The Speechwriter Read Free

closed, as if he found the conversation slightly disappointing. Sometimes he would contend with reporters over the phone, the receiver clutched between his head and shoulder, and play video games at the same time. Aaron couldn’t be shaken or hurt; he could endurethe governor’s cruelest and most irrational criticisms as if he’d barely heard them.
    There were three other guys in the press office: me, Nat, and an alternating member, which at that time was Mack. Mack was from the Department of Commerce, a cabinet agency. Commerce was on the fifteenth floor of a sleek downtown building adjacent to the State House. The governor had “borrowed” him from Commerce, which was his way of keeping operating costs for the office at about half of what it had been under the previous governor. Mack, who was from Nebraska or one of the Dakotas, seemed angry about being moved from the crisp, spacious offices of the Commerce Department to the governor’s cluttered press office. He generally sat with his face sullenly fixed on his computer screen. I believe he had made the understandable but fatal error of interpreting the governor’s criticisms of his writing as personal animus. Anyhow he moved on a few months later, and a myth grew up that he had been on the verge of killing someone.
    Nat was a Michigander who had found himself in the South through some complicated set of circumstances involving a scholarship. He had a wife and two daughters, as I did, but a fiercer drive to succeed. Nat would usually arrive earlier and stay later than I did, and he was naturally inclined to become more emotionally invested in performing his job well than was healthy. There was a certain dry midwestern intensity about Nat: he laughed without smiling and always seemed to know something you didn’t. Later the governor would put him in charge of operations, which meant he wasalways telling you to do something the governor wanted you to do. He seemed uncomfortable giving direct orders, perhaps because this was the South and southerners don’t always say things directly. So he would tell you to do things in awkwardly courteous ways.
    â€œBarton,” he might say, trying hard to sound relaxed and friendly, “uh, two questions for you. One, how’s your family?”
    â€œThey’re fine,” I would say. “What’s the second thing?”
    The second thing would of course be the command, which Nat always put in the form of a question: “The Hibernian Society dinner is next month. Could you draft a few toasts for the governor?”
    Our office was in the glorious and noble State House, which I reckon is the greatest building in the state, but the press shop itself was a cramped space with the smell of many years of reheated lunches and was difficult to negotiate owing to the great piles of newspapers, magazines, notebooks, and foam board–mounted charts. The walls too were cluttered. Recently there had been a rally outside the State House protesting the governor’s veto of a million dollars or so in funding for a bureaucracy called the Arts Commission, and on the wall were two giant placards bearing the words “Keep Funding for the Arts.” There were several calendars on the wall, some of them two or three years old. Just over my desk was a picture of the governor, cut from a magazine. He was talking to a small crowd, both his arms extended to one side as if he had been indicating the size of something. Above his head someone had written, “And then a little manabout this big came out of the woods and told me to run for governor!”
    After about two weeks of my trying to look busy, Nat told me to “take a stab” at a speech. (Members of the press office came naturally to use the governor’s own diction, even in casual conversation; sometimes we even peppered our talk with “aahh” and “wwwww.”) The speech at which I was to take a stab was an address