Ken Hechler while working in the Truman White House. He is the oldest living presidential speech writer.

Ex-White House speech writers go down memory lane

THE CHARLESTON GAZETTE
Sunday, October 13, 1985
Page: P3D

By KEN HECHLER In the years before he became a West Virginia political science professor and member of Congress, Secretary of State Ken Hechler was a speech writer for President Harry Truman and also helped President Franklin Roosevelt prepare papers for publication. Ken Hechler -  When I looked around the dining room in the palatial home of William Safire on Oct. 4, I saw a most remarkable group of 30 presidential speech writers spanning the administrations of eight presidents since World War II. There were big guns like Clark Clifford, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Jack Valenti and Patrick Buchanan and “ghost writers” who had served Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and now Reagan.My first thought was to reflect on what President Kennedy had said when toasting the Nobel Prize winners at a White House dinner: “This is the most extraordinary collection of talent that has ever been gathered together at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Then Arthur Schlesinger told of the perils of a speech writer working for an articulate president who is also a keen editor.He related he had written two lengthy paragraphs, documenting the talents of the dinner guests, and listing all of Jefferson’s achievements as an architect, musician, inventor, astronomer and so on - and President Kennedy with one deft stroke of the pen had destroyed his research and substituted the memorable phrase which he delivered.

Safire and Clifford, along with a few other writers, dreamed up this delightful, bipartisan idea. The Oct. 4 dinner was billed as the “Founding Dinner of the Judson Welliver Society.” Why the name?

Wherefore the purpose? According to Mr. Safire, who has few peers in the origins and proper uses of language: “Mr. Welliver, as you know, was the first White House speech writer. Although his title was “literary executive secretary,” he wrote most of the public utterances of President Harding and was largely responsible for Calvin Coolidge’s reputation for eloquence “The purpose of this loose association of former White House speech writers is to meet once a year for dinner, extol the virtues of our former line of work, and to allow as how today’s speeches are seldom what they used to be in our day. No dues, no partisanship, a social occasion, with brief and well-written speeches to each other .” After this somewhat tongue-in-cheek description in his invitation, Safire added a P.S.: “If further research reveals that Mr. Welliver was involved in Teapot Dome, we will rename the Society .” Safire moved the program along deftly, introducing one spokesman for each of the eight presidents to mention those present from his administration. Six Reagan speech writers were there, including a young lady named Margaret Noonan, who looked barely old enough to be a college coed. Asked if she had to work any overtime, she groaned a little when she said she “might” have to come in the next day, Saturday. A Ford staffer scoffed that he had to work every weekend, and she eyed him with some disdain and inferred that things must have been poorly organized.

Anthony Dolan drew the first big laugh of the evening by indicating the political outlooks of all the Reagan speech writers, including his designation of Pat Buchanan as “the moderate” in the group. Dolan said that Reagan was the first president, by recruiting speech writers of differing points of view, “who has institutionalized the power struggle.” James Keogh, a Nixon speech writer, started his remarks: “I want to make one thing perfectly clear: the Nixon speech writers always avoided cliches.” He then went into a hilarious description of the Nixon speech writer who had come in to see his boss with the suggestion: “Let’s do something really newsworthy; you say that the easy way out is the course of action you choose, and you have after mature thought decided to discard the hard and difficult way to do it.” Jack Valenti, now the head of the Motion Picture Association, was in top form as a raconteur. He told of the time John Steinbeck was called in by Lyndon Johnson to submit some speech material, but speech writer Dick Goodwin had in successive drafts gradually taken out everything Steinbeck had offered. When Valenti brought the final draft to Johnson, “he lowered his hooded eyelids and rasped: “Where’s the Steinbeck in here?’ Being told that Goodwin felt it better to take it out, Johnson thumped the table and proclaimed: “Tell Goodwin that either Steinbeck is in, or Goodwin is out.’ 1/3″ Valenti also ribbed his fellow-staffer, Harry McPherson, with the account of how Johnson when he was Senate majority leader first showed a recognition of McPherson’s talents. “One day Johnson beckoned him to the rostrum, and leaned over to whisper in Harry’s ear. Harry was sure his initiation into the inner circle of confidantes was about to take place when Johnson grunted: “Harry, do you think you could find me some of those sour lemon gumballs?’ 1/3″ Arthur Schlesinger ruminated on the generational gaps between Truman and Reagan, as represented by the ages of the writers. He recalled that in 1948 he had been asked to prepare something for a Truman speech in Boston and how “apparently Mr. Truman totally disregarded my immortal words.” Then in 1956 Adlai Stevenson sent Schlesinger to New York to consult with FDR’s two top speech writers, Judge Samuel I. Rosenman and playwright Robert Sherwood. After a lengthy luncheon, Rosenman and Sherwood gave Schlesinger an envelope with their suggestions for the next Stevenson speech.

Schlesinger related: “I read it on the plane, and I was appalled at how bad it was; it was completely out of sync with what  Stevenson had been saying and believed. Of course it was discarded.

Then I thought to myself: will the time ever come when I write something for a future candidate, and some smart-ass youngster tells me it is totally useless? Well, just that happened during Bob Kennedy’s campaign in 1968 when Adam Walinsky and his buddies shunted aside one of my superlative efforts.” One of the Carter speech writers had done some research on Judson Welliver, and presented a rollicking account of the “deathless prose” which Welliver wrote for Harding and Coolidge.

As the only person present who had actually met Welliver, I gave a more charitable profile of an elderly man who had once been the top political writer in Washington in the days of Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

What I appreciated about Welliver was that he befriended a struggling young graduate student like myself and unlocked many secrets of the great legislative battles in Congress early in this century when Teddy Roosevelt’s followers were trying to democratize Congress.

Clark Clifford and I were the only representatives of the Truman White House at the Safire dinner. Clifford, now one of Washington’s most successful lawyers at the age of 78, regaled us with some new Truman stories, one of which I had never heard before.

As Clifford told it, the six boys in Truman’s graduating class shared their life’s ambition; Truman’s was to go to the
West Point and join the Army. One boy, tom Barrows, said his ambition was to get rich. Many years later, at a high school reunion when they were all about 70 years old, Truman asked Tom how he was doing.” Not only am I the richest man in town, I’ve just married a 20-year-old girl,” Tom answered. “But I was only able to do it by lying about my age.” Truman said he betted Tom had tried to convince her he was 50.”Oh, no,” Tom answered, “I could see what she was interested in so I told her I was 90, and she said yes right away.”Clifford related a final anecdote about the 1948 campaign, when the beleaguered Truman was persuaded by a
California advertising executive named David Noyes that the only way he could beat Dewey was to dramatize his own sincere devotion to peace. Notes all but convinced Truman that the way to do this was to send Chief Justice Fred Binson to Moscow to sit down with Stalin and show him deeply the president wanted to avoid war with the
Soviet Union. Clifford angrily argued that such a move would undercut Secretary of State George Marshall’s efforts, and would bring down a storm of criticism on Truman for playing politics with foreign policy.Clifford added: “Well, there was a leak, and Time magazine gave the details of the proposed Vinson mission, then added that this diabolical scheme had been hatched in the” Machiavellian brain of Clark Clifford.” Clifford said that 57 negative letters came in the next day, with such salutations as “You fascist, fat-cat faker.”  Then he added that at the end of the week his secretary brought him a letter on  lined yellow paper, written with a crayon, and his secretary proudly smiled:” At last, this letter is a sympathetic one,” Clifford said: “I settle back in my chair to soak up the praise of the writer, one Josiah Witherspoon, and my spirits rose until I reached the postscript which stated:” I apologize for writing this in crayon, but you see where I am confined they won’t allow me to use any sharp instruments.” All in all, it was agreed that the Judson Welliver Society got off to a good start. I suspect it will survive and grow, as a healthy bipartisan effort in a town where partisanship is rife.  

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