White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 4

  Shortly before 5 pm on Sunday, December 7, 1941, Roosevelt summoned Grace Tully to his study. Reports had been coming in from a smoldering Pearl Harbor all afternoon and the president finally had a moment to reflect on the speech he would give the next day to Congress and the nation. Tully found him alone behind his desk. Two or three piles of notes were neatly stacked in front of him and he was lighting a cigarette. “Sit down, Grace,” he said. “I’m going before Congress tomorrow. I’d like to dictate my message. It will be short.”

  He took a long drag on his cigarette.

  “Yesterday—comma—December 7—comma—1941—comma—a date which will live in world history—comma—the United States of America was simultaneously and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan—period.” Later, going over the draft, Roosevelt made a handful of changes, scratching out “world history,” for example, for “infamy.” He tacked “without warning” onto the end of the first sentence, but thought better of it and crossed it out.

  He kept revising the speech the next morning, going over it with Hopkins and updating it with the latest news from the Pacific—through the war years, he would always strive to include the latest news from the front. “Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong,” he inserted. “Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.”

  Reaching for an extra bit of symbolism, FDR asked Edith Wilson, Woodrow Wilson’s widow, to sit with Eleanor in the House gallery.*

  As he had used his speeches to lift the public spirit during the Great Depression, so too he would calibrate the public mood during the war: Not too dour in the early going when the enemy forces were advancing across the Pacific, and not too optimistic when the tides later turned.

  War brought changes that ranged from mundane—blackout curtains now covered the Cabinet Room windows during the all-night writing sessions so as to avoid giving a target to potential enemy bombers—to frustrating—the ever present push to include news from the front in speeches.

  The triumvirate stayed basically intact through the war years. Rosenman continued commuting from New York City to Washington—flying down after court and catching the 2 am sleeper train back—until March 1943. Over the course of four or five days that month, he went blind in one eye. He had optic neuritis, a rare condition resulting from overwork and nervous strain. Six weeks convalescence at Johns Hopkins Hospital brought back most of his vision, but his doctors gave him a choice: He could quit the court or quit the president. Continuing his current dual workload could result in permanent blindness. At FDR’s request, Rosenman resigned the bench in October and moved down to Washington. For the first time in seven years working for President Roosevelt, he drew salary as a White House staffer.

  Roosevelt had at first suggested that he create a position for Rosenman akin to the one he had held in Albany: counsel. But Attorney General Francis Biddle objected on the grounds that his position as the president’s chief legal adviser made him the counsel. What to do? FDR decided that Rosenman would be special counsel. “Next week Biddle is going down to Mexico to make a speech,” Roosevelt said. “While he’s away I’ll announce it and when he comes back it’ll be a fait accompli.”

  Sherwood went to Britain in February 1944 as head of the Office of War Information’s Overseas Branch. He stayed until the fall when, in September, he resigned his post to return home to work for Roosevelt’s reelection. This did not mark the end of his official foreign work, however: In the spring of 1945, FDR sent him to the Pacific to sound out General Douglas MacArthur on the future governance of an occupied Japan.

  Returning in late March, Sherwood reported directly to the president and, at his request, wrote a memo summarizing his findings.* He told his wife afterward that he had never seen the president in such poor shape: He had been uncharacteristically quiet and querulous and Sherwood was shaken.

  Nevertheless, it scarcely occurred to him that he would never again see Roosevelt. Even when he got the news on April 12 of FDR’s death, he could hardly believe it—expecting to learn it had been a hoax. He spoke to Hopkins—convalescing from one of his assorted bouts of illness at a hospital in Rochester, Minnesota—the next morning. They had something great they would take with them the rest of their lives, Hopkins told Sherwood, no sadness in his voice. “Because we know it’s true what so many people believed about [FDR] and what made them love him,” he said.

  Hopkins was in and out of hospitals for the remainder of 1945 and into 1946. He died of hemochromatosis on January 29, 1946, at the age of fifty-five.

  Sherwood returned to his entertainment roots after the war, reaching a new peak in 1946 when he won an Oscar for best screenplay for The Best Years of Our Lives. In 1949, he won his fourth Pulitzer Prize for his memoir, Roosevelt and Hopkins. But beneath the success there was personal drift—the rest of his work, Rosenman later commented, consisted of unremarkable movies and television scripts. Sherwood told Rosenman that his years in Washington, living real drama, had dulled his ability to write the fictional variety. He died of a heart attack in New Rochelle, New York, on November 14, 1955.

  “It was really best for him, in my opinion, that he finally went, rather than continuing along the path that he was going,” Rosenman later said. “He never became disreputable or a matter of public scorn, but his friends knew that he was drinking too much. It was quite sad.”

  Rosenman lived until 1973. New generations of White House speechwriters periodically invited him down for a meal in the White House mess to pick his brain about how it had been at the beginning. Taken into the Cabinet Room in 1969 by Nixon speechwriter William Safire, Rosenman grew misty-eyed. “That’s where Bobby Sherwood, Harry Hopkins and I used to work on speeches,” he said. “It always seems so much smaller when you come back, from the way you remembered it.”

  Roosevelt left numerous legacies with which his successors could grapple and try to adjust, whether in governmental size or philosophy, in the style of his public pronouncements or the manner in which they were drafted. He was not the first chief executive to employ a speechwriter full time, but by institutionalizing the position, he revolutionized it—and presidential communications. And if too often FDR’s successors reached for his speaking style—presidents through the 1970s would still try to give “fireside chats”—this often reflected a failure to achieve Roosevelt’s skill in the hidden processes that lead up to a speech.

  Roosevelt’s gift—by design or by instinct—was to find people who could catch and augment his own style, aides who could, to use a sports metaphor, help the president elevate his own game. As the speechwriting was often part of the policy formulation process, these were men who could and did debate policies with their chief. And as he had the time and interest to engage deeply in the preparation process, these were for the most part men who knew their boss intimately.

  As with trying to mimic FDR’s speaking style, adopting the specifics of his preparation style would not necessarily make sense for his successors—especially given the growth of the government and White House staff, and their own predilections. But to the extent that succeeding presidents have managed to even approximate FDR’s skill in using speechwriters to augment their own styles, they have succeeded in presidential communication. It has come naturally to some, while others have had to learn on the job. Those who failed to use this tool found their White House tenures curtailed.

  “Missouri English”

  APRIL 1945

  If the activity was familiar, the experience was brand-new for Sam Rosenman. Once again he was sitting at the big table in the Cabinet Room writing a speech for the president of the United States—an address to the San Francisco conference that was creating the United Nations—but instead of working intimately with his boss and one or two others, Rosenman was one of at least nine. More talking than writing got done as paragraphs, phrases, or ideas were inserted with little thought of cohesion or continuity of style. The chaos and resulting mishmash of a speech rankled the orderly judge, who referred
to the process as a “speechwriting convention.”

  As strange was the man who would give the speech. Through a dozen years of depression and war, Franklin D. Roosevelt had defined the presidency in the age of mass communications, reinventing how the nation’s chief executive communicated with the voters. When he was elected in 1932, radio was still developing as a political communications tool. It had blossomed under FDR and he had mastered it. Now Harry S. Truman faced the challenge of following him not simply in terms of giving speeches but in preparing them.

  Rosenman had not spoken ten words to Truman before FDR’s death. In the days after Truman became president, Rosenman and the rest of the White House staff—no more than twenty people in total—submitted their resignations so that the new president could bring his own folks in to the administration. Hearing nothing for several days, and spurred by the untidy new speechwriting process, not to mention business opportunities he was starting to line up (which would have paid a great deal more than the $10,000 he received in annual White House wages), Rosenman went to see Truman. Stay until V-E Day, Truman asked. Rosenman argued briefly but acquiesced: He would stay until victory in Europe. He was struck by Truman’s sociable humanity, in contrast to Roosevelt’s majesty. FDR was always pleasant, but one never forgot that he was the president.

  Rosenman was not the only one struck by such differences. On April 18, six days after FDR died, Truman paid his first visit to the White House Map Room, the top secret nerve center from which Roosevelt had overseen World War II. Carpetless so as to avoid entangling FDR’s wheelchair, it was a small first-floor room that lay directly across from the elevator Roosevelt used to come to and from the residence each evening. It was outfitted with maps of the world that had grease pencil markings on clear plastic overlay denoting troop dispositions, and pins signifying Axis and Allied ships—blue for U.S. vessels, orange for Japanese, red for British, black for German, gray for Italian.* The area was so secure that Map Room personnel had to wheel Roosevelt around, as his valet was not cleared to enter. Truman had never seen it as vice president.

  Truman was expected at 2 pm, but because Roosevelt was chronically late, the duty officers were startled when three loud raps announced his arrival at 1:48 pm. Such early arrivals would “scare the bejesus out of staff members,” recalled George Elsey, a naval reservist who was working as assistant to the president’s naval aide. Lanky and good-looking, Elsey was “very crisp and very precise and very logical,” one colleague recalled years later. He had been a graduate student in American history at Harvard before joining the Office of Naval Intelligence in December 1941. While working in the Map Room, he had helped Sherwood, Rosenman, and Hopkins with research for FDR’s speeches, and on one occasion collaborated with Sherwood on a radio address praising Christopher Columbus.

  On that first visit to the Map Room, Truman said that he wanted to meet the young watch officers—and then walked around the room introducing himself. Roosevelt would have let the officers come to him.

  On May 8, 1945, the Allies achieved victory in Europe. Rosenman again went to Truman and asked that the president accept his resignation. Stay until V-J Day, Truman asked. Rosenman acquiesced. Writing in his diary the next month, Truman described Rosenman as “one of the ablest men in Washington, keen mind, a lucid pen, a loyal Roosevelt man and an equally loyal Truman man.” By then, Rosenman had resolved to kill the speechwriting convention: He and press secretary Charlie Ross, a friend of Truman’s since high school, went to the president and explained that it did not work, that the two of them had to be able to write the first draft themselves; then the convention, which was mostly composed of Truman’s Missouri cronies, could have a crack at it. Truman gave them the okay. It was the first victory in Rosenman’s campaign to eliminate the speechwriting group. And when on June 26 the president spoke to the closing session of the United Nations Conference, it was the first speech composed with what Rosenman viewed as any sense of order.

  Having eliminated the convention from the preparation of the first draft, Rosenman set about dismantling it entirely. “It’s very easy to sit around a table and smoke a cigar and say you ought to do this and you ought to say that,” he recalled. “When that happened I would take a yellow pad and say, ‘That’s very good, take this pad and go into the next room and write me three paragraphs.’ Usually that fellow disappeared because when it came to putting something on paper he couldn’t.”

  In mid-July, Truman was scheduled to travel to Potsdam, Germany, to meet with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill to discuss postwar issues. Early that month, Admiral James K. Vardaman, his naval aide, brought a young officer in to the Oval Office to meet Truman. “Mr. President, this is Lieutenant Clark Clifford, the 38-year-old naval officer I told you about,” Vardaman said. “He is going to look after my office while we are gone.” Truman’s expression registered no change as he glanced up and quickly took in the officer, saying only: “Big fella, ain’t he?”

  “He was like a Greek god—way over six feet tall, and handsome,” one Truman White House staffer later recalled. Clifford had spent sixteen years as a trial lawyer in St. Louis, starting out with pro bono work. “I handled fourteen of those and every client I had went up to the state penitentiary,” he said. “But I was learning all the time.” Looking back, Clifford ascribed his skills as a political infighter and White House aide to these tough courtroom lessons. Speaking in front of a jury trained him to organize facts and present them in as persuasive a manner as possible.

  His ascent to the White House was brilliant luck. Joining the Naval Reserve in 1944, Clifford was stationed in San Francisco working on naval logistics. It was there that he got a call from an old client and friend, Vardaman, a naval reservist who had just been assigned to the White House. Why not come along? Vardaman asked. “He was energetic and highly capable, which could not be said of several of Truman’s early appointees,” Elsey later said of Clifford. Clifford quickly discovered that in the White House the naval aide had little to do—and his assistant less. But he also noticed that even when the rest of the building was quiet, Rosenman’s office hummed with activity. Clifford and Rosenman, with a shared affinity for legal nuance, quickly hit it off, and the young naval officer soon ingratiated himself with the White House veteran, helping out the special counsel where he could.

  On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced his nation’s surrender. With victory over Japan, World War II was concluded—but Rosenman’s White House tenure was not. He again asked Truman for his release. Stay while the country reconverts to a peacetime footing, the president now asked. Again, Rosenman agreed.

  By this time the two had gotten into a “groove,” as Truman put it, in terms of preparing his speeches and messages. Returning from the Potsdam Conference in early August, Truman had observed to Rosenman that his presidency had focused almost exclusively on foreign affairs, and that he had to force his attention to domestic issues. Rosenman suggested that Truman lay out his political philosophy in a written message to the Congress detailing his domestic plans. The judge had talked to Truman’s new aides and old Missouri friends like John Snyder, whom Truman would appoint Secretary of the Treasury in 1946. They were all conservative, and Rosenman supposed that Truman would depart from the liberal, New Deal path in favor of a more conservative course on domestic policies. So he was pleasantly surprised when Truman, talking to Rosenman about what he wanted in the message, laid out a strongly liberal agenda.

  Rosenman, with Ross’s help, wrote a pair of drafts of the message before sharing it with the other writers. A week of sometimes heated argument ensued, with Rosenman and Ross advocating for a liberal continuation of the New Deal while Snyder and others argued that the suggested program was communistic and would be a disaster for both the country and the Truman presidency. The message would be a blueprint for the nascent administration. “This was indeed the show-down for the President—the point of no return,” Rosenman later noted. “It set President Truman on the path of the future
which he was to follow.” Truman’s decision to follow the liberal course brought Snyder to tears.

  On both speeches and written messages, Truman had a different collaborative approach from FDR. Rosenman later estimated that stylistically Truman did not contribute 20 percent of what Roosevelt did to the speech process. He would give detailed instructions about what he wanted to say, but would contribute little in terms of how to say it. This would change as Truman became more comfortable as president and learned to use his speechwriters not simply to echo Roosevelt but to amplify Truman. But it was a slow process.

  When Rosenman ran into Robert Sherwood on an airplane toward the end of Truman’s first term, they got to reminiscing. They laughed about how the playwright had been so sure that Roosevelt drafted his own speeches because of their stylistic consistency. “It’s a strange thing about that continuity of style,” Sherwood teased. “It not only stayed with Roosevelt all during his governorship and the presidency, but I’ve even noticed that it’s lapsed over to his successor.” Clifford too had noticed the similarity and resolved to help the president sound like Truman, not FDR.

  Truman also paled in comparison to his predecessor when it came to delivering a speech. Roosevelt was a master with a prepared address, whether it was a fireside talk or a rally in front of thousands. Truman was a mess. Even with thick-lensed glasses compensating for his poor eyesight, he had trouble reading a text. He would lean so far over the page, straining to see the words, that his audience often saw more of the top of his head than his face. He would look up, trying to connect with the audience—and then back down, trying to relocate his place in the speech, which took a moment or two—and then back up, restarting the process. He sped through his texts, the words streaming steadily in what the press liked to call his “drone,” the slightly nasal midwestern voice flat, as if he was concentrating so hard on getting the words out that he could expend no thought on which to emphasize. He gestured in a way that came to be derisively known as “chopping wood.”