speech to the country. some of us, and i think i had a lead role on this at that moment worked on a 20,000-word carefully drafted detailed message to the congress. and he had it both ways. he had a two-tier communication approach. ray, i think you, too, thought that was an idea -- >> it was very good. actually, what made it possible, was what the constitution -- the state of the union is provided for in the u.s. constitution. but what the constitution says is that the president shall from time to time report to congress on the state of the union. it does not say anything about format. and in the earlier years in the country, these were written messages. eventually, sometime probably around the advent of television, i don't know, it became common for a president to make a state of the union address. >> woodrow wilson. >> was it? yeah. to -- a live address to congress.

but these things could be awfully ponderous things. if you had to listen to one, you might fall asleep several times. it would be good if you were trying to sleep at night, trying to read it. and so, nixon decided to have the best of both worlds. he started this practice of having two versions, a spoken version and a written version. they would -- the spoken version would be covered by stuff in the written version. the written version would be much more spelled out in detail. and it would be sort of a significant -- a sophisticated analysis of why the things he was asking for in the spoken message should be done. it worked well. he would take two written copies, hand one to the speaker of the house, one to the president of the senate. then he would deliver the address. it was i think a very helpful innovation. >> lee, i worked on one earlier.

i was going to mention this but 20,000 words? it's a little overdone. i worked on one myself, one of the speeches delivered by the president and we had a 6,000-word address. what you would get there is various departments had policies they desperately wanted to get into the state of the union. we said, we can't do it because the president wants to deliver a speech. lyndon johnson would get up there, and we're going to do this, and we're going to do this -- >> clinton went an hour and a half. >> they are listing all these things. president nixon said, put all those in a message. it will have the same standing. so people can point to it, this is white house policy, this is administration policy, and get it all written. we'd start that up. i wrote one. mine was 6,000. i never thought we got to 20,000. >> the written message got to 20,000 or so the president said. i think i finished it about 8:00 in the morning and went home to bed. the president had -- always

signed these things with signing pens. one of them i still have somewhere. evidently he designated for me. i wasn't there because i was home sound asleep he was said to have said, did we kill him in the process? maybe it came close. >> i want to make two observations based on what we've been saying here. first of all, you notice in all those speeches you're watching, he's not using a teleprompter. president nixon almost never used a teleprompter. he read from the text. even the state of the union speech, the inaugural speech and all those major speeches, he did not use a teleprompter. we have transitioned significantly over the years. in fact, president reagan didn't use them that often either. >> if i didn't mention it, ken was head speechwriter on the presidential address at that time. >> the second observation is that what you heard today how vietnam permeated so much of what we did in the white house until 1973 when the war ended,

theoretically ended. it just dominated everything. in fact, dominated half of what i did, these kind of things i did. we had against all odds trying to get public opinion to continue to support these very difficult policies, even as we were withdrawing troops from vietnam in huge numbers, we had the national security staff working for secretary -- henry kissinger. three people in sort of a vietnam war room. drosh and cramer and don brewster and they worked in anonymity. i would be up there once every three days. they would collect vast amounts of information we would use in speeches and communications or whatnot. vietnam just dominated evhi to have watergate dominate >>

ou know, you mention 1974. if you're talking january then, that is after the saturday nigh irving committee hearings had been going on, had been concdedr a couple of months and been concluded.hehole impeachment process was under way so i think you see a little more stress and strain in the president of the united states there than you saw earlier. >> you see those contrasts. bill? >> while my friends were solving great geopolitical problems in rhetoric, i was doing what was called rose garden rubbish. rose garden rubbish was the contemptuous name they had for the -- what lee was talking about before. there's just so many things the president is asked to speak on or write something about. and most of the time those things are forgotten almost

immediately after they're said but they have to be done. so while all of these world shaking events were going on, i was doing like st. patrick's day stuff and -- >> especially st. patrick's day stuff. >> i knew that. arbor day. one good thing was the duke ellington medal of freedom. i worked on that. but the point, and lee made it right at the beginning is, there is no end to the things people want presidents to do. when i hear even scholars sometimes say, why did these presidents have speechwriters? why don't they write their own stuff? well, one reason is if they did that, they'd never come out of the oval office which, in some cases, might be good, you've got to have people and he put together -- again, lee stressed this. he put together a staff that had different styles.

i once read a criticism of that in which they said that just makes the president schizophrenic. one day he's this, then whatever he happens to be. and the answer to is that you can get it from art or you can get it from your own life. presidents, like yourself, have many dimensions to them, many sides to them. they have many ways of communicating. when you have people on your staff, fellows like this, it makes it easier for you to do that. >> speaking of being multi-dimensional, richard nixon was surely that. the end of that speech we just saw as pat was opining, he sort of left the formal part of the speech and said i must add a word about watergate. the first time he used that word to the congress, anyway. and he talked briefly about how the business of the country would go on. eight months later, of course, ray was called in and asked for a thousand words or something.

we all have heard this segment of rhetoric before but i thought we could also share it now. this is the resignation speech of thursday night in august of 1974. >> august 8th. >> august 8th. >> i have never been a quitter. to leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. but as president, i must put the interest of america first. america needs a full-time president and a full-time congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad. to continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the president and the congress.

in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issue of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home. therefore, i shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. vice president ford will be sworn in as president at that hour in this office. >> ray, can you tell us about that experience? >> one lead-up to it. i'll throw in. on -- let's see, i guess tuesday before -- tuesday of that week, we had -- al hague convened in his office heads of departments, to strategize the battle ahead and went through all strategic discussions here, fighting the impeachment battle in congress.

then that ended and we were scattering. al's secretary came in and asked me to come back in. al said, that was all a sham. we need a resignation speech. so i started on that on tuesday. he delivered that address on thursday evening. it was a fairly busy couple of days. i was sorry it had to be done. but if it had to be done, i was glad to be the one doing it. we went back and forth. the president and i went back and forth through several drafts. as we did with anything like that, we pared it down until he found what he wanted to say and was satisfied with it, which he was. he delivered the address thursday night. most people who saw things or remember anything about the television of this period, what they remember is his emotional farewell to the staff from the east room, which was very

dramatic because he delivered this resignation address thursday night to the nation on television, then assembled the staff in the east room on friday morning. and then he came in. going over there, i didn't know much of anything was going to be done. i thought it was just a farewell. but -- and he delivered a more formal, a little informal talk here. everybody was trying to keep their eyes dry. and so forth. then we gathered on the south balcony to wave good-bye as they left and got aboard the helicopter to take him out to california. and one of the things i remember about that most is we were all pressed tightly together on the balcony waving good-bye and the woman on my right had tears streaming down her cheeks was barbara bush, george bush sr.'s wife. they climbed the helicopter and

went back to san clemente and that was the end of it. >> if i can, what led up to that was ray and i and al hague and ron zeigler and jim st. clair went in on sunday and we went up to camp david. they were talking about the tape of june 23rd. we didn't know exactly what it contained but that's what was being demanded. we called steve bull and he got the tape of the 23rd. we found out the tape of the 23rd contained statements that seemed to contradict what president nixon had been saying for three months. the president had himself heard that tape three months before when he said i'm not going to send it over to the special prosecutor. so that led us to believe that when that tape was dropped, there would be a perceived credibility crisis.

>> that was called the smoking gun? >> the smoking gun. what we decided up there was that the tape was fatal. and that what we should do is go back to the white house and proceed to drop the tape. when the tape hit, the support that still existed for the president, which was considerable in the senate, frankly, the bottom would drop out and then our friends and out our allies and the president's supporters would see that it was not survivable. so it was not some kind of staff pushing the president out or pushing him to do something. you just drop something and it was like something fatal that hit and everybody knew that. as ray has written in the "new york times," i believe it was, the -- barry goldwater and hugh scott and i think congressman rhodes came over to the white house, and they were on the lawn. i guess it was wednesday of that

week. the mythology is that they went in and talked the president into resigning. but that is nonsense because ray price was already working on the resignation speech when they came to the white house. >> yeah, it was, yeah, yeah. but it was a secret from them but they took credit for it. >> we have some slides of the president's reading text of that speech. i don't know if you can see them well from the audience. you can see the line towards the bottom. i have never been a quitter. i don't know if you can read -- this is very typical of nixon reading text. rosemary woods typed them out in this fashion. lots of white space, very easy to look up and look down and find your space. everything in logical order. last-minute changes at the top. underscoring under key words to emphasize. this was his meticulous approach

to delivering a speech. maybe another page of the speech, too, that we can look quickly at. and on a happier note, a page or two of the inaugural address. maybe we can have those on the screen and take a quick -- this is the mark on the left hand says, therefore, i shall resign the presidency and a double line at the bottom, a pause, very much nixon's code to himself. just before that happy note, the inaugural address also available? a glimpse of -- it's fascinating to go into the archives, national archives are very much a part of this event today. it's fascinating to look at some of these documents. here is part of the inaugural address. >> first inaugural address. >> first inaugural address. we want to have some time for audience questions, so maybe this is a good time to move to that. there's a microphone, i think, somewhere. we'd love to have you

participate in this discussion. >> before you get to that, i want to make an observation about the process. we didn't have computers and microsoft word in those days. when you did speeches and they had to be edited, they had to actually be retyped, edited and retyped. and so, this is a tribute to those secretaries in those days who worked all hours of the night on those ibm typewriters. then you corrected them, edited them on the sheet and rewritten, every time. it was a whole different technology. >> nixon himself never learned to type. >> yes, i think i see a question in the back. >> i do have a question. this has been a fascinating forum, and i thank all the participants for being here. i must also observe that it's been a forum that nixon might love, nixon's mother might love, but it's also taking place at a university. so one of the questions i have is this. the title of the panel is

"writing for 37." nixon has been presented in a certain kind of way. we might reflect on certain aspects of the controversies of the vietnam war, bombing of cambodia is not something we perhaps want to be laughing about. nixon did prosecute a war for another four years, got the same peace deal he could have gotten in 1969. nixon was someone who inaugurated a southern strategy, american politics, using race in a very ugly way. and then we have watergate, an umbrella term for a wide range of trillion activities. criminal activities. the smoking gun tape did not reveal a perceived credibility gap. there was a huge gap. the elephant in the room here, as the distinguished gentlemen on the forum are implicated, in this. what's it like to write for a president who should have been driven from office? that would be fascinating to reflect on now that we've had some 35 years to think about that. >> well, i for one would not accept his premises. >> go ahead, ray.

>> no, when he said i fought the battle with him throughout that, because i believe -- we believed and i still believe, whether you do or not, that we were on the right side of the battle. if i did not believe it, i would not be there. i did believe it and i still believe it and i think you're wrong. >> let me say with regard to the war in vietnam, when general eisenhower left office and richard nixon left office in 1961, there were 600 american advisers in south vietnam. when we arrived back in the white house after a democratic decade, democratic overwhelming control of both houses and to the presidency of the united states, we had 535,000 americans in vietnam. richard nixon said, i'm going to end the war with honor. he did not promise to cut and run. he worked tirelessly. he worked hard. through all that period of time, with demonstrators in the streets against him, he did not

start that war. he supported it, but he never said we're going to cut and run. so, all those four years, i'll tell you who is responsible. take a look at the best and brightest who took us in there. take a look at the wise men. take a look at the "new york times" and "washington post" and all the others who cheered america into that war, and suddenly when richard nixon enters the white house, it is nixon's war? he simply wanted to end that war with honor. and in 1973, we had all the p.o.w.s home and the south vietnamese were in control of every provincial capital. he had won the war basically. what happened then was congress began to cut off all the military equipment until a north vietnamese said, the congress forced the south vietnamese to fight a poor man's war. it was not richard nixon who marched us into vietnam. he tried to get us out with other than. honor. he succeeded in doing so, quite frankly, against the opposition

of a lot of people who were responsible for having all those guys over there. >> the controversy continues. it's useful to be reminded that this is a terribly controversial time. there were many advocates on the other side. controversial time, there were many advocates on the other side, and people gathered here were all at one time or another advocates on the other side, so it's natural that you've gotten a certain interpretation. i suppose there's a larger question for speech writers, that is, how do you assemble a coalition of speech writers who have different views and how as a writer do you always agree with the principle you are writing for. when you don't agree, how do you handle that in your own mind. at what point do you leave. at what point do you stay silent. bill has written about it. >> i've written speeches longer than anyone here, not as good as anyone here, but longer. and i used to speak to college audiences and they always asked me the question, when do you get

off the boat here. i always said if it's a serious matter of conscience and this happens very rarely, but if it's a serious matter of conscience, you follow your conscience, you leave the job, that's it. you can't do it. but 99% of the time it isn't like that. you disagree with the boss on a certain issue, but it isn't maybe a moral issue, it's an issue of policy whatever it happens to be, and you just got to ask yourself the question is this the best way for me to keep on helping this person, man or woman, i'm working with even if i do not agree with him or her. let me give you an example from my own background. when i was with senator jim buckley, great man that he is, jim, as you all recall, gave a speech asking president nixon to resign. it was a heart-wrenching thing.

it was just so difficult for him to do. before he gave his speech, he had it drafted by i think it was jim burnham of "national review." yeah i think so. before he gave his speech, he showed it to me. so, there i was, you know, i had worked for nixon. i don't want jim to be giving the speech. what i said to him, you give this speech, you're not going to get re-elected, first of all, and second of all -- but i helped him. i helped to clarify it a little bit. i didn't think that was a matter for me for resignation. but each speechwriter has to make his or her own judgment as to when that bright red mark comes up. and, believe me, in my experience, very rarely is it a matter of complete conscience. of war and peace, whatever it happens to be. almost always it's a matter of policy and then you have to say to yourself, do i go along with

this policy and make it as analytic and good as i can in the prose, or do i say to the guy, i can't do this? >> a couple other people wanted to ask a question. yes, i'm having difficulty seeing hands raised. >> i'm brad patterson, i had the honor of being one of your colleagues on the nixon staff and i was deputy cabinet secretary for eisenhower. i have a question, how did president nixon handle conflicts among his staff on issues of messages or speeches? i can think of an example, in march of 1970 the supreme court has said you're going to have desegregation of all the schools, the southern schools and they're going to do it now. and this was a very controversial political and substantive controversy across the country and for the president. he asked my boss to do some research on this. i was executive assistant to leonard garman, and ray price, i think you put your hand to one of the great state papers of the

nixon administration in march of 1970 in a message to congress on school desegregation this very complicated and controversial subject, which as i remember you asked the congress to appropriate sums of money to help the southern districts go through this terribly difficult process. but there were people on the staff, i think, pat, you were one, there was another, so there was controversy on the staff. now, in the eisenhower's time i was there to give you an example, you would have a cabinet meeting. my understanding is in general president nixon didn't like to have meetings with people face to face with controversies face to face in front of him in a cabinet or any other time. but i think he took this message to his thinking room over in the executive office building and made his own decisions. but -- so my query is, how is that or other controversies, how were they handled in the nixon white house?

>> well, i think, brad, i recall being in that. it was a very tough series of meetings. secretary -- excuse me, attorney general mitchell sort of chaired them. vice president agnew was there. i was there. you were there. i think -- i mean, there was real conflict in there, and i think at the end it was bryce hollow, was it not, who was asked to draft the statement that was being made on -- basically, let me say this, the whole issue was desegregation of the southern schools. in terms of what was done, when we arrived 10% of the southern schools were desegregated, when nixon left, 70% were desegregated but there was a huge battle over the issue that had come out of the charlotte decision of court ordered busing i which would takes kids from one school to another to achieve racial balance and nixon was

opposed to that but he was in favor of desegregation. but my recollection is that that battle basically was won by those who argued for going forward with the tough decisions, getting the money and getting it done. >> and just one ps on that, which is not a speech writing matter, but how this was -- what made -- why nixon was able to do successfully what everybody had said could not be done successfully. george shultz was the key to this. and george was our secretary of the labor and secretary of the treasury, but he'd been a leading labor negotiator, moderator and so for beforehand, a brilliant man. and he set up a program which we had -- we set up committees in the various southern states. each a mixed black and white committee. they had a cheer mandate, this was going to happen.

the schools were going to be desegregated and saved or desegregated and ruined, it's up to you to work out in your state by state and len garman, of course, was a key player in this, too, as you well remember. and whether -- so, we set up these committees black and white and each state had one. and then they started doing it state by state. but finally -- finally he invited this -- i'll try to shorten this up, but invited the members of the mississippi delegation, i think george organized this, to come up to the white house. and be put together there. and they all came together. first the roosevelt room, and then they were moved into the oval office to meet with the president. and, pardon me, it was a very emotional thing for them and for the president, too. and finally they just -- i think

the leader of the black group and kind of the guy who was the leader of the white group got together, and they finally said to one another, if you and i can't do this, nobody can. and so they took it upon themselves to make it happen and happen right. it worked in mississippi and then it worked throughout the rest of the south. >> incredible story here. [ inaudible ] yes >> different style. >> it wasn't even. brad patterson a great witness to so many things. not a lot of dramatic speeches in this thing but a lot of small conversations, that's another part of leadership. a liberal "new york times" correspondent -- >> one of us. >> -- wrote a book on one of us who said more progress was done in a year and a half with the

desegregated schools. so there are different ways of going at this and different ways of evaluating this. if we take one or two more questions. again, i can't quite see. sure. >> i have a question, it sort of goes back to technique. you talked earlier about the substance and the sizzle but there's also a delivery of the speech. i worked as a speechwriter. one of the things you have to worry about is the delivery of the person that you're working for. is there a challenge with that? was there any advice for nixon on how to deliver the speech or did you just work around? >> the answer from what ray said earlier, some of the speeches i worked on we went through eight or nine drafts and by the end of it i couldn't find two words put together that belonged to me. they were all his. he turned it into his words and his formulation and his way of saying it that he was comfortable with, so that made it frankly relatively easy. there were some cases when you're on campaigns and even in reagan where you might have to