RIP Bob Hartmann, "SOB"

I regret never having met Robert Hartmann, the close aide to Gerald Ford who died last week -- he was one of the classic, colorful characters in White House history.

Hartmann was Ford's vice presidential chief of staff, and became a "counselor" when Ford moved into the Oval Office and ran the president's speechwriting operation. (He provided Ford his most memorable line, that "our long national nightmare is over.")

As I recount in White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters, the two men were oddly matched: Ford had the easy manner of a legislative leader. Hartmann was, Ford put it mildly, "suspicious of everyone."

"You don't suspect ill motives of anyone until you're kicked in the balls three times," Hartmann once told his boss. "As a human being, that's a virtue. As a president, it's a weakness."

Hartmann, a long-time reporter at the LA Times, was the picture of an old-school newspaperman, with a raspy voice and a growly temperament. He enjoyed the nickname Sweet Ol' Bob -- SOB.

The Washington Post's Sally Quinn wrote that he had "more enemies than any other man in Washington." Chief among his White House sparring partners were a couple of younger presidential staffers named Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. In a pattern that will come as no surprise in retrospect, Cheney and Rumsfeld established their own shadow speechwriting operation.

In one particularly illustrative and memorable moment late in the 1976 presidential campaign, as I relay in White House Ghosts, Hartmann and Cheney got into a screaming match in the middle of Air Force One over whose speech Ford was going to give.

Washington truly lost a character last week.