A Mole's Eye View of the Ford White House
Coyne, John R. Jr.
A Mole's Eye View of the...
...But they were of a very different magnitude...
...And Gerald Ford told us that "our long national nightmare is over...
...But by then it was clear that I would have to leave soon, either voluntarily or by invitation...
...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...
...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 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...
...During my months with Nixon I had kept a large photograph propped up against the wall...
...An expanded version of this article (copyright ©1978 by John R. Coyne, Jr...
...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...
...The Party's Over," he said...
...referred to the "great people of Israel" in a toast to Anwar Sadat...
...Now, it's Bring on the Clowns...
...The problem with Agnew and perhaps Nixon was the great gap between rhetoric and reality...
...After the sixties, after Watergate, after Nixon, there was simply no context left within which his presidency could sensibly fit...
...lines for beginning a speech, ending a speech, acknowledging an introduction, specific occasions...
...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...
...Actually, he is hot-blooded, romantic, compassionate...
...This older writing try-out spent a good deal of time wandering around near her desk, where he engaged in a peculiar ritual...
...Buchanan was a gentleman...
...That's just about where Republicans are today...
...One night, for in-stance, he fell asleep on his office couch and awoke to find a mouse running across his face...
...But one phrase had jumped out at him, something about the bureaucracy being "jerry-built" over decades...
...That would have appalled me during the Nixon-Agnew years...
...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...
...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...
...It is clear that Robert Kennedy lacked the * Robert Kennedy and his Times, Houghton Mifflin Company, $19.95...
...Paul Theis simply wasn't up to the job, nor was his successor, Bob Orben, the right man...
...Hence, his terrible image-building problem during the primaries, when the same Ford never seemed to appear twice...
...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...
...When they found them, they frequently also found that they were former Nixon staffers whom they had purged when they first came in...
...He burst into the secretaries' section of the chief speechwriter's office, waving the panties in the air, red-faced, and shouting about morality...
...In one sense, Schlesinger succeeds at his task...
...And in 1976, this was a distinct political liability...
...But others in a better position to know said it was Donald Rumsfeld, Ford's chief of staff...
...he is cold, calculating, ruthless...
...Toward the end, Ford's advisers seemed to realize this, and began to search out talented people to help Ford get reelected...
...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...
...And so we wrote them short and simple...
...He was bad-mouthing Buchanan, as he liked to do, and had gone through the zipper routine...
...Also, said Friedman, Ford was a very slow reader...
...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...
...The name of the organization was Orben's Current Comedy and Orben's Comic Fillers...
...It was time to go...
...In the writing department, as in most other departments, the Nixonites were steadily purged well into 1975...
...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...
...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...
...Later, after Donald Rumsfeld got a firmer grip on things, the atmosphere reportedly improved somewhat...
...The problem was perfectly understandable...
...After a while the head would say something like, "Oh, excuse me," and then withdraw...
...in the foreword he "declares an interest," confessing that he was "a great admirer and devoted friend of Robert Kennedy's...
...As he jabbered about it, the whole thing seemed so trivial and some-how extremely distasteful, and I swore and stamped out...
...The heads inevitably paused when they came to that picture...
...The secretaries laughed at first, thinking he was joking...
...But whatever the reasons, it made no difference...
...But he wasn't...
...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...
...I was pleased, of course, since no other Republicans in the country said that about any of the speeches Ford gave for them...
...At the other end Robert Hartmann, Ford's old adviser and crony from the Hill, guarded his position as final editor jealously...
...there were no programs or policies or goals...
...M y departure came in the winter of 1975...
...But they had also had enough of politicians whose rhetoric and actions had nothing much to do with anything at all...
...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...
...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...
...Early on, Gergen told the writers that they were free to turn down any assignment connected with the murkier aspects of the Watergate defense...
...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...
...A Mole's Eye View of the Ford White House Were joke-writers really needed in the Ford White House...
...Finally, one of them spoke...
...Nor could the four of us who wrote his speeches manufacture a great deal...
...this reader at least ends up liking Robert Kennedy...
...It is to Schlesinger's credit that he faces this difficulty squarely...
...It had been a long trip and Hartmann had looked at the draft too late in the day to do much editing...
...Perhaps he had trouble keeping his shirt tucked in...
...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...
...We wrote the speeches short and simple, careful not to trigger an attack of "swimmer's breath...
...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...
...The girl burst into tears...
...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...
...And vice versa...
...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...
...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...
...The problem began with Paul Theis, the new chief speechwriter, and ended with Robert Hartmann...
...But after NixonAgnew, for many of us, that was no longer true...
...As he talked to her he'd unzip his trousers, then make various careful readjustments...
...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...
...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...
...A very strange duck," said one of them later...
...Nixon may have been searching for the self he wanted to be in the eyes of others...
...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...
...Not long after Nixon boarded the last flight to San Clemente, an unpredicted torrential rain fell briefly on Washing-ton...
...With Ford it seemed to be all rhetoric, with nothing special at all inside trying to get out...
...When he embarked upon his massive study of Robert Kennedy, * Arthur Schlesinger must have had his doubts...
...Even though Schlesinger, as a master of extenuations, continually weights the evidence in Robert Kennedy's favor, the evidence overwhelms the general argument...
...Stories of this sort floated through the early Ford White House...
...But in general, that's the way it seemed to be with the Ford people...
...There was the would-be writer who briefly occupied Pat Buchanan's hand-some old office...
...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...
...But Ford never seemed able to decide on what self he wanted others to see...
...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...
...As Victor Gold, Agnew's press secretary, used to say, the elastic in my brain just wouldn't stretch any further...
...Everything had become trivialized, and now it was all equally important or equally banal—messages to Congress, WIN buttons, bikini panties...
...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...
...For the first couple of weeks, nothing much happened, and then began the phenomenon of the appearing 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...
...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...
...The American Spectator December 1978 9 Then there was the problem with Ford's style...
...The American Spectator December 1978 11...
...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...
...Ford's problems with words were to become legendary, as when he mentioned the disease "sickle cell Armenia...
...There had been, as the world knows, bad things happening in the Nixon White House...
...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 whatever the problem, it finally proved too much...
...Stephen Miller RFK: Ruthlessness Reconsidered When does a passion for the poor leave off and the passion for power begin...
...People had had enough of politicians saying one thing and doing another...
...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...
...People were hungry for character and intelligence, with those qualities precisely reflected in rhetoric and a program for the nation...
...So where it took, say, ten to twelve pages of speech text to get Nixon through twenty minutes, Ford needed only five or six...
...Perhaps it was just an unconscious habit...
...Some of us, perhaps, could be rehabilitated...
...And so, for the first time, another writer had to pick up my assignment...
...Nor did he ever successfully convince people that there was any-thing very much beneath the surface...
...Yet we always knew there was something struggling underneath...
...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...
...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...
...But there were problems to the end, many of them the direct result of the quality of the staff...
...Nor was it his fault that he inherited an administration in disarray and disrepute...
...John R. Coyne, Jr., is an associate of The American Spectator and a contributing editor of National Review...
...They think," Alsop continued, Stephen Miller is a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...introduced Elliot Richardson as "Elliot Roosevelt...
...But you can't call a man who accomplished what he accomplished dumb...
...Throughout the compound, the purges of those publicly identified with Watergate and most of the new super loyalists began almost immediately...
...This was true, and it was one of the reasons we enjoyed working in the Nixon speech operation...
...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...
...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...
...That may be unfortunate, but it's a fact of American life...
...But by late 1974, with Ford in the White House, it didn't seem to make any difference...
...But there was something lacking, something we have come to look for in our Presidents...
...and pronounced "holocaust" as "holy coast...
...At least," she sobbed, "Mr...
...The Nixon pictures in the White House compound came down, and the Ford pictures went up...
...Ford was a smart and successful man...
...For a time the heads appeared warily, and the lips didn't move...
...But the Ford replacements were a different breed, frequently lending the whole operation an air of low comedy...
...Peculiar things were always happening to Friedman...
...That designation, while accurate on paper, is somewhat misleading...
...will appear in his Washington memoir, Fall In and Cheer, to be published by Doubleday in January...
...Time magazine brought out a special edition entitled "The Healing Begins...
...It was this frantic thrashing that eventually led to my first personal falling out with the Ford people...
...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...
...As one newsman put it, he might as well have said the jig is up in Angola...
...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...
...The editor was Bob Orben, also Gerald Ford's chief speechwriter...
...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...
...Some said Hartmann...
...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...
...Orben was a talented and well-liked professional...
...I sat among my already packed boxes and watched the heads appear...
...He looked very right there...
...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...
...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...
...But Schlesinger's book is not simply a memoir of Robert Kennedy as he and others knew him...
...But he lacked some extra dimension...
...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...
...But it would require a lengthy period of intense denazification...
...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 wasn't Ford's fault, of course...
...But he didn't, and we kept thrashing around for new approaches, each one worse than the one preceding it...
...The Republican Party was—and remains —a shambles, an empty structure without goals, policies, or a coherent philosophy...
...Nor did I care in the least, I realized...
...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...
...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...
...I never found out who it was...
...And judged not as a memoir by a devoted friend but on—shall we say—"public" grounds, the book is utterly unconvincing...
...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...
...One unreconstructed Nixonite put it differently, however...
...John R. Coyne, Jr...
...praised the "ethnic of honest work" in New_ Hampshire...
...The address of the organization placing the ad was Washington, D.C...
...There was no real purpose, no philosophical underpinning, no emotion...
...Further, explained Fried-man, Ford had trouble with long or unfamiliar words or phrases, tending to get them tangled in his tongue...
...On the stump, he was an enigma...
...But the rest of us just sat and waited and watched the heads...
...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...
...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...
Vol. 11 • December 1978 • No. 12
