The Speechwriter Page 4

  He wrote so many letters that occasionally he would forget the name of the person he was writing to. “This is a letter to what’s-his-name,” he’d begin. “Jeane will know his name, ask Jeane.” Jeane was our senate liaison and someone who knew nearly everyone. “Dear whoever,” he would continue, “I just wanted to let you know how sorry I was to hear about your dad. I remember losing my dad when I was seventeen, and all I can say is it wasn’t easy. Please know you’ll be in our prayers over the coming weeks and months.” I wondered if the governor would pray for somebody whose name he couldn’t remember. Would he tell God to ask Jeane?

  Occasionally he’d forget almost every relevant piece of information. “This is a letter to what’s-his-name. Ask Jeane. Dear whatever, I just wanted to write and say I appreciated—whatever it was—he sent something, a box of pecans or something—I hope to see you soon down at wherever—he has a house somewhere, we were there last year. Ask Jeane. Please pass along a hello to whatever his wife’s name is. Take care. Sincerely.” I spent many hours trying to figure out what should take the place of the “whatevers” and “wherevers.”

  After several weeks of transcribing his letters I started to recognize stock phrases. His syntax became familiar, and I could anticipate certain ungainly phrases before he said them. It was like listening to twelve-tone music: you had to force yourself to do it, but after a while you could discern some charmless patterns, and even like them in a perverse kind of way.

  To people he had met who had impressed him for some reason—and he wrote letters to all such people—he would say, “You’ve got a great way about you.” He began many sentences with “given the fact”: “Given the fact that we’ll be in Europe in June, I thought there might be a chance we could meet in Prague.” There were maladroit sentence lengtheners, intended to make sentences look more consequential or thoughtful than they were: “none other than” (“The dinner was none other than fabulous”; “Failing to address this problem would be none other than disastrous”), “in your direction” (“I wanted to send a thank-you in your direction”), “over the weeks and months ahead” (“You’ll be in our prayers over the weeks and months ahead”). Hours of listening taught me to divine the reasons for his choice of words. “Indeed,” for example, had a number of purposes, all of them more or less inapt. Sometimes he dropped it into hackneyed phrases in order to let his reader know that he knew they were hackneyed but that they were true anyhow: “We’re mortgaging our children’s future” would become “We’re indeed mortgaging our children’s future,” and those who failed to learn from history were “indeed” doomed to repeat it. Sometimes “indeed” served to separate words that sounded awkward together. Every writer encounters this problem; you can’t use the words “voters voting in the next election” without sounding odd. A careful writer would find a new way of saying it; the governor’s solution was to write “voters indeed voting in the next election.” I remember a press release I drafted for him in which he added the sentence “Jefferson and the founding fathers indeed founded this nation on the notion of limited government.”

  Eventually I began to compile a list of his favorite words and phrases. Here is one version of the list I still have with me:

  PHRASES

  Given the fact that

  toward that end

  in which you operate

  the level of

  both . . . and frankly

  goes well beyond

  the way you live your life

  in this regard (in this regard it’s worth . . .)

  in many ways

  none other than

  this larger (this larger notion/idea)

  for that reason

  in large measure

  as a consequence

  more than anything

  in my direction

  nonetheless (small but nonetheless significant sign)

  over the weeks and months ahead

  speaks volumes

  NOUNS

  range (a range of)

  host (a host of, whole host of)

  admiration (usu. profound admiration)

  pearls (of wisdom)

  ADJECTIVES, ADVERBS

  remarkable

  incredible (working incredibly hard)

  inevitably

  frankly

  awfully

  larger

  disturbingly so, especially so

  amazingly

  considerable (very considerable)

  fabulous

  dire

  VERBS

  present

  impress (impressed me)

  admire (admire the fact that)

  highlight

  underscore

  OTHER

  inasmuch

  whereby

  This collection summarizes the governor’s character as well as any biography could, though I reckon only I can see that. Its terms are plain and practical, but they’re boring, and most of them are slightly awkward. Some are lazy: the only reason to say something “speaks volumes”—“The fact that you refused to give up speaks volumes about your character”—is because you want the credit for making a large claim without bothering to find words to make it.

  Any time I was asked to write a letter or an op-ed, I’d have this list in front of me. Sometimes, instead of consulting it to help me put an idea into the right words, I would get my ideas from the list itself. If I didn’t know how to begin, say, an article for the Chamber of Commerce magazine, I’d just write “in which you operate.” I’d stare at it for a few minutes, then I might begin, “This administration has always operated on the principle that government doesn’t have all the answers.” Or I would write “in large measure” and wait. Then it would come to me: “The government structure given to us by our state’s constitution is in large measure a throwback to the days just after Reconstruction, and it’s for that reason our administration has taken the stand it has.” Eventually, in the case of op-eds, he would change nearly everything I wrote, but if it contained enough of his own syntax, he at least wouldn’t be outraged, and sometimes he’d leave it alone.

  Once, I heard him tell a reporter, “I write all my own stuff.” He said it with conviction, and I was standing beside him. At first I was appalled; he knew I wrote his “stuff,” or a lot of it. Later, though, I reflected that when he read language written deliberately in his own strange voice, he felt he had written it. And in a sense he was right.

  One day he burst into the press office, as usual criticizing something I’d written. “Again, I would never write this.”

  I looked at it and didn’t recognize it. I told him I hadn’t written it; he had.

  He paused and looked at it more closely. “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” I said. But I wasn’t.

  * * *

  I. Bobby Harrell, speaker of the house, was the most powerful man in the state house. He wielded his power like a cudgel; nobody in the legislature liked or crossed him. He didn’t look the part at all, curiously: a little man with hardly any expression in his face. I read somewhere that the human face contains fifty-three muscles. Harrell looked as if he had only about ten.

  5

  * * *

  LETTERS

  One Sunday night in February, Shelby, the governor’s scheduler, called me at home to tell me I would be traveling with the governor on Monday to three small towns. These would not be a day’s round of the usual press conferences, which would have taken place in the larger cities with bigger media markets, but a series of fifteen-­minute “talks” to local businesses. Each stop would involve a small crowd—as many as a hundred, as few as almost nobody—and two or three local journalists. The talk involved three bills the governor wanted to see passed in the legislature: one on drunk driving penalties, one on the amalgamation
of two state agencies, and one on the state budget.

  I was to get the day’s schedule from Lewis, who would explain my duties. These sounded complex: Motion to the governor “five minutes” when you have ten minutes before you have to leave. If you wait until you’ve got only five minutes, Lewis explained, it’ll take him ten minutes to get away from the crowd, and when he finds out he’s five minutes late he’ll blame you. Remember, he said, you’ve got to be the bad guy. If someone’s hogging the governor’s attention, he doesn’t want to be the one to break it off. You’ve got to step in and say something like “Governor, I’m so sorry, but we’ve really got to make the next appointment.” I was to shadow him, but not walk too closely, especially if there weren’t very many people around him. Lewis said more than once, “He hates the entourage look.”

  Was anyone traveling with us? It was just me, the governor, and a member of the security detail.

  Richard Mitchell, the comptroller general, I learned, would be at each stop. Mitchell was one of the governor’s allies. “But unfortunately,” Lewis said, “he won’t be in the car with you.” I wondered what he meant by “unfortunately.”

  On the way to the first event, the governor read the Wall Street Journal. When he was done, he folded it up and threw it into the backseat—that is, at me. I had heard that if you sat in the backseat when he was in the front, the governor would throw things at you. Not at you, exactly, just into the backseat. But he wasn’t trying not to throw things at you, either. When he was working, staffers existed—physically, literally—only insofar as they could aid him. In one sense it was impossible not to admire the man’s ability to fix his attention so exclusively on whatever he was doing. Still, it was unnerving to realize that, to him, at that moment, you were a nonentity; you weren’t.

  This was the first of three days of these talks, and first days of anything usually went badly. The governor always needed a few practice runs before he was comfortable with what he was saying. He would thumb through the talking points and inevitably find something he disliked or some question unasked or unaddressed. When this happened he would ask the nearest staffer a question you couldn’t answer. Silence was the worst possible response. It suggested to him that you were trying to make something up.

  “What was the Second Injury Fund?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll call Stewart and find out.”

  Having talked to Stewart—at that time deputy chief of staff for policy—you would try to tell the governor what the Second Injury Fund was, but he would ask another question you weren’t able to answer, and soon the superfluity of your role as mediator would become apparent and he’d grab the phone from you. Stewart knew everything, and the governor depended on him a great deal, but for reasons I never quite grasped he never wanted to talk to Stewart directly unless he had to. Perhaps it made his dependence on his deputy too obvious.

  The talks that day didn’t go well. Not that the people hosting them cared. Owners of little stores and repair shops in small towns were happy to have the governor there and didn’t care what he said. But I didn’t have the knack for managing him. I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt his conversations with “five minute” warnings, with the result that we left each stop ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes behind schedule—which enraged him more each time.

  He hadn’t warmed to his talk yet. One of his points had to do with the difference between certain lawmakers’ bold rhetoric on tax reform and their tendency to weaken reform legislation when given the chance. He wanted to say, “So we’ll see if the juice was worth the squeeze,” meaning, I think, we’ll see if it was worth counting on their stated intentions. The expression didn’t precisely fit, and he made it worse by repeatedly reversing “juice” and “squeeze.” “We’ll see if the squeeze was worth the juice.” Everyone listened respectfully, but I thought I saw two machinists exchange looks of perplexity.

  Mitchell was there to talk about transparency in government. He believed, with some evidence, that state lawmakers were using parliamentary measures to hide unnecessary and, in some cases, unethical appropriations. He seemed to enjoy himself. At each stop he would draw a theme from the physical surroundings. The first stop was a warehouse in which the steel frames of small boats were built. “It’s funny we’re here where boats are made,” Mitchell began, with his characteristically warm smile, “because our ship of state is sinking in a sea of red ink.”

  This was around the time when speculation about the governor’s chances on a national ticket began to circulate. For a variety of reasons, most of them negative (he didn’t have the liability of so-and-so; as a state rather than a federal officeholder he had no record on such-and-such), he was among those thought to be attractive vice presidential candidates. “Are you interested in the vice presidency, Governor?” a reporter would ask, knowing he couldn’t answer yes or no. Over the next several months he went through a series of responses. On this occasion he was experimenting with the unhappy analogy of being struck by lightning. “That’s very flattering, but it’s all just surreal,” he would say. “It’s so unlikely. But if lightning does strike, I’d be lying if I said I’d hang up the phone.” Saying yes or no to a lightning strike didn’t sound right. But at first he couldn’t even get the lightning line right. “If that lightning bolt strikes,” he would say, or “If that lightning bolt falls in my direction,” or “If that ball of lightning ever does come my way.”

  We were at the third stop, an establishment that sold high-end cookware, when my phone vibrated.

  “Hey, it’s Aaron.”

  “We’re in the middle of the event here,” I whispered.

  “When it’s over, tell the governor Jakie’s calling for an investigation over the NGA thing.” “Jakie” was Jake Knotts, a state senator and a venomous critic of the governor.

  “Investigation?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Investigation of what?”

  “Just tell him it’s about the NGA thing. He’ll know what you mean.”

  “It’s funny we’re here beside all these cooking pots,” Mitchell was saying, gesturing to a display of Dutch ovens.

  “What’s ‘the NGA thing’?” I whispered to Aaron.

  “Just tell him Jakie’s calling for an investigation over the NGA grant.”

  “. . . this state has been cooking the books for a long time.”

  “What NGA grant?”

  “He’ll know what you’re talking about. Jakie’s on the floor right now. It’s already on the AP wire.”

  “Knotts, calling for an investigation,” I repeated to Aaron. “About cooking the books.”

  “No. About the NGA grant.”

  “Sorry. NGA grant.”

  When we got into the car, I said to the governor, “Aaron called a minute ago. Knotts is on the floor of the senate calling for an investigation.” Suddenly I couldn’t recall why. All I could remember was that it wasn’t about cooking the books.

  “What’s he want to investigate?”

  “He—Aaron—seemed to think you’d know,” I lied.

  “I don’t know. I’m asking you. Why’s Knotts calling for an investigation?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” the governor said fiercely, “you just told me somebody’s saying there should be an investigation. Investigation of what? Of me? And you don’t know why? I’m asking. You don’t know?”

  “It was in the middle of the press conference and I didn’t get the details.”

  “Okay, so you’re going to tell me I’m being investigated, but you’re not going to tell me why?”

  “Oh! I know. The NGA grant.”

  “What about the NGA grant?”

  “Now that I don’t know. Aaron said you’d know.”

  “Again, I don’t know. I’m asking you.”

  This went on for three or four minutes. I wondered why he didn’t just pi
ck up his phone and call Aaron for the details, or tell me to. Later I would realize that he knew everything about it already and that this was his way of coping with distressing news. He wasn’t trying to demean me, but when he was anxious, he needed somebody to berate, and you were nearby and a staffer you were that somebody. Being belittled was part of the job. It created a weird camaraderie among the staff: we would relay the latest episode and compare it to the “classic” ones of former times. “Nothing tops the time he lectured Lewis for getting the wrong burrito,” someone would say, and the stories would all be retold again.

  The next morning in the office the air felt tense. When I arrived, the governor was already there, which was unusual. (Ordinarily he would arrive at ten or ten-thirty.) Aaron was walking up and down the governor’s wing of the State House, from the press shop to the governor’s office, pen and tablet in hand, as if he were waiting tables.

  I gathered from Nat that the bustle had to do with Knotts’s accusations. I read the reports from the AP and The State—the first I knew about any of it. A year before, the National Governors Association had had its annual meeting in Charleston. The governor had done a few fund-raisers to help offset the cost to the taxpayers, and that money included a $150,000 grant from the state. As it turned out, the funds raised had exceeded what was needed by a substantial figure. The governor had put the excess in the account of Reform Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group he had founded a year before. Actually “group” is probably an exaggeration; as far as I know it was just a bank account and maybe a staffer and a laptop. The question was whether the money he raised for the NGA, which included governors from both parties, belonged to the state. If it didn’t, he could presumably do whatever he wanted with the unspent portion. If it did, he was guilty of diverting state funds to what could almost be called his personal account, “a potentially serious offense,” wrote editorialists who didn’t know whether or not it was serious.