Speak the Speech
Bachrach, Judy
Speak the Speech The twilight world of the White House ventriloquists. BY JUDY BACHRACH Is there any creature in the world lower or more pitiful than a White House ghostwriter? I mean,...
...Schlesinger the Elder’s caustic 45-year-old recipe for State Department policy statements could have been written this morning: Take a handful of clich?s . . . repeat at fi ve-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 was unhappy unless we constantly proclaimed the rectitude of American motives...
...If only Schlesinger the Younger shared that wicked touch...
...It is only in brackets, for example, that we learn that, after the Lewinsky scandal erupted, “the need to excise potential double entendres did not end with the State of the Union...
...Ken Khachigian, who wrote for Ronald Reagan, recognizing the symbolic and practical value of spending a companionable lunch with the bigwigs, did just that...
...Such lines as “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America” (speechwriter David Kusnet ventriloquizing for Clinton) or “I ask you to live your lives and hug your children” (Karen Hughes pulling W’s strings) or “The kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it” (vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon spoon-fed by—who knows...
...The early portions of White House Ghosts, devoted to the likes of Warren G. Harding, FDR, Harry Truman, and Ike, are earnest and just a bit dull...
...And in some instances their bosses are talented...
...Even when the substance is pretty good (rare enough, given all the White House meddlers) you may still have to look down one day and fi nd some speaker like Jimmy Carter delivering it from your lap...
...It was Johnson who advised his aides, “You’ve got to write it so that the charwoman who cleans the building across the street can understand it...
...Unfortunately, after a year or so, the average LBJ speech sounded as though the charwoman had written it...
...Startling omissions, however, are only part of the problem...
...A reprise of “Read my lips: No new taxes” (Noonan as portraitist...
...Footnotes are the usual repository of such insights as the book has to offer...
...Lots of threads, no pattern...
...Whatever happened to the proposed era of Berra-isms, one wonders...
...would not, perhaps, have guaranteed him a landslide victory in 1992...
...Alas, White House Ghosts tends to pick up this and other topics and then, without examination or elaboration, toss them, the total effect being like looking at the underside of a tapestry...
...But at least they can strike...
...Why not grab such an opportunity...
...In a similar vein: When speechwriter Jeff Shesol was debating whether or not to take a job in the Clinton White House at the precise moment that Kenneth Starr seemed poised to sink it, it was once again Schlesinger the Elder who offered some acerbic suggestions...
...And the third was that he wanted his speeches packed with a lot of Yogi Berra quotations...
...Either way, a speechwriter couldn’t lose: “You’ll either see a White House fi ghting for its life or a White House in a state of dissolution, both of which would be very interesting...
...Is it really so low...
...It’s not in the book) most often provoke a simple reaction in the listener: Huh...
...But it might have provided a nice plebeian counterpoint to barcode gaffes at the checkout line...
...I would rather quote Yogi Berra than Thomas Jefferson,” the leader of the free world, as he was then called, told staffers...
...It’s a particularly low form of rhetoric...
...It is worth noting that the best passages in White House Ghosts come from the author’s own father...
...This was the result, as the author reveals in a footnote (again referencing his father) of the president’s insistence that every sentence had to be made into a new paragraph...
...The fi rst was that he did not like the word “I,” as in “I want a bill that’s going to stop crime” because that would be insulting to the police who were trying their best...
...The second Bush decree: His writers shouldn’t pen speeches that were too emotional because he wasn’t...
...Schlesinger the Elder was clearly disgusted on being given these instructions by Theodore Sorenson: “The real triumph is to divide each sentence into several paragraphs,” he wrote in his journal in 1964...
...Well—yes...
...The chapter on JFK’s speeches and speechwriters, a slight improvement, may indeed be fertile territory...
...but if one can extrapolate, it does seem that he dates the downfall of speechwriting to Lyndon Johnson...
...Besides, he added, the job being dangled wasn’t exactly brain surgery: “Have you ever written political speeches before...
...he said...
...A national plague of damp eyes and constricted throats on listening to, “I did not have sex with that woman—Miss Lewinsky...
...Schlesinger, who is the son of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., speechwriter to John F. Kennedy and famous historian, is a laborious and dutiful chronicler...
...For example: What did these unhappy writers going into the job actually think would be expected of them...
...What the hell is the Big Guy trying to say...
...I mean, yes, maybe a Hollywood scriptwriter...
...And in a third exhilarating footnote, the author mentions that when Hendrick Hertzberg, then a ghostwriter for a defeated Jimmy Carter, was packing up, he was good enough to leave a vital sixword message on the word processor: “Get your mess privileges right away...
...Ventriloquism never has been considered the loftiest form of entertainment...
...And anyway, modernday presidents don’t really want the citizenry to know quite what they are saying...
...Imagine you are working for George Herbert Walker Bush, who gave his writers three rules...
...I know Texas has a lot of electrical votes”—Yogi’s neat political observation to Bush Sr...
...some speechwriters kept a running list of deleted lines that became ‘very, very long.’” In another, we discover that Peggy Noonan never has managed to fi gure out why she assigned such a very high number to her points of light: “A thousand clowns, a thousand days,” she ruminates, “a hundred wasn’t enough...
...Like many historians, Schlesinger the Younger draws no obvious conclusions (the book might have been better if he had...
...Come to think of it, the author of that last phrase never is identifi ed in this book...
...In fact, even on completion of this 592-page volume, the reader will remain ignorant of any number of things about presidents and what they are scripted to say...
...Which—who knows exactly what jump-starts history?— may account for a lot of other interesting events that occurred during that administration...
...Four more years of “a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky” (a disturbing Peggy Noonan landscape, no longer hanging on living room walls...
...Why wasn’t Yogi offered a few bad meals at the White House mess in return for a few mauvais mots...
...but it is territory that, by now, is pretty well ploughed, and the original ploughers long ago wrote their own books...
Vol. 13 • June 2008 • No. 41
