GHOST STORIES

FREDERICK J.O. BLACHLY

From the very beginning, American politics has been
shaped by the quiet pens of ghostwriters.

Were it not for a ghost, the Constitution of the United States might not have been ratified, and our great nation might have remained a Balkanized congregation of separate, quarreling political jurisdictions, forever at odds. The Constitution had been drafted in Philadelphia in 1787. Delegates from the thirteen states had approved the document, but the Constitution had to be ratified by at least nine states before it could come into effect. Each state established a special convention to decide the issue. To help assure ratification, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote “The Federalist Papers,” using the pen name “Publius.” These political papers were written originally to influence the delegates to the New York convention.

Of particular importance was the vote in Massachusetts. The outcome, one way or the other, would have tremendous influence in the other states. The Governor of Massachusetts was John Hancock— the same man who had signed the Declaration of Independence in letters so large that “King George can read it without his spectacles.” Hancock had been against the ratification of the proposed Constitution. So was a majority of his delegation.

Friends of the Constitution went to see Hancock. They persuaded him that he held the fate of the nation in his hands. If Hancock said “yes,” all right-thinking men would follow his lead. If he said “no,” the country would fall into ruin. Flattery worked! Hancock began to change his mind. A man named Theophilus Parsons quickly wrote an impassioned speech for the Governor to deliver to the Constitutional Convention. Thus, Parsons became one of the first American ghostwriters. So persuasive were Parson’s words—and Hancock’s delivery—that the Convention voted to ratify the Constitution by a vote of 187 to 168.

The other states followed. The Constitution was adopted. George Washington was elected President. He had ghostwriters, including Jefferson and Hamilton.

Almost every president from that day until the present has used ghostwriters. They have to. There simply is not enough time for presidents and other high government officials to write their own speeches, “spontaneous” remarks, reports to Congress, proclamations—ranging from Thanksgiving Day to United Nations Day to Human Rights Day commemoratives— countless letters of congratulations, condolences, and all the other messages expected of the President and his chief advisers.

Until recent years, ghostwriters were expected to be heard, but not seen. The fiction was that presidents wrote their own speeches. The “ghosts” acquiesced, content to work in a back room and experience a thrill when someone would say “President So-and-So must have written that himself—it sounds just like him.”

I first became acquainted with the art of ghostwriting in 1945, when I worked for the Reader’s Digest. An important original article in support of the about-to-be United Nations was printed in the magazine. The article was signed by Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, but had been written by my first boss at the Reader’s Digest, William Hard, Sr. (CC 1917-1962). A year later, I myself became a Reader’s Digest ghost when I wrote an article signed by Philip Murray, president of the United Steel Workers Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

In 1950, I became an assistant to one of the greatest ghostwriters in modern times, the late James V. Fletcher, who worked in the US Department of Commerce, writing for men as different as Henry Wallace, Averell Harriman, and Charles Sawyer. Eventually Jim Fletcher went to work as the chief speech writer for the top executives of the Chrysler Corporation. When Fletcher was being considered for the job, he met with the chairman of the board, who asked, “Dr. Fletcher, if I ask Mr. Sawyer about you, what do you think he will say? Fletcher replied, “I think he will say something like this: ‘Dr. Fletcher is a wonderful idea man. He is a demon researcher. He is an excellent literary assistant. But if he tells you he wrote a single one of my speeches, he is a goddam liar.’” The call was made and the question put to Sawyer, who repeated word-for-word the answer Fletcher had predicted.

IN EVERY VOICE

That’s what makes a great ghostwriter: knowing what your principal is likely to say, and how he is likely to say it. Some ghostwriters claim they write the same style for any principal. I disagree. Some principals want to sound like Henry James with long involved sentences. Others want the short, punchy sentences of Ernest Hemingway. Still others prefer a mixture of styles. Simply put, ghostwriters have to think like their principals. If you are writing for the Commander-in-Chief, you cannot use the ideas or language of a supply sergeant. If you are writing for the Secretary of State, you must speak the language of diplomacy.

In 1963, when I was a public affairs adviser to the US Department of State, a request came for 26 speeches in support of a bill in Congress to authorize the United States government purchase of bonds that were being issued by the United Nations.(In the absence of such financial support, the UN would go broke because of the failure of the Soviet Union to pay its share of UN peacekeeping expenses.) Each speech was to be two or three minutes long. The late Michael Moynihan (brother of Senator Pat Moynihan of New York) and I divided up the job. Each one of us would write 13 speeches to be given by various members of the House of Representatives. The speeches ranged in style from conservative Republican to liberal Democrat and everything inbetween. These works of art were distributed to the appropriate congressmen and, in due course, appeared word-for-word in the Congressional Record.

Ghostwriters often make policy. If the principal asks for a speech for a certain occasion, but gives no indication about what he or she would like to say, the writer may put in some ideas of his own. If the principal accepts the words—policy is made! In 1950, Commerce Secretary Sawyer was to give a speech to dedicate a new airport near Baltimore, Friendship International Airport (now called Baltimore Washington International, or BWI). He asked Jim Fletcher and me to write a speech calling for “new directions in transportation policy.” It was up to us to find the new directions.

We decided to entitle the speech “Transportation, Bloodstream of Business.” Fletcher and I consulted agencies concerned with road building, airport construction, inland waterways, air safety—everyone who had anything to do with transportation. We got agreement on the text (no small feat in a bureaucracy of competing empires), got approval from the Secretary, and went to work to assure media coverage. We passed out copies of the text, with a cover sheet giving the principal recommendations. We called our friends who wrote for newspapers or spoke for radio and TV. We twisted the arms of trade association executives and the editors of trade association publications. We did everything we could think of to assure widespread coverage of this important policy speech.

Secretary Sawyer made the speech. Not a word appeared anywhere. The headline news that day was “North Korea Attacks South Korea.”

Ghostwriting is fun, but the results are sometimes baffling. When Thomas W. Wilson (CC 1978-1997) and I were working for Averell Harriman, in the Executive Office of the President, we were asked to prepare a speech. We did. He gave the speech, not once, but over and over again. No matter what the occasion, or what the audience, he gave the same speech. However, since Harriman’s usual style of performance was a barely audible mumble, perhaps it didn’t make any difference.

Early in 1953, before the change of administration from Truman to Eisenhower, I came to the office one day and found my secretary sobbing as if her heart would break. When I asked her what was the matter, she said, “Just before six o’clock last night I got a call from Mr. Harriman’s office. They wanted me to go to his house to take notes of an interview with a long-time friend—a reporter for the Times of London. After the men had a few drinks, Mr. Harriman talked in a whisper and the British journalist talked in a British accent, and I couldn’t get any of their conversation.”

I asked my secretary if she had gotten one or two words from each question and answer. She said she thought she did. “Fine,” I said, “you write out what you have, starting with question one, answer one. We will reconstruct that interview.”

This we did. Using the one or two words in each Q and A, I dictated the interview to my secretary. She typed it up. The British journalist showed up about three o’clock, looked at the “transcript” and said, “Miss Waters, I didn’t know you were a court reporter.”

THE RIGHT WORDS

Each year the President of the United States is required to issue a UN Day Proclamation on the 24th of October. As a public affairs adviser for the Bureau of International Organization Affairs in the State Department, it was my responsibility to prepare this statement, some four to six weeks before UN Day. When Richard Nixon came into office in 1969, I asked the State Department library to use its new computer to find everything that Nixon had ever said about the UN. A file of printouts an inch thick came to my desk. I read through this file and came up with a “great idea.” I decided to use the President’s own words to put together a proclamation. Using sentences from various speeches by the former Representative, Senator, Vice-President, and now President Nixon, I stitched together a suitable text and submitted it to the front office. The text came back marked “Too liberal! Try again.” I resubmitted the same text, but after each sentence I gave the source (RN, the audience, the city, and dates). So there I was, a ghost living off the work of other ghosts! The text went to the White House and appeared over the President’s signature just the way I had put it together.

Sometimes government ghosts are given specific directions, sometimes not. When I was writing for Harold Stassen, the only direction I ever received came from his administrative assistant, who said, “The Governor told me to tell you to write him a good one!” This carte blanche may have been the result of my first meeting with Stassen. One Friday afternoon, shortly after he had succeeded Harriman as Director for Mutual Security, I discovered by accident that he was scheduled to appear on “Meet the Press” the next Sunday, and that he had not had any kind of briefing.

I got to work and dreamed up 26 questions, any one of which might be asked. Some of the questions were political, and I noted these with a red circle. Others were more or less routine questions of fact. On Saturday morning, without an appointment, I parked myself in Stassen’s outer office. When I got in to see him, I introduced myself and showed him the list of questions. He said, “Those are good questions, do you have the answers?” I replied, “The questions marked in red are questions of administration policy and your answers would be better than mine. The rest are a matter of facts and figures and the answers are on the way.”

When “Meet the Press” went on the air the next day, the first six questions were ones I had written down and, as a matter of exceedingly good luck, were in the exact order I had listed them.

High government officials who have to meet the press must be briefed on likely questions and supplied with appropriate answers. Some years later, Secretary of State Dean Rusk explained what happens when an official is not prepared. “If I get a question to which I don’t know the answer, I can’t just shrug the question off with ‘How the hell should I know?’ So I do the best I can, and if things turn out more or less the way I said they would, everything is O.K. If not, there is a ‘credibility gap.’” To try to avoid this gap, by anticipating the questions and supplying the answers, is the job of the press secretary or the public affairs adviser.

On one occasion we were briefing a new administrator for the Agency for International Development. I asked him in a snarly voice, “Mr. Administrator, are you going to resign?” He hemmed and hawed and then said, “Why did you ask me that question?” “Because,” I replied, “you have to expect it and you have to give a prompt answer. I suggest your answer be ‘Not unless the President asks me to.’”

On another occasion, Stassen was asked to speak at Gettysburg on Veterans Day. What can be said at that place on that occasion which hadn’t been said in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln, in words that will echo in the American consciousness forever? There is no writer alive today whose prose could possibly compare with Lincoln’s. I decided the only thing to do was to try to imitate the Gettysburg Address, by keeping the speech just as short, using the same rhythms, and trying to bring the subject matter up to date. As I finished typing my draft, the special appointee who headed our office came into my room, snatched the paper and asked incredulously, “What—only three paragraphs?” But he was a devotee of the four-martini lunch and had a tin ear.

SILENT PARTNERS NO MORE

Today, there are no more ghosts in government. They write books about themselves and their careers. Newspapers report their comings and goings. The Smithsonian Institution even devoted an all-day seminar to these government ghosts. This seminar, held in December 1998, was entitled “All the President’s Words.” It brought together, in public, speech writers from the Truman Administration to the Clinton Adminstration.

Nowadays, government ghosts have come out of the closet; they have taken off their clothes of invisibility; and they have taken on corporeality. Are we better off knowing the truth about government ghosts? Maybe, maybe not. Presidents will utter what they hope will be immortal words. And it will be left to the historians to figure out who first put those words to paper—the well-known speaker or the ghostwriter.

Frederick J.O. Blachly (CC ‘80) was an associate editor of the Reader’s Digest and later a writer and public affairs adviser for the departments of Commerce and State, and in the Executive Office of the President. He says “I made my living as a writer and my life as a musician.” He played in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and was first cellist of the Washington Camerata.

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