winter Haven, Florida. It consisted of the word “nuts” repeated 108 times. I still have a copy of it. But despite my dire predictions, it is difficult to ascertain how much support Jim lost in his 1976 reelection race solely because of his Nixon resignation statement. The statement certainly didn’t help matters, that’s for sure, but 1976 was generally a bad year for Republicans and conservatives. In 1975 New York City had undergone a financial crisis when decades of liberal mismanagement led to de facto bankruptcy. Jim was never able to clearly make his case that the man-made disaster did not and should not become a burden on people living in the other forty-nine states and in the majority of New York counties. He came up with a plan involving accelerating federal payments to New York. But it was a time for one-liners—for instance, the New York Daily News headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead”—and not for the kind of careful, reasoned, detailed solution Jim offered. On Election Day 1976 he lost (not all that badly, but it was a sound beating) to Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Jim’s loss was devastating, not only to his family and those of us lucky enough to work for him, but also to the Senate, to conservatism, and to the country. For one thing, if he had been reelected, he, a nature lover since childhood, would have had a platform from which to promote conservative views on the environment that were different from the knee-jerk free market versus eco-freaks paradigm that has prevailed. During the Carter presidency, Jim’s voice would have been heard more and more, making him the national figure he was destined to be.

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The abortion debate, in which he served as the leader of the pro-life side, would have been different, because he always presented his views on this issue with the logic, clarity, and civility the issue demands but is so often lacking. After his loss, he served our country with honor as undersecretary of state during the Reagan administration, president of radio stations broadcasting to the Soviet bloc during the latter days of the cold war, and, ultimately, as a highly praised and respected judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He may well be the only living American to have served as a high official in each branch of the federal government. But I believe he would have been even more effective as he gained seniority in the Senate, because from 1976 to 1980 conservatism was on the rise, its arguments were getting a hearing, and Jim would have been the logical leader of the movement’s political ascendency until the moment for Ronald Reagan to take center stage. And, who knows, maybe Reagan would have looked to a popular senator from New York to balance the ticket. And, who knows, after Reagan’s two terms . . . But it was not to be. If only ultra-left congresswoman Bella Abzug had beaten Moynihan in the 1976 New York Democratic senatorial primary. (He won by less than a percentage point.) . . . If only New York’s liberal leaders had not bankrupt the city . . . if only . . . if only . . . •    •    • My first meeting with Ronald Reagan took place in 1976, when I was still with Jim Buckley, during Reagan’s ultimately unsuccessful race for the Republican nomination against President Gerald Ford. I got a call from Marty Anderson, my friend and former Nixon colleague, who was now at the Hoover Institution in Stanford. Was I available to come out West and talk with somebody about writing a speech? “Who is it?” I asked. “Governor Reagan,” Marty said. “I think you should talk with him.” I was on the next available weekend plane. When I got to the living room of his home in Pacific Palisades, Reagan, dressed casually in slacks and an open-necked polo shirt, was talking to one of his aides when the aide saw me and said, “Governor, this is Bill Gavin.”

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Reagan turned and, for the first time, up close, I saw that inimitable, irresistible grin that the nation and the world would later came to know. “Well, thanks for coming all the way out here, Bill,” he said as we shook hands. “I’m glad to be here, Governor. You look great.” In fact, he did look great. The last time I saw him up close—but not this close—had been in 1969 when he gave a talk in the Indian Treaty Room of the Executive Office Building. At the time, I thought he looked much older than I had expected. But he looked younger now—eight years later—than he had then. He was bigger—more robust, larger across the chest and shoulders—than I had previously thought. His screen and television image did not adequately convey the rugged, outdoors quality of the man. So I guess my compliment sounded a bit more surprised than I meant it to be. In any event, I was forty-one at the time. I now know that Reagan must have heard similar compliments from many younger people. He no doubt knew that when you are in your mid-sixties and someone who is in his early forties says, “You look great,” there is often an unspoken subtext that says, in effect, “I expected to see a doddering, drooling geezer, but you really don’t look all that bad for a guy with one foot in the grave.” But Reagan simply raised his eyebrows in mock surprise, tilted his head in that special way he had, grinned that grin, and said, “Well, thank you, Bill”—and looked genuinely thankful. I cannot recall everyone who attended the meeting at Reagan’s home, but I know John Sears, another friend I had first met when I came on with Nixon, was there, along with Marty Anderson and Dick Whalen. Ed Meese, Governor Reagan’s executive assistant; Dick Wirthlin, his polling expert; and Mike Deaver and Peter Hannaford, Mike’s partner in a new public relations firm devoted to promoting Reagan, also attended. Deaver had been an assistant to Governor Reagan, and Hannaford was director of public affairs during Reagan’s last year in Sacramento. It was Peter Hannaford who turned out to be the man I eventually dealt with concerning speeches I wrote for Reagan. Since I was never on Reagan’s personal staff until the 1980 campaign, there was never a question about proximity or access. A middleman was needed, someone to whom I could send speech drafts knowing he would pass them on to Reagan. No speechwright ever had a better middleman. Peter, a soft-spoken, precise, well-organized, mild-mannered, but

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tough-minded guy, had no hidden agenda and no desire to show anyone the influence he had with Reagan. He was the perfect aide, intelligent, devoted to the Reagans, willing to share the glory as long as the job got done, and wholly without the smug, I’m-all-right-Jack attitude that so often accompanies proximity and access to great leaders. Yet, with all these qualities, he was anything but the obsequious yes-man. He shares with Reagan one great gift: he knows who he is and is comfortable with that knowledge, a center of calm amid the usual storms of politics. He was—and remains—one of the nicest, most competent, least egotistical men I got to know in politics. But, anyhow, now we all sat in the bright, comfortable, colorful, Californiastyle Reagan living room with its big piano, the top of which was covered with framed photographs of the Reagans with various celebrities (or was it various celebrities with the Reagans?). The purpose of the meeting was evident right from the start: Reagan was in an uphill struggle for the nomination, and we were there to brainstorm, if that is the word, a strategy for him that would include a televised speech I might write. A lot of ideas were batted back and forth, but I didn’t sense any progress being made. But then Dick Whalen, who, when he speaks on politics, speaks with assurance and authority, and a realistic, Irish-commonsense view of the difficulties inherent in life and politics, spoke directly to Reagan. “Governor, one of the problems with many Republicans is the rhetoric we use. I call it mahogany Republican prose.” I laughed out loud. The phrase was perfect to describe the ponderous stuff Republicans often spouted when on the campaign trail. “Mahogany Republican prose,” Dick continued, “is heavy, respectable, solid, and, quite frankly, dull as hell. It appeals to businessmen with all the talk about the bottom line and the inevitable question to a Democrat: have you ever met a payroll? That’s okay so far as it goes. But most ordinary people—working people, the blue-collar people you need to reach, people who agree with you but are Democrats—want something different, in words they respond to, about their ordinary lives.” And looking at me, Dick then said, “And you have here the one Republican speechwriter in the country who knows how to write a speech like that.” I then told Reagan I believed the blue-collar, ethnic voters who were naturally drawn to his messages focus on the things closest to them—their families, jobs,

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and neighborhoods. Republicans had to stop sounding like shills for big business and begin to speak to working people in terms they could understand. Reagan nodded, asked a few questions, and then we went on to other topics. Out of that meeting came a speech I wrote for Reagan that he delivered in a nationally televised speech, July 6, 1976. As I watched the speech on television, it looked as if Reagan was making it up as he went along, sitting comfortably on the edge of a desk, completely relaxed, talking instead of orating, showing his mastery of the conversational style of public discourse. I got so caught up in what he was saying that I temporarily forgot he was using some of the words I had written for him. •    •    • The next morning, writing in the Washington Star, political reporter James R. Dickenson wrote, under the headline “Reagan Seeks Traditional Middle-Class Family Vote”: In his nationally televised address last night Ronald Reagan portrayed himself as the public champion of traditional middle-class family values who as President would get government working for those values instead of working against them. Reagan’s half-hour speech obviously intended to try to broaden his political base to include dissatisfied Democrats and independents, the George Wallace constituency, and Eastern and Southern European ethnic groups, including Jews, who are upset by “reverse discrimination” in the name of civil rights. . . . Reagan focused less on specifics that mobilized his hard-core conservative supporters in the primaries. He concentrated more generally on middle-class concern about inflation, busing, school prayer, abortion and individual freedom and initiatives vs. interference and meddling by big government.

So far as I am aware, Dickenson was the only member of the national press to immediately grasp and write accurately about Reagan’s strategy. In 1976 it was an article of faith in the media that Reagan’s political success had been one of those phenomena that are explicable only in terms unique to California, a celebrity-crazed state where the sun had baked the brains of most of the people. Everyone knew that his true, very limited audience was, to use the then-widespread phrase of contempt, “little old ladies in tennis shoes” (today, of

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course, the phrase would be damned by feminists, the AARP, little people, and Nike). Dickenson, alone among reporters, had actually listened to what Reagan said and thus became the first reporter to lay out in plain terms what the Reagan strategy would be for the foreseeable future. The mainstream press missed the point, because they already knew who (a second-rate movie actor) and what (either a clown or a closet fascist, take your pick) Reagan was. Clark Clifford, the smooth, slick, silver-haired, wheeling, dealing consummate Democratic liberal Washington insider, best summed up the withering contempt they all felt for Reagan by calling him “an amiable dunce.” I don’t know whether anyone on the Reagan team briefed Dickenson as to the direction the speech would take, but he certainly got it right. I guessed that this one-shot assignment would be my last for Reagan. I was wrong. We would meet again. But by the end of 1976, Reagan was not at all on my mind. Jim Buckley had lost the election. By January 3, 1977, I’d be out of a job.

Chapter Eight

Bob Michel, Man of the House

Late November 1976. The office suite of Senator James L. Buckley: If something doesn’t happen soon, I’ll be out of a job in little more than a month. My wife, three children, all depending on me. A mortgage, little savings. Jim’s defeat still haunts me. I’ve made a lot of phone calls, had lunch with a few people, but the election was bad for Republicans, and no one has any tips about jobs opening up. There aren’t that many new Republican members coming in. There are few things more depressing than sitting at your desk in an office whose boss has just lost an election. It is as if nothing I did for Jim mattered. It’s over. It’s as if— The phone rings. I pick it up. “Willy? Pat.” It’s Pat Buchanan, who calls me Willy, the only person in the world to do so. He asks me how I’m doing. Typically nice of him to call, to think about me. I guess we both know more about losing than we care to. Then he says, “Here’s the thing. Do you know who Bob Michel is?” “Yeah. In the House. He’s whip. He got some kind of conservative award back in 1969,” I say. “I attended the event. But I don’t know him personally, no. Why?” “I hear he’s looking for a writer. He’s going to make a run for House Republican leader. I don’t think this time, but down the road. Why don’t you go over there? It will help you get your feet on the ground until something better comes along. There’s a guy named Ralph Vinovich, his administrative assistant. Go see him.”

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So I walked from the Russell Senate Office Building, past the Capitol Building, to the Rayburn Building on the House side, and met with Ralph Vinovich. We talked for a while. Would I have access to Bob Michel? I asked. Absolutely. We discussed pay. We talked about the facts that I was not from Illinois, I had never worked in the House, and I had no idea of the political and economic situation in Peoria, Bob’s hometown. But since I would be writing, for the most part, on national political issues, so that Michel’s speeches would gain some press coverage to give him a leadership image, my ignorance of the 18th Congressional District was no deal-breaker. Michel’s office was not as ideologically oriented as Jim’s was, although Bob had perfectly respectable scores in orthodoxy surveys by conservative activist organizations. He was not a “movement” activist conservative, guided by theory, and insofar as I know, he had never read an issue of National Review in his life. He was, instead, what I’d call a natural conservative, somebody whose background, experiences, and disposition gave him a conservative viewpoint in a nonideological way. Jim Buckley was a conservative— his views were rooted in consciously adopted ideological imperatives—while Bob Michel was simply conservative. His view of the world tended toward social, political, and economic attitudes that are recognizably conservative, without any conscious ideological foundation to support them. Ralph asked me if I could give him some samples of my writing. I said I thought it would be better if I did some reading in the Congressional Record to see how Michel spoke and then meet him. Then, if Bob wished, I could write a draft of a speech reflecting my understanding of what he wanted. Ralph said okay. Based on my experience and what he had heard about me, he didn’t think I needed to first show him how I write. If, in the event the Michel-Gavin pairing didn’t work out and Bob and I were incompatible, well, that would be that, and I’d have to start looking for a new job pretty quickly. Fair enough. We agreed that I’d think about it and then get back to Ralph. Within a day or two I was contacted by a senior aide to Richard Schweiker, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania. In 1976 Ronald Reagan, in his ultimately unsuccessful bid to beat President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, had announced, just before the Republican National Convention, that he would choose Schweiker, a moderate, as his vice-presidential running mate. I never quite understood what that was all about. The announcement was obviously a

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ploy to gain media attention just before the convention, and although daring in theory, it didn’t play all that well with many conservatives. Eventually nothing came of it, because Ford, of course, won the nomination. But the Reagan endorsement had made Schweiker a national figure, for a while at least. I met with his aide, who offered me a job as speechwright. So in just a couple of days I had two job offers after what had seemed to be an eternity of silence. There was a lot to be said about going to work for Schweiker. Before his election as senator, he had been my congressman when I lived in Abington. He had once been gracious enough to address my humanities class in Abington summer school, and I had been impressed with his friendliness and his ability to speak of Congress in a way my students could understand. And I recalled that when Barry Goldwater was running for president, Schweiker, up for reelection himself, had the courage to stand next to Goldwater at an event held outside the Casa Conti restaurant near Abington. Since moderate Republicans in 1964 were avoiding Goldwater at all costs, I had always remembered Schweiker’s gutsy little gesture of party loyalty. So the offer to write for him was attractive. But for reasons that are still not clear to me, I chose to go with Bob Michel. There was no moment of truth, no sudden vision that this was the way to go. I had liked working in the Senate, and Schweiker had the reputation of being a good man to work for. But I knew my feelings about the Senate were based on working with Jim, not because of the way the Senate operates. And there was some question as to whether Schweiker would be running again in 1980 (he did not run, and President Reagan named him head of the Department of Health and Human Services). In any event, I went to see Ralph Vinovich to say I accepted his offer. We shook hands and the deal was made. “Oh, well,” I thought. “I’ll give it a shot, keep body and soul together with a paycheck, and keep my eyes open for something better. It’s a good place to park myself for a year or so.” Eighteen years later, when Bob Michel retired, I retired with him. Some year. Some parking space. I want to add here that Ralph Vinovich was a wonderful man, a great friend, and a perfect top aide for Bob Michel. In all the years we worked together, Ralph let me do my job, rarely commenting on speech drafts unless they concerned

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something specific to the 18th Congressional District of Illinois, about which he knew everything. If there is ever a Congressional Aide’s Hall of Fame, the late Ralph Vinovich will be a unanimous first ballot choice. As I began to work for Bob, one of the first things I discovered was that speechwriting in the House is different from speechwriting in the Senate, the difference being almost wholly because of time limits. There are 100 senators, with practically limitless debate time. But there are 435 members of the House, and debate time has to be carefully regulated by the House Rules Committee, which provides a rule for each piece of legislation to come to the floor. The rule specifies the amount of time the debate will take. If there is an hour of debate, that means the majority and minority will each have a half hour to talk. That, in turn, means the leaders of the respective sides have to portion out, in minutes, precious time among the many members who might want to speak. A House member can always insert into the Congressional Record remarks on a given topic without actually saying anything in debate on the floor, but most congressmen with a particular committee, regional, constituent, or ideological interest in the proposed legislation want to come to the floor and get face time (on C-SPAN at least). There is a “one-minute” morning ritual at the start of each legislative day in which any member can come to the floor of the House and speak on any subject. Some of these one-minutes, if done well, are reported in the newspapers or, in rare instances, get a few seconds on the evening television news. But most one-minutes are used to comment on what was in the morning newscasts or newspapers, hoping to score a few points on the opposition party. Some of these mini-speeches are pretty good and get the day off to a rousing start. The one-minute time restriction always reminded me of the early days of musical recording: there were only three minutes or so of time on the old 78 rpm recordings, so jazz players had to improvise in short bursts. This paradoxically led to some of the greatest jazz recordings ever made, because the solos, maybe only twenty or thirty seconds long, had to be crafted with exquisite skill. Some of the one-minute speeches in the House had that same quality—they said something well in a short time. After the business of the day is concluded, a House member can come to the floor for what is called a special order. He or she may speak on any topic, but with an hour time limit. There is usually no one else on the floor to hear

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the speech, except perhaps a few other members waiting to make their own special order remarks. It was Rep. Newt Gingrich, Republican of Georgia, then a backbencher in the House, and later to become Speaker, who transformed the special order from a dull procedure into a sharp political weapon. When television cameras were allowed in the chamber, Gingrich immediately understood, quicker than anyone else in either party, that viewers at home watching C-SPAN would not know if the floor was empty or packed with members during special orders, because under House rules the cameras could not pan the floor or seek reaction shots. The cameras had to stay on the member who was speaking in the well of the House floor. Gingrich had a professorial manner of speaking, rarely raising his voice, and a gift for a special kind of invective, criticizing the manners and the morals of the other party—“corruption” was one of his favorite words—without getting angry or overheated. He ingeniously used the special order to demonize Democrats, over and over. He got media attention and, what proved to subsequently become more important for him, attention among his colleagues, not all of whom were admiring. Because the camera was on him alone as he spoke, many viewers thought this relatively junior member was courageously engaging in debate and scoring unanswered points, coming to the floor and criticizing Democrats who were unable to answer his criticisms. This technique ultimately drove Democratic Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill to overreact. He publicly criticized Gingrich in harsh, personal terms and ordered the cameras to pan the empty floor. It was one of the biggest mistakes O’Neill ever made, for the ensuing controversy made Gingrich a star among House Republicans, particularly among younger members. This is one of the few times that rhetoric can be said to have had an immediate effect in the House, where most members are practically immune to rhetorical persuasion. Gingrich used the special order not to try to thrill the handful of listeners on the floor. He simply offered his considered view of the utter corruption he saw in the majority party, as if he were teaching a course in civics. He knew that the television camera, by what it did not show, would do the rest of his work for him. So with a few exceptions, a House member is limited in debate to only a minute or two. But it may be asked, how can anyone discuss a complicated piece of legislation in such a short time? The answer is: practice, practice, practice. The House member and his speechwright have to learn to make points quickly; keep it short and direct; and limit the topics to be covered. A

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senator can talk and talk, make digressions, and go into considerable detail about the topic at hand. A House member, unless he or she is a committee chair or in the leadership, has to get to the point immediately. A speech in the Senate can be like a nineteenth-century novel: long, meandering, filled with descriptions and asides, and stuffed with information. A House speech is more like a debased form of haiku: quick, direct and concise, impressionistic, making one or two points quickly and sharply. I think the best way to describe the difference between oratory in the Senate and the House is to say that senators speak “vertically,” in depth, while House members have to speak “horizontally,” talking about the surface of things in a linear fashion. Senators can babble on about philosophy or history and then take a detour down Digression Lane for minutes at a time, pausing to look at the scenery, and then drive on. But House members must always stay on the main highway, keeping up to speed, and talk specifically about the technical or legislative aspects of the proposed legislation before them. To say that they speak on “surface” matters is not to say their remarks lack knowledge or deep understanding on the topic, but only that the constraints of time make it necessary for House members to, in the dialect version of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest’s words, “get there fustest with the mostest.” Depending upon certain parliamentary procedures, such as the “five-minute rule,” House members can get more time to speak on a topic, but even then there is not usually the wide-ranging opportunity to give an old-fashioned stem-winder of a speech, because the member might have to use the time to rebut criticisms of his or her position that have already been made in debate. The fact is any House member who can’t hold his or her own in non-scripted debate on the floor or in committee should retire “to spend more time with the family.” Speeches and remarks written by speechwrights are important to a House member, but the ability to think on one’s feet is most important. Thus, in many remarks I prepared for Bob, at his request I would in one section or another insert “extem” (for “extemporize”), because as much as he wanted the comfort and the security of a written statement, he also realized that his persuasive powers with other members depended on his ability to tell them—on the run, as it were—what he was thinking about the debate as it was going on. His prepared remarks may have been written two or three days earlier, because they dealt with the structure and facts of the argument being made,

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which did not change. But when you are on the floor, listening to the debate, other members may say things you feel you have to address, pro or con. The use of “extem” was a chance for Bob to quickly speak to the evolving shape of the immediate give-and-take of debate. One other aspect of House rhetoric was the emphasis on tactics. What members of Congress say in speeches and remarks is always shaped by how a legislative problem is presented to them. In the House, legislative form often dictates rhetorical substance. A president can speak on any subject he wants to, and in general terms. This is not an option for House members when they are working on legislation. Every piece of legislation is unique and has its own specific language, and it is this language, not some political or ideological platonic ideal, with which the House members must deal. Constituents often criticize a representative for voting for or against a piece of legislation without knowing the specific circumstance under which the legislation was brought before the members. Was there a restrictive rule drafted by the majority? Was this particular legislation seemingly changed from an earlier version but in reality only changed cosmetically, not in substance but in form? The problem facing many House members is not only that they have to give reasons for their votes, but also that in order to be understood, they often have to give a legislative history that can become very difficult to describe to those who do not know how Congress operates. In politics, once you start explaining, you can quickly lose the strong point of your argument and get bogged down in details. Legislators like to look positive as often as possible. How often in leadership meetings of House Republicans did I hear variations on the theme of “Give me something to vote for; I don’t want to go home and have to explain why I voted ‘no’ on the crime bill (or the tax bill, or whatever it is).’ Sometimes the same argument is framed differently: “We have to show voters what our real position is—not against their crime bill, but for a true crime bill, with teeth,” or “ Let’s make sure we get across how the other party is manipulating this issue by the unfair rule they crafted.” Or “It’s important that we show the American people who we are and what we stand for.” Trying to precisely explain a complicated tactical maneuver or some parliamentary stratagem is very difficult for a speechwright. All the eloquence in the world is not going to help you concisely explain why voting “No” on a certain amendment is really a positive action, because “No” really means “Yes”

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to certain principles that are not in the delivered bill. And this is the context in which so much of congressional oratory is written and spoken. Obviously, not all of Bob’s remarks and speeches were made on the floor of the House. He usually made two or three Lincoln Day speeches a year, back in the district or as a favor for other members in their own districts. College commencements, service club remarks back home, lobbying groups, Capitol Hill policy group breakfasts, convention speeches, American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars speeches—we did them all. Often I would get a call from a staffer for some freshman Republican congressman asking what Bob had been saying about this or that issue. If I had a copy of a relevant text handy, I would send it to the staffer so that he could give his or her boss some idea of what the Republican leadership was saying on a given topic. So although time constraints worked against any expansion of remarks, Bob had more than enough speaking engagements to give him the chance to extemporize to his heart’s content, and to address major issues at length. When he became leader, he was asked by many colleagues to speak at fund-raisers in their districts. This meant I had to find out what the big issues were in the district and make sure Bob was on the right side of any controversial topic, or, if he was not, that he was able to handle the subject without alienating the audience. How did the Michel-Gavin speechwriting process work? First, let me explain how I write speeches, because speechwriting, often under deadlines and pressure, has its own rhythms. To begin, I never worry if a rough draft, meant for my eyes only, is sloppy or even at times incoherent. What I aim for is getting the essential points on paper in a single, uninterrupted flow of writing, even in a grotesque form that will need drastic rewriting and probably break the spell-check on the computer. (Of course, until the mid-nineties there was no spell-check, at least not for me, so my speechwriting, from Nixon to my early days with Bob Michel, always depended on someone to decipher my bad typing and try to figure out what I was attempting to say in order to type a clean draft. The word processor and spell-check have saved me much time and frustration. As a writer, I am a big fan of the computer.) When the raw draft is finished, I begin the first editing process, taking out three sentences, say, and putting a new one in their place, moving what is now paragraph three to the lead paragraph, deleting a paragraph that is too long,

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filling out a thought that needs expanding, seeing how the different parts of the draft now fit together. This first self-editing process provides me with more happiness than any other part of writing. By the time I start rewriting, I have already conquered the “where to begin” anxiety by simply beginning to write, even though what I am writing may not wind up to be the beginning of the finished piece. I am one of those writers of whom it might be said I don’t know what I’m going to write until I start writing. Well, that’s not quite true. A speechwright, of course, has an assignment, so he knows the major points that have to be covered. The question is, how do you cover the points? I don’t know until the act of writing frees my mind and allows me to learn from what I am writing. I almost never work from an outline. I don’t know why outlines don’t help me, but that is the case. I think I am better able to write if I strike some balance between letting the act of writing tell me—as I am writing—where to go and then going back, editing out what is bad, and writing sentences and entire passages that I never would have written if I had tried to first think my way through the piece. Most writers will understand what I mean when I say it is the act of writing itself that is the best source of inspiration. This is particularly true when you are working in politics, where very often there is no time for getting it exactly right the first time. Strange as it may seem, the best way to write under pressure is to start writing whatever comes into your head and then edit the hell out of it, instead of waiting for inspiration or a bon mot. My imagination, unleashed, gives me the raw material on which my intelligence, experience, and instincts can work For any speech that is to be given outside the House floor, the first thing that must happen is receiving a written invitation. I played no part in the process of choosing when and where Bob would speak. That was his job. When he chose to accept an invitation, he would send a copy of it to me. I would then either call or write to (this was before e-mail) the person who had signed the letter and ask questions about the group’s interests. Now, in most cases the interest was evident. If, say, a foreign policy group asked Bob to speak, I knew what Bob would say. But still, even in a case where the speech topic was clear enough, there was other information I had to get for the introductory part of the speech. My model for every speech Bob made to any outside group was this: intro— substance—ending. Now, the strange thing about this is that the introductory

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remarks were often as crucial to the success of the speech as the substantive message. It isn’t simply that the intro sets the tone of the speech but that Bob had to make certain to refer to distinguished or at least well-known local people, usually at the dais, associated with the group, and talk (often extemporaneously) about the group itself, its history, its beliefs, and its contributions to the nation’s economic, social, or political well-being. It wasn’t just a case of flattering the audience, but also of making certain the first words the audience heard were not about some policy or program or crisis (or about Bob himself), but about the group, placing it in the broader context of the substantive remarks to be made later. Introductory remarks are very important in a speech, yet they rarely receive comment. But if you are speaking in a congressional district and get some local fact wrong in your introduction, or refer to Mayor Jones as Mayor Smith, the audience has immediately lost faith in you. So I always made certain that I got the facts right for the intros. This sounds like an obvious idea, but anyone who has written a speech knows how things have to be checked and double-checked. I would throw in a bit of local color (such as praising the most popular local sports team) and, if relevant, refer to famous citizens who had graced this fair locale. Of course, Bob’s long political experience had already given him an almost instinctive feel for what to say in his introductory remarks. His open, frank, and friendly personality shone through, making the intros sound not only relevant but fresh. After a transition line or two (something like this: “Although the National Kumquat Growers’ interest in growing delicious, wholesome food is well known, there is another aspect of your industry I want to address tonight—the agriculture bill coming up soon in the House”), I’d start to work on the substantive remarks. I might add at this point that I did not always write in the order of intro first, remarks second, ending last. Sometimes I began writing the substantive remarks and then went back and did an intro. It depended on the amount of information I had for the substantive remarks, and this is where experts came in. Bob, as minority leader, had experts on hand in just about every field Congress deals with, from nuclear energy to farm prices. These experts were either on his staff or staffers on various committees. I spent most of my time working with the experts, because outside of foreign affairs and defense, where I had a lot of current information, if not professional competence, there were technical topics I simply know nothing about.

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A speechwright has to learn to work with experts, and it can be said that the success of many of Bob’s speeches could be traced not to my golden words, but to the accurate, relevant, politically important facts and figures and theories and interpretations given to me by the experts I asked to help. But for a speechwright, working with experts can sometimes be a chore. Since they know so much, and in such depth, it can be difficult for a layman to grasp what is essential in what they say and what is peripheral. That is why I always ran my early drafts by the experts, so that Bob wouldn’t be embarrassed by some goof I made that, in the rush of things, may have slipped his attention. Did I get it right? Add to this one other fact: I have worked with innumerable experts, far more intelligent and informed than I am, and far more knowledgeable in specific policy areas, who, unfortunately, can’t write very well. I’m not talking about literary genius, but about the ability to write straightforward declarative sentences and organized paragraphs. And even when I was able to translate the language of expertise into English, I then had to change that into the style of Bob Michel, with his emphases and his rhythms. He liked short sentences in his speeches, as most speakers do. Most “real” writers like what musical composers call “the long line,” a flowing, moving series of words or phrases that has logical continuity, a kind of interior tension seeking release, and beauty of form. But as speechwrights and their bosses well know, what works on a page doesn’t always work in a speech. So I found myself, again and again, cutting long sentences in two, making them work for Bob, instead of having Bob cope with the complex sentences. And even after that, Bob had his personal way of “measuring” a speech passage by inserting, in pen, little slash marks at certain points. I could never understand just how he determined where the slash marks should go, because he would insert them in places where I could not find a natural pause. But the slash technique worked for him. As far as the conclusion to a speech is concerned, I have always found it to be the trickiest part to write. There has to be some kind of summing up, but it can’t take too long, because the audience, sensitive after twenty minutes or so to the speaker’s rhythms, and aware of how much time has passed, is ready for the speech to end. A good quotation always helps (especially in Lincoln Day speeches—Abe had a lot to say, and most of it was good stuff), or maybe a rip-roaring call for action if the group you are addressing is, say, a Republican county organization or a Republican convention.

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I mentioned quotations, so I should say that I quickly learned that Bob Michel did not rely on the same sources as Jim Buckley did. With Jim, references to Edmund Burke, G. K. Chesterton, conservative or libertarian economists, and the Constitution were the order of the day. With Bob it was a quotation from some revered Republican like Abe Lincoln, or Senator Everett Dirksen, who once held Bob’s congressional seat, or some sports figure, especially baseball players and golfers, or a reference to Peoria, the quintessential American city that was his birthplace. Bob was a heartland-of-America, meat-and-potatoes kind of speaker, who gets the job done because he is who he is: an entirely credible, likeable, informed, and decent human being. So when I had an assignment, I’d cobble together a first draft and put it aside for a time and then do something else to clear my head and give me chance to get a different perspective. Then I’d get back to the text for a new draft. I’d rewrite it from start to finish, almost always taking more out than I put in. Then I ran that draft past the relevant expert, just to double-check that I had the arguments right. I then walked the few steps to Bob’s office and personally gave the draft to Sharon Yard, his longtime secretary. And that was very often the last time I would see the speech. Every now and then, especially if the speech was in Washington, I’d be in the audience, just to see what worked and what didn’t. When Bob was speaking out of town, he usually placed a small tape recorder on the podium, and he would give me the tape after he returned so that I could check out how it went. Writing for Bob Michel was a process that, practically speaking, never stopped, or at least not for very long. Floor remarks, committee remarks, association meetings, whatever the occasion was, his speaking schedule was always busy, especially after he became minority leader in 1980. So I churned out speeches, remarks, one-minutes, two-minutes, whatever was needed, for eighteen years. During those years it often occurred to me how fortunate I had been to have worked for two good men like Jim Buckley and Bob Michel as a Congressional speechwright. I cannot think of two men more dissimilar on the surface. Jim was born into wealth; Bob was the son of hardworking French immigrants. Jim’s approach to politics was to weigh any proposed action against the conservative principles he cherished; Bob is a born politician, and I once told him that when he awakes each morning he already knows in his bones the Republican position on any given issue. Jim is shy, not exactly a loner, but content to be by himself,

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walking in the woods, a quiet man not given to wasting words or time; Bob is among the most gregarious, outgoing, and convivial human beings I have ever known, the life of every party, ready to break into song (he has a trained, wonderful bass-baritone voice) at a moment’s notice. Jim is a bird-watcher; Bob is a golfer. If Jim has any interest in baseball, or in any major sport, he never disclosed it to me; Bob has always been a rabid fan of the Chicago Cubs and, until a few years before his retirement, still played in the annual congressional baseball game. All that these two men have in common—on the surface—is love of family, personal integrity, enjoyment of music, and a deep love of this country. In World War Two, Jim served in the navy in the Pacific. Bob, who landed in Normandy on D-day plus six, was a combat infantryman in France, Belgium, and Germany and was wounded in action. During Bob’s last years in the House, it was popular among some younger Republicans to talk about politics in metaphors dealing with armed combat: politics is “war,” you have to “get in the trenches” and “fight for your life,” and so forth. Bob Michel taught his staff, by his example, not to use these metaphors. Unlike the tough-sounding younger members, he had seen real combat, firsthand, and knew that the kind of superheated rhetoric that tells us politics means no-quarter “warfare” demeans the service of those who actually engaged in actual battle and perverts politics from a way of settling differences to a way of settling scores. Like Jim Buckley he knew that in order to raise a point you don’t have to raise your voice. Each of these men in his own way taught me that civility should not be confused with servility, which it all too often is. Civility does not mean a speaker has to avoid making hard judgments, even forcefully if necessary. It certainly does not mean acquiescing in evil for fear of offending someone. It means adherence to principle articulated without personal animus. Be civil, yes, but don’t be servile. Stand up for what you believe it. Politely. It was an honor to be able to help both Jim and Bob, and I am grateful not only for what they taught me about how to practice politics but also for how they exemplified what it is to be a good man. One day toward the end of my time with Bob, I was sitting in my office on the second floor of the Capitol Building when a reporter who covered the Hill for a major newspaper came in to chat. We weren’t personal friends, but I knew him in that casual way I knew reporters who were constantly coming in and out of the office to see Bob, his all-purpose expert Bill Pitts, or Mike Johnson (or

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whoever happened to be the press aide at the time). So we were talking about this and that, and then the reporter said, “You know, there’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you.” “What’s that?” “Well, the thing is this: you’re supposed to be a top speechwriter, but your boss isn’t exactly known for being articulate or being able to rouse the troops. Doesn’t that bother you, writing for a guy who’s not known as an inspiring speaker?” “I look at it this way,” I said. “Bob goes to the floor, or he makes a speech back home or to a trade group here in Washington. Different kinds of speeches, different topics. But the one thing they all have in common is this: he has to make a good argument in every speech. And that’s what I do. Making sure his arguments are made in the best way possible.” “Oh,” said the reporter, “I see.” But I knew he didn’t see. To him, as to many reporters, rhetoric meant Kennedyesque “eloquence.” But I knew arguments are more important. And, more importantly, so did Bob Michel. We worked together as a team for eighteen years, making the best arguments we knew, as best we could.

Chapter Nine

Working with the Gipper, Again

In 1978, as I was learning about how to write in the House, I got a call from Marty Anderson. He asked me to attend another meeting at Reagan’s home. Reagan was going on the campaign trail for Republican congressional candidates. He needed a stump speech. Would I be willing to give it a try? The same group was there as the last time I had visited the Reagan home, minus one or two, plus Lyn Nofziger, Reagan’s canny, no-nonsense press aide. Dick Wirthlin briefed us about his polling, various aides spoke on the topics of their expertise, and that evening we all dined with Reagan. He and Mrs. Reagan had ordered in chili from Chasen’s restaurant, a favorite of movie stars for many years. I sat directly across from Reagan as he regaled the table with stories of Hollywood (for instance, Errol Flynn, unsure of his ability, was a far better actor than he thought he was), jokes (“Insanity is hereditary—you get it from your kids”), and a discussion of his relationship with Senator Barry Goldwater, for whom Reagan had given “The Speech” in 1964, a televised address that galvanized Goldwater voters and was the first step Reagan took toward running for office himself. I got the strong impression that although their relationship was cordial, Reagan believed Goldwater had never given him adequate credit for “The Speech” and never really thanked him for it. •    •    •

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After flying home, I got to work on a stump speech that contained what I later called “the litany”—five simple words: Family. Work. Neighborhood. Peace. Freedom. This was the very essence of the Reagan blue-collar strategy. Reagan liked the speech and used it throughout his speaking tour. Peter Hannaford, in The Reagans: A Political Portrait, wrote: “Reagan was touching the right chords [with the speech] . . . but reporters who covered these events for the most part did not notice anything different. It was reported as just another political speech by a man who was already one of America’s best public speakers.” Reagan was openly telling the media and the Democrats exactly what kind of campaign he was going to run in 1980, but they were not listening, because they all believed he was a joke. Blessed is the politician who is underrated by his foes. Between 1978 and 1980, as I worked for Bob Michel I kept in touch with Reagan’s aides, particularly Peter, and in 1980 I sent a memo to Peter outlining what I thought should be in Reagan’s acceptance speech. Peter, in turn, wrote to Reagan: “As Bill Gavin put it in a memo . . . a good acceptance speech should have something Old (in this case a reweaving of some of your best themes and lines since millions of Americans have yet to come to know them); Something New (in this case the American Compact); Something Borrowed (quotes from Lincoln, the Federalist and Tom Paine), and Something (Red, White and) Blue (‘the renewal of the American Spirit’).” “The American Compact,” an idea of mine that made it into the speech, was a reference to the Mayflower Compact. Reagan did a great job with the idea, but it was instantly forgotten after the words were spoken (although I still have a copy of the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times: “Reagan Calls for New ‘Compact of Freedom’”). I believe it was my old pal Bill Safire who pointed out that the word “compact” had long since lost its original Mayflower meaning and now means a small case containing a mirror and a powder puff. Working with Peter, I had made some useful contributions to the acceptance speech, which Reagan, of course, delivered in his usual spectacular fashion. I watched the speech on television (this time at home), just as I had watched Nixon’s acceptance speech in 1968. But this time I already knew I had made major contributions to the speech, so I did not jump up and shout, “He’s using my stuff.” By now I was a seasoned old pro and not capable of wonder, alas. When he finished speaking, after the moment of silence he dramatically called for, there was a great roar of approval. I turned down the sound and

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watched the celebration. I just may have been a bit misty-eyed. I thought about that other acceptance speech. It seemed much longer than twelve years ago. •    •    • A week or so later, Ed Meese asked me to take leave from my job with Bob Michel and become “chief speechwriting coordinator” (I was never quite certain exactly what the title meant) for the campaign. I promised Bob I would return to him after the campaign was over (which I did), and Bob graciously said okay. I told Ed I did not want to make the campaign tour. That was fine, he said. So I came on board, as they used to say, and spent the campaign at the Reagan-Bush Committee headquarters, 901 South Highland Street, in Arlington, Virginia, a few miles from my home. A gifted speechwriter and equally gifted political consultant, Ken Khachigian (yet another old friend from the Nixon days—we were all over the place, Nixon’s revenge), was on the plane with Reagan and soon became, for good reasons, Reagan’s favorite writer. So here I was again, writing in a presidential campaign. There was one difference this time: I was in the starting lineup, and I knew what I was doing. Well, to be honest, not entirely. In speechwriting, as in most things, it is exactly when you think you know everything that you find out there is still much you need to learn, or at least remember. The fact that I was not on the campaign plane with the candidate led to a number of problems I was not prepared for. The kick-off speech to the campaign in September, which would be delivered in my hometown of Jersey City (going after those blue-collar, Catholic votes), was my first assignment. I worked hard on the speech, going through a number of drafts. Two days before I sent it to the plane, I just happened to be speaking with a man who handled logistics for the tour. We were chatting about the speech draft, and, quite casually, he asked if I had the references to the Statue of Liberty up front. Statue of Liberty? “Oh, didn’t they tell you?” he said. “Reagan is going to be in Liberty Park in Jersey City with the Statue of Liberty in the background. Great film footage.” No, no one had told me anything about the Statue of Liberty. But I should have asked. (That was one of the lessons I had forgotten: ask if you don’t know.) It was my fault. A speechwright should always know the locality of the speech. And here I had a nice speech without a single word about Lady Liberty. I quickly

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inserted a rhapsodic hymn to her. As I dimly recall, Reagan used a draft by someone else. Another problem with not being on the plane: whatever I wrote was faxed to the tour and then given to aides for their advice and criticism. There was a lot of creative editing going on by people I didn’t know. I had no problem with that, in principle at least. In fact I believe that is exactly as it should be. Those on the tour are closer to the candidate and know the hour-to-hour, minute-tominute situation far better than those at headquarters. But it was tough for me to make the adjustment, because in 1968 I had been on the plane. Add to this the question of timing. Most campaign speech drafts are done days, maybe even as long as a week, in advance of when the speech is to be given. But in a campaign things happen so quickly and there is such a need for instant replies, attacks, and changes in tactics that the writer in headquarters can’t possibly have the same feel for the text as the staff on the plane. I felt a little bit out of touch, a little bit behind the beat, throughout the entire campaign. Access and proximity, again. •    •    • But I had more than enough to do. One night Marty Anderson and I worked through the early hours of the morning, pushing, shoving, pulling, and dragging words and phrases, numbers and statistics, and economic assumptions in and out of a few dozen drafts of a speech for Reagan’s major economic address. I hasten to add that Marty crunched the numbers and I wrote the words—or most of them. As I recall, our text served as the foundation of the speech, but there were many other additions and deletions made by others, including Reagan. One day Ed Meese asked me to join the tour in Illinois. Reagan was to make a bus tour through part of the state. I would meet Ken Khachigian and hammer out a couple of speech drafts, which, as I recall, were considered to be urgent, although for the life of me I cannot recall what the topics were or why they were so urgent. Ken and I holed up in some godforsaken motel room just outside Peoria and emerged the next morning, groggy but happy, having somehow gotten the job done. It was on the bus tour that I witnessed Ronald Reagan go through a transformation I would not have believed possible. It had been a long day. Ken and I sat opposite Reagan at a little pull-out table on the bus, talking to him about some speech, I forget what. He looked awful, old and tired, and not

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really concentrating as we talked. We had one last stop to make, a small town in south-central Illinois, where a rally would be held. I wondered if the obviously exhausted old man sitting across from me would be able to get up from his seat, let alone talk to a crowd. As we came near to the town, we began to see people standing on the sidewalk, smiling and waving. There weren’t many of them. But as we got even closer, the crowds grew, people lining the sidewalks two or three deep. Reagan looked out the window. He smiled and waved. And this is when it happened. He was suddenly transformed—“transfigured” might be an even better word—before my eyes. Instead of the old man I had just seen a few minutes ago, there was a vibrant, lively man sitting across from me, his face fairly glowing with a big smile as he waved to the crowd on the sidewalks. He looked at Ken and me and grinned the Reagan grin. He was Ronald Reagan once again. When we arrived at the town, Reagan rose quickly to his feet, got off the bus, and delivered a nice little speech to a cheering crowd. He looked as if he could go on for one more stop, three, four, you name it. He was pumped. It was as if the crowd had been a magic elixir, a fountain of youth, for him. The 1980 campaign was the end of my working relationship with Ronald Reagan. Ed Meese was kind enough to offer me a White House speechwriting job. But I had promised Bob Michel that no matter what happened, win or lose, I would come back to him. And I wanted to do that very much. At this time in my life, I did not want the pressure of a job at the White House, even if I now knew (most of) what I was doing. Ken became the chief speechwriter, and Reagan kept on making those marvelous speeches with Ken’s help. I was always amazed that Reagan could take what I had written and make it seem as if he were making it up as he went along. Peter Hannaford had a word for the kind of editing Reagan did for a speech—“needlework.” Nothing major, a word changed here or there, a line crossed out, some words added. Somehow he managed to make the speech his own. But I often felt he succeeded in communicating with audiences by the magic of his public persona as much as he did with his oratorical powers. His easy, conversational style, which President Obama also uses so well, the characteristic little movement of his head to one side as he spoke, the irresistible grin, his dead-pan expression setting up a joke, his uncanny use of his voice to convey different emotions, and his easy mastery

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of the four “p’s” of public speaking—pitch, pace, pause, and percussion—were as much a part of his platform style as the words he spoke. He didn’t thrill his listeners as much as he captivated them. He didn’t want to talk down to us, orate from on high, as much as he wanted us all to be on the same level, so he could talk with us—Uncle Ron, the family tale-teller. You didn’t listen to Reagan in order to get thrills. You listened to him because he seemed to be talking to you, so even in speeches about dry and dusty policy questions, his charming personality shone through. Again, his kind of eloquence consisted not so much in what he said or even how he said it (or where he said it—think of his speech about the D-day heroes on Normandy Beach), but in who he was, or, at least, the speaking persona he allowed us to see. Ronald Reagan was easy to get to like, but he was one of the most mysterious public figures I have ever met, (and, remember, I met Richard Nixon). I know how odd that sounds, because Reagan seemed to be the most open and easy-going of all national leaders. I was not one of his longtime aides, so I am not certain that my reading of the man is correct. But I once mentioned to someone who was one of his trusted, longtime aides my belief that Reagan deliberately kept a great part of himself removed from other people. The aide thought for a moment and said, simply, “You might be right,” and let it go at that. Reagan was a genial enigma, a man who was wholly present to you, totally engaged, but at the same time more than a step removed. •    •    • I met Reagan one more time, in 1988, with a group of senior House aides. We had been invited to the Oval Office so that each of us could have a photo taken with him, a typically nice gesture on his part. When it came my turn, he smiled and looked at me. I was certain he had no idea who I was, which was not surprising, because he had employed thousands of aides during his political career, and, in fact, except for the times I have already mentioned, I never worked directly with him. But that was fine with me, because my work for him included writing I was most proud of, and he had given me that chance. I still have the photo. We are shaking hands. He is in profile, as I am, and he is wearing his characteristic little smile. I am looking at him with what might be called respectful admiration, just the same feeling I always had when I was in his presence. I almost said, “Mr. President, I used to write for you,” but thought

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better of it. I knew I had the honor of having written for him, and that was all that mattered. Besides, there was someone else in line, in back of me, eager as I was to get his picture taken with an American legend.

Chapter Ten

Getting the Job Done

At some point in the late 1980s, I forget exactly when, I began to be afflicted by doubts about what I was doing to earn my living. It wasn’t a crisis of the spirit (to use the phrase I coined for Nixon so long ago). I had no political or ideological second thoughts. In fact, if anything, my long political experience had deepened and strengthened my conservative views. I still loved working for Bob Michel. I could still grind out the stuff, and Bob wasn’t complaining. So what was the problem? I was the problem. Someone once said that speechwriting is a young person’s game, and there’s a lot to be said about that view. I was now close to sixty. In twenty years I had written speeches about a lot of subjects: the nuclear freeze, farm prices, inflation, Latin American policy, environmental issues, abortion, the cold war—you name it, I wrote about it. I wasn’t a burnt-out case exactly, and I had not become the jaded, faded, and degraded stereotypical old political pro who is steeped in cynicism. But there was very little that was new under the sun to me, politically at least. Perhaps I had not seen and done it all, but I had seen and done more than my share. Besides—to get to a more mundane, but important, point—I was getting tired of the drive-time commute from my home in Virginia. In the morning, I’d start along crowded suburban streets to the entrance of the George Washington Parkway. Then I’d inch along the parkway until it was time to endure the creep-creep-creep over the Fourteenth Street Bridge. On the return trip at night, I had to quickly maneuver, often in •  125

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the dark of winter, across three lanes on the bridge to get to the exit for the parkway, speed down the exit, and then stop, trying to get back on the parkway while cars raced by. Commuting had nothing to do with politics or ideology or writing, but it was starting to wear me down. Part of my malaise could be traced to the fact that I had always worked for a member of the House minority (Bob Michel never was in the majority throughout his entire congressional career), and minority status really wears you down, because in the House the majority party makes the rules and makes them in such a way that they almost always win. But for some reason, it was the issue of Central America that gave me the gloomy feeling that no matter how hard I worked I would always be engaged in a Sisyphean effort, able to make some slight progress for policies I believed in, but then see the total effort ultimately fail. As Bob’s assistant on defense and foreign policy, during the 1980s I had devoted an inordinate amount of time and energy on the many issues involving the Reagan administration’s support of the various governments of El Salvador as they fought Marxist-Leninist guerillas and its support of contra guerillas against the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. That bitter, years-long debate (almost entirely forgotten today, except among left and right activists), reinforced something I had reluctantly concluded years before: most political debates never get to the real point, because the two sides won’t agree on the facts. This truth of political life had never bothered me before—it was the way things were—but now I began to come close to despair as I wrote speeches on the subject. On almost every major point in the debate on Central America, ranging from the ideological backgrounds of the Sandinistas (hard-core Communists or left-wing freedom fighters?) and the contras (hard-core fascist Somozistas or right-wing freedom fighters?) to the size of each side’s armed forces, to the history of the conflict, there was a total disagreement as to the basic facts. I attended meetings of the joint leadership of the House during the years of Central American policy debate, and almost always the issue could not be joined because the two sides could not agree on the facts. The Congressional Record was filled with innumerable assertions of facts, facts piled upon facts, but the two sides could not agree on what the relevant facts were. As I said, I do not wish to suggest that the Central American debate taught me this sad lesson about facts in debate; it only reinforced the lesson. When I came to Washington, I quickly discovered that, oddly enough, experts who agreed with one ideological view of

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an issue looked at a problem and always discovered their view was supported by the facts, while experts on the other side had, oddly enough, looked at different facts and come up with an opposing view. But in the Central American debate it seemed to me that the situation was even worse: no one could agree as to what a fact is. There is an old saying in politics: don’t debate your opponents; dismiss them. This phenomenon seemed to me to be happening more and more: there was little effort to refute or even challenge the facts proposed by the other side. The important thing was to get your facts into the debate, assert your position, denounce the other position, but ignore the opposition’s case. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said that in a debate you are entitled to your own opinion but not entitled to your own facts. But the possession and promulgation of “your own facts” seemed to be accepted by both sides as a legitimate tool of debate. If that was the case, what good was rhetoric? What chance did a speech have of making a good argument that just might convince someone on the other side? What part did argument play in such a debate if there was no agreement as to what the argument was about? Part of my mind realized that it had been forever thus and that there was nothing new about a refusal for each side to agree on the facts of the matter (see debates that went on just before, during, and after the Civil War for a case in point), but for some reason—weariness? age?—it began to bother me. (Abortion, of course, was another issue in which the very facts underlying the argument could not be agreed upon.) I hadn’t lost my writing talent, and I hadn’t lost my desire to fight for what I believed was right, but I had begun to ask myself, for the first time, is this all worth the trouble? Is all the effort, all the thought, all the faith and hope that goes into a debate doomed to become the victim of an unwillingness on both sides to agree to the facts? Decades before, Walter Lippmann, in his influential book Public Opinion, had suggested there be a nonpartisan, above-suspicion national board of fact-checkers who would set the limits of political debate by ascertaining what was true and what was false in factual assertions. Where anyone would get flesh-and-blood human beings to staff such a board would be a problem, since only angels could ascertain the facts to everyone’s satisfaction. But in any event, all of this had made me very weary, and I was starting to lose that inestimable gift of any speechwright—the eager anticipation of doing the next speech. In fact, there were days I wished all the speaking would stop. But it didn’t, so I muddled through without a thought of ever recovering that

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first, fine, careless rapture of being young, idealistic, and eager to continue the fight with the same passion. I’d fight on, but only in the sense of Hemingway’s hero Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, mortally wounded, but hanging on against the pain so he can shoot the fascist officer climbing up the hill. A brave, but ultimately doomed, holding action seemed to me the best I could hope for. And so the guy who writes with heart, the writer who had heart, had in fact lost heart. And that was a terrible thing to know. I was reminded of a story I once read about, as I recall, a pitcher named Herb Score, who pitched for the Cleveland Indians during the 1950s. Score was among the fastest pitchers ever, but one day he was hit by a line drive, smack in the face, and never really recovered. He could no longer throw that blazing heater. So he was sent down to the minors to see if he could get it back. But nothing worked. In despair, walking the streets of some minor league town, he saw a church and went in. He knelt in a pew for a while, but he couldn’t even pray. He began to weep and soon was sobbing. He felt a hand on his shoulder, looked around, and saw a kindly looking old priest. In a gentle fashion, the priest asked, “My son, can I help you?” “Nobody can help me, Father.” “Have you lost a loved one. Is that it?” “No, no,” Score said, through his tears. “It’s worse than that—I lost my fastball.” Well, I wasn’t feeling as bad as Score, but “heart” was my fastball. if I had lost heart, lost the initial passion and love for what I was doing, what kind of a writer would I be? It was not quite my dark night of the soul but more like Dante’s “middle of the journey,” the unsettling feeling of losing one’s way in a dark wood. And at the same time I also realized that Bob would soon be retiring. Maybe not this Congress, maybe not the next, but relatively soon. The thought was at once sad and welcome. Sad because since 1977 I had worked with him, and I did not want it to end. Welcome because in another sense I wanted it to end. More and more I realized that I needed to have some time for myself, because I wanted to write for myself, and what I wanted to write was a novel, the goal (often unstated) of so many writers of my generation. Maybe I would not even get an agent, maybe the manuscript would never be published. But I just wanted to write a novel, in all its complexity, in all that it demands personally from a writer, not just write something, but create something. I knew that at my age it might be too late. I knew that it would take an effort I might not be

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able to make, but I wanted to be able to say, to myself if no one else, at least I tried. I didn’t want to go to my grave knowing I had not taken the chance. So I knew that when Bob retired (not desired by me), I would leave the House too (desired by me). Then I’d give myself one shot at the novel to see if I could pull it off, discover if I had in me what it takes to write a long work of fiction that would be populated by believable characters, hold a reader’s attention, and be constructed in a smooth, professional style. So, after all those years, there it was, something I had not thought about—or didn’t want to think about—confronting me: I wanted to begin to write for myself. Years before, I had tried to write a novel, a couple of times, in fact, but I discovered quickly I didn’t have the discipline—or, as I grew older, the energy—to wake up very early or stay up very late to write. What I needed was a block of time, a year or probably more, that I could devote to crafting a novel. I could not do it part-time. So this was the way I felt, this was the way I was thinking, when on January 12, 1991, the House voted on the question of whether to support President George H. W. Bush’s decision to deploy American troops—already in place in Saudi Arabia—in offensive action to free Kuwait, which had been invaded by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in August 1990. I will not go into the complicated political, geopolitical, and geostrategic arguments that led up to this vote except to say this was one of those rare occurrences when a question of life or death comes before the House. As House minority leader, Bob would finish the debate for our side. But in the days leading up to the vote, I could tell he was troubled, not on where he stood—he firmly supported the president’s decision—but on how best to address the issue. When you are voting to send American troops into battle, you not only have to have good reasons for doing so, but you must also be able to communicate those reasons. So Bob and I began to develop a routine. In the morning, if his schedule was free, he would come to my office, close the door, and we would talk. This was usually not the way we worked. Most of the time when a speech had to be written, he called me into his office, told me what he wanted, and I wrote the speech. But this time he wanted to talk things over. He wanted to get this one exactly right. He wanted to say what had to be said, but not in a way that would hurt the chances of getting some Democrats to support the president. The vote

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could not be presented as a partisan issue. But what would his argument be? A House leader usually has the choice of using as much time as he wants or needs and is not held strictly accountable for time by the chair. But Bob didn’t want some encyclopedic, long-winded, stem-winder. He didn’t want flashy language or histrionics. He just wanted to get it right. I tried some approaches and showed them to him, but they were missing something. We talked and talked, but we couldn’t find the heart of what he needed to say. It wasn’t just about supporting the president. It was about reasons for supporting the president. We would sit there in the morning, before anyone else in the office came in. He would talk and I’d take notes. One morning, after fruitless discussion, as he was about to leave the room to begin his long day, he turned and said, almost as an afterthought, “Gav, the problem is, they have different ideas about going to war.” “Who?” “The younger members, especially Democrats. Their view of war is colored by what happened in Vietnam. But that’s not how the World War Two veterans feel. To the Vietnam generation, you don’t commit troops until every last avenue of negotiations has been exhausted. They’re afraid of getting bogged down in an endless war, and, believe me, I can see their point. But to my generation, we know that if you let an opportunity pass to stop a tyrant early, things will only get worse and there will be more bloodshed.” “They’re both legitimate views,” I said. “Yes, they are,” he said and left. And I knew immediately that I had what we’d been looking for. This was the idea that would become the heart of his speech. I began to type. I don’t know what I typed first. Probably some effort to get down on paper what Bob had just said before I forgot it. And then I was back in the old rhythms. Things weren’t coming easily, but I felt as if I could do this. It would be difficult, but I could do it, and I wanted to do it, not because I thought Bob’s words—whatever they eventually would be—could change much, but because I wanted to do the job that had to be done for him. And so I typed and typed and edited and deleted and pasted, and there I was, back in it once again, that wonderful zone of doing work for the sake of the work itself, just getting it right. On the day of the vote, when it became Bob’s turn to speak, he was the last speaker on our side of the aisle. He began (extem!) by praising Speaker Tom

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Foley, who previously had come down from the Speaker’s chair to the floor to address the Congress (Speakers of the House almost never do this). Foley had urged all members, on both sides of the aisle, to vote their conscience. Even in this moment of decision, Bob, man of the House, had the institution in mind. He praised all House members, on both sides of the aisle, for the quality of the debate this far. Then, after some more extemporaneous preliminary remarks, he looked directly at the Democratic side of the aisle (almost all the members were present, a rare occurrence) and said, in part: I guess younger members are tired of hearing of World War Two types always using the prelude to that war as a model of foreign policy. For so many members, your war was the Vietnam war. That war shaped your thinking, one way or the other, a different war, different lessons. . . . I, like so many other members of my generation, am haunted by the ghosts of Munich and the ghosts that Munich produced, and that is why I am so opposed to a policy of delay against aggression threatening our vital national interests. At this point you might be saying, all right, but that was then and this is now. And I agree. There is not a perfect fit between the lessons of Munich and the problem of Kuwait. New problems demand new approaches. All I could ask is that we at least consider that delay often can have more serious consequences later on than swift action. This is just not a theory. It happened, to the horror of the world. What reason do we have to believe our time is immune to a similar disaster? . . . American troops in the gulf have bound themselves by sacred ties of duty and honor and willingness to sacrifice. Cannot we at least be bound to a binding resolution that will give their commander in chief what he has requested?

A great speech? No. An effective speech? Yes. Was Bob Michel a great orator, from the Eloquence School? Not at all. Was Bob able to speak with power and conviction and sincerity? You better believe it. Would the words of his remarks ever be engraved in stone? No chance. Did the remarks do the job? Yes, they did the job. No attempts at eloquence, no thrill-talk, just plain words from a plain-spoken man to his colleagues. But those simple words had an effect on the House. It wasn’t something you could quantify or measure. I doubt if it changed many, if any, votes, although it had the virtue of not losing any votes. But if you have been on the floor of the House as many times I have, you can feel something

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in the air when a speaker has received the attention of the entire House. And that special feeling was almost palpable when Bob ended his remarks, to great applause, some of it coming from the other side of the aisle. If someone else without Bob’s combat experience had said the same words, the words would not have had the same force. But Bob had been a combat infantryman. Everyone on the floor knew it; he didn’t have to remind them. He knew what war is. So his words were not “mere rhetoric” to his colleagues but working rhetoric at its best, the honest words of a man who has lived what he speaks about, who doesn’t question the patriotism of those who disagree, and a man who realizes that different generations see things differently. He was saying, in effect, you have your facts, we have ours. Okay. But let us all at least try to understand what the other side is thinking and feeling. He didn’t take any longer than two minutes, if that. But his speech, in my view—and the view of many others—was one of his finest moments, as leader, as a congressman, and as a speaker. I knew then we would win the vote (by then it was almost a sure thing, which it proved to be). I left the floor and walked through Statuary Hall on my way back to my office. I was elated. I had a spring in my step once again. The fog had lifted, the doubts had vanished, and it occurred to me that no matter how much longer I worked in the House, a year or four years, my education as a speechwright would never end. There were always new things to learn. I had forgotten that, and the sudden rediscovery was exhilarating. There were always surprises. And if you were very, very lucky, you would get the chance, once or twice, to see perfection. You would see the right guy deliver the right words in the right way to the right audience at the right time. Bob had just done that. Everything I had ever learned about good, working rhetoric had come together in those few words of mine he had spoken. But I also knew that his success involved more than my words. It was the man himself, his present and his past, his personality, his defeats and his victories, communicating his inner strength to listeners, not through conventional eloquence, not through thrill-talk, but through a projection of his authentic self. He used what his speechwright had given him, but he also gave of himself. The words, as he spoke them, had life—his life, not mine. That is what I had just seen and heard on the House floor. I was about to leave Statuary Hall when I paused to look up at the statue of Clio, the Muse of History, in her winged chariot, my favorite statue in the

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Capitol Building. She was standing in her winged chariot, looking backward over the doorway leading to the Great Rotunda. She knew what had just occurred on the floor. She would file away Bob’s remarks among the billions of words that have been spoken in Congress and forget about them. Clio loves eloquence. She always has. But she has been around long enough to know that tastes change and that someday, just maybe, people may look back and see that working rhetoric, not eloquence, is what held American politics together, day by day. I knew that those words would be forgotten by history. For now, only those of us fortunate enough to have been there would remember what Bob had said and how he had said it. But that was something worth having, wasn’t it? That was something worth working for. Bob had done the job that had to be done. Clio would forget, but for that golden moment what he said had exactly the impact he had hoped for. That’s what good working rhetoric does, after all: within the rules of the game, it says what has to be said and gets the job done, without fuss, even if the words are not conventionally eloquent and are quickly forgotten. There is, to me, something awe-inspiring and oddly beautiful in that accomplishment—getting the job done right. I continued walking to my office, eager to get back to work After all, Bob wasn’t retiring yet; there were still big issues to debate. As far as a political speechwright is concerned, there’s always tomorrow to consider, there’s always some new issue to learn about, and, if you are lucky, there’s always another speech to write, a good speech that gets the job done. I had forgotten that, but now I remembered. When I got back to my office, I took off my jacket, sat at the desk, and turned on the computer. That novel could wait. I had work to do. Bob had another speech coming up soon. As I had for more than two decades, I began to write, not exactly sure of where I was going, but confident, after all this time, that I would get where I needed to go, one way or another. I would get the job done, again.

App e n d i x

Richard M. Nixon, Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech, Republican National Convention, Miami Beach, Florida, Thursday, August 8, 1968

Mr. Chairman, delegates to this convention, my fellow Americans, sixteen years ago I stood before this convention to accept your nomination as the running mate of one of the greatest Americans of our time or of any time, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eight years ago, I had the highest honor of accepting your nomination for president of the United States. Tonight I again proudly accept that nomination for president of the United States. But I have news for you. This time there’s a difference. This time we’re going to win. We’re going to win for a number of reasons; first a personal one: General Eisenhower, as you know, lies critically ill in the Walter Reed Hospital tonight. I have talked, however, with Mrs. Eisenhower on the telephone. She tells me that his heart is with us. And she says that there is nothing that he lives more for and there is nothing that would lift him more than for us to win in November, and I say let’s win this one for Ike! We are going to win because this great convention has demonstrated to the nation that the Republican Party has the leadership, the platform, and the Source: Transcribed from “Richard Nixon: Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, August 8, 1968,” at The American Presidency Project, http://www. presidency.ucsb.edu/mediaplay.php?id=25968&admin=37.

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purpose that America needs. We’re going to win because you have nominated as my running mate a statesman of the first rank who will be a great campaigner and one who is fully qualified to undertake the new responsibilities that I shall give to the next vice president of the United States. And he is a man who fully shares my conviction and yours that after a period of forty years, when power has gone from the cities and the states to the government in Washington, D.C., it’s time to have power go back from Washington to the states and to the cities of this country all over America. We’re going to win because at a time that America cries out for the unity that this administration has destroyed, the Republican Party, after a spirited contest for its nomination for president and vice president, stands united before the nation tonight. And I congratulate Governor Reagan. I congratulate Governor Rockefeller. I congratulate Governor Romney. I congratulate all those who have made the hard fight that they have for this nomination. And I know that you will all fight even harder for the great victory our party is going to win in November, because we’re going to be together in that election campaign. And a party that can unite itself will unite America. My fellow Americans, most important—we’re going to win because our cause is right. We make history tonight, not for ourselves but for the ages. The choice we make in 1968 will determine not only the future of America but the future of peace and freedom in the world for the last third of the twentieth century. And the question that we answer tonight: can America meet this great challenge? For a few moments, let us look at America, let us listen to America to find the answer to that question. As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night. We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other, fighting each other, killing each other at home. And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish. Did we come all this way for this? Did American boys die in Normandy, and Korea, and in Valley Forge for this? Listen to the answer to those questions. It is another voice. It is a quiet voice in the tumult of the shouting. It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators. They’re not racists or sick; they’re not guilty of the crime that plagues the land. They are black and they are white, they’re native born and foreign born, they’re young

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and they’re old. They work in America’s factories. They run America’s businesses. They serve in government. They provide most of the soldiers who died to keep us free. They give drive to the spirit of America. They give lift to the American Dream. They give steel to the backbone of America. They’re good people, they’re decent people; they work, and they save, and they pay their taxes, and they care. Like Theodore Roosevelt, they know that this country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless it is a good place for all of us to live in. And this, I say to you tonight, is the real voice of America. In this year 1968, this is the message it will broadcast to America and to the world. Let’s never forget that despite her faults, America is a great nation. And America is great because her people are great. With Winston Churchill, we say: “We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies because we are made of sugar candy.” America’s in trouble today not because her people have failed but because her leaders have failed. And what America needs are leaders to match the greatness of her people. And this great group of Americans, the forgotten Americans, and others know that the great question Americans must answer by their votes in November is this: whether we shall continue for four more years the policies of the last five years. And this is their answer and this is my answer to that question: When the strongest nation in the world can be tied down for four years in a war in Vietnam with no end in sight; when the richest nation in the world can’t manage its own economy; when the nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is plagued by unprecedented lawlessness; when a nation that has been known for a century for equality of opportunity is torn by unprecedented racial violence; and when the president of the United States cannot travel abroad or to any major city at home without fear of a hostile demonstration, then it’s time for new leadership for the United States of America. My fellow Americans, tonight I accept the challenge and the commitment to provide that new leadership for America. And I ask you to accept it with me. And let us accept this challenge not as a grim duty but as an exciting adventure in which we are privileged to help a great nation realize its destiny. And let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth—to see it like it is and tell it like it is—to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth, that’s what we will do. We’ve had enough of big promises and little action. The time has come for honest government in the United States of America. And so tonight I do not

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promise the millennium in the morning. I don’t promise that we can eradicate poverty, and end discrimination, and eliminate all danger of war in the space of four or even eight years. But I do promise action—a new policy for peace abroad, a new policy for peace and progress and justice at home. Look at our problems abroad. Do you realize that we face the stark truth that we are worse off in every area of the world tonight than we were when President Eisenhower left office eight years ago? That’s the record. And there is only one answer to such a record of failure, and that is a complete housecleaning of those responsible for the failures in that record, and the answer’s a complete reappraisal of America’s policies in every section of the world. \We shall begin with Vietnam. We all hope in this room that there’s a chance that current negotiations may bring an honorable end to that war. And we will say nothing during this campaign that might destroy that chance. But if the war is not ended when the people choose in November, the choice will be clear. Here it is. For four years, this administration has had at its disposal the greatest military and economic advantage that one nation has ever had over another in a war in history. For four years, America’s fighting men have set a record for courage and sacrifice unsurpassed in our history. For four years, this administration has had the support of the loyal opposition for the objective of seeking an honorable end to the struggle. Never has so much military and economic and diplomatic power been used so ineffectively. And if after all of this time, and all of this sacrifice, and all of this support there is still no end in sight, then I say the time has come for the American people to turn to new leadership not tied to the mistakes and the policies of the past. That is what we offer to America. And I pledge to you tonight that the first priority foreign policy objective of our next administration will be to bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam. We shall not stop there—we need a policy to prevent more Vietnams. All of America’s peace-keeping institutions and all of America’s foreign commitments must be reappraised. Over the past twenty-five years, America has provided more than one-hundred and fifty billion dollars in foreign aid to nations abroad. In Korea and now again in Vietnam, the United States furnished most of the money, most of the arms, most of the men to help the people of those countries defend themselves against aggression. Now, we are a rich country. We are a strong nation. We’re a populous

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nation. But there are two-hundred-million Americans and there are two-billion people that live in the free world. And I say the time has come for other nations in the free world to bear their fair share of the burden of defending peace and freedom around this world. What I call for is not a new isolationism. It is a new internationalism in which America enlists its allies and its friends around the world in those struggles in which their interest is as great as ours. And now to the leaders of the Communist world, we say, after an era of confrontation, the time has come for an era of negotiation. Where the world’s super powers are concerned, there is no acceptable alternative to peaceful negotiation. Because this will be a period of negotiation, we shall restore the strength of America so that we shall always negotiate from strength and never from weakness. And as we seek peace through negotiation, let our goals be made clear: We do not seek domination over any other country. We believe deeply in our ideas, but we believe they should travel on their own power and not on the power of our arms. We shall never be belligerent, but we shall be as firm in defending our system as they are in expanding theirs. We believe this should be an era of peaceful competition, not only in the productivity of our factories but in the quality of our ideas. We extend the hand of friendship to all people, to the Russian people, to the Chinese people, to all people of the world. And we shall work toward the goal of an open world—open skies, open cities, open hearts, open minds. The next eight years, my friends, this period in which we are entering, I think we will have the greatest opportunity for world peace but also face the greatest danger of world war of any time in our history. I believe we must have peace. I believe that we can have peace, but I do not underestimate the difficulty of this task. Because, you see, the art of preserving peace is greater than that of waging war and much more demanding. But I am proud to have served in an administration which ended one war and kept the nation out of other wars for eight years. And it is that kind of experience and it’s that kind of leadership that America needs today and that we will give to America with your help. And as we commit to new policies for America tonight, let me make one further pledge: For five years hardly a day has gone by when we haven’t read or heard a report of the American flag being spit on, an embassy being stoned, a library being burned, or an ambassador being insulted someplace in the world.

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And each incident reduced respect for the United States until the ultimate insult inevitably occurred. And I say to you tonight that when respect for the United States of America falls so low that a fourth-rate military power like North Korea will seize an American naval vessel on the high seas, it’s time for new leadership to restore respect for the United States of America. My friends, America is a great nation. It is time we started to act like a great nation around the world. It’s ironic to note when we were a small nation—weak militarily and poor economically—America was respected. And the reason was that America stood for something more powerful than military strength or economic wealth. The American Revolution was a shining example of freedom in action which caught the imagination of the world. And today, too often, America is an example to be avoided and not followed. A nation that can’t keep the peace at home won’t be trusted to keep the peace abroad. A president who isn’t treated with respect at home will not be treated with respect abroad. A nation which can’t manage its own economy can’t tell others how to manage theirs. If we are to restore prestige and respect for America abroad, the place to begin is at home in the United States of America. My friends, we live in an age of revolution in America and in the world. And to find the answers to our problems, let us turn to a revolution, a revolution that will never grow old—the world’s greatest continuing revolution—the American Revolution. The American Revolution was and is dedicated to progress, but our founders recognized that the first requisite of progress is order. Now, there is no quarrel between progress and order, because neither can exist without the other. So let us have order in America—not the order that suppresses dissent and discourages change but the order which guarantees the right to dissent and provides the basis for peaceful change. And tonight it’s time for some honest talk about the problem of order in the United States. Let us always respect, as I do, our courts and those who serve on them. But let us also recognize that some of our courts in their decisions have gone too far in weakening the peace forces as against the criminal forces in this country. Let those who have the responsibility to enforce our laws and our judges who have the responsibility to interpret them be dedicated to the great principles of civil rights. But let them also recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence, and that right must be guaranteed in this country. And if we are to restore order and respect for law in this country, there’s

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one place we’re going to begin. We’re going to have a new attorney general of the United States of America. I pledge to you that our new attorney general will be directed by the president of the United States to launch a war against organized crime in this country. I pledge to you that the new attorney general of the United States will be an active belligerent against the loan sharks and the numbers racketeers that rob the urban poor in our cities. I pledge to you that the new attorney general will open a new front against the filth peddlers and the narcotics peddlers who are corrupting the lives of the children in this country. Because, my friends, let this message come through clear from what I say tonight: Time is running out for the merchants of crime and corruption in American society. The wave of crime is not going to be the wave of the future in the United States of America. We shall reestablish freedom from fear in America so that America can take the lead in reestablishing freedom from fear in the world. And to those who say that law and order is a code word for racism, there and here is a reply: Our goal is justice, justice for every American. If we are to have respect for law in America, we must have laws that deserve respect. Just as we cannot have progress without order, we cannot have order without progress, and so, as we commit to order tonight, let us commit to progress. And this brings me to the clearest choice among the great issues of this campaign. For the past five years we have been deluged by government programs for the unemployed, programs for the cities, programs for the poor. And we have reaped from these programs an ugly harvest of frustration, violence and failure across the land. And now our opponents will be offering more of the same—more billions for government jobs, government housing, government welfare. I say it’s time to quit pouring billions of dollars into programs that have failed in the United States of America. To put it bluntly, we are on the wrong road, and it’s time to take a new road to progress. Again, we turn to the American Revolution for our answer. The war on poverty in America didn’t begin five years ago in this country. It began when this country began. It’s been the most successful war on poverty in the history of nations. There is more wealth in America today, more broadly shared, than in any nation in the world. We are a great nation. And we must never forget how we became great. America is a great nation today not because of what government did for people but because of what people did for themselves for over a hundred and ninety years in this country.

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And so it is time to apply the lessons of the American Revolution to our present problem. Let us increase the wealth of America so that we can provide more generously for the aged, and for the needy, and for all those who cannot help themselves. But for those who are able to help themselves what we need are not more millions on welfare rolls but more millions on payrolls in the United States of America. Instead of government jobs, and government housing, and government welfare, let government use its tax and credit policies to enlist in this battle the greatest engine of progress ever developed in the history of man—American private enterprise. Let us enlist in this great cause the millions of Americans in volunteer organizations who will bring a dedication to this task that no amount of money could ever buy. And let us build bridges, my friends, build bridges to human dignity across that gulf that separates black America from white America. Black Americans, no more than white Americans, they do not want more government programs which perpetuate dependency. They don’t want to be a colony in a nation. They want the pride, and the self-respect, and the dignity that can only come if they have an equal chance to own their own homes, to own their own businesses, to be managers and executives as well as workers, to have a piece of the action in the exciting ventures of private enterprise. And I pledge to you tonight that we shall have new programs which will provide that equal chance. We make great history tonight. We do not fire a shot heard ’round the world, but we shall light the lamp of hope in millions of homes across this land in which there’s no hope today. And that great light shining out from America will again become a beacon of hope for all those in the world who seek freedom and opportunity. My fellow Americans, I believe that historians will recall that 1968 marked the beginning of the American generation in world history. Just to be alive in America, just to be alive at this time is an experience unparalleled in history. Here is where the action is. Think. Thirty-two years from now most of Americans living today will celebrate a new year that comes once in a thousand years. Eight years from now, in the second term of the next president, we will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution. And by our decision in this election, we, all of us here, all of you listening on television and radio, we will determine what kind of nation America will be on its 200th birthday; we will determine what kind of a world America will live in, in the year 2000.

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This is the kind of a day I see for America on that glorious Fourth eight years from now. I see a day when Americans are once again proud of their flag. When once again at home and abroad, it is honored as the world’s greatest symbol of liberty and justice. I see a day when the president of the United States is respected and his office is honored because it is worthy of respect and worthy of honor. I see a day when every child in this land, regardless of his background, has a chance for the best education that our wisdom and schools can provide and an equal chance to go just as high as his talents will take him. I see a day when life in rural America attracts people to the country rather than driving them away. I see a day when we can look back on massive breakthroughs in solving the problems of slums and pollution, and traffic which are choking our cities to death. I see a day when our senior citizens and millions of others can plan for the future with the assurance that their government is not going to rob them of their savings by destroying the value of their dollars. I see a day when we will again have freedom from fear in America and freedom from fear in the world. I see a day when our nation is at peace, and the world is at peace, and everyone on earth—those who hope, those who aspire, those who crave liberty—will look to America as a shining example of hopes realized and dreams achieved. My fellow Americans, this is the cause I ask you to vote for. This is the cause I ask you to work for. This is the cause I ask you to commit to—not just for victory in November but beyond that to a new administration. Because the time when one man or a few leaders could save America’s gone. We need tonight nothing less than the total commitment and the total mobilization of the American people if we are to succeed. Government can pass laws. But respect for law can come only from people who take the law into their hearts and their minds and not into their hands. Government can provide opportunity. But opportunity means nothing unless people are prepared to seize it. A president can ask for reconciliation in the racial conflict that divides Americans. But reconciliation comes only from the hearts of people. And tonight, therefore, as we make this commitment, let us look into our hearts and let us look down into the faces of our children. Is there anything in the world that should stand in their way? None of the old hatreds mean anything when you look down into the faces of our children. In their faces is our hope, our love, and our courage. Tonight I see the face of a child. He lives in a great city. He’s black. Or he’s

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white. He’s Mexican, Italian, Polish. None of that matters. What matters, he’s an American child. That child in that great city is more important than any politician’s promise. He is America. He is a poet, he’s a scientist, he’s a great teacher, he’s a proud craftsman. He’s everything we ever hoped to be and everything we dare to dream to be. He sleeps the sleep of childhood and he dreams the dreams of a child. And yet when he awakens, he awakens to a living nightmare of poverty, neglect, and despair. He fails in school. He ends up on welfare. For him the American system is one that feeds his stomach and starves his soul. It breaks his heart. And in the end it may take his life on some distant battlefield. To millions of children in this rich land, this is their prospect for the future. But this is only part of what I see in America. I see another child tonight. He hears the train go by at night and he dreams of faraway places where he’d like to go. It seems like an impossible dream. But he is helped on his journey through life. A father who had to go to work before he finished the sixth grade sacrificed everything he had so that his sons could go to college. A gentle Quaker mother with a passionate concern for peace quietly wept when he went to war, but she understood why he had to go. A great teacher, a remarkable football coach, an inspirational minister encouraged him on his way. A courageous wife and loyal children stood by him in victory and also in defeat. And in his chosen profession of politics, first there were scores, then hundreds, then thousands, and finally millions worked for his success. And tonight he stands before you—nominated for president of the United States of America. You can see why I believe so deeply in the American Dream. For most of us the American Revolution has been won; the American Dream has come true. And what I ask you to do tonight is to help me make that dream come true for millions to whom it’s an impossible dream today. One-hundred and eight years ago, the newly elected president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, left Springfield, Illinois, never to return again. He spoke to his friends gathered at the railroad station. Listen to his words: “Today I leave you. I go to assume a greater task than devolved on General Washington. The great God which helped him must help me. Without that great assistance, I will surely fail. With it, I cannot fail.” Abraham Lincoln lost his life, but he did not fail. The next president of the United States will face challenges which in some ways will be greater than those of Washington or Lincoln. Because for the first time in our nation’s history, an American president will face not only the problem

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of restoring peace abroad but of restoring peace at home. Without God’s help and your help, we shall surely fail; but with God’s help and your help, we shall surely succeed. My fellow Americans, the long dark night for America is about to end. The time has come, the time has come for us to leave the valley of despair and climb the mountain so that we may see the glory of the dawn—a new day for America, and a new dawn for peace and freedom in the world.

Acknowledgments

Vladimir Nabokov wrote a classic autobiography called Speak, Memory. I have always liked the title, because it reminds us that in order for memories to come to us, we first have to summon them. It has been my experience as I grow older that I may say “speak, memory” and discover that memory is taking a nap, which is perhaps what I should be doing. Or else memory doesn’t exactly speak to me clearly but instead mumbles, angrily, like someone with a bad hangover being suddenly awakened. I say all this as an introduction to the obligatory authorial disclaimer “thanks to everyone who helped in this book, and all errors are mine alone.” All too true, I’m afraid, and since my mumbling memory at times seems to be not only incoherent but also speaking in another language (Urdu? Basque?), I ask the reader’s forgiveness for the things I got wrong. I relied on four sources for the events recounted in the book: documents in my possession (such as copies of Nixon memos), notes I had made close to the time an event occurred (such as scribbled notes written just after my 1968 meeting in Miami with Nixon), research (I can Google with the best of them), and memory—and in some cases all four sources. There is, of course, no documentation or notes concerning Mr. Furlong’s story about the Jersey City orator, and I had to rely on memory alone. The fact that the story remained with me all these decades suggests to me that for some reason it was important to me even if I never knew why. Now I know—it was in the memory bank, awaiting its call to provide a story for my book. •  147

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In some cases, particularly concerning Richard Nixon’s visit to the Republican Conference, I had everything but the date. And try as I could, I could not pin it down. The Republican Conference does not keep records on such things, and my former colleagues could not agree on a date. The photos that were taken of Nixon, Bob Michel, and me were perfect in every way but one: there was no date. I finally came across a New York Times story, “Nixon Treated as Hero in Halls of His Disgrace” (nice sensitive touch there, Times), in a March 9, 1990, edition of the newspaper with the dateline March 8. I owe a great debt to Dr. Martin J. Medhurst, Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Communications, Baylor University, coauthor (with Gary C. Drebelius) of “Building the Speechwriter-Principal Relationship: Minority Leader Robert Michel Confronts His Ghost,” an article in the Central States Speech Journal (Winter 1986). In 1986 Dr. Medhurst, then a professor at the University of California, Davis, came to Bob’s office and interviewed both of us about the speechwriting process, the first time a scholar had interviewed a writer and a principal at the same time and in the same place. And here I must tell a story that is so unlikely that readers may find it hard to believe. But it happened: When I had written enough of this book to be able to show it to a publisher, I made a few inquiries and came to the conclusion that a scholarly press would be my best bet. But since my two novels were published by St. Martin’s Press, I knew nothing about university press publishers. So I did what any red-blooded American would do—I went to Google, typed in a few words, and got the usual list of sites that were relevant to my query. Since one site looked as good as another, I clicked on the first site that was shown. I came across the name of someone to contact and sent a query. The very next morning I received an e-mail from Martin Medhurst. He told me he would take a look at what I had written and then reminded me of our meeting in 1986. I was flabbergasted. Although I had not forgotten the Michel-Gavin interview, I had not connected it with Dr. Medhurst’s name. And here he was, in the first Google entry I tried. What are the odds of that happening? But it happened and led to an introduction to my editor, Martha Bates of Michigan State University Press, without whose skill, patience, and support the manuscript would not have reached publication. In preparing to write the chapter on Bob Michel, I reread the Medhurst-Drebelius piece for the first time in many years and found

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that it said just about all that needed to be said about the Michel-Gavin writing arrangements. So in the Bob Michel chapter I have used this article as a useful reference point. I want to especially thank my friend and former Bob Michel colleague Bill Pitts for his gracious help in getting my facts straight about rhetoric in the House. He was and is a master of parliamentary procedure, and his encyclopedic knowledge of House rules and customs was of great help in getting that part right. If there are any errors in that chapter, chalk them up to me. Mike Johnson, another friend and Michel staff colleague, also was kind enough to share his thoughts with me. Thanks, Mike. I deeply appreciate permission given to me by Wiley-Blackwell publishers and by the Center for the Study of the Presidency to use parts of “His Heart’s Abundance: Notes of a Nixon Speechwriter,” an article I published in Presidential Studies Quarterly 31, no. 2 (June 2001). The Richard Nixon Foundation, under the leadership of my old campaign pal, Ron Walker, was kind enough to answer some questions I had about the 1968 campaign. The text of the 1968 acceptance speech was transcribed from “Richard Nixon: Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, August 8, 1968.” I thank the American Presidency Project, which provided the address as delivered by Richard M. Nixon. My fervent thanks goes to the staff at Michigan State University Press for their professionalism, patience, and unwavering support.