Writing for a President Indifferent to Speeches

To judge George Bush, one must first know who he wanted to be.

A few weeks into his Administration, the President chatted with his new speech writers in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. One of the first questions asked was, “Who’s your personal hero?” Surprising many of us, he turned up his nose at Winston Churchill--not so much at the man as at the tired Churchillian anecdotes and shopworn quotes.

The President gestured approvingly at the equestrian portrait of Teddy Roosevelt above the fireplace mantel. Then he divulged his answer: “I still like Ike.”

Time after time, Bush rejected the inclusion of Franklin D. Roosevelt or Churchill quotes in his speeches. Not so Dwight D. Eisenhower’s.

Indeed, if Bush had a vision, it was to be another Eisenhower: to preside over a calm period of national growth, cooperation and renewal; to manage world affairs with skill and subtlety; to achieve maximum ends with minimalist means and modest rhetoric.

He revealed this vision at the outset, in an inaugural address crafted by Peggy Noonan but quintessentially Bush. He spoke of the bitter partisanship, divisiveness and wicked innuendo that characterizes relations between Congress and the executive. And he blamed the deterioration of civility on an old but still festering wound--Vietnam. By invoking that war, the new President suggested that the acrimony it produced was an aberration to be overcome.

It was a noble, centrist conception of government, and it was an utterly naive assessment of the realities of Washington--and America. Bush sensed that America’s Augustan era had already passed, but seemed unready to accept that fact as a challenge. He never came to grips with the idea that America needed a reformist leader in the White House, not just a solid CEO.

Given the gridlock with Congress, Bush had only one real option in domestic policy--to propose a daring reinvention of government, then to mount the bully pulpit to make it come to life.

In the first spring of his Administration, I was ordered to open a file of background material from which to write a speech that would have proposed tough new ethics laws for Congress, announced that the President was ready to sequester spending and justified the imposition of a line-item veto, putting the issue to a test before the U.S. Supreme Court. That file was passed from speech writer to speech writer right down to the last minutes of the ’92 Bush campaign. The speech was never written.

Win, lose or draw, Bush had the chance, then, to pursue a real Harry S. Truman strategy--one that even if it had failed, would have set the agenda for the future, much as Truman set the agenda for the Kennedy-Johnson era. Yet, Bush remained oddly diffident about speaking forcefully on behalf of his own agenda. His staff constantly conspired to find a way to get the President to speak up on his agenda and to speak out about his feelings.

Bush often complained about speeches in a kind of personal code. “Too much Churchill” obviously wasn’t meant literally; rather, the prose was pompous, purple, the rhetoric vaunted, overreaching. (The President once said to me, as I was walking out of the Oval Office, “Don’t make me sound like Winston Churchill.” I sensibly squelched the temptation to assure him he was in little danger of that from either of our efforts.) The President also often complained that the “I-factor” was too high in his speeches, meaning they were too full of braggadocio.

In an era of chest-thumping politicians, there is much to admire in Bush’s natural modesty. But there is also a great irony. Though he is sincerely modest, Bush comes across as an aristocrat who feels he doesn’t need to explain his decisions to those who must live with their consequences. There were times when it seemed as if Bush believed that the act of giving a speech--and giving it well--was not worth the effort.

Perhaps he had taken comfort from Ike’s obtuse performances at press conferences. But the old general, who as a young officer had served as a speech writer to Douglas MacArthur, could marshal words as weapons when it suited his purpose. Bush rose to the occasion only on a few occasions. All America remembers his acceptance address at the 1988 Republican Convention in New Orleans.

I will never forget his performance in Mainz, in what was then West Germany. At the time, it was becoming obvious that Germany would reunite. But the evolving character of this new Germany was far from obvious. German reunification had long been a bromide of U.S. foreign policy. But Germans knew that official thinking in Washington had long been divided over the desirability of this goal.

On live television, Bush spoke movingly, even passionately, of the postwar German struggle. He suggested that in this new era, the nature of our friendship would be different. America would stand by Germany as a brother, not as a big brother. We would accept a united Germany as a full equal, as a “partner in leadership.” He closed by calling for “a Europe whole and free.” In one ringing phrase, he endorsed a reunited Germany and a liberated East on Western terms.

Much to the frustration of his speech writers, Bush refused to take credit for the demise of communism or to even declare the end of the Cold War until every last agreement had been negotiated and signed. It’s difficult to imagine any other American politician showing similar restraint. Bush, though, was serving the greater interest by refusing to serve himself. How lucky, and ironic, that we should have elected a leader whose natural reticence was exactly what was needed as America won the Cold War.

Bush fell short of his benevolent vision of matching Eisenhower’s era of calm progress. But in the company of his predecessors, he joins them as a peer--a man who was right for his time.