Writing the president's speeches, thanklessly

NON-FICTION | Giving props to ghost writers

Like many schoolchildren, I was required to memorize the Gettysburg Address. Unlike most, however, it was my mother, not a teacher, who made me do it. She tried this with poetry, too, but it didn't work; our tastes were too different. But on the Gettysburg Address we agreed: It was perfect.

Little did I know what a critic of presidential rhetoric this youthful experience would make me. I have never, willingly or not, memorized a presidential speech again. But I'm not dead yet, and, as they say, I live in hope.

It was learning that presidents use speechwriters that soured me on the form, but White House Ghosts has made me rethink this position.

Robert Schlesinger, the youngest son of historian and presidential speechwriter Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., himself a teacher of political journalism and a blogger, has written a fascinating and informative account of those men and women whose words have become part of history under the names of the men they wrote for. Even today, when White House speechwriters are hardly the ghosts they once were, the average American seldom knows their names.

Although Schlesinger begins his account in detail with FDR, he provides a brief history of earlier presidents and their speechwriters. Sadly, Washington did not write his famous farewell address himself. James Madison wrote it, and Washington "augmented and edited" and sent it on to Alexander Hamilton. Washington made the final touches, but never gave the address; it was printed in Philadelphia's largest newspaper.

It was Judson Welliver, described as "'literary clerk'" to Presidents Harding and Coolidge, who is considered the "first ghostwriter in the modern sense -- a White House staffer whose regular job description includes helping the president compose his remarks." And it is Welliver for whom presidential speechwriters named their social club. Schlesinger has said that it was his attendance with his father at Judson Welliver Society dinners while growing up that led him to write this book.

White House Ghosts has a wealth of details, from the fact that Roosevelt's famous fireside chats occurred with far less frequency than remembered to the "stream of policy advice on a range of subjects" Lyndon Johnson received from writer John Steinbeck after Steinbeck, in Jack Valenti's words, "'fell flat on his face'" as a possible speechwriter. Gore Vidal was considered for a speechwriting position in the Eisenhower administration. Nixon believed that speeches should be written for the ear, not the eye. Carter would not allow many sentences in a speech to begin "I think," "And" or "But." George H.W. Bush did not like the word "I" used at all. He avoided emotion in his speeches because of his tendency to tear up, but he did like "a lot of Yogi Berra quotes."

Presidential speechwriters have had a lot to put up with in every administration: long hours, lack of recognition, seeing credit for their contributions taken by others, intense competition from colleagues, and presidents who can't make up their minds or leave major decisions until the last minute.

Schlesinger is adept at illustrating how successfully -- or not -- each administration used its speechwriters. And many of them, in Schlesinger's hands, become more than names. Attention is finally paid to a long list of public servants.

Joanne Collings is a Washington D.C.-based free-lance writer.