The Speechwriter (3 page)

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 you'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 Harrell
I
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 personal 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.”

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.