Брой 4
Martin J. Medhurst
Абстракт. The practice of speechwriting has its beginnings alongside the beginnings of recorded history. Some of the brightest rhetorical minds of antiquity were speechwriters and the practice has only become more common and richer. Nowadays politicians, CEOs, political candidates all use speechwriters. The paper combines examples of presidential rhetoric with conclusions from interviews with many prominent speechwriters, who have prepared speeches for American presidents over the past few decades, in order -to present and analyze the process and the modern practice of speechwriting.
Keywords: speechwriting, presidency, communicators.
Писането на речи и американската президентска институция
Мартин Медхърст
Abstract. Практиката на писане на речи има своето начало наред с началото на писаната история. Някои от най-ярките реторически умове на Античността са били автори на речи и тази практика през годините само е ставала по-разпространена и по-богата. Днес политици, директори на компании, политически кандидати използват автори на речи. Докладът комбинира примери за президентска реторика с изводи от интервюта с водещи автори на речи през последните няколко десетилетия, за да представи и анализира процеса и модерната практика на писането на речи.
Ключови думи: писане на речи, президентска институция, комуникатори.
The practice of speechwriting is almost as old as recorded history itself. In ancient Greece, the practice of logography was widespread, particularly in the courts of law. We know that several of the Ten Attic orators – Antiphon, Isocrates, and Lysias among them – were speechwriters in their younger days. Indeed, it was as a writer of other people’s defenses in the law courts that Isocrates first became wealthy. To be a successful logographer was a recognized pathway to individual fame and fortune. But we also know that at one point early in his career Isocrates chose to quit being a speechwriter for others and to turn his talents, instead, to the instruction of the young, an instruction that was based in rhetoric and public affairs. In his school, which soon grew to become the largest in Athens, Isocrates wrote speeches of his own, both for instructional and political purposes – speeches that were models of rhetorical reasoning, design, and appeal; speeches that dealt with the central civic issues of his day. What occasioned such a change?
For Isocrates, the chief issue was ethical in character – how ought one to live life and make use of one’s talents. Clearly, Isocrates was very talented. He was a successful, highly regarded, and well-to-do logographer. By popular standards, he was a success. But by his own internal compass, Isocrates came to realize that he was spending his life in the service of small causes. He was writing speeches about domestic disputes, money disputes, personal injury cases, and all manner of causes that were important only to the disputants themselves. In short, his was a pen for hire. This, he decided, was no noble cause, no proper calling for a man whose social and political conscience was moved by the great issues of his day. So he shuttered his logography business and opened a school, where he would eventually teach some of the greatest leaders in Athenian history – orators, historians, poets, statesmen, military leaders, philosophers – all manner of intellectual leaders. In the act of teaching, he would also write such political masterpieces as “On the Peace”, “Areopagiticus”, and “Panathenaicus”. And he would set forth his rhetorical precepts in such works as “Against the Sophists”, “Antidosis”, and “Nicocles”. He chose as his life’s cause Pan-Hellenism and employed a particular brand of sophistical rhetoric as his teaching philosophy. In the life of Isocrates, we find the first recorded instance where talent and ability with the written word clash with money and power on the one hand, and conscience and calling on the other, and result in a life-long commitment to rhetorical reasoning as method and the public good as end.
Many others followed in Isocrates’ path. Over the course of the last 2500 years numerous public figures have turned to speechwriters at moments of transition, war, or crisis. Julius Caesar employed two writers named Oppius and Hirtius as he was working on his Commentaries; Emperor Nero called upon the Stoic philosopher Seneca to pen his maiden speech; Pope Julius II had speechwriters for his sermons; Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay often assisted George Washington with his state papers, including his famous Farewell Address; Amos Kendall wrote speeches for the unlettered Andrew Jackson, including his famous “Bank Veto Message”. His presence behind Jackson’s words was so noticeable, in fact, that Jackson’s enemies often referred to Kendall as “his thinking machine and his writing machine… and his lying machine”. Abraham Lincoln sought assistance on his First Inaugural Address from William Seward. The famous nineteenth-century historian George Bancroft occasionally wrote speeches for President Andrew Johnson. Indeed, the list of leaders throughout history who have, on occasion, turned to others for speechwriting help is long and distinguished.
Today, speechwriters are an established and often institutionalized part of modern society. We tend to think of speechwriters only in relation to political figures, but the fact is that every CEO of a major corporation, every president of a major university, every General or Admiral in the military, every major religious figure from the Mother Teresa to Billy Graham has, from time to time – and in many cases most of the time – employed a speechwriter or ghostwriter. And sometimes the speechwriter and ghostwriter are one and the same. Most people know that Michael Gerson was the chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Most do not know that he was also the chief ghostwriter for Charles Colson’s bestselling book Kingdoms in Conflict. So whether openly acknowledged or intentionally hidden, speechwriters are a ubiquitous presence in modern society – so much so that we now have entire businesses that specialize in nothing but supplying speechwriters to those in need of that service.
I have spent the last 45 years studying political speechwriting. I have focused my efforts on those who write for the President of the United States, although I have also interviewed a few people who wrote for leaders of other nations. I came to focus on presidential speechwriting through my study of rhetoric and the rhetorical criticism of American political discourse. I interviewed my first major speechwriter – Robert Shrum – in 1976, and have interviewed 40 or more presidential speechwriters from every administration from Truman’s through that of George W. Bush. As you may know, Shrum started as a writer for George McGovern in the 1972 presidential campaign. He then wrote briefly for Jimmy Carter in 1976, before partnering with Edward Kennedy for a brief presidential run in 1980, a campaign that ended with Shrum’s writing Kennedy’s famous speech at the 1980 Democratic National Convention, “The Dream Shall Never Die”.
Since that first interview 33 years ago, I have talked with a large number of presidential speechwriters, including Clark Clifford, George Elsey, Bryce Harlow, Theodore Sorensen, Bill Moyers, Raymond Price, Robert Orben, Rick Hertzberg, Peggy Noonan, Tony Dolan, Curt Smith, Michael Waldman, and Michael Gerson, among others. Today I’d like to share some of what I have learned about speechwriting at the highest level of American government. To do so, I will divide my remarks into four sections: 1) the people who do the speechwriting, 2) the process of presidential speechwriting, 3) the presidents for whom the writing is done, and 4) the final product itself – the speech text. Four P’s: people, processes, presidents, and products.
People: The Speechwriters
The question that has been posed to me more than any other is this: How does one become a presidential speechwriter? The question seems to presuppose a pat answer, as though there is a single pathway that inexorably leads to the White House. There is not. Indeed, I shy away from making almost any kind of generalization about who presidential speechwriters are, what backgrounds they come from, or how they ended up writing for a president of the United States. But there are two generalizations I think I can safely make before turning to the eccentricities. The first generalization is that accident and timing has a lot to do with it. The second is that since 1969, there has been some tendency to prefer people with a background in journalism or mass communication.
To illustrate the role of accident and timing one need turn no further than President Obama’s chief White House speechwriter, Jon Favreau. Favreau was a 23 year old, recent college graduate when he went to work at minimum wage for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. During the course of that campaign, he was made deputy speechwriter when the writing tasks became so overwhelming that another body was needed. He happened to be there and he could write a coherent sentence. He had never, in his life, written a speech for another person, though he had written speeches for himself. During the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Favreau was instructed by the Kerry camp to find the keynote speaker, then little-known Illinois State Senator Barack Obama, and instruct him to remove a specific line from his speech, because that same line was going to be used by Kerry himself. Favreau did as instructed and thus met Barack Obama under rather unusual circumstances. After Kerry’s loss in November 2004, Obama remembered the young man, and upon the recommendation of Robert Gibbs, his director of communications, invited Favreau for interview. He needed a campaign speechwriter. Favreau passed the interview and became Obama’s chief speechwriter, with less than a year’s experience in writing political speeches. His performance on the campaign trail was superior and he entered the White House as chief of speechwriting in January 2009. Had it not been for that chance meeting at the Democratic National Convention, it is unlikely that Favreau would ever have become a presidential speechwriter. I wish I could say that this story is unusual, but in point of fact, it is not. People become presidential speechwriters in some of the most bizarre ways imaginable.
It is true that since 1969 presidents have seemed to prefer writers that come from the fields of print or broadcast journalism. Nixon picked Raymond Price from the New York Herald Tribune and Patrick Buchanan from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat; Ford picked Robert Hartmann from the Los Angeles Times; Carter selected James Fallows from The Washington Monthly; Reagan had Tony Dolan from the Stamford Advocate and Peggy Noonan from CBS News. But for every writer that comes from a journalism background, there is another who does not. While it is true that the single profession most widely represented among White House speechwriters is journalism, it is not true that most White House speechwriters have been journalists. Most have come from a combination of professions that include lawyer, professor, high school teacher, military aide, Hollywood gag writer, corporate executive, public relations officer, congressional staffer, nonprofit advocate, economist, advertising specialist, and novelist, among others.
One of the reasons that journalists often have been selected is because they deal on a daily basis with a wide variety of topics and because they work on a deadline. Both are crucial to White House operations. In most administrations the speechwriters have been generalists who could write on a wide variety of topics. In some administrations, however, specializations develop among the writers. In the Johnson White House, for example, Harry McPherson handled most of the speeches on Vietnam; Douglass Cater handled speeches on health, education, and welfare; Richard Goodwin specialized in civil rights and the major speeches such as the inaugural address and the State of the Union; Myer Feldman wrote about economics and handled messages to special interest groups; and Horace Busby handled the Texas connections and interest groups, and edited most of the important speeches so they would sound more like Johnson. Bill Moyers and Jack Valenti routed and edited the speeches. On occasion, some administrations have experimented with hiring writers who specialize in a single subject, usually economics, national security, or labor. In most such instances those experiments have failed, as have the repeated attempts of administrations since FDR to hire “literary” figures. As the less than successful speechwriting careers of John Steinbeck, Eric Goldman, Peter Benchley, and others have illustrated, “being a good writer doesn’t make you a good speechwriter”. Neither, apparently, does being a speech teacher, since only one professor of rhetoric has ever served as a presidential speechwriter. Lacking both policy expertise and the ability to write on deadline, such types seldom succeed in the world of political speechwriting.
In recent years, the White House has employed 5–7 speechwriters, in addition to the director of speechwriting. That number often expands as a campaign approaches and recedes again as the campaign winds down. Different administrations have had different theories about how the speechwriting operation should be organized and staffed. Most scholars agree that fundamental shifts took place in 1969 and 1978. In 1969, Nixon became the first president to list an office of Speechwriting and Research within the White House Office (WHO). Such a function had, of course, been present in every White House since 1921, but the official location of that function had often been hidden behind such titles as “Literary Executive Secretary”, or “Administrative Assistant”, or “Legislative Aide”. Indeed, for most of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, many White House speechwriters were officially located for payroll purposes in the Bureau of the Budget, thus obscuring both the number of speechwriters and the function they were performing. Nixon brought the ongoing function out into the open by appointing six speechwriters to the newly formed office. That office was headed by a manager, James Keough, who was not a speechwriter but an administrator and scheduler. The chief speechwriter was Raymond Price, who had been with Nixon since 1967, joined by Patrick Buchanan and William Safire as first-team writers, ably assisted by Richard Whalen, Lee Huebner, and William Gavin. The speeches went from Price through Keough to Bob Haldeman. By most accounts this system worked fairly well, at least until Watergate intervened. The second major change happened in 1978, when Jimmy Carter brought Gerald Rafshoon to the White House to head a new Office of White House Communications. Carter moved the speechwriting operations under this new office, with the speechwriters, then headed by Rick Hertzberg, reporting through the director of White House Communications, who in turn reported to the Chief of Staff. This moved the speechwriters yet another step away from the president and resulted in a very unhappy group of writers who produced some of the worst presidential prose in history.
Both of these changes are important for several reasons, the chief among them being access, both perceived and real. While the first dimension of access is always the speechwriter’s personal relationship with the president, a closely related second dimension is how close (both physically and organizationally) the speechwriters are to the Oval Office. When speechwriters have long and close personal relationships with their principal, as C.D. Jackson had with Eisenhower and Theodore Sorensen had with Kennedy, no organizational chart matters. Such writers have direct access to the president whenever it is needed. But those kinds of relationships are the exception, not the rule. Most White House speechwriters have known their principals for months, not years, often only since the beginning of the campaign. In those cases, organizational charts and procedures do matter – greatly. Largely because Raymond Price had been with Nixon since 1967, the Nixon writers had few problems with access to the Boss, even with Nixon’s infamous praetorian guard in place. But that would not be true of writers in the Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush the Elder White Houses. In each of those cases the writers were physically, organizationally, and – in all but the Reagan White House – psychologically removed from the president. Thus from about 1973–1993, there were structural, organizational, and psychological factors that worked together to undermine some of the essential factors involved in writing effective speeches for other people. These factors included access, policy direction, specific ideas, rhetorical style, and volition or force.
The single biggest complaint of speechwriters between 1973 and 1993 concerned lack of access to the president. During these years writers were often assigned to write speeches without ever meeting with the president, often without explicit policy guidance, frequently with no policy even in existence (thus leaving it to the writer to make up the policy as he wrote the speech), and with little or no idea how important the particular topic was to the president or to the president’s overall agenda. Such lack of access also made it difficult to learn the idiosyncrasies of the presidential style, lexicon, and modes of verbal reasoning. At its worst, this lack of access resulted in a complete disconnect between the president and his writers, as happened in the Carter White House. At its best, in the Reagan White House, it resulted in some powerful speeches that clearly reflected the beliefs and style of the president though that result seems to have been as a consequence of the ideological make-up of that particular speechwriting group and the clear ideological stance of the president for whom they wrote. They didn’t have to guess where Ronald Reagan stood on most matters, since he had stood pretty much in the same place for the previous 30 years. Even so, most people are surprised to learn that Peggy Noonan, who wrote some of Reagan’s most famous speeches, actually met the man face-to-face only three times in five years.
White House speechwriters are, almost without exception, considerably younger than those who populate the policy offices. Most speechwriters range in age from 27–37, with most in their late 20s or early 30s. One reason for this is the taxing nature of their jobs. It is not unusual for a White House writer to arrive at 7:00 am and leave sometime after 7:00 pm. If a deadline looms – and they are always looming – then it could be much later than 7:00 before the writer heads for home. This schedule, which seldom lets up, is one of the reasons why most presidential speechwriters burn out before the administration is completed. Among Reagan’s original writers, only Tony Dolan lasted all eight years. In a two-term administration, it is not at all unusual to have two or three changes in the leadership of the speechwriting office. During Clinton’s eight year reign, he employed David Kusnet, Don Baer, Michael Waldman, and Terry Edwards as his chief speechwriters. Waldman lasted five years, the others considerably less.
Process: How the Speech is Made
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of presidential speechwriting concerns the process itself. Although that process varies a little from administration to administration, one can outline the general process as a way to highlight those places where issues arise. Generally, speeches are scheduled anywhere from 4–10 weeks in advance. This is a necessity since the president may give anywhere from 5–15 speeches, remarks, greetings, toasts, messages, or news conferences in any given week –all of which require work by the speechwriters. Such advance notice is especially imperative for major policy speeches, which require considerably more vetting than greetings made in the Rose Garden. Once the schedule is set – and it is never really set, since presidents must respond to accidents, emergencies, tragedies, and natural disasters that could not be foreseen at the time the schedule was composed – the director of speechwriting will assign the speeches to individual writers, trying to spread the workload around in a more or less equitable fashion, within the capabilities of the individual writers. On major speeches, the writers will usually have 2–4 weeks to compose a draft suitable for distribution. Such a draft will probably have gone through anywhere from 3 to 5 drafts internally within the speech shop. At the point it is deemed “ready” by the director of speechwriting, the draft will then be sent first to whoever is the intermediary between the head of speechwriting and the president, often the director of White House communications or the Chief of Staff. In the case of the George W. Bush administration, Michael Gerson would determine when the speech was ready; it would then be sent to the director of White House Communications, who was Karen Hughes for much of the administration. She would then take it to the president, sometimes with edits of her own. The president would then read and edit the speech as delivered to him, whereupon it would be returned to the speechwriting shop for further work. Once that work was completed, it would then go back up the line, through Gerson and Hughes, to the president. Once the president was satisfied with the draft, it would then go out for vetting to the people and offices affected by the speech. The more important the speech, the larger the number of people who will have to “sign off” on it before the text can be “frozen”. If the speech concerns foreign or military policy, the most sensitive of all speeches, the number of vetters could be as high as 20. The normal presidential speech is vetted by anywhere from 6–12 people, some of whom have editing rights (they can actually edit the text of the speech) and others of whom have commentary rights (they can write comments on the text of the speech but cannot edit it).
The vetting process has long been the bête noir for presidential speechwriters, who often chafe when people who have had no creative role in producing the speech suddenly become experts in everything from word choice to policy implications. Over the years various speechwriters have developed techniques to deal with this problem. Richard Goodwin would often hold the draft until it was too late to do much editing. Tony Dolan was known to send his drafts to the president through intermediaries who were not part of the official vetting process, including Nancy Reagan. Other speechwriters intentionally put in provocative language that they know will be struck out in the hope of retaining what they consider to be the more important parts of the speech, sacrificing one part to save the others. It is during the process of vetting the speech – which is officially called the process of clearance – that the speech emerges as the primary cite of contestation over policy. Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987 is a good example of such contestation. Drafted by Peter Robinson, the speech became famous for the line, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”. But the line almost didn’t make it into the speech because of the clearance process. The State Department objected to the line on the basis that it was not diplomatic enough – the language was too crude. If we really wanted the wall to come down, this was not the proper way to do it, by an open and public calling out of the Soviet leader. The Defense Department objected to the line on the basis of its potential to provoke a backlash. Others thought the line below the dignity of an American president. For days the line was fought over until finally the president made the decision that it would stay. This kind of dispute is a regular occurrence on major speeches, where inevitably the viewpoints of State, Defense, the Joint Chiefs, the NSC, the CIA, and whatever other departments or agencies might be involved, are in conflict. The speech text becomes the battleground for which faction’s take on policy is to be enforced. These kinds of policy disputes are often fought out under the guise of language disputes, where changing the language is tantamount to inflecting the policy in one direction or the other. Sometimes these disputes come down to a single word and the meaning or significance of that word to differing audiences.
Once the speech is “cleared”, it then goes to the fact checkers who go over every claim, every statistic, every historical example. Any part of the speech that is open to contestation is fact-checked and verified with at least two reliable sources. The fact checkers are the last line of defense against error and embarrassment. Sometimes the line between fact and fiction is quite thin. During the clearance of Reagan’s first inaugural address, it was discovered that the hero of Reagan’s peroration, Martin Treptow, was not, in fact, buried at Arlington National Cemetery as the speechwriters had assumed, but rather in Bloomer, Wisconsin. Rather than change the story about the diary page found on Treptow’s dead body – a story that Reagan liked very much – a slight change in the wording of the speech was made. Instead of saying that Treptow was buried at Arlington, the speech was changed to say that he was buried “under one such marker”, thus leaving the location of that marker ambiguous while still implying that Treptow and the heroes buried at Arlington were related.
On major speeches most presidents want a draft frozen 1–2 days in advance of the event. Sometimes that happens and sometimes it does not. It is not at all unusual for major speeches still to be undergoing editing and minor word changes right up to the moment of delivery. When Eisenhower went to New York to deliver his famous “Atoms for Peace” address to the UN General Assembly in December 1953, he ordered Air Force One to circle the field for about 20 minutes as the secretaries hurriedly tried to mimeograph and assemble copies of the text that contained Ike’s last-minute changes. Some presidents, such as Clinton, are notorious for editing right up until the last moment – a habit that led to near-disaster on more than one occasion – while others, such as Reagan, liked to have a finished and polished copy upon which few changes would normally be made. It is difficult to generalize across presidencies because each president has his own way of dealing with speech texts, and even a president’s general way of handling speeches is no sure guide to any individual speech, where circumstance and situation often dictate when, where, why, and how last minute changes are made.
The President: Communicator-in-Chief
Giving speeches is one of the chief tasks of the modern American president. Of course, it was not always so. Prior to the presidency of William McKinley in the last part of the nineteenth century, American presidents gave relatively few speeches, especially as compared to their 20th and 21st century counterparts. But with the rise of the rhetorical presidency in the early 20th century and the subsequent expansion of mass communication, first in the form of radio and then of television, giving speeches became a more important part of the presidential office. The man, the moment, and the medium all came together first in the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose mastery of radio made him one of the premier communicators of the 20th century. It is no accident that FDR was also the first president to maintain a stable of speechwriters in the White House. While Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover had each had a single White House writer, it was Roosevelt who both expanded the number of writers and institutionalized the function of speechwriting as a normative part of the presidential office. And he did so in his own unique way. Speechwriting under FDR – and indeed under each and every president since – was an expression of the beliefs and personality of the chief executive.
FDR was a born communicator. He liked people. He liked sharing and debating ideas. He liked to write and he loved to edit other people’s writing. Most importantly, he was an idea person. He liked new ideas, whether they originated with himself, or with someone within his circle, or from outside sources. If FDR liked an idea, he quickly made it his own. Unlike Eisenhower, who didn’t care who got credit for an idea, as long as it worked, FDR was intellectually jealous and guarded the authorship of his prose to a degree unheard of in the American presidency. In his book FDR and Fear Itself, Davis Houck recounts how FDR took the final draft of his first inaugural address that had been prepared by his speechwriter Ray Moley and meticulously copied it out in longhand on lined paper so that future historians could see that FDR wrote his own speeches. That’s how important speeches and speechwriting were to Roosevelt. He understood that speeches were not just vehicles for communicating ideas – though they were certainly that – but that they were also windows into a president’s identity and character. What was said, and the way it was said, and to whom it was said, and under what circumstances made all the difference in whether a president’s goals were likely to be met. With that realization, FDR set about to surround himself with one of the finest group of thinkers and writers in the history of the presidential office – Ray Moley, Tommy Corcoran, Adolf Berle, Benjamin Cohen, Robert Sherwood, Archibald McLeish, and Samuel Rosenman, chief among them. Roosevelt had a particular way of working with his writers, often asking two or more of them to work on a speech simultaneously, with each ignorant of the others’ involvement in the drafting. FDR would then take the various drafts and read through them, selecting some ideas from one and other ideas from the others. He would then ask one of the writers to take these disparate ideas and combine them into a new draft that contained all of the ideas the FDR found usable. In this way, he literally picked the brains of his advisors before assembling a text that represented his own views as distilled from the views of those who were advising him. They were no longer their views, they were now his views. And he made them his own through constant reworking, editing, and polishing of the language.
American presidents have displayed an amazing variety of ways to interface with their speechwriters – from FDR, who often offered his writers a drink as they lounged in his study to go over speeches; to Kennedy’s alter-ego relationship to Theodore Sorensen, where it was difficult to know where the one ended and the other began; to LBJ’s mercurial relationships with his writers – close and cordial at one moment, heated and distant at the next; to Carter’s resentment of anyone who tried to put words into his mouth, including his own speechwriters whom he deeply distrusted; to Reagan’s ideological sympathy and psychological identification with his writers, whom he loved but almost never saw; to George H. W. Bush’s cordial but distanced relationship not only to his writers but to the act of speaking itself, which he saw as mostly “phoney baloney”, in the words of one of his speechwriters.
As there is no one, single route to the presidency, so there is no one pattern that characterizes the relationship between presidents and their speechwriters. However, the factors that enter into determining those relationships seem clear: 1) the president’s attitudes about the role of rhetoric in governance, 2) the president’s willingness to invest significant amounts of time and energy in the communicative dimensions of the presidency, 3) the president’s personal knowledge of and experience with speech making, including the use of speechwriters, 4) the president’s own talents as a writer and editor, and 5) the president’s personal relationship to his writers, especially as that relationship relates to trust.
Some presidents – FDR and Reagan come immediately to mind – believe that rhetoric is central to governance. Other presidents, such as Ford, Carter, and Bush 41, have had little use for the spoken word as a means of accomplishing policy outcomes. In these cases attitude is the central, defining difference. George H. W. Bush is a prime example. Bush saw presidential rhetoric as part of the larger image-making function of presidential politics. As such, he considered speechmaking to be primarily public relations – a series of generic forms that had little or no relationship to the substance of governing. That being so, it naturally followed that one should spend very little time on such puffery when the real business of domestic policy and international relations beckoned. And so he didn’t. He made no effort to staff his speechwriting office with talented writers. He downgraded the privileges and ranks accorded to previous White House writers. He appointed as White House Communications Director a person with no speechwriting experience of his own and whose attitude toward speechwriting was that it should be as homogenous as possible – that there should be no distinctive voices or rhetorical signatures discernable among the different writers. These attitudes and decisions – both of the president himself and of his senior staff – contributed in no small measure to the ineffectiveness of the Bush White House.
In contrast to Bush are the presidents who did consider rhetoric to be a prime tool of governance, among them FDR, Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton. Bill Clinton understood that his ability to communicate clearly and persuasively was one of his greatest talents. He enjoyed planning speeches, enjoyed working on speeches, enjoyed the give and take with his speechwriters, and enjoyed delivering the speech to an audience – none of which could be said about George H. W. Bush. Clinton not only was involved at each stage of the composition process, but he was one of those rare presidents who actually wrote large chunks of some of his speeches. He spent more time on his speech preparation than perhaps any other president, with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan. He was involved at each stage of the process and considered speech making to be one of his most important activities. He was willing to practice his speeches and to receive criticism before delivery – something that H. W. Bush resisted at every turn. The great irony here is that the president who was a good communicator (Clinton) was willing to devote the time and energy to become even better, while the president who was a poor communicator (Bush) withdrew even further into his self-imposed belief that there was nothing he could do to improve his performance – a sure recipe for failure if ever there was one.
One of the factors that has historically distinguished presidents who are effective White House communicators from those who are not, is their prior experience with speech making and speechwriters. While virtually all occupants of the White House have made hundreds of speeches before being elected president, not all have made important speeches or worked with a bevy of speechwriters. Truman came to the presidency after less than three months as vice-president. Before that he was a senator from Missouri. He had no speechwriters as a senator and was seldom called upon to make a major speech outside of his home state. Gerald Ford had spent his entire career as a member of the House of Representatives, a body whose members seldom have full-time speechwriters, unless they are in major leadership positions. Most of Ford’s speaking had been limited to the floor of the House. Likewise, Jimmy Carter had no full-time speechwriter when he was governor of Georgia. When he started using speechwriters during the 1976 campaign, he found it hard to accept their help. That difficulty continued during his four years in the White House.
Another factor that affects the president’s ability to be an effective communicator is his own talent as a writer and speaker. FDR, Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama had demonstrated that talent before reaching the White House. Unsurprisingly, they became some of the best presidential orators. Others who had much less talent – Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson, for example – nevertheless took what talent they did have and worked to improve it through practice and the employment of talented speechwriters. Each ended up making at least one speech as president that is today recognized as a masterpiece – proof positive that natural talent alone is not the decisive factor. Speakers with merely adequate talent can rise to the occasion if they have the right attitude, work ethic, and speechwriters.
The final factor is the president’s relationship with his speechwriters. That relationship has ranged from intimate (as with Kennedy and Sorensen) to friendly (as with Eisenhower and Harlow) to business-like (in the case of Ford and Hartmann) to distanced (in the case of H. W. Bush and all of his writers) to suspicious and sometimes hostile (as with Carter and his writers). The key factor here is trust. The president must have an implicit trust in the judgment, character, ethics, talent, and rhetorical acumen of the person to whom he entrusts his words. No aide can help a president more than an inspired speechwriter; no one can hurt a president more than an uninspired or merely pedestrian one. The speechwriter who can inspire trust in his principal is one who will find writing for that person far more enjoyable. When the principal distrusts the writer, the resulting product is usually less than stellar.
The Product: A Speech
And it is that product – the speech – that I want to focus on as I draw to a close. We can understand the people, the process, and the president, but in the end it all comes down to a product. If it is a major speech, that product will be heard and read, analyzed by the media, scrutinized by friend and foe, reprinted and widely distributed by the government, and studied for generations to come by students and scholars alike. In my 2008 book with Stephen Lucas, Words of a Century: The Top 100 American Speeches, 1900–1999, published by Oxford University Press, 36 of the top 100 speeches were made by sitting presidents of the United States. Most of those 36 were written by speechwriters. They were written in moments of deep despair, such as the Great Depression, when FDR told the American people that they had “nothing to fear but fear itself”. They were written at moments of transition, as when Eisenhower warned the American people to guard against the power being acquired by the “military-industrial complex”. They were penned at moments of social revolution, as when Lyndon Johnson faced the American people to speak “for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy”, in support of voting rights for African Americans. And they were spoken in times of great sadness, as when Ronald Reagan remembered the Challenger astronauts as they “waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God”.
Great ideas and moving language are those that match themselves to specific situations. Sometimes those situations have a long and complex history. At other times they come on quickly, with little or no warning. As a textual critic, I have examined many presidential speeches, oftentimes pouring over the multiple drafts of a single speech to try to discern the motives for textual changes. In the case of Eisenhower alone, I have written analyses of seven of his major speeches, in each case trying to discern the influence of speechwriting on the final product. What I have learned through these critical exercises would probably take a book to fully explicate, but here are some distillations of my findings.
To begin, it is important to remember that a speech text is like a living organism. It may start as one kind of thing, but it usually evolves into something quite different. Indeed, I have referred to this tendency as “organic evolution at work in the world of art”, and have described it like this:
What starts as a change in terminology in draft #2, becomes a change of verb form in draft #3, then a rearrangement of sentences in draft #4, then part of a new paragraph in draft #5, necessitating in draft #6 a new illustration which, itself, necessitates further stylistic changes until by the final draft the original sentiment may be eliminated entirely.
This kind of evolution in the speech text is the primary way that rhetorical invention happens in a speech prepared by speechwriters. Such changes are driven by eight factors, one or more of which arise in every speechwriting situation. Textual evolution happens when there is:
1) A change in the purpose of the address.
2) A change in the external circumstances or situation.
3) A change in the person(s) doing the writing.
4) A change in the target audience(s).
5) A change in the timing of when the speech will be given.
6) A change in presidential temperament about any of the first five factors.
7) A change in empirical facts.
8) A change in the internal debate and dynamics within the administration.
In my study of Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech, I found that the first draft included all sorts of topics that various people in the administration wanted addressed – from the European Defense Community to the need to balance the budget. Most of those topics would, in fact, drop out completely by the final draft – and here’s why. Between the first and second draft, the administration had received a note from the Soviet Union calling for a dismantling of American defense structures in Europe. The second draft was thus transformed into a rebuttal of that note. Between draft 2 and 3, the administration received an invitation from the Secretary General of the United Nations for the president to address the General Assembly. What had until this point been a speech targeted to the American public suddenly became a speech to the world body. As the audience changed in draft 3, so too did the purpose. The speech was no longer simply a report to the American people on the dangers of the nuclear age. Instead it now became a “vehicle for playing superpower politics on the stage of world opinion”. Up through draft 4 there has been no involvement by Eisenhower at all. But in draft 5 the president decided to edit the whole speech, adding several lines and one whole paragraph in his own handwriting. In so doing, he greatly softened the language, taking a more conciliatory tone and strengthening the themes of peace and hope. Draft 6 added a peroration on “the hope for peace”. Eisenhower took draft 7 with him when he flew to Bermuda for a Big-Three conference. There he showed the most recent draft to the leaders of France and Great Britain, the latter of whom was a fellow named Churchill. With their input draft 8 was produced. It removed all references to colonialism and further softened the language. Drafts 9 and 10 continued to soften the language by deleting the threat of nuclear retaliation, further de-emphasizing the centrality of American arms, and adopting an explicitly global perspective. Draft 11, the final draft, was produced on the plane ride from Bermuda to New York City, and added an arresting vision of the future where “experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine, and other peaceful activities”.
In this one speech we can see several of these eight factors at work: a change in purpose, brought on by a change in situation, that in turn constituted a change in audience as well as a change in timing. The Soviet note, the invitation from Dag Hammarskjold, and the meeting with Churchill all resulted in changes to the speech text and reflected an ongoing evolution within the administration as to what, exactly, they hoped to accomplish with this speech. Although the writers did not change, virtually everything else did. These are the typical kinds of dynamics to which presidential speechwriters must be able to respond.
By understanding the people who write the speeches, the processes they use, the presidents for whom they write, and the products they create, we can better appreciate the place of speechwriting in both domestic and international politics.
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