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In 1958, just weeks after Army Private First Class Stephen Hess completed his two-year military career, he received an unexpected call to join President Dwight Eisenhower's speechwriting team. The twenty-five-year-old Hess found himself at the center of American political life. And a career was born.
In the coming decades, Hess would find himself on assignmentsassisting Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In this book he brings the reader into White House offices, along to political party conventions and inside presidential campaigns, from protest rallies to white-tie dinners, while bumping up against some of the world's most famous people and going behind the scenes of dramatic political moments at the United Nations in New York and UNESCO in Paris.
Bit Player follows Hess as he begins a second career as a Brookings Institution scholar producing books on the presidencyand the media while also monitoring the achievements and failures of successive presidential administrations for television and newspapers.
Now in his mid-eighties, Hess looks back at what he describes as concentric circles of research, travel, advising, writing, and teaching. His book is rich with insight into contemporary American democracy, poignant in its reflections of avoidable missteps by even the best and most experienced leaders, and consistently good-humored in the author's self-awareness of his own role behind the scenes of political power.
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List of contents
Contents:
Foreword
Preface
Eisenhower
First Words
Getting There
First Politics, 1952
Enter Professor Moos
Drafted
The Eisenhower White House, 1958-61
The Staff
The 1960 Election
Speeches
Remembering Ike
Nixon
Interregnum, 1961
The Harlow Miracle
Working for Richard Nixon
California, 1962
November 22, 1963
A Bookmaker
Lincoln Week, 1966
Harvard, 1967-68
Miami Beach, 1968
The 1968 Campaign and Spiro T. Agnew
Deputy Assistant to the President for Urban Affairs
To HEW
The White House Conference on Children
A White House Conference on Youth
What Next?
Leave-Taking, 1972
Brookings
Settling In
Governmental Studies
Things to Do
Watergate
Talk
The Presidency Book
Newswork
Transitions
Beth's List: A Summing Up
September 11, 2001
Des Moines, Iowa, 1976
Kansas City, 1976
United Nations, 1974 and 1976
Make-A-Wish Foundation
Campaign Etiquette
Political Cartoons
The Notorious RBG
Hyman Rickover, "Father of the Nuclear Navy," 1954
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, 1977
Richard Avedon, 1990
Oliver Stone, 1994
Former British Prime Minister John Major, 2009
Circles within Circles
Afterword
Thanks
Index
About the author
By Stephen Hess
Summary
This memoir by a certified member of Washington's old-guard establishment is rich with insight into contemporary American democracy, poignant in its reflections of avoidable missteps by even the best and most experienced leaders, and consistently good-humoured in the author's self-awareness of his own role behind the scenes of political power.
