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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
In the spring of 1982 I was living in a tiny cottage on the outskirts of Oxford, England. Having studied in Oxford, I had chosen for reasons I can't begin to reconstruct now to remain in Oxford for an additional year to write a novel. At the end of that year, I had produced one half of a novel so bad that even I couldn't stand to read it, and I had run up considerable debts. Desperate, I wrote letters to everyone I could think of who might possibly give me a lead on a job, and one person among several one who wrote back was William F. Buckley Jr., the great conservative journalist. Now, this was generous of Bill Buckley, because I scarcely knew him; he'd simply been kind enough to encourage me when I was a student journalist at Dartmouth. But Bill said, "You like writing. You like politics: you ought to go to Washington, think about becoming a speechwriter. And if you go to Washington, you ought to get in touch with my son, Christopher." (Christopher Buckley was then writing speeches for Vice President Bush.)
I packed up my Oxford cottage, flew to Washington and presented myself to Christopher Buckley. Now, I thought that if things went just beautifully, Christopher might be able to help me find a job writing speeches for a member of Congress or the postmaster general. Christopher Buckley explained that he would be leaving his job in a couple of weeks and that his replacement, who had been lined up for many months, had just fallen through. Christopher couldn't see any reason why I shouldn't write for the vice president of the United States, myself. He suggested that I speak to Tony Dolan, then Ronald Reagan's chief speechwriter. While I was talking to Tony Dolan, the telephone rang. It was the campaign of Lew Lehrman the Republican who ran against Mario Cuomo for governor of New York in that year. The campaign was looking for a speechwriter. Tony couldn't see any more reason why I shouldn't write for a gubernatorial candidate than Christopher had seen why I shouldn't write for the vice president. The next day Tony and Christopher conspired and put their plan into effect. Christopher told the vice president's people that he'd found the perfect replacement for himself me but that they'd better move quickly because Lehrman wanted to hire me. And Tony told the Lehrman people that he'd found them the perfect speechwriter me but that they'd better move quickly because the vice president's staff wanted to hire me. As soon as they said this, it became true. Both the vice president's staff and the Lehrman staff, assuming that if the other wanted me I must be pretty good, began pursuing me. And at the end of two weeks I had offers from both. I was 25 years old. I had never written a speech in my life. Nobody asked for credentials. Nobody asked for a writing sample. I went with the vice president instead of Lew Lehrman, for the noble reason that whereas I thought Lew Lehrman might lose to Mario Cuomo as indeed he did George Bush had a safe job until at least the re-election year of 1984.
Serving for six years as a speechwriter gave me the opportunity to conduct a close, continuous study of one of the largest and most magnificent Americans in the history of the republic. Landing in the White House on a fluke made me conscious that I'd better do just that.
In my judgment, the Cold War did not simply end; the Cold War was won. All of us speechwriters worked so hard to master the rhythms of speech of Ronald Reagan, to climb inside his mind. We read all his old work, sorted through his writing style, his speaking style, his stands on the policies, so we all developed pretty good Reagan impersonations. If you had walked past our suite of offices one evening when several of us faced deadlines, you'd have heard three or four people saying, "Good afternoon and welcome to the White House." You'd have thought you were in an asylum in which everyone thought he was Ronald Reagan instead of Napoleon.
I realized that although the president made a show of taking a relaxed approach to his job ("I know hard work never killed anyone," he once quipped, "but I figure, why take a chance?"), he actually worked steadily. Whereas Vice President Bush often wouldn't get around to looking at a speech until he was actually delivering it. Remember that look of surprise that would sometimes come across his face? Completely genuine. The president edited every draft the speechwriters sent to him, condensing material, enlivening flat passages, firming up arguments.
I learned the extent to which the president relied on his wife, drawing on her for comfort and encouragement. I saw one incident after another in which Reagan demonstrated gentleness, courtesy and good humor. Hard work, a good marriage, a certain lightness of touch the longer I studied Ronald Reagan, the more lessons I learned.
Words Matter
In June 1987, I was assigned to write a speech for the president to deliver in Berlin. My guidance from the senior staff ran, in total, as follows: the president would stand in front of the Berlin Wall, with the Brandenburg Gate rising behind him; he'd have an audience of about 10,000; he ought to speak for between half an hour and 40 minutes; and his subject should be foreign policy. I flew to Berlin to research the speech, a 30-year-old man in trouble. I needed material. My first stop was to the office of the ranking American diplomat in Berlin, who was full of ideas about what Ronald Reagan should not say in Berlin. He wanted me to understand that the president should not come across as a kind of crude, American cowboy. West Berliners, he said, were the most left-leaning of all Germans. And, he said, don't make a big deal out of the Wall. They've all gotten used to that now. I left his office without much more material than I'd had when I'd gone in.
Next I was given a ride over the city in a U.S. Army helicopter. Now, all that's left of the Berlin Wall in the city today is a mark in the ground where it once stood. In those days, the Wall was formidable enough from inside West Berlin tall, concrete slabs, circling the city. But from the air it was incomparably more chilling, because from the air it was possible to see what lay on the other side of the Wall barbed wire, dog runs, gun emplacements. For some reason, what made the deepest impression on me were the large stretches of very carefully raked gravel. I asked the pilot what was going on there. He said that raked gravel was to keep the East German guards honest. If one of these young men was ever tempted to let a girlfriend or a family member escape to the West, he'd have to explain the footprints in the gravel to his commanding officer.
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Going to the Well "I should point out right away that, while it is true that I was chief speechwriter to Vice President George H. W. Bush," Peter Robinson said after Skip Rhodes' introduction, "I was also his only speechwriter." As for his role in writing speeches for President Reagan, Robinson noted, "I had a special job on the speechwriting staff; I was known as the 'well man.' When a speech was completed, it would come to me and then I would take it and insert here and there 'Well,...'" |
That evening, I broke away from the American party to go to a dinner party hosted by West Berliners. I had never met anyone at the party; the host and hostess were people with whom I had in common a friend in Washington. They had gathered a dozen or more people of different walks of life, different political outlooks. We bantered a while about the weather, Riesling wine, and finally I explained what I'd been told, and said, "Is it true? Have you gotten used to the Wall?"
Silence. I thought I had made the gaffe that the diplomat was afraid the president would make. That I had been a crude American. Then one man raised his arm and pointed and said, "My sister lives 20 kilometers in that direction, but I haven't seen her in more than two decades. How do you think we could get used to that?" They went around the room, each person talking about the Wall. One man described walking to work; each morning he passed a guard tower, and each morning a kid, on top of the tower with a rifle over his shoulder, would peer down at him with binoculars. The man said, "We speak the same language. We share the same history. But one of us is a zookeeper, and the other is an animal. And I've never been able to decide which is which." Our hostess, a lovely woman, became angry. She made a fist of one hand and slapped it into the palm of the other and said, "If this man, Gorbachev, is serious with his talk of glasnost and perestroika, he can prove it by coming here and getting rid of this Wall." This was nothing I needed to mull over; I knew, the moment she said that, that if Ronald Reagan had been there he would have responded to her remark, to the decency and the power that it conveyed.
Back to Washington. I fiddled around for a while, came up with that line, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." (Now such a well-remembered line that it's embarrassing to think I had "Herr Gorbachev, take down this wall." I came close a few times before I got it.) I built the speech around this, then we went to see the president. There were several speeches to be discussed. Mine happened to come up last. The president said simply that he liked it.
We speechwriters always went into these meetings, wanting to get more out of Ronald Reagan. We wanted to get him talking, give us new material, new insights into the way he thought. So you'd go in with a question or two. I said, "Mr. President, I learned when I was in Berlin that they'll be able to hear the speech on the other side of the Wall, by radio and if the weather conditions are just right, I was told, they'll be able to pick up the speech as far east as Moscow itself. Is there anything in particular that you'd like to say to people on the other side of the Wall?" And Ronald Reagan thought for a moment and then said, "Well, there's that passage about tearing down the Wall that's what I'd like to say to them: that wall has to come down."
The speech then went out to staffing. For three weeks, from the day it went to staffing, until the day Ronald Reagan delivered it, the National Security Council and the State Department virtually the entire foreign-policy apparatus of the U.S. government opposed it. The speech was naοve; it would raise false hopes; it would indeed make the president look like a crude, anti-communist cowboy. I got called into meeting after meeting in which I had to defend the speech. Colin Powell, then deputy national security advisor, let me know in rather vigorous language what he thought of the speech. To my astonishment, I heard myself telling him in rather vigorous language what I thought of the speech. It's amazing what you'll do when you're 30 years old and don't know any better. (I should add that although, in my judgment, Colin Powell took the wrong side in the dispute over the speech, he was always a great favorite of Ronald Reagan's. I saw Reagan just before his 80th birthday, when the first Gulf War was taking place, and the president said he was especially proud of one of the generals. And I said, "Oh, you mean General Schwarzkopf." He said, "No, no, no. I mean Colin Powell. I advanced him, you know." Ronald Reagan said, "I like Colin Powell so much, I used to say to him, Why Colin, I think you're a dark Irishman.'")
We had a lot of fights over speeches in the Reagan years. Ordinarily, the fights would die down. In this case, the fight didn't die down. Ken Duberstein, the deputy chief of staff, concluded he had no choice but to take the matter back to the president. The traveling party was in Italy; the president was attending the Venice economic summit before going to Berlin. Ken Duberstein sat Ronald Reagan down in the garden of some Italian palazzo, went over all the objections to the speech with him, had him re-read the central passage, and then they talked about it for a moment or two. Ken told me afterwards that the president discussed it, and then there came a moment when Ronald Reagan just broke into a grin and said, "Well Ken, let's just leave that line in." A few days later, on the day itself, when the president left Venice and flew to Berlin to deliver the speech, the State Department submitted yet another alternate draft. The president said, on his way to the Wall, that he was determined to deliver that controversial line. The president leaned over and slapped Duberstein on the knee, then he smiled. "The boys at State are going to kill me," Reagan said, "but it's the right thing to do."
Individuals Matter
"When history is taught at all nowadays," George F. Will wrote not long ago, "often it is taught as the unfolding of inevitabilities, of vast impersonal forces." The role of contingency in history is disparaged, so students are inoculated against the notion that history can be turned in its course by individuals. Working for Ronald Reagan amounted to a graduate course in just the opposite the ability of a single man to change the entire world. To work in the Reagan White House was to see Ronald Reagan overrule his opponents in Congress, in the press, even, quite often, members of his own senior staff: to reduce regulations, control the growth of spending and cut taxes, launching the longest peacetime expansion in American history.
The Cabinet room, spring 1982. The president is meeting his economic advisory board: George Shultz, Milton Friedman, a number of distinguished economists. Up for discussion: whether they should delay or even cancel the third year of the president's cuts in personal income taxes. Arthur Burns, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, argues that the president ought to go ahead and do just that. A deal has been worked out whereby Congress has promised that for every dollar in taxes raised, Congress will cut three dollars in spending. The president listens to Burns, then says, "Arthur, I want you to know how much I enjoy these meetings. They give me a chance to get out of the Oval Office, to talk with you fellows about big ideas, but it would help an awful lot if we talked in these meetings about something I might actually do." Then, Ronald Reagan leaned across to Arthur Burns and said, "Never mention a tax increase in my presence again."
To serve in the Reagan White House was to see Ronald Reagan overrule opponents to rebuild our defenses and place the Soviet Union under increasing pressure. The Cabinet room, 1981. Discussion about American negotiating strategy regarding Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces. The Soviets had deployed hundreds of them in Eastern Europe, targeting Western Europe. Jimmy Carter had developed the so-called "two-track" negotiating position; the Soviets would have been permitted to retain many of the missiles they had already set in place. Ronald Reagan scrapped this position and came up with his zero option, under which, if we promised we wouldn't deploy any missiles, the Soviets would be required to dismantle and destroy all of their missiles. Paul Nitze, the American arms negotiator, explains to the president that he is saying that in return for never spending a penny, we're expecting the Soviets to destroy an investment that cost them tens of millions of rubles. "Mr. President," Paul Nitze says, "I don't even know how to put that proposal to my Soviet counterpart." Ronald Reagan said, "Well, Paul, you just tell the Soviets you work for one tough son of a bitch."
1983, March. The Cabinet room. The president is having lunch with the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He tells them to discuss anything that's on their minds. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Watkins says that he has never felt comfortable with the American doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction. Watkins says, "Mr. President, I've always wished there were some way we could defend the American people, instead of promising to avenge them." The Joint Chiefs did not know that ever since Ronald Reagan had been governor, he had been receiving briefings from Edward Teller on the increasing technical feasibility of some form of defense against incoming ballistic missiles. Ronald Reagan asks each of the Joint Chiefs his view of some form of strategic defense. Each agrees that in principle he has absolutely no objection to a strategic defense. Six weeks later, Ronald Reagan goes on the air and announces the Strategic Defense Initiative, turning American nuclear policy upside down, in a speech that he and only a handful of other people in the White House knew about and that he permitted his own Cabinet to see only 48 hours before he delivered it.
In 1992, the year after the Soviet Union was dissolved, I attended a dinner at which Henry Kissinger described a trip he had just made to Russia. Speaking to high officials in the government and military, Kissinger had asked each to name the critical factor in the demise of the U.S.S.R. Almost without exception, Kissinger said, they named SDI. The Soviets may have overestimated our technical capacity; on the other hand, we didn't have to build a complete version of SDI to make their calculations difficult. If the Soviets no longer knew how many missiles would get through, then they might have had to launch hundreds more to have had a chance of success. But the Soviets could never have afforded hundreds more.
The great man or woman in history, philosopher Sidney Hook argues in The Hero in History, is someone of whom we can say on the basis of the available evidence that if they had not lived when they did or acted as they did, the history of their countries and of the world, to the extent that they are intertwined, would have been profoundly different. Their presence, in other words, must have made a substantial difference with respect to some event or movement deemed important by those who attribute historical greatness to them. Does Ronald Reagan fit the description? He does, indeed. No one else would have done what he did. And what he did changed the world.
"He was an authentic person and a great person," Mikhail Gorbachev said in a recent interview. "If someone else had been in his place, I don't know if what happened would have happened."
Lessons After Office
In 1989, his offices as a former president had just been set up. I went down to Los Angeles to see him. I missed the White House. I missed my friends in the speechwriting shop, the intensity, the sense of being at the center of it all. It seemed to me that if I, a humble speechwriter, missed the White House, the former president must miss it even more. After a moment of small talk, Ronald Reagan asked me if I had seen the newspaper that morning. I winced, because I had. One headline in that morning's Los Angeles Times: "Star Wars was Oversold, Cheney Says." Another headline, also on the front page: "Saw Risk of Reagan Impeachment, Meese Says."
For Ronald Reagan's place in history, that was not a good front page. The former president said, "I just don't understand it." I said, "Mr. President, neither do I." Then Ronald Reagan continued, "How can a judge determine the outcome of a sporting event?" I realized he wasn't talking about his place in history; he was talking about the America's Cup. That was the year the American entry was a catamaran, and a judge in New York had just ruled that the catamaran violated the deed of covenant and had awarded the America's Cup to New Zealand. Ronald Reagan winked and said, "Well, at least it wasn't a judge I appointed."
That was a lesson about letting go. For eight years he had been the most powerful man in the world, and then he had gone right back to being as ordinary an American as a former president can be. When Ronald Reagan picked up the newspaper, he turned to the sports page.
Ronald Reagan was born in a town that still stands. He liked to tell jokes and watch old movies. If you visit his ranch, you can see his favorite riding boots, standing in his tiny closet, the leather still supple. Soon enough, the 40th president of the United States will slip away, departing the narrow confines of the present, to take his place in the annals of the nation. From that hour on, we will need to remind ourselves that he was no mere force or idea or abstraction. We can aspire to his virtues, because he was one of us. Ronald Reagan was a man.
