How I Helped Bill Clinton Write A Letter To Paul Newman After His Car Crash

As a 21-year-old White House intern in the spring of 1996, I was told that the best stories from inside the Beltway – or any stories, actually – could never be told. Then and especially now, I didn’t mind that ominous warning from the Director of the Office of Personnel Security, since most of my stories as a ghostwriter for President Bill Clinton were less dramatic than one might have imagined.

Some anecdotes, however, have stuck with me for almost 30 years, and the recent Autopian deep dive in the Volvos of Paul Newman jogged loose a specific memory buried somewhere inside my overfilled mental hard drive.

Oh, for sure I remember one of Paul Newman’s Volvos, as over the course of two days in college I had no choice but to know all sorts of things about my close personal friend, Paul, and his major fender bender in Connecticut. That’s because on March 6, 1996, I was asked to step inside the brain of POTUS and write a personal get-well letter to the late actor, race car driver and salad dressing magnate.

The details of the accident remain very fuzzy to me, but I finally found this archived account from a Singapore-based “family newspaper” called the Weekend East, proving that this really happened. Despite the alarming headline, it flippantly describes the Feb. 22, 1996 crash that left Newman with a broken hand.

From that short article titled “Paul Newman and wife escape death in car crash”:

The near-tragedy took place as Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward, were driving from their home in Westport, Connecticut, to meet friends on February 22.

“Suddenly, an oncoming vehicle crossed over and hit the car in front of the Newmans’ ’95 Volvo station wagon,” said the couple’s executive assistant, Darice O’Mara.

“The vehicle glanced off the front car, swerved and collided with Mr. Newman’s, causing considerable damage to his Volvo. But he was able to avoid an even greater calamity with expert defensive driving.”

[…]

According to Ms O’Mara, the actor’s hand became painful and swollen during the night, and the next morning he went to his private physician for treatment. She said: “X-rays revealed a broken bone in his left hand. It was reset and a cast was put on.
“Mr Newman told me: ‘It’s ironic. All the competitive races I’ve been in, without any serious injuries – then to be hurt while driving on a back road!

That sounded pretty serious, actually! And did Paul really say those words, or was executive assistant Darice using some poetic PR license?

We may never know if Newman laughed off his brush with death, but at least POTUS was taking the accident somewhat seriously. Based on that blurb’s March 15 publishing date, my boss, Bill, already knew about it, and we underlings sprung into action. I only remember March 6 from looking back at my end-of-semester final paper, where I documented all of my correspondence to earn six college credits at this unpaid White House internship.

Also, a copy of the March 7 letter remains framed on my wall next to my diploma.

A Little Background

As a senior at The George Washington University in, I had already slogged through about a dozen internships in Washington, D.C. Many felt significant to me, like clerking at the Washington Bureau of The Dallas Morning News, in which I landed a front-page byline and would frequently wander over to The Capitol with my press pass to watch Congress do its stuff.

Other gigs felt like mere resume stuffers, like the semester I spent at something called the Interactive Television Association, which predicted a future in which we’d watch some sort of magical “web like” content on our TVs. For these far-fetched dreamers, I mostly fetched coffee.

So, seeking just one more job at the end of college, I figured I’d apply to work at the White House. Not because I was an eager, young Clintonite; no, I lived a few blocks away and presumed it would make for a cushy, fitting collegiate finale as an International Affairs major.

I didn’t get too fired up when I was accepted into the intern program. The hundreds of other college seniors probably took it more seriously because they would move to D.C. for the semester and be placed in all sorts of offices I didn’t know existed, like the one in charge of cataloging the gifts sent from children to Chelsea Clinton’s cat, Socks (more on that poor cat later).

And fine, since I know you’re wondering: I did not work with Monica Lewinsky. Apparently, we shared the same office, though – she was there two semesters before me. I never witnessed anything untoward at my job, unless you count our fellow interns using the feds’ Xerox machines to photocopy the Washington Post’s crossword puzzle and trying to finish it before our unpaid lunch breaks.

Without knowing at the time that this question about presidential shenanigans would lead every subsequent conversation, ever, about my White House internship, I was quite pleased that my three years in collegiate journalism earned me the right to land in the Office of Communications, specifically in the Presidential Letters and Messages department.

My job was to ghostwrite letters, on behalf of President Clinton, to those his staff deemed “more important people.”

What that meant was that Clinton received thousands of letters every day, and about 95 percent of them received one of hundreds of rotating “form letters.” We wrote those, too, but I especially liked the remaining five percent that were either too weird for a form letter, or in my office’s case, considered special enough to earn a personalized reply. The crazy letters never made it to my office, but were instead intercepted by the FBI, probably.

Within that increasingly niche pile of inbound mail, you could find letters from ambassadors, celebrities, foreign governments as well as special events requesting a letter from POTUS in their event program. Those were the most boring to write, but we took them as seriously as second-semester seniors could take anything.

Almost all of the letters were signed by “autopen,” a robotic arm that actually held a real pen. I never saw the autopen, but I pictured it looking straight out of “Terminator.” In other words, though the signature was legal and binding, these letters never crossed the president’s desk. Every administration since at least Ronald Reagan has done it, more or less, the same way.

A little insider baseball if you ever received a letter from Bill Clinton: if the paragraphs were indented, it was signed by autopen. If the paragraphs were not, it was signed by hand. That was the only way to tell, since the autopen was considered a legally binding signature.

Anyway, I wrote hundreds of these letters, and since I was an intern, I usually got handed the bottom of the barrel.

As my alter ego, I congratulated the 1995 bowler of the year and the deputy marshal of the Newark St. Patrick’s Day Parade. I accepted the resignation of the ambassadors to Albania and Bulgaria, and apparently, I understood “the importance of the Third International Rubber Agreement of 1995 to North Carolina and other states.”

But every now and then, the real staffers would throw us interns a bone. “FOBs,” or “Friends of Bill,” got actual letters from our office, ones that were read and signed by the president.

It was a largely monotonous job, and most of it took place in the Old Executive Office Building, not the White House that people imagine. The West Wing is far too small for all of the employees to fit. Most of the White House business took place next door. Still, we had free roam of that building and the gated-off grounds connecting the OEOB and the White House. I spent many lunch hours outside, overlooking the press room and staff parking lot, frequently noticing the comings and goings of George Stephanopoulos, who at that point was a “senior advisor” to President Clinton and drove a red Honda CR-X. I always wondered why he didn’t splurge for something nicer.

Despite the repetitive nature of the task, certain days piqued my interest, and that spring, a staffer told me he had a special assignment for me. Newman, a close friend and campaign donor of Clinton’s, was in an accident that I vaguely remembered hearing about on the news.

The White House asked me to ghostwrite a short and funny letter to Newman. And do it in the style of POTUS, they said.

I had spent months learning how to write like the President – flowery, generic, and without using words that were too big. It was like deprogramming myself from all those journalism classes, throwing AP Style out the window. But I had gotten pretty good at ending almost every letter with some version of, “As we build bridges to the 21st century, Hillary and I send you best wishes.”

This time, they were asking me to be pithy and funny, Clinton style.

I remember it very clearly: I leaned back in my chair, put my loafers on the desk, and spent the next hour pretending to be Bill Clinton. I may have talked with that Arkansas drawl for a few minutes, it wouldn’t surprise me.

Finally, I came up with this:

Dear Paul:

Sorry to hear about your accident — I’m glad your hand fared better than your Volvo. I know how much you like driving fast cars, but try to save those tight turns for the race track!

I hope you’re feeling better and look forward to seeing you soon.

Sincerely,
Bill Clinton

The typical editing process in my office ranged from scant to highly bureaucratic. Most times, letters didn’t go out the door without several initials and stamps. Paperclipped stacks of letters in Courier, apparently the official font of the administration, wound up in my pile, and for the most part, we were on our own to set due dates.

Our computers were more like monochrome terminals, and we couldn’t spend much time researching our topics. We could look up previous letters sent from the White House (I spent many afternoons typing in celebrities’ names to see what they had gifted POTUS – I laughed endlessly at David Hasselhoff’s monogrammed “Baywatch” jacket he give Clinton, along with the thank-you letter some previous intern had penned).

We could print a letter and walk it over to a supervisor, usually an Arkansan slightly older than I. This staff was not composed of journalists or otherwise professional communicators; I never fully understood how they got there, where they were going, or how they made their edits. I did know that if a request came with a hand-written scrap of paper from the President, it was to be taken seriously.

Naturally, I expected my letter to Newman to go through an extensive vetting process, but I must’ve really nailed the succinct bromance between Bill and Paul on my first try, as it wasn’t changed at all. It came back stamped and unedited (except for the misspelling of my last name on the carbon copy).

And out it went. I hope it cheered him up.

I don’t remember any other details about the accident or that day, but I know we didn’t have regular Web access in our office. The Internet was definitely a thing by then – I had already built my own rudimentary website in very bad HTML in the campus computer lab – but if we could search for things on Yahoo! at work, I don’t know how we did it. I recall that if we needed information, we called someone inside the OEOB, or just the subjects, themselves. People always picked up the phone when we told them we were calling from the White House.

Lest I seem ungrateful, we enjoyed other perks at this 25-hour-per-week unpaid job. We attended official state arrivals, although in the case of the French visit, we also had to stuff tiny flags in baskets in the East Wing (they at least let us play with Socks to make it less demeaning). We visited the Oval Office once, too … though we were also forced to hand wooden Easter Eggs to children rolling them around the South Lawn.

At the end, we met Clinton, himself, and he thanked us for our work. We had to buy our own unofficial T-shirts for $25, though.

And of course, we made friends from all over the country, a few of whom I stay in touch with today. Most left after the semester; a few stayed with the administration. One took great pleasure from calling me from the White House switchboard and once from Air Force One, just because he could.

Yet, it was a time before digital cameras, except for my colleague Neal, who brought a little 35 mm film camera with him “just in case.” We didn’t get many photos. But ask Neal, Dina, and that other guy we can’t remember: none of this is slightly exaggerated.

These few accompanying photos of this anecdote are the most proof I can offer, as anything signed by the President (autopen or real pen) was officially written by him and never had our name on it anywhere. The lowly interns who ran the joint were nameless and faceless automatons, unless they rose to staff-level. For me, after graduation, I was ready to leave 16th and Pennsylvania Ave. right away.

Even at that age, politics first-hand seemed too … generic.

From that final independent study paper, which was difficult to recover from a Microsoft Word 6 file on my Mac LCII, the whole account only merited 105 words:

“Wednesday, March 6: Today was a great day, even if it was not full of much substance. After looking up some letters in the database and logging some messages, I rewrote another intern’s poor attempt at a letter. Then one of the internship’s highlights was thrust upon me: a humorous note to Paul Newman about his minor car accident. It was just three sentences, but it was cute and the President signed it, himself. I got my hands on a copy of the final letter, which went unedited, and kept a photocopy for myself. I think I might have had my 15 minutes of fame.”

In my semester at the White House, I wrote more important letters that never saw Clinton’s desk. Only a few did and, and perhaps two received his actual signature.

So, yeah, I made that photocopy on the official White House letterhead, a green-tinted special paper they called vellum. For the record, I did not steal a ream of it and print my resume on it, as did one former intern who was summarily fired for this offense.

I did, however, print out all the letters I wrote (on plain paper) and have finally reviewed them to see if any were vaguely automotive related. Apparently, I wrote to the Association of American Railroads on the topic of H.R. 2539, the bill to sunset the Interstate Commerce Commision – but I remember that less than my Clintonian correspondence to the 1996 National Association of Hosiery Manufacturers.

Much like my gentle presidential ribbing of Paul Newman’s broken hand, that hosiery commemoration was a real work of prose.

Andy Tarnoff is the founder of OnMilwaukee and is a digital media consultant, podcast host and writer. He’s a graduate of The George Washington University, and worked at the White House Office of Communications, The Dallas Morning News Washington Bureau and two Milwaukee PR firms before branching out on his own at age 23.

Story images: Andy Tarnoff/White House

Top graphic images: Andy Tarnoff/White House; Depositphotos.com; The Autopian