that would be a -- >> i'm glad you mentioned it, because i had meant to mention that, and i forget to. when we inherited the 1960s, we inherited as pat has spelled out what i've often referred as the second most disastrous event and nearest thing to civil war since the 1860s. >> let me just say, he asked to lower our voices, but by october 15th, 500,000 people surrounding the white house with buses going around it and 82nd airborne in the basement. >> voices kept rising and subsiding. and that's a good transition, actually, to the next little clip we have, which is from the address nixon gave in response to that march on washington that fall. gathering of people. it became known as the silent majority speech, november 3rd, 1979. i think it's an example of a speech that nixon wrote almost entirely himself. i remember he retreated i think

to camp david and said he didn't want to be bothered by anything. he just wanted to focus on how to address that particular moment in american history. and here's part of what he said. >> let historians not record that when america was the most powerful nation in the world, we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism. and so tonight, to you, the great silent majority of my fellow americans, i ask for your support. i pledged in my campaign for the presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. i have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge. >> and indeed that speech was very well-received. i think nixon's ratings went up,

high 70s. >> went up to i think 68, highest he got in the entire presidency. and frankly, that sustained him, i think, right through the -- right through the four years. the only time he reached the same level was when the p.o.w.s came home in march i think of 1973. >> it's a speech well worth reading carefully. and i think crafted largely by the president himself. six months later, all that is risen again, and pat, you were involved then -- and let's show another vietnam speech, which had us -- i'm going to say a slightly different tone. nixon wanted a different tone, and he asked you to provide it. and this is the speech -- >> that's why he didn't pick ray. >> i think writers -- writers were really there not so much because they specialized in a style or even an ideology -- excuse me, not so much specialized in a subject, but because they each had a style. and in this case, nixon clearly

wanted a tough speech. and is this a little bit of what he got. and pat, maybe you can tell us more about it. >> sure. >> this is april 30th, i think, 1970. >> my fellow americans, we live in an age of anarchy. we see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. even here in the united states, great universities are being systematically destroyed. small nations all over the world find themselves under attack from within, and from without. if, when the chips are down, the world's most powerful nation, the united states of america, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the

world. >> yeah. let me tell you, that's april 30th. i guess i was called into the -- the president had -- the oval office and the office next to it but he would go across the street to the executive office building where there was a huge office deep in there right underneath the vice president's and he called me in there. he said, we're going into cambodia with ground troops. and he said, henry sent me a draft, and he didn't like it. he said, i've got -- >> henry? >> henry kissinger, i'm sorry. he said, i have some notes here. i started taking notes from what he said. he said, take this paragraph and put it in there. you're taking all this, about 12 pages of this. he said, now go back and in about two or three hours give me a draft. during the course of this, he said, we're not going to go into the fishhook and parrots beak we're going into all eight

sanctuaries. so i said, all eight? he said, yeah. he said, we're already bombing them. i said, you're bombing them? sir, they are going to know we're coming. he said, don't worry about that, pat. we've been bombing them for a long time. that's when i found out about the cambodian bombing. >> for almost a year. >> i went back to the office. i got working on it. my secretary was working real fast. we didn't have computers and things. she was writing fast and then so i got the draft and i took it down to him. of course i had copies of it. he said, don't show it to anybody. and so this is bad news. you know? henry might be interested. i went up and went swimming at the university club. then they didn't have bathing suits. it was all men. so i'm swimming, paddling along. the university club. someone came down and said, mr. buchanan, the white house is on the phone. i go up there stark naked and

pick up the phone and hear, there is the speech! [ laughter ] henry kissinger. i said, henry, i'm sorry, the old man said to give it to him and that was it. and so that speech, though -- what happened in the aftermath, of course, there was an enormous firestorm created. i had sort of an arthritis problem, so i went home. three days later my buddy mort allen who ran the press summary called me up and said four kids were killed and nine wounded at kent state. i said, where is kent state? and the country exploded. i didn't even know where it was. it was a small school. as a consequence of that, i think nixon went down and bud kroge tells the story in his book. he got up one morning. he was tremendously concerned about that. he went down to the lincoln memorial, met with the kids, tried to establish some sort of communion with them. it was an extremely dramatic

moment in the nixon presidency. it was at that point he decided we could only be in for 60 days and then he pulled out. >> and the troops did come out of cambodia. >> after that, the american casualties in vietnam spiked up during the cambodian incursion. but after that, they dropped by half. >> it was a period of incredible turmoil. kissinger in his memoir says raise this right now, that you did not work on foreign policy speeches after that. is that true? >> kissinger said that? >> yeah. >> i don't think on major -- i don't know that he had -- i don't recall. >> i just wondered whether there was a -- because the speech itself was nixon with the bark off as he liked to say. >> right. you know -- pardon? nixon, i mean, when he called me in there, rather than ray, it was for a reason.

he was ticked off. >> we had somewhat different styles. >> more stylistic. we could stay on that subject. and may come back to it. speaking of different styles, however, i want to jump back in time. just a little. and move on down the panel. to do that, there was a section in nixon's acceptance speech in 1968 which reveals a different side of presidential rhetoric and one unusual for nixon. maybe we can play that acceptance speech. >> tonight i see the face of a child. he lives in a great city. he's black or he's white. he's mexican, italian, polish. none of that matters. what matters, he's an american child. that child in that great city is more important than any politician's promise. he is america. he is a poet. he's a scientist. he's a great teacher. he's a proud craftsman. he's everything we ever hoped to

be and everything we dare to dream to be. >> that passage goes on then. in it nixon says -- you'll remember this better than i do. i see another child tonight, and he talks about his own child, how he would fall asleep hearing train whistles in the night and dreaming of far off places. bill gavin contributed to that whole sense of heart, that was the word, in that writing. can you tell us a little about all of that? >> yes, i can. lee was kind enough to mention my forthcoming book, "speech write" which will be published by michigan state university press. the reason i say that, first of all, it's a shameless plug. but second of all, i have spent the last two or three years researching stuff i did. i was talking to my colleagues back stage of all of us saying,

gee, i don't remember it that way or whatever it happened to be. one of the things i did was an analysis of that acceptance speech. i just want to speak about that for a few minutes because it helps to solve a problem. that's one of the things i see speechwriting as. it's a technique of solving a particular problem. it is not, in my view, an exercise in eloquence. i think we've been eloquenced to death. i think that the search for eloquence is the curse of the speaking class. what our rhetoric needs and what nixon did in his speech and so many other speeches, he directly addressed a specific kind of a problem. in doing so, he used every rhetorical tool he could. let me begin by saying the speech was like any acceptance

speech, a hodgepodge. people -- ray contributed. lee contributed. everybody threw something in. but he himself worked over that speech. montauk. yeah. he worked over it. the reason i know that is in order to prepare for the book, i got four drafts of the speech, of the acceptance speech. particularly in that part we just saw here, he made the slightest changes sometimes. i think one was -- the original was, i look at the face of a child. he changed the at into "into." i look into the face of a child, which is a much more warm way of saying it. but in order to understand why that particular passage is remembered, it should be because richard nixon in presenting that

speech had to solve four or five problems. the first is he had, as pat has pointed out, a host of people who quite literally hated him. one of the reasons the old haters hated him was because he had nabbed a man named alger hiss. they never forgot that. the second thing is, he himself had a reputation of tricky dick, that arch fiend that manipulated people. the third is that, he had mawkishness in his rhetoric, the republican coat that pat nixon wore, that little speech he gave during the 1952 campaign. he himself was parodied by a lot of peoplw he would speak. the out of sync.

he had to solve and make sure that all of those things were taken care of in this speech. anybody that thinks a speech is words, that's not true. words -- the whole thing is him projecting that. i had been a high school teacher of english. i wrote a letter to richard nixon a lawyer urging him that he run for president. i got a form letter back a week later. i didn't know anything about form letters. i had no idea. then eventually i got a phone call from a man named leonard garment who said mr. nixon likes what you do and why don't you start sending in one-liners. in december of 1967, i was still a high school teacher working as a master teacher at the graduate school of education at the university of pennsylvania at that time but i was still a high school teacher. we get an invitation to come to richard nixon's christmas party.

at his 5th avenue -- i'm a high school teacher. i can't believe it. is this a fake? is somebody kidding me? what? so we went there. we walked in. as you walked in, you walked in and the elevator -- you went right into the apartment. he was standing with his back toward us. i think it was dwight chapin. i'm not too sure but it must have been dwight. he came and he introduced me to richard nixon. he said, ah, gavin, the one-liner man. he had me. he had me. that was it. i'd go anywhere with him. so i kept on sending those things in. eventually, he asked me to become a member of the staff. just a sidebar here. i was at the university of pennsylvania graduate school of education, so i had to get downstairs to tell them i was going to leave a few weeks early. so i go to the dean and i say -- you know, blah, blah, blah, he said, why are you leaving? i said, i'm going to join the richard nixon campaign. he just looked at me, as if i had a fatal disease.

he said, what on earth are you doing anything like that for? i tried to explain to him but didn't work too well. i went up to new york, eventually went down to miami. before i left new york lynn garment stuck his head in my cubicle and said, did you send your thing over for the acceptance speech. i said nobody told me to write it. he said stop telling people to tell you to get it and get it over to me. i forgot about it. the night of the speech, i was watching it on television and he got to this part, and i wasn't even at the convention hall. i was back at the hotel watching it on tv. well, i leaped in the air, danced around, it's my stuff, it's my stuff. the next day nixon had a good-bye to the staff who helped him at the convention. called me over, put his arm around me, an uncharacteristic gesture from a man who was not

touchy, feely and spoke to me for about five minutes about that section of the speech last night. you saw what i did with it. i didn't say this, i said that. and did you see the way -- i'm going, yeah. i didn't know what to say to him. he said i want you to come on to trisha. that's what happened. >> trisha was the name of the airplane? >> trisha was the name of the airplane. that particular part of the speech is important because if he had got it millimeter wrong it would have been mawkish nixon. it would have been the nixon that is satirized, even demonized. but he did it. you didn't see this but when he finishes that passage, that whole building rocks. [ roaring sound ] everybody's cheering. he's just standing there like this, with this look on his face. i said to someone it's like a great baseball player, albert pujols, when they hit a home run, they don't smile. they just trot around the bases. that's what i'm paid to do, baby.

that was the look on his face. he hit it right on the nose. he also did that with the rest of the speech, which contained much more political things. when i was with bob michael, richard nixon came back to the house to give a speech to house republicans. bob asked me to greet him at the door of the capital building. he came out, shook hands, et cetera. we went upstairs and bob says, how do you like being with your old speechwriter there, mr. president? he looked at me and said, gavin, we raised gavin. and, of course, it was true. my story is not much too sad to be told. but it's so improbable that if i didn't live it, i wouldn't believe it. >> it's a wonderful story. >> let me just add something there. i was at that staff gathering that bill describes. i have never heard -- i haven't

heard him describe it, but i've described to people and said we were all there. richard nixon, astonishing gesture, came over, puts his arm around bill gavin, talks to him personally, as bill says for five minutes. what he was telling him, it was just a grace gesture by richard nixon. but what he was saying is that you did a tremendous job for me, and i want everybody here to know it. it was a very moving thing to watch. >> thank you, just one last point. >> sure. >> he didn't have to do that. i was -- he was one of the most famous men in the world. i would need an entire public relations firm to bring me to the level of decent obscurity. three-quarters of the people on the staff didn't know who i was. who the heck is this guy talking to nixon with the plaid jacket on? he was kind enough to do that.

i don't present this to the court of history, extenuating circumstances, but that was part of the man. >> for sure. great sense of personal consideration. i think we all agree with that. i think the lesson, the more important, the more considerate he was in a certain sense. he saw life from the perspective of somebody who had come up from a small town, small horizon roots and was able to listen to train whistles in the night and dream and then suddenly had an empathy for people who saw life from that perspective. cared about words. i think that's one thing that comes through. really cared deeply about words. he was afraid of being corny. i think a lot of it went back to checkers, the use of a little dog of checkers in 1952 which a lot of people to this day can't possibly forget about him. let me pick up, though, where we left off with some of the promise of the first year of the

administration, becoming -- absolving in the conflict of the 1970 period. campus unrest, economy stagnated, setback in midterm elections. i think there was a time in '71 when even re-election for nixon looked like a daunting prospect. one of the problems -- at the same time, however, a lot was going on on a lot of other fronts. we know the china initiative was being planned right in that period. we can talk about that later. a lot was happening on the domestic front. i think this is one of the areas where history more recently but even the public record at the time didn't really reflect the level of imaginative initiative that was wrapped up in the domestic program. i won't even try to tick off 10 or 15 or 20 elements. we have a panel on this stage last summer about welfare reform, for example. the whole new federalism, the

war on cancer and so many areas of domestic initiative that tend to be obscured. i think one of the problems nixon himself would say, we don't have a great theme, an overriding slogan, we haven't found a way to package all of this. i want to get ken's thoughts on this because he was very much involved in the effort to do that. before we do, look at the state of the union address in 1971, this is after the midterm elections. i think it was one of the better efforts to find a phrase that might summarize some of the domestic energy that we felt was there but wasn't always getting through to the public. >> these troubled years just passed. america has been going through a long nightmare of war and division, of crime and inflation. even more deeply, we have gone through a long, dark night of the american spirit.

now, we must let our spirit soar again. now, we are ready for the lift of a driving dream. >> the lift of a driving dream. seemed to me to be a phrase that we could have built around. ray, you were writing the state of the union. do you remember anything about it? >> i don't remember much about it. i think it was mine but i couldn't say for sure. >> it's his. no, i mean, really. i'm sure. you used that when we announced in 1968 and went to new hampshire. as i talked about that. that was in the concord speech. you wrote the opening speech of the campaign and lift of a driving dream. i remember teddy white talking about that. let me just say briefly about this '71 speech, this was clearly a move to get back up on a higher level because it was felt that -- i was out with agnew in 1970, what we called the seven weeks war against the radical liberals.

and richard nixon -- >> i don't remember that phrase, pat, but -- >> richard nixon went out also and he became -- agnew was supposed to carry the hod, be the bayonet of the party. richard nixon went out and began taking up some of the themes. we were using with the vice president. he came off as exceedingly harsh. ed muskey had that famous cape st. elizabeth address on national television where he was calm and statesman-like, they say we're for crime, and that's a lie. they know it's a lie. clearly we were looking for an up, positive thrust. and put that election behind us. >> john mitchell even said of the '70 campaign, looks like we're running for sheriff. there was a backing away maybe from some of that harsher rhetoric. ken, you came to the white house just at that time. you were involved in trying to rally a lot of people on behalf of the cause. what do you recollect?

>> i rise in tribute to the junior speechwriters in the white house. you had the murderers row of buchan buchanan, saffire and price and then a whole tribe of us who were really jr. speechwriters who never got to work on the big speeches. our job in the state of the union speech i'm remembering that where he announced six great goals. one of the jobs we had was constantly to provide background material to push these -- the agenda we had for the administration. so that meant writing fact sheets and talking points. and we just didn't write for the president. we wrote for cabinet officers, we wrote for senators. i was senator dole's speechwriter. i was speechwriter for the republican national chairman. i wrote for cabinet officers and they never knew it. because we would draft segments

of speeches. for congressional members, we'd write one-minute we called them chair speeches that we would flood washington, d.c. it would go back to this hostile atmosphere we had. we had to overcome this constantly by generating on our own a massive amount of communication with the white house. i actually started doing that in herb klein's communication shop, and then through the political campaign of '72 and then afterwards we continued to do it. whether it was the war on cancer or revenue sharing, some of the other great domestic programs we had. >> wage and price controls on one stage. >> right. >> harder to defend. >> well, we had the great controversial moments of the nixon presidency, wage and price controls, august of 1971. then in '72, may, just before he went to the soviet union on a big foreign trip, the president ordered the mining of hifong harbor.

>> against all advice. i think. it was a gutsy move. >> huge, gutsy move. they said he took a leave of his senses. it turned out to be a phenomenal foreign policy move. you had the -- during the easter offensive of 1972 in vietnam, so you had these great seminal moments when there was great national controversy and the december bombing where president nixon ordered b-52s back in the air because the paris peace talks were going nowhere. one of our jobs was to provide this back-up material to help flood the media, our supporters, our surrogates. all over the -- i think we rose -- elevated that to an art form and it basically all came down from the top. >> it was an active effort. things got better. nixon went to china, signed the first arms control period of the

nuclear era in moscow. the economy picked up i think and he won a record landslide in ' 72. then by early '73, all the troops were out of vietnam and all the p.o.w.s came home. that was another record high. nixon talked about it this way in another state of the union address, early '74 actually. if i remember right. >> america is a great and good land. we are a great and good land because we are a strong, free, creative people and because america is the single greatest force for peace anywhere in the world. [ applause ] today, as always in our history, we can base our confidence in what the american people will

achieve in the future on the record of what the american people have achieved in the past. tonight, for the first time in 12 years, a president of the united states can report to the congress on the state of the union at peace with every nation of the world. [ applause ] because of this, in the 22,000-word message on the state of the union that i have just handed to the speaker of the house and the president of the senate, i have been able to deal primarily with the problems of peace, with what we can do here at home in america, for the american people, rather than with the problems of war. >> that last little bit i asked to be added because it gave me a chance to talk about one thing that i was involved with that little speech.

that little 22,000-speech that he handed physically to the presiding officers was a message that i worked on. it was his effort to reconcile two very differing obligations that a president has with the state of the union address. ray might want to speak to this. on the one hand, this is a great state occasion, great ceremonial occasion. diplomatic corps is there, military officers, congress, a chance to speak in a ceremonial way to families gathered in living rooms across the country. on the other hand, there's an obligation to the administrative role of the president as the leader of the federal government bringing in and sending out again signals from every department and agency and bureau for what's called the state of the union message every year, which often turns into what is popularly called a laundry list. nixon is the only president who has done this. i don't know why. it's a schizophrenic assignment, i think. he decided to do it in two parts. ray worked on ns