Schlesinger Fils Turns In Masterful Debut On White House Speechwriters
In White House Ghosts, Robert Schlesinger has written a masterfully evenhanded rendering of behind-the-scenes life in the Oval Office that may be the best political book we've read this year.
While we get to know our presidents from press conferences, they're few and far between. But presidents give speeches nearly every day, so the people who write them are a key link between the chief executive and the people he governs. This book claims to be the first in-depth examination of presidential speechwriting, spanning administrations from FDR to GWB.
As such, it succeeds on several levels. It's thoroughly researched, employing both secondary and primary sources, which include contemporaneous notes from both speechwriters and their bosses. It's entertaining, with abundant you-had-to-be-there anecdotes. In spite of the wide range of presidential ideologies surveyed, one comes away at the end without sensing the author's bias, although as he is the son of former JFK adviser and liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, one might hazard a guess.
The work's greatest triumph, though, is that it conveys immediacy, making the reader feel surrounded by several grubby, unshaven wunderkinds at 3 a.m., drinking their fifth cup of coffee while grinding out the seventh draft of the State of the Union address that has to be delivered later that day.
A major takeaway from Schlesinger's book is how deeply involved most modern presidents have been in the actual crafting and editing of their own speeches. Some chief executives were better writers than the scribes who toiled for them, others far worse. But ego and legacy concerns led them often to micromanage the process. And speechwriters took no back seat to presidents in preening and seeking recognition, often leading to internecine warfare, which often crippled production, a circumstance some presidents handled efficiently, others fecklessly.
A major issue for speechwriters since the job was created under Warren Harding is access to the president. Uniformly, those who write in the president's voice feel it essential to have face time with him or at least to sit in frequentlly on policy meetings, to gain a sense of nuance that will enhance their speeches. Understandably, presidents want to restrict access as much as possible in certain sensitive areas, sometimes shutting out the scribes to such a degree as to render them ineffective.
Political junkies among us will devour the sections deconstructing the creation of great presidential speeches -- from JFK's "ask not" inaugural, to FDR's "we have nothing to fear...," to LBJ's "I shall not seek nor will I accept...." to George Bush's 2002 address linking Iraqi leaders to yellowcake uranium, which served as his partial justification for taking America into war. In painstaking fashion, Schlesinger deconstructs the process of writing the Iraqi speech, the bottom line of which seems to be that if Bush's argument may not have been an outright lie, but it certainly was a reckless assertion.
It's fascinating to watch the extent to which newsmen and newswomen flow into White House jobs and back out again, so even casual observers are likely to recognize such speechwriters as Ted Sorenson, Bill Moyers, Ron Nessen, and Peggy Noonan. But what about such unlikely figures as novelist John Steinbeck or Jaws author Peter Benchley?
It's particularly engaging to see our presidents, warts and all, grappling to put on the best face but limited by the technology of the times. If ever a president cried out for TelePrompTer, then not yet invented, it was Harry Truman, who, in his Missouri twang, used to read speeches without looking up and to accelerate his delivery in the boring sections, just to get through it.
Bill Clinton would often grab a cup of coffee and extend the editing into the presidential limousine, surrounded by a clutch of aides, en route to the event. In Annapolis once, he held the cup in his teeth so he could edit a sentence. When the car hit a pothole, a full cup of coffee cascaded down the front of his white dress shirt. With no time to send someone to shop for another, a Keystone Cops routine ensued, with frantic aides running from car to car in the motorcade to find a man with Clinton's shirt size.
More resourceful than most, Clinton would easily extemporize when he found the wrong speech coming up on his TelePrompTer. In fact, his best speeches turned out to be those in which he'd depart from his notes and, like the jazz musician he is, do an extended riff on one issue or another. Aides told Schlesinger Clinton ad libbed fully a quarter of one State of the Union Address.
Schlesinger, a former reporter who teaches political journalism at Boston University, has written an impressive debut. One hopes we'll see more from him. In the meantime, it's a book that would be more welcome than most ties on Father's Day.
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