A Mole's Eye View of the Ford White House
Coyne, John R. Jr.
A Mole's Eye View of the...
...There had been, as the world knows, bad things happening in the Nixon White House...
...But after NixonAgnew, for many of us, that was no longer true...
...The problem began with Paul Theis, the new chief speechwriter, and ended with Robert Hartmann...
...Perhaps he had trouble keeping his shirt tucked in...
...But there was something lacking, something we have come to look for in our Presidents...
...As Victor Gold, Agnew's press secretary, used to say, the elastic in my brain just wouldn't stretch any further...
...Theis would fuss over drafts until the very last minute, crossing out anything remotely controversial and blanding them down until they were as innocuous as cottage cheese...
...People were hungry for character and intelligence, with those qualities precisely reflected in rhetoric and a program for the nation...
...The secretaries laughed at first, thinking he was joking...
...In one sense, Schlesinger succeeds at his task...
...As one newsman put it, he might as well have said the jig is up in Angola...
...But the rest of us just sat and waited and watched the heads...
...During the primary campaign of 1976, several reporters with whom I had been traveling were passing around an ad, photocopied from the 1976 Writer's Market, a publication that solicits free-lance material...
...Bakshian and I were, apparently, going to be asked to stay on, at least through the transition, and although both Bakshian and I had done a number of Ford's speeches, Friedman decided to offer us some advanced tutelage on the subject of writing for Ford...
...The office door would open, and someone would put his head around the corner and look the office over very carefully, as if taking mental measurements...
...Some said Hartmann...
...And vice versa...
...But he didn't, and we kept thrashing around for new approaches, each one worse than the one preceding it...
...and pronounced "holocaust" as "holy coast...
...The girl burst into tears...
...Orben was a talented and well-liked professional...
...It showed Agnew, wrapped up in a black raincoat on an over-cast day, scowling and squinting as he reviewed an honor guard of Portuguese troops, with long bayonets attached to their tifles...
...According to the guards, he encouraged his secretary to do likewise, and one of them claims to have found her one morning, passed out on her office floor with her skirt over her head...
...In the writing department, as in most other departments, the Nixonites were steadily purged well into 1975...
...It is clear that Robert Kennedy lacked the * Robert Kennedy and his Times, Houghton Mifflin Company, $19.95...
...It was time to go...
...It wasn't Ford's fault, of course...
...At the other end Robert Hartmann, Ford's old adviser and crony from the Hill, guarded his position as final editor jealously...
...introduced Elliot Richardson as "Elliot Roosevelt...
...Their replacements were often odd types, men who had grown old in hack jobs on the Hill or in the bureaucracy with a surprising number of quirks...
...But whatever the reasons, it made no difference...
...But in general, that's the way it seemed to be with the Ford people...
...And once, in a speech to the Future Farmers of America, he suggested it would be advisable for us all to take "a trash inventory of our homes...
...The American Spectator December 1978 9 Then there was the problem with Ford's style...
...And Gerald Ford told us that "our long national nightmare is over...
...It is to Schlesinger's credit that he faces this difficulty squarely...
...Actually, he is hot-blooded, romantic, compassionate...
...We tried various approaches, the most dependable being to look over the transcripts of the speeches as given on the previous day, picking out those sections we had written that he used—and therefore seemed to like—and working them into new drafts...
...John R. Coyne, Jr...
...We wrote the speeches short and simple, careful not to trigger an attack of "swimmer's breath...
...But the Ford replacements were a different breed, frequently lending the whole operation an air of low comedy...
...But it would require a lengthy period of intense denazification...
...But Schlesinger's book is not simply a memoir of Robert Kennedy as he and others knew him...
...Hence, his terrible image-building problem during the primaries, when the same Ford never seemed to appear twice...
...There was a great sense of drift in the Ford White House during those days, much of it the result of the hordes of people who wandered in and out, as Ford's advisers attempted to put together a staff...
...The Republican Party was—and remains —a shambles, an empty structure without goals, policies, or a coherent philosophy...
...Stephen Miller RFK: Ruthlessness Reconsidered When does a passion for the poor leave off and the passion for power begin...
...And judged not as a memoir by a devoted friend but on—shall we say—"public" grounds, the book is utterly unconvincing...
...But they had also had enough of politicians whose rhetoric and actions had nothing much to do with anything at all...
...Ford was a smart and successful man...
...But when he gave them, Ford suddenly seemed to develop a Fidel streak, rambling on at times for 45 minutes, swimmer's breath or no, picking up some of the prepared remarks and garbling them, frequently breaking down into total incoherence...
...Finally, one of them spoke...
...Toward the end, Ford's advisers seemed to realize this, and began to search out talented people to help Ford get reelected...
...People had had enough of politicians saying one thing and doing another...
...Early on, Gergen told the writers that they were free to turn down any assignment connected with the murkier aspects of the Watergate defense...
...The name of the organization was Orben's Current Comedy and Orben's Comic Fillers...
...Since he was such a devoted friend, one can understand why he is at pains to convince us that Joseph Alsop was right when he said that so many people have Robert Kennedy "absolutely wrong...
...The ultimate criteria [sic] is, `Will this line get a laugh if performed in public?' Material should be written in a conversational style....We are particularly interested in material that can be used by speakers and toast-masters...
...The ad read: "We are looking for funny, performable one-liners, short jokes, and stories that are related to happenings in the news....The accent is on comedy, not wit...
...And so, for the first time, another writer had to pick up my assignment...
...The guards of the Executive Protective Service, for instance, were horrified by the drinking habits of a trusted Ford aide, who, they maintained, was frequently seen in the morning drinking straight from a bottle he kept in a desk drawer...
...Friedman was an older man, amiable, a gangling sort of fellow with an odd loose gait who frequently seemed to be arguing with himself in the halls...
...The address of the organization placing the ad was Washington, D.C...
...So where it took, say, ten to twelve pages of speech text to get Nixon through twenty minutes, Ford needed only five or six...
...This was one of the key phrases in the campaign she was helping to orchestrate—we were fighting for the survival of "the two-party system," one of the reasons being that "one-party domination" would lead to a "veto-proof Congress...
...When they found them, they frequently also found that they were former Nixon staffers whom they had purged when they first came in...
...There was the would-be writer who briefly occupied Pat Buchanan's hand-some old office...
...One morning, I recall, a lady who was highly thought of by Ford and had been brought down from the Hill to help run the '74 campaign sent out an emergency call...
...Ford's problems with words were to become legendary, as when he mentioned the disease "sickle cell Armenia...
...It was this frantic thrashing that eventually led to my first personal falling out with the Ford people...
...The problem with Agnew and perhaps Nixon was the great gap between rhetoric and reality...
...in the foreword he "declares an interest," confessing that he was "a great admirer and devoted friend of Robert Kennedy's...
...He was assigned a secretary, young and attractive, who had frequently filled in for the regular secretaries in various writers' offices, among them Buchanan's...
...The writing department, consistently one of the best and most effective under Nixon, never recovered, and to the end most of Ford's speeches were at best banal and at worst embarrassing...
...Some of us, perhaps, could be rehabilitated...
...She was being interviewed by a group of journalists and wanted us to write an explanation for her of what Ford meant by the phrase, "veto-proof Congress...
...Paul Theis simply wasn't up to the job, nor was his successor, Bob Orben, the right man...
...That may be unfortunate, but it's a fact of American life...
...But whatever the problem, it finally proved too much...
...The Nixon writers, each of them, had been people of ability, competence, and talent, and each of them had a sense of purpose, even if misplaced...
...He burst into the secretaries' section of the chief speechwriter's office, waving the panties in the air, red-faced, and shouting about morality...
...Thus, when Ford broke out of the White House during the disastrous congressional campaign of 1974, and raced across the country speaking for every Republican in sight (many begged him not to come), he had not a clue as to what to say...
...As he jabbered about it, the whole thing seemed so trivial and some-how extremely distasteful, and I swore and stamped out...
...As a close friend of the Kennedy family, he must have wondered whether he was the right man for the job—knowing, among other things, that many readers would dismiss him as a court historian, regarding the twists and turns in his argument with more than a modicum of suspicion...
...This head, from which the eyes seemed to protrude somewhat wildly, was attached to the body of Milton Friedman, an old Capitol Hill war-horse who had become Ford's chief speechwriter after Aram Bakshian and I had turned down the job...
...The problem was that there wasn't much of anything to say, and for a time neither the writers nor Ford's advisers could come up with anything...
...Further, explained Fried-man, Ford had trouble with long or unfamiliar words or phrases, tending to get them tangled in his tongue...
...And in 1976, this was a distinct political liability...
...I never found out who it was...
...But others in a better position to know said it was Donald Rumsfeld, Ford's chief of staff...
...That would have appalled me during the Nixon-Agnew years...
...This was true, and it was one of the reasons we enjoyed working in the Nixon speech operation...
...They think," Alsop continued, Stephen Miller is a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...It had been a long trip and Hartmann had looked at the draft too late in the day to do much editing...
...Nor could the four of us who wrote his speeches manufacture a great deal...
...The time was ripe for a new synthesis, a new context, and the old establishment politicians like Ford had had their day, a day that will probably never come again...
...Not long after Nixon boarded the last flight to San Clemente, an unpredicted torrential rain fell briefly on Washing-ton...
...The Nixon pictures in the White House compound came down, and the Ford pictures went up...
...If it was a public relations liability for a Ford speechwriter to have written for Red Skelton, it was even worse to have worked for Agnew...
...Nixon may have been searching for the self he wanted to be in the eyes of others...
...There was the man from one of the agencies who one day, while rumaging around his new office, came upon a man's black rain-coat, in the pockets of which were a matchbook from a San Francisco topless bar and a pair of bikini panties...
...But by then it was clear that I would have to leave soon, either voluntarily or by invitation...
...will appear in his Washington memoir, Fall In and Cheer, to be published by Doubleday in January...
...Even though Schlesinger, as a master of extenuations, continually weights the evidence in Robert Kennedy's favor, the evidence overwhelms the general argument...
...He looked very right there...
...But by late 1974, with Ford in the White House, it didn't seem to make any difference...
...For a time the heads appeared warily, and the lips didn't move...
...Stories of this sort floated through the early Ford White House...
...A Mole's Eye View of the Ford White House Were joke-writers really needed in the Ford White House...
...Once, when we all seemed involved in a civil war with the future of the nation at stake, even the silliest projects—making inserts, outlines, and cards, for instance—seemed imbued with at least a modicum of purpose and sense...
...The point, apparently, was that someone would associate the "jerry" in "jerry-built" with Jerry Ford, and Theis had put in a panic call for me to come to his office to discuss the enormity of the implications...
...After a while the head would say something like, "Oh, excuse me," and then withdraw...
...But Ford never seemed able to decide on what self he wanted others to see...
...But you can't call a man who accomplished what he accomplished dumb...
...Now, it's Bring on the Clowns...
...There is something about a professional gag-writer working as 10 The American Spectator December 1978 chief speechwriter for the President of the United States that just doesn't wash, something that at the very least should drive political presidential image-builders up the wall...
...An expanded version of this article (copyright ©1978 by John R. Coyne, Jr...
...During my months with Nixon I had kept a large photograph propped up against the wall...
...Perhaps it was just an unconscious habit...
...referred to the "great people of Israel" in a toast to Anwar Sadat...
...Everything had become trivialized, and now it was all equally important or equally banal—messages to Congress, WIN buttons, bikini panties...
...But he wasn't...
...One unreconstructed Nixonite put it differently, however...
...Time magazine brought out a special edition entitled "The Healing Begins...
...The American Spectator December 1978 11...
...On the stump, he was an enigma...
...Later, after Donald Rumsfeld got a firmer grip on things, the atmosphere reportedly improved somewhat...
...One night, for in-stance, he fell asleep on his office couch and awoke to find a mouse running across his face...
...And so we wrote them short and simple...
...lines for beginning a speech, ending a speech, acknowledging an introduction, specific occasions...
...Perhaps the single best one came at a White House breakfast, where he announced that Daniel Moynihan's successor at the UN "will follow the same policy of challenging some of the Third and Fourth World powers, calling a spade a spade...
...and it became increasingly difficult to write those senseless speeches, those silly jokes, the proclamations of National Pickle Week, those fudged-up signing or veto statements, those letters, TV clips, and telephone calls...
...Yet we always knew there was something struggling underneath...
...Throughout the compound, the purges of those publicly identified with Watergate and most of the new super loyalists began almost immediately...
...Nor was it his fault that he inherited an administration in disarray and disrepute...
...Bill Steponkus, a former speechwriter who had gone back to work on the Hill but retained close ties to the Ford people, called to tell me I would soon be getting my walking papers because "someone over there" didn't like me ("over there" was the West Wing of the White House...
...Sick of the bland diet, I had written an Agnew-style conservative stem-winder for delivery in Utah, where Ford would be speaking for the senatorial candidate Jake Garn...
...Nor did he ever successfully convince people that there was any-thing very much beneath the surface...
...The heads inevitably paused when they came to that picture...
...At least," she sobbed, "Mr...
...There was no real purpose, no philosophical underpinning, no emotion...
...With Ford it seemed to be all rhetoric, with nothing special at all inside trying to get out...
...Buchanan was a gentleman...
...The Party's Over," he said...
...The editor was Bob Orben, also Gerald Ford's chief speechwriter...
...As soon as Rumsfeld arrived, they said, he did a thorough staff review and was appalled to find notjust a Nixon holdover but an Agnew holdover still on the staff...
...When he embarked upon his massive study of Robert Kennedy, * Arthur Schlesinger must have had his doubts...
...he is cold, calculating, ruthless...
...I was pleased, of course, since no other Republicans in the country said that about any of the speeches Ford gave for them...
...But one phrase had jumped out at him, something about the bureaucracy being "jerry-built" over decades...
...That designation, while accurate on paper, is somewhat misleading...
...But he lacked some extra dimension...
...there were no programs or policies or goals...
...As he talked to her he'd unzip his trousers, then make various careful readjustments...
...John R. Coyne, Jr., is an associate of The American Spectator and a contributing editor of National Review...
...this reader at least ends up liking Robert Kennedy...
...We were, of course, all under deep suspicion, the common assumption being that anyone sitting in those offices must have been in some way involved in bugging people, playing dirty tricks on them, and in general subverting the Constitution...
...It seemed incredible that this key adviser and strategist didn't understand one of the few things said during the campaign that made any sense at all...
...Peculiar things were always happening to Friedman...
...praised the "ethnic of honest work" in New_ Hampshire...
...He was bad-mouthing Buchanan, as he liked to do, and had gone through the zipper routine...
...This older writing try-out spent a good deal of time wandering around near her desk, where he engaged in a peculiar ritual...
...But there were problems to the end, many of them the direct result of the quality of the staff...
...Apparently, Dave Gergen, the last director of the Nixon writing department, who for the time being had been asked to stay on, had told Friedman that Bakshian and I were innocent of any Watergate crimes, and so it was safe to talk to us...
...A very strange duck," said one of them later...
...Having nothing to say, Ford, in desperation, kept pushing against the outer limits of the rhetorical barrier, hoping that somehow he'd break through into some sphere of sense and ideas...
...I had a four-martini lunch with a group of former Nixonites that noon, and in the afternoon I found that I couldn't hit the typewriter keys well enough to write the lady's paragraph on the "veto-proof Congress...
...Later, after Ford had given my speech as it was written, Senator-elect Garn told CBS News on election night that he thought it might have been that speech, more than any other single factor, that finally helped put him over the top...
...But they were of a very different magnitude...
...The temptation, of course, is to blame Ford for the banality of his administration and to laugh along with those critics who liked to call him "a dumb Nixon...
...That's just about where Republicans are today...
...The problem was perfectly understandable...
...M y departure came in the winter of 1975...
...Ford, he told us very seriously, suffered something called "swimmer's breath," the result of which affliction being an inability to make it all the way through a long sentence without drawing a shuddering gasp somewhere in the middle...
...Ford's chief writer was actually Robert Hartmann, a former newsman of legendary drinking habits who insisted on having the final editorial say on any piece of writing before it went in to Ford...
...The writing operation is only a small part of the whole White House operation, but it can be an extremely important one, especially when the man you write for has no words of his own...
...For the first couple of weeks, nothing much happened, and then began the phenomenon of the appearing heads...
...I sat among my already packed boxes and watched the heads appear...
...It is an ambitious work of historical and political analysis, one in which Schlesinger labors to substantiate his claim that Kennedy was "the most creative man in American public life when he was killed," someone who had the makings of a great President...
...But he had made his reputation as a professional joke-writer who had once worked for Red Skelton, and he had originally been brought to the White House to undertake the futile task of making Gerald Ford funny...
...Also, said Friedman, Ford was a very slow reader...
...After the sixties, after Watergate, after Nixon, there was simply no context left within which his presidency could sensibly fit...
...Nor did I care in the least, I realized...
Vol. 11 • December 1978 • No. 12
