Karl Hess: Presidential Speechwriter Turned Homesteader

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PLOWBOY: Where did you go after leaving Mutual?

HESS: To a little newspaper in Virginia that didn't give a damn about my age. Anyone who'd work for six dollars a week was all right with the guys who ran the place. And I got to be a city editor, sports editor every kind of editor while I was there.

I stayed with that paper until I was 16 because-and this is really wild-back then, anyway, at the age of 16, you became official. When you were 16, you could go anyplace. So I went to work for a bigger newspaper, and kept on moving until-by the time I was 18-I was assistant city editor of the Washington Daily News. By then, thank goodness, people had stopped asking me how old I was because-I'm not sure-there may be a law against being an assistant city editor when you're only 18.

Well, anyhow I lost that job when I refused to write an obituary for Franklin Roosevelt. I thought he was the first real social fascist on the North American Continent and, when he died, I stayed out all .night celebrating our liberation. My superiors, of course, didn't share those opinions and they fired me.

But I didn't care. At that time, I could get a job with any paper in town. So I went to the Times-Herald then ran through all the other newspapers in Washington. Eventually I wound up as news editor of Aviation Weekly. That's where I really started getting interested in technical writing and where I developed a love for flying. I even got a pilot's license and all that stuff.

PLOWBOY: When did you first enter the rather specialized field of political writing?

HESS: Shortly after Tom Dewey lost his second Presidential election. That was 1948, and I was asked to write some speeches for the Republican National Committee.

Now this was the second great revelation of my life. Because while it's easy to be a journalist being a speech writer-man!-that's real tall clover. You don't have to do anything to write speeches for politicians. You don't have to know anything. You don't even have to think. All you have to do is be glib and invent great phrases. Historic phrases.

You see, all politicians want to go down in the history books. Right? And history books are written, by and large (chuckle), by idiots. And idiots look for meaningless but good-sounding phrases.

That's why all political administrations have to have slogans. All except the good ones, that is. The good ones don't need slogans. Like what was George Washington's administration called? Or Jefferson's? Madison's?

PLOWBOY:So you don't have to be a good writer to turn out political speeches?

HESS: Oh, you have to be a very good writer but you don't have to be very smart. As a matter of fact, if you put too much content into the speeches you'll get yourself in trouble.

A good political address, you see, should contain only one thought. Because that's about all the audience can handle. And what's so profound about coming up with a political program anyway? Ask any 16-year-old kid to give you three sensational ideas for what the government should do, and he or she will come back with the same answers as anyone else. So what you need in a political speech is great phrases. Since every politician says roughly the same thing, each one is judged by history merely on the basis of how well he or she says it.

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