The Speechwriter Page 16

  Pictures had to come down from the office walls, desks had to be cleaned out, and the stacks of newspapers and notebooks and manila folders and old executive budgets had to be stored in boxes or thrown out. Hundreds of pages of the governor’s handwritten notes for speeches, together with the note cards he used to deliver them, all had to be put in boxes and sent to the archives. It felt good to seal them up with industrial boxing tape and send them away, like burying a hateful relative.

  * * *

  The last time I saw the governor was early one weekend morning before the inauguration of his successor. I’d come in to fill out some remaining paperwork and box up a few items. When I got there, the door to his office was open. I looked in. Most of the furniture was gone. Boxes were everywhere. His office had been full of baubles given to him by admiring citizens and sundry companies and organizations: a toy crane, a replica passenger jet, a small palmetto tree made exclusively of bottle caps. Until a few days before, there had been framed pictures everywhere: pictures of the governor with his family, of the governor with other famous politicians, of the governor with various hardhat-wearing dignitaries holding shovels at groundbreaking ceremonies. Now the walls were bare, the pictures packed away. His desk was gone. A great stack of books he’d been intending to read was gone too.

  The governor was there, alone as far as I could tell. He sat on one of the remaining chairs looking at a few of the pictures that hadn’t yet been stored away. He held one in his hands and gazed at it silently. I couldn’t make it out and wondered if it was a picture of his sons or his wife. He looked at it for a long time. When he put it down, he just sat silently.

  Was he at last pondering the ruin he’d created? Maybe in part, but I doubt he thought of it as ruin. The word suggests finality, and I was sure that this man would not accept any form of finality until his heart stopped beating. He had been ready to pick up the pieces almost as soon as he’d strewn them on the ground; resigning may have been an option for a few days, but leaving the public sphere never was. I was sure of it. When people asked me what he planned to do after leaving office, I would say I didn’t know but expected he would start figuring out what office to run for next. That would get a laugh, but I meant it, and I knew I was right. Men like him think of achievement and victory, not of failure, and when they fail disastrously their first thought is not to repair the damage but to gauge how far it is to the next victory. Of course this isn’t a new insight. Politicians have dishonored themselves and embarrassed their families and allies many times before, and their staff—sometimes in books like this one—have expressed shock and dismay at the way their chiefs have wanted to make it all go away with a few insincere apologies. Why do we continue to trust these men?

  Let me ask that question in a more pointed way: Why do we trust men who have sought and attained high office by innumerable acts of vanity and self-will? When a work colleague makes a habit of insisting on his own competence and virtue, we may tolerate him, we may even admire his work, but his vanity is not an inducement to trust him. Why, then, do we trust the men who make careers of persuading us of their goodness and greatness, and who compete for our votes? Catherine Zuckert makes this point powerfully in an essay on Tom Sawyer. Tom, remember, is brave and clever and has a firm sense of the right thing to do, but he is animated mainly by a hunger for glory. He is, in short, the essence of an able politician. “People like Tom Sawyer serve others not for the sake of the others,” writes Zuckert. “They serve because they glory in receiving glory. . . . We should reward such people with the fame they so desire—if and when they perform real public services. But we should not trust them.”II I feel the force of that last sentence now: we go badly wrong when we trust them. Indeed much of the hand-wringing commentary about the loss of trust in government resulting from Vietnam and Watergate is simply, I now think, a failure to appreciate the simple truth that politicians should never have been trusted in the first place. They may be lauded when they’re right and venerated when they’re dead, but they should never be trusted.

  I say all this confidently now, but it wasn’t that long ago that I thought the answer to all our social and political problems was to elect the right people—good people with the right ideas and the courage to act on them. Before I went to work for the governor, I thought he was one of the right people. And he was. He did what he said he was going to do, he took his duties seriously, he behaved himself in public with charm and decorum, he did not fear criticism, and he had realistic views of what government could and couldn’t accomplish. He was everything a politician should be—a politician in the best sense of that word, if it has a best sense. After two or three weeks of working for him, though, I knew something was wrong. It wasn’t that I thought he should have been the same thoughtful political leader in private that he was in public; the difference between public persona and reality is a valuable and inevitable one. Rather, I found it unnerving to discover such a stark difference between the personality he presented to the public and the one to which he subjected his staff. I remarked on this difference many times to my wife during that first year. We often laughed about it, but I think we both knew it signified something terrible—not just about the governor but about the world, or at least about democratic cultures in which political leaders often function as celebrities and even heroes. What that something was came to me much later, when I glimpsed the depth of his self-absorption. Here was a man who shattered his ambitions and humiliated his family and friends by pursuing his own petty, myopic desires. And yet in his ruin he could not find more than the paltriest shred of genuine self-criticism. I believe he wanted to feel a deeper remorse, but he looked inside and it wasn’t there. All he found was more of himself.

  And if that was true of him, it wasn’t true only of him. It was true to one degree or another of all politicians. So the axiom on which I had unconsciously based my thinking for years—that what we needed was to elect the right people, good people, smart and wise and principled people—had been a delusion. That’s probably putting it too strongly. We should want to elect wise and principled people, but once you think of them as wise and principled, you trust them, and at about the time you trust them, they undermine your trust and you’ve got to find someone else. So I realized that the men in whom I had placed my hopes could at any moment fall victim to vain impulses and self-addiction and so make clowns of themselves and ruin the causes for which they claimed to fight.

  I must sound hopelessly naïve. Hadn’t I noticed that politicians are prone to vanity, and that vanity frequently unmakes them? Yes, I had noticed. But I had thought of it mainly as a joke. Now I realized it wasn’t a joke. It was the most important thing.

  Self-regard isn’t a foible to which some politicians are vulnerable. It is the peculiar and deadly flaw of modern democratic politics. Let me explain what I mean, briefly. There have been essentially three ways of arranging a constitutionally limited government, three ways of placing men under the authority of other men according to preordained laws. The first is by submitting to a constitutionally limited monarch. Subjects love or at least respect the king because of who he is: he is theirs, just as his father was before him. If the king is a fool or a tyrant, he is still the king and entitled to reverence, though not to obedience in every respect; only if he breaks the bond between himself and his subjects entirely can he be thrown out. The second is by establishing some form of meritocracy. No political entity can achieve complete meritocracy because merit, although we know it when we see it, or at least we think we do, is too hard to define and impossible to predict. Greater or lesser forms of meritocracy existed (in the English-speaking world) from the time of Oliver Cromwell to the mid-twentieth century. It was Cromwell who rejected the practice of appointing aristocratic and royal favorites and pursued the principle that men should be chosen according to their capabilities rather than their blood ties and social connections. During this era meritocracy mixed with both democracy and aristocracy, sometimes
tending in one direction, sometimes in the other, but the essential idea was government by people qualified to govern. That ideal was still at least theoretically practicable in Western democracies until the principle of universal suffrage began its ascendency. At our nation’s founding, remember, the idea that everybody should have the right to vote was the crazy dream of a few radicals; in most places only property owners could vote, state legislatures elected U.S. senators, and electors chosen by legislators elected presidents. What’s left to us now is the third form of constitutional government: giving authority to men and women chosen by simple majorities. Since we don’t believe in hereditary royal authority, and since we’ve accepted the idea that virtually everyone should have the vote, we have no choice but to confer power on those who can persuade most of us that they’ll use it well. Successful politicians are people who know how to make us think well of them without our realizing that that’s what they’re doing; they know how to make us admire and trust them.

  I don’t say any of this to demean politicians. It takes an able and industrious person to do what they do, and many of them are capable of courage and honorable conduct. But the same can be said of traveling salesmen; it does not follow that we should trust them. The brutal reality is that politicians gain power by convincing us that they are wise and trustworthy. What they do isn’t in fact very different from the classical arts of rhetoric or oratory. Most modern politicians, and certainly the one I worked for, are not orators in the common sense of the word, but they use language, timing, and images to win electoral and legislative victories, just as the Sophists did in the fourth and fifth centuries BC. In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates reviles rhetoric as a form of “flattery,” sometimes translated as “pandering”: “the ghost or counterfeit of a branch of politics.” Flattery “pretends to be that which it simulates,” says Socrates, “and having no regard for men’s highest interests, is ever making pleasure the bait of the unwary, and deceiving them into the belief that it is of the highest value to them.” Rhetoricians, in other words—politicians—please the masses not by actually doing wise and virtuous things with state power but by making the masses believe that that’s what they are doing, or that that’s what they want to do, or that that’s what they would do if more power were given to them. We could press Socrates on whether he really believes it’s all a matter of pleasure, but there is an undeniable kind of pleasure to be had in a politician’s expression of a message we approve of, or of any powerful person’s enunciation of our own views. When the governor speculated that the administration in Washington was attempting to create a “savior-based economy,” the effect had an almost aesthetic quality to it, like reading a line of poetry that encapsulates a thought you didn’t even know you had until you read it.

  The problem was that the governor wanted to be a savior himself. His ideas were sound, his views genuinely held, and at crucial times he showed great courage in holding to them—the kind of defiant fearlessness we long for in politics. But he was a politician, and so he had a direct personal interest in others believing these things about him. Acclaim and attention were his highest aim—just as they are every determined politician’s highest aim: the praise, the fawning, the seriousness with which people take their remarks, the gaze of audiences, the way a crowded room falls silent when they enter. When we revere a politician and give him our vote, we do so because we believe his most fervent desire is to contribute to the nation’s well-being or to make the right decisions with public money. That may be a desire, but it is not what drives him. What drives him is the thirst for glory; the public good, as he understands it, is a means to that end. So when a great statesman accomplishes a laudable goal by sagacity and bravery, we’re right to give him the praise he craves. But when we’re surprised and disgusted because the man we lauded has humiliated himself and disgraced his office, we haven’t just misjudged a man—we’ve misjudged the nature of modern politics.

  In the office, amid the empty walls and taped-up boxes, I stood there watching the governor for another minute or two. He didn’t move for a long time but sat staring at a shuttered window. Perhaps he was thinking of what he would do next or whether greater things lay ahead.

  I backed quietly out of the room and went home.

  * * *

  I. Essay on the History of Civil Society, part 1, section 3.

  II. Catherine Zuckert, “Tom Sawyer: Potential President,” in Democracy’s Literature, edited by Patrick Deneen and Joseph Romance (Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2005), 61–78 (76).

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © Yevette Shaver

  Barton Swaim, a South Carolinian since age three, attended the University of South Carolina and the University of Edinburgh. From 2007 to 2010 he worked for Mark Sanford, the state’s governor, as a communications officer and speechwriter. He lives in Columbia with his wife, Laura, and three daughters, and writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal and the Times Literary Supplement.

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  Copyright © 2015 by Barton Swaim

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  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition July 2015

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  Interior design by Lewelin Polanco

  Jacket design by Jonathan Bush

  Jacket photographs © Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Swaim, Barton, 1972–

  The speechwriter : a brief education in politics / Barton Swaim. — First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.

  pages cm

  1. Sanford, Mark, 1960– 2. Sanford, Mark, 1960– —Friends and associates.

  3. South Carolina—Politics and government—1951– 4. Swaim, Barton, 1972–

  5. Speechwriters—South Carolina—Biography. I. Title.

  F275.42.S26S94 2015

  328.3'3092—dc23

  [B]

  2014047506

  ISBN 978-1-4767-6992-9

  ISBN 978-1-4767-6996-7 (ebook)