The President's Eyes and Ears

A glass of Rebel Yell bourbon close at hand and classical music playing softly on the stereo, the ex-newspaper reporter mulls over ideas at home for the next presidential speech. By 2 a.m., he is pounding away at his portable typewriter, smoothly capturing the cadences and patterns of his boss's speaking style. Next morning, red-eyed from a night without sleep but wearing his favorite cream-colored suit, he hands his manuscript to the President in the Oval Office, then argues tenaciously in defense of every word. Only rarely does Gerald Ford ask for a revision of an idea or even a phrase.

Such is the frenetic working pace --and enormous influence over the President--of Robert Trowbridge Hartmann, 57, Ford's chief speechwriter, political adviser, troubleshooter and confidant. Other White House intimates regard the conservative Hartmann as Ford's most trusted Counsellor. "The President knows that Bob is smarter than hell and straight as an arrow with him," says Bryce Harlow, an ex-adviser to Richard Nixon who serves on Ford's kitchen cabinet. Adds another presidential aide: "Bob's the President's eyes and ears. It would be impossible to overemphasize his importance." Summoned by a beeper when needed by Ford, Hartmann finds that his duties have no clear boundaries. "My role is best described by that door over there," he says, nodding toward the portal that leads from his sparsely furnished office, once occupied by Rose Mary Woods, to the Oval Office a few paces away. "My main function is to do what seems to the boss to be the most important thing to do next."

It was Hartmann who persuaded Ford to strive for independence as Vice President and avoid becoming overcommitted to Nixon's Watergate defense. Hartmann crafted Ford's well-received Inaugural Address, his first speech as President to Congress and his speech last week appealing for leniency for deserters and draft dodgers. Hartmann also was the only White House aide who participated in Ford's selection of a nominee for Vice President. He tabulated the names recommended by Republican Congressmen, Governors and others, and later discreetly checked out the three finalists, though Ford never confided in him that he had settled on Nelson Rockefeller. All through the process, Hartmann adamantly refused to talk with reporters.

That seeming aloofness only augmented Hartmann's longstanding reputation for brusqueness and abrasiveness. After he became a Counsellor to the President, his father, Miner Hartmann, 85, sent him a vial of silicon carbide, which is used in grinding steel. "You grew up on it," explained an accompanying note from the elder Hartmann, a patent attorney in Beverly Hills, Calif., and former chemist who once directed research for the Carborundum Co. Even Wife Roberta concedes that Hartmann "does not have time to be as tactful as some people would wish." But he can also be garrulous and genial, particularly while reminiscing with old friends from his days as a reporter.

Born in Rapid City, S. Dak., Hartmann was raised in Niagara Falls and California, where his family moved when he was nine in hopes that a warmer climate would end his repeated bouts with pneumonia. After he graduated from Stanford University in 1938, a globe-trotting student tour of Japan, China and Europe whetted his interest in journalism, and he joined the Los Angeles Times to cover the police and local courts. In 1954 he was made chief of the newspaper's first full-time Washington bureau and soon became one of then Vice President Nixon's favorite reporters. But in 1962, after Otis Chandler succeeded his archconservative father as publisher, he sent Hartmann to cover news from Rome because the reporter was philosophically out of tune with both the new management and the Kennedy Administration.

Hartmann returned to Washington two years later as publicist for the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, became editor of position papers for the House Republican Conference hi 1966 and began his close association with Ford, who was then Republican leader hi the House. In 1969 Hartmann joined Ford's staff as legislative assistant and quickly won his boss's admiration for his willingness to work long hours, his avid embrace of conservative principles and his skill as a writer. Hartmann proudly recalls how he helped gore the Democratic Administration by exploiting the phrase "credibility gap" and by publicizing the number of Government contracts given to some of President Johnson's chief financial backers. During those years Hartmann also wrote position papers on legislative issues for the Republican House leaders. "We called them Constructive Republican Alternative Programs," he says, "which formed the acronym CRAP."

When Ford became Vice President, he named Hartmann his chief of staff. But Hartmann proved to be a poor administrator, and after Ford was sworn in as President he made a point of retaining General Alexander M. Haig Jr. as White House chief of staff. Hartmann nonetheless remains the President's most influential and most nearly indispensable adviser. To master the grueling White House pace, he has given up cigarettes, coffee and martinis and dropped, at least temporarily, his hobby of snorkeling and taking underwater photographs near his vacation home in St. Croix. He still swims daily in the pool behind his home in Westgate, Md., and plays boccie, an Italian bowling game that he learned in Rome, on his backyard court. But most of his time is now spent in the White House only a beep away from the President.

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