The Speechwriter (8 page)

“I mention that story,” I continued, “because I think it's a powerful illustration of the influence our mothers have over our lives. Even before we come into the world—.”

“Boring. Total downer. Again—you have to remember the audience. This isn't some anti-abortion group. You've got to dig deeper. Remember who you're talking to.”

“Governor, I can guarantee you these people are anti-­abortion.”

“You don't know that.”

I did know that, and so did he. “They're celebrating traditional motherhood, they're independent Baptists, and they're from Florence.”

Now it would become an argument about something else. He'd get impatient and say, “Never mind, I'll think of something,” and walk into the event.

It didn't matter what he said. At the Mother of the Year ceremony, middle-aged women cackled and cooed at anything the governor wanted to say. I waited outside and eavesdropped on the event.

“I read an interesting article the other day in the
Wall Street Journal
, about a musician . . .”

If the event was away from the office, and you weren't with the governor, these conversations would happen over the phone. Sometimes they were brutal. He would discover the unsatisfactory nature of the talking points four minutes before he arrived at the event. After a year or so working for him, though, these calls became so routine that they lost their sting. At four minutes before an event was to begin,
you'd wait for the phone to ring. When it rang, you'd prepare to answer his questions as best you could. Maybe you had written “coat and tie” as the appropriate attire, and he'd arrive to find everyone dressed casually. Maybe you had neglected to indicate whether or not he was speaking first. It mattered: if he spoke first, what he said should be more important; if third or fourth, less so. Maybe he wanted to know some vital fact about the group he was about to address—whether they'd supported his tax plan the year before, or whether they were mostly middle-class activist types or wealthy donor types—and that fact wasn't properly denoted in the talking points.

If he called you directly, it was bad. But I got better at handling him. Once, he was about to walk into an event announcing a large investment by the Heinz Company. I'd given him four or five possibilities (“narratives,” he called them), but he hated them all. “Tell me something interesting!” He was almost shouting into the phone, but I couldn't think of anything else to say about the making of ketchup. Then, as if by inspiration, I remembered a joke I used to tell in school. “Okay,” I said, “how about this. A few statistics for you. Did you know that, according to two major studies conducted at Yale and Oxford Universities, over half of all cases of heart disease could have been prevented by the simple expedient of consuming one tomato a week?”

“That's not true,” he said. “You've got that wrong. But go on.”

“Did you know, furthermore, that a modest increase in one's consumption of tomato phosphate, an ingredient found
in Heinz ketchup and steak sauce, can cut your risk of colon cancer by sixty percent?”

“That's stupid,” he said. “Where are you getting this?”

“And did you know, finally, that approximately ninety-­one percent of statistics are made up on the spot?”

There was a long pause. “That's good. I like that.”

“It should get some laughs,” I said. “By the way, I made up ‘tomato phosphate.' I don't even know what that is.” But he had hung up.

That summer the governor became even more cantankerous about talking points than he was ordinarily. That was the summer when veep speculation was at its not very considerable height. Reporters from national media would show up at otherwise insignificant events to file reports on one of the politicians on everybody's list of attractive running mates.

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.