The Speechwriter Read Free Page A

to one of the state’s military brigades, a farewell address before the soldiers left for Afghanistan. I sensed that Nat didn’t enjoy writing speeches, that he wanted to move to some other function in the office, and that he had had less than total success as the governor’s writer.
    The address flowed from my head with no effort at all. Nat told me the governor liked to have three points. Sometimes four, but never two. The speech had to do with honor, sacrifice, and something else, I forget what. It was all fairly predictable, I remember thinking, but I felt I had put the points together with some skill, and I had used two or three quotations that I felt sure would impress the governor: one from a Psalm and another from a speech by Adlai Stevenson, whose biography I had just read.
    When you were done writing an address—“talking points” was the general term—you were to place it in the governor’s “speech book,” the most important of the office’s innumerable three-ring binders. Once you put the speech in the speech book, you waited. Usually, Nat said, the governor would come into the press office and tell you he didn’t like it and tell you to “take another stab” or to give him “something memorable.”But the governor didn’t ask me for any revisions on this first speech.
    The day of the speech came, and I listened to it with ears greedy for my own words. As he approached the podium, he walked erect; all his movements seemed smooth and intentional. Once he’d gotten the acknowledgments and thank-you’s out of the way, his first words were “As we gather here to send these brave men and women into harm’s way, I think it behooves us to remember how fragile life is.” I felt a surge of electricity go through me. With the exception of “into harm’s way,” that’s what I had written. I’d chosen the normally ridiculous word “behooves” because it’s a military sort of word. He kept going, and it was more or less what I’d written. I felt dizzy. He even used the Adlai Stevenson quote, which I feared might be a stretch.
    It wasn’t just that they were mostly my words, though. In fact the words themselves weren’t particularly memorable, and anyhow the governor didn’t sound like a phrasemaker or a wordsmith; he stumbled over a few of the lines and twice pronounced “lest” as “least.” It wasn’t the words; it was his manner. There was a natural warmth and directness about his presence: the movement of his hands was understated and graceful, his pauses thoughtful rather than awkward, his posture relaxed. Nor was there a hint of the prefab humility you get from most politicians on solemn occasions: the exaggerated tributes to “the brave men and women of the United States military,” the body posture that says “This show is about me” even as the mouth discharges panegyrical cant about the character and commitment of others.The governor knew how to look like he didn’t take himself too seriously, as if there had been a time in his life when he didn’t.
    On the following Monday he called me into a meeting of senior staff. I started to sit, but he told me not to. “Aahh. I just wanted to say, that speech to the Two-eighteenth was fantastic.” That was his word, “fantastic.” He said he’d used the hard copy of the talk I’d given him, something he said he’d never done before.
    For the next forty-eight hours or so, I felt an enormous surge of self-satisfaction. I would soon be indispensable. I would study the questions faced by this great, graceful statesman, and I would suggest to him what he should say. He wouldn’t always say what I suggested, but often he would. Someday I would write for the president, maybe. I would be revered for my skills as a fashioner of words.
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    A few days later the governor walked