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Robert Schlesinger: White House Ghosts


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Published: Jun 25, 2008

Thu., June 26, 6:30 p.m., free, reservations required, National Constitution Center, 525 Arch St., 215-409-6700, constitutioncenter.org

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Don't get spooked — Honest Abe's ethereal top hat isn't floating through his old bedroom, scaring off the deep-pocketed guests who slumber there now. Historian Robert Schlesinger's White House Ghosts (Simon & Schuster, $30) is about the shadowy figures who put words, not shrieks, into the mouths of presidents.

Kicking off with FDR and devoting a chapter to each subsequent POTUS through Dubya, Schlesinger traces an alternative history of the modern presidency through the speechwriters who aspire to communicate (and, in many cases, influence) policy. The fascinating — albeit worrying — fact that emerges is that in the modern media age, a leader's success hinges at least as much in how he sells his ideas as on what those ideas actually are.

The more successful collaborations — Truman, Kennedy (whose team included the author's late father, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.) and especially Roosevelt — came when the scribes understood the man they wrote for and could think in his voice. The failures are indicative of their administrations: George H.W. Bush, self-destructively self-effacing, bleeding every paragraph of poetry lest his emotions overcome him; Jimmy Carter, the idealist engineer, unable to delegate and drowning emotion in a sea of details.

Schlesinger traces the evolution of many of the era's most memorable slogans; odd how "axis of hatred" or "Herr Gorbachev, bring down this wall" contort the tongue, so used to their familiar revisions. But even more fascinating are the petty squabbles and ego-driven infighting that abound, even among writers whose job it is to pen eloquence that will ultimately be credited to the one who articulates it, not those who dreamed it up.