White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Read online

  Debate swung back and forth. On Thursday, October 18, Sorensen wrote a draft of a speech for Kennedy to give after a military strike against the island. “This morning I reluctantly ordered the armed forces to attack and destroy the nuclear buildup in Cuba,” the president’s speech read. Americans should “remain calm, go about your daily business, secure in the knowledge that our freedom-loving country will not allow its security to be undermined.”

  That night, the Ex Comm seemed to agree on a blockade with the possibility of military action later, only to revisit the question on Friday morning—above the protests of Sorensen, who complained that they had reached decision. We’re not serving the president well by reopening the debate, Sorensen told the air strike proponents. And, he added, my ulcer doesn’t much like it either.

  He retired to his office and tried a first draft of a naval blockade speech. But at this hour of maximum danger, his pen faltered. “Back in my office,” he recalled, “the original difficulties with the blockade route stared me in the face: How should we relate it to the missiles? How would it help get them out? What would we do if they became operational? What should we say about our surveillance, about communicating with Khrushchev?”

  The questions were, he said forty-four years later, the product of the “combination of my legal background and my Unitarian background—I’m a questioner and a skeptic, a dissenter.”

  Sorensen returned to the Ex Comm late that afternoon in the unaccustomed position of being without a speech. Rather, he brought with him the questions that had halted his hand. “As the concrete answers were provided in our discussions, the final shape of the president’s policy began to take form,” he noted. “It was in a sense an amalgam of the blockade-air-strike routes; and a much stronger, more satisfied consensus formed behind it.” That night, he ate his first hot meal in days, sent over to the White House by a friendly Washington matron, and, using Woodrow Wilson’s speech declaring the United States’ entry into World War I and FDR’s speech after Pearl Harbor as reference points, stayed up until three o’clock writing a draft.

  All of this debate had taken place out of the public view. Kennedy had maintained his public schedule, leaving for a campaign swing on Thursday. But midmorning on Saturday, October 20, Pierre Salinger announced to the press that the president had a “slight cold” and would cut short his trip. Arriving at the White House around 1:30 pm, Kennedy read Sorensen’s draft before the two went up to the Oval Room on the second floor of the presidential living quarters—selected for its location out of the eye of the press, who would notice top national security officials suddenly congregating on a Saturday afternoon in, say, the Cabinet Room—to meet with the Ex Comm.

  The group debated Sorensen’s draft, and also an air strike draft which Bundy had prepared and which was favored by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon. JFK, who always favored leaving an out for an opponent, elected the limited course of a blockade while leaving open an air strike down the road.

  Even then debate over the draft continued, with Adlai Stevenson, the ambassador to the United Nations, arguing that the speech should include an offer to trade the missiles in Turkey. Kennedy conceded that such a trade would probably ultimately be necessary, but he insisted that that bargaining chip be held in abeyance rather than played in the opening gambit. (In the end, the missiles in Turkey were secretly bargained away—a fact that would not become public for decades.)

  The question lingered of what to call the response: “Is this a ‘nuclear quarantine’ or a ‘blockade’ or something in between?” a talking point on the Sunday meeting agenda asked. Rusk questioned whether the word “blockade” was desirable. He argued for “quarantine.” While the two words had the same meaning under international law, “quarantine” had better political connotations; it would not invite comparisons to the Soviet “blockade” of Berlin.

  Other small but important changes to the speech were made over the next couple of days. A passage that acknowledged that the blockade would not stop the Soviet buildup was dropped. Also gone was a promise that the missiles in Cuba would “someday go—and no others will take their place.” More important, a pair of blunt warnings about what the crisis could bring to Cuba came out. Sorensen’s third draft cautioned that if the offensive buildup continued, “appropriate action will be undertaken at a time and in a manner of our own determination…including the targeting of these bases by our strategic forces.” “Strategic forces” was a euphemism for nuclear weapons. This draft was shaking the nuclear saber not as a possible final eventuality, but as a next step. (In the final version of the speech, the U.S. armed forces were ordered to prepare for “any eventualities.”)

  Several pages later, Cuba was warned, “Do not become the first Latin American country to be a necessary target for massive destruction.” That admonition was not in the delivered speech, but a third and similar warning—that Cuba had become “the first Latin American country to become a target for nuclear war”—was. Never in the Cold War did the United States renounce first use of nuclear weapons. But it was a measure of the seriousness with which the Kennedy administration took the crisis that they were considering such explicit, explosive, grim rhetoric.

  The Ex Comm met again at 11:30 am on Monday, October 22. Secrecy had held for almost a week and Kennedy was within hours of addressing the nation. Whichever side revealed the missiles first would frame the discussion before the world. Now, as he met with the group, the president received a note. “The Russians are going to make a major announcement in two hours?” he asked. Then, turning to his advisers, he added: “They’re going to announce it,” referring to the presence of the missiles. A brief debate ensued: Should JFK make his announcement before the Soviets could?

  From the start, Kennedy had grasped the importance of secrecy. So long as only he and his advisers knew that the United States knew about the buildup, he could maneuver and consider his options. He had directed his aides to keep the secrets and he had privately called upon The Washington Post and The New York Times to hold stories on the brewing crisis.

  “From the start he knew that unless the missiles in Cuba and the American response were announced deftly, the world might be disgusted that the United States was risking nuclear war to remove missiles no more menacing than those along the Soviet border,” Michael Beschloss later wrote. “Another President might not have taken such care to make sure that the missiles were not revealed by the Russians, the New York Times or CBS in a way that would undermine public support for his course of action.”*

  JFK and his advisers decided not to move up his speech—and the Russians’ “major announcement” proved to be merely Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko’s routine departure statement upon leaving the country.

  Five minutes before the 7 pm airtime on October 22, the president lowered himself onto the seat at his desk, a pair of pillows cushioning him. Wearing a corset to relieve his chronic bad back, Kennedy sat straight and stared into the camera as he prepared to give the most important speech of his life—and of the Cold War:

  Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.

  Framing the issue as one of Soviet secrecy and deception, JFK quickly won the country’s support. The Cuban missile crisis was the Cold War’s critical moment. The lives of the world hung in large part on the decisions of fifteen men. Several factors were important in Kennedy’s successful handling of the crisis—perhaps none more important than having time to consider all options. But given that time, the act of translating policy impulses and instincts into prose policy played an important role in the deliberations before Kennedy’s speech. Settin
g policy into words had raised new questions and exposed possible weaknesses. And choosing the right words for the speech itself helped set the terms of the international debate.

  This crisis was a unique situation—a literal crisis, in which the regular rules of policymaking were of necessity suspended. But Kennedy used speeches and speechwriting for policy development in other situations as well. As Truman had circumvented the bureaucracy with his State of the Union announcement of the Point Four program providing technical aid to developing countries, Kennedy used speeches to set policy outside of the departments. Soliciting first drafts from different departments was common, especially in the case of foreign policy matters, but JFK used his speechwriters to break out of the diplomatic blandness that Foggy Bottom produced. He faced a growing permanent executive branch bureaucracy that was not beholden and often unresponsive to the political administration. JFK used the president’s public pronouncements as a prod for both foreign and narrowly domestic audiences.

  The following spring, Kennedy used a speech to plot a broader new course on foreign policy.

  Traveling in the Soviet Union in April 1963, Norman Cousins, the Saturday Review editor who had suggested to Eisenhower that he make a “great, sweeping” farewell address, had acted as a backchannel between Kennedy and Khrushchev. He relayed a private message from the president to the premier designed to restart nuclear test ban negotiations, begun in the Eisenhower administration, that had stalled over an apparent misunderstanding regarding the number of annual on-site inspections permitted. The Americans wanted twelve to twenty annually, while the Soviets wanted none. Kennedy was willing to go to eight to ten, but Khrushchev thought the Americans had offered three. The Soviet leadership felt that it had been misled, circumscribing Khrushchev’s options. “You can tell the president I accept his explanation of an honest misunderstanding and suggest that we get moving,” the Soviet leader told Cousins. “But the next step is up to him.”

  Visiting the White House on Friday, April 22, Cousins reported to Kennedy that Khrushchev was willing to talk, but was feeling heat from his hard-liners and from the Chinese to denounce the United States as warmongers. Kennedy said that he wanted a test ban, but wondered how important an issue it was to American voters. Pulling out the White House’s weekly mail report, he noted that such a treaty was far down the list, below questions about Caroline’s pony. In addition, the mail was running fifteen to one against. He asked Cousins to keep him up to date.

  Concluding the conversation, JFK got up and walked to the French doors that opened onto the Rose Garden and South Lawn. Chairs were being set up for a music students’ event that he was scheduled to address in twenty minutes, at noon. “What do I tell them?” Kennedy asked Cousins. When Kennedy liked his reply—about the number of educational television stations in the country—he said, “That’s great. Can you type it up?” While Cousins found a typewriter, the president went for a quick swim in the White House pool.

  Over a week later, on April 30, Cousins followed up with a letter to Kennedy suggesting that he give “the most important speech of your Presidency…in its breathtaking proposals for genuine peace, in its tone of friendliness for the Soviet people and its understanding of their ordeal during the last war.” A Soviet Central Committee meeting was scheduled for June, Cousins noted, suggesting that Kennedy “beat Mr. K. to the punch” with a peace speech. Kennedy forwarded the letter to Sorensen and they decided that the June 10 commencement at Washington, D.C.’s, American University would be an appropriate venue. It would be a sweeping address, aimed at breaking the stalemate with a serious peace offer. But the rush of events overtook Sorensen so that when Kennedy departed on Wednesday, June 5, on a trip west to inspect military facilities and meet with local officials, Sorensen had not produced a first draft of the speech.

  Sorensen had been quietly consulting with Bundy, his deputy Carl Kaysen, Schlesinger, Walt Rostow, chairman of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, and his own brother, Tom Sorensen. He also dug up material that had been cut from previous addresses—the idea of a “Pax Americana” had first appeared in early drafts of the inaugural—and dashed out seventeen typed pages of a rough draft that contained many of the elements that would make up the delivered speech. “The clamor of conflicting ideologies and political systems must not drown out the fact that we are all residents of the same planet,” Sorensen’s notes said in an early version of the speech’s most oft-quoted line. “We are all dependent on the same national [sic] environment. We all look to nature’s bounty for sustenance. We all have the same capacity to hope. We all feel pain and are diminished by it. And we are all mortal.”

  Sorensen worked late into the night on Thursday, June 6, rearranging and rewriting from his notes, producing a first draft. The next day he had “a small but select roundtable meeting,” as Bundy described it, of the men he had been consulting. “We got the bugs out of it unusually quickly and with very little friction,” Bundy recalled. Not in the loop were Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and General Maxwell Taylor of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who would all be informed of the content on Saturday, the 8th. Their departments’ official views had not been solicited.

  As Sorensen later wrote, Kennedy “did not want [his] new policy diluted by the usual threats of destruction, boasts of nuclear stockpiles and lectures on Soviet treachery.” By keeping the speech—and the policy—closely held within the White House, Kennedy and Sorensen were working around and targeting bureaucracies over which they did not feel he had control. Foggy Bottom in particular was viewed as a continuing vacuum of both original ideas and forceful language.

  The recipe for a foreign policy statement from the State Department, Schlesinger wrote, “was evidently to take a handful of clichés (saying something in a fresh way might create unforeseen troubles), repeat at five-minute intervals (lest the argument become clear or interesting), stir in the dough of the passive voice (the active voice assigns responsibility and was therefore hazardous) and garnish with self-serving rhetoric (Congress would be unhappy unless we constantly proclaimed the rectitude of American motives).”

  Kennedy’s was not the first and would not be the last administration where the search for penetrating rhetoric and pungent phrases ran up against the bland wall of diplomatic speech. For the American University speech—and his new push for a test ban treaty—JFK’s solution was to lead and let the bureaucrats catch up. “I suppose that, from the viewpoint of orderly administration, this was a bad way to prepare a major statement on foreign policy,” Schlesinger reflected in his diary. “But the State Department could never in a thousand years have produced this speech. The President is fortunately ready, from time to time, to assert control over the policy of his administration, however deeply it may offend the bureaucracy.”

  By the time even the top political appointees of the cabinet departments had a chance to catch up, Sorensen and the speech were flying west to meet Kennedy in Hawaii, where he was giving a civil rights address on Sunday, June 9. Though the president had discussed the peace speech with Sorensen—and Sorensen certainly knew his thoughts on the issues—it was not until Kennedy was flying east again on the Sunday afternoon (well into the evening, Washington time) that he first reviewed a draft.

  The president made some changes but not many and none of substance: there are strikingly few differences between Sorensen’s first full draft and the speech that Kennedy gave. The biggest involved the announcement that test ban negotiations involving the United States, the United Kingdom, and the USSR would resume in Moscow—word had come from Khrushchev only on Saturday that he would be willing to restart the talks. Kennedy arrived in Washington on the morning of June 10 and after a quick stop at the White House went to American University.

  He had, he told the graduating students,

  chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived—yet it is the most important top
ic on earth: world peace. What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

  The speech called upon both sides in the Cold War to reexamine their assumptions about both peace and their adversaries. The two blocs must figure out how to live and compete peacefully together, he said.

  And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

  Viewed from the twenty-first century, this elegant rhetoric hardly seems revolutionary, but at the time it was the kind of speech that only a proven Cold Warrior could successfully give without seeming weak in the face of the Communist threat. “Public cant about communist dangers in the fifties and sixties made it almost impossible for an American politician to make the sort of speech that Kennedy gave,” Robert Dallek has written. “It was a tremendously bold address that carried substantial risks. By taking advantage of his recent success in facing down Khrushchev in Cuba, Kennedy gave voice to his own and the country’s best hopes for rational exchange between adversaries that could turn the East-West competition away from the growing arms race.”