Presidential Speechwriter Ken Khachigian Reflects on a Storied Career in Memoirs

Khachigian has raised money for the Armenian Assembly of America all over the country, and has spoken at Armenian General Benevolent Union, Armenian Missionary Association of America, Armenian National Committee of America and Armenian Eyecare Project meetings over the years.

Childhood

Khachigian traversed a long road to his position of prominence in politics. He related that growing up on a family farm in Visalia, in the San Joaquin Valley, he began driving a tractor at 6 years old. “We didn’t have a shower, so I started bathing out of a milk pail till probably I was 9 or 10 years old. We had one zukaran [bathroom] for 6 of us in the house, and one, what we called a shashma, in the barn, for when things were very urgent. So we were total kiughatsis [villagers] out there on the farm.” He was doing heavy tractor work at age 12 and one summer a few years later, had to take over the irrigation chores.

Though he said he didn’t consider this a tough life, it wasn’t something he enjoyed all the time. He said, “One thing I noticed about it was a lot of it was a struggle. I found my dad struggling a lot, with bad years and a few good years, and the bad years wore heavily on him. I didn’t think it was something I wanted to do.”

Instead, he decided to go to college, graduating University of California, Santa Barbara, with honors in 1966, and Columbia Law School in 1969, but those early years did leave some important traces on him. He said, “I grew up in the age of radio where you had to picture things and you didn’t have television so you had to visualize what you heard on the radio. I think that made a big difference in how I wrote.” Moreover, sitting on a tractor for 7 or 8 hours a day and driving back and forth constantly left one with nothing else to do but to think, he observed.

California Armenians

Both of Khachigian’s parents spoke Western Armenian, but he said his mother, born in the US, worked to Americanize his father and the children. Consequently, Khachigian and his brothers went to concerts, and joined DeMolay, a fraternal organization for young men, as well as 4-H clubs. Khachigian saw Adlai Stevenson when he came to town and met Jack Kennedy when he was 15 years and Kennedy was campaigning for president in 1960.

At the same time, Khachigian in a 2020 article noted that his family drove 15 miles each Sunday to the First Armenian Presbyterian Church in Yettem, where much of the congregation was originally from Chomaklou. He was given the baptismal name of Khazar (Ghazar). He remembered in his interview for this newspaper that the sermons were half in Armenian and half in English.

He said, “I was bilingual until I was in kindergarten. Then you go to kindergarten and all your friends and your neighbors are Americans. You continue at home, it’s mostly English, but you are still bilingual a little bit. So, I can speak kitchen Armenian.”

When asked if knowing Armenian (with some scattered words of Turkish) helped him in any way to work differently as a speechwriter, he said he had never thought of it, but “At any event, knowing those different words, I think, helped your mind perhaps be a little bit more creative.”

“It was interesting growing up. My feet were always half in one culture and half in the other culture growing up. But I am still active in the Armenian community,” Khachigian said. “And then, on the other hand I belong to groups that are solely non-Armenian. I still live in two worlds, and it is funny how people view you that way. It’s hard.”

Khachigian was a popular student, who became sophomore, junior and then senior class president in high school. While he generally did not experience any anti-Armenian prejudice, there were two incidents that stuck in his mind. Once in grammar school, when he was 8 or 9, he said, “a young boy called me a dirty Armenian and I was instructed to beat him up when I got home. I was hoping that he would never call me that again, because I didn’t want to have to beat him up.”

The second one was with the first girl he dated in high school. He couldn’t get a second date because her father wouldn’t allow his daughter to date an Armenian. Khachigian said, “I was baffled by it. I was just taken aback because otherwise there wasn’t any discrimination within the school, amongst my friends or within the community.” In fact, since the girl was a sophomore and Khachigian was then a senior, Khachigian could have been considered a prize catch for her.

Khachigian also said that his father was blackballed by a fraternal organization, either the Elks or the Eagles, when he tried to join.

The Chomo’s

Khachigian declared that Armenians from Chomaklou call themselves Chomo’s. His family connection to Chomaklou remained a constant thread throughout his life. “Those of us who are around, we still talk about it. Even the non-Chomakloutsi’s are a little bit envious I think of how close knit we are,” he said. He remembered the picnics in Mooney Grove Park near Visalia, and a family trip in 1955. “Of course every major city we stopped in, in Detroit and Chicago, we didn’t stay in hotels. We stayed with Chomaklou relatives,” he said. This was true in New York City also, where they attended a big picnic of Armenians from Chomaklou in Van Cortland Park in the Bronx, at which his father united with some childhood friends.

Once, Chomaklou even made an appearance on the presidential level. Khachigian related that when his father passed away in December 1975, he was working for President Nixon in San Clemente, California. Nixon asked what he could do to recognize his father. Khachigian explained that his father came from the small village of Chomaklou near Kayseri and the best way was to donate in his memory to the Chomaklou Compatriotic Society. So President Nixon wrote a 500 dollar check to the society, which is worth almost 3 thousand dollars today accounting for inflation. This might be the only instance of an American president donating to an Armenian compatriotic union.

Khachigian still keeps in touch regularly with some Chomaklou Armenians in Orange County, where he lives, and has reconnected with others. He learned that there is a small group of them in Cordoba, Argentina, and said that one of his goals, if he can manage it, is to find them and visit.

President Reagan’s Public Mention of the Armenian Genocide

The April 22, 1981 proclamation by President Ronald Reagan in remembrance of the Holocaust includes the phrase “Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it,” which took place at a time where the State Department and executive branch of the US government generally appeased NATO ally Turkey by not using the word genocide for the events of 1915.

Khachigian was the one responsible for writing this one-off usage, not to be repeated again by a president until Joe Biden’s acknowledgment. When asked how hard it was to get it accepted, he replied, “Well, actually it was very easy because the State Department never got involved. I never tried to sneak it through because that was not in my temperament. I never tried to manipulate my position, but I had the opportunity to use it in the proclamation.”

To be safe, he did get approval. He said, “First I did what I was supposed to do, and I checked initially with the Deputy National Security Advisor, Bud Nance [James Wilson “Bud” Nance]. I said, Bud I want to alert you to this, that I am putting this into the proclamation and it could be controversial. Then he looked at what I wrote and he said, well that’s a fact, isn’t it? And I said, As far as I am concerned it is a fact. Then he said, okay, well, it is okay with me.

“Then I thought well I had better doublecheck, because this could be scrutinized and I don’t want the blame coming on me, I don’t want to take full responsibility for this. So, Dick Allen, Richard Allen, was the National Security Advisor, and I had known him since 1968, from the Nixon era, and I said, Dick, I want to show this to you. I’d shown it to Bud Nance. Here, please read this proclamation, and he said, well, that is historic fact. I said, well, yes it is. He said, well, as long as it is an historic fact, there is no reason why it shouldn’t be in the proclamation. I had the check off from the two National Security Advisors, and boom, it went in to the president, and nobody else. It never went to the State Department. It ended up in the proclamation.”

Khachigian said, “It is amazing, when true facts are presented, and people don’t deny them, it becomes part of official history. That is the problem with the State Department: they don’t deal with straight facts. All these years, and even now, they dance around it, and then they came back the next year and they danced around it. Then they came out with this term which I don’t even understand, Medz Yeghern.”

He could not recall any big outcry or retaliation in the Administration, but the Turkish government did blame “the Armenian speechwriter,” and tried to say this was not the true voice of the president. Khachigian said, “But they couldn’t change the fact that it was a statement by the president, and it is a part of history. They can’t change that.”

Armenian Americans in Politics and Lobbying

George Deukmejian was a role model for him, Khachigian said. He introduced himself to Deukmejian while going to the 1968 Republican Convention in a shuttle bus. He told then State Senator Deukmejian that he was working for presidential nominee Nixon, and Deukmejian and his wife Gloria invited Khachigian for breakfast. Khachigian said he became Deukmejian’s source into the Nixon campaign, and they became close. In 1970, Khachigian helped him in his first race for attorney general.

He said that though both Deukmejian and he had the goal of setting an example to get more young Armenians involved in politics, he was bothered that in fact they do not. He said, “They get successful in business, and they get successful in a lot of other endeavors, but they don’t apply themselves the way they should in politics. Even when they do get involved in politics, it is not at a level where they can make a difference. A lot of them become bureaucrats…”

He said that he hoped his book will encourage Armenians to engage more in politics: “Even though this book is not aimed at the Armenian community, I just hope that young people see the name, and it has the same effect that it had for me when I was growing up, when I would see the name William Saroyan, or I would see the name George Mardikian, or [that of] some other prominent Armenian. It gave me some source of pride, thinking that I could achieve some high goal. So I hope to be a role model.”

(Just to be clear, the book, unlike this article, only directly mentions Armenians in a few places where Khachigian refers to working with Governor Deukmejian, a few mentions of growing up in Visalia, and the chapter on Chomaklou and the Bergen-Belsen speech.)

As far as what is taking place now, with the emptying of Artsakh and the dangers Armenia itself faces, Khachigian confessed that while not a specialist in this field, he did know one thing: “I always have said this and continue to say this: that Hayasdan has made a huge, huge mistake by not engaging financially in a very large way in lobbying in Washington.” He said he told two different ambassadors of Armenia that they should be ready to spend money because otherwise they give ground away to Turkey and Azerbaijan and everyone else against Armenian interests. He said, “until you are willing to spend, 5, 6, 7 million dollars a year on lobbying you are going to lose. You can’t just depend on the Armenian Assembly and the ANC [Armenian National Committee of American] to do your lobbying. It just doesn’t work that way.”

He said he even explored creating a powerful organization like the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) by talking with some large Armenian donors, but to no avail.

At present, Khachigian said, “I just think that in return for the genuine effort by a lot of our organizations, all they are given in return is lip service.” Even politicians like Rep. Adam Schiff, who has received a great deal of support from the Armenian community and was in the influential position of head of the House Intelligence Committee, did not confront and take on the president or State Department directly, Khachigian said, by “stomping into the White House and saying this has got to change, or leading a delegation to the White House.” Resolutions, letters or statements are not sufficient to change policy, he observed.

Ultimately, the best way to get action is to make professional lobbying organizations earn their pay, Khachigian said. He explained, “The way to make them earn it is to spend millions and millions and millions of dollars and say we pay you to deliver the goods, and that means countering what the Azeris and Turks are doing at State. If you can’t do it, we hire a different lobbying organization, and if that lobbying organization can’t do it, we hire the next lobbying organization, the next pr organization, and we pay them 5 or 6 million dollars. If you want to make this money, you deliver the goods.”

Khachigian issued a powerful statement on LinkedIn concerning the September 2023 Azerbaijani invasion of Artsakh on October 4 of that year, declaring that America waived its conscience, as it had in 1915. He called out the moral cowardice of President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in the face of a genocidal purge of the Armenians there.

In speaking with the Mirror-Spectator, Khachigian recently exclaimed about what happened to the Artsakh Armenians: “I do know this, that you have 120,000 people who are involved in another kaghtaganutiun. That was a kaghtaganutiun – instead of mules and walking on their feet through the desert, they were in old Toyota trucks and beat up cars going through the Lachin corridor, or however they got to Hayasdan, with only what they could carry on their backs and leaving their homes, and having the equivalent of what happened in 1915, having their churches destroyed, their houses taken over, and their lives lost forever – that was the same. The only thing that didn’t happen was that they weren’t slaughtered, that they had a minimum of food, and they had a place to go, where at least some of them found some housing and food and water, but it wasn’t any different. One hundred and twenty thousand people lost their lives and the State Department didn’t do anything.”

Instead, he said, the US offered a ridiculously small sum of money, some 17 dollars of person, as aid, and Armenians did not have a pr campaign and a political lobbying campaign jumping all over that as they should have, while every day there is shouting and screaming about what is going on with Israel and Hamas.

Memories

Everyone kept telling Khachigian that he ought to write his memoirs and ultimately he did, because, he said, “Obviously not many people get to spend as much time as I did with the two major political figures of the last third of the last century. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan … were the political giants and political legends of the Cold War. I had a unique story to tell and the unique life that I had led, coming from where I did to what I had achieved…”

He said that one good thing about waiting so long to write this book after many other people already wrote about the same events is that he can set the record straight. Khachigian noted: “I had four and a half years to spend with my files. I kept diaries and very meticulous notes. So part of what I have done is correct the record as well, where it has been distorted or mistold by other people.”

He had developed a close relationship in particular with Reagan. The reason, Khachigian said, was that he thought they had similar backgrounds, coming from small towns and growing up in radio. “Even though he was born 1911, so he was 33 years older than I was, nevertheless, I think culturally we understood each other, a lot better than others did. I don’t know, we just, we got along, I think. I think he just felt comfortable around me,” Khachigian stated. “I was more of a speech collaborator rather than a speech writer, I think.”

While he never took a strong advocacy role while working as presidential speechwriter, Khachigian said that in hindsight, he regretted not speaking up at certain meetings contrary to what others were saying. He addresses this in his book.

Khachigian’s book concludes with a chapter called “The Lions Gather,” in which he accompanies Nixon to a meeting with Reagan in 1990. Khachigian reminisced: “I couldn’t have ever believed at any point in my life that I would have been in a position to have been there, sitting with those two men who I had created an extraordinary bond with, especially with Reagan.”