July 5, 2025 • 58 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Michael Berry Show. Welcome to the Saturday Podcast. Today
we are shining a spotlight on Kenneth kochegian I Hope
I pronounced that correctly, a distinguished political strategist and one
of Ronald Reagan's most trusted speech writers. Katchigean, not koch
I think it's Kachigian, played a vital role in crafting
(00:22):
speeches that defined the Reagan era. He would also advise
Republican campaigns across the country, shaping American politics for decades,
from behind the scenes stories to the art of creating
speeches that still resonate today, he's going to share with
you some unforgettable anecdotes about working with President Reagan, highlighting
(00:47):
President Reagan's wit, which everyone remarks on, his warmth and
the enduring power of the spoken word. John F. Kennedy
said of Instant Churchill after Churchill passed that he mobilized
the English language and sent it into battle, and he did.
We've played some Churchill speeches on here, and we will
(01:09):
play some more. So this is Kenneth Kachigean at Hillsdale
College telling his favorite stories of working with the man
that Rush Limball famously called ranaldus Maximus.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
We hope you enjoy. I thought the best way to
tell this story was to tell it on the basis
of how I traveled through my career with President Reagan,
and I can tell it with these pictures and a
narrative and how I got to know him, and on
(01:46):
this topic of the Reagan I knew, and to tell
you how I got to know him and through the
stories and experiences I had over this fabulous, wonderful career
I had, And it starts with this didn't start with
this wonderful This is my favorite. Actually, this is my
favorite photo of the two of us in the Oval
(02:06):
office where he's telling me, probably telling me a joke,
but this is my favorite picture. Okay, So no, Actually
I was a great fan of Ron Reagan back before
(02:28):
he ever knew it. I was a fan of Death
Valley Days. He was the old Ranger back in nineteen
sixty four. He was the host of the Death Valley Days,
and I used to watch it on television. So I
was actually a fan of him before he even knew it.
And then when I was a student by President at
UC Santa Barbara in nineteen sixty six, one of the
(02:51):
duties I had or privileges I had was to introduce
guest speakers on campus. And he was running for governor
of California in nineteen sixty six, and he was campaigning
at Santa Barbar for governor, and so I called the
local Republican headquarters and I said, I asked if Reagan
(03:12):
would want to speak on campus. So actually I got
to meet him at the campus and introduced him, and
I still have the remarks that I wrote for him.
So that's his remarks that he gave. That's his story
about the remarks he gave on campus in nineteen sixty
six when I first met him as a twenty one
year old. And then that's a picture of me and
(03:36):
President Nixon because the reason I put that picture in
there is because I worked with President Nixon on his
memoirs in St. Clementy, And it was through Richard Nixon
that I got to actually meet Ronald Reagan as as
a speechwriter, because Richard Nixon and I worked on his
memoirs and then the David Frost interviews from nineteen nineteen
(03:57):
eighty eighty. This was after his resignation nineteen seventy five
through seventy nine, and then after that was completed. He
introduced me to President Reagan's campaign former campaign manager Stu Spencer,
who got me on the airplane with President Reagan. And
the reason I do that is to tell you is
(04:18):
that the way you build a bond and forge any
relationship with somebody like President Reagan, and the kind of
relationship I built with him over the years on the
theme of this presentation, the Reagan I knew, was that
you build it in the crucible of a campaign, the
(04:41):
difficulties of the campaign that we had where President Reagan
or Governor Reagan at that time, was behind Jimmy Carter
throughout most of that campaign, right up until the end,
and when I joined him with five and a half
weeks ago, we were behind most of the time. We
were having a lot of difficulties, We were being protested
(05:03):
a lot of the time. And I joined him when
he really needed some help writing speeches because they were
sending ponderous speeches from the campaign, and Spencer asked me
to join because they needed somebody with experience that I
had developed during my time to the Nixon White House.
So I began joining Reagan in September of nineteen eighty
(05:29):
and that's me on the campaign playing with him. We
used to start the every day on the beginning of
the campaign by Reagan rolling a orange down that campaign
aisle to the son of William Nelson singing on the
road again. We must have been at a college campus
(05:49):
where they had him a basketball. That's Jim Brady sitting
behind me, and begin each day like that. Reagan really
he would stand there right next to me, and we
didn't begin to really know each other. He was not
(06:11):
easy to get to know very well. He was very
cool with people that he didn't really know at the outset.
And so that's why I put this in here, because
this is when we're starting to forge a bond. But
in the campaign, you're beginning early of your early baggage calls,
(06:36):
you're working late at night, you're eating drinking cold coffee,
eating stale doughnuts, you're on deadlines, you're going from city
to city, and he's on He's sixteen, nine years old
and he's working very hard and we're trying to make
news every day. And to build this kind of relationship,
I had to come up with some lines that kind
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of to make the news, to make news for him
every night, to try to get Jimmy Carter off balance,
and the economy at that time was eighteen percent inflation
rates excuse me, mortgage rates thirteen percent inflation, unemployment at
eight percent, and the economy was really in a bind.
(07:18):
And we were trying to come up with a way
to demonstrate that to the public and make some news
every night. And so finally to get the confidence of
the candidate, to get him to know me, for me
to create a bond with him, I had to every
night come up with something. And we were finally at
a campaign rally coming up at Langhorn, Pennsylvania, at the
(07:40):
Oxford Mall. And I don't know where it came so
out of my head under the stress of campaign pressure
or whatever it was, but we were campaigning at the
Oxford Mall in Pennsylvania, in Langhorn, and there it was
look around you at the price of food, the price
of gasoline, the interest rates you have to pay to
(08:04):
buy a house, the amount of taxes taken out of
your paycheck. Look around and ask yourself, are you better
off today than you were in nineteen seventy six? And
that was the birth of the iconic line, one of
the most iconic lines in politics. Ever to be heard.
He tweaked it as you saw later in that movie
(08:28):
that you saw earlier today in the debate with Jimmy Carter,
he changed it just a little bit to are you
really better off than you were four years ago? But
that's where that line was born, coming out of my
electric selectric typewriter at the Oxford Mole in Langlorn, Pennsylvania.
And from there on Reagan got a little more confidence
(08:53):
in me in terms of that I could help him
out and come up with rhetoric that would help him
get elected. And it worked. So based on that and
the fact that he knew that we could collaborate. After
the election, my intention was to go back to California.
(09:16):
I had no interest in going back to the White House.
But they wanted me to work in the White House,
and so he asked me if I could spend at
least the first hundred days. And so we started with
the inaugural address, and we had a couple of meetings
and so I worked on a draft of the inaugural address.
And just so you know, Reagan thought of himself. He
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didn't like the people to write his speeches for him.
He thought of himself. He said in Hollywood, I was
known as a good script doctor, not a good script writer.
So we worked on the inaugural address, and I presented
him with a draft and he basically rewrote good parts
of it, and I oversaw the preparation of it and
(10:00):
everything else. And then there a day before the inauguration,
I presented him with what was called half sheets. He
liked to work off of half sheets like this. These
are half sheets of tapwriter paper cut in half. And
he worked off of half sheets. And so that's presenting
(10:21):
the inaugural address film the day before he delivered it.
And there he is on the West Capitol steps for
the first time delivering it. And I want you to
notice something. There's no teleprompter there. He delivered the inaugural
address without a teleprompter, just like he delivered all of
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his campaign speeches without a teleprompter. He used half sheets
all the time like this without a teleprompter. And the
teleprompter has become a tyrant for all the politicians today.
But he never used a teleprompter. So after that he
came to the White House, and after all those years
(11:02):
at General Electric, where he traveled the country, this crusade
that he had of cutting taxes and lowering government and
cutting spending and just taking control of the national debt
and making a stronger country, a stronger national defense, a
stronger foreign policy. It was just in his soul that
(11:25):
he wanted to change America. The crusade came to the
White House and he was like a kid in the
candy store. And so these are our first cabinet meetings.
And this was probably January twenty second this picture is taken.
I'm on the far left hand side there in the corner,
taking notes. I took notes constantly during this whole time.
(11:46):
And that's why my book is so well documented, because
I took notes at every meeting I ever went to.
And there he is Cap Weinberger must have been gone
that day. So that's Frank Carlucci there to his president's left.
And al haiged was right. But he set in that
(12:09):
first meeting to the cabinet, he said, you know, we
came here to do things differently. He lectured his cabinet.
He wanted to make a big change. He wanted that crusade.
He called it a crusade, just like you saw in
the movie. But it was not just about foreign policy.
It was about domestic policy when he said, and that's
a direct quote, we came here to do things differently.
(12:31):
He wanted to up end the government. He wanted to
cut taxes, he wanted to cut back on regulations, he
wanted to get He thought there was so much waste
in government. And he kept lecturing his cabinet over and
over again in the first three, four or five six
cabinet council meetings. And I remember that so distinctly, and
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it's in the first three chapters of his that I
described in as opening of his president tency. And then
it became a mission for him that was very, very important.
And this is a January twenty eighth meeting with his
economic advisors, and this isn't important. The reason I put
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this slide up is that this is an especially important
meeting to me is because he has his This is
George Bush to his left, and his economic advisors, Don Reagan,
the Treasury Secretary, Murray Wiedenbaum is head of Council of
Economic Advisors. David Stockman, who was from Michigan by the way,
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who became OMB director, and Marty Anderson and Reagan stopped
in this meeting and gave it an important economic lecture
to all of us. It took about ten or fifteen minutes,
and you saw a little fracture of that in the movie.
But he went on and on about how government got
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too big and about have bothered him so much, and
that he wanted to make such important changes, and he
was upset with his staff that they weren't doing enough.
And one thing I'm just I'm going to just quote
one thing that he said. We've been living on borrowed time,
and we can't cure it instantly. What we can do
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is bring the rolling boulder to a stop and then
start pushing it back up the hill. We've talked for
forty years about cutting the size of the government, but
that's never happened. No government in history has voluntarily reduced
its size. Does that sound familiar to you. Sounds like
what's going on today, doesn't it? Anyway, this is what
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he wanted to do. However, it didn't take long before
he was disappointed. I left the White House because I
was on temporary assignment, and I went back to California.
But it didn't take long before he called me back
in June, and he called me to a meeting in
Camp Date and that's the Aspen Lodge in Camp David.
(15:02):
That's the President's lodge in Camp David. And we had
a meeting to discuss two important speeches he wanted to give,
and I discussed that in my book where he says
he put the yellow pad down and he said, Ken,
he says, you know, the staff. The staff has gotten
(15:22):
away from our central mission. They've gotten away from the
things we've talked about in the campaign. They've gotten away
from the crusade that we brought to government. And he
was already disappointed that his own staff was not pushing
the mission or did not absorb the crusade that he'd
(15:45):
wanted to bring to government. And this was a problem
that when you look at the Reagan presidency, there were
members of his own staff that really did not believe
in what he was doing. And most of the had
not traveled with us in the campaign. They didn't have
that same sense, they didn't have the same bond with him,
(16:07):
the same connection with him. Those of us who campaigned
with him had about cutting taxes, about cutting state government regulation,
about the same notion of the taxes were too high.
And so he was disappointed with them about all those things.
So this is a very important feature. I think of
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the message that I have to tell you about the
wrong Reagan I knew, and the message, it's a very
strong message in my book. Anyway, it doesn't mean that
we didn't try to sell the case. So we did
have an economic recovery plan in early nineteen eighty one.
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It was called the kemp Roth Tax Cuts, cutting taxes
and cutting the budget. And what made him the great
communicator was how he he sold his case, and for
those students here to learn how to communicate and how
to best sell anything. Instead of using if you're giving
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a speech, instead of using raw statistics, Reagan knew that
the best way to sell something about the economy was
to use illustrations. And in this case, the way he
did it was this is Reagan on February fifth, nineteen
eighty one, which is the speech I worked with him
on that he and I collaborated on. He wanted to
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talk about how inflation had eroted the value of a
dollar bill. That's a dollar bill he's holding in his hand,
and he wanted to talk about how inflation had eroded
the value of a dollar from nineteen sixty to nineteen
eighty one. And he held the dollar bill in his hand,
and then in his pocket he had a quarter, a dime,
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and a penny, and he that dollar bill. From nineteen
sixty to nineteen eighty one, he had gone to thirty
six cents. I said, mister President, are you sure you
can do that on TV? Live TV? Take out the
dollar bill and take out thirty the court of the
diamond the penny. And he was insulted. I should have
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never questioned the great performer, but that's how he made
the illustration. And then on February eighteenth of nineteen eighty one,
we did a joint session with Congress speech, and he
was outraged at the national debt. Now, the national debt
in nineteen eighty one, I don't know if you want
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to guess what it was, but it was not yet
a trillion dollars. Today it's thirty six trillion dollars. Then
it was like a nine hundred and eighty nine billion.
But he was really outraged at the size of the
national debt, and he wanted to illustrate to the Congress,
you and the Congress, I've got to do something about
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the national debt. So we've got to do something about it.
And I want to tell you how bad it is.
So he put out his hand and he did this
all he by the way. He did it by long division.
But I don't know how he got to it. But
he said, instead of if I hold one thousand dollars
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bills to make a million dollars in my hand, it
would be four inches high. If I hold one thousand
dollar bills in my hand to reach a trillion dollars,
it would reach to the sky. Originally he said eighty
eighty miles high, and then we had to correct them
because his math was just a little bit off, and
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we found it was actually sixty seven miles high. But
this is how he liked to tell his stories to
get the point across the Congress. But the national debt
was absurd, but that was much better than saying, hey,
the national debt's going to a billion dollars or trillion dollars,
and that's out of line. So that's how the great
communicator made his point. Now, another great story I love
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is this is after his assassination attempt, and this is
April twenty eighth, nineteen eighty one, and I was one
of the few people who got to meet with him
after he started recuperating, and it was about probably about
April twenty first, I don't know the exact date. We
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got to meet with him in the residence, and naturally
we were going to exploit as much as we could
the fact that there was all this national sympathy for
him after the assassination attempt. We wanted to sell his
economic recovery plan. So we were going to do his
Joint Session speech, and I thought it would be make
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a lot of sense to add zest to the speech
by finding a letter from some from some somebody that
was get well card or something like that. So I
asked the correspondent the section, and they found this letter
from this second grade boy from Riverside School in Rockville Center,
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New York. And there he is. He pulled it out
of his pocket. It was not in the advanced copy
of the of the text, so it was a surprise
to the Joint Session, and it was from Peter Sweeney,
this little second grader said, and he pulled it out
of his pocket. He says, I have this letter from
this little second grader who says, dear mister President, please
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get well quick, or you might have to give a
speech to your pajamas, and then he paused, and you
can see you can see Tipple and' neil laughing back there,
and then he and then he paused, and he says
and he read, ps if you have to give a
space in your pajamas, remember I warned you. And they're
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laughing back there, and he had him in the palm
of his hands. He was such a great performer anyway,
those are some of the great communicating skills he had.
So the Reagan you don't know is what some of
the stories I wanted to tell you. And this is
us at Camp David once again. Now we're filming the
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Morning Morning in America, ADS, and this is the scenes
that you never saw anywhere. This is me when I
was forty years old. This is a long time ago,
and the President and a fellow in the back of
the Phil Dusonberry with the tie on as the producer,
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and I say, it's the Reagan you don't know is
because Reagan was un comfortable with people that were strangers
in his life. A lot of his staff he didn't
feel comfortable with because he wasn't with them, as I
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say in the Crucible of the Campaign, or it wasn't
around them a lot. He knew ed me, he knew
Mike Deaver, he knew Bill Clark, he had been around
him a lot. But there was a lot of people
on his staff that were just staff people. He didn't
have a bond with them. And he and I had
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created a bond over the years that was so special.
And I know it sounds pretentious and precious sometimes, but
that's the part of Reagan. Reagan was always genial, and
you could see him in a crowd laughing. You could
see ten people around him laughing and cheerful, and it
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was seem to you he doesn't Reagan. He would seem
like he knows and loves all these people, but he's
probably telling a joke or telling a story about Doris
Day and some movie he did. But that's because he
was uncomfortable around them. That's the way he would deal
with a discomfort. So when he was in a situation
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like this, that's why they called me in because they
needed somebody with whom he had some kind of bond
with which to make this commercial. So about a week
before they did this, they say, hey, Kotchigan, we're filming
this commercial with the President. We're going to need somebody
to sit across from him to do these takes that
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he knows a familiar face, and so that's going to
be you. And so that's that's the sort of the
story about Reagan, a special side of him that a
lot of people don't know. And of course Missus Reagan
was there because she's someone that he always wanted around
in situations to give him a comfort level. And there
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she is. I don't know what she's doing, picking something
out of my eye. But she's also a real flirt.
I'll have to tell you about that. But there's another
slide of her. Sometimes if you're on the wrong side
of her. She wasn't. She was just the opposite of
being a flirt. And this is another After filming the
commercials at Camp David, we filmed also part of the commercials.
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That's the South Portico south Portico of the White House,
a really special place by the way, when you look
out at the south lawn and we're filming another ad
and it's the same thing. They needed somebody to start
talking to Reagan while the camera starts, and then I
would be out of the view. The camera would keep
rolling while he's talking to me or George Schultz or
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George Bush or somebody else. So if you watch those
that morning again in America Film, which you can get
on YouTube, you can see this all in action. I
call this when the President needed friend. After the election
of eighty four, we were in that massive landslide, which
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was just wonderful. He was going seventy to sixty eight,
sixty percent in the polls. He was going great, and
then Chancellor Coll of West Germany invited him to Germany
to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the end of World
War Two, and so they sent an advanced team over
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to to Germany to advance the trip. And the idea
was for him to do a commemoration of the visit
by laying a wreath upon the soldier's graves, and one
of the soldier's graves was to show the the Fellowship,
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and by showing the fellowship, they would put a wreath
on the grave of German soldiers as well. It turns
out that those graves were covered with snow when they
did the advanced trip, and then when the snow melted
in the spring, it turns out that those graves were
of Nazi ss Wolfing soldiers. The wolf in SS the
(27:23):
worst of the kind. And so this big explosion took
place of our controversy of accusing the president of being
anti Semitic, that he opened the wounds of war, that
he shouldn't be going there, headlines in the Post, the Times,
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and all the newsweeklies, and you can see that this
is just one headline out of dozens and dozens Congress
passed resolutions. Nancy didn't want him to go, but he
got his back up and he said, I've got to
do this chance. And we had pershing missiles in Germany,
by the way, so that was another There was a
(28:08):
national defense reason why we had to go. So in
order to make amends. And this is the Time magazine
article about this, a misbegotten trip opens old wounds. And
that's the look on the face of President Reagan as
(28:28):
Ellie Wizzell was lecturing him in the White House. So
they decided, in order to do an expiation of this visit,
he would go to the bergen Belsen concentration camp and
give a speech to try to get out from under
this horrible controversy. As polls that dropped fifteen percent. I
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was not in the White House. I was no longer
the Who House, but I would get called in on
special assignment. Missus Reagan wanted me in on this speech.
So I got called in with a short notice, and
I sat down with the President. And this is the
look on his That was the kind of look on
his face when I walked into the old Office. He
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was stricken, he was saddened, he was down. He said
he just couldn't believe that anybody could consider him that
he would be anti Semitic, or that he would ever
dare have those views. And so he gave me some
basic ideas, and so I had to go back and forth,
and we worked very hard. And it turns out when
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I say this is when the President needed a friend,
he did need it once again. He needed a friendly face.
He needed somebody that he could collaborate with, Somebody that
was familiar to him, somebody that was not a stranger.
He had he had six or seven speech writers in
the White House, but there wasn't anybody that could sit
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down with him that he he had a feeling with
that was brought him a comfort level that he could
work on that speech, that knows that it could bail
him out of this situation. And we worked on that
and it turned out to me he delivered that speech
at bergen Belsen, which has been called Reagan's greatest speech
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and Gregan's greatest commemorative speech. And if you ever get
a chance, I hope you can try to watch it.
It's very it turns out to be very moving. Reagan
the competitor. Sometimes again you see the genial side of
Reagan and that he can, you know, take it easy
(30:44):
with people. But I call him the competitor. And he
tells the story about in the movies dealing with I
love this story because revealed different side of him. Errol
Flynn was a big camera hog, he said, and in
the movies and they had competition with one another, and
and Errol Flynn would try to get in front of
(31:07):
him in front of the camera. So one time he said,
there they were in a break in a scene during
the Santa Fe Trail, and so Reagan says, during the
breaking says, I I took my boot and I started
making a big mound with dirt and it got it
(31:28):
be about eight or ten inches high. And when the
when the director said action said, I stepped up on
the mound so I could be up above Ero flann
So I just always loved that story. So there was
that side of him. He loved to compete. This picture
I put in there not to show you the two
(31:50):
of us working, but if you picture Missus Reagan being
in the seat that I'm in, and picture me being
across from them in a bench, we were on Air
Force one, the three of us when in October of
the nineteen eighty four campaign, I tried. I came back
for five months to work on the campaign. And in
(32:13):
nineteen eighty four, and Mondale had been attacking Reagan ferociously,
just ferociously, and Reagan was upset because the speech writers
were instructed by Jim Baker not to put Mondale's name
in Reagan's speeches, and he and Baker instructed me as well,
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But I wasn't writing the speeches, but nevertheless I was
getting the blame for it, so missus anyway, But the
bottom line is is that Reagan made sure that Missus
Reagan got the message from him to her and from
her to me to make sure that Mondale's name got
(32:55):
put back in the speeches. And when Missus Reagan wanted
to make something clear, he made it very clear. And
so my point is is that when Reagan got his
back up about something like that, he could make it clear.
Now whether he did it or she did it didn't matter.
And so it ended up that he Just a few
(33:17):
days later, we had a whistlestop tour through Ohio. That's
Harry Truman's give him Hell, the car he rode in
nineteen forty eight. We took the same car through southern
Ohio on October twelfth, and I wrote that, I wrote
I got the assignment to write that speech. I used
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Mondale's name like just about every other line, and Reagan
was very, very happy. And this is me delivering his
nineteen eighty eight speech to the convention. What's interesting about
this is that Missus Reagan and the President different on
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what this speech should be like. This is one of
those rare occasions where I had to sit between the
two of them at a at a lunch where they
were discussing this speech. Now, Missus Reagan wanted this speech
to be all visionary and warm and fuzzy, but the
Democrats had been attacking Reagan throughout their convention very harshly,
(34:23):
and Reagan got his back up and disagreed with Missus
Reagan and missus. Reagan wanted this speech one way, he
wanted this speech another way. I knew who I worked for,
and so I had to write it his way. But
the point is is that when he made up his
(34:44):
mind that he wanted to respond to these Democrats, he
got it his way. So I delivered a tough speech.
And that's that's anyway. That's how it ended up. Finally,
I want to end up with these treasured moments I
had with him, because this, this is the other Reagan.
I knew here. We are an air force one, and
(35:08):
I can't tell you what a pleasure, how much fun
it is to write on the presidential aircraft. And on
this occasion, I don't I don't remember where. I think
we were flying from Chicago to Washington before working on
a General Assembly speech, and I was sitting on that
(35:30):
bench that I was just referring to, and Reagan was
wearing he always wore cuff links, and I looked over
his cup links and I said, mister President, there's a
date on your cuff links. And he said yeah, And
(35:51):
I said, what's that date? What is that date? Well,
he said, that's the date of our anniversary. So I
grabbed his wrist, I said, what's the date. So that's
me grabbing his couplings. And that's a look on his face.
(36:12):
You see how smug he is. And he got it right.
But that's the kind of relationship we had that I
could do that to the President of the United States. Otherwise,
I mean, otherwise he probably would slugged me or something.
Missus Reagan wasn't. You can see the look on her face. Oh,
you touched the President of the United States. This is
(36:34):
another churichh moment I had. We were going to meet
Missus Reagan for lunch. We were going to work on
the anti drug speech to just say No speech back
in nineteen eighty six. And she was late. She was
with her lady friend somewhere, and she was ten minutes late.
And I got to the weir Ath Century Plausa hotel
(37:00):
well and he said. I walked in and said, Ken,
come here, let me show you what I've been doing.
I said, what's that, miss President? He said, well, look,
and he'd been flying paper airplanes off the top of
the balcony at the Century Plaza using White House presidential stationery.
(37:27):
Now only now the president we all had presidential stationery,
but only the President has this special sort of mint
colored White House stationary that he gets and this picture
which was captured by Pete Susan, the White House photographer,
and he sang literally saying to me, WHOA, look at
(37:48):
that go and and the and the plane, the paper
airplane is just floating down like this, and he was
like a he was like an eight year old kid,
so proud of himself about smoothly that I know. And
it was going to the I think the Century the
Fox Studios lot was just below, because we're on the
(38:09):
Century Plaza Hotels on the Century Fox lot, and there's
got to be some workmen down there cleaning up about
fifteen paper airplanes. I wonder what this White House stationary
is all about. And finally you saw the film from
the Rancho del Cielo when we were working on the
(38:34):
nineteen eighty eight convention speech that has farewell address there.
I am. I'm not carrying the nuclear football, by the way.
So we had lunch at the patio with he and
Missus Reagan, and so I just arrived on the on
the ranch to work on the on the speech with him,
(38:56):
and on my wall he wrote notations on all the pictures.
He gave me and he says, I can't you arrived
just in time where cutting wood just up ahead, And
so I had just come to work with him. And
then when I after we had lunch and finished working
on the speech, he took me to his little house
(39:17):
showed me. He said, I want to show you all
the wood work I did on the house and the
floor he laid, and how proud he was of all
the work he had done, and it was just so
special that he was just a normal guy. It bothered
me that I never told him. You know, he was
so used to seeing me in suits and formal clothes
(39:38):
and everything, and bothered me that I ever told him that.
As I grew up in the same way about you know,
cutting brush and doing work like that on my farm
growing up in Vaisalia, California, on the sixty acre form
I should have told him. He probably would have liked
to hear that. And then and this is the end.
As I was leaving to go back to my car
(40:02):
that take me back to my hotel from the ranch.
This is a president driving me at such a special time.
That have the most special chauffeur in the world. I
call it driving mister Daisy, and that's to the president's
right as a secret Service agent. And then you know
(40:24):
who's standing above that is the White House doctor, just
in case the President does something stupid and gets in
a car rerecord or something like that. Anyway, I couldn't
have been more special than that. And then this is
one of my final favorite pictures of him and the
(40:45):
President me in the Oval office. That's such a beautiful shot.
And he inscribed it with a typical Hollywood inscription. He said, Ken,
you and I should have been both of us should
have been facing the camera, and we should have both
been closer to it. And it sums up such a wonderful,
(41:06):
beautiful trip I had with the President of the United States.
Thank you for listening to Thank you.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
Mister Kitchian has agreed to sign copies of his book
behind closed doors in the room with Reagan and Nixon.
We now have time for Q and A. If you
have a question, please make your way to a microphone.
Student questions will be given preference.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
Well, first, thank you for a fascinating speech. Since you
have the ear for words. How would you compare Nixon, Reagan,
and Trump. Well, obviously different styles. Nixon Nix was a
great It was a much more formal orator. Nixon was
(42:04):
a great communicator in his own right. Nixon campaign. I
will tell you something interesting about Nixon. He never used
never used note and when he campaigned, never used notes,
never used a teleprompter, so all his campaign speeches were
(42:25):
all extemporaneous when he spoke. When Nixon spoke at events,
for example, as president, he spoke extemporaneously. We provided him
with background information, suggested remarks, and then he would study them,
(42:46):
take notes, and then speak extemporaneously. It was formal addresses,
he used texts, and from the Oval office he used
the teleprompter. But I think Nixon was He worked very
hard at his presentations. He admired Reagan's communicating skills. But
(43:08):
I think Nixon in his own way was a great communicator,
but in a different way, much more formal, much more structured.
I think Reagan was unparalleled in a lot of ways
because of he had artful He was an attractive man,
(43:30):
he had great voice, He was skilled from all the
years in Hollywood, for all those years he spent on
the time with General Electric traveling throughout the country. He
was a good storyteller, and he was a creature of radio.
So for those of you who are my age who
(43:52):
can remember radio and radio had to create word pictures.
I grew up in an age of radio, so your
mind created word pictures that that helped regular a lot.
Trump is a good communicator in the sense that he
(44:15):
goes to people's guts. And that's what made him a
good communicator in twenty sixteen, and why he won the
election is that he spoke to what Scamming and Wanttenberg
(44:36):
called the real majority. They wrote a book in nineteen
seventy called the Real Majority and what Joe Kraft called
the Forgotten Man, and he knew how to reach to them,
so they all That's how they all different in different ways.
I think Trump is much cruder. I think he's I
(44:57):
think he could be less excessive in what he does.
I think he should give shorter speeches, and I think
Trump should not use a teleproblemter as much as he does.
Speaker 4 (45:11):
Thank you, mister Kashegian on kind of the same note
as the previous gentleman. There's been quite a few opinions
in recent years, particularly from a certain sector of the
conservative movement, that Trump's policies, particularly in the realm of
foreign affairs, and maybe some of his economic policies relating
to tariffs are kind of a move away from Reaganism.
(45:34):
Would you consider that an accurate interpretation or no? As
someone who worked in the Reagan administration, I.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
Think what I can make a much a better answer
on domestic affairs, and that is what he's doing domestically
is what Reagan intended to do in nineteen eighty one.
He's kicking the table over. You heard what I said
(46:07):
about Reagan. We came here to do things differently. Reagan
really wanted to do a lot of the things that
Trump is doing now, and I think there was he
would have I can't you know, I can't speak for somebody.
I can't tell you what he would say, but I
(46:28):
think he would be envious of the way he's cutting back.
And Reagan was prevented from doing a lot of the
things that he really wanted to do. He wanted to
make all those cuts he wanted. He was so tired
of the bureaucracy. And that meeting we had at Camp David,
I showed you where he said, the fellows have gotten
away from my crusade, and he was bothered by it.
(46:51):
So I think he would be very supportive of the
kind of cuts that were made. And he was very
on the other hand reage. You know, there was some
meetings where he say he was sensitive. He was a
child of the depression, and he said, well, you know,
I'm really sensitive to the people that are losing their
(47:13):
jobs because I remember it was like to lose jobs
of the depression. So he wanted sort of a soft landing.
But then again there but then he was so bothered
by the excesses of government. You know, he paid taxes
at ninety percent when he was in Hollywood, or ninety
one percent or whatever that high tax rate was. And
(47:33):
then he would tell his story. There's this. I know
I'm going on too long, but this is a story
that this is a story that's important for me to tell.
He used to go to these he used to be
a spokesman, and he talked about going to these events
where he would be an MC and he talked about
the Pillsbury bakeoff. You remember the Pillsbury bakeoffs and these ladies.
(47:58):
This is a different era. The ladies would compete to
make their special recipes. They'd have a contest Pillsbury bake Off,
and the ladies would win and they'd get an award,
and Reagan would be in an MC at these events,
and Reagan would tell the story that the ladies would
get the award and they'd get a cash check, and
(48:22):
he said there'd be an irs agent off stage waiting
to collect the share of that award just as they
walked off. He told that story several times that had
really made him angry. So that's the kind of thing
I think he'd be envious of a lot of the
things that Trump is doing.
Speaker 5 (48:42):
Thank you so much for your presentation. You mentioned that
President Reagan was sometimes disappointed when his crusade wasn't moving
as quickly as he wanted it to. From your vantage
point as a speech writer, did you ever feel that
there was a discrepancy between the vision you were presenting
in the speeches and the political reality.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
I've been asked a lot of questions. I've never been
asked that one. I think there's always you have to
have a division between vision and reality because otherwise you're
not going to have some changes. You have to say
(49:27):
things that are over the horizon, and I think that's
what Reagan would do. He would say things that maybe
would spark something that would be maybe a little beyond
what people would believe or think, that would trigger a
thought that nobody would ever think of before. And so
(49:49):
you have to say things that were different and that
maybe not be real. But I don't but I don't
think you would ever say the outlandish that was ever
beyond total reality. But he was he liked, He was
a story He was a born storyteller. And I had
to I had to pull him back a few times,
(50:12):
and we had we had to fact check him, you know,
when the presidents had presidents have to be fact checked.
We had three researchers in the White House that did
nothing but fact check all this, all the president's speeches.
And that's the first thing among the things I did
when I hired the speech fighting staff. I hired three.
I brought back three researchers. And the President would get
(50:34):
upset when he would put something in a speech like
that business about the stacking the thousand dollars bills. He
came he came back with eighty miles high and I
had to pull him back to sixty seven miles high.
But he did it by long division, and I had
to go to the Bureau of engraving and mint and
(50:56):
get the right answer. But I said to miss President,
any time you utter anything, the press is going to
go back and check every utterance you make because it
goes down in history. So we had to make reality
checks on everything.
Speaker 6 (51:18):
Thank you so much for your talk. It was amazing
to hear all those stories. We have a oratory competition
coming up here in a couple of days, and I
wanted to get your opinion. What is one piece of
advice you'd give to speech writers, not about the presentation
or the performance of it, but actually writing a memorable
speech that will impact people.
Speaker 2 (51:47):
How do you write it? There's no book on speech writing.
There's You have to have a message. You have to
have a core message. You have to come up with
That's the first thing. You have to come up with.
What's your what is your what is the message you
want to convey? And how do you get there? And
(52:10):
then once you come up with that, Once you have
that message, then what's the pathway to that message? And
then you start. You know, sometimes I wake up in
the middle of the night coming up with things and
I put them and I grabbed my iPhone and I
(52:30):
dropped things down the there's so much, so many. I
wrote a whole book on this and that bergen Belsen speech.
I wrote the best lines I came up. I wrote
on a napkin at a bar in Georgetown, and that line,
(52:53):
are you better off than you were in nineteen seventy six?
I don't know where it came from. Sometimes you just
have to keep thinking and thinking. But at the core
you have to have what what is that audience? What's
going to move that audience? What do I want them
(53:13):
to know? It's like it's like a preacher's sermon. What
do you want them? What do you want them to
leave the room thinking? How about that? Put that? Put
that at the top of the page. What do you
want them to leave the room thinking? That's number one?
And then start from there. And then then the first
(53:33):
sentence is the hardest thing to do when you're right,
When you write an essay, it's the first sentence of
the heart. Otherwise I don't have there's no book on it.
Speaker 3 (53:46):
Sorry, we now have time for one more question.
Speaker 7 (53:51):
Thank you so much for your presentation. You mentioned that
you grew up on a sixty acre farm, You went
to UC Santa Barbara, and then you ended up speech
writer for a president. What brought you through all those
different experiences in life? What values, what virtues held you
fast through all those different experiences.
Speaker 2 (54:09):
I'm sorry, Can you repeat for me? Come closer.
Speaker 7 (54:18):
You mentioned you grew up on a farm, you went
to UC Santa Barbara, and then you were a speech
writer for the president. What sort of virtues, what sort
of values did you hold fast through all those different experiences.
Speaker 2 (54:29):
I see the virtue is I came up from My
dad was a survivor of the army and genocide, and
he taught me a lesson of very hard work. I
(54:52):
had three brothers. We worked on a farm. I started
driving a tractor at six years old, and so I
was a farmer and he uh and and when I
when I begin this process in politics, politics, it was
(55:15):
UH to always uh never, don't expect to start at
the top, be prepared to do whatever you're asked to do.
Be prepared to start at the bottom and work your
way up. And it's it's a virtue to to be uh,
(55:38):
to be willing to always put extra effort into anything
you do. I to leave your ego aside. It's not easy.
I flunked my English entrance exam at UCSB, I had
(55:58):
to take what was called boneheaded English. It was called
subject Day, but it was called bonhead English. So I
had to learn how to write like baby steps. So uh,
and then I my my job. My first volunteer job
in the Nixon campaign was in the correspondence section. And
(56:21):
I really wanted to be like a research assistant or
an intern. But they said, now you've got to start
at the bottom. You've got to be a do these
menial correspondence So and it's you have to be. Uh.
You have to be to show that you are just
(56:43):
willing to put your shoulder to any task that's given
to you. I can't put it anywhere. I mean, it's
just like anything else that you want to achieve. It's
like Hillsdale College didn't when it started before dtor Arne
got here and put it to the top.
Speaker 3 (57:01):
Please join me in thanking our speaker, give your.
Speaker 1 (57:07):
Life to Michael Berry Show and podcast. Please tell one friend,
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(57:30):
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(57:54):
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(58:15):
take all the credit for ourselves. God bless the memory
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(58:40):
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The Michael Berry Show. Welcome to the Saturday Podcast. Today
we are shining a spotlight on Kenneth kochegian I Hope
I pronounced that correctly, a distinguished political strategist and one
of Ronald Reagan's most trusted speech writers. Katchigean, not koch
I think it's Kachigian, played a vital role in crafting
(00:22):
speeches that defined the Reagan era. He would also advise
Republican campaigns across the country, shaping American politics for decades,
from behind the scenes stories to the art of creating
speeches that still resonate today, he's going to share with
you some unforgettable anecdotes about working with President Reagan, highlighting
(00:47):
President Reagan's wit, which everyone remarks on, his warmth and
the enduring power of the spoken word. John F. Kennedy
said of Instant Churchill after Churchill passed that he mobilized
the English language and sent it into battle, and he did.
We've played some Churchill speeches on here, and we will
(01:09):
play some more. So this is Kenneth Kachigean at Hillsdale
College telling his favorite stories of working with the man
that Rush Limball famously called ranaldus Maximus.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
We hope you enjoy. I thought the best way to
tell this story was to tell it on the basis
of how I traveled through my career with President Reagan,
and I can tell it with these pictures and a
narrative and how I got to know him, and on
(01:46):
this topic of the Reagan I knew, and to tell
you how I got to know him and through the
stories and experiences I had over this fabulous, wonderful career
I had, And it starts with this didn't start with
this wonderful This is my favorite. Actually, this is my
favorite photo of the two of us in the Oval
(02:06):
office where he's telling me, probably telling me a joke,
but this is my favorite picture. Okay, So no, Actually
I was a great fan of Ron Reagan back before
(02:28):
he ever knew it. I was a fan of Death
Valley Days. He was the old Ranger back in nineteen
sixty four. He was the host of the Death Valley Days,
and I used to watch it on television. So I
was actually a fan of him before he even knew it.
And then when I was a student by President at
UC Santa Barbara in nineteen sixty six, one of the
(02:51):
duties I had or privileges I had was to introduce
guest speakers on campus. And he was running for governor
of California in nineteen sixty six, and he was campaigning
at Santa Barbar for governor, and so I called the
local Republican headquarters and I said, I asked if Reagan
(03:12):
would want to speak on campus. So actually I got
to meet him at the campus and introduced him, and
I still have the remarks that I wrote for him.
So that's his remarks that he gave. That's his story
about the remarks he gave on campus in nineteen sixty
six when I first met him as a twenty one
year old. And then that's a picture of me and
(03:36):
President Nixon because the reason I put that picture in
there is because I worked with President Nixon on his
memoirs in St. Clementy, And it was through Richard Nixon
that I got to actually meet Ronald Reagan as as
a speechwriter, because Richard Nixon and I worked on his
memoirs and then the David Frost interviews from nineteen nineteen
(03:57):
eighty eighty. This was after his resignation nineteen seventy five
through seventy nine, and then after that was completed. He
introduced me to President Reagan's campaign former campaign manager Stu Spencer,
who got me on the airplane with President Reagan. And
the reason I do that is to tell you is
(04:18):
that the way you build a bond and forge any
relationship with somebody like President Reagan, and the kind of
relationship I built with him over the years on the
theme of this presentation, the Reagan I knew, was that
you build it in the crucible of a campaign, the
(04:41):
difficulties of the campaign that we had where President Reagan
or Governor Reagan at that time, was behind Jimmy Carter
throughout most of that campaign, right up until the end,
and when I joined him with five and a half
weeks ago, we were behind most of the time. We
were having a lot of difficulties, We were being protested
(05:03):
a lot of the time. And I joined him when
he really needed some help writing speeches because they were
sending ponderous speeches from the campaign, and Spencer asked me
to join because they needed somebody with experience that I
had developed during my time to the Nixon White House.
So I began joining Reagan in September of nineteen eighty
(05:29):
and that's me on the campaign playing with him. We
used to start the every day on the beginning of
the campaign by Reagan rolling a orange down that campaign
aisle to the son of William Nelson singing on the
road again. We must have been at a college campus
(05:49):
where they had him a basketball. That's Jim Brady sitting
behind me, and begin each day like that. Reagan really
he would stand there right next to me, and we
didn't begin to really know each other. He was not
(06:11):
easy to get to know very well. He was very
cool with people that he didn't really know at the outset.
And so that's why I put this in here, because
this is when we're starting to forge a bond. But
in the campaign, you're beginning early of your early baggage calls,
(06:36):
you're working late at night, you're eating drinking cold coffee,
eating stale doughnuts, you're on deadlines, you're going from city
to city, and he's on He's sixteen, nine years old
and he's working very hard and we're trying to make
news every day. And to build this kind of relationship,
I had to come up with some lines that kind
(06:58):
of to make the news, to make news for him
every night, to try to get Jimmy Carter off balance,
and the economy at that time was eighteen percent inflation
rates excuse me, mortgage rates thirteen percent inflation, unemployment at
eight percent, and the economy was really in a bind.
(07:18):
And we were trying to come up with a way
to demonstrate that to the public and make some news
every night. And so finally to get the confidence of
the candidate, to get him to know me, for me
to create a bond with him, I had to every
night come up with something. And we were finally at
a campaign rally coming up at Langhorn, Pennsylvania, at the
(07:40):
Oxford Mall. And I don't know where it came so
out of my head under the stress of campaign pressure
or whatever it was, but we were campaigning at the
Oxford Mall in Pennsylvania, in Langhorn, and there it was
look around you at the price of food, the price
of gasoline, the interest rates you have to pay to
(08:04):
buy a house, the amount of taxes taken out of
your paycheck. Look around and ask yourself, are you better
off today than you were in nineteen seventy six? And
that was the birth of the iconic line, one of
the most iconic lines in politics. Ever to be heard.
He tweaked it as you saw later in that movie
(08:28):
that you saw earlier today in the debate with Jimmy Carter,
he changed it just a little bit to are you
really better off than you were four years ago? But
that's where that line was born, coming out of my
electric selectric typewriter at the Oxford Mole in Langlorn, Pennsylvania.
And from there on Reagan got a little more confidence
(08:53):
in me in terms of that I could help him
out and come up with rhetoric that would help him
get elected. And it worked. So based on that and
the fact that he knew that we could collaborate. After
the election, my intention was to go back to California.
(09:16):
I had no interest in going back to the White House.
But they wanted me to work in the White House,
and so he asked me if I could spend at
least the first hundred days. And so we started with
the inaugural address, and we had a couple of meetings
and so I worked on a draft of the inaugural address.
And just so you know, Reagan thought of himself. He
(09:37):
didn't like the people to write his speeches for him.
He thought of himself. He said in Hollywood, I was
known as a good script doctor, not a good script writer.
So we worked on the inaugural address, and I presented
him with a draft and he basically rewrote good parts
of it, and I oversaw the preparation of it and
(10:00):
everything else. And then there a day before the inauguration,
I presented him with what was called half sheets. He
liked to work off of half sheets like this. These
are half sheets of tapwriter paper cut in half. And
he worked off of half sheets. And so that's presenting
(10:21):
the inaugural address film the day before he delivered it.
And there he is on the West Capitol steps for
the first time delivering it. And I want you to
notice something. There's no teleprompter there. He delivered the inaugural
address without a teleprompter, just like he delivered all of
(10:41):
his campaign speeches without a teleprompter. He used half sheets
all the time like this without a teleprompter. And the
teleprompter has become a tyrant for all the politicians today.
But he never used a teleprompter. So after that he
came to the White House, and after all those years
(11:02):
at General Electric, where he traveled the country, this crusade
that he had of cutting taxes and lowering government and
cutting spending and just taking control of the national debt
and making a stronger country, a stronger national defense, a
stronger foreign policy. It was just in his soul that
(11:25):
he wanted to change America. The crusade came to the
White House and he was like a kid in the
candy store. And so these are our first cabinet meetings.
And this was probably January twenty second this picture is taken.
I'm on the far left hand side there in the corner,
taking notes. I took notes constantly during this whole time.
(11:46):
And that's why my book is so well documented, because
I took notes at every meeting I ever went to.
And there he is Cap Weinberger must have been gone
that day. So that's Frank Carlucci there to his president's left.
And al haiged was right. But he set in that
(12:09):
first meeting to the cabinet, he said, you know, we
came here to do things differently. He lectured his cabinet.
He wanted to make a big change. He wanted that crusade.
He called it a crusade, just like you saw in
the movie. But it was not just about foreign policy.
It was about domestic policy when he said, and that's
a direct quote, we came here to do things differently.
(12:31):
He wanted to up end the government. He wanted to
cut taxes, he wanted to cut back on regulations, he
wanted to get He thought there was so much waste
in government. And he kept lecturing his cabinet over and
over again in the first three, four or five six
cabinet council meetings. And I remember that so distinctly, and
(12:51):
it's in the first three chapters of his that I
described in as opening of his president tency. And then
it became a mission for him that was very, very important.
And this is a January twenty eighth meeting with his
economic advisors, and this isn't important. The reason I put
(13:13):
this slide up is that this is an especially important
meeting to me is because he has his This is
George Bush to his left, and his economic advisors, Don Reagan,
the Treasury Secretary, Murray Wiedenbaum is head of Council of
Economic Advisors. David Stockman, who was from Michigan by the way,
(13:35):
who became OMB director, and Marty Anderson and Reagan stopped
in this meeting and gave it an important economic lecture
to all of us. It took about ten or fifteen minutes,
and you saw a little fracture of that in the movie.
But he went on and on about how government got
(13:57):
too big and about have bothered him so much, and
that he wanted to make such important changes, and he
was upset with his staff that they weren't doing enough.
And one thing I'm just I'm going to just quote
one thing that he said. We've been living on borrowed time,
and we can't cure it instantly. What we can do
(14:18):
is bring the rolling boulder to a stop and then
start pushing it back up the hill. We've talked for
forty years about cutting the size of the government, but
that's never happened. No government in history has voluntarily reduced
its size. Does that sound familiar to you. Sounds like
what's going on today, doesn't it? Anyway, this is what
(14:40):
he wanted to do. However, it didn't take long before
he was disappointed. I left the White House because I
was on temporary assignment, and I went back to California.
But it didn't take long before he called me back
in June, and he called me to a meeting in
Camp Date and that's the Aspen Lodge in Camp David.
(15:02):
That's the President's lodge in Camp David. And we had
a meeting to discuss two important speeches he wanted to give,
and I discussed that in my book where he says
he put the yellow pad down and he said, Ken,
he says, you know, the staff. The staff has gotten
(15:22):
away from our central mission. They've gotten away from the
things we've talked about in the campaign. They've gotten away
from the crusade that we brought to government. And he
was already disappointed that his own staff was not pushing
the mission or did not absorb the crusade that he'd
(15:45):
wanted to bring to government. And this was a problem
that when you look at the Reagan presidency, there were
members of his own staff that really did not believe
in what he was doing. And most of the had
not traveled with us in the campaign. They didn't have
that same sense, they didn't have the same bond with him,
(16:07):
the same connection with him. Those of us who campaigned
with him had about cutting taxes, about cutting state government regulation,
about the same notion of the taxes were too high.
And so he was disappointed with them about all those things.
So this is a very important feature. I think of
(16:29):
the message that I have to tell you about the
wrong Reagan I knew, and the message, it's a very
strong message in my book. Anyway, it doesn't mean that
we didn't try to sell the case. So we did
have an economic recovery plan in early nineteen eighty one.
(16:50):
It was called the kemp Roth Tax Cuts, cutting taxes
and cutting the budget. And what made him the great
communicator was how he he sold his case, and for
those students here to learn how to communicate and how
to best sell anything. Instead of using if you're giving
(17:12):
a speech, instead of using raw statistics, Reagan knew that
the best way to sell something about the economy was
to use illustrations. And in this case, the way he
did it was this is Reagan on February fifth, nineteen
eighty one, which is the speech I worked with him
on that he and I collaborated on. He wanted to
(17:34):
talk about how inflation had eroted the value of a
dollar bill. That's a dollar bill he's holding in his hand,
and he wanted to talk about how inflation had eroded
the value of a dollar from nineteen sixty to nineteen
eighty one. And he held the dollar bill in his hand,
and then in his pocket he had a quarter, a dime,
(17:58):
and a penny, and he that dollar bill. From nineteen
sixty to nineteen eighty one, he had gone to thirty
six cents. I said, mister President, are you sure you
can do that on TV? Live TV? Take out the
dollar bill and take out thirty the court of the
diamond the penny. And he was insulted. I should have
(18:19):
never questioned the great performer, but that's how he made
the illustration. And then on February eighteenth of nineteen eighty one,
we did a joint session with Congress speech, and he
was outraged at the national debt. Now, the national debt
in nineteen eighty one, I don't know if you want
(18:40):
to guess what it was, but it was not yet
a trillion dollars. Today it's thirty six trillion dollars. Then
it was like a nine hundred and eighty nine billion.
But he was really outraged at the size of the
national debt, and he wanted to illustrate to the Congress,
you and the Congress, I've got to do something about
(19:01):
the national debt. So we've got to do something about it.
And I want to tell you how bad it is.
So he put out his hand and he did this
all he by the way. He did it by long division.
But I don't know how he got to it. But
he said, instead of if I hold one thousand dollars
(19:22):
bills to make a million dollars in my hand, it
would be four inches high. If I hold one thousand
dollar bills in my hand to reach a trillion dollars,
it would reach to the sky. Originally he said eighty
eighty miles high, and then we had to correct them
because his math was just a little bit off, and
(19:43):
we found it was actually sixty seven miles high. But
this is how he liked to tell his stories to
get the point across the Congress. But the national debt
was absurd, but that was much better than saying, hey,
the national debt's going to a billion dollars or trillion dollars,
and that's out of line. So that's how the great
communicator made his point. Now, another great story I love
(20:08):
is this is after his assassination attempt, and this is
April twenty eighth, nineteen eighty one, and I was one
of the few people who got to meet with him
after he started recuperating, and it was about probably about
April twenty first, I don't know the exact date. We
(20:33):
got to meet with him in the residence, and naturally
we were going to exploit as much as we could
the fact that there was all this national sympathy for
him after the assassination attempt. We wanted to sell his
economic recovery plan. So we were going to do his
Joint Session speech, and I thought it would be make
(20:55):
a lot of sense to add zest to the speech
by finding a letter from some from some somebody that
was get well card or something like that. So I
asked the correspondent the section, and they found this letter
from this second grade boy from Riverside School in Rockville Center,
(21:20):
New York. And there he is. He pulled it out
of his pocket. It was not in the advanced copy
of the of the text, so it was a surprise
to the Joint Session, and it was from Peter Sweeney,
this little second grader said, and he pulled it out
of his pocket. He says, I have this letter from
this little second grader who says, dear mister President, please
(21:44):
get well quick, or you might have to give a
speech to your pajamas, and then he paused, and you
can see you can see Tipple and' neil laughing back there,
and then he and then he paused, and he says
and he read, ps if you have to give a
space in your pajamas, remember I warned you. And they're
(22:10):
laughing back there, and he had him in the palm
of his hands. He was such a great performer anyway,
those are some of the great communicating skills he had.
So the Reagan you don't know is what some of
the stories I wanted to tell you. And this is
us at Camp David once again. Now we're filming the
(22:31):
Morning Morning in America, ADS, and this is the scenes
that you never saw anywhere. This is me when I
was forty years old. This is a long time ago,
and the President and a fellow in the back of
the Phil Dusonberry with the tie on as the producer,
(22:53):
and I say, it's the Reagan you don't know is
because Reagan was un comfortable with people that were strangers
in his life. A lot of his staff he didn't
feel comfortable with because he wasn't with them, as I
(23:13):
say in the Crucible of the Campaign, or it wasn't
around them a lot. He knew ed me, he knew
Mike Deaver, he knew Bill Clark, he had been around
him a lot. But there was a lot of people
on his staff that were just staff people. He didn't
have a bond with them. And he and I had
(23:33):
created a bond over the years that was so special.
And I know it sounds pretentious and precious sometimes, but
that's the part of Reagan. Reagan was always genial, and
you could see him in a crowd laughing. You could
see ten people around him laughing and cheerful, and it
(23:57):
was seem to you he doesn't Reagan. He would seem
like he knows and loves all these people, but he's
probably telling a joke or telling a story about Doris
Day and some movie he did. But that's because he
was uncomfortable around them. That's the way he would deal
with a discomfort. So when he was in a situation
(24:18):
like this, that's why they called me in because they
needed somebody with whom he had some kind of bond
with which to make this commercial. So about a week
before they did this, they say, hey, Kotchigan, we're filming
this commercial with the President. We're going to need somebody
to sit across from him to do these takes that
(24:43):
he knows a familiar face, and so that's going to
be you. And so that's that's the sort of the
story about Reagan, a special side of him that a
lot of people don't know. And of course Missus Reagan
was there because she's someone that he always wanted around
in situations to give him a comfort level. And there
(25:04):
she is. I don't know what she's doing, picking something
out of my eye. But she's also a real flirt.
I'll have to tell you about that. But there's another
slide of her. Sometimes if you're on the wrong side
of her. She wasn't. She was just the opposite of
being a flirt. And this is another After filming the
commercials at Camp David, we filmed also part of the commercials.
(25:28):
That's the South Portico south Portico of the White House,
a really special place by the way, when you look
out at the south lawn and we're filming another ad
and it's the same thing. They needed somebody to start
talking to Reagan while the camera starts, and then I
would be out of the view. The camera would keep
rolling while he's talking to me or George Schultz or
(25:54):
George Bush or somebody else. So if you watch those
that morning again in America Film, which you can get
on YouTube, you can see this all in action. I
call this when the President needed friend. After the election
of eighty four, we were in that massive landslide, which
(26:16):
was just wonderful. He was going seventy to sixty eight,
sixty percent in the polls. He was going great, and
then Chancellor Coll of West Germany invited him to Germany
to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the end of World
War Two, and so they sent an advanced team over
(26:41):
to to Germany to advance the trip. And the idea
was for him to do a commemoration of the visit
by laying a wreath upon the soldier's graves, and one
of the soldier's graves was to show the the Fellowship,
(27:03):
and by showing the fellowship, they would put a wreath
on the grave of German soldiers as well. It turns
out that those graves were covered with snow when they
did the advanced trip, and then when the snow melted
in the spring, it turns out that those graves were
of Nazi ss Wolfing soldiers. The wolf in SS the
(27:23):
worst of the kind. And so this big explosion took
place of our controversy of accusing the president of being
anti Semitic, that he opened the wounds of war, that
he shouldn't be going there, headlines in the Post, the Times,
(27:45):
and all the newsweeklies, and you can see that this
is just one headline out of dozens and dozens Congress
passed resolutions. Nancy didn't want him to go, but he
got his back up and he said, I've got to
do this chance. And we had pershing missiles in Germany,
by the way, so that was another There was a
(28:08):
national defense reason why we had to go. So in
order to make amends. And this is the Time magazine
article about this, a misbegotten trip opens old wounds. And
that's the look on the face of President Reagan as
(28:28):
Ellie Wizzell was lecturing him in the White House. So
they decided, in order to do an expiation of this visit,
he would go to the bergen Belsen concentration camp and
give a speech to try to get out from under
this horrible controversy. As polls that dropped fifteen percent. I
(28:49):
was not in the White House. I was no longer
the Who House, but I would get called in on
special assignment. Missus Reagan wanted me in on this speech.
So I got called in with a short notice, and
I sat down with the President. And this is the
look on his That was the kind of look on
his face when I walked into the old Office. He
(29:12):
was stricken, he was saddened, he was down. He said
he just couldn't believe that anybody could consider him that
he would be anti Semitic, or that he would ever
dare have those views. And so he gave me some
basic ideas, and so I had to go back and forth,
and we worked very hard. And it turns out when
(29:36):
I say this is when the President needed a friend,
he did need it once again. He needed a friendly face.
He needed somebody that he could collaborate with, Somebody that
was familiar to him, somebody that was not a stranger.
He had he had six or seven speech writers in
the White House, but there wasn't anybody that could sit
(29:58):
down with him that he he had a feeling with
that was brought him a comfort level that he could
work on that speech, that knows that it could bail
him out of this situation. And we worked on that
and it turned out to me he delivered that speech
at bergen Belsen, which has been called Reagan's greatest speech
(30:23):
and Gregan's greatest commemorative speech. And if you ever get
a chance, I hope you can try to watch it.
It's very it turns out to be very moving. Reagan
the competitor. Sometimes again you see the genial side of
Reagan and that he can, you know, take it easy
(30:44):
with people. But I call him the competitor. And he
tells the story about in the movies dealing with I
love this story because revealed different side of him. Errol
Flynn was a big camera hog, he said, and in
the movies and they had competition with one another, and
and Errol Flynn would try to get in front of
(31:07):
him in front of the camera. So one time he said,
there they were in a break in a scene during
the Santa Fe Trail, and so Reagan says, during the
breaking says, I I took my boot and I started
making a big mound with dirt and it got it
(31:28):
be about eight or ten inches high. And when the
when the director said action said, I stepped up on
the mound so I could be up above Ero flann
So I just always loved that story. So there was
that side of him. He loved to compete. This picture
I put in there not to show you the two
(31:50):
of us working, but if you picture Missus Reagan being
in the seat that I'm in, and picture me being
across from them in a bench, we were on Air
Force one, the three of us when in October of
the nineteen eighty four campaign, I tried. I came back
for five months to work on the campaign. And in
(32:13):
nineteen eighty four, and Mondale had been attacking Reagan ferociously,
just ferociously, and Reagan was upset because the speech writers
were instructed by Jim Baker not to put Mondale's name
in Reagan's speeches, and he and Baker instructed me as well,
(32:34):
But I wasn't writing the speeches, but nevertheless I was
getting the blame for it, so missus anyway, But the
bottom line is is that Reagan made sure that Missus
Reagan got the message from him to her and from
her to me to make sure that Mondale's name got
(32:55):
put back in the speeches. And when Missus Reagan wanted
to make something clear, he made it very clear. And
so my point is is that when Reagan got his
back up about something like that, he could make it clear.
Now whether he did it or she did it didn't matter.
And so it ended up that he Just a few
(33:17):
days later, we had a whistlestop tour through Ohio. That's
Harry Truman's give him Hell, the car he rode in
nineteen forty eight. We took the same car through southern
Ohio on October twelfth, and I wrote that, I wrote
I got the assignment to write that speech. I used
(33:39):
Mondale's name like just about every other line, and Reagan
was very, very happy. And this is me delivering his
nineteen eighty eight speech to the convention. What's interesting about
this is that Missus Reagan and the President different on
(34:01):
what this speech should be like. This is one of
those rare occasions where I had to sit between the
two of them at a at a lunch where they
were discussing this speech. Now, Missus Reagan wanted this speech
to be all visionary and warm and fuzzy, but the
Democrats had been attacking Reagan throughout their convention very harshly,
(34:23):
and Reagan got his back up and disagreed with Missus
Reagan and missus. Reagan wanted this speech one way, he
wanted this speech another way. I knew who I worked for,
and so I had to write it his way. But
the point is is that when he made up his
(34:44):
mind that he wanted to respond to these Democrats, he
got it his way. So I delivered a tough speech.
And that's that's anyway. That's how it ended up. Finally,
I want to end up with these treasured moments I
had with him, because this, this is the other Reagan.
I knew here. We are an air force one, and
(35:08):
I can't tell you what a pleasure, how much fun
it is to write on the presidential aircraft. And on
this occasion, I don't I don't remember where. I think
we were flying from Chicago to Washington before working on
a General Assembly speech, and I was sitting on that
(35:30):
bench that I was just referring to, and Reagan was
wearing he always wore cuff links, and I looked over
his cup links and I said, mister President, there's a
date on your cuff links. And he said yeah, And
(35:51):
I said, what's that date? What is that date? Well,
he said, that's the date of our anniversary. So I
grabbed his wrist, I said, what's the date. So that's
me grabbing his couplings. And that's a look on his face.
(36:12):
You see how smug he is. And he got it right.
But that's the kind of relationship we had that I
could do that to the President of the United States. Otherwise,
I mean, otherwise he probably would slugged me or something.
Missus Reagan wasn't. You can see the look on her face. Oh,
you touched the President of the United States. This is
(36:34):
another churichh moment I had. We were going to meet
Missus Reagan for lunch. We were going to work on
the anti drug speech to just say No speech back
in nineteen eighty six. And she was late. She was
with her lady friend somewhere, and she was ten minutes late.
And I got to the weir Ath Century Plausa hotel
(37:00):
well and he said. I walked in and said, Ken,
come here, let me show you what I've been doing.
I said, what's that, miss President? He said, well, look,
and he'd been flying paper airplanes off the top of
the balcony at the Century Plaza using White House presidential stationery.
(37:27):
Now only now the president we all had presidential stationery,
but only the President has this special sort of mint
colored White House stationary that he gets and this picture
which was captured by Pete Susan, the White House photographer,
and he sang literally saying to me, WHOA, look at
(37:48):
that go and and the and the plane, the paper
airplane is just floating down like this, and he was
like a he was like an eight year old kid,
so proud of himself about smoothly that I know. And
it was going to the I think the Century the
Fox Studios lot was just below, because we're on the
(38:09):
Century Plaza Hotels on the Century Fox lot, and there's
got to be some workmen down there cleaning up about
fifteen paper airplanes. I wonder what this White House stationary
is all about. And finally you saw the film from
the Rancho del Cielo when we were working on the
(38:34):
nineteen eighty eight convention speech that has farewell address there.
I am. I'm not carrying the nuclear football, by the way.
So we had lunch at the patio with he and
Missus Reagan, and so I just arrived on the on
the ranch to work on the on the speech with him,
(38:56):
and on my wall he wrote notations on all the pictures.
He gave me and he says, I can't you arrived
just in time where cutting wood just up ahead, And
so I had just come to work with him. And
then when I after we had lunch and finished working
on the speech, he took me to his little house
(39:17):
showed me. He said, I want to show you all
the wood work I did on the house and the
floor he laid, and how proud he was of all
the work he had done, and it was just so
special that he was just a normal guy. It bothered
me that I never told him. You know, he was
so used to seeing me in suits and formal clothes
(39:38):
and everything, and bothered me that I ever told him that.
As I grew up in the same way about you know,
cutting brush and doing work like that on my farm
growing up in Vaisalia, California, on the sixty acre form
I should have told him. He probably would have liked
to hear that. And then and this is the end.
As I was leaving to go back to my car
(40:02):
that take me back to my hotel from the ranch.
This is a president driving me at such a special time.
That have the most special chauffeur in the world. I
call it driving mister Daisy, and that's to the president's
right as a secret Service agent. And then you know
(40:24):
who's standing above that is the White House doctor, just
in case the President does something stupid and gets in
a car rerecord or something like that. Anyway, I couldn't
have been more special than that. And then this is
one of my final favorite pictures of him and the
(40:45):
President me in the Oval office. That's such a beautiful shot.
And he inscribed it with a typical Hollywood inscription. He said, Ken,
you and I should have been both of us should
have been facing the camera, and we should have both
been closer to it. And it sums up such a wonderful,
(41:06):
beautiful trip I had with the President of the United States.
Thank you for listening to Thank you.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
Mister Kitchian has agreed to sign copies of his book
behind closed doors in the room with Reagan and Nixon.
We now have time for Q and A. If you
have a question, please make your way to a microphone.
Student questions will be given preference.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
Well, first, thank you for a fascinating speech. Since you
have the ear for words. How would you compare Nixon, Reagan,
and Trump. Well, obviously different styles. Nixon Nix was a
great It was a much more formal orator. Nixon was
(42:04):
a great communicator in his own right. Nixon campaign. I
will tell you something interesting about Nixon. He never used
never used note and when he campaigned, never used notes,
never used a teleprompter, so all his campaign speeches were
(42:25):
all extemporaneous when he spoke. When Nixon spoke at events,
for example, as president, he spoke extemporaneously. We provided him
with background information, suggested remarks, and then he would study them,
(42:46):
take notes, and then speak extemporaneously. It was formal addresses,
he used texts, and from the Oval office he used
the teleprompter. But I think Nixon was He worked very
hard at his presentations. He admired Reagan's communicating skills. But
(43:08):
I think Nixon in his own way was a great communicator,
but in a different way, much more formal, much more structured.
I think Reagan was unparalleled in a lot of ways
because of he had artful He was an attractive man,
(43:30):
he had great voice, He was skilled from all the
years in Hollywood, for all those years he spent on
the time with General Electric traveling throughout the country. He
was a good storyteller, and he was a creature of radio.
So for those of you who are my age who
(43:52):
can remember radio and radio had to create word pictures.
I grew up in an age of radio, so your
mind created word pictures that that helped regular a lot.
Trump is a good communicator in the sense that he
(44:15):
goes to people's guts. And that's what made him a
good communicator in twenty sixteen, and why he won the
election is that he spoke to what Scamming and Wanttenberg
(44:36):
called the real majority. They wrote a book in nineteen
seventy called the Real Majority and what Joe Kraft called
the Forgotten Man, and he knew how to reach to them,
so they all That's how they all different in different ways.
I think Trump is much cruder. I think he's I
(44:57):
think he could be less excessive in what he does.
I think he should give shorter speeches, and I think
Trump should not use a teleproblemter as much as he does.
Speaker 4 (45:11):
Thank you, mister Kashegian on kind of the same note
as the previous gentleman. There's been quite a few opinions
in recent years, particularly from a certain sector of the
conservative movement, that Trump's policies, particularly in the realm of
foreign affairs, and maybe some of his economic policies relating
to tariffs are kind of a move away from Reaganism.
(45:34):
Would you consider that an accurate interpretation or no? As
someone who worked in the Reagan administration, I.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
Think what I can make a much a better answer
on domestic affairs, and that is what he's doing domestically
is what Reagan intended to do in nineteen eighty one.
He's kicking the table over. You heard what I said
(46:07):
about Reagan. We came here to do things differently. Reagan
really wanted to do a lot of the things that
Trump is doing now, and I think there was he
would have I can't you know, I can't speak for somebody.
I can't tell you what he would say, but I
(46:28):
think he would be envious of the way he's cutting back.
And Reagan was prevented from doing a lot of the
things that he really wanted to do. He wanted to
make all those cuts he wanted. He was so tired
of the bureaucracy. And that meeting we had at Camp David,
I showed you where he said, the fellows have gotten
away from my crusade, and he was bothered by it.
(46:51):
So I think he would be very supportive of the
kind of cuts that were made. And he was very
on the other hand reage. You know, there was some
meetings where he say he was sensitive. He was a
child of the depression, and he said, well, you know,
I'm really sensitive to the people that are losing their
(47:13):
jobs because I remember it was like to lose jobs
of the depression. So he wanted sort of a soft landing.
But then again there but then he was so bothered
by the excesses of government. You know, he paid taxes
at ninety percent when he was in Hollywood, or ninety
one percent or whatever that high tax rate was. And
(47:33):
then he would tell his story. There's this. I know
I'm going on too long, but this is a story
that this is a story that's important for me to tell.
He used to go to these he used to be
a spokesman, and he talked about going to these events
where he would be an MC and he talked about
the Pillsbury bakeoff. You remember the Pillsbury bakeoffs and these ladies.
(47:58):
This is a different era. The ladies would compete to
make their special recipes. They'd have a contest Pillsbury bake Off,
and the ladies would win and they'd get an award,
and Reagan would be in an MC at these events,
and Reagan would tell the story that the ladies would
get the award and they'd get a cash check, and
(48:22):
he said there'd be an irs agent off stage waiting
to collect the share of that award just as they
walked off. He told that story several times that had
really made him angry. So that's the kind of thing
I think he'd be envious of a lot of the
things that Trump is doing.
Speaker 5 (48:42):
Thank you so much for your presentation. You mentioned that
President Reagan was sometimes disappointed when his crusade wasn't moving
as quickly as he wanted it to. From your vantage
point as a speech writer, did you ever feel that
there was a discrepancy between the vision you were presenting
in the speeches and the political reality.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
I've been asked a lot of questions. I've never been
asked that one. I think there's always you have to
have a division between vision and reality because otherwise you're
not going to have some changes. You have to say
(49:27):
things that are over the horizon, and I think that's
what Reagan would do. He would say things that maybe
would spark something that would be maybe a little beyond
what people would believe or think, that would trigger a
thought that nobody would ever think of before. And so
(49:49):
you have to say things that were different and that
maybe not be real. But I don't but I don't
think you would ever say the outlandish that was ever
beyond total reality. But he was he liked, He was
a story He was a born storyteller. And I had
to I had to pull him back a few times,
(50:12):
and we had we had to fact check him, you know,
when the presidents had presidents have to be fact checked.
We had three researchers in the White House that did
nothing but fact check all this, all the president's speeches.
And that's the first thing among the things I did
when I hired the speech fighting staff. I hired three.
I brought back three researchers. And the President would get
(50:34):
upset when he would put something in a speech like
that business about the stacking the thousand dollars bills. He
came he came back with eighty miles high and I
had to pull him back to sixty seven miles high.
But he did it by long division, and I had
to go to the Bureau of engraving and mint and
(50:56):
get the right answer. But I said to miss President,
any time you utter anything, the press is going to
go back and check every utterance you make because it
goes down in history. So we had to make reality
checks on everything.
Speaker 6 (51:18):
Thank you so much for your talk. It was amazing
to hear all those stories. We have a oratory competition
coming up here in a couple of days, and I
wanted to get your opinion. What is one piece of
advice you'd give to speech writers, not about the presentation
or the performance of it, but actually writing a memorable
speech that will impact people.
Speaker 2 (51:47):
How do you write it? There's no book on speech writing.
There's You have to have a message. You have to
have a core message. You have to come up with
That's the first thing. You have to come up with.
What's your what is your what is the message you
want to convey? And how do you get there? And
(52:10):
then once you come up with that, Once you have
that message, then what's the pathway to that message? And
then you start. You know, sometimes I wake up in
the middle of the night coming up with things and
I put them and I grabbed my iPhone and I
(52:30):
dropped things down the there's so much, so many. I
wrote a whole book on this and that bergen Belsen speech.
I wrote the best lines I came up. I wrote
on a napkin at a bar in Georgetown, and that line,
(52:53):
are you better off than you were in nineteen seventy six?
I don't know where it came from. Sometimes you just
have to keep thinking and thinking. But at the core
you have to have what what is that audience? What's
going to move that audience? What do I want them
(53:13):
to know? It's like it's like a preacher's sermon. What
do you want them? What do you want them to
leave the room thinking? How about that? Put that? Put
that at the top of the page. What do you
want them to leave the room thinking? That's number one?
And then start from there. And then then the first
(53:33):
sentence is the hardest thing to do when you're right,
When you write an essay, it's the first sentence of
the heart. Otherwise I don't have there's no book on it.
Speaker 3 (53:46):
Sorry, we now have time for one more question.
Speaker 7 (53:51):
Thank you so much for your presentation. You mentioned that
you grew up on a sixty acre farm, You went
to UC Santa Barbara, and then you ended up speech
writer for a president. What brought you through all those
different experiences in life? What values, what virtues held you
fast through all those different experiences.
Speaker 2 (54:09):
I'm sorry, Can you repeat for me? Come closer.
Speaker 7 (54:18):
You mentioned you grew up on a farm, you went
to UC Santa Barbara, and then you were a speech
writer for the president. What sort of virtues, what sort
of values did you hold fast through all those different experiences.
Speaker 2 (54:29):
I see the virtue is I came up from My
dad was a survivor of the army and genocide, and
he taught me a lesson of very hard work. I
(54:52):
had three brothers. We worked on a farm. I started
driving a tractor at six years old, and so I
was a farmer and he uh and and when I
when I begin this process in politics, politics, it was
(55:15):
UH to always uh never, don't expect to start at
the top, be prepared to do whatever you're asked to do.
Be prepared to start at the bottom and work your
way up. And it's it's a virtue to to be uh,
(55:38):
to be willing to always put extra effort into anything
you do. I to leave your ego aside. It's not easy.
I flunked my English entrance exam at UCSB, I had
(55:58):
to take what was called boneheaded English. It was called
subject Day, but it was called bonhead English. So I
had to learn how to write like baby steps. So uh,
and then I my my job. My first volunteer job
in the Nixon campaign was in the correspondence section. And
(56:21):
I really wanted to be like a research assistant or
an intern. But they said, now you've got to start
at the bottom. You've got to be a do these
menial correspondence So and it's you have to be. Uh.
You have to be to show that you are just
(56:43):
willing to put your shoulder to any task that's given
to you. I can't put it anywhere. I mean, it's
just like anything else that you want to achieve. It's
like Hillsdale College didn't when it started before dtor Arne
got here and put it to the top.
Speaker 3 (57:01):
Please join me in thanking our speaker, give your.
Speaker 1 (57:07):
Life to Michael Berry Show and podcast. Please tell one friend,
and if you're so inclined, write a nice review of
our podcast. Comments, suggestions, questions, and interest in being a
corporate sponsor and partner can be communicated directly to the
show at our email address, Michael at Michael Berryshow dot
(57:30):
com or simply by clicking on our website Michael Berryshow
dot com. The Michael Berry Show and Podcast is produced
by Ramon Roeblis, The King of Ding. Executive producer is
Chad Knakanishi. Jim Mudd is the creative director. Voices Jingles,
(57:54):
Tomfoolery and Shenanigans are provided by Chance McLain. Director of
re search is Sandy Peterson. Emily Bull is our assistant
listener and superfan. Contributions are appreciated and often incorporated into
our production. Where possible, we give credit. Where not, we
(58:15):
take all the credit for ourselves. God bless the memory
of Rush Limbaugh. Long live Elvis, be a simple man
like Leonard Skinnard told you, and God bless America. Finally,
if you know a veteran suffering from PTSD, call Camp
Hope at eight seven seven seven one seven PTSD and
(58:40):
a combat veteran will answer the phone to provide free counseling.
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