The Speechwriter Read online

  I tried writing some letters for him. This seemed to go slightly, though only slightly better.

  Every great politician has a special discipline, and the governor’s was letter writing. The rule was, if anybody said anything favorable about him in the press or anywhere else, that person would get a letter from the governor. Not a form letter: the words had to make it clear that this letter was to this person for this reason. The press office was also tasked with drafting “happy letters”—letters to people who had done something heroic, received awards, or done or achieved something otherwise noteworthy. The governor demanded that large numbers of happy letters be sent out every month, a demand that required us to expand the meaning of noteworthiness. If a citizen of the state had been appointed by the president to a federal regulatory board, that person got a letter. But there were few such occasions, and we were forced to scour the papers for hometown heroes: a local businessman who’d been recognized by the American Red Cross for generosity, an elderly lady who’d been a county librarian for fifty years, a teenager who’d pulled a man from a burning car.

  One of the first happy letters I wrote was to a soldier who had been awarded a Purple Heart. I drafted a letter of moderate length written in an informal style with modestly stately diction: not flowery but sufficiently laudatory. I showed him the letter.

  “Again,” he said, gesturing in a way that signified dissatisfaction. “What did this guy do to get a Purple Heart?”

  “He defused roadside bombs.”

  “I need—you know—something thoughtful, something moving. Just give me something else.”

  There were several more exchanges between the governor and me over this letter, and they all went about the same way. At last he approved a draft, making only one change. I had written, “the fact that you’ve risked your life for your country”; he altered it to “risked your life in the service of national duty.”

  * * *

  It’s impossible to attain much success in politics if you’re the sort of person who can’t abide disingenuousness. This isn’t to say politics is full of lies and liars; it has no more liars than other fields do. Actually one hears very few proper lies in politics. Using vague, slippery, or just meaningless language is not the same as lying: it’s not intended to deceive so much as to preserve options, buy time, distance oneself from others, or just to sound like you’re saying something instead of nothing.

  Sometimes, for instance, there would be a matter the governor didn’t want to discuss in public, but we knew he’d be asked about it at his next public appearance, or in any case Aaron would be asked about it. Let’s say the head of a cabinet agency had been accused by a state senator of running a cockfighting ring. His behavior would fall within executive purview, but since he had not been indicted or even legally accused, he couldn’t be fired or forced to resign. Aaron knew the governor would be asked about it at a press conference, so our office would issue a statement to any member of the press who asked about it. “[The senator’s] remarks have raised some troubling questions,” the statement might say, “and we’re looking closely at the situation in an effort to determine whether it merits further investigation by state or local law enforcement. At the same time, we want to avoid rushing to judgment, and we hope all concerned will likewise avoid making accusations in the absence of evidence.” This is the kind of statement Aaron would need: one that said something without saying anything. It would get the governor on record without committing him to any course of action. Hence the rhetorical dead weight: “state or local law enforcement” instead of just “law enforcement”; all that about “rushing to judgment” and “making accusations in the absence of evidence,” as if anybody needed to be told that. If a reporter asked the governor about it, he could avoid talking about it without having to use that self-incriminating phrase “No comment.” “I’d go back to what we’ve already said on this,” he might say, and repeat the gaseous phrases of the statement.

  Many people take this as evidence of duplicity or cynicism. But they don’t know what it’s like to be expected to make comments, almost every working day, on things of which they have little or no reliable knowledge or about which they just don’t care. They don’t appreciate the sheer number of things on which a politician is expected to have a position. Issues on which the governor had no strong opinions, events over which he had no control, situations on which it served no useful purpose for him to comment—all required some kind of remark from our office. On a typical day Aaron might be asked to comment on the indictment of a local school board chairman, the ongoing drought in the Upstate, a dispute between a power company and the state’s environmental regulatory agency, and a study concluding that some supposedly crucial state agency had been underfunded for a decade. Then there were the things the governor actually cared about: a senate committee’s passage of a bill on land use, a decision by the state supreme court on legislation applying to only one county, a public university’s decision to raise tuition by 12 percent. Commenting on that many things is unnatural, and sometimes it was impossible to sound sincere. There was no way around it, though. Journalists would ask our office about anything having remotely to do with the governor’s sphere of authority, and you could give only so many minimalist responses before you began to sound disengaged or ignorant or dishonest. And the necessity of having to manufacture so many views on so many subjects, day after day, fosters a sense that you don’t have to believe your own words. You get comfortable with insincerity. It affected all of us, not just the boss. Sometimes I felt no more attachment to the words I was writing than a dog has to its vomit.

  It was our job to generate supplies of “language.” Once the governor was comfortable with a certain argument or a certain way of stating a position, that became our “language.” Language fell under the press office’s purview. “Do we have anything on the cigarette tax?” someone from the policy office would ask. “Yeah, we’ve got language on that.” Every week, sometimes every day, some new dispute would have all the attention—tax incentives for corporate retailers, a lawsuit against the Department of Social Services, a bill forcing businesses to verify the immigration status of all their employees—and language was needed for each one. Sometimes you got the feeling that all these fights over policies didn’t amount to much more than a lot of words. It was Foucault who held that political power structures were really just a matter of “competing discourses.” There’s something to that idea, only in my experience nobody controlled anything, and certainly not discourse. Nobody ever won. It felt like a long pitched battle in which there were no victors and only occasional casualties.

  Once, when the governor had angered the public education establishment over a funding issue, the office received a barrage of calls chastising him for his “arrogance.” Almost all the callers, we began to notice, used that word. Then we realized that most of them were just reading a statement given to them by some advocacy group. I was sitting next to June, the deputy chief of staff, when she took one of these calls. She had heard the statement recited many times already and knew it ended with the words “Please tell the governor to stop his political posturing. We, the voters, are watching.” Evidently this caller had stumbled over the phrase “political posturing” and lost her place in the script. So June helpfully added, “You, the voters, are watching?”

  “Yes,” the caller said.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” June answered, chewing gum and playing Brick Breaker on her computer. “I’ll pass along your message to the governor.”

  * * *

  Our first task was mastering the language we already had; the second, for me, was developing the capacity to produce it anew. This wasn’t going well. I took great pains with my compositions; I groped for just the right word, rearranged sentences to make them strike the ear in just the right way. That’s the difficult thing about writing well: you labor for a long time over a single paragraph, as I have this one, and in the end, if yo
u’re successful, it looks as if it took no work at all. I anticipated that the governor would sense the difference between what I produced and what my colleagues and predecessors produced.

  I did not feel superior to them in other respects. They were far more intelligent and capable than I was and worked faster. They understood the import of complicated policy decisions. They could speak credibly about the differences between competing bills on income tax reduction and the principles underlying each one. They seemed to have a natural and instantaneous grasp of things like labor force growth and global GDP. Yet when they tried to put their understanding into written form, they sounded like morons. Nat was a partial exception here, but even he seemed to think that writing was good only if it sounded grandiose, which to him meant using blistering sarcasm, cute analogies, and of course alliteration.

  The governor would ask for an op-ed on some topic and say he wanted it the next morning. Ordinarily you’d have to know a lot about labor force growth to write an op-ed on it, but I didn’t. The policy shop would provide the relevant facts and analysis; my job was to shape those into eight hundred words of readable English. I would spend most of the night rewording phrases for maximum effect, perfecting transitions, scouring my mind for just the right metaphors, making the discussion of policy sound authoritative but not wonkish, and giving the last paragraph that sting that makes an op-ed memorable.

  And he’d hate it. Once, the door of the press office flew open and the governor, paper in hand, started to explain to me why what I had written wasn’t right. “Again.”

  After experiencing a few seconds of what looked like unbearable frustration, he summoned the words to explain what galled him. “I would never say, ‘the extent to which.’”

  “So let’s say something different.”

  “But my point is, you’ve got to know your audience. The mechanic in Greenwood doesn’t go around talking about things being ‘the extent for which.’”

  “The extent to which.”

  “Whatever. My point is, always know your audience. I’ll work on this tonight.”

  When the op-ed came back to us, it began, “As the old saying goes, the first step to getting out of a hole is to quit digging. I think this certainly applies to the mountain of debt now facing our country.”

  “Is it a hole, or is it a mountain?” I asked after the governor had walked out. I must have developed a reputation for pedantry over matters of language because Aaron asked me to shut up.

  It helped to tell my wife about these episodes. We laughed at them. But they made me unhappy.

  4

  * * *

  MY LIST

  I sat at my desk, ready to hear about how another of my op-eds was all wrong. This time the governor himself didn’t tell me; Aaron did. He had just come from a “hand-off.” The governor would call senior staff into his office and “hand off” miscellaneous pieces of paper to them—articles ripped from newspapers, business cards, his own handwritten notes, drafts of letters or op-eds, sometimes nothing more than a tiny yellow sticky note. He had usually written something on each of them: “Show to R” or “When jobs #s?” or just “?” In the case of written products generated by our office, he would sometimes draw a ∆ at the top. This meant he wanted it changed but couldn’t say how or why. Once he gave me a shred of paper that looked as if it had been ripped from an envelope; he’d scribbled the words “kraut gdp” on it. This meant he wanted me to find an op-ed in which the columnist Charles Krauthammer discussed world debt relative to GDP, or something like that. Another time I saw him give Paul, the head of the policy office, a draft of a policy letter written by one of our staffers; across the top of it the governor had written the words “Written by 6 year old?”

  Staffers came out of hand-offs holding a pile of papers, trying to remember what the governor wanted done about each one. Aaron pulled from his pile an op-ed I’d written the day before. “He hated this. He said it was too strident, and he wants more ‘cool stuff.’ Sorry, man. Oh yeah, and he said he would never say—let’s see, where is it?—right here. He would never say ‘And it’s easy to see why.’ I don’t know why that hacked him off so bad.”

  I sat staring blankly at my draft—the governor had scrawled a giant question mark across the first page—wondering how dispensable I was. I had been there only a few months. Later in the day Aaron motioned for me to step into the conference room. It felt ominous. He asked me how things were going and other questions one might ask a fairly recent hire. Then he said, “The governor’s thinking of bringing in a new writer.”

  I just sat there trying to look placid.

  “It’s not that you’re a bad writer.”

  “I know,” I snapped. Then, more slowly, “I know that I’m not a bad writer.”

  It was just that he wasn’t sure I could write like him. You might be a great writer, Aaron explained, but if you can’t write like he wants you to, you’re gone. He had told the governor to hold off and give me more time.

  “Thanks, Aaron.”

  I brooded about this for a day or two and then discussed it with my wife. This time I gave real thought to her counsel to write badly. One of the governor’s op-eds published about this time, one he himself had written in defense of a nonprofit group he’d started a few months before, contained these sentences:

  Unfortunately, some like Speaker Bobby HarrellI have reacted negatively—depicting it as an effort to give a punch in the nose. It is not that. It is about friends across this state caring enough about the importance of change that they will invest time, money and effort in bringing it about.

  “An effort to give a punch in the nose,” full stop. “Friends across this state caring enough about the importance of change”—as if they cared not about the abstract concept of “change,” which was nonsensical enough, but about its “importance.” I felt confident that if I had written these words and given them to the governor, he would have fired me on the spot. He knew bad writing when he saw it, except when he was the author. Something about its provenance in his own brain made him see mellifluous perfection where everybody else saw the awkward platitudes of a high school term paper.

  My job wasn’t all bad. To the governor I was a liability, but to the rest of the staff I’d become an authority. Almost instantly I’d acquired the reputation of a grammarian. Nearly every day my phone would ring and someone would ask, “Is it ‘none is’ or ‘none are’?” or “Can you use ‘impact’ as a verb?” or “Do you capitalize ‘judicial branch’?” At first I tried to respond with nuanced explanations about how this usage was once considered incorrect but had become so common that educated people now use it routinely, or about how that rule was useful as a guide although it could be broken in some circumstances. But I sensed impatience. All my questioners wanted to know was what was right and what was wrong. They didn’t care what was generally accepted or defensible; they wanted to know what they should say in order not to sound like ignoramuses. Someone once called to ask me if “alleve” was a word. This young woman was transcribing a letter the governor was dictating; when she questioned the word, he told her to ask me.

  “I don’t think so. It’s a pain medicine, isn’t it? Aleve, A-L-E-V-E.”

  “That’s what I told him, but he swears it’s a word.”

  “You look it up in the dictionary?”

  “It’s not in there.”

  “He must be thinking of ‘alleviate.’”

  “He wants to use ‘alleve.’”

  “He’s confusing ‘relieve’ and ‘alleviate.’”

  “He wants ‘alleve.’”

  “Well, give it to him, I guess. But tell him he needs to get permission from whoever owns Aleve. Maybe put a little trademark sign beside it.”

  It was around this time that I got the idea—or maybe I was asked to do it, but I think it was my idea—to help transcribe the governor’s dictated letters. His person
al assistant, Lewis, brought me an ancient dictation machine, a tape of fifteen or so letters, and a pair of headphones. I typed them out as best I could and gave the document to Lewis for editing. Over the next four or five months I transcribed well over a thousand letters from the governor. It was tedious work. Most of them began with the words “I just wanted to write.” The governor wrote letters to almost everyone he met, especially, though not exclusively, those whom he perceived to be important or in some way influential. Some of them were extremely short. “This is a letter to Bill Dixxon,” he’d say into the Dictaphone. “Dear Bill, I just wanted to write and say how much I enjoyed being with you over the weekend. You’ve got a great way about you, and I did enjoy the chance to know you a little better. I hope our paths cross again soon. Until then, take care. Sincerely.” Some of them were longer but still routine: expressions of appreciation for invitations or gifts, notes of condolence for lost relatives or of happiness for job promotions he had read about in Barron’s or some local business magazine. Others were longer and had to do with governmental affairs.

  A few were to his family. He would write long letters to his sons about how much he enjoyed watching their track meets and baseball games, telling them what Calvin Coolidge said about perseverance. Sometimes you’d find out who the governor had met or been with while he was out of the office. “This is a letter to Colin Powell”; “This is a letter to Charlie Rose”; “This is a letter to Brian Williams.”