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PERSONAL MEMORIES OF A WHITE HOUSE SPEECHWRITER
Peter Robinson
Former Speechwriter to Ronald Reagan; Author, How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life; Fellow, Hoover Institution
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: Were there any subjects that Ronald Reagan would not let you write about, personal or public?
A: There was one subject about which he never ever spoke in public, and that was his first marriage. That wounded him so profoundly that he could never bring himself to talk about it. In his first memoir, Where's the Rest of Me?, he devotes one sentence to his first marriage.
I went into the White House, making a mistake that I think a lot of people still make: you look at this good-looking, genial figure and assume that he got where he was by being lucky all his life. Of course, to an extent, he was lucky. Few people have the genes that he had; few people have the talent to become movie stars. But he had had his full share of life's misfortunes. His father was a drunk in the worst places to be a drunk, the small towns of the upper Midwest, at the worst time in American history to be a drunk, Prohibition. And this kid was raised moving from town to town to town, almost certainly because his father couldn't hold a job. This is one reason Reagan had difficulty forming lasting friendships. His first marriage, which to him all the evidence indicates was one of profound happiness, ends after eight years and wounds him very deeply.
Yet he was fundamentally optimistic. He understood somehow the underlying goodness of reality, that no matter what it threw at you, you could find good in it by working at it. This leads to his pony joke; talk to any Reagan hand, and they've heard this joke a dozen times. Two little boys (they're twins) one an optimist, the other a pessimist to such an extent that their parents become convinced they're unbalanced. They take them to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist treats the pessimistic little boy by taking him down the hall and showing him into a room piled to the ceiling with brand new toys. And the little boy bursts into tears. "What's wrong," says the psychiatrist. "Don't you want to play with the toys?" The little boy says, "Yes, but if I did, I'd only break them." Then he treats the optimist, by taking him down the hall and showing him into a room, filled to the ceiling with manure. And the little boy squeals with delight and clambers to the top of the manure pile and drops to all fours and starts digging. The psychiatrist says, "Son, what on earth are you doing?" The little boy said, "Well, with all this manure, there must be a pony in here somewhere." To Ronald Reagan that was more than a gag; it was a fundamental outlook on life.
Q: Did being an actor make for being an effective president?
A: Reagan, himself, often said that he didn't see how someone who hadn't had training as an actor could do the job of president. He meant that at a couple of levels. The first is the obvious level he was always so poised, carried himself so beautifully. He knew how to hit his marks. He could walk into a room and know whether the lights were right for him to record an event on camera or if they were not right, and so on. Often, before he began a taping or any long speech, he'd drink a glass of very hot water so hot that it would be served to him with a napkin around it. He said he could get through even the State of the Union address on this. He said, he had been told to drink hot water for his vocal chords by Frank Sinatra and Billy Graham, "and I figure anything those two agree on has to be true."
Reagan made 17 or 18 movies in his first three years in Hollywood. He was in Hollywood in the days when they were cranking them out. He often said, They didn't want them good, they wanted them Thursday. There'd be problems with production. The lights wouldn't be right. Often the script wasn't done. Reagan got a reputation as an actor who could compose a scene that would bridge them through on the set. This is very useful; you get the idea that life is not predetermined; it can end in any number of different ways. You can try different endings, different scenes.
1977. Carter's just been elected, there's no thought at the time that Reagan will run again in 1980, and detente and coexistence are the order of the day. Richard Allen, who would go on to become Reagan's first national security advisor, has a long meeting with Reagan down at Pacific Palisades. They're talking about defense and foreign policy. The then-former governor says, "Would you like to hear my view of the Cold War?" Allen says, "Well, of course, governor, I'd like to hear your view of the Cold War." And Ronald Reagan said, "Well now, some people would accuse me of being simplistic, but there's a difference between being simple and being simplistic. My view of the Cold War is, we win and they lose." You can't imagine what impact that had in 1977. Allen had worked for Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, he knew Henry Kissinger. He said, "I had never heard a major American political figure say anything like that."
Q: Was his administration more media-savvy than predecessors'?
A: There are two answers to that. One is that he had a particular kind of genius in Mike Deaver, who understood the importance of the visuals what would end up on the television screen on the evening news. The other aspect is Reagan, himself. People who have that certain indefinable something charisma, sparkle, an ability to connect through politics are very unusual. Teddy Roosevelt seems to have had it; Franklin Roosevelt; John Kennedy; and Ronald Reagan.
Q: What is your assessment of the decision to run "Morning in America" in 1984? It was kind of like a McDonald's ad or a car ad
A: Kind of.
Q: rather than an issue-oriented campaign in 1984.
A: Abraham Lincoln ran an issue-oriented campaign, right? But he also spoke in sound bites: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a slave owner." Ten seconds. It is simply the imperative in American politics we hear over and over again that it's the imperative as a result of television, or if you go a little bit back, as a result of radio. If you look at the great figures, they were always capable of giving you something in a sound bite and at length. Look at the Reagan years and the speeches he gave in 1984: one issue-dense speech after another. But you also had to have a campaign theme, a quick summary that got to the heart of what had happened in the preceding four years. "Morning in America" did that pretty well.
Q: An article in The Nation on the wind down of the Cold War cited a White House official as saying words to the effect that, We got our ideas from you guys in the peace movement. Did you, as a speechwriter, derive any inspiration in what you wrote about for President Reagan from the peace movement?
A: No. But there's something to it in the following sense: Ronald Reagan abhorred nuclear weapons. Speech meeting: he launched into a story about how one of the jobs he had, putting himself through college, was washing dishes in the girls' dormitory. He'd always pause when he said that and say, "Not the worst job I ever had." But then he went on to tell us a story one evening this is a college kid during the '30s he's washing and another fellow is drying up. This new notion of aerial warfare comes up, and the other fellow says that in the next war the U.S. will simply be able to bomb cities from the air. Ronald Reagan said, "I told him we would never do that .We would never attack civilian populations." And then the president just fell quiet. He didn't need to say it: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Tokyo. We had done it, and Reagan has been profoundly shaken by that. The strategic defense initiative, his hard position on intermediate-range nuclear forces, all of this arose from a profound abhorrence of nuclear weapons on Ronald Reagan's part.
Q: Was he as simple as he appeared? When I say simple I don't mean dumb, but rather he just tried to look at things as black and white.
A: Certainly there was more depth than is usually associated with him. Clark Clifford, former secretary of defense, comes to town and says, "Ronald Reagan is an amiable dunce." That is nonsense. Was he simple? Yes. 1964 speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater that launches Ronald Reagan as a national figure: "They say there are no simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers." That was a large component of the power of his presidency.
The federal government is gigantic. In his day, in what was called the executive office of the president people supposedly working directly for the president himself: 800 people, let alone all the cabinet departments. Everyone throughout that entire structure knew where Ronald Reagan stood on every major issue of the day. That kind of simplicity gave the entire administration an immense unity of purpose and energy. On the other hand, did he know what was going on? This is the way to make this answer a little tighter I refer you to this new book edited by my colleague at the Hoover Institution, Martin and Annelise Anderson, Reagan: A Life in Letters. He wrote some 5,000 letters as president. These letters show a man in charge. He knows what's going on around him in detail. He knows the issues in detail. He knows his own positions in detail. He was never a kind of master of detail like Carter or Clinton, but to a far greater extent than is generally understood.
Q: What advice do you think Ronald Reagan would give George W. Bush today about being president?
A: He'd give George W. Bush two out of three. I believe Ronald Reagan would be very pleased by the way Bush responded to September 11th, by the way he has deployed American force around the world. Ed Meese feels Reagan would've handled the Europeans a little bit better than George W. Bush did. Maybe yes, maybe no. Ronald Reagan had no depth of patience for the French himself. He'd also have been very pleased by Bush's tax cut. He'd have been displeased by the lack of even any effort to restrain federal spending.
George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan both know how to be president. I had a meeting with George W. Bush when he was governor of Texas, 18 months before he declared his candidacy. He had a bunch of us speechwriters in because he was thinking of setting up his own speechwriting shop. I and another fellow there had both worked for his dad and for Ronald Reagan. We started to tell him how his father had done things. The governor didn't want to hear how his father had run his speechwriting operation. He wanted to hear how Ronald Reagan had done it.
Bush isn't gifted with words; he doesn't have that same sparkle and ease that Reagan had, to put it mildly but you see in Bush someone who understands the importance of setting a few clear goals and someone who understands the importance of talking to the country.
