Ken Khachigian - Political Consultant to Nixon and Reagan

Ken Khachigian was born in September 1944 in Visalia, California, and was raised on a 60-acre farm that grew cotton, walnuts, and grapes. The farm was founded by his paternal grandfather, who escaped from Armenia in 1912 and immigrated to the U.S. Ken and his three brothers worked on the farm with their father. He began driving a tractor at the age of six and was doing heavy tractor work by age twelve. They lived simply, he said, "like Kiughatsis" (villagers). Although he didn’t think it was a tough life, he observed how the bad years were very hard on his father. “I didn’t think it was something I wanted to do,” he said. Determined to pursue a different path, Ken decided to go to college. He graduated with honors in Political Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1966, and earned a law degree from Columbia Law School in 1969.

Ken Khachigian with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan (Ronald Reagan Library and Foundation)

While at Columbia, Ken got his first taste of politics by volunteering for Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1967. He was hired by Pat Buchanan to work in the New York campaign headquarters answering letters. Eventually, he handled small research projects for Nixon’s speeches, and by the summer of 1968, he was writing position papers on agriculture, housing, and transportation as a research and policy aide. In 1970, he began writing speeches and preparing political analyses during the mid-term congressional elections. By May 1971, he was working on Nixon’s 1972 presidential re-election campaign. In early 1973, Khachigian transferred to the President’s speechwriting staff with the title of Deputy Special Assistant to the President. By June of that year, he took on the role of researcher and writer on issues related to the Watergate break-in. He worked for President Gerald Ford until the fall of 1974, when he moved to San Clemente, California, to assist Nixon with his presidential memoirs and prepare for the historic interviews with David Frost.

In 1980, Ken joined Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, traveling on the campaign plane to revise speeches between campaign stops. In 1981, he was named Chief Speechwriter and Special Consultant to the President. He wrote Reagan’s inaugural address, his three main economic speeches, and the "Welcome Home" speech for the Iranian hostages. In April of that year, President Reagan’s proclamation in remembrance of the Holocaust included the phrase: “Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it.” That sentence was written by Ken Khachigian. When asked how hard it was to get it accepted, he explained that he got approval from the Deputy National Security Advisor and the National Security Advisor, who agreed with him that it was a historical fact. Of course, the Turkish government blamed “the Armenian speechwriter” and tried to claim that it 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.”

During the 1984 presidential campaign, Khachigian served as Chief Campaign Speechwriter, Senior Advisor, and Director of Issues and Research. He wrote Reagan’s 1984 nomination acceptance speech and was one of only two campaign aides to accompany the President aboard Air Force One throughout his re-election campaign. In May 1985, the President delivered a speech at the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany to pay respects to the soldiers interred there. TIME magazine praised the address as a “skillful exercise in both the art of eulogy and political damage control.” Reagan biographer Edmund Morris regarded it as the best speech of Reagan’s career.

In addition to his work on the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush-Quayle campaigns, Ken served as a national senior adviser to presidential nominees Bob Dole, John McCain, and Fred Thompson. He has been active in California elections since the early 1980s. During the 1982 and 1986 California gubernatorial campaigns, Khachigian was Senior Advisor and Principal Strategist for Governor George Deukmejian, whom he met in 1968 on a shuttle bus en route to the Republican Convention. Khachigian said that although he and Deukmejian aimed to set an example to inspire more young Armenians to get involved in politics, he was disappointed that they do not. “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—they become bureaucrats,” he said.

Ken Khachigian has finally released his memoirs, titled Behind Closed Doors: In the Room with Reagan & Nixon. He hopes his book will encourage Armenians to engage more in politics: “I just hope that young people see the name, and it has the same effect that it had on me when I was growing up—when I would see the name William Saroyan or George Mardikian or some other prominent Armenian. It gave me a sense of pride, thinking that I could achieve some high goal. So I hope to be a role model.”