Speech writer and communications strategist Ken Khachigian’s improbable rise from a family farm to a seat at the table in the White House is a primer for anyone interested in turning a passion for public service and a way with words into a brilliant career spanning half a century.
Whether crafting presidential inaugural speeches, developing communications strategies, or generating electoral campaign slogans, the prolific Khachigian served in the trenches of word warfare during the Cold War, leaving a legacy of memorable and inspirational messages to move the masses.
His career began in New York City in the late 1960s. Khachigian was a student at Columbia University Law School with a political science degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara. One summer, he volunteered for the election of Richard Nixon, and the rest was history in the making. Step by step, he gained the kind of soft influence in American politics that only a personal speech writer, strategic advisor, and trusted confidant can enjoy.
In the mid ‘70s, Khachigian found himself in the middle of a national crisis, when President Richard Nixon, a complicated and consequential figure of 20th century American politics, resigned in the middle of his second term. Managing the fallout from Watergate, working with Nixon on his memoirs, and preparing him for the iconic David Frost interview that drew 45 million TV viewers from around the world, the ever tenacious and confident Khachigian proved himself worthy of trust and respect.
He eventually wound up as Chief Speech Writer and Special Consultant to probably the most gifted orator in 20th century presidential history—Ronald Reagan, also known as “The Great Communicator.” Little did the public know that many of Reagan’s most lauded speeches were penned by the son of an Armenian Genocide survivor with no formal education.
Khachigian was responsible for President Reagan’s first Inaugural speech, the “Welcome Home” speech for the released American hostages in Iran as well as key economic speeches, three major speeches before joint sessions of Congress and Reagan’s acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention in 1984. In April 1981, he authored the pivotal Holocaust proclamation in which, for the first time, a U.S. Presi-dent likened the Holo-caust to the Armenian Genocide—a bold move met with political sensitivity but upheld as historical truth. He later composed Reagan’s moving and historical 1985 address at the former Bergen Belsen concentration camp. Khachigian recounted that before he sat down to draft the speech, he attended the April 24th memorial commemoration at Arlington Cemetery. The event triggered emotional memories from his youth, when he recalled hearing his father and others relate stories of being forced from their village. With this as his inspiration, he began writing what Reagan biographer Edmund Morris called the best speech of Reagan’s career.
In his recent memoir Behind Closed Doors —in the Room with Reagan & Nixon, Khachigian invites readers into the corridors of power during the Nixon and Reagan administrations. He recreates those tense scenes and internal competitions among the White House staff—all in the service of drafting crucial presidential speeches with just the right policy concepts, word choices, turns of phrases, and rhetorical constructs, one of which was etched into the collective American psyche. For example, “Ask yourself. Are you better off today than four years ago?” was the brainchild of Khachigian.
For Khachigian, wordsmithing was serious business, at a time when deep research and fact-checking were the norm and writing was a discipline that required veracity, substance, and style. While such standards can be obscured by today’s digital shortcuts and freewheeling social media, Khachigian’s book makes a compelling argument for why strategic communications, when used responsibly and with integrity, remains a core pillar of effective politics and governance.
During this exclusive interview with Khachigian, he often muses at how he, the son of a Genocide survivor, came to be an eyewitness to history in the administrations of two dramatically different yet transformational American presidents. With his front-row seat to the power center of the free world, Khachigian had the rare distinction of being paid to put words into the mouths of historical giants.
Q: Many thanks for this opportunity to learn about the power of words to influence the masses at home and abroad. Speaking of words, let’s start with your recently published memoir Behind Closed Doors—in the Room with Reagan & Nixon. Why did you decide to write it?
A: I’ve had such an interesting career and Nixon and Reagan were two presidential legends and political giants of the 20th century, ending the Cold War. Very few people had the close bond that I had with them. And so, everybody kept saying, ‘you need to write a book.’ Of course, after the White House, I had to make a living and returned to my private law practice while working on other campaigns and serving in advisory positions. But I finally reached a point when I realized that the time was ripe.
It was 2019. I was on a vacation cruise. We were between stops. But instead of disembarking to sightsee, I sat down with my yellow pad, cappuccino, and cigar and told myself, ‘Hey, you just have to start with the first word.’ And, as any professional writer knows, it all starts with a blank sheet of paper and a first word. It could also be a paper napkin, which I have been known to use to formulate some of my best ideas.
I’ve had such an interesting career and Nixon and Reagan were two presidential legends and political giants of the 20th century, ending the Cold War. Very few people had the close bond that I had with them. And so, everybody kept saying, ‘you need to write a book.
Honestly, I’m glad I waited that long. Had I followed the lead of former colleagues from the White House, who, shortly after leaving their positions, hired ghost writers to author their tell-all books, I would not have had access to so much information. That not only enriched my own sources,
but also, in some cases, helped me set the record straight on any faulty accounts of what happened. Of course, I was also accustomed to taking copious notes. Once I joined the Nixon White House, I had to take extensive notes of every meeting I attended. If ever a movie was made about this, you would have to see everybody in the room furiously taking notes.
Then, when I went to work with Nixon on his memoirs, I had to keep almost verbatim notes of each session. After all, Nixon had engaged with so many larger-than-life historical figures from Winston Churchill, Eisenhower, Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi to Senators Everett Dirksen or Joe McCarthy. Every word uttered out of his mouth, whether about his administration, Watergate, the opening of China, or working with Jack Kennedy as a congressman in the 1940’s, was golden.
Q: How do you think your book is relevant to new generations?
A: I believe it’s educational. It’s a guidepost. It helps tell those starting out what they can do to work their way up in their own careers and change their lives by doing things that maybe they thought they couldn’t do. I had no idea that I could rise as high as I did, coming from where I started in Visalia, an agricultural town in the San Joaquin Valley. My dad was an Armenian immigrant and Genocide survivor. My mother was the daughter of Armenian immigrants. She had only finished high school; my dad had no American education. I was raised on a farm along with my three brothers, went to rural public schools, and graduated from a public college. Yet that didn’t prevent me from being accepted into an Ivy-league law school like Columbia University.
You see, from the time I was six years old, my father pounded one Armenian word into my head: jarbig. It means clever or resourceful, even street smart. As a survivor, he had to be jarbig about how to collect food and water for his family and find work to survive. So, this book is about how not to limit yourself. But how to keep working to move forward and, perhaps, one day make history.
Q: When did you discover that you had a talent for writing?
A: Well, my passion has always been politics. And believe it or not, I started out as a very poor writer. So poor that when I entered undergraduate school, I had to take an entrance exam in English to qualify for basic first year English class. I was asked to write an essay, and I flunked. That meant taking what they disparagingly called “bonehead” English. Well, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. We had a very stern instructor who would teach us writing, diction, spelling, and learning about run-on sentences and dangling modifiers and where to put semi-colons. She drilled it into our heads every day. Over time, I learned how to write an essay and then go over it line by line. By my last two years of college, I was writing well, especially my essays.
That was the skill that I brought with me into the Nixon presidential campaign, but I quickly realized that 10-page essays neither helped the candidate nor the audience. I learned how to deliver a one or two page well researched, condensed, clearly written backgrounder. This was an exercise that helped me write crisply. The more I wrote, the crisper my content became. And when I got into the Nixon White House, my first job was in communications, writing fact sheets and summaries for administration staffers and Cabinet members to support the president’s various positions.
I also wrote what were called “cheer” speeches—one-to-two-minute remarks written for our legislative liaisons to take over to Capitol Hill. I churned out dozens of cheer speeches every day. Sure, it was tiresome, but it was my job. And before long, I learned to write meaningful content in a very short time.
This prepared me for a great opportunity to work under Pat Buchanan to do preparatory work for the 1972 Nixon campaign. Pat was a Columbia journalism graduate and an editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. I wrote so many pieces with him that, after Nixon was re-elected, I was asked to join the White House speech writing team.
Q: Let’s turn to your years with Ronald Reagan. How lucky were you to have a professional actor with such a commanding stage presence deliver your words?
A: Yes, he sure had a way about delivery. And he had that Irish ‘blarney’ to tell a good story. He was very attractive and comfortable in front of the camera. But I will also point out that Reagan, like me, grew up on radio and got his start as a radio announcer. This is important because, with radio, it’s all about creating word-pictures for the listeners. I had that ability to create word-pictures. Even Richard Nixon beat that into my head, as he too was raised on radio. Both President Reagan and Mrs. Reagan also understood this. Having an ear for words goes a long way, and many of my younger colleagues couldn’t match that.
Q: You’re obviously such a versatile writer. Let’s take the campaign themes and slogans you’ve written. How effective are they in persuading audiences to your side?
A: First, there’s got to be a core message that comes out of it that people remember. You want to leave them with one or two central thoughts. And that’s the real challenge in strategic communication. What are those central thoughts that will leave a lasting impression?
Q: How do you figure this out? With polls and demographic studies?
A: Quite often our pollsters would love for us to think that all the demographic data and all the detail is the answer. But, in my experience, that’s often overload, and you can get lost in all that information. You really need to look at the broader pictures. It’s not that difficult to read the public’s mind. It’s a matter of looking around and saying, ‘what’s dominating the surrounding community?’ And I don’t think you always need polls to tell you that. The lines that I came up with for Reagan in the 1980 campaign had very little to do with demographics or polls. They had to do with pointing out the mistakes of his opponent rather than getting down into the weeds. Many times, it’s just my gut instinct that is built up over more than 50 years in politics and law.
First, there’s got to be a core message that comes out of it that people remember. You want to leave them
with one or two central thoughts. And that’s the real challenge in strategic communication.
Q: How would you define strategic communications?
A: It starts with setting a goal, then everything else you do to meet that goal is strategic.
I’ll give you an example. When Reagan won in 1980, the first order of business was getting the Economic Recovery and Tax Act passed. The strategy was to move quickly while he still had a good approval rating. He made a speech about it only 16 days after being sworn in. Then 13 days later he made his case at the State of the Union address. So, it was a series of communications to promote passage of the Act. And the core message was to cut the budget and move the country forward by doing everything different than what the previous administration did. By summer, things were getting wobbly, and he needed Democratic support to pass
the bill. And that’s when I helped him again with a closing concept to the effect that we could go down one of two roads. One was a road to the past and one was a road to the future. It was very clear word-picture.
Q: As another example, what would have been a strategically correct core message to sway the global media and geopolitical decisionmakers in our favor on the question of Artsakh?
A: It’s like anything else. The Armenians absolutely had to assert that their position was one hundred percent correct, and the Azeris’ position was one hundred percent wrong. It’s very simple: We had an Armenian homeland in Artsakh, and we have the ancient churches and Armenian cultural treasures to prove it. Then Azerbaijan took away an Armenian homeland that was nested in Azerbaijan. That’s a two-sentence core message that people could picture. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a multimillion-dollar media campaign to hammer this home. Not because we couldn’t get the funds. It was that we didn’t have a central organization to channel those resources and come up with a strategy that everyone could agree on. We just don’t have that kind of leadership yet. In contrast, the success of The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is because they all submerge their egos on behalf of their cause.
Q: What advice do you have for Armenian-Americans thinking about entering mainstream public service or going into politics?
A: Number one, you must enjoy politics and that kind of lifestyle. This is something I really loved. I didn’t make much money in those early years, but it ended up well for me. The one thing they can do is believe that they may have to make some financial sacrifices early on in their careers to see the payoffs later. Don’t expect to go straight from college to a six-figure salary.
There are so many opportunities. There is no reason why young Armenians can’t end up as chief of staffs for very prominent congressmen or senators, for example. We have the brain-power, the access to the greatest universities. If you have some internships on the Hill instead of going straight into business, try that first. I know one non-Armenian woman who started out as my secretary. Then she became an assistant in the California state assembly, then was hired to work for a congressman. From there, she ended up as a senior vice president for Verizon. Now, she’s back in government as chief of staff to the senator from Iowa. These are positions that are not difficult to get if you work your way up. And there’s no reason why Armenian Americans shouldn’t be able to get into the White House. They just need to work their way through the system. Also, they should find opportunities to work on election campaigns.
There is no reason why young Armenians can’t end up as chief of staffs for very prominent congressmen or senators, for example. We have the brainpower, the access to the greatest universities.
Q: What gives you the greatest sense of professional achievement?
A: Sometimes I need to pinch myself. That I really was there, sitting with Nixon in San Clemente while he recounted stories like ‘Willie Brandt of Germany told me this’ or ‘When I was with Mao Tse-Tung.’ Or, having dinner with the Reagans at Camp David or flying on Air Force One with them across the country in 1984. It’s just hard to imagine that I wrote speeches or campaign slogans that made history, along with these towering figures who were once leaders of the free world.
Q: Is there anything else you’d convey to our readers?
A: One thing is for young men and women to try to be more involved in public service or local or national politics and believe in themselves. Insert themselves into positions of power on behalf of their heritage and think about what our forebears went through. I believe this brings such honor upon the Armenian people, when they see someone in that position of power and influence. I cannot tell you the number of times Armenians come up to me and say how much pride they take in seeing a fellow Armenian achieve that.
It’s just hard to imagine that I wrote speeches or campaign slogans that made history, along with these towering figures who were once leaders of the free world.
For example, that Bergen-Belsen speech that President Reagan made during that controversial trip to Germany. The visit to the concentration camp was added at the last minute to counteract the uproar surrounding his decision to also visit the German military cemetery in Bitburg, which included the graves of Nazi-SS soldiers. I was assigned to write the speech very quickly and the pressure was intense. Fortunately, it turned out to be one of the most moving and healing speeches Reagan delivered on the world stage.
The inspiration came to me from the Armenian Genocide. Had I not kept the memory of my ancestors and the intimate knowledge of that history through my family members, I never could have written that speech with the authenticity and relatability it needed in that tense sit-uation. You can read about it in Chapter 20 of my book.
It was a full-circle moment for me. And it demonstrates that, by stepping out into the wider world with confidence and pride, one day you could be in a position to change the course of history.
