The Speechwriter Read online

  Aaron had gotten a call from a reporter with one of the national papers saying he’d be at an event the following week, a groundbreaking for a new police academy, where the governor was to speak for five minutes or so. A few legislators would be there too but probably few if any local media; usually it wasn’t something the governor would fret over, except in the routine sense of claiming he disliked what I’d written and having me redraft the talk an hour or so before he left for the event. Two or three days earlier he was already telling me, “We’re not there yet,” which meant I had to rewrite everything.

  These were hard times. Rick, the chief of staff, had left in order to run for the state senate. Stewart had been made chief of staff, and Nat had been moved to Stewart’s office as head of cabinet affairs and operations. Mack, whom I’d always suspected of possessing a keener intelligence than his tobacco chewing suggested, had left to become an academic. We had hired another speechwriter, Chris, but he wasn’t useful yet, and for a few weeks I was the only one writing anything.

  There were two things the governor wanted at events like this. One was to mention Rosa Parks. For him, Rosa Parks sitting on a seat in the white section of a Montgomery bus encapsulated a beautiful political ideal: changing everything, stopping everything, bringing a whole society to its knees, just by saying No. But he couldn’t mention Rosa Parks on most occasions; it just didn’t work. I once tried to suggest other historical figures who did similar sorts of things—Lech Walesa, Martin Luther—but he didn’t think they had the same appeal for the kind of people he usually addressed, which I’m sure was true.

  The other thing he liked—and this applied to every talk—was to say something interesting and relevant that nobody was expecting. He hated the thought of being the politician who says the same predictable boring things at every event; he wanted to walk into every speaking engagement armed with a story or fact or witty remark that would make him stand out in the minds of those who heard him. But he would not trust me, or anybody, to discern what was an appropriate remark for the occasion. It had to “feel right” to him, which it only rarely did.

  He liked stories, especially stories drawn from history. And only stories involving people whose names everyone had heard of. All foreign names (Lech Walesa) were out. And generally only American stories, unless they were stories about governments bankrupting themselves, of which there were not many. He also liked the story of William Wilberforce, the English reformer and parliamentarian who was largely responsible for Britain abolishing the slave trade.

  For the police academy’s groundbreaking I had prepared five narratives. I walked into his office. I didn’t see him. “Sir?”

  “Yeah,” I heard him groan.

  On the other side of the room, behind some chairs, he was on his back, resting on a giant yellow ball. I’d heard he had back trouble. He looked at me sideways. “It’s called an exercise ball. My sister gave it to me.”

  “Right. Ah, your talk at the police academy.”

  “What d’you got?” he asked, without getting up, shifting from side to side on the ball. “Let’s hear the talk. Go.”

  By this time I was used to being told to “give the talk” to him, though the horizontal posture made it slightly awkward.

  “Not far from here is Maxcy Gregg Park,” I began. “I wonder how many of you know who General Maxcy Gregg was. At Sharpsburg, in September Eighteen-sixty-two, General Gregg’s brigade was confronted by a brigade of untrained Connecticut volunteers who had loaded their rifles for the first time two days before the battle. Gregg’s men had been through several battles already. They’d been together from the beginning of the war. The result—.”

  “Next,” he said from the exercise ball.

  I stared at him. “The result—.”

  “Next.”

  “General Gregg’s—.”

  “Next.”

  Then I said as fast as I could, “General-Gregg’s-men-slaughtered-the-Connecticut-men-by-a-ratio-of-nine-to-one.”

  “What’s that supposed to prove?”

  “The value of training. The Connecticut men hadn’t trained. Gregg’s men were well-trained. Most of them had been at Shiloh. This is a police academy. Where they train. Train people. To do police stuff. If you don’t train, you won’t do it well. Message: Training is important.”

  “Next.”

  I went straight to the next theme without arguing. “Winston Churchill spent the years leading up to the Second World War advocating—.”

  “Next.”

  “Are you serious? You didn’t—.”

  “Next. C’mon, next.”

  “The Olympic downhill skier—.”

  “Next,” he said, still lying on the yellow ball. “These people don’t care about downhill skiing.”

  “It’s funny, though. This downhill skier fell at the Olympics like twenty feet out of the box.”

  “That’s not funny. It’s tragic. Next.”

  “James Madison—.”

  “Next.”

  “I wonder if anyone knows who created the first police force?” I waited for the “Next,” but it didn’t come, so I kept going. “It was Robert Peel, prime minister of—.”

  “Next.”

  I stared at him. “I’m fresh out.”

  Slowly he pulled himself up off the exercise ball. “You’re not saying anything interesting.”

  Ten minutes later I would think of several sizzling replies, but I wouldn’t have had the courage to say any of them to his face. At the moment I just stared at him like an idiot. At last I asked, “What sort of thing are you looking for here?”

  “Something magical. Something no one’s thought of. Wwwww—whatever. Just something that’ll make people say, ‘Oh, I never thought of that.’ Not something about Wwwww—William Peel or whoever.”

  I went back to the press office and worked for another two hours, then came to him with four or five more ideas, but nothing worked. At last I asked Nat to help me come up with something. What I really wanted was for Nat to go into the governor’s office with me when I pitched my ideas. When the governor got into one of his unreasonable moods, he would object to anything for any reason—a misplaced comma, the word “gallant”—and use it as an excuse to throw people out of the office and demand a complete do-over or redraft. Nat had a way of talking to the governor at these times that kept him from interrupting. He would start talking rapidly, as if possessed, and even if what he was saying didn’t make sense, the governor wouldn’t stop him. Nat would keep talking until the governor heard something he couldn’t object to. This was a talent I did not have and could not cultivate. I have to think hard before I say anything. Aaron had a talent for talking creatively, and of course Stewart had it. But Aaron and Stewart tended to fall back too readily on stock phrasing. Nat had a way of talking fast and creatively and giving his words an aura of excitement and logical cohesion they wouldn’t possess if you saw them written on paper. He would suddenly say, “What if—what if—what if we—what if you said—,” and you couldn’t help assuming that whatever came next was probably worth listening to.

  So I asked Nat if he’d come with me when I suggested a few narratives. He agreed. I wrote for an hour or so, showed Nat what I’d come up with, and we both walked into the governor’s office.

  “Wwwww,” the governor said, looking up from a notepad with a blank stare. “Okay. Go.”

  I wanted to start with James Madison and the War of 1812 and how America learned from its mistakes, so this time I just left out Madison’s name. “After the Revolution, many Americans were starting to conclude that the Atlantic Ocean made the new nation more or less impervious to attack.”

  Instantly I knew I’d blundered.

  “‘Impervious?’” the governor repeated, staring at me with a deadpan look. “‘Impervious to attack?’”

  “Governor,” I said, “you don�
�t have to use these words, obviously. We’re just talking about the stories, the—.”

  “No, but this is a serious point,” he said. “‘Impervious to attack.’ You don’t sound like you know who you’re talking to. I hate that.”

  “The point is—.”

  “I know what the point is. But you’re not—thinking—about—the audience.” Now he was pounding his desk. “You’ve got—to think—about—the audience. These are regular guys at this thing, law enforcement types, not a bunch of academics who go around talking about things being ‘impervious to attack.’”

  “I understand that—.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s obvious you don’t get it.” He leaned back in his chair, stared at the ceiling, and said, slowly, “What would the—the—the truck driver—what would the trucker at the—the—the feed-and-seed think of it? You’ve got to think about the truck driver at the feed-and-seed.”

  Nat, who’d been pretending to write things down on a scrap of paper, said, “Why would a truck driver be in a feed-and-seed?”

  The governor stared at him. “No, the point—.”

  “Seriously,” Nat said, “does this truck driver have some kind of side interest in farming?”

  “Okay, I got it,” the governor said, “you got me.”

  “Governor, Barton has a good story here. Just ignore the issue of phrasing for a minute and hear him out.”

  From there I went on to tell the governor about the War of 1812 and how the young nation had learned the importance of maintaining a standing professional army and how it couldn’t rely on a bunch of farmers to come together in times of crisis and form a lethal fighting force to repel a well-trained invader. At last he settled on something, I don’t remember what. Maybe it was 1812 or maybe some other idea, or maybe it was one of his usual bits of rigmarole; he was very fond of a quote from some historical novel, something about land being more than dirt, although he would tell it as if it weren’t fiction but history. Anyhow he settled on something and left.

  It must have been seven or eight o’clock by then, and my wife had been calling, leaving messages asking when I’d be home. I hadn’t called her back. These were bad days for us. I was ignoring her, fixated instead on pleasing a man who could not be pleased. I didn’t work the long hours some of my colleagues did—Stewart never left the State House, as far as I knew—but even when I went home I’d find myself fretting over op-eds and agitatedly telling the children not to talk to me while I took a call from the governor or Aaron about the next day’s talking points. Laura would ask, with some logic, why I was getting so worked up over an op-ed or a speech when I knew he would ignore it or find a reason to dismiss it. I didn’t have an answer. I was either worrying over work or reading books; my income couldn’t support a family of five (we’d had a third daughter by then), and I had to turn out book reviews and essays as fast as I could. My colleagues would see me eating lunch over a biography of Hardy or a book about Scottish literature, and they would assume I was learned. In fact I was just surviving, barely.

  Between work and writing my mind was almost completely elsewhere. Unlike other men my age who ignore their families, though, I couldn’t point to a hefty income to justify my absenteeism. Laura dealt with it, but sometimes we shouted at each other. Sometimes fights would arise about my work, but usually the cause was something else entirely, and I wouldn’t know how it started or how to solve it.

  That night I didn’t go immediately home. I walked out the west wing door intending to meet some friends a few blocks from the State House for a drink. But instead of walking to the bar, I just stood there, looking at the sky. A breeze made the sweat on my back feel cool. I leaned against the wall. Just above my head was a bronze star marking the spot where one of Sherman’s cannonballs had struck the building, ripping away a chunk of stone.

  Stewart came out to smoke. “You have fun with the—what was it—the police academy groundbreaking?”

  “Yeah.”

  He lit a cigarette.

  “You want to kill him, don’t you?” he asked after a minute or two.

  “Do you?”

  “I’ve wanted to kill him many times,” he said in a calm, almost soporific voice. “He’s a terrible person.”

  “Is he? I mean, you really think he’s a terrible person?”

  “In a way, yeah. You can’t get to where he is without being a terrible person. At this level, they’re all self-aggrandizing bastards. You should go with us to NGA next time. Watch these guys and their staff. Petty, mean-spirited, vicious little tramps who would step on anyone if it made them look good in front of their boss. Now I grant you, some are better at hiding it than our boss, but in their dark little hearts they’re all just as bad as he is.”

  We stood watching the sun go down for two or three minutes. Through the trees it looked as if it were just above the river. Union troops had crossed that river many years before.

  “Just think,” he said, the breeze driving the smoke sideways from his mouth. “If you can do this, you can do anything.”

  “I keep hearing that.”

  I wondered if that was just a platitude, or if it was true.

  * * *

  I. David Gergen, Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

  8

  * * *

  PRESS CONFERENCES

  From January to May, when the legislature did the bulk of its business, the governor would do a press event every fortnight or so, sometimes more often. Some of these were bill signings, but most happened just before the legislature did something he considered foolish. He would urge the legislators not to go through with it, they’d go through with it, and our office would put out a scathing press release or a scathing media statement or, if the governor felt strong enough about it, a scathing op-ed. We did a lot of scathing.

  Most press events were boring, highly predictable. The governor could sense this, and sometimes he would do crazy things to compensate reporters for the boredom. Once, just as a press conference outside a gas station was about to begin—the governor was denouncing a hike in the cigarette tax—he decided to move the whole thing inside. It was a preposterous thing to do: outside there was a lovely backdrop of gas pumps and a giant advertisement for cigarettes. Inside he had to stand in a narrow aisle crammed with candy bars and potato chips. One reporter had to ask questions from the next aisle, over a display of soft drinks. When the stories appeared the next day, the governor’s head appeared just in front of a fluorescent poster declaring “3 MUSKETEERS 12-PACK ONLY $4.99.” There was always the threat of such weirdness at one of our press conferences. Maybe reporters liked that. They always seemed to show up, even if we told them almost nothing of what it was to be about.

  It was the spring of 2008, and we had information the revelation of which interested state as well as national media. After 9/11 the U.S. Congress had passed a law requiring states to alter their driver’s licenses to meet national criteria, in effect creating a national ID card, called Real ID. If a state did not comply by the deadline, its governor could apply for an extension, which (federal authorities implied) would be readily granted. Failure either to comply or to apply for an extension, however, would result in citizens of that state no longer being admitted to federal buildings or on airplanes that flew through federal airspace.

  This was perfect material for the governor to mount a rebellion. He was never interested in Southernness or the Lost Cause, but he relished the idea of spurning federal authority. An attempt by federal bureaucrats to force states to revamp their driver’s licenses, then to make the states pay for it, all for the purpose of compiling a centralized database of personal identities: it seemed calculated to ignite his imagination. Best of all was the fact that the feds, in their communications with our office, didn’t stress the consequences of noncompliance, leading us to believe t
hey wouldn’t actually do anything about it if we refused to comply.

  If you worked for the governor for any length of time, even if you just knew a little about him, you knew he would refuse to apply for an extension of the Real ID deadline. Doing so would have compromised his brand. He wouldn’t be criticized for complying with the law, except by libertarians. But if he complied, it would bother his conscience and, more important, he would look like any other politician.

  Of course we waited until the day of the deadline to make the announcement. Aaron put off reporters with the usual verbiage about how “we’re studying all the implications of the law” and “we’ll come to a conclusion shortly.”

  A week beforehand the smarter editorialists, the ones who already knew what the governor would do without waiting for a press conference announcing the decision, began to describe apocalyptic visions. They spoke of contingencies under the pretense that they could influence the decision: “If he refuses to ask Washington for an extension, the citizens of this state will suffer the consequences of his arrogance,” and so on.

  About six months before this, the General Assembly had passed, with overwhelming majorities, a binding resolution refusing to comply with Real ID. That was when very few of the legislators knew what it was and it was generally thought that neither Congress nor Homeland Security was serious about it. Federal initiatives like this get started all the time, but then they peter out, either because administrations change or because they’re discovered to be unenforceable or too expensive. Or they’re enforced and no one notices. Now that Homeland Security clearly intended to keep Real ID alive, legislators who’d voted for the resolution began pretending they hadn’t or explaining that they didn’t realize the feds, whom they continued to denounce, would keep us from boarding airplanes.

  The press conference, in which we would release copies of a letter from the governor to the secretary of Homeland Security announcing that the state would not apply for an extension on compliance, was to take place in the rotunda of the State House. People began arriving about an hour beforehand, not journalists but the public as well. Some of them wore Confederate flag lapel pins. Some of them had dreadlocks and nose rings and enormous backpacks, as if they’d hiked from somewhere far away. There were families whose children carried Bibles, and there were four or five gay activists (or so I took them to be) carrying rainbow flags. Some of them brought signs saying “No Big Brother” and “Down with Fed ID” and “Don’t Take the Chip.” A black man held up a sign saying “Screw the Feds”; one lady with long hair in a French braid carried a sign saying “Real ID = Mark of the Beast.” She was standing right beside the podium. Nat, who had an eye for these things, told another staffer to pretend to be a security handler and ask people if they wouldn’t mind stepping away from the podium.