 This is Peter Benchley. The date is November the 6th, 7th. We're shooting in the University Club on the 3rd floor in New York. Peter was a White House speechwriter, and then since he's gone on to much more grand and glorious things. Peter, you're on. Ladies and gentlemen, it's really great to be here today. My name is Peter Benchley, as Harry sort of said. I was in the White House from March of 1967 until January 20th of 1969 when the Secret Service unceremoniously kicked me and all the drunken friends of mine out of my office in the corner of the Executive Office building because the administration had changed at noon, and here it was 4 o'clock, and we were all smashed lying on the desk, lamenting the change in administration. So I was, to my knowledge, the youngest speechwriter on the staff, certainly the most incompetent, the least experienced, with the least justification for being there, and did undoubtedly the worst job of anybody in the history of the United States. Harry Middleton and I were sort of roommates. He had an office. I had a kind of, I don't know what you'd call it, an open space sort of out in the Executive Office building. We shared a glorious secretary named Joyce Zagora. I'm sure her first name was Garlington, but then she got married and changed it to Zagora. Anyhow, it was years before I learned why it was I had been hired, and I'll go to that now because it is sort of germane to the ignorance that I passed most of my time in the White House under. Apparently I was hired, and I'll give you the circumstances, because there was a suspicion on the part of either the President or Robert Kintner who hired me that my father was the editor of The New Yorker. And I discovered this only because many years later, well, not too many years later, under the Ford administration, my father received an invitation to dinner at the White House addressed to Nathaniel Benchley, editor of The New Yorker Magazine, which he received with great delight since he had never been editor of The New Yorker, nor had his father, although he wrote for The New Yorker, both of them did. And it then dawned on me, since I couldn't possibly figure why else I'd ever been hired to do a job for which I was so incredibly inept or unqualified, that that's why. It was known that the President Johnson wanted to curry favor with the eastern liberal commie faggots, and there were many of us who would go out to Harvard and other terrible schools that he didn't like, and he very much wanted to be understood by the East, by Walter Cronkite, by the eastern liberal establishment, because he felt excluded by them. This was well known at the time. I was hired, I met him the first time in the little office off the Oval Office, and he assigned me to get three television sets and monitor the evening news shows, and tell him what they said about him, and what position he held with them, were they fair or unfair? That was one of the last times I ever saw the man the first time. That was before I was hired, and I suppose in the next twenty-two months I must have seen him half a dozen times perhaps. He usually forgot my name, but sometimes he remembered it. I should give this a prelude for Harry's benefit and civilizations, that my memories are completely clouded by the fact that in 1986 I published a book called Q-Clearance, which was a fictional story about a guy who had given, had been given what I had, another preposterous assignment, Q-Clearance, which was the highest possible atomic energy clearance. That was because I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, not the White House, as I'm sure has been covered in other interviews. The White House staff was very small, and everybody worked for other agencies technically. I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission and was never in the building, never met the commissioners, and was a GS 15 Step 9 making 25,000 and change a year, which was an enormous raise from Newsweek. I remember Jack McNulty crowing at one point that he had written the inauguration, what do you call it, the entry speech for the Secretary of Commerce, for whom he supposedly worked, and he went up and said to the man in the receiving line, or so goes the story, good evening sir, my name is Jack McNulty, I'm your special assistant, you will never see me again, if that's true. I don't know whether these things are true, they're all pretty good recollections to me. In any event, the reason I was hired was, a sensible reason was that in 1964, I was the television editor of Newsweek Magazine, and I covered the Atlantic City Convention, the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, and I had met through the years at Newsweek, Robert Kintner, who was the president of NBC. In fact, at the time, he was just the president of NBC News. I had known him off and on since then, never really personally, because he was a titanic figure in the media at the time, and I heard, I don't even remember how, that he was looking for speechwriters. I'd been at Newsweek for three years and was bored with being a television editor, and so I think I wrote him a note saying, I hear you're looking for writers, is there any point in my coming and talking to you? And he said, come on down, have lunch. So my wife Wendy and I went down and had lunch with him. First of all, there's an aura about being in the White House that it magnifies everything a thousand percent. So when we walked into his tiny basement office, we were already staggered with the thought of it, and then when we heard that he had a telephone in his car later, that blew it. I mean, I knew I was in the seat of power. There were no such things as phones in cars. You had guys in loincloths running around giving messages. That's how you communicated in those days. So Mr. Kintner, after a brief social conversation, just sort of how do you do, said in a gravelly voice that I won't attempt to mimic. Well, I can let you have a job anywhere you want to go in the world with the USIA, or you can come work for the president and I can probably get you 25 grand for that. There's no rush. He said, why don't you have Charlie McGuire take you to lunch in the mess and let me know around four. I have a phone in the car. Well, Charlie McGuire, who has already been introduced to you, was his so-called cabinet secretary at the time. And he took Wendy and me to lunch in the White House with just further notice. And I didn't have to wait for four o'clock. I called them the number right after lunch and said, you bet. So I arrived at the White House sometime in 1960. Come on, here, seven. And in March, I think, and discovered there were two speechwriters at the time. It was Will Sparks and Bob Hardesty, who nominally worked for the president. There were two others who I didn't know who worked for, but they all said they worked for the president. That's Ben Wattenberg and Irv Duggan. I had no idea who they technically worked for, but they all said they worked for the president. I guess everybody in the world worked for the president. If you were down there, you worked for the president. So I began with learning things. I didn't know anything about Texas accent. I didn't know anything about how the man spoke. I was not given, as writers never were, access to the president to get to know him or how he spoke or what he wanted to say. We were told what he wanted to say and told to say it. We heard that he, and he did actually have one meeting with us. And Harry, you may remember better than I whether it was one or two. But when he had us all into the cabinet room and we sat around and the president told us what he wanted us to say, this was at the urging of Harry McPherson. You've got to get to know your writers, sir. And the president wished there were no writers. He made sure. He believed there were no writers. Writers didn't exist because everything was his, and he's right. So we were told at that time that he wanted four paragraph speeches, four sentence paragraphs, four word sentences, and four letter words. And that was it. Now, it's hard to handle a subject of importance in that kind of format. Fortunately for me, I was never given a subject of that importance to cover, so it made little difference to me. Now, here's where my memory goes bad, because I remember, I thought it was me who wrote a letter of congratulations to a rabbi on 50 years of Christian endeavor. But on reflection, I think it was McNulty who did that. I remember Jack writing a speech to, oh, Christ. No, a letter to a couple congratulating them on their 100th anniversary rather than to the husband on his 100th birthday. And there were other triumphs like that. I remember Jack writing a proclamation for White Cane Safety Day, which was for the blind, and he began it, tap, tap, tap. And I thought that was great. We knew the president liked acronyms, so we used to sit around and make up acronyms. I can't remember what the terms were, but one of them was T-W-A-T. And then actually, McNulty got one funded. He knew the president liked acronyms, so he made up VIPs and then thought out what it means, and he figured out it meant veterans in public service. And by God, he got that funded to the tune of something like $50 million, and we did it as a joke. Now, having thus enlightened you about my fabulous entree into the office, I forgot to mention one thing. The first thing I saw of the president was the first moment I saw the president. We were in the little office, Kintner and I. Kintner was a chain smoker, and he used to spill ashes all over his blue suit. And the president called him a human ashtray or a walking ashtray, depending. So when I met the president, when I first saw the president through the door of the little room into the Oval Office, he was lecturing a small man from the subcontinent. And he stood up and stood over this man. The president was 6'4", I guess. Whatever his height was, he seemed about nine feet tall. The presidency, number one, increases the size and gravity of an individual. And this man was a large, commanding man. So he further increased the size of the presidency out of his presence. And what he was saying to this young or small gentleman from the subcontinent was, son, all right, I'll tell you what, I'll take off my ammunition belt, and I'll take off my hand grenades, and I'll put them right down here. And I'll take off my rifle, and I'll put it over here, and I'll take all my planes and put them aside. And I'll say, okay, now, Uncle Ho, I'm ready to talk. And you know what he's going to do to me, son? You know what he's going to do? He's going to kick me in the ass. Now, that was my first personal real life introduction to the president. I was first of all scared to death. Then when he came into the Oval Office, he focused entirely on me. One of his many talents was to convince you, whoever you were, that for that split second that he was focusing on you, you were the most important person in the universe. You might forget your name in 10 seconds, but never mind. He made me believe that I was probably the most valuable person ever hired there. And he did ask me how I could come to work for this walking ashtray. And then he told me that I had to monitor the networks. I got three television sets, monitored the networks, dutifully filed reports, and never heard a word from anybody about anything. It's funny I stopped it. As the most junior speechwriter, speechwriter, which is something of an exaggeration, eventually there were eight of us, I think, including your good self, Harry, who turned out to be the most competent, capable, long-lasting, loyal, true, and altogether worthwhile person of the lot. And as I remember, at the largest number, at the maximum, the president was at one point giving 58 speeches a week. So even I, down in my cellar of ineptitude, had to be given something worthwhile. And gradually I began to write speeches on consumer affairs, partly because somebody had to do it, but also because I knew Betty Furness very, well, she was an old family friend. And when she was named special assistant to the president for consumer affairs, I guess, she asked me to write for and I would do some stuff just as a favor. There was a time, several months after I'd been hired, I don't remember when this was. I was at a dinner party and I was then, as I did until 1981, drinking heavily because that's what my family did, if not for a living, for an avocation. Every male in my family back to the 14th century has been in jail or in trouble for drink or debt. Anyhow, I was fulfilling that legacy and I was at a dinner party and I got a call from Larry Levinson, who was one of Joe, Joe Califano's number one assistant, as far as I knew. And it was about 11 o'clock at night. And he said, come into the office, I want you to get to work on a message to Congress for tomorrow, whatever. I said, when's it due? And he said, in a couple of days, and I said, to hell with it, I'm not coming in. And he was a long silence on the phone. And he said, you do say that, you're not coming in. I said, no, it's 11 o'clock at night, I'll do it tomorrow. And I hung up the phone. Never heard another word until about two weeks later on a Saturday morning, I got summoned in to Joe Califano's office. I never saw Joe Califano because he had nothing to do with the writers theoretically. Little did I realize the power the man actually had, but he had nothing to do with hiring me. I don't think I'd ever met the man. And he said very nicely that the president wanted me to shift over and go to work entirely for Betty Furness and essentially not to write for the president anymore. It was couched in terms that it was because I was so valuable to Betty Furness. I was acutely alert enough to understand this was outright punishment for having the incredible stupidity annealed somewhat by Scott Twiskey to refuse an order from Larry Levinson. And somewhere in the depth of my viscera I found the astonishing guts to say to Califano, Joe, you didn't hire me and you can't fire me. If the president wants me to leave and go work for Betty Furness, he can tell me himself. And I got up and I left. And that was the last I ever heard of the issue about however many months later when we were all leaving. And you and I, Harry, with the only two left, I got called in to do a project and directly for the president I was summoned into his bedroom. And I thought it was to write a speech of some significance and hell no it was to write a children's book for one of his daughters about her dog. And this is in the beginning of Hugh Clarence. It's exactly as it happened. I walked into the office one morning and as I had gotten out of the taxi I rent my pants from the very front to the very back. And I had just a completely open trap door on the bottom of my trousers. And as I got in the office, Joyce said to me, Peter, the president wants to see you in his all in his bedroom right now. I said, sure, Joyce. Yeah, that's right. I'd seen the president maybe twice in my life a lot on television. And she said, I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. And she was all excited. I still didn't think she was telling me the truth. So I said, yeah, right, Joyce. Give me a needle, would you? And she said, Jim Jones just called and the president wants to see you in his bedroom right now. I said, he can't mean me. And she said he did anyway. He did. So I said, Joyce, look at this. I can't possibly go see the president. So I got boxer shorts on and I got my trousers open from stem to stern. I don't think he's going to like that. He's going to think I'm a flasher for one thing. So she said, take your pants off. And I thought, okay. So I took my shoes off, took my pants off and Joyce put them on her desk and she took a stapler and she put the two seams together and she went bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. She closed the seam. She said, put your pants on and get over to the White House. So completely bewildered I did. And I went up into the president's bedroom where needless to say I'd never been before. And he, I stood at the base foot of the bed and he laid in bed with his glasses down like this and he has papers all over here. And he looked at me and I knew he hadn't the faintest idea who I was or why he had called me in. But Jim Jones, it reminded him and he said to me, you're a very loyal fellow, aren't you? And I thought this man has no idea that he tried to fire me through California at one point or California tried to fire me or something. He said you're, as he always said, a course of source of comfort and strength to me. I said, well, that's very nice, Mr. President. On the rest, you know, I bowed and scraped and then I found out I was to do a children's book for one of his daughters, which I did. I don't know if it was ever published. But let me see that. I think that's, no, there's more than I have to have a sip of water here. I've seen these collections come back and get confused with my own fictions. What are you going to do? A story came out of this so-called firing of me and it was warped and for years he used to bother me, but it doesn't bother me anymore. Newton Minow was the first person to tell the story and it goes like this, that the president fired me and I said, okay, and he fired me because I was an incompetent writer, I guess. I don't know what the truth was, the story supposedly said. But I wrote him a final speech and it was on cards. The whole thing is completely incredible because he didn't speak from cards and he would never have, this could never have happened. But the story was that I wrote him a final speech in which he went card by card saying, we can have the war in Vietnam and we can have the great society. We can have guns and butter, we can have this, we can have that, we can have the war on poverty and the civil rights movement and still defend our interests in Vietnam et cetera, et cetera. And now I'm going to tell you why. And he rolls the last card and it says, you're on your own LBJ and signed Peter Benchley. Well, as preposterous a story is that I could not imagine. It was untrue, it was impossible, it could never have happened. The fact that, I mean, one, he didn't speak from cards, two, you couldn't possibly get a speech directly to the president. As you know, you would go through McGuire, McPherson, McGonigle, McGoosey. Everybody would have a hand in it. And it was all Ben Watenberg would say he wrote it all anyway, so it didn't make any difference. So the story was annoying. And then Califano picked it up. He fired me because I had no talent. Oh, how ironic. And this was after Jaws was published. And anyway, the story was annoying. But I was very lucky to have been hired by Kintner because Kintner was an alcoholic and he understood us. And so when months later, months after Joe tried to fire me, I was at some big party and as usual was drunk. And I took it upon myself, thought that it was a great idea to go up and tell Joe what I thought of him. Sweet Jesus. So I did. I don't remember much of this. I remember waking up in the morning on the couch in the living room, fully dressed, thinking, why am I here? And where have I been? And then, oh my God. So I debated calling in sick from the next year or two. And instead I went into the office, which was an act of enormous courage, and snuck under the door and hid behind the desk until Kintner called me in. And fortunately, Kintner, who wonders, I say, understood alcoholics, laughed and said, boy, you really pulled one last night. And I said, yes, sir, I know. Do you want me to quit? And he said, hell no. Just try not to do it again. End of story. I mean, end of my story. I don't know what the stories are in real life about this, but I find it highly amusing that Joe Califano, who was a chain smoker in those days, then went on to be a haunch show in the world of substance abuse and all the rest, because we all were chain smokers. And there used to be in the speech writers among certain of us, I would never include Harry in this, because Harry was Simon Pure, that there was in Will Sparks' office, which was the biggest office down at the end of the hall. We would have a half gallon of vodka. And he used to put a quarter and a cup whenever he'd take a drink. And on slow days, of which there were many, McNulty and I and other social romaine nameless would play gin rummy and have a substantial amount to drink. And then if we thought we were unfit to go into the White House mess, which was occasionally the truth, we'd go over to a restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue and while away the rest of the day. I also, at the time, was studying guitar, classical guitar, which I didn't know then, but was really a way that I was trying to stop drinking. So I'd have something to do at the end of the day. And I took guitar lessons. But because if you drink a lot, you know that you can find an excuse for anything. I figured I don't want to practice at the end of the day. I'd rather drink at the end of the day. So the solution for this is to bring the guitar to the office. So I did. I brought the guitar to the office as I know perhaps Harry will remember. And I used to practice my classical guitar then. Why you didn't hit me over the head with a goddamn thing because it was annoying. I cannot imagine. But that's what I did. And soon that got all around the place. I have no idea what my reputation was at the end of the time, except as a complete incompetent. But I stayed, to my knowledge, the last living speechwriter in that building. Because by the end of the administration everybody else had gotten jobs. Jack was the speech writer for the president or chairman of General Motors. Will had something, Bob Hardesty had something. You had been tapped to be what you have become in the celestial sphere in Texas. And I had no job at all. I had been quietly writing freelance for Newsweek, a feature service of Newsweek for several months. So I had something to go on too, but no job. So gradually as other speechwriters left I moved up to the larger offices. And finally by the time Election Day came around I was in the biggest inauguration day. I was in Will's office. This enormous office. And it was later filled with about 300 secretaries as I recall. But I had a desk and several couches and a conference table and, you know, everything short of a shower and a sauna. And so I thought, hell, this was a great place. Three TV sets. And at one point when I was the last of the functioning speechwriters, I mean the people who were writing who were called that because there was always Harry MacPherson who wrote and there was John Roche who wrote and there were other people who wrote whose job nominally it was not to be a speechwriter. I was called down to the Situation Room by Walt Rosto to write a speech. I didn't have any idea on what. I was just the last body in town so they haul me down there. And it was to be on Vietnam about which I knew nothing. And Rosto said in the process of briefing me, he said, do you realize that we just dropped more bombs? I think it was during the Tet Offensive or one of the important things. We just dropped more bombs than were dropped on all of Europe in all of World War II, in this one offensive. We've just done that. And I said to Mr. Rosto, that is fascinating. Where shall we put that in the speech? And he looked at me as though I had just hatched out of a multicolded egg. And he put his papers together and he turned around and he walked out of the office. That was the last time I ever saw him, too. I had a way of clearing a room in those days. That was as high as I ever got in terms of speech writing to doing things of substance. I did actually do a few things on consumer stuff that actually got said. But I remember, and again, I don't remember whether I did this or I heard it because I put it in the book that I did. Q Clarence, for any of you who want to get a Q Clarence out of print, but you can buy old copies. I had been given, no, I better go back to where I was going. I think this happened to me, but I'm not sure. We were assigned, one of us, for the sake of argument, said I was assigned to do two speeches at once. One to the Boy Scouts and one to the Red Cross. They were 400 word speeches. They were very short, and they ran on the teleprompter one after another. And they were both to be delivered in the Rose Garden. In the audience there would be switches switched in between speeches. So I wrote them both. And in those days, as you'll recall, if you wrote the speeches, oftentimes you were allowed to go listen to them be delivered, even up to the point where sometimes you could go to a state dinner if you'd want. So I went and I watched them. And the teleprompter man put the wrong speech first. So let's say the Red Cross was there and the president started reading the Boy Scouts speech. And instead of brushing it off, he was not used to television, didn't like television. He leaned over the podium and looked down at the guy who was running the teleprompter and said that's the wrong goddamn speech! And I remember I couldn't decide whether I should run for my life or just sit back and laugh as it turned out. And I incorporated it into my book so I truly don't remember whether I did it or it was happened to you or McNally or somebody else. But it was a wonderful indication of the way, the haphazard way in which writing was done and speaking was done and the president's regard for writers. The president's regard for writers was somewhere between slim and none. He would have some of us meet with Liz Carpenter every Friday to do jokes for the upcoming week's speeches. Now if the jokes worked, you'd never hear about them because they were good and the president had delivered them so they were his. And they were his anyway which is the truth. If the jokes didn't work, Maguire or Sparks or you would get a call saying I am not a funny president who did goddamn stuff and put it in those speeches. It's terrible. And then he'd want more jokes for the next speech. So I I've forgotten my train of thought but in any event I was given Q clearance when I came into the office and Q clearance was this enormously high security clearance in the Atomic Energy Commission. I had no desire for it. I didn't want it. I didn't understand how to handle it. The Atomic Energy Commission guy who came to see me in the White House said you've got to get a shredder so that you can shred all the documents we're sending you. I said don't send me the documents because I don't even understand them. So don't send me the documents. He said I have to send them to a wife because that's the pay grade you're at. Oh, give me a break. So I kept getting these absurd documents. I didn't have a shredder. I said where do you go buy a shredder? He said get a shredder. Well little did I know you pick up the phone and call the shredding department and say get me a shredder and I'm in the White House. I can't do that. So I didn't know how to get a shredder so I never shredded anything and I just threw the stuff in the waste basket which is probably a federal crime. But it was symptomatic of the times that you'd be given this enormous clearance for which I was completely incompetent. I never mattered to anything because I never understood anything I received but if anybody had ever looked in my wastebasket who cared they would have seen an enormous amount of stuff. Thus the plot of Q clearance which was that a cleaning lady in the White House comes upon a moron like me, looks in his wastebasket and finds stuff marked terminally classified, show this and you're dead, et cetera, et cetera. So it was an absurd clearance for me to have. In fact the whole premise that I was there was absurd but one of the lessons that I learned that I came away from there and it was finally cemented in 1974 with Nixon was that the president of the United States would lie to the people, not just to his staff, not just to the government people but he would lie to the American people, the American public and in the recent papers that you and Mrs. Johnson had the courage to release which suggested that the president knew from the very beginning that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable and that he believed it. I think that was a very courageous thing for Mrs. Johnson and you to decide to do but it was part of the destruction of a whole generation's trust in his government. The first blow to that was the assassination of Kennedy which I don't know anybody who believes the Warren commission report, I don't know anybody who believes that that was not a conspiracy. Two for me was my discovery that the president had been lying all along and which I knew this long before the public did only because I was involved in it and three was Nixon who turned out to be not just a liar but a criminal. So he thought holy shit this is what we elect of the office and this is what we get what we deserve and the disillusionment with that was enormous to the creation of cynicism in a 26, 27 year old young man. I don't mean this is the end of the world but it was the awakening to have cynicism in myself. Then of course by the time Clinton came around and I would say refined lying to an art but he didn't. I mean it was so blatant and ridiculous that he sort of it was unrespectful. He didn't respect lying because he didn't do it well. He just let it out there as if people should believe it which was absolutely ridiculous. All during the course of my time in the White House the president continued to want to be accepted by the eastern liberal establishment and he would do all manner of things in an attempt to get there. And one example was a writer for the New Yorker a genuine writer for the genuine New Yorker named St. Clair McElway. St. Clair McElway had written a book just after World War II whose name conveniently I'm not going to forget The Edinburgh Caper in which he described himself going crazy during World War II and recommending something astonishing to Curtis LeMay who was the head of the Asian Theatre at the time and he was an assistant to LeMay I had forgotten the details but McElway was certifiably nuts and was put away and he wrote this book about it which was a wonderful book but in that he admitted that he was certifiably nuts and he wrote a bunch of other books he was a brilliant writer but nuts and one day I got a call he was an old friend of my family so one day I got a call in my office our office from McElway I said Mac where are you he said I'm in the press room and I said what are you doing there he said I'm waiting to see the president oh really what are you going to do the president wanted to see him yeah he said I'm doing a big profile on the president for the New Yorker he can't wait to see me I'm going to fly down to the ranch with him spend some time and I said you are he said yeah it's going to be great I'm doing this big profile it's wonderful he'll get in the New Yorker I admire him so much etc etc etc so I quickly checked around at the New Yorker and found he didn't have an assignment to do a profile on the president at all and I knew he was nuts so I called George Christian and I said George here's what I know I told him and he said thank you for the information at which McElway called me from Air Force One hey I'm going down the ranch this is so great I can't tell you I'm with the president all the time I thought this cannot be happening for all I know this was before bombing of airplanes and anything but he may have a gun in his baggage and may decide he wants to fly to who knows Singapore so I got if not Christian his deputy Tommy Johnson on the phone and said do you know what's going on here how come this guy got on he said George said to me or whoever it was I was speaking to said to me I told the president he said I don't care he's a wonderful man I want him to come with me so the next call I get is about a month later and Mc is now in Austin in a hotel he's been at the ranch for a week or two but he's now in a club in Austin actually a club some club the president got him as a guest into and he said he's going to spend six or eight months down there doing this profile and he wasn't doing the profile at all I don't know what he was living on finally I think the president forgot he was there and left him in Austin somewhere and I never heard anything more from McKellway about that except I saw him about four years later and I said whatever happened to that profile he said ah Sean turned it down well Sean turned it down it had never been assigned so the president's desire to be accepted by the eastern liberal establishment was it became sad in the end but he was he didn't get hurt by some of these eastern liberal crazy people because they were I'm trying to think if there's anything else I've only been going on like mad for an hour half an hour or more here but um let me see is there anything else you can think of that I haven't mentioned the the last night the party hmm who was it who got us invited you uh Liz Carpenter oh because I remember you and I and McNally or whoever was left you and I and whoever was left uh decrying the fact that the writers weren't asked and we had had no direct contact with the president but we felt that we we deserved to be asked so we were asked up into the mansion for the last night and it was a very memorable of course I can't remember much about it but it was a very memorable evening and it was the first time anybody had really let their hair down in my presence at least and it was it was a very sentimental evening and it was a evening full of stories that I can't remember and I remember Wendy feeling all teary about it and the souvenir I have of it is the wastebasket that says adios and with pictures of the whole first but I don't remember anything else was there something memorable about it? No, memorable to me uh Liz was the one that got us on and uh six months after that you savaged her book and she she got a went out and got a pillow that said no good deed goes unpunished Oh oh now that's an interesting question as I got out of the White House I I was brand new as a freelance writer and I took anything I could get to make a living I would take if they assigned me a movie review a book review whatever it was and in I got two assignments at once from Life Magazine and they both appeared by accident I think in the same issue one was a nice little piece about Cat Key and the Bahamas and the other they had asked me to review a book by Liz Carpenter and it was a memoir and I did not know at the time which I do know now never to review certainly never to review books not to review novels by anybody you like or have any respect for at all because you are put in an awful position you cannot I can't and I won't write a review that is disparaging of a novel or any book written by a friend of mine because I know how much effort goes into writing a book at the time I needed the money I read the book I hated the book I thought it was a waste of her talent she was an enormously I remember the review remotely correctly it said as much it said that she was a talented funny very skilled writer and I was really sorry that the book didn't live up to her talent I argue with you that the book was savage I just said I didn't like it I'm sure and I I regretted it as soon as it was published because I realized how much first of all the no good deed ever goes unpunished kind of thing I remembered she was right I should have said no I won't review the book I read it and then said no or something I now know that lesson but again in the flame of youth I didn't know any better and I thought I had to be honest big mistake you don't have to be honest especially in reviewing books by friends or people you know you don't have to be honest in fact your obligation is not to be honest Peter this is a diversion but while you're on for other purposes talk a little bit about Jaws how you came to write it and what it did for you I mean I presume you were somewhat overwhelmed by the success of it or were you prepared for that among the freelance assignments I got after I got out of the White House the first ones were from the National Geographic and from Life magazine I did a piece on working in the White House as a speechwriter for Life magazine I don't know whether you ever read it I don't know whether it got any reaction from anybody I read it I don't think it it didn't get any adverse reaction but I did redo it by reading it it was a kind of funny piece about Charlie McGuire's office being carved out of what used to be the ladies room and the bathroom and Joe Califato and I got a note from Kintner simply saying that's the way it was bang exclamation point and that was all the reaction I had anyhow I got a call from McNulty saying again as I did about Q. Clarence Jesus people are really furious and I believed it so anyhow I couldn't imagine why anybody cared it was truthful I mean it was true and it didn't harm anybody and it was kind of amusing but in 1964 long before all of this drama had happened I read a story in the New York Daily about a fisherman who had caught a 4,550 pound great white shark off the beaches of Long Island and I thought my god what would happen if one of those things came in to a resort community and wouldn't go away and I stuffed it in my back pocket and forgot about it well when I later on went to work as a semi-freelancer for the Newsweek Freelance Newsweek broadcast service and the Newsweek writing stories and doing television stand-ups once in a while we used to get asked we meaning any any journalist in New York would be asked out to lunch by publishers looking for ideas and I used to keep two ideas in my quiver to get a free lunch because I had a wife and two children living in a small town in a small house and I couldn't afford to feed them so I would get at least one good meal every once in a while by having these two items in my wallet one was a non-fiction idea about pirates which I thought had never been adequately covered and the other was a novel about this shark and I'd get a lunch every once in a while and that was the end of it because everybody would say great idea now go do something and I wouldn't so in 1970 I guess I went to lunch with a guy named Tom Congdon who was a senior editor at Doubleday and he said the unforgivable he said I'll pay you a thousand dollars if you'll write four chapters of the shark novel I'll hell a thousand dollars that's pretty good so I took the advance and didn't do anything and then a couple of months later my agent called and said where are the four chapters and I said oh I don't know she said then give me the thousand dollars back I gotta give it to the man and I thought oh my so I sat down the first call I made was to my father in Nantucket he lived in Nantucket full time at the time and I said what happens to a body if you cut it in half does it float any part of it float and he said depends where you cut it if you cut it below the air sacs the top half will float and if you cut it above the air sacs the bottom half what are you doing I said I'm trying to do a novel about a fish and he said that's a hell of a fish and I said yeah well so I hung up I was working in the back room of a thing called the Pennington Furnace Supply House in Pennington, New Jersey they made furnaces there furnaces are made of sheet metal which had to be hammered into shape it was not exactly the cliched image of the lonely artist struggling in his garret I lived amid chaos beyond belief but it only cost fifty excuse me it only cost fifty dollars a month so I could afford it and I started writing this story about a fish and I had no ambitions for it at all except to see whether I could tell either a long short story or a short long story and because I was two or three days a week for the Newsweek broadcast and feature service I had enough leeway to take two or three days a week sometimes four to work on this thing I turned the four chapters in and Tom Congdon hated them the first eight pages which had never been changed not a comma was ever changed in the first eight pages which is the beginning of Jaws led to such promise that Tom as he said in a recent Bravo show about it was devastated when he saw that I had then gone on and attempted to write a flippant witty thriller about a shark well you can't he said to me you cannot do that it's an oxymoron you cannot write a funny book about a shark that eats people it's a funny thriller and that's it either takes skill beyond anything and you're shown by any writer in history or it's an oxymoron go back and do it again so I went back and I did it all seriously this time and he liked it and he began to make suggestions and so as I took the next year and finished the book and he would make suggestions and I'd rewrite and then he'd make other suggestions and I'd rewrite finally it was finished and we had no idea what to call a damn thing 20 minutes before it was to go into publication I sat with him at the Dallas Cowboy which was a restaurant used to exist in New York and we talked about titles I had about a hundred titles some were pretentious in the François Sago manor like a silence in the water a stillness in the sea others were the obvious ones the jaws of death the killer at night and all these preposterous things my father submitted Huastat Naushanamaleg and there were other ones but finally with 20 minutes to go I said to Tom, look we can't agree on anything for a title we can't agree even on can't agree even on anything except one word that's jaws let's call a damn thing jaws and he said what does it mean and I said I don't know but it's short and he said okay so I told my agent whose response was exactly the same and my father whose response was exactly the same and my wife that's terrible and I said I know but it's short so here they put this book together and it was going to be a novel because it was about 300 pages long in book size manuscript 302 or something and to my amazement I'd written a novel length story so that was that and as always happens double day began to circulate part of it around to salesmen to their salesmen all publishers do this they say this novel is coming out it's by a first novelist would you here's what we think you should concentrate on because most first novels are not sold by the salesmen from the publishing house they go into a bookstore or a book chain and they have a big scrapbook or catalog book it may be done by computer now but they go along and they say this is a book that you really should get this is Robert Caro's book on Lyndon Johnson or this is a really big one and here's a memoir by Willie Morris and you really ought to get that and well I'll skip over this first novel and this because you really don't care about that but that was the fate that I thought I was destined to it's sort of the book that the publishers I mean that the salesman skips over when selling it to the bookstores but there was something about the first eight pages that's all Tom Condon gave the book salesman and there was something compelling about the first eight pages and so they didn't skip over it when they sold it and they actually made an attempt to make the bookstores buy it and to their amazement this first novel about a fish was there was a good reaction to it so they printed they decided to print 35,000 copies which is enormous for a first novel by an unknown about a subject God knows as obscure as a fish I had no ambitions for the book at all I knew it couldn't be made into a movie because you can't catch and train a great white shark and I didn't think the technology was good enough to make one I knew it was a first novel that nobody ever read and it was a first novel about a fish strike three, goodbye so I was standing at home one day one of my days off from the Newsweek situation and I had been writing screenplays with a friend of mine that were going nowhere but never mind and he and I were working that day at our house and I got a phone call from Tom Condon a double day saying that the book had been just bought by Bandham the paperback house for $575,000 well I had $106 in the bank at the time and this was a substantial amount of money I'd only get half, double day we'd get the other half and it wouldn't come for a couple of years but never mind it was a promise against which if I wanted I could go make bank loans Wendy was the only one who had the wit and the foresight to know how to react and she burst into tears and I said what is that about and she said life will never be the same not that it was so great at the time starving to death but life will never be the same she was right because soon thereafter the book was chosen as a dual main selection by the Book of the Month Club from the Readers Digest Book Club and it was sold to the movies for $150,000 plus $25,000 to write the screenplay which is a whole separate story but what happened when the book was published it did indeed change my life forever because the combination of the publicity for the book and the publicity for the movie was engineered with sort of unprecedented and unparalleled acuity by the producers David Brown and Richard Zanick who were associated with Universal by Universal and by Doubleday and Banda who did the paperback they knew that they could create an overused word called a synergy here that would create something much larger than the sum of its parts and by promoting the book, promoting the movie promoting the book, promoting the movie they managed to sell in paperback 5 million copies of Jaws in the United States before the movie came out 5 million copies after the movie came out which was completely unprecedented at that time it was unquestionably the most successful first novel in American history with the exception of Gone with the Wind was that John Leonard of the New York Times I don't know who that is but oh Joe Califana was I live and breathe it was it was a phenomenon, first of all it gave me freedom so I could write whatever I wanted that which can be a curse and a blessing because I had a friend who when he finally could afford to freelance did it for six months and shot himself because he found he had nobody to blame for anything when it went wrong he needed the structure of time life where he had worked so it also gave me much more important or not more important than the freedom equally as important as the freedom was the ability to learn about the ocean and I'd grown up on the ocean in Nantucket in the summertime and I knew an awful lot about sharks just as a child it is my belief that all male children in the world over at one time or another are fascinated with either sharks or dinosaurs and my fascination was with sharks because they still exist they're a known commodity they represent evil to human beings and they fascinated me so I knew enough about them but in between the book and the movie a producer for ABC's The American Sportsman which was a show that ran for 20 years until about 1984 I think and they were the first magazine show in the sports business or as far as I know in any business on television and they took two or three episodes per hour and they'd get a movie star and get him to go fly fishing get a baseball player and get him to go hunting or find somebody who was a star in one discipline and have him go try out something else so that he'd be sort of taking the public's point of view into this new adventure it was this very successful show that went on for years and the producers had never done any underwater stuff before and he certainly had never done any shark stuff so he came to me and said how would you like to go swimming with these creatures that you've written about down in South Australia well at that time only one group of people had ever done this and that was the crew of Blue Water White Death which was a documentary released in 1971 that was then and is now the best documentary ever done on sharks and the accompanying book by Peter Matheson called Blue Meridian that was a summon substance of the research that had been available to me and I knew all about them and I said I will go if I can take with me one of the crew from Blue Water White Death and by complete coincidence Stan Waterman the great underwater photographer pioneer of American underwater photography he was a friend of mine and I said would he come with me and he said sure so anyway we went down to South Australia we did this documentary it showed on a Sunday afternoon at four o'clock and to my recollection it was watched by something in the neighborhood of 19 million families which was an enormous rating for Sunday afternoon and for 1974 and for a television show at the time period so suddenly there was interest in this and to my everlasting luck the producer who then went on to find or tried to find movie stars and baseball players and hockey players who would go dive under dive under water period and dive with things that wanted to eat you couldn't find any so he had to keep coming back to the writer which of course is the bottom of the totem pole in the world the writer is always the low man on the totem pole the subject of jokes to hear about the Polish starlet who came to Hollywood and slept with the writer anyhow he had to keep coming back to me so over the next two decades I was able to do twenty I don't even know the total by now documentaries in which I was able to not only take my wife and children and dive with the wonderful animals that live in the sea but I was able to develop an ecological sense myself of the oceans of the neglect that had been visited upon the oceans of the shocking neglect that the US government above all has given to the oceans today the budget of NASA is 15.3 billion dollars and the budget of NOAA of which the oceans is only a small part is 3.5 billion dollars and that was a ratio that it stood forever so gradually as the world grew in its environmental sensibility I grew and was able to learn more and so as I wrote more and more novels they all began to have an environmental twist to them some of them were continued to be thrillers some of them were gentler books there were two comedies in there one about the White House called Q. Clarence and one about alcoholism and I thought a comedy about alcoholism was again an oxymoron but it seemed to have worked out okay and that was called Rummy's Alcoholics find that humor is one of the few ways they get through the day because if you can't understand how ridiculous you behaved and how life is and how ridiculous everybody else is you might as well shoot yourself so the books that I did gradually took on a more environmental tone and became as I grew environmentally they grew they changed and my children my wife and I were able to right up to this very moment continue to gain knowledge and sympathy with an understanding of the oceans, the creatures that live in the oceans the importance of the oceans the damage we're doing to them until at the second I am now full-time a mouthpiece for the oceans I worked for, as the spokesman for the Oceans Program of Environmental Defense I mouth off on behalf of Wild Aid I write things about the environment I work with the University of Miami's Rosensteel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and on and on and on I just got back from London where I spoke on behalf of the Galapagos Conservation Trust now we're flushing a toilet, that's convenient this is a classy joint we have here people go to the John while we're doing interviews this is disgraceful so that has been the track or the movie business likes to say the arc of my career has been from writing to having environmental sensibility be a part of the writing to being full-time concerned with the environment and letting that be this is really going to be ridiculous the continuing disgrace of the way I just have a pee for me of the way the US and the world treat the oceans we are fishing out the oceans all around the world the industry is going down the chute people are starving to death and we are continuing because there are no international agreements about the oceans continuing to devastate them one of the curiosities to me about priorities in the world is that people talk about the environment as if it were like the economy warden with a rack or trying to think of some other issue banking, bank fraud and corporate malfeasance the environment is not an issue the environment is what we breathe eat and exist in it should not be on a list of priorities it should be its own priority and it should be the number one priority because to categorize it as the environment well no I'm more interested in the economy there will be no economy if we fuck up the environment so the oceans sustain life on the planet so let's go turn the oceans into a bottomless dump and guess what there will be no more life on the planet because we had more priorities over blowing up the rack so it is a source of as you can see some concern to me that we meaning human beings have referred to the environment as one of the many priorities but we better deal with the economy first and it's going to take international cooperation far beyond anything that has ever existed in order to change this and I don't know it's a very frustrating thing way to spend your time because there is no answer no practical answer it needs sort of the utopian benevolent dictatorship where there can be one guy who says this is for the benefit of all mankind now do it because we can't come to an agreement with Japan and Norway about whales just as an example we can't come to an agreement with Japan about anything and it is a source of great dismay great worry my wife is a professional environmentalist she is on the Princeton Borough Council she was the founder, a founder of the New Jersey Environmental Association for a living and so we have a partnership of passion and when it comes to the environment in the oceans all of which became even more prominent with the recent elections in which the Republicans swept everything and now they not only consider the environment one of a list of priorities but it has just dropped about nine notches so that we can go ahead and devastate the forests and piss in the rivers and dump in the oceans it's amazing to me that these people continue to do this and the Republicans it is astonishing that these guys can be so blind to this and it's not as though this is an evangelical point of view that I'm espousing because it's not like abortion where there are two points of view to me there are two points of view with this and when we die end of story so now you've heard my speech on the environment what would you like me to do I'd like to ask you to just reflect on your memories of Lady Bird and other people in the White House that you think are worth talking about reflect on them in a critical way just as you remember them after excuse me as I went to get some water that I was attacked there was a bunch of circus elephants coming down the street and the guy threw something at me I apologize this is not my normal outlook here I'm generally a picture of fashion yes all right my remembrance of people in the White House well there's you Harry you of course the most prominent member of the White House staff was the president of whom I recall with enormous admiration great sympathy and absolutely no personal recollections whatsoever except I admire him as the consummate politician and I admire what he did except for Vietnam I think this was without question one of the great presidents of the 20th century right up there with Roosevelt if it weren't for Vietnam and it's always easy to criticize in retrospect and say he should have done this and he should have done that and I'm just glad I wasn't in that position because I don't know what I would have done and I never knew the man I met him as you know half a dozen times including once in his bedroom if I had committed some grievous error the next time I saw him in a receiving line he'd forget my name I don't know where he sees if I had done something that somehow he had perceived of as worthy he'd remember my name and ask how everybody was but I really had no recollection of him the person again I didn't know her but the person who exuded talent warmth caring and merit overall merit was Mrs. Johnson I didn't know her again she was always civil to me charming but since the years in the White House I have seen enough of what she has done to hold her in enormous esteem this has always been a woman of control tact perception ability to work around a very difficult man she's accomplished and God knows you know her better than I do I know her as a civilian only I read about her in the papers I knew her at the time only as a figure of adoration worship if you will she was a great woman who next in the line well I remember Robert Kintner very well because he was the guy who hired me I had enormous admiration for him a friend of the president since his days on the Harold Tribune that is Kintner's days on the Harold Tribune and he was talented dedicated and I think a man of great perceptions who would have been able to serve a lot better than he did and a lot longer than he did if it hadn't been for the two illnesses that brought him down so I'm sorry that he didn't have longer to serve at the job or maybe he didn't want to stay I don't know Charlie Maguire who I had great contact with because he ran all the speeches was he could be very kind he was obviously smart as hell you sort of have to start at that baseline at any of the people that we dealt with were smart as hell with one or two exceptions but Maguire was he worked in this tiny little office that had been part of a ladies room hacked out of two or three stalls in the ladies room and when Kintner left he ran the speeches and even before Kintner left he was the conduit for the speeches he was a neurotic driven talented man who saved me from disgrace two or three times on the other hand was a source of enormous annoyance and well his neuroses got to him he was power crazy and he you knew that nobody around him flung the word the president wants more than Charlie Maguire did and those were the magic words then you call anybody and the president wants me to get hold of this arrogant horse shit Charlie was very good at that I think he was very very good at his job he got the speeches in he was a good critic he knew how to rewrite a very perceptive man as to what A would work and B was good and C what the president would accept Liz Carpenter whom we've already discussed I have great regrets about I remember her very fondly she had an enormous ego and we dealt with her with I did at least with kid gloves because you know she was a woman who had been with the Johnson family for five thousand years and she could do you a great deal of damage within the context of the White House I deeply regret the review that I gave her book afterwards which I've already explained I would never have done it if I had known today what it was like to write a book let alone to review to criticize what somebody else has spent a lot of time doing she was terrific and talented and I think she served the Johnsons very well and again these are people I didn't know people I knew mostly were other writers like Will Sparks who was terrific journalistic experience very wise very knowing quiet but with a great sense of humor and a man who was dedicated a dedicated Democrat and dedicated to working serving the president Tommy Johnson just as well but I didn't know him particularly well Jim Jones the same I didn't know him these were people whose paths I crossed only occasionally Joe Califano you know my fabulous relationship with Joe and Larry Levinson and another one I guess they did wonderful jobs for the president they were in their own way they exercised their power with an iron fist or with a steel rod or whatever they certainly it looked as though Levinson took pleasure in beating the rest of us into submission or if not into the ground he had a flunky name Jim Gaither who used to carry on his orders and come and pound on us now and again as always the writers of the bottom of the heap there was Ben Wattenberg who has become a figure of I guess some reverence in Democratic thought is because he's he was a very smart man who had very good perceptions about politics and he has since been a commentator sort of as I understand it he's sort of a right wing Democrat and all I remember of him is that he used to take credit for everything anybody wrote whether or not it was he and he very often he'd toss the president wants the president says around a lot too let me see Hardesty I knew less well than Will same with Irvin Duggan who worked with Bob Charming guys who I didn't have much truck with at all there were the Bette Noirs I mean John Roach was impossible and part of that is perception because I felt that he held me in huge contempt and that I deserved it whereas I believe the truth was he had no idea who I was let alone bothering to hold me in contempt that's the way human beings are when you see a situation oftentimes you think of it in terms of yourself did I cause that how's that going to affect me that's known as solipsism as you see a situation only in terms of how it affects you and how you may affect it so John Roach was a mean-spirited arrogant highly self-regarded brilliant man and it was unnecessary that he was such a bastard because Harry McPherson was just as smart and just as powerful and could accomplish the same things by being charming gentle not at all condescending civil I don't know what else to say he was generally an overall nice guy even when situations were poor I don't remember him trying to fire me I'm not saying it didn't happen I just don't remember and I wouldn't have blamed him if he did because certainly the one that California tried didn't work so if Harry tried good for him I can't think of anything else to jog you on because I think you've done a wonderful job and I did I did lead you into that discussion about the environment for a particular reason which I will tell you about when we finish here but do you have anything else occur to you well I feel enormously privileged to have been where I was at the time to be having been in the White House to have the perspective on the White House from the inside at the age of 26 and 27 was a privilege that is so rare that except for Tommy Johnson that I treasure it and I am deeply grateful for it although I now see that it was a complete accident and never should have happened I think it I really think it was a wonderful experience I wouldn't do it again for all the money in the world but it was something I will cherish I I can't say it was a happy time it was an exhausting time I think that the combination of some of us you, me, McNulty Sparks made as pleasant a job of it as we possibly could I remember our secretary Joyce Garlington Zagora with great affection she was efficient, she stayed on in the White House for years and now she's vanished we can't get hold of her so I wish her well but no I just I regarded as a privilege and an accident though it was it was terrific Peter, thank you very much that'll be epic