From ‘Word Donkey’ to ‘Fireman’: A Speechwriter’s Life

Review of: Behind Closed Doors: In the Room with Reagan & Nixon by Ken Khachigian (Post Hill Press, 496 pages, published July 2024)

In his magisterial memoir, former White House speechwriter and Nixon/Reagan confidant Ken Khachigian humorously designates a portion of a political scribe’s career as the “Word Donkey” stage. A word donkey is the cool-headed, rapid-fire writer who everyone turns to when no one else is really sure (or wants to volunteer) what a politician should say—like in 1980 when, aboard Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign plane, Khachigian was given less than two hours to completely re-write a Reagan speech in light of a late-breaking statement earlier in the day by then-President Jimmy Carter.

Intensifying the pressure further as he sweated over his typewriter, Khachigian adds, was the moment when “Mrs. Reagan visited me to ask in a flat, icy voice, “Why doesn’t Ronnie have his speech for the next stop?”

Khachigian got to work and created a speech that, after Reagan delivered it, was excerpted on all three main TV networks that evening. “Every speechwriter,” adds Khachigian, “will appreciate my airborne episode—with the candidate, candidate’s wife, and entire entourage awaiting the end results of one’s brain searching to transmit magic words to one’s fingers in an atmosphere of chaos at thirty-five thousand feet under time constraints. The classic test for the Word Donkey.”

Another step in a speechwriter’s rise involves reaching the “fireman” or “firefighting” phase. That’s when enough trust has accumulated, as Khachigian explains, for a speechwriter to be brought in “either to complement the presidential staff ’s efforts or engage directly in rescue missions [intended to salvage troubled speech drafts] on short notice.” Examples from Behind Closed Doors include Khachigian’s efforts to help Reagan shore up faltering Congressional Republican fortunes in 1982, or the speech he wrote for President Reagan’s closely-watched 1985 visit to a military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany—or Khachigian’s role in the White House’s efforts to tamp down the PR storm that followed the Iran-Contra revelations in 1987.

Born into an Armenian-American farming family in Visalia, CA, Ken Khachigian was a law student at Columbia when he volunteered in 1967 for Richard Nixon’s  presidential campaign, taking the first steps towards his eventual emergence as a key GOP scribe and political strategist. Khachigian’s Behind Closed Doors is a sweeping memoir that begins with Nixon’s final days in office (which Khachigian witnessed as a Nixon White House staffer), covers his extensive post-White House work with Nixon, and then continues through Khachigian’s years as a top Reagan advisor.

The book’s overall emphasis falls firmly on Khachigian’s collaboration with Ronald Reagan on key speeches and statements. For example, Khachigian’s chapters on the 1980 Reagan campaign draw on an approximately 35,000-word, previously-private diary he compiled during those crucial months – enriching this memoir with a first-person, deep-in-the-backrooms perspective on Reagan’s successful White House bid.

In addition, many of Khachigian’s chapters on the Reagan White House years quote from a stream of previously-unpublicized occasional letters and memos on political tactics and strategy through which Richard Nixon, via Khachigian, shared his perspective with Reagan’s team.

Another noteworthy thread in Khachigian’s narrative includes reflections on what experiences or talents political speechwriters need to succeed.  For example, a Reagan White House colleague asks him “if there was a book on speechwriting” to help him learn the basics.  Khachigian’s response:  “’[Y]ou can’t learn speechwriting from a book. There’s no book like that.’”

To flourish in their chosen roles, Khachigian advises, political speechwriters need to understand the “subtlety, creativity and poetry involved in reading political movements” and in “translating” all this into “content, tenor and spirit that move individuals to act or refrain from acting.” They also need “an ear for political rhetoric,” and a “sense of how to connect with voters.”

Where should one go to learn these things, if they cannot be absorbed though books? To Khachigian, much of this curriculum can be profitably studied through direct involvement in the “successful execution of arduous political campaigning.”

By getting out on the political frontlines, in Khachigian’s view, a budding speechwriter can directly experience how candidates accomplish two important goals. The first is how candidates use messages in their speeches and statements to connect with and politically mobilize local constituencies; and the second is how these messages also help drive “the daily news cycle [and] cater to the media’s need for lead stories and sound bites.”

Khachigian also warns speechwriters about an occupational hazard awaiting them. He refers here to the “power seekers” who can show up in any political office, ready to ferociously prospect for ways to increase their own personal glory and influence.

To keep themselves free from the power seekers’ fixation on factional politics, speechwriters need what Khachigian calls the “philosophical commitments” and “loyalty” to stay aligned, above all, with the office’s true top boss—the elected official whose political program the speechwriters have pledged their pens, their personal honor and their best professional efforts.

This is not the typical advice or perspective that experienced speechwriters decide to memorialize for those who will follow them. But then again, based on his impressive length of service in two eventful presidential administrations, Ken Khachigian is far from being a typical political speechwriter.