The Speechwriter Read online

  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 was always 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.

  “Barton,” he might say, trying hard to sound relaxed and friendly, “uh, two questions for you. One, how’s your family?”

  “They’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 man about 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 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.

  * * *

  A few days later the governor walked into the press office and said he wanted an op-ed. The topic was the recently concluded legislative session. Nat gave me some guidance on what the governor wanted to say about the session, and I wrote a draft. I gave it to Nat to edit. I stood behind him as he struck and rearranged phrases. I noticed he changed one of my sentences to begin with “Yet.”

  “He won’t like that,” I said. “He said he doesn’t like beginning sentences with conjunctions.”

  “He doesn’t know ‘yet’ is a conjunction.”

  I also noticed Nat alliterating, and mentioned it. He had written “friends of fiscal fecklessness” or “legislative liberality” or something like that. He smiled vaguely. “He hates it. I do it just to make him mad.” I asked if he wouldn’t mind not doing that, and he agreed to rewrite the phrase. We labored over this little piece for another half hour. The introduction said something about the governor’s sons disliking report cards and compared what he had to say about the legislative session to a report card informing parents (taxpayers) where their children (the taxpayers’ paid representatives) had succeeded and where they had failed. It was hokey, but only slightly, and it cast the governor in a favorable light: he was a father insisting on accountability at home and in government.

  I gave it to him; he said he would read it that night.

  The next morning he swung open the great mahogany door of the press office, paper in hand. “Again,” he began, clearly dissatisfied. The governor would begin sentences with the word “again” not as a way of calling your attention to something he had said before but as a way of expressing unhappiness. Maybe he had expressed the same opinion on an earlier occasion, but it had been months in the past and was almost certainly said to someone else, not you; or maybe he was referring to the night before, when he had read the piece and mentally criticized it, only you weren’t there.

  “Again,” he said, “this just doesn’t sound like me.”

  “What doesn’t sound like you?” I asked.

  “
It just—it just. I don’t know. We’re not there. You’re not getting the voice.”

  “Can you give me an example?”

  “The whole thing. It’s just not me. I’ll work on this myself and give it to you tomorrow.”

  The next morning we received his revision. At the top of the page were his initials, signifying (it was explained to me) that no changes were to be made to the document save typographical errors or the most shocking grammatical mistakes. He had rewritten it entirely. Hardly a phrase remained from the draft. I can still recite the opening sentence from memory: “Legislative sessions represent a way of bringing change to our state—and given that our last one ended a few weeks ago, I write to give you my take on what happened and what it means going forward.”

  I looked at Nat in disbelief. “‘Legislative sessions represent a way of bringing change to our state’?”

  Nat smiled vaguely as if he had known the outcome beforehand. He told me that “the whole ‘new speechwriter’ thing” was bound to wear off and that I was now one of the staff. “For two weeks or so you get to be the bright shiny new thing. Then you become—just an old key.”

  “An old key?”

  “Useful occasionally but nothing special. And duplicable. I just made that up. It’s actually pretty good.”

  Aaron was there. It was then that he told me that everyone who worked for this governor had one goal. It wasn’t to please him with your superior work, because that would never happen. The goal was to “take away any reason he might have to bitch at you.” It was then too that Nat explained that my job wasn’t to write well; it was to write like the governor. I wasn’t hired to come up with brilliant phrases. I was hired to write what the governor would have written if he had had the time.

  “And this is how he writes?”

  “Um, yeah,” Nat said. “Welcome to hell.”

  3

  * * *

  LANGUAGE

  The governor had just won reelection to a second four-year term. He had routed his opponent, a gigantic man with an oafish grin who had criticized the governor for failing to “get things done.” There was an element of truth in that criticism. The joke about the governor was that he didn’t play well with others. Most of the state’s legislators hated him; they overrode his vetoes by huge margins. The contrast between him and them was extreme. They spoke with heavy accents; he spoke with a relaxed, somehow aristocratic lilt. They came across as warm and jolly; he was charming but aloof. They were mostly overweight, a few severely so, and physically unprepossessing; he was thin, six feet tall, with deer-like features and sad eyes. They had wives back home and, in many cases, girlfriends in the capital; the governor’s wife had a natural, unflashy beauty, and their four well-adjusted young sons lent the family an appearance of decency and strength other politicians long for. The legislators had little regard for ideological differences; apart from the R’s and D’s after their names, their voting patterns were largely indistinguishable; the majority party exercised near total control of the legislature, and the opposition offered only an occasional squeak in protest, so desperate were its members to hold on to what power and prestige they had. The governor, by contrast, spoke endlessly about ideological differences; again and again he denounced the majority party’s—his own party’s—reluctance to act on its supposed principles. Their staffers wore seersucker suits with pastel bow ties in the summer and high-quality wool suits the rest of the year; they drove gigantic SUVs and paid for them with six-figure salaries. The governor’s staffers were paid little and looked it. Members of the General Assembly enjoyed the perquisites of office and the visible trappings of authority: the catered banquets, the special car tags, the fawning female lobbyists. The tags on the first family’s cars were the ordinary ones, and when the governor went to a catered banquet, you’d see him putting boiled shrimp or a couple of deviled eggs into a napkin and stuffing it into his jacket pocket so he wouldn’t have to buy dinner on the way home. They named roads and interchanges after themselves; one of the main routes from the capital to the coast, for example, reads like a roll call in the senate. There were never any plans to name anything after the governor.

  The governor was famous for his frugality; it was part of the brand. His father, though well off by most standards—he was a heart surgeon in the state’s Lowcountry—had prevented his children from enjoying much in the way of luxury. The governor had inherited some wealth, and he’d had a postcollegiate stint at Goldman Sachs and learned to make a good deal more (how I’m not sure). But he inherited his father’s parsimonious ways. There were legends about how he had slept on a futon during his days in Congress (he had won his first election in 1994 and served three terms) in order to return his housing allowance to the U.S. Treasury; about how, despite the millions he made in real estate, he had driven the same old Honda for years. In politics, legends are always just legends, and enterprising reporters were always trying to upend those of the governor’s frugality. But these attempts usually ended up reinforcing as much of the legend as they contradicted. He hadn’t slept on a futon every night, a reporter discovered; often he slept in a Georgetown apartment owned by a friend. But this only emphasized the fact that he had in fact slept on a futon in his office.

  The remarkable thing about his reputation for cheapness is that it was true. Or true in spirit. Everybody had a story about the governor’s parsimony. I can remember being in the car with him on a sizzling summer afternoon, a security officer driving, the car stopped at a train crossing. While we waited for the train to pass, the governor insisted that the officer turn off the car in order to save gas. Deprived of the air conditioner, we sat for a few minutes while the train took its time. I could see a bead of sweat dropping off the tip of his chin as he talked on the phone and pretended not to notice how miserable he had made himself and us.

  Most of his clothing was in a deplorable state. He would not consent to have it dry-cleaned; his staff, and his wife, would occasionally have his shirts and trousers cleaned without his knowledge. He wore only one coat, a navy blazer with one or two missing sleeve buttons, and one pair of trousers, charcoal gray. Both had so many stains that, had they been of a lighter color, their filth would have been revolting. Once I saw inside the collar of one of his white button-up shirts; it was solid brown. Another time he wore the same white shirt, an ink stain on the sleeve, for almost two weeks straight.

  It was part of the governor’s genius—the remark was commonplace—to turn his mania for saving money into a political asset. His tirades against wasteful government expenditure were delivered with evident conviction. He could not read or hear about the General Assembly dedicating $104,000 for the construction of a green bean museum without visible agitation. When he was shown a newspaper report about a government employee, a university vice president, whose “travel expenses” exceeded the salaries of many of the university’s staff, he held the newspaper with one hand and slapped it with the other, as if striking the face of the offender. For a minute he seemed too shaken or angry to speak; he just mumbled, “Bleeding the life out of you people.”

  The governor’s Christmas gifts were a yearly joke. In his congressional days, his wife had bought gifts for the staff, spending a modest sum, $200 or so, according to the legend. When he discovered this, he denounced his wife’s improvidence so forcefully that she vowed to leave the task to him. The result was a comedy that, in its way, was more valuable than actual gifts: the governor would regift items that had been given to him by grateful constituents throughout the year. My first year in the office I received a T-shirt advertising a hardware store (“a family business since 1972!”). The next year I received several cans of shoe polish wrapped in cellophane. Mack got a three-year-old jar of preserves. Another staffer received a Christmas ornament bearing the words “Merry Christmas! Love, the Peterkins.”

  The governor’s neurotic cheapness had bigger consequences. One was that most of the staff was under
thirty years old. He wanted a tiny staff, paid poorly and prepared to work long hours, which in practice meant young people, mostly unmarried. Sometimes it seemed like a band of kids were in charge of the state. Once, when some of the senior staff were absent, Rick, the chief of staff, remarked that it looked like “Bring Your Kids to Work Day, only without the parents.” Another consequence was that you knew you could be let go. It wasn’t a typical government job in which you could get lost in the process. There were only about twenty-five of us in the office—half the size of administrations in other small states—and poor performance was obvious to everybody. There was nowhere to hide, no way to settle at the bottom. This was probably a good thing in most respects, but there was something indecent in the way some of us strove, like prisoners in a gulag, to become useful to the master.

  I began to think this way after just a few weeks. A month or two in, there were signs that I might not be the writer the governor wanted. Almost certainly wasn’t. He hadn’t liked any of my op-eds. During those first few months Laura, my wife, told me several times that I needed to start writing badly—badly like him, with clumsy, meandering sentences and openings that seemed calculated to make you stop reading. But I couldn’t bring myself to try it.

  I don’t claim that my writing was brilliant, but the objections he raised were mystifying to me and sometimes totally unreasonable. He would quibble with a harmless phrase and, instead of saying simply that he didn’t like it and having me change it or changing it himself, he would fulminate about it and rewrite the entire piece in a fit of irritation. It was almost as if he was afraid that if somebody started writing precisely what he wanted, he’d have no control over what was written. Expressing constant dissatisfaction was perhaps his way of maintaining control. Once, he stormed into the press office, paper in hand, incensed that I had written the words “towns of Lee County.” He thought it should have been “towns in Lee County.” He walked around to various offices—legislative, policy, law—asking staffers if they thought it sounded right to say “towns of” or “towns in” Lee County.