White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters

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Copyright © 2008 by Robert Schlesinger

Illustration credits appear on Back matter.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schlesinger, Robert

White House ghosts: presidents and their speechwriters/Robert Schlesinger.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographic references and index.

1. Presidents—United States—History—20th century. 2. Presidents—United States—

Biography. 3. Rhetoric—Political aspects—United States—History—20th century. 4. Political oratory—United States—History—20th century. 5. Speechwriting—United States—History—20th century. 6. Speechwriters—United States—Interviews. 7. Interviews—United States. 8. United States—Politics and government—1933–1945. 9. United States—Politics and government—1945–1989. 10. United States—politics and government—1989–. I. Title.

E176.1.S+ 2008

2008003127

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6535-2

ISBN-10: 1-4165-6535-3

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonSays.com

For Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a student and teacher

of history, a writer of presidential speeches,

and most of all a wonderful father.

Contents

Introduction: The Coming of the Literary Clerk

ONE

Grace, Take a Law

TWO

Missouri English

THREE

Sometimes You Sure Get Tired of All This Clackety-Clack

FOUR

The Age of Sorensen

FIVE

Now That’s What I Call a News Lead

SIX

Concern for Image Must Rank with Concern for Substance

SEVEN

Go Back and Give Me One Speech, Not Two Speeches

EIGHT

Don’t Give Any Explanation. Just Say I Cancelled the Damn Speech

NINE

The Musketeers

TEN

I’m Not Going to Dance on the Berlin Wall

ELEVEN

No, No, No, This Is a Speech—I Just Want to Talk to People

TWELVE

The Troika

Notes

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

Photographic Insert

WHITE HOUSE GHOSTS

INTRODUCTION

The Coming of

the Literary Clerk

When George Washington considered retiring in 1792 after a single term as president, he asked James Madison to help him draft a farewell address. Four years later, when the general did leave the presidency, he passed the Madison draft, which Washington had augmented and edited, on to Alexander Hamilton. Washington then polished and added to Hamilton’s effort. The result was the first and one of the best presidential farewell addresses. It was actually never orally delivered but rather was printed in Philadelphia’s largest newspaper, the American Daily Advertiser. As a spoken speech could only reach its immediate audience, such documents were prepared with readers in mind more than listeners. Washington warned against foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues; against the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty; against the party system; and in favor of the new federal government.

During his presidency, from 1829 to 1837, Andrew Jackson utilized Amos Kendall, a former newspaperman and a member of his kitchen cabinet, for help in drafting his public statements—both written and spoken. Stooped, nearsighted, and poorly dressed, Kendall had a sallow complexion, a hacking cough, and prematurely white hair that made him look older than his forty-some years. Jackson would lie in his bed smoking and dictating thoughts. Kendall would smooth them out and read them back. Jackson would shake his head and try again, repeating the process until they arrived at a formulation that suited the president. One Jackson critic called Kendall the President’s thinking machine, and his writing machine, ay, and his lying machine.

The historian George Bancroft, the Secretary of the Navy, helped write President James K. Polk’s message to Congress asking for a declaration of war against Mexico in 1846. Bancroft would later write messages to Congress for President Andrew Johnson.

As Abraham Lincoln was working on his first inaugural, he planned to close by telling his dissatisfied friends in the South that they had the choice between peace or the sword. Incoming Secretary of State William Seward, who had vied with Lincoln for the Republican presidential nomination, suggested that the new president add a note of fraternal affection. He supplied a few lines, including the hope that the mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts and hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation. Lincoln polished the thought into poetry for his inaugural address: The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as they surely will be, by the better angels of our nature.*

If Judson Welliver, literary clerk to Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, was not the first aide to help a president compose a speech, he is recognized as the first ghostwriter in the modern sense—a White House staffer whose regular job description includes helping the president compose his remarks.

A snub-nosed, soft-spoken Illinois native, Welliver had been a well-known reporter, writing for the Sioux City Journal, the Des Moines Leader, the Sioux City Tribune, and the editorial page of The Washington Times, before joining the Harding presidential campaign. Welliver was described even by the acid-tongued H. L. Mencken as a journalist of the highest skill and [who] knows how to write simply and charmingly. Mencken had no use for Harding, a former newspaperman himself. Harding, Mencken famously noted of the president’s own inaugural address, writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. He continued: It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm…of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

Is it any wonder that Harding sought help in drafting his public remarks? Welliver was not only speechwriter but press handler. During the campaign, he had written prepackaged news stories for reporters to send home. Harding died in August 1923, and Welliver stayed on with his successor, Calvin Coolidge, for more than two years, leaving on November 1, 1925, to become publicist for the American Petroleum Institute.*

Harding was the first president to have a full-time speechwriter, but it is no coincidence that only one president after him—Calvin Coolidge—forewent such an aide. When Harding was elected in 1920, the election results were for the first time broadcast on the radio, reaching a few thousand households in Pittsburgh. When the parties nominated their candidates four years later, there were nearly six hundred radio stations around the country and as many as 3 million receivers. The 1924 Republican and Democratic nominating conventions were the first to be broadcast.

Politics was on the cusp of a revolution. Radio supplanted print as the dominant medium and was in turn replaced by television. Television evolved to include live, remote broadcasts, then fractionalized from three networks into a panoply of outlets, including twenty-four-hour news channels, a multiplication process that has grown exponentially with the Internet.

The rise of mass media allowed a new, more intimate kind of communication between president and populace. Using the radio, Franklin D. Roosevelt would practically invent this modern style of presidential communication. And as the opportunities for exposure multiplied, and with them competing entertainment alternatives, presidents responded by raising their own profiles. In his only term, from 1929 to 1933, Herbert Hoover made an average of a little more than eight public appearances a month; in less than a full term, John F. Kennedy averaged nearly nineteen such appearances; in his first term, Bill Clinton made more than twenty-eight. As the importance of public communications has grown, so has the importance of the aides who help presidents speak.

Presidential speechwriters are a group unique to the modern presidency, and as such they afford a unique lens through which to view the nation’s modern chief executives. Looking at how presidents prepared their speeches, the care they put into them, and the people they chose to aid them, we can learn about their views of the modern presidency.

Clark Clifford, who helped write speeches for Harry S. Truman, used to talk about the speechwriters’ code. Speechwriters, Clifford would say, tell the world that they go in to discuss with their president the upcoming speech in Pittsburgh, and the president gives an outline—points he wants to touch on—and from this the writers produce a draft. In fact, Clifford continued, the president would say: I’ve never carried Pittsburgh, they’ve always been against me, and who set up this goddamn thing anyway? The reality, more complicated and more fun, lies in the middle.

ONE

Grace, Take a Law

JULY 1, 1932

In Chicago, the Democratic Convention nominating speeches had given way to hours of seconding addresses. Around 3 am thunder rumbled and lightning crackled outside of Chicago Stadium. The first balloting did not start until 4:28 am and was bogged down by challenges.

At the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, New York, Judge Samuel Rosenman was wrestling with the conclusion to a speech he was not sure would be delivered.

He had passed the evening with Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and some members of his family—wife Eleanor, mother Sara, twenty-two-year-old son Elliott—and Mrs. Dorothy Rosenman, listening on the radio to the party proceedings. By the time the storm raged over Chicago, Elliott was stretched asleep in a chair and Dorothy Rosenman dozed, slumped against her husband’s seat. By morning the judge had sent to the closest delicatessen for hot dogs and retreated to a small, informal dining room to finish Roosevelt’s acceptance speech.

Franklin Roosevelt and Rosenman had first met during FDR’s 1928 gubernatorial run. Fifteen years removed from his last experience with New York legislative issues, Roosevelt had sought an aide to travel with him, reeducate him on what faced the state, and help him write speeches. Although his ghostwriting experience was limited, Rosen-man, who had been a state legislator for five years and a member of the Bill Drafting Commission for three, otherwise qualified. Clean-shaven and slightly plump, Rosenman’s fastidious appearance reflected an ordered mind. He was a neat man, aide David Ginsburg recalled seven decades later. He knew where things were and knew what he wanted.

When FDR won the 1928 election, Rosenman worked as his counsel, helping the governor deal with the New York City political machine and the state legislature, and aiding him in drafting speeches and political messages. For the last two years of Roosevelt’s term, Rosenman lived in the governor’s mansion—exposure that helped him learn the processes of his boss’s mind, especially how he wrote and spoke. Rosenman had in March suggested to Roosevelt that he bring university professors to Albany to discuss national problems that he would face as president—what would become known as FDR’s Brains Trust.

Now, Rosenman was determined to finish the speech regardless of the outcome in Chicago: an incomplete project irked the ordered lawyer, and after all it only lacked a peroration. I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people, he wrote.

Like most such memorable political phrases, New Deal was not conceived in capital letters. When Rosenman handed FDR the new paragraphs, the governor glanced at them and apparetly gave them little more thought. Like other memorable slogans, this one had antecedents and echoed ideas already floating through the public consciousness. The issue of The New Republic presently on newsstands had a cover story by economist Stuart Chase entitled A New Deal for America. In 1933, FDR would tell a founder of the International Mark Twain Society that he had obtained the phrase from Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. Rosenman would dismiss speculation that the phrase was designed to echo FDR cousin Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal and FDR hero Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom.

Raymond Moley, who had been the principal drafter of the acceptance speech (per custom he had not written a closing), later claimed credit for the phrase’s origin, noting that he had first paired the words in a May 19 policy memo to the governor. But while his assertion is literally correct, he had used the words only in passing—Reaction is no barrier to the radical. It is a challenge and a provocation. It is not a pledge of a new deal; it is a reminder of broken promises.*

Whether any of this entered into Rosenman’s choice is unknowable. But the phrase would have been lost to history if another close FDR aide had had his way.

After Roosevelt forces secured the nomination on the fourth ballot on the evening of July 1, the candidate announced he would fly to Chicago to address the convention, a risky move—air travel was still a novelty—and a break with tradition. The throng that greeted Roosevelt’s trimotored plane in the Windy City on the afternoon of July 2 included a mismatched pair of Roosevelt aides, each with designs on the nominee’s speech.

One was Moley. A Columbia University professor of public law, he had an incisive mind and grounded sense that distinguished him as a realist among the ivory tower set. He had piercing eyes, and smoked a heavy, dark pipe. He had first met Roosevelt in 1928 when he helped the candidate prepare a plan and a speech on simplifying the state’s justice system. In the 1920s, Moley had conducted studies of criminal justice in Cleveland, Ohio, and then in Missouri and Illinois. He had directed research for the New York State Crime Commission and had also done some work for a group called the National Crime Commission, of which FDR was a director.

After Roosevelt was elected governor, he appointed Moley to a committee that helped overhaul the state’s parole system and to the Commission on the Administration of Justice in the State of New York. He also informally consulted with Moley on such matters, sometimes using him to help draft speeches. Rosenman had tapped Moley as the first member of the Brains Trust and he had become its leader, ferrying a stream of professors up to Hyde Park.

Also awaiting the candidate in Chicago was a former reporter, Louis McHenry Howe, an aide of longer standing than any other in FDR’s orbit, having first met the young politician when Roosevelt was a one-term state senator more than two decades earlier. Sensing potential greatness, Howe had undertaken to teach him politics and had become an all-purpose political aide and confidant, acting as everything from surrogate to strategist to speechwriter. He stood five foot four inches tall, weighed less than one hundred pounds, and seemed chronically ill. His face cratered by a childhood bike accident, Howe was known as the medieval gnome, an appellation that he embraced with grim humor. He was devoted to FDR, territorially jealous, snapping angrily at others who drew close to his Franklin.

As a trio, Rosenman, Moley, and Howe did not mesh, getting along only as their common cause required. Rosenman later described Moley as very devious in some of his dealings but an excellent writer…. He was sort of a hypochondriac, was quite morose, had a very limited sense of humor, and for that reason, he was not easy to work with. Moley, in turn, viewed Rosenman as patently on the smug side, a trifle obsequious if you were ‘important,’ a shade highhanded if you weren’t. Roosevelt did not need them to get along so long as he could employ their talents.

When during the convention Howe saw a copy of the acceptance speech in Chicago, he flew into a rage. Good God, do I have to do everything myself? he exclaimed. I see Sam Rosenman in every paragraph of this mess. By the time Roosevelt landed in Chicago, Howe had produced his own draft, to Moley’s great alarm. The professor fought his way through the chaos to Rosenman. You’ve got to do something about this, he told Rosenman, explaining Howe’s intention to switch the speeches. I have tried to tell him how foolish that would be, but it’s no use; he is over there talking to the governor about it now.

Rosenman approached the open car that would carry Roosevelt to Chicago Stadium (already two and a half hours late, he had no time to rest) in time to hear Howe arguing with Roosevelt. I tell you it’s all right Franklin, Howe said. It’s much better than the speech you’ve got now—and you can read it while you’re driving down to the convention hall, and get familiar with it.

But Louis, you know I can’t deliver a speech that I’ve never done any work on myself, and that I’ve never even read, Roosevelt responded. It will sound stupid, and it’s silly to think that I can.

Howe would not be put off. The governor agreed to peruse the alternative text en route to the convention hall. For years to come, FDR would recount with relish how, his car speeding through the crowd-lined streets of Chicago, he had smiled, waved, and tipped his hat to the crowd while sneaking glances at the Howe speech in his lap.

Standing in the back of the convention hall, Rosenman and Moley listened in horror as Roosevelt started reading Howe’s speech. But after a minute he returned to words the pair knew well. FDR had torn the front page off Howe’s speech and then gone back to the Albany draft, including the historic promise of a new deal.

In campaigns and in the White House, speeches not only reflect policies but frequently act as a policy-forcing mechanism: The fact of a pronouncement focuses and curtails any lingering debates—most of the time. The central issue of the 1932 presidential campaign was the depression that had brought the country to the brink of material and psychological collapse. One component of the economic debate was the question of trade tariffs, an issue that had torn the Democratic Party for a generation.* In early September, Moley presented Roosevelt with a pair of tariff-focused speeches: one, inspired by Tennessee Democratic senator Cordell Hull, a free trader, advocated a 10 percent across-the-board cut in tariffs; the other, a response written by retired Army Brigadier General Hugh Johnson, argued against cutting the tariff in favor of bilateral old-fashioned Yankee horse-trades.

Roosevelt seemed to scrutinize the two speeches before he looked up at his aide and told Moley to weave the two together. It was of course an impossible order and Moley told him so. Roosevelt deferred a decision for weeks, before, in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, finally shifting in favor of the Johnson approach. It would not be the last time FDR or other presidents would blithely expect his writers to execute the rhetorical equivalent of cognitive dissonance.

Of greater importance at the Palace on the evening of September 22 was Roosevelt and Moley’s first discussion of an inaugural address. FDR removed his heavy leg braces and ordered the telephone cut off. Despite a long day of campaigning, he was at his best at night, and after briefly going over the next day’s address, he and Moley turned their thoughts to what Roosevelt might say after being sworn in more than five months later.*

Moley always bristled at being characterized as a speech writer or—worse—a ghost writer, both of which he interpreted to be something akin to a scriptwriter producing finished texts that pols would read verbatim. My job from the beginning—and this continued for four years—was to sift proposals for him, discuss facts and ideas with him, and help him crystallize his own policy, he wrote in 1939.

This summation is a good starting definition for the position of presidential speechwriter. Implicit is the notion that policies and words are inextricably linked—the former cannot be conjured in the absence of the latter. It was a role Moley and others played for FDR in the White House, not mere wordsmiths but advisers who helped the president flesh out policy by putting it in words. The job of speechwriter has evolved as television eclipsed radio as the nation’s medium, as the White House staff grew from a handful to a sprawling group of specialized cadres, and, of course, as each president has dealt with it in his own way. The rise of presidential speechwriters has also spurred philosophical questions involving whose words the president speaks. And these are issues that not only relate to questions of credit but can have real world consequences.

The topic of the inaugural speech was next broached on a train trip in early February from Warm Springs, Georgia, to Jacksonville, Florida. Moley then brought a draft to Hyde Park on Sunday, February 26, 1933—six days before FDR’s inaugural.

Around 9 pm the next evening, after dinner, Moley and the president-elect retired to the library, with its lit fireplace. Roosevelt, sitting at a folding card table, carefully read Moley’s typed draft before remarking that he had better transfer it into his own longhand. Howe was arriving the following morning and would have a fit if he suspected any other hand but FDR’s had composed the speech.

So, with Moley sitting on the long couch in front of the fireplace, Roosevelt rewrote the speech on a legal-size tablet of paper. The two men sipped whiskey and edited on the fly, reconsidering each sentence, sometimes each word, before FDR committed it to paper. How do you spell foreclose? Roosevelt asked at one point. There were occasional distractions and interruptions—calls from incoming cabinet members—as they worked through to the draft’s end.

When they finished, Moley took his original and tossed it onto the still-glowing fireplace embers. This is your speech now, he said.

But Roosevelt had in mind more than to fool Louis Howe. His handwritten copy of the speech, on file at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, has a typewritten note dated March 25, 1933, signed by the president and explaining that it was the Inaugural Address as written at Hyde Park on Monday, February 27, 1933. I started in about 9.00 P.M. and ended at 1.30 A.M. A number of minor changes were made in subsequent drafts but the final draft is substantially the same as this original. That account omits Moley, conjuring an image of FDR writing in solitude. A generation of historians recounted the scene before Moley—incensed by the Roosevelt deception—published his second New Deal memoir in 1966, correcting the record.

It was an unworthy and uncharacteristic ploy on Roosevelt’s part, but illustrates the tension that often exists over ownership of a speech or phrase when a president uses a writer. Moley burned his draft of the speech because of a keen sense that whatever might be the authorship, he and he alone would have to carry the responsibility of what was said on the fateful day of inauguration. The president has ownership of his words, if not always literal authorship.

And the authorship question is rarely clear-cut. In the case of the Roosevelt inaugural, the absence of any extant copy of Moley’s original makes it impossible to pinpoint the parentage of most phrases. His draft was informed not only by discussions with Roosevelt but months of close contact. Whatever he had brought to Hyde Park was already FDR-sponsored, if not produced. And Roosevelt was a careful participant in the speechwriting process, a close editor who reworked material to fit his own needs.

Roosevelt’s charade achieved its immediate goal: Howe believed the speech was FDR’s alone. He edited it himself, dictating a shorter, tighter version, with a new first paragraph that contained the exhortation, The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Several theories about the line’s origin have been suggested over the years. Rosenman later remarked to Eleanor Roosevelt that it echoed Henry David Thoreau (Nothing is so much to be feared as fear), and she replied that her husband had had a volume of the American philosopher’s works in his room in the Mayflower Hotel the night before the inaugural—an account Moley disputes.

Like the phrase new deal, the concept of fearing fear was not new. It had echoes, from Epictetus to Cicero to Shakespeare to Daniel Defoe to Thoreau. A 1931 edition of The New York Times had a front-page story quoting U.S. Chamber of Commerce chairman Julius H. Barnes as saying, In a condition of this kind, the thing to be feared most is fear itself.

Moley recalled the phrase appearing in, of all places, a February 1932 department store ad, but that advertisement has disappeared. Whether Howe saw the ad or the Times piece (possible), picked up the concept from classic literature (unlikely: his tastes ran almost exclusively to pulp detective novels), or arrived at the thought on his own will never be known.

Roosevelt had a keen sense of public psychology. He understood that what people needed was restored hope and a sense of order. As important was his insight that radio, the first live mass medium, lent itself to a previously unimagined oratorical intimacy. For the nation’s first 150 years, political addresses were designed to be delivered to large, present audiences. Speeches had to be long enough to satisfy people who had traveled great distances to hear them, and delivery had to reach the peripheries of crowds. Radio flipped things: instead of aiming addresses at large public crowds, one could now visit individuals in the quiet of their homes. FDR’s lower-key, more casual style supplanted formal rhetoric.

Yet under these apparently effortless performances existed a new political mechanism. Other presidents had had help with speeches, but the intersection of a new medium and a new governmental style under Roosevelt created a need that has not abated. Presidents could communicate instantaneously with greater numbers of their countrymen than ever before, but as the scope of the federal government and expectations of it grew starting with the New Deal, presidents would have less time to prepare their own communications.

While presidents and politicians have sought to mimic FDR’s achievement by adopting his style—and later John F. Kennedy’s and Ronald Reagan’s—the successful communicators have found ways to match his success in finding collaborators who could help them develop and elevate their own rhetorical voices. No president after Roosevelt tried to serve without one, and more often several, speechwriters. Their political successes often reflected their ability to properly use these aides.

Like so much in the Roosevelt White House, the speechwriting system was not well ordered. FDR used a broad selection of friends and aides to draft speeches and written messages to Congress, often drawing them into the process through their policy portfolios. And as FDR experimented with different policies, he cycled through various advisers. Howe, appointed as Roosevelt’s private secretary, continued to contribute to speeches to the end of his life in 1936. Other contributors included Donald Richberg, a Chicago labor lawyer before joining the administration; the diplomat William Bullitt; law professor Felix Frankfurter, who would continue to consult on speeches even after he joined the Supreme Court; retired Army Brigadier General Hugh Johnson, who was a key official in the National Recovery Administration and later the Works Progress Administration; Brains Trusters Rex Tugwell, an agriculture expert and Columbia professor, and Adolph Berle, a former child prodigy who graduated from Harvard as a teenager and was appointed to be counsel for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

Moley took a nominal position as Assistant Secretary of State, off the White House staff so as to avoid inflaming Howe, but that role was short-lived. Secretary of State Cordell Hull discovered at the 1933 World Economic Conference in London that Moley had been secretly sending negative reports to Roosevelt. So when he left the department in September 1933, he moved at once into preparation of a new weekly news and opinion magazine, Today.

Almost immediately, Moley was summoned by Roosevelt on October 22 to help prepare a fireside chat for that evening on commodity prices and the value of the dollar. Moley opposed FDR’s plan but he answered the call because, in this instance, I was merely a draftsman. Later he rejected suggestions that he was a mercenary pen who provided words without regard for their content. I was no weaver of fancy phrases to fit whomever might call for such confections, he wrote in 1966. If I had not believed in Roosevelt’s objectives, I could not have participated.

But in October 1933, Moley was ready to weave. While loyalty and overall agreement with the New Deal quieted his discomfort, the fireside chat signaled a policy divergence between the two friends that would grow over the next three years. Five days later Today debuted,* with a Moley editorial saying that Roosevelt’s character and heritage would prevent him from ever assuming dictatorial powers. If this seems oddly obvious seventy-five years later, it was not so at the time: that the president could assume extraordinary authority to battle depression was part of the political debate. But Moley was not being entirely truthful: his notes from his initial inaugural discussions with Roosevelt included ideas of dictatorship and dictatorial powers. The inaugural address raised the notion that Roosevelt might ask for wartime powers if Congress did not act quickly.

Quiet invitations to the White House remained a regular part of Moley’s life during FDR’s first term. By his own reckoning, he made the train trip from New York to Washington no fewer than seventy-five times, spending 132 days in D.C., to consult on speeches and written messages to Congress—and that did not include trips to Hyde Park. He would slip in a side entrance, through the Cabinet Room and the office of Marguerite Missy LeHand, FDR’s personal secretary, thus avoiding the media (of which he, of course, was a member).* He stayed overnight in the executive mansion occasionally, but more often would check into a hotel. As he avoided the official White House calendar, his visits did not attract press attention.

The editor of a news weekly moonlighting as the president’s top speechwriter would be a scandalous violation of journalistic ethics in present times. But the battle lines were then less distinct. In May 1932, for example, a small group of reporters picnicking with Roosevelt and LeHand were ribbing the governor about his speeches, so FDR jokingly challenged them to produce something better. The Herald Tribune’s Ernest K. Lindley, with help from his colleagues, wrote a draft the candidate used at Oglethorpe University later that month. The speech’s promise of bold, persistent experimentation became a neat summation of Roosevelt’s governing philosophy.

In December 1933, Roosevelt asked Moley to oversee the drafting of a securities exchange bill for the following year. Moley called in a pair of young lawyers he knew, Tom Corcoran and Ben Cohen. Corcoran worked at the Reconstruction Finance Corporation while Cohen was a staffer at the Public Works Administration. Both disciples of Frankfurter, the two were an inseparable team. Corcoran—Tommy the Cork—was brash and blustery, unafraid to fight, threaten, or cajole. He played piano well and accordion better, singing along from a bottomless supply of Irish folk songs and sea shanties. Cohen was quieter, more cerebral, moodier. The pair complemented each other, and became presidential favorites as policy advisers and eventually speechwriters.

Moley got more assignments. I’d be called in to put together ideas against which I had argued passionately, he wrote. I was summoned, in such cases, as a technician at speech construction, just as I’d be called in if I were a plumber and a pipe needed fixing. He justified it to himself as a chance to do good: For every time I would be asked to put clarity into statements of which I thoroughly disapproved there would be two or three times when it was possible to modify or head off a step entirely, he stressed.

The disagreements became more frequent, and Moley’s Today editorials were increasingly critical. The First New Deal, which emphasized government and business working cooperatively, was giving way to the Second New Deal, which had a more populist, anti-corporate tone. Moley was openly and approvingly suggesting that conservatism and big business would soon be back in public favor. The divergence crystallized at the White House five days before Christmas 1935 during a discussion of FDR’s upcoming annual message to Congress.* Roosevelt, at just over 50 percent in the polls, said he wanted a fighting speech to kick off the campaign year.

Whom are you going to fight? Moley asked. And for what?

But while he opposed the idea, he played technician once again. The resulting speech evoked battle against the attempted return to power of entrenched greed and a resplendent economic autocracy that wanted power for themselves, enslavement for the public. It turned Moley’s stomach. He had never before realized the extent to which verbal excesses can intoxicate not only those who hear them but those who speak them. For five more months he muddled along, trying to square the circle—either to extricate himself from Roosevelt’s orbit or persuade the president to steer a more business-friendly course. His attitude became Nunc dimittis—Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.

Roosevelt was already preparing for that eventuality. In May 1936, he invited the Rosenmans for a Memorial Day weekend Potomac cruise on the presidential yacht, the Potomac. Also aboard were Stanley High and his wife. A Chicago native, High held a doctorate in theology, had served as a Methodist minister in China and, while never ordained, was the pastor of a church in Stamford, Connecticut. And he was a Republican: He had actively opposed Roosevelt in 1932 and would return to the GOP fold in 1940, but for a brief season he was a New Dealer. He had started occasionally contributing to FDR’s speeches in 1935.

Moley was well on his way to becoming the first in a line of publicly embittered former presidential speechwriters. And while the feeling was mutual—FDR thought Moley had swung too hard to the right to be an effective collaborator—it was not in Roosevelt’s character to make a clean break with an old friend and comrade-in-political-arms. Moley allowed FDR to pull him back for his 1936 acceptance speech, reworking a monstrously long Corcoran draft that included the statement, this generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

What Moley did not know was that FDR had also tapped Rosenman and High to write a draft. Such competing assignments were standard procedure in other areas of the Roosevelt White House, but rare in presidential speechwriting—and even then, usually happened only where Moley was concerned.

Three days before the speech was to be delivered, FDR invited the four writers to dine with him and Missy LeHand. The president and Moley quarreled at the dinner table. Roosevelt ribbed the writer about his new, rich friends and their influence on his editorials. Moley shot back that FDR’s inability to take criticism was leading him to poor policy. The other guests were aghast—it was the only time, Rosenman later wrote, that he ever saw the President forget himself as a gentleman. Moley downplayed the exchange as typical of the kind of informal relationship he had with the president, including a habit of plain, even rough, talk, and said it was quickly forgotten.

Moley produced a draft that was, in his words, Sweetness, if not Light, invoking faith, hope, and charity. The Rosenman-High effort, on the other hand, was closer to thunder and lightning, decrying a new despotism wrapped in the robes of legal sanction. The result was a ragged stitch job that in one breath attacked economic royalists (a High contribution) and in the next waxed about giving government the vibrant personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity.

As he had four years earlier, FDR hid the fact of other hands in the speech. But this time Moley was the deceived, as the president told him that he himself had made some changes to add fire to the talk.

Roosevelt and Moley went through the motions one last time in Hyde Park in September, on the writer’s fiftieth birthday. As an absurd hide-and-seek went on—Rosenman, Corcoran, and High, who along with Cohen became the 1936 campaign speech team, were squirreled away on another part of the estate—Roosevelt made a halfhearted attempt at recruiting Moley. The writer declined. After Roosevelt’s reelection he sent a polite telegram of congratulations. And there the story of personal relations ends, Moley noted in 1939. There was no ‘break,’ no trouble, no recriminations, no bitterness. The two friends met only once more, and Moley quickly became one of the president’s most pungent and vocal critics.

During the first term, the Supreme Court had struck down various elements of the New Deal. In response, Roosevelt had made one of his few major political errors, proposing in February 1937 a reorganization bill that would, among other things have added a new justice to the Supreme Court for every one that had reached the age of seventy years and six months, with a total possible limit of fifteen. When the Senate Judiciary Committee convened its first hearings into the Court plan in 1937, Moley was the first witness to testify in opposition. Years later he told an interviewer that when he dreamed of FDR, it was always of their reconciling.

Roosevelt marked up no other speech as much as his second inaugural address. Richberg had written a first draft, but as he was a better lawyer than speechwriter, Rosenman and Corcoran reworked it before sending it to Roosevelt. Then the four men edited, tightened, worked, and reworked the speech to the president’s satisfaction.

FDR’s skill as an editor lay in his ability to pare sentences and punch up tired rhetoric. He would usually produce the sort of homely analogy that so often illustrated his public pronouncements. Between the second and third drafts, a section was inserted outlining the problems the country faced, each proceeded by I see… For example, I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day. FDR produced the capstone to this series, giving the speech its signature line. Rosenman had penciled a summary line into the text, but Roosevelt erased it and wrote: I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

This kind of moment was not uncommon. Roosevelt would stop, lean back in his chair, and stare up at the ceiling. Sometimes minutes passed in silence. Then he would dictate a passage that more often than not remained in the speech’s final draft. He sometimes prefaced this by turning to his secretary, Grace Tully, and saying, Grace, take a law—a nod to a George M. Cohan Broadway musical, I’d Rather Be Right, in which Roosevelt, during the Hundred Days, would dictate laws to Congress.

Sometimes FDR’s dictations would nail the point. At other times he would ramble, eventually losing steam and finally saying breezily, Well—something along those lines—you boys can fix it up. Sometimes his inserts were never meant for the speech at all, but were simply an opportunity for the president to vent, confident that his aides would know better than to leave the bile in the next draft. If his writers were united in disagreement with him, he might turn to Tully or LeHand and say with mock plaintiveness, They won’t let me say anything of my own in my own speech. He often overruled his aides at these times, though he might tell them they could remove an offending section, adding, I’ll just ad-lib it—and he would.

When a final text was produced, FDR marked it up for ease of reading—underlining words to emphasize or noting pauses. Hardheadedness will not so easily excuse hard-heartedness, the second inaugural said, a neat bit of phraseology too easily transposed, as FDR did while reading the draft out loud to himself. To ensure that no such mistake occurred during his actual delivery, the president drew a small circle (the head) over headedness in his reading copy and a small heart over heartedness.

The president’s phone rang at around 3 am on Friday, September 1, 1939. Both the hour and the fact that the call went directly through to Roosevelt indicated its gravity. It was William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador to France, calling from Paris. He was relaying a message from Anthony Biddle, the U.S. ambassador to Poland, who had been unable to reach Washington directly. Biddle’s message: German bombs and shells had started falling on Poland.

The years between the outbreak of war and the United States entry into the conflict presented special problems for Roosevelt, who had to lead an electorate that had competing opinions about how to handle the international situation. ‘Stay out of war.’ ‘Help England and France.’ Anybody who wants to understand the American people today must take those two desires into full account," the pollster George Gallup wrote in The New York Times on April 30, 1939. The strains of these competing impulses found voice in increasingly vocal isolationist and interventionist movements, the former arguing that Europe’s problems were of no concern to the United States, while the latter advocated U.S. aid to Britain and France—for example, by repealing the neutrality laws that forbade the United States from selling arms to belligerents.

The trick for Roosevelt during these years was to orient the country to resist the Fascist menace without getting so far ahead of public opinion as to lose it. It was a time of transition and tension in terms of his speechwriting: whether in building a new speechwriting staff or in pushing his own government rhetorically farther than its diplomats preferred.

On Sunday evening, September 3, Roosevelt was giving his first fireside address since June 1938.* He aimed to calibrate American reaction to the war, warning that an ocean separating the United States from the fighting did not place the nation beyond the conflict’s reach, while also pledging that the country would remain officially neutral. This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well, he said. Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience.

Roosevelt had himself added that qualification during the initial editing process of a draft that originated in the State Department. The occasion also illustrated a shift in FDR’s speeches. From 1939 onward, his focus was increasingly international and war-related, away from domestic issues. And it would not be the last time that Roosevelt—or any president—punched up a State-drafted speech to point the country in the proper international direction.

When Roosevelt gave the commencement address at the University of Virginia on June 10, 1940—the day that Italy declared war on France and Great Britain—the State Department prepared a lengthy insert for his speech. But Roosevelt himself—picking language from a cable sent by French premier Paul Reynaud—again found a cutting image to dramatize the occasion. Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles argued that it would be diplomatically imprudent and got Roosevelt to remove the phrase. But the president reconsidered and on the train ride down to Charlottesville handwrote the line back into his speech: On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.

By the end of that summer, the list of former Roosevelt speechwriters well outnumbered the roster of available talent: Howe was dead; Moley had become an FDR critic, as had Hugh Johnson; High was expelled from the New Deal ranks in early 1937 after committing the cardinal sin of using his insider status and information for an article in the Saturday Evening Post; Corcoran had offended too many people to maintain his utility (Nearly all the Democratic national political leaders in the country had become bitter at him, Rosenman later wrote); and while Cohen would occasionally contribute, he was not as effective without his partner. Rex Tugwell and Don Richberg had long since left the administration.

Bullitt contributed briefly during the summer and fall of 1940 but, preferring to work alone, was never part of a speechwriting team. Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish contributed occasionally, starting that year. Rosenman had been a fixture since the 1936 reelection campaign and would remain through the balance of Roosevelt’s presidency.

But one key aide had joined the speechwriting group: Harry Lloyd Hopkins. Iowa-born, he had worked in New York State social services before joining the administration in March 1933 as head of federal relief efforts. He had moved into the president’s inner circle (and for a time into the White House itself), and was for FDR’s last five years his most important aide. He was in a sense a bookend to Howe, though whereas Howe had taught Roosevelt, it was the president who instructed Hopkins in the arts of politics. Like Howe, Hopkins was territorial about his boss and also almost constantly sick.

Hopkins had no truck with formality and relished cutting through ceremony or meandering chatter. Winston Churchill once told him that when the war was over, the British government planned to give him a noble title. When Hopkins responded that nobility was not something he sought, Churchill said, We have already selected the title: You are to be named, ‘Lord Root of the Matter.’

Hopkins’s greatest strength as a speechwriter lay in criticism: he had a keen eye for weaknesses in an argument, and would deftly tear up sub-standard drafts. But he had other duties, and the advent of the 1940 campaign prompted Rosenman and him to have an emergency meeting about their speechwriting. They needed one more collaborator—a liberal who could write and, as important, was sympathetic to the president’s foreign policy. Their first choice, a radio commentator named Raymond Gram Swing, was unavailable, as was their second choice, a newspaper commentator who was on assignment in India.

They finally lit upon a choice with a touch of glamour: Robert Emmet Sherwood, the playwright, who had already won two Pulitzer Prizes. He had a bright wit and quick humor and was something of a bon vivant. An activist who had rallied aid for Great Britain, Sherwood had known Roosevelt at least casually for a number of years. "Those of us who voted against you have caused [sic] to be ashamed of ourselves," he wrote Roosevelt in May 1933.

Sherwood and his wife visited the Roosevelts in January 1940, and the president expressed an interest in a pair of speeches that Abraham Lincoln gives in Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois. The playwright sent these along with a note that said: I saw Harry Hopkins and told him that I wish with all my heart to offer my services, for whatever they’re worth, to you in this crucial year and to the cause which is yours as surely as it was Lincoln’s.

Hopkins ran into Sherwood one Sunday that summer in Long Island. What are you warmongers up to now? Hopkins growled, referring to Sherwood’s work with William Allen White’s Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, a pro-interventionist political group. Sherwood lost his temper when Hopkins called the playwright and his friends pro-British fanatics who were undermining the president by pushing too hard for U.S. aid to Britain. When Sherwood finished an impassioned defense of internationalism, Hopkins, no isolationist, grinned: "All right then—why do you waste your breath shouting all this at me? he asked. Why don’t you get out and say these things to the people?"

Sherwood would get his chance to do more than that. Hopkins brought him to see Rosenman in early October at the judge’s Central Park West apartment to discuss the president’s speeches.* Rosenman and his wife shared an amused glance when the playwright said that the president must draft all of his speeches himself. If there had been substantial assistance there would have been a mélange of style and quality which would have shown it right away, Sherwood said.

Talk turned to a foreign affairs speech the president was to give on Columbus Day, October 12. The men passed around and critiqued a draft that the State Department had produced. Satisfied not only that Sherwood’s foreign policy ideas were in sync with FDR’s but that he could express them with clarity and force, Rosenman slapped a pencil down on the table. "Boys, there comes a time in the history of every speech when it’s got to get written—that time for this speech is now, he said. So let’s get to work."

He turned to Sherwood and suggested he put into writing some of the points he had been expounding. The playwright looked mystified, as if wondering, What in the world is the use of my writing a couple of paragraphs here in this apartment in New York City? How is that going to do any good in a speech the president is writing in Washington?

Roosevelt’s final speechwriting team was now in place. Virtually every major FDR speech over the next five years would be written by some combination of Rosenman, Hopkins, and Sherwood—usually all three.

Work on the speeches generally took place after the regular work day, a reflection of the informality retained even through the war years. Perhaps a half-dozen evenings a month, the writers gathered in the Oval Office at the cocktail hour, while the president mixed drinks and held court. He displayed more enthusiasm as a bartender than skill: his bourbon old-fashioneds were first rate, but his martinis—with two kinds of vermouth and, occasionally, absinthe*—were less well received.

Dinner—the White House kitchen was surprisingly mediocre—was served at seven forty-five and only afterwards would the real work commence. Roosevelt sat on a couch near the fireplace in his office, his feet propped up on a custom-built stool. He often pulled from his pockets little scraps of paper on which he had noted down ideas, phrases, or specific points to make.

The president would retire by eleven; the speechwriters then retreated to the Cabinet Room to finish the draft and often another. White House stenographers, security guards, and—perhaps most important—kitchen staff quickly became used to the odd hours. These late work nights often involved plates of sandwiches, pots of coffee, bottles of soda, beer, and bourbon: Rosenman drank Coca-Cola and coffee to keep himself up; Sherwood and Hopkins insisted that bourbon had the same effect on them.

The three men were gathered around Roosevelt’s desk on such an evening preparing for the 1941 State of the Union address, which he was scheduled to give on January 6. It was coming at a critical moment: The Fascist plague had darkened most of Europe, with Great Britain barely holding out under Churchill’s stalwart exhortation six months earlier that, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

The truth was that Great Britain was rapidly running out of cash with which to pay for arms (Roosevelt had prevailed in 1939 in amending the neutrality laws to allow weapon sales). So, in mid-December 1940, Roosevelt had hit upon the idea of lending weapons to Britain, selling the plan (in a metaphor of his own creation) as being the equivalent of lending a length of hose to a neighbor whose house was on fire. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help to put out his fire, Roosevelt told reporters on December 17. Now, what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.

Twelve days later, Roosevelt gave a fireside chat on the subject (This is not a fireside chat on war. It is a talk on national security), telling his countrymen that the United States must be—in a phrase coined by French diplomat Jean Monnet—the great arsenal of democracy.

The 1941 message, then, was the next crucial step in selling the plan, and in preparing the country for war. Hopkins, Rosenman, and Sherwood were revising the third draft with the president when he announced that he had a thought for the peroration. He leaned back in his swivel chair and stared at the ceiling. And stared. The silence became uncomfortable.

FDR’s hesitation had less to do with an epiphany than phrasing and refinement. Speaking to the press in July, he had outlined what he called the five freedoms that were the objective of U.S. foreign policy—freedom of information, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. Now, merging freedom of information and expression, he was ready to introduce the concept on a broader stage.

He finally leaned forward. Dorothy, he said to his secretary Dorothy Brady, who would sometimes relieve Tully during long speechwriting sessions, take a law.

The first is freedom of speech and expression everywhere in the world, his message would say.

The second is the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—which translated into international terms means economic understandings which will secure to every nation everywhere a healthy peace time life for its inhabitants. The fourth is freedom from fear—which translated into international terms means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation anywhere will be in position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor.

Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms were a stirring expression of foreign policy ideals that both elevated the immediate argument and provided an enduring conception of U.S. policy. The Four Freedoms would become a central piece of Allied propaganda once the United States entered the war. Sixty years later, President George W. Bush’s speechwriters would study the speech as they worked on their president’s remarks to Congress in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Harry Hopkins remained unconvinced. That covers an awful lot of territory, Mr. President, he said. I don’t know how interested Americans are going to be in the people of Java.

I’m afraid they’ll have to be some day, Harry, Roosevelt replied. The world is getting so small that even the people in Java are getting to be our neighbors now.

Indeed, the eyes of the United States would focus on the South Pacific sooner than even FDR likely anticipated.

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,