{"id":1579,"date":"2013-05-29T09:35:46","date_gmt":"2013-05-29T16:35:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/?p=1579"},"modified":"2013-05-29T09:35:46","modified_gmt":"2013-05-29T16:35:46","slug":"an-evening-with-presidential-speechwriters-of-days-gone-by-ricochet-com-05-28-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/2013\/05\/29\/an-evening-with-presidential-speechwriters-of-days-gone-by-ricochet-com-05-28-13\/","title":{"rendered":"An Evening with Presidential Speechwriters of Days Gone By | Ricochet.com | 05.28.13"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may or may not have heard of the Judson Welliver Society. \u00a0It was the creation of William Safire, the now-departed columnist for\u00a0The New York Times\u00a0<\/i>and before that a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon. \u00a0Periodically it brings together former presidential speechwriters from all prior administrations with living speechwriters. \u00a0Peter has asked me to report on this year’s meeting, which he could not attend and which was on Tuesday a week ago.<\/p>\n

Actually, “society” is too grand a term. A “once every year or two depending on nothing in particular assemblage for drinking, eating and (what else?) speechifying” would be more like it.<\/p>\n

Last Tuesday members gathered at the home of Chris Matthews. Before his leg tingled at McNBC, Chris was a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter and then an aide to Tip O’Neill. \u00a0Politics aside, he is a very good guy and, with his wife, Kathleen, was an impeccable host.<\/p>\n

Safire convened the first of these dinners mid-way through the Reagan Administration. \u00a0He made a point, which has been continued ever since, of inviting the current presidential writers. \u00a0I was in the White House at the time. \u00a0I believe my inaugural dinner (we former presidential speechwriters like to use terms like “inaugural”in reference to ourselves, a subtle hint at past glories) was the second convocation, or perhaps the third.<\/p>\n

Of that first dinner I remember in particular Clark Clifford’s talk. \u00a0Clifford had been the principal political aide as well as speechwriter for Harry S Truman (Truman aficionados please note that, in Truman’s own style, I deployed no period or other punctuation after the president’s middle initial; Turman had no middle name, only that single letter). \u00a0Tall, lean, as elegant in manner and dress as any human being I have ever laid eyes on, Clifford told the most amazing stories. \u00a0He had everyone on the floor laughing. \u00a0At the next dinner two years later, Clifford spoke again, and told the same stories word for word again, as he did at the next one I attended, which was his last. \u00a0Thing is, each time he rehearsed his repertoire, it was with such energy and such a sense of fun that everyone died laughing all over. \u00a0He was a spectacular story teller.<\/p>\n

This year a film crew was present. \u00a0Robert Schlesinger — son of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (JFK speechwriter and historian) — is producing a documentary follow-on to\u00a0White House Ghosts<\/i>,\u00a0his excellent book on presidential speechwriting and speechwriters from FDR to George W. Bush (http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/White-House-Ghosts-Presidents-Speechwriters\/dp\/B003H4RDCO<\/a>). \u00a0The crew set up right behind me, and judging from the camera’s height and the occasional, “Oh sorry,” the top of my head may be in for a starring role.<\/p>\n

This year at least one veteran of each administration represented spoke, including John Podhoretz (Reagan, now editor of\u00a0Commentary<\/i>\u00a0magazine), Mary Kate Cary (Bush 41, now a columnist for\u00a0U.S. News<\/i>),\u00a0Jeffrey Shesol (Clinton, now partner in West Wing Writers), Michael Waldman (Clinton, now president of NYU Law School’s Brennan Center), and \u00a0John McConnell (Bush 43, now a much-in-demand writer and speaker). \u00a0The Carter administration was particularly heavily spoken for and about by Carter writers Hendrik Hertzberg (now political commentator at\u00a0The New Yorker<\/i>), James Fallows (The Atlantic<\/i>), and Gordon Stewart (chairman of the Society and MC of the evening). \u00a0In addition to Schlesinger, family \u00a0represented several of the departed members\u00a0including Ted Sorensen and Bill Safire.<\/p>\n

I haven’t mentioned all the writers \u00a0or all who spoke, but everyone who got up was witty or moving or both. \u00a0Particularly good, for different reasons, were Dana Rohrabacher (Reagan, now a member of Congress) and Matthews.<\/p>\n

Rohrabacher told a story of Reagan’s 1984 trip to Ireland and a presidential speech scheduled for delivery while there. \u00a0The speech included a Gaelic phrase that some staffer’s friends at a Washington-area Irish bar had suggested as appropriate. \u00a0It seems the speech flew through the clearance process and only at the last minute did anyone think to check what the phrase meant. \u00a0Let’s just say, it turned out to have been a practical joke that the president would not have found funny had the phrase’s meaning been discovered AFTER delivery.<\/p>\n

By the way, had Reagan delivered it, he would not have been the first president to have stumbled so. \u00a0Other than Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” the best-known presidential address in Cold War Berlin was JFK’s when he said in German, “I am a Berliner.” \u00a0Except that the key word was not quite right. \u00a0It turned out he actually said, “I am a jelly donut.” \u00a0The crowd cheered anyway.<\/p>\n

Rohrabacher closed with a heartfelt affirmation of the common goal of serving the nation and all it stands for.<\/p>\n

Matthews spoke about working on a book about Reagan and Tip O’Neill. \u00a0Reagan and O’Neill were very different men, he said, coming from very different places in the political world. \u00a0They fought each other hard, but they also worked hard and maturely \u00a0to produced deals for the good of the country. \u00a0He talked about what made the relationship work.<\/p>\n

Maybe I am wrong, but in listening I felt Matthews was contrasting the current president unfavorably with Reagan, much less if at all the current speaker with O’Neill. \u00a0If so, it would not be new. \u00a0Despite the tingling leg, Matthews has ripped into Obama publicly on several occasions for not listening to Congress, not dealing with them, not undertaking the hard, essentially door to door labor (except that instead of working precincts, presidents work senators and congress members) a president has to do to be effective. \u00a0In public in the past he has seemed dismayed and even at times seems disgusted with the Obama operation.<\/p>\n

Except this evening, courtesy kept him from being so direct. \u00a0The current writers were there. \u00a0He left his audience to draw their own conclusions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may or may not have heard of the Judson Welliver Society. \u00a0It was the creation of William Safire, the now-departed columnist for\u00a0The New York Times\u00a0and before that a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon. \u00a0Periodically it brings together former presidential speechwriters from all prior administrations with living speechwriters. \u00a0Peter has asked me to report on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[87,163,162],"class_list":["post-1579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-speecheslectures","tag-ricochet","tag-speechwriting","tag-white-house"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1579"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1581,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579\/revisions\/1581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}