Tea Leaves in the Sink

...True, there has not been any discernible revival of the national letters since January 20, but Edmund Burkes are not hatched overnight...

...Ghostwriting, then, is an expedient born long ago in the literary deficiencies of captains and kings and proliferated in our day by a sort of creeping insanity...

...He let it be known that he wrote his own Inaugural and that he regularly goes into seclusion with pencils and long, yellow pad...

...From all sides came the discouraging taunt, “Tell it like it is...

...He frequently speaks without a text...

...for the artifices of politics-as-usual are perpetually at war with honest expression...

...It is often superficial-a hurried response to an artificial need, such as the arbitrary demands of a speaking tour schedule...

...In short, he is a juggler of conflicting interests, perhaps preordained to be so by the democratic system, and so he seeks as much to conceal and evade as to reveal and confront...

...He will not knowingly anger the many, or even the few, unless those few are either remote from his constituency or necessary casualties of his courtship of the many...

...Such a reform may still be possible...

...But no matter...

...And it is hackneyed...

...Now it is a bureaucratically entrenched institution, adding yet another layer of obfuscation and impersonality between the citizen and the process that rules him...

...So I suggest a look at that process...

...Nor can a thousand such exercises develop a political wiseman...

...At the end, we have the situation so well described by David S. Broder (The Washington Monthly, February, 1969): the speechwriter on the campaign plane, typing out copy for a waiting press, and distributing it before the candidate has even seen it...

...As a CBS documentary pointed out last year, ghostwriters in the more “efficient” political campaigns avoid the candidate and work directly with the pollsters and ad men...

...He has a large staff of ghosts and an editor-in-chief, James Keogh, formerly of Time...

...in short, their character and greatness...

...In those simpler days, ghostwriting seemed faintly dishonest...

...It inclines to be wooden because it expresses, not first person insights and convictions, but secondhand approximations...

...What’s the difference,” today’s statesman will say of ghostwriters, “so long as I tell them what I want and they shape it up and put the feathers on it...

...Now, all this may be only tactical...

...the writer, subordinate, uncertain, lacking personal experience and a sense of authority, relies on the stock phrases of others...

...Growing numbers complained of an oppressive dreariness, a terrible sameness, a frustrating indirectness in political language at all levels...

...This dichotomy is reen-forced in the modern era by the universal speed-up...

...It is usually tepid...

...There are some who see glory in it...

...Like them, he felt honor-bound to conceal his handiwork...

...It is the continuing means by which he evolves and distills his experience into a philosophy, enlarges his capacity for conceptual thought, and develops the powers of expression without which he cannot effectively ,lead...

...A generation ago, the ghostwriter was as unacknowledged as the hair-dyer and corseteer of today’s public man...

...He follows his view of the truth to its logical conclusion, even though the result may shock the public, anger the majority, embarrass his family, offend his friends...

...It is no longer a one-to-one relationship...

...His dedication to the truth is qualified, as he will admit to intimates (even the estimable Senator Fulbright has confessed that his objectivity stops at cotton and rice, and he might have added civil rights...

...Nixon’s credibility...

...George Orwell, in an essay called “Politics and the English Language...

...He is just a “common, garden variety” Republican or Democrat, he says...

...They can cultivate periods of silence...

...By some measurements, ghostwriters had achieved a gaudy success, and by the middle 1960’s hundreds of them were at work throughout government and politics...

...But today’s Governor or Senator considers himself too busy to labor over words, busier than the wartime President who struggled through six handwritten drafts of the Gettysburg Address...

...The goals of politics-to compromise, fuse, placate, reconcile, bargain, accomplish-are sometimes higher or broader than the goals of literature...

...He feels he has something new and provocative to say...

...His staff is frustrated to the point of despair...

...Or so he thinks...

...The media have an insatiable appetite for pronouncements...

...How wise and resolute can the statesman be whose preparation rests on the quicksand of ghosted research and committee minutes...

...The public man important or wealthy enough to command a large payroll often employs a whole stable of speechwriters...

...He cultivates support from as many factions as possible and so he blurs differences and 'plays down distinctions...

...some who fear for a society whose campaigns are on time but whose dialogue is worn...

...Can anything be done to reverse the trend...

...Instead of a new rapport between the political establishment and the people, there was a breakdown in communication...

...It would be overstating things to hold ghostwriting responsible for the “credibility gap” and its heritage of cynicism...

...there is an inherent caution forced upon one who is only anticipating another...

...It is only a difference of degree that public statements today are written by advertising agencies and pools of rented brains...

...The defeated Stevenson of 1952 would probably have been irresistible in 1968...

...they tell his wife what to wear...

...the jets place almost any platform within reach...

...The drab uniformity of processed communication has created a thirst for eloquence, for individuality, for signs of personal thought and inner life...

...The free-lancer applies through channels, gets his assignment from someone’s assistant, and at the appointed time delivers the required number of pages...

...But the process, covert or overt, seemed to work...

...By 1956, John Emmett Hughes, one of Mr...

...Nixon seems to think so...

...Thus -manufactured communication between the government and its citizens...

...We see it again in the evolution of the bi-partisan, multi-billion-dollar ABM program, for which a new justification is offered as each old one is shot down...

...Debate followed by majority decision-that is its operating principle...

...He “deplores labels .” This ambivalence, this incapacity to synthesize the parts into a consistent whole, has characterized our national misadventures, from the urban catastrophe to Vietnam...

...They do not contend for the abolition of ghostwriting, only that it be reduced from a corporate process to a human relationship...

...He dropped his ectoplasm and became a speechwriter...

...Our typical ghostwriter, then, is restricted from the start by the hobbles and blinkers of politics, and to these are added the limitations peculiar to his craft...

...Manufactured communication poses obvious dangers...

...Democracy lives by words...

...Such a cycle is familiar to those who have worked in a variety of ghostwriting situations...

...some who sense that democracy without the politician-philosopher-teacher can have no vision and no future...

...Editors know that the completed book will bear little resemblance to the outline first submitted by the author...

...He does not seek to destroy prevailing illusions...

...it is important, he insists, that what he says to the people be genuine, authentic, his...

...No attitude could be further estranged from that of the archetypal politician, At times a transcendent issue may impel him to rise above his normal pursuits, but usually he selects a topic because it is in his interest to be heard on it, or to support a particular side of it...

...He inhales, early in his career, the narcotic of having his writing done by someone else and becomes progressively hooked on it...

...Because of this interminable revising, the Candidate is gray and exhausted, the news deadlines have all been missed, the personal appearance schedule is in hopeless disarray, the local pols are grumbling, the fund-raising has collapsed, the campaign is a shambles...

...In short, the outside writer is a free agent whose role is to reveal and confront...

...Scholars lamented that our corporately produced public papers could not stand comparison with those of the do-it-yourself eras of Jefferson, Lincoln, or Wilson...

...The outside writer on public affairs chooses his subject, and perseveres in it, because it grips his imagination...

...So he must have writers...

...Reform comes strangely and is more enduring when based on utilitarian rather than romantic premises...

...he can not withdraw for a week to define his thoughts lest that machine come shuddering to a halt...

...A l l of us sense at times that the quality and liberty of modern life is threatened by a universal phenomenon: the displacement of human relationships by impersonal processes that develop autonomous lives of their own and grow beyond the control of anyone-as, for instance, the bureaucracy, or the military, or the intelligence agencies have grown beyond the control of our elected representatives...

...He does not hesitate to violate taboos...

...and a disgruntled public is trying to tell them they must...

...At least Mr...

...He says, “I would hope that I could...

...no write-up of any politician was taken seriously unless it included a rundown of his scribes and their pedigrees...

...The great machine ground out thousands of statements a day, but fewer people were listening...

...His editing declines to the softening of a phrase here, the adding of a clause there, minor changes of syntax made with a flourish...

...So it was kept under cover...

...Well-programmed with answers to surface questions, our typical official is hard-pressed to relate these answers to a philosophy, as any devotee of the Sunday interview programs will acknowledge...

...They can...

...The difference is that he cannot know what he really wants until he submits his first impressions to the hard discipline of contemplation...

...He is bent over the night table in a hotel room at 3:OO a.m., rewriting the ghosted drafts of the coming day’s speeches...

...During the Vietnam debate at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, identical literary allusions appeared in a number of the pro-Administration speeches, only to be repeated the following night in Humphrey’s acceptance speech...

...Together they not only tell the candidate what to say...

...He instinctively recoils from the new or provocative, since he wins favor by intoning the familiar and the accepted...

...but one cannot help feeling that the confusion would be diminished...

...His instructions diminish to a few minutes of inspirational conversation, which he persuades himself is the heart of the drafting process...

...The state of our national letters is more than a matter of artistic concern...

...He seeks to make a virtue of his disarray...

...In time a virtual cult of the ghostwriter developed, and he ceased to be a ghost at all...

...It reflects the degree of clarity, coherence, and vision in public policy...

...Was this futile or sublime...

...it has been committeeized and bureaucratized...

...As soon as the user has formed the habit, his most precious faculty as a public man-the capacity to define and articulate a public philosophy-is in danger of atrophy...

...This pattern of discovery and growth cannot occur when a speech is hurriedly group-fabricated to fit the boss’s initial notions...

...he habitually tailors his judgments to the prepossessions of his audience...

...Some government agencies actually let out contracts for speeches on the open market...

...Moreover, he is at once both the prisoner and the exploiter of revolutionary advances in communications and transportation...

...Eisenhower’s speechwriters, could give a speech he wrote himself at the Republican National Convention...

...It lacks individuality, for it is not self-expression...

...The preparation of speeches and papers is the public man’s education...

...And it is in these books that we find their training ground, the growth of their powers of reason and persuasion, the metamorphosis of their statecraft, the foundation stones of their resoluteness in crisis...

...These traditional difficulties of ghostwriting have lately been compounded by its institutionalization...

...The speeches Churchill wrote himself run to 18 volumes: the papers of Lincoln to 14...

...It is an index of the candor, the comprehension, and hence the consent that exists between the government and the people...

...He boasts that he is not “doctrinaire...

...It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language...

...had in mind when he urged upon his staff a “passion for anonymity...

...Certainly, there has been a revival of Mr...

...Bored reporters coined derisive epithets for the stock quotes they nonetheless filed-such as BOMFOG, for Nelson Rockefeller’s brotherhood-of-man-fatherhood-of-God orations...

...His idiom reflects his uncertainty...

...George Orwell, writing on the deliberate imprecision of political language, used this image to demonstrate the cyclical way in which an effect can become a cause: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more because he drinks...

...The public man today is the hub of a complex, rotating machine...

...It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts...

...The public man must be heard often, he must compete every day, or he will be forgotten by the voters and outdistanced by rivals...

...Even a decade later, Robert E. Sherwood described his writing chores in Roosevelt and Hopkins so mysteriously that the reader could only conclude that the Brain Trust served as a breathing thesaurus while Roosevelt did all the real writing...

...Even in its rudimentary form, in which the great man’s prose is drafted by one close confidant, ghostwriting is fraught with difficulties...

...He need not confer with, or even meet, the officials who deliver his speeches...

...Though he writes for a living, he would think it a betrayal to adopt a stance merely for personal gain, or to soften or harden his judgments in deference to the prejudices of his public...

...Ghostwriters were publicly dispatched to Annapolis to resuscitate a failing candidacy...

...Busy and hard-pressed though they are, they will see that they can get off the treadmill...

...But this apparent success was illusory...

...One cannot be sure, of course, that the present confusion would not have developed even if our leaders had been obliged to agonize through their own policy statements, instead of having them painlessly served up by a succession of hired hands...

...He does not say, “I will...

...It tends to render the public dialogue artificial, to reduce it to propaganda, to banish trust, and thus to pollute our decision-making process...

...He observes the taboos and scrupulously conforms to any number of orthodoxies -political, regional, ethnic, religious, group...

...He chooses his positions on gut issues expressly to advance his personal career...

...it smacked of deceit, plagiarism, impotence...

...To illustrate, I draw the following contrast, acknowledging that it applies only much of the time, not all of the time...

...Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy were in their heyday then, and statesmen were reluctant to invite comparisons...

...There is another danger...

...He seeks to draw hard distinctions, to debunk popular illusions, to challenge some aspect of the reigning orthodoxy...

...If on some morrow we were to discover that our elected representatives were speaking to us in words ciphered by computers, it would strike home that something dear to self-government had vanished...

...They can reorder their priorities so that they work more with their writers, edit their drafts rigorously, and sometimes write important speeches solo...

...But certainly the process by which we produce our public statements has played a part...

...But he scribbles on...

...policy blunders and simple lying had too much to do with it...

...If the President can partially free himself from the cult of the ghostwriter and finds it in his interest to do so, public men in lesser places will lose all justification for their own thralldom and begin to grow uneasy...

...he seeks to identify with them...

...it might even be indispensable to the aspiring leader...

...In a final pretense of positive participation, he will take to fetishes-adding semi-colons or dashes at peculiar places or making every second sentence a new paragraph...

...The arrival of the staff literatus at Hyannisport, or Waverly, or The Ranch would set off ripples of speculation that an important announcement was imminent...

...And his motive may be only that, having in the past been labelled a phony, he is determined to disprove that label by sweeping away all visible trappings of artificiality...

...they appeared on “Meet the Press” and “The Tonight Show...

...and such is the daily flood of news that most impressions on the public are transient and quickly superseded...

...One thinks of Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 campaign...

...Though he may have been in politics for 25 years, he hasn’t made up his mind whether he is a liberal or a conservative, or what wing of his party he is in...

...The ghostwriter’s first dilemma is that he must operate under the rules of politics, not literature, and the two are often at cross purposes...

...This creates an administrative problem which he solves by hiring an editor-in-chief, who gives the writers their assignments and edits their drafts, relieving the boss of his former role and removing him one step further from the process...

...It was he whom F.D.R...

...The example is the thing...

...and his political colleagues would brand him a fool if he did not...

...but the goals are different, and it takes a remarkably gifted and honest politician to bridge he chasm...

...that a sense of ethics and restraint be imposed upon it, so it might fulfill its valid purpose of assisting the public man to fashion his ideas, rather than relieving him of the obligation and, ultimately, the capacity to do so...

...When a speechwriter transferred allegiance from Johnson to McCarthy to Kennedy to Humphrey (or from Romney to Rockefeller to Nixon), it was heralded as a pivotal event...

...The college generation declared that it could no longer believe anything a public figure said...

...Ghostwriting is an ancient accommodation, originating in the circumstance that men of action, fame, wealth or-power-are not always gifted as thinkers and writers...

...Dismaying as this system is, frightening as are its implications, it might still be redeemable if the public man regarded his processed drafts not as the end product but as only a beginning, to be reshaped by him into his own thought and word...

...They can begin to educate themselves for high service...

...Ghostwriting has existed for centuries, but as an informal, personal relationship...

...and should he do so, his literary colleagues would scorn him...

...At first there is intense collaboration and revision between the writer and his boss...

...Then he applies for another contract with some other bureau...

...be broadcast...

...In between, there will be a rethinking, an evolution, an ironing out of inconsistencies, a new direction...

...Nixon’s 1968 campaign, after all, represented a high-water mark in packaging and gimmickry...

...Let a government pronouncement of any distinction be issued and the identity of its real author was sure to James Boyd has been a speechwriter for, among others, two Congressmen, one Senator, and the head of a federal agency...

...He has dismantled the apparatus of teleprompters and trick mirrors that characterized the public appearances of President Johnson...

...But as the boss grows dependent on (and accustomed to) his writers, he loses stomach for the arduous regimen of composition...