White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 2

  Standing in the back of the convention hall, Rosenman and Moley listened in horror as Roosevelt started reading Howe’s speech. But after a minute he returned to words the pair knew well. FDR had torn the front page off Howe’s speech and then gone back to the Albany draft, including the historic promise of a “new deal.”

  In campaigns and in the White House, speeches not only reflect policies but frequently act as a policy-forcing mechanism: The fact of a pronouncement focuses and curtails any lingering debates—most of the time. The central issue of the 1932 presidential campaign was the depression that had brought the country to the brink of material and psychological collapse. One component of the economic debate was the question of trade tariffs, an issue that had torn the Democratic Party for a generation.* In early September, Moley presented Roosevelt with a pair of tariff-focused speeches: one, inspired by Tennessee Democratic senator Cordell Hull, a free trader, advocated a 10 percent across-the-board cut in tariffs; the other, a response written by retired Army Brigadier General Hugh Johnson, argued against cutting the tariff in favor of bilateral “old-fashioned Yankee horse-trades.”

  Roosevelt seemed to scrutinize the two speeches before he looked up at his aide and told Moley to “weave the two together.” It was of course an impossible order and Moley told him so. Roosevelt deferred a decision for weeks, before, in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, finally shifting in favor of the Johnson approach. It would not be the last time FDR or other presidents would blithely expect his writers to execute the rhetorical equivalent of cognitive dissonance.

  Of greater importance at the Palace on the evening of September 22 was Roosevelt and Moley’s first discussion of an inaugural address. FDR removed his heavy leg braces and ordered the telephone cut off. Despite a long day of campaigning, he was at his best at night, and after briefly going over the next day’s address, he and Moley turned their thoughts to what Roosevelt might say after being sworn in more than five months later.*

  Moley always bristled at being characterized as a “speech writer” or—worse—a “ghost writer,” both of which he interpreted to be something akin to a scriptwriter producing finished texts that pols would read verbatim. “My job from the beginning—and this continued for four years—was to sift proposals for him, discuss facts and ideas with him, and help him crystallize his own policy,” he wrote in 1939.

  This summation is a good starting definition for the position of presidential speechwriter. Implicit is the notion that policies and words are inextricably linked—the former cannot be conjured in the absence of the latter. It was a role Moley and others played for FDR in the White House, not mere wordsmiths but advisers who helped the president flesh out policy by putting it in words. The job of speechwriter has evolved as television eclipsed radio as the nation’s medium, as the White House staff grew from a handful to a sprawling group of specialized cadres, and, of course, as each president has dealt with it in his own way. The rise of presidential speechwriters has also spurred philosophical questions involving whose words the president speaks. And these are issues that not only relate to questions of credit but can have real world consequences.

  The topic of the inaugural speech was next broached on a train trip in early February from Warm Springs, Georgia, to Jacksonville, Florida. Moley then brought a draft to Hyde Park on Sunday, February 26, 1933—six days before FDR’s inaugural.

  Around 9 pm the next evening, after dinner, Moley and the president-elect retired to the library, with its lit fireplace. Roosevelt, sitting at a folding card table, carefully read Moley’s typed draft before remarking that he had better transfer it into his own longhand. Howe was arriving the following morning and would “have a fit” if he suspected any other hand but FDR’s had composed the speech.

  So, with Moley sitting on the long couch in front of the fireplace, Roosevelt rewrote the speech on a legal-size tablet of paper. The two men sipped whiskey and edited on the fly, reconsidering each sentence, sometimes each word, before FDR committed it to paper. “How do you spell foreclose?” Roosevelt asked at one point. There were occasional distractions and interruptions—calls from incoming cabinet members—as they worked through to the draft’s end.

  When they finished, Moley took his original and tossed it onto the still-glowing fireplace embers. “This is your speech now,” he said.

  But Roosevelt had in mind more than to fool Louis Howe. His handwritten copy of the speech, on file at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, has a typewritten note dated March 25, 1933, signed by the president and explaining that it was “the Inaugural Address as written at Hyde Park on Monday, February 27, 1933. I started in about 9.00 P.M. and ended at 1.30 A.M. A number of minor changes were made in subsequent drafts but the final draft is substantially the same as this original.” That account omits Moley, conjuring an image of FDR writing in solitude. A generation of historians recounted the scene before Moley—incensed by the Roosevelt deception—published his second New Deal memoir in 1966, correcting the record.

  It was an unworthy and uncharacteristic ploy on Roosevelt’s part, but illustrates the tension that often exists over ownership of a speech or phrase when a president uses a writer. Moley burned his draft of the speech because of “a keen sense that whatever might be the authorship, he and he alone would have to carry the responsibility of what was said on the fateful day of inauguration.” The president has ownership of his words, if not always literal authorship.

  And the authorship question is rarely clear-cut. In the case of the Roosevelt inaugural, the absence of any extant copy of Moley’s original makes it impossible to pinpoint the parentage of most phrases. His draft was informed not only by discussions with Roosevelt but months of close contact. Whatever he had brought to Hyde Park was already FDR-sponsored, if not produced. And Roosevelt was a careful participant in the speechwriting process, a close editor who reworked material to fit his own needs.

  Roosevelt’s charade achieved its immediate goal: Howe believed the speech was FDR’s alone. He edited it himself, dictating a shorter, tighter version, with a new first paragraph that contained the exhortation, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

  Several theories about the line’s origin have been suggested over the years. Rosenman later remarked to Eleanor Roosevelt that it echoed Henry David Thoreau (“Nothing is so much to be feared as fear”), and she replied that her husband had had a volume of the American philosopher’s works in his room in the Mayflower Hotel the night before the inaugural—an account Moley disputes.

  Like the phrase “new deal,” the concept of fearing fear was not new. It had echoes, from Epictetus to Cicero to Shakespeare to Daniel Defoe to Thoreau. A 1931 edition of The New York Times had a front-page story quoting U.S. Chamber of Commerce chairman Julius H. Barnes as saying, “In a condition of this kind, the thing to be feared most is fear itself.”

  Moley recalled the phrase appearing in, of all places, a February 1932 department store ad, but that advertisement has disappeared. Whether Howe saw the ad or the Times piece (possible), picked up the concept from classic literature (unlikely: his tastes ran almost exclusively to pulp detective novels), or arrived at the thought on his own will never be known.

  Roosevelt had a keen sense of public psychology. He understood that what people needed was restored hope and a sense of order. As important was his insight that radio, the first live mass medium, lent itself to a previously unimagined oratorical intimacy. For the nation’s first 150 years, political addresses were designed to be delivered to large, present audiences. Speeches had to be long enough to satisfy people who had traveled great distances to hear them, and delivery had to reach the peripheries of crowds. Radio flipped things: instead of aiming addresses at large public crowds, one could now visit individuals in the quiet of their homes. FDR’s lower-key, more casual style supplanted formal rhetoric.

  Yet under these apparently effortless performances existed a new political mechanism. Other presidents had had help with spee
ches, but the intersection of a new medium and a new governmental style under Roosevelt created a need that has not abated. Presidents could communicate instantaneously with greater numbers of their countrymen than ever before, but as the scope of the federal government and expectations of it grew starting with the New Deal, presidents would have less time to prepare their own communications.

  While presidents and politicians have sought to mimic FDR’s achievement by adopting his style—and later John F. Kennedy’s and Ronald Reagan’s—the successful communicators have found ways to match his success in finding collaborators who could help them develop and elevate their own rhetorical voices. No president after Roosevelt tried to serve without one, and more often several, speechwriters. Their political successes often reflected their ability to properly use these aides.

  Like so much in the Roosevelt White House, the speechwriting system was not well ordered. FDR used a broad selection of friends and aides to draft speeches and written messages to Congress, often drawing them into the process through their policy portfolios. And as FDR experimented with different policies, he cycled through various advisers. Howe, appointed as Roosevelt’s private secretary, continued to contribute to speeches to the end of his life in 1936. Other contributors included Donald Richberg, a Chicago labor lawyer before joining the administration; the diplomat William Bullitt; law professor Felix Frankfurter, who would continue to consult on speeches even after he joined the Supreme Court; retired Army Brigadier General Hugh Johnson, who was a key official in the National Recovery Administration and later the Works Progress Administration; Brains Trusters Rex Tugwell, an agriculture expert and Columbia professor, and Adolph Berle, a former child prodigy who graduated from Harvard as a teenager and was appointed to be counsel for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

  Moley took a nominal position as Assistant Secretary of State, off the White House staff so as to avoid inflaming Howe, but that role was short-lived. Secretary of State Cordell Hull discovered at the 1933 World Economic Conference in London that Moley had been secretly sending negative reports to Roosevelt. So when he left the department in September 1933, he moved at once into preparation of a new weekly news and opinion magazine, Today.

  Almost immediately, Moley was summoned by Roosevelt on October 22 to help prepare a fireside chat for that evening on commodity prices and the value of the dollar. Moley opposed FDR’s plan but he answered the call because, “in this instance, I was merely a draftsman.” Later he rejected suggestions that he was a mercenary pen who provided words without regard for their content. “I was no weaver of fancy phrases to fit whomever might call for such confections,” he wrote in 1966. “If I had not believed in Roosevelt’s objectives, I could not have participated.”

  But in October 1933, Moley was ready to weave. While loyalty and overall agreement with the New Deal quieted his discomfort, the fireside chat signaled a policy divergence between the two friends that would grow over the next three years. Five days later Today debuted,* with a Moley editorial saying that Roosevelt’s character and heritage would prevent him from ever assuming dictatorial powers. If this seems oddly obvious seventy-five years later, it was not so at the time: that the president could assume extraordinary authority to battle depression was part of the political debate. But Moley was not being entirely truthful: his notes from his initial inaugural discussions with Roosevelt included ideas of “dictatorship” and “dictatorial powers.” The inaugural address raised the notion that Roosevelt might ask for wartime powers if Congress did not act quickly.

  Quiet invitations to the White House remained a regular part of Moley’s life during FDR’s first term. By his own reckoning, he made the train trip from New York to Washington no fewer than seventy-five times, spending 132 days in D.C., to consult on speeches and written messages to Congress—and that did not include trips to Hyde Park. He would slip in a side entrance, through the Cabinet Room and the office of Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, FDR’s personal secretary, thus avoiding the media (of which he, of course, was a member).* He stayed overnight in the executive mansion occasionally, but more often would check into a hotel. As he avoided the official White House calendar, his visits did not attract press attention.

  The editor of a news weekly moonlighting as the president’s top speechwriter would be a scandalous violation of journalistic ethics in present times. But the battle lines were then less distinct. In May 1932, for example, a small group of reporters picnicking with Roosevelt and LeHand were ribbing the governor about his speeches, so FDR jokingly challenged them to produce something better. The Herald Tribune’s Ernest K. Lindley, with help from his colleagues, wrote a draft the candidate used at Oglethorpe University later that month. The speech’s promise of “bold, persistent experimentation” became a neat summation of Roosevelt’s governing philosophy.

  In December 1933, Roosevelt asked Moley to oversee the drafting of a securities exchange bill for the following year. Moley called in a pair of young lawyers he knew, Tom Corcoran and Ben Cohen. Corcoran worked at the Reconstruction Finance Corporation while Cohen was a staffer at the Public Works Administration. Both disciples of Frankfurter, the two were an inseparable team. Corcoran—“Tommy the Cork”—was brash and blustery, unafraid to fight, threaten, or cajole. He played piano well and accordion better, singing along from a bottomless supply of Irish folk songs and sea shanties. Cohen was quieter, more cerebral, moodier. The pair complemented each other, and became presidential favorites as policy advisers and eventually speechwriters.

  Moley got more assignments. “I’d be called in to put together ideas against which I had argued passionately,” he wrote. “I was summoned, in such cases, as a technician at speech construction, just as I’d be called in if I were a plumber and a pipe needed fixing.” He justified it to himself as a chance to do good: “For every time I would be asked to put clarity into statements of which I thoroughly disapproved there would be two or three times when it was possible to modify or head off a step entirely,” he stressed.

  The disagreements became more frequent, and Moley’s Today editorials were increasingly critical. The First New Deal, which emphasized government and business working cooperatively, was giving way to the Second New Deal, which had a more populist, anti-corporate tone. Moley was openly and approvingly suggesting that conservatism and big business would soon be back in public favor. The divergence crystallized at the White House five days before Christmas 1935 during a discussion of FDR’s upcoming annual message to Congress.* Roosevelt, at just over 50 percent in the polls, said he wanted a “fighting speech” to kick off the campaign year.

  “Whom are you going to fight?” Moley asked. “And for what?”

  But while he opposed the idea, he played technician once again. The resulting speech evoked “battle” against the attempted return to power of “entrenched greed” and a “resplendent economic autocracy” that wanted “power for themselves, enslavement for the public.” It turned Moley’s stomach. He had never before realized “the extent to which verbal excesses can intoxicate not only those who hear them but those who speak them.” For five more months he muddled along, trying to square the circle—either to extricate himself from Roosevelt’s orbit or persuade the president to steer a more business-friendly course. His attitude became “Nunc dimittis—Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.”

  Roosevelt was already preparing for that eventuality. In May 1936, he invited the Rosenmans for a Memorial Day weekend Potomac cruise on the presidential yacht, the Potomac. Also aboard were Stanley High and his wife. A Chicago native, High held a doctorate in theology, had served as a Methodist minister in China and, while never ordained, was the pastor of a church in Stamford, Connecticut. And he was a Republican: He had actively opposed Roosevelt in 1932 and would return to the GOP fold in 1940, but for a brief season he was a New Dealer. He had started occasionally contributing to FDR’s speeches in 1935.

  Moley was well on his way to becoming the first in a line of publicly
embittered former presidential speechwriters. And while the feeling was mutual—FDR thought Moley had swung too hard to the right to be an effective collaborator—it was not in Roosevelt’s character to make a clean break with an old friend and comrade-in-political-arms. Moley allowed FDR to pull him back for his 1936 acceptance speech, reworking a monstrously long Corcoran draft that included the statement, “this generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

  What Moley did not know was that FDR had also tapped Rosenman and High to write a draft. Such competing assignments were standard procedure in other areas of the Roosevelt White House, but rare in presidential speechwriting—and even then, usually happened only where Moley was concerned.

  Three days before the speech was to be delivered, FDR invited the four writers to dine with him and Missy LeHand. The president and Moley quarreled at the dinner table. Roosevelt ribbed the writer about his “new, rich friends” and their influence on his editorials. Moley shot back that FDR’s inability to take criticism was leading him to poor policy. The other guests were aghast—it was the only time, Rosenman later wrote, that he ever “saw the President forget himself as a gentleman.” Moley downplayed the exchange as typical of the kind of informal relationship he had with the president, including a “habit of plain, even rough, talk,” and said it was quickly forgotten.

  Moley produced a draft that was, in his words, “Sweetness, if not Light,” invoking faith, hope, and charity. The Rosenman-High effort, on the other hand, was closer to thunder and lightning, decrying “a new despotism” wrapped “in the robes of legal sanction.” The result was a ragged stitch job that in one breath attacked “economic royalists” (a High contribution) and in the next waxed about giving government “the vibrant personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity.”