Fame-Dropping: Five Decades of Encounters with the Eminent

Fame-Dropping

Fame-Dropping

Five Decades of Encounters

with the Eminent

James C. Humes

Hamilton Books

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Introduction

On December 20, 2010, Conservative MP Jonathan Aitken met me for drinks at the Sloane Club in Chelsea. As we sipped our cocktails, he told me that he had some important advice to offer. Jonathan had been head boy at Eton—in other words, Captain of School, a position of high visibility and prestige—and he entertained similar ambitions for my grandson James. He knew the director of admissions for Eton, and assured me that he would tell him that James Quillen would do Eton proud. But in return, he told me that I had to promise to do something for him. When Jonathan was ten (as he related), he found a valise in his grandmother’s attic. He opened it. It contained papers addressed to his yet-unborn great-grandson a century after he was writing. Jonathan’s grandfather had been governor of the Sudan and both in and out of government service. Over the years, he had become acquainted with the statesmen of the day, and wrote down his observations of them.

An accomplished statesman in his own right, formerly an adviser to Queen Elizabeth, Jonathan had a way of giving friendly advice the weight of an official directive. He told me that as someone who had been on the fringes of history, I should jot down my observations for my grandson and namesake, James, and his siblings, to read and study one day.

In accordance with his suggestion, this chronicle is a collection of my observations and comments about some of the great men and women of my day whom I met and talked to. I am imposing some restrictions: It is limited, with a few exceptions, to noteworthy figures of the twentieth century. I owe the title to Jonathan Aitken’s sending me the book Dropped Names by Frank Langella, who played Nixon in the Frost/Nixon movie. Dropped Names contains Langella’s personal impressions of the star personalities he had met.

Chapter 1

The White House

Dwight David Eisenhower: Supreme Allied Commander in

World War II and America’s Thirty-Fourth President

My first interest in a political campaign arose in 1951, when General Eisenhower was battling Bob Taft for the Republican nomination. Although my family was distant kin of Taft through his mother, Helen Herron, I was swept up by the glamour of the I Like Ike phenomenon. Yet my first meeting with Eisenhower was an unhappy one. In the summer of 1956, as a Young Republican in Washington, DC, I served as an usher at a thousand-dollar-a-plate fundraising dinner held at the Washington Coliseum (known at the time as the Uline Arena). Some of Ike’s aides told me that the president needed to find a men’s room. Eager to help, but not wanting to seem like I didn’t know what I was doing, I took a guess, pointed to the right, and rushed ahead of the presidential party. To my dismay, I found it was the ladies’ room. I yelled, Everyone out! and saluted beside the open door, hiding the telltale sign. The president, sighting an unfamiliar environment, glared at me with his icy blue eyes, and strode on.

Contrary to the genial smiling image he portrayed on TV, Eisenhower was a flinty five-star general. My wife Dianne, who worked for him as a secretary outside the Oval Office in 1957–58, said the staff was more scared of Ike than of Governor Sherman Adams, his brusque front man, especially on days when Ike resumed the role of general by wearing a brown suit. One time a new secretary wore pants, and on seeing her, Ike uttered his curse: Hell’s bells! He was as purely male as his wife Mamie was feminine. She loved wearing pink and playing canasta with the girls. Ike liked golf and bridge with the boys, although his friends didn’t enjoy partnering with him in bridge because he’d bark at their mistakes. Yet Eisenhower (German for hewer of iron) could easily morph into Ike at a public event: a Norman Rockwell painting of a seventy-year-old Huck Finn. His grandson, David, told me that his grandfather always came up grinning, having learned that trick while fighting when he was a boy. They can never lick you if you’re smiling, as Grandpa Ike told David.

My only long conversation with Eisenhower took place during October 1962 in Gettysburg, when I was a candidate for the Pennsylvania Assembly. Keystone State gubernatorial candidate Bill Scranton (who knew him slightly, for he had served under U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles) arranged the meeting; he had told Ike that I was the best of young leaders. Fixing his eagle eyes on me, the general asked if I was going door to door in the campaign. I nodded yes. He told me to list my likely voters on a card, and then urge them on to the polls.

While Ike’s critics may have painted him as a do-nothing president, his eight years of peace and prosperity (as well as six balanced budgets) comprise a record for any president to emulate. Not to mention two keys to that booming economy: The St. Lawrence Seaway Act (which Ike signed into law in May 1954) opened the heart of our country to the Atlantic, and the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways (authorized in June 1956) shortened the links to all American cities. Liberals have compared the extent of these two achievements to the great scope of Kennedy’s Peace Corps and Johnson’s Great Society, and found them lacking. But conservative substance and results often prove greater than symbolic progress by the left.

The Democrats also faulted Ike for not being intellectual like Adlai Stevenson. But he was knowledgeable. When President Johnson’s domestic policy aide Joe Califano was about to go up to Eisenhower’s home in Gettysburg to brief him on policy, LBJ gave him this advice: Listen to Ike and make a note to yourself every time he frowns, or looks at the sky. LBJ knew that Ike was a wise old man, irrespective of the crap the Democrats repeated about him in campaigns.

While at Gettysburg in 1967, I witnessed one example of the former president’s wide reading. A retired general, commenting on Vietnam, claimed to quote Herodotus on the Peloponnesian War: You can’t be an armchair general twenty miles from the front.

Eisenhower thanked him for these words of wisdom, which had clearly piqued his interest. When the general had left, Ike told me that, first of all, it was Aemilius Paullus, not Herodotus, who had written this; second, it referred to the Punic Wars, not the Peloponnesian War; and third, this general had misquoted the author. When I asked why he didn’t correct the general, Ike said that he didn’t want to embarrass him. He had learned in the military that sometimes it’s best to hide your ego as well as your intelligence.

The British military historian John Kerrigan said Eisenhower was the man he most admired in history. If not an intellectual by academic standards, he was a wise leader, insightful and prudent.

Richard Nixon: America’s Thirty-Seventh President

Of all the leaders for whom I drafted speeches, the brightest was Richard Nixon. He was also the best read in history and biography. Nixon was like the motivating teacher or professor you once had, not the one who gave you easy A’s, but the one who insisted, This is not your best—you can do better. As I once said about speechwriting, Reagan edited for style, Nixon for substance.

Nixon was an introvert in an extrovert’s profession. He disdained small talk, and despised fools. He was awkward on social occasions. The only small talk he could engage in comfortably was on sports. Being somewhat reticent himself, he was distrustful of my ‘showboating’ side. His favorite in our family was my wife, Dianne; Nixon’s former office manager Loie Gaunt told my daughter Rachel on a visit to Yorba Linda in 2009 that Dianne reminded him of his own wife, Pat.

He was attracted to intelligent and independent-minded people who had ideas, even if they disagreed with him. He had no use for rigid lefties, or doctrinaire right-wingers who spouted clichés. Although he could be stilted and stiff at receptions and parties, he could be warm in cerebral settings. He was more expansive on those occasions than Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, or Ronald Reagan.

Nixon could be brusque and even curt in his dealings if he was focused on something else. Yet he was also quite considerate. Hundreds of letters attest to his handwritten notes to orphans and Vietnam War soldiers, as well as notes to the daughters of both JFK and LBJ, and his calling on Ted Kennedy Jr. (the senator’s son) after the young man lost his leg to cancer. The press knew nothing of these gestures.

In 1959, Nixon asked me where I thought we would be with China in twenty years. His diplomatic overtures to China a dozen years later, culminating with a personal visit in 1972, would open the door to normalized relations with the communist behemoth. As British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan stated, this was probably the greatest diplomatic feat of the last century.

While the liberal media painted him as a hard man of the right, Nixon was actually the most progressive president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Setting time frames and goals for Affirmative Action programs, creating the Environmental Protection Agency, giving the District of Columbia the vote, providing female collegiate athletes with opportunities to excel, ending the draft, and beginning the withdrawal from Vietnam: These were among his initiatives and accomplishments. To this day, our biased media has cast all Republican presidents as stupid—except Nixon. They knew he was smart, just wicked.

Nixon revealed his knowledge of history when discussing his proposed negative income tax with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist and diplomat who was one of his closest advisors. This wealth-redistribution program would have outflanked anything dreamed up by the liberals. Citing the words of Disraeli, Nixon told him that the Republicans would outdish the Whigs.

On my sixtieth birthday, Tricia Nixon Cox gave me a note card that she had found in her father's desk drawer after his death. Written on the card were ten political maxims Nixon had derived from his knowledge of great leaders, such as Pericles, Franklin, Churchill, MacArthur, and others—the essential rules for leadership and negotiation. These "Ten Commandments of Statecraft" had guided Nixon through conflicts in Asia, Russia, and the Middle East.

A President needs a global view, a sense of proportion, and a keen sense of the possible. He needs to know how power operates, and he must have the will to use it.

If I could carve ten rules into the walls of the Oval Office for my successors to follow in the dangerous years just ahead, they would be these:

Always be prepared to negotiate, but never negotiate without being prepared.

Never be belligerent, but always be firm.

Always remember that covenants should be openly agreed to but privately negotiated.

Never seek publicity that would destroy the ability to get results.

Never give up unilaterally what could be used as a bargaining chip. Make your adversaries give something for everything they get.

Never let your adversary underestimate what you would do in response to a challenge. Never tell him what you would not do.

Always leave your adversary a face-saving line of retreat.

Always carefully distinguish between friends who provide some human rights and enemies who deny all human rights.

Always do at least as much for our friends as our adversaries do for our enemies.

Never lose faith. In a just cause faith can move mountains. Faith without strength is futile, but strength without faith is sterile.

Having laid down these rules, I would also suggest that the President keep in his desk drawer, in mind but out of sight, an eleventh commandment: When saying always and never, foreclose the unique exception; always leave room for maneuver. A President always has to be prepared for what he thought he would never do.

—Richard M. Nixon[1]

Julie Nixon Eisenhower: Daughter of Pat

and Richard Nixon

Julie Nixon Eisenhower manifests all the grit of her father and the grace of her mother. She combines the resolve of Richard Nixon with the radiant warmth and compassion of Pat Nixon.

Julie is a fighter. She pleaded with her father not to resign. A Nixon never quits, she told him. The flag of family and its ultimate vindication kept flying. That conviction remains as steadfast and strong in the present day as it did in the past during the national ordeal of Watergate.[2] As long as she lives, so will Richard Nixon’s vision of a world where conflicts are stabilized into an uneasy, if unsettling, truce between the aspirations of the free and the malice of America’s adversaries—those who work to sap our nation’s strength and vigor amid the surging tides of change.

Julie voices the opinions her father would have held against those at home and abroad who attack our Constitution, particularly our right to free speech and expression. Like her father, she abhors the academic who—instead of championing free speech—challenges this value in a posture of political correctness. Both Julie at Smith College and her husband David Eisenhower at Amherst experienced their Ivy League campuses dissolving into diatribe and dissent. The hatred of America and its morals has not waned but worsened since Nixon’s time. Riots and protests confront many a speaker who is not a certified leftist.

Julie has manifested the values of her father and family in her role as a mother and nurturer. I was invited to the home of Julie and David Eisenhower outside of Philadelphia when their children were young. On this visit, Julie’s daughter Jennie gave a rousing rendition of Button Up Your Overcoat. Jennie would carry her theatrical talents to the stage and to the screen, appearing on Broadway and in several Hollywood movies.

Julie is true to her ideals, and does not let friend or foe get in the way of her opinions. She turned down pleas from Pennsylvania Republicans to run for the position of U.S. senator from the Keystone State. As Julie explained, she is a loyal Republican, but a mother first and foremost. Family has always been her greatest priority.

And her integrity is not tempered by political affiliation. In the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton was under constant attack from Republicans, based on accusations of graft and corruption during his time as governor of Arkansas, Julie refused to join in. Her poise and aplomb earned her grudging praise by many a Democrat. As a presidential daughter, she is a model for emulation. She combines a vivacity of spirit with a valor of steel. She embodies the qualities of both her parents, and her life is a testament to each of them.

Gerald Ford: America’s Thirty-Eighth President

Gerald Ford was an ordinary man who did the right job at the right time. Dictatorship may depend on one man, but the greatness of democracy is that of ordinary men and women doing their jobs extraordinarily well. Ford was an example of that. I first wrote speeches for him in the summer of 1976. He seldom corrected my drafts, but sometimes he had the annoying habit of ad-libbing to make it seem like he wrote the address himself. One such text praised Pat Moynihan’s tenure at the UN. I wrote that Ambassador Moynihan stripped the pretense of democracy from the dictators in Africa. In delivering the speech, Ford ad-libbed that Pat had called a spade a spade! Other remarks displayed prescience and a simple eloquence. When Ford returned from Philadelphia following the Bicentennial Celebration, and heard the news that not one protest or demonstration had marred the occasion, he turned to his wife Betty and said that America was healed.

I got to know Ford while working with ghostwriter Trevor Armbrister, for whom I suggested the title A Time to Heal from Ecclesiastes for the former president’s autobiography. Ford was an innately kind man. When cruel things were said about him, he shrugged them off. The only two people he expressed dislike for were Nixon’s defense secretary, Jim Schlesinger, and White House Counsel John Dean. He had little respect for Reagan’s competence. He did admire Nixon, particularly in foreign policy, but unlike Nixon, he read little. When I would give him a quotation from Churchill, Truman, or Lincoln in hopes of expanding his conception of the presidency, he’d brush it off. To the media, all GOP presidents are backward, and they tried to portray him as stupid. But Ford ranked higher in his Yale Law School graduating class than either Cyrus Vance or Sargent Shriver, his classmates. He would amaze me by recalling a military appropriations bill signed ten years earlier, with numbers correct almost to the decimal point. He told me he pardoned Nixon, not for his sake, but for the country’s, knowing that the pardon would defeat him in 1976. Years later, Ted Kennedy praised this much-criticized pardon as an act of statesmanship and courage.

The most influential address I ever drafted was not in the White House, and not for a serving president. When I was in Vail, Colorado in 1977 helping Ford with his memoirs, he asked me to write a speech for the thirty-second anniversary of Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech, to be delivered at the site of the original event in Fulton, Missouri. In Europe, the communists were threatening to win elections in France, Italy, and Spain, while from the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Soviets were promoting communism with a human face. Unlike every president since Harry Truman, who had stood beside Churchill at tiny Westminster College while the British statesman outlined the dire threat posed by communism, President Carter refused to take a stand on the European elections.

At that time in Washington, to save electricity, Carter had the lights in the Capitol dome turned off. In Ford’s speech, which I drafted, the former president alluded to turning off the Capitol dome’s lights in Washington to save energy, and raised the specter of parliaments in Rome, Paris, and Lisbon dousing the lights of free debate in the absence of democracy. These remarks echoed the words of British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey on the eve of World War II: The lamps are going out all over Europe. Clearly, the communists thought that a minority could gain power in Western Europe, as they once had in the East. For the speech I had drafted, Canopy of Tyranny, Ford spoke at Westminster College on October 29, 1977, to a standing-room-only crowd of more than four thousand people. His words resonated with supporters of democracy and human rights around the globe, including those at the Holy See; the speech was later featured prominently in the Vatican’s daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s foreign policy advisor, later told me that if France, Italy, and Spain were painted red on a map of Europe, his boss could forget about re-election. And this Second Iron Curtain Address may have had an effect: Soon after, Carter changed his position and declared that the election of communist parties in Europe would be a disaster. Fortunately, the communists did not win a plurality in any European country.

The most surreal experience I ever had as a writer also involved a speech for Gerald Ford, which was delivered at New Haven, Connecticut, in October 1978. GOP Congressman Ronald Sarasin was running for governor to unseat Ella Grasso, and Ford had been invited to speak on behalf of his former House colleague. But what made the occasion weird for me is that I drafted all the speeches delivered that evening: the one by Sarasin, the introduction of Ford by the Connecticut GOP state party chairman, and the featured speech by former President Ford. Eloquence at short notice—such is the life of a White House ghostwriter!

Ronald Reagan: America’s Fortieth President

Ronald Reagan was the most amiable president I ever met, but also the most aloof. When I first encountered him in 1973, I was promoting my book Instant Eloquence, and my law-school friend Chuck Manatt hosted a reception for me at the Beverly Hilton. Reagan speechwriter Pete Hannaford took me in for a quick handshake with the governor. It was perfunctory, with no injection of personality. I told the governor to note my soul shakers in the book—anecdotes from history for closing talks inspirationally. One of those soul shakers became his favorite—words taken from John Winthrop’s sermon, A Model of Christian Charity, in which the future governor of Puritan Massachusetts expressed his intent to build a city upon a hill.

In 1975, I helped Reagan with his remarks before the World Affairs Council in Philadelphia. He had left the California governor’s office in January of that year, and the speech was designed to showcase his knowledge of foreign policy—with an eye towards his presidential ambitions. Having worked on this speech, I was an unwitting participant in one of the greatest bloopers in the history of public speaking. I had adapted Reagan’s address from the work of a foreign-policy think-tank apparatchik—reshaping the stiffly bureaucratic language into something that, if not quite poetic, was certainly conversational and simple. One theme to be emphasized was the Third World, in terms of enlarging America’s policy vision towards less-developed nations. But wherever I had drafted the phrase Third World, Reagan mistakenly ad-libbed Third World War!

Reagan never addressed me by name. He would call me that Churchill fellow, and then proceed to tell me a Churchill anecdote. If he seemed simplistic to the left, he was. He was guided by simple beliefs: love of God, love of country, and the American way of life—free markets and a free world. Reagan changed America and all of humanity. In making communism a dirty word and capitalism a good one, he provided a benchmark for every president who succeeded him.

A story he told me about his youth may be instructive. Reagan was attending church in Dixon, Illinois with his mother and brother on an August day so sweltering that you could have fried eggs on the courthouse steps, Reagan recalled. As the preacher climbed the stairs to the pulpit, he saw Reagan pull at his necktie and collar. The pastor looked out at his congregation, and then, pointing downwards with his finger towards the infernal regions, he said: It’s hotter down THERE! His Sunday sermon concluded, the reverend walked out of church. If brevity was the point of this anecdote, it also illustrated Reagan’s basic groundings in God and family.

George H. W. Bush: America’s Forty-First President

The first President Bush was the quintessential aristocrat. Despite his adoption of Texas as his political base, he remained the Andover and Yale man, with a family-bred sense of noblesse oblige. He was the English public school Tory transformed for American political life. But to Margaret Thatcher he was a wet, the type of moderate Establishment conservative she despised. She manifested her suspicions of President Bush when she saw him in August 1990, against a backdrop of the events that led to Desert Storm the following January. Turning to America’s leader, she told him not to go wobbly on her! Thatcher, who once remarked that consensus is a euphemism for cowardice, knew that Bush was conditioned to accept the views of his State Department: the same ones who advised Reagan to oppose Britain’s defense of the Falklands in 1982.

I first got to know Bush in 1972, at a dinner with my distant cousin John Humes, Nixon’s ambassador to Austria, at the Chevy Chase Club. The gracious and congenial Bush recruited me to write speeches, and once took me to dinner with him at the Alfalfa Club. He was not a natural extrovert like his son George Jr., or his secretary of state and chief of staff, Jim Baker. But he worked at knowing names and storing away personal data about all his friends and employees. While I did write some speeches for him, and once accompanied him to Indianapolis, I was pushed aside in favor of Spiro Agnew’s former pen Vic Gold—who in all fairness was a superior writer.

On one occasion, George Bush met me at The Brook in Manhattan, where I introduced him to my daughters Mary and Rachel. We soon