The modern presidency includes giving upwards of 400 speeches a year. How does the president find time to do it? They don't. That's where the speechwriters come in. This is how the (ideally) inspiring, comforting, clarifying sausage gets made and former Barack Obama senior speechwriter Sarada Peri is giving us a peek behind the curtain.
Transcript
John Fitzgerald Kennedy: The faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it.
Hannah McCarthy: Nick, are you familiar with John F. Kennedy's inaugural address?
Nick Capodice: I think so. You don't want me to take a crack at it, do you?
Hannah McCarthy: Sure.
Nick Capodice: Ask not what your country can do for you.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy: You can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. That's terrible.
Nick Capodice: That's right. Sorry, everyone. [00:00:30] I do love that speech.
Hannah McCarthy: My fellow citizens of the world. So I have to admit here, I'm not sure I ever actually listened to the whole thing. I just knew that line. Ask what you can do for your country, right? But to hear this youngish guy who just narrowly won the presidency speak with so much urgency and energy and certainty in his voice. I could feel the echoes in the air, you know, I could feel [00:01:00] the change. It riled me up.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy: Grief can sacrifice when we ask of you with a good conscience. Our only your reward. With history, the final judge of our deed. Let us go forth to lead the land we love. And I'm just watching this speech and thinking, who wrote that gold?
Hannah McCarthy: Th [00:01:30]is is Civics 101, I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: And today we're talking about the political professionals behind the words of the politicians. We're talking about speechwriters, in other words, Nick. We're talking about ghosts.
Sarada Peri: We're ghosts for a reason.
Hannah McCarthy: This is Sarada Peri. She was special assistant and senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama, and she spoke with former host Virginia Prescott back in 2017.
Nick Capodice: All right, when you and Sarah to say ghosts, you really just mean a ghost writer, [00:02:00] right?
Hannah McCarthy: Well, weirdly, I get the sense that it goes deeper than that. A presidential speechwriter is like this spirit of the White House crafting the words that will come out of someone else's mouth.
Sarada Peri: I would joke that I kind of started to kind of inhabit the mind and soul of Barack Obama in some way, right? So, you know, whenever something happened in the world, my first question wasn't, what do I think it was? What does Barack Obama think about this?
Nick Capodice: All right. Hannah, I'm going to pull back the curtain for good or for ill here. But [00:02:30] you and I do this all the time. We write a script for a show and we write one another's voices. And when I write your voice, I have to think, What would Hannah actually think about this? Would she say it this way? Would she even know this? So I get that. But writing a script for a show like ours is very different from writing a speech that's supposed to sound like it's coming from the heart and soul of a political leader. So I have to ask, was everything Barack Obama said to the public written [00:03:00] by Sarada and other speechwriters?
Barack Obama: It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.
Sarada Peri: Well, first of all, I don't think I think it would be disingenuous for us to say that we wrote and write everything as speechwriters. The best speeches are collaborations. And so what we're really trying to do and certainly [00:03:30] in the case of the president, but with anyone that you work with is to help them figure out what they want to say and then more often than not use their words to do that. So it's really a collaboration.
Hannah McCarthy: Let's go back to John F. Kennedy. His speechwriter was Theodore Sorensen. Now, for one thing, Sorensen never would have admitted to being the originator of the famous ask not line. In actual fact, when asked if he wrote those words, his responses varied from Kennedy wrote it all himself to I [00:04:00] simply don't remember to ask not. That said, here's Sorensen in an interview with WNYC back in 2008.
Theodore Sorensen: JFK never read a speech verbatim in his life that he had not previously reviewed and revised.
Nick Capodice: Which makes perfect sense. If you're a good politician. No matter how much you trust someone on your staff, you're still going to proofread your work and you're going to say, You know what? I wouldn't say it that way.
Hannah McCarthy: But to answer your question, who is writing most of [00:04:30] the words a president speaks to the public?
Theodore Sorensen: Starting in the fall of 1956, we spent three or four years traveling the country together, just the two of us to every one of the 50 states, and you get to know somebody and his way of thinking and his way of speaking pretty well. When you do it day after day in all 50 states for three years or more. And so the ideas [00:05:00] were his, the policies were his, the judgments and decisions were his. And when he expressed those decisions in the White House, it was not difficult to for me. Having participated in the meeting to go a few steps down the hall to my office and try to reflect, in words on paper, the first draft of the decision he wanted to convey to the public.
Nick Capodice: So [00:05:30] in other words, the answer is yes. The speechwriter is writing most of what a president says, but they have to get to know everything the president thinks and feels about the subject they're writing on
Hannah McCarthy: And how that person would choose to speak about that subject. I got the sense that spending time with the president is crucial for a successful speechwriter to be able to write something for someone that they would reasonably say. You have to know them pretty well. Here's Sarada again.
Sarada Peri: So I actually [00:06:00] think it's less about getting how someone speaks and more about how someone thinks. And so you really want to spend time sort of immersing yourself in in their thinking, which is often in the form of, you know, talking to them and spending as much time as you can in the case of working for the president. You might get limited time with the person, but I had the good fortune of working for somebody who had been in office for a few years and so I could read every single thing President Obama had said, you know, read all of the transcripts of the interviews he had given [00:06:30] his books, you know, even when he was on Jimmy Fallon or something.
Jimmy Fallon: A democracy requires compromise even when you're 100 percent right.
Barack Obama: Yeah.
Jimmy Fallon: Did you get that from Michelle? Because I think because I've been married, I've been married.
Barack Obama: It is. Yeah, that was a marital tip, as well as a tip about democracy...
Sarada Peri: Really immersing yourself in all of their public comments and as well as conversations with them to kind of figure out how they see the world and [00:07:00] use that to kind of develop your sense of their voice.
Nick Capodice: Well, it's not just a person's voice or their personality that's on the line. If we're talking about political speechwriters, presidential speechwriters, we're talking about politics, we're talking diplomacy and foreign policy. That part that's got to originate with the politician themselves, right?
Sarada Peri: With President Obama, we weren't making up policy. We weren't making up what he wanted to say. We got that direction from him. And you know, if you want credit for [00:07:30] what you say that or what you write, then write it under your own byline and go and give the speech. But ultimately, you know, when President Obama gave a speech that I had worked with him on, it was he who was held accountable for it, right? Not me. And so my job is is to help him do that the best he can. But we're not there to take the credit for having helped them craft that. At least that's what I think, right?
Nick Capodice: In terms of being held accountable, taking credit for the things you say. There are times when a president has to confront something that's difficult. It's not just the good stuff. [00:08:00] I'm thinking about Ronald Reagan having to give a speech after the challenger disaster.
Ronald Reagan: And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process. Sense of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted, belongs to the brave. The Challenger [00:08:30] crew was pulling us into the future and we'll continue to follow.
Nick Capodice: Or something that is much more nuanced, like George W. Bush's get on board speech after September 11th. I mean, how do you both condemn terrorism and encourage Americans to get back on airplanes?
George W. Bush: And one of the great goals of this nation's war is to restore public confidence in the airline industry is to tell the traveling public, get on board, do your business [00:09:00] around the country, fly and enjoy America's great destination spots.
Hannah McCarthy: Well, why don't we take one of the least enviable speeches any presidential speechwriter would ever have to contend with?
The afternoon --
Ray Price: On Tuesday afternoon, Al called me over to his office Tuesday, the 6th, and I came in and he was sitting there reading and just after a minute he looked up. We need a thousand words. He was going to resign. On Tuesday.
Hannah McCarthy: August [00:09:30] 1974, Richard Nixon and his staff decided the writing is on the wall. He is facing near certain impeachment and removal from office following the Watergate scandal. So as people call up his speechwriter, Ray Price, they tell him We need a thousand words on resigning.
Nick Capodice: That pressure must have been unbelievable. This was the speech about something claiming personal responsibility and resigning because of [00:10:00] their actions. How do you do that with someone else? Did did Ray Price work with Nixon to get it done right?
Hannah McCarthy: Here's Price describing what it was like. This is from a C-SPAN interview that was done on the 15th anniversary of the August 9th, 1974 resignation.
Ray Price: We went back and forth. He would call me, I would call him. We would revise and reedit, as we frequently did Wednesday night. We'd been through a couple of more drafts, meanwhile, and I was working in my office and I just checked back [00:10:30] before we came in here. Some of the times I got a call from him at 8:30 with some more thoughts on the thing, and he had a quote from from from Teddy Roosevelt that he particularly wanted to use a man in the arena, which he did. And a couple of other things.
Richard Nixon: And when my heart's dearest died, died, the light went from my life forever. That [00:11:00] was T.R. in his 20s.
Hannah McCarthy: That, by the way, is Nixon reading the tribute Teddy Roosevelt wrote following the death of his young wife.
Nick Capodice: Wow, that is a very intense way of putting the end of your presidency. Was that Nixon's idea?
Hannah McCarthy: Apparently.
Ray Price: 4:15 a.m., 4:30 a.m. he called again some more thoughts on that, working it out, 4:45, they called again. Still more thoughts on that, working it out and that section, which you'll see in a moment the whole toward the end of it, the whole section about what the important [00:11:30] legacy is and the important thing is the world and the country must do near as it was essentially worked out in those early morning calls Thursday morning, the last call from was it seven minutes after 5:00 Thursday morning
Nick Capodice: While we're on the subject? Hannah, what exactly is the process for the average speechwriter? I'm going to guess that writing a resignation speech involves significantly more back and forth and anxious phone calls than, say, a president's address at the Ford plant.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, to [00:12:00] be clear, it all depends on the structure of the administration. Like Kennedy's speechwriter, who we heard from earlier, Ted Sorensen, he didn't work with a team. He was in addition to being Kennedy's speechwriter, a close presidential adviser, as well. So his process was pretty much right. It run it past Kennedy, make some edits and get it back to the president. Things tend not to work that way anymore. So let's talk about how it worked in the Obama White House.
Sarada Peri: Every White House is different, although I, you know, think that the processes are probably [00:12:30] kind of passed along. So in our case, our director of speechwriting, my boss Cody Keenan, would sit down with with us, with our team and kind of go through the schedule and help tell us what was coming up generally and then kind of divide up the speeches based on people's time, people's interest, you know, who had availability.
Nick Capodice: So in the Obama White House, we're talking about a whole team of people devoted to speechwriting.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, over the years, presidential administrations have learned that that is what it takes to ensure that you've got a constant flow of speeches [00:13:00] ready to go.
Sarada Peri: So you get assigned a speech and it could be anything from this is happening in two days. Sorry, you better get going on it or it could be. This is happening. You know, this is a commencement address that's happening in a month and a half and you have some time. Typically, it was maybe a week ahead of time that we had. And then if it was a policy speech or something along those lines, you would meet with the relevant policy people. You learn about the policy, they tell you kind of generally what the message ought to be. And then you go back and you work on a draft. And [00:13:30] from there I would, you know, we would write a draft. Let's say I was writing an education policy speech. I would do a draft, send it to my boss, who would then edit it, and then we would circulate it around the building.
Nick Capodice: They circulate the speech around the building, how many people see this thing before the president presents it?
Sarada Peri: The lawyers are seeing it. The fact checkers are seeing it, the policy, people are seeing it and everybody has an opportunity to weigh in with their thoughts. Make sure things are accurate. Make making sure that we're also appropriately [00:14:00] reflecting the policy. And then it goes to the president who would make his edits usually by hand because he was a, you know, a writer in that way. And then we would take the draft from there and go final. There are some speeches, many actually, where we would get his input on the front end so we might meet with him as in advance as possible to get his thinking up front and then use that to incorporate into your draft and then you go back and forth with him from there. But it really depended on the nature of the speech. [00:14:30]
Hannah McCarthy: So Nick, I have to confess at first I was thinking to myself that would be really hard for me. You know, in the highly plausible universe in which I become president, I'm supposed to get up there and act as though the words that I'm communicating to the press and the American people and foreign nations are words that are my own. And then I realized, Oh yeah, speeches take days or weeks to work on what president has time for that?
Nick Capodice: Yeah. Aren't they giving a speech basically every day? [00:15:00]
Hannah McCarthy: Pretty much. And then, you know, there's the fact that a speech isn't just given to convey information to the public. It's meant to stir emotion.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, you mentioned being riled up by Kennedy. That's that's part of the point. You're supposed to feel something to come away with some kind of inspiration or comfort. And that speech, Kennedy's inaugural, is famous in part because of how it made people feel. And that's the thing about speechwriters, Hannah, that leaves me a little bit in awe [00:15:30] their ability to create something that makes the hair stand up on your arm, something that makes you lean forward in your seat. So what's the secret? How do you write something that makes someone's stomach flip?
Sarada Peri: So when people think about what makes a great speech, they'll often think that it's sort of really beautiful, soaring language and a kind of rhetoric. But I actually think that if you were to strip all of that away, what you would really find in the best [00:16:00] speeches is a clear and persuasive argument. And the way you get to that is by having a central purpose sort of knowing why you're giving this speech and what exactly you want to convey so that at the end of the speech, the audience knows what it ought to think and feel and do. And what often happens when we give a speech is that if the speaker has not identified what that is, why am I delivering [00:16:30] this and what do I want the audience to think at the end? It can kind of become what we call a Christmas tree. You sort of put a lot of ornaments on the tree. It gets filled up with ideas, but there's no sort of driving animating idea behind it. And so it gets cluttered, but a great speech kind of strips all of that away and makes an argument for one central idea.
Nick Capodice: All right. So while we're on the subject of good presidential speeches, I have to ask a question that I might not want to know the answer to. To me, there is one speech in particular [00:17:00] that is the antithesis of the Christmas tree. It is content and style and meaning at its finest, and being written by the president is actually pretty essential to its power. So here I go. Are you going to break my heart, Hannah, and tell me that Abraham Lincoln did not dash off the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope?
Hannah McCarthy: I've got the answer to that, but I'm going to withhold it just a little till after the break, which is right now.
Nick Capodice: But [00:17:30] before we go to the break, dear listener, it is my quick weekly reminder that while this show is and always will be free to You, it's not free to make. We want to ensure that we can continue bringing you the ins and outs of American democracy for years to come. And if you can lend us a helping hand in that mission, we would be much obliged. If you can spare a little pocket change or a lot of pocket change, consider making a gift at our website. You can get there by clicking the Donate button at civics101podcast.org. Many, many, many, many thanks. [00:18:00]
Hannah McCarthy: All right, we're back.
Nick Capodice: All right. Hannah, you were just about to tell me whether one of the more romantic stories about Abraham Lincoln and his towering genius is in fact true.
Hannah McCarthy: All right, give me the story that you have heard.
Nick Capodice: Ok, the story I know. And it's the only story that maybe I want to know [00:18:30] is that Abraham Lincoln en route to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to dedicate a new national cemetery, wrote one of the greatest orators ever to be delivered on the back of a big envelope while sitting on a train.
Hannah McCarthy: Ok, that story is not true.
Nick Capodice: Why are you doing this?
Hannah McCarthy: I why I read one of the most thorough historical deep dives into this question that I could find. The closest thing to truth that we have got is that Lincoln had a full two weeks [00:19:00] to work on his remarks prior to arriving at Gettysburg, and he used them. The speech was mostly, if not entirely, completed by the time he arrived in Pennsylvania in 1863. There are some eyewitness accounts of his drafting a copy of the speech on the back of a yellow government envelope once at the hotel in Gettysburg. But this speech was not a stroke of sudden, impromptu genius.
Nick Capodice: But he did, in fact, write it.
Hannah McCarthy: Honest Abe? Yeah, he wrote [00:19:30] it.
Nick Capodice: All right, I can live with that. I just was worried I was going to hear that the Gettysburg Address was the work of a team of presidential ghostwriters
Colin Powell: Four score, and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent
Colin Powell: A new nation...
Hannah McCarthy: Because that would have hurt, right?
Nick Capodice: Yeah.
Hannah McCarthy: Because there's this image of Abraham Lincoln laboring over that speech. This sense that it was a part of him that he was conveying to the American public.
Colin Powell: Or any nation so conceived. And so dedicated can long endure...
Hannah McCarthy: If that [00:20:00] isn't the case, then that speech somehow loses potency. It feels more like political messaging than it does a heartfelt message to the American people.
Nick Capodice: Exactly. And which is so different from today. We just heard the ins and outs of political speechwriting from a recent administration, and I'm in no way wounded by the idea that Obama had people crafting his words didn't bother me at all. So what happened? At what point did presidents stop writing all their own speeches? [00:20:30]
Hannah McCarthy: At no point, George Washington's inaugural address was written in large part by James Madison. Alexander Hamilton contributed a lot to Washington's famous farewell address.
Nick Capodice: I had no idea.
Hannah McCarthy: You weren't supposed to have any idea because for a long time, it was totally taboo for a president to admit to having help with speechwriting. When William Henry Harrison ran for president in 1840, people were not happy that he had a correspondence committee to help him [00:21:00] answer letters. Citizens wanted a leader who appeared genuine and human, not someone whose message was carefully cultivated by a team. Still, Mark Twain secretly helped President Grant to write his memoir. Warren Harding had a full time ghostwriter on the DL in the 1920s.
Nick Capodice: All right, so my question is, was Lincoln just the exception to the rule? Did presidents leave speechwriting to the professionals from the very beginning?
Hannah McCarthy: Not entirely. But then they really [00:21:30] didn't have to consider the fact that Lincoln gave maybe sixteen speeches in a year, whereas Obama, in his first year of the presidency, gave over 400.
Nick Capodice: That's outlandish. That's more than a speech a day, just constant speeches.
Hannah McCarthy: That is the modern presidency. In the earlier days of governing the country, though, there was time to craft your own speeches or take a lot of time to work closely with people you trusted to get your message across. I [00:22:00] mean, Woodrow Wilson, for example, is pretty widely accepted as having written all of his own speeches. It wasn't really until Franklin Delano Roosevelt that all of that changed the presidency had just gotten too big.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Harry Truman: If we fail in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world, and we shall surely [00:22:30] endanger the welfare of this nation.
Dwight D. Eisenhower: It is what the book of history and not with isolated pages that the United States will ever wish to be identified.
Hannah McCarthy: By the time Kennedy was in office, he was calling his speechwriter his intellectual blood bank.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy: I am talking about genuine peace, a kind of peace that makes life on Earth worth living if the kind that enables men and nations to grow.
Nick Capodice: In other words, Kennedy's speechwriter was the life support for a major [00:23:00] component of the presidency.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, we should emphasize here that speeches are very high stakes thing. They are the most public and widely publicized thing that a president regularly does. Having a really good speechwriter can be a true boon to the presidency.
Nick Capodice: It's interesting. And even though the public is aware and accepting of speechwriters nowadays, there does seem to be a lingering desire for the unpolished, un practiced, seemingly [00:23:30] unwritten presidential speech. And we've got a really recent example of that in former President Donald Trump. He prided himself on riffing and was not one to admit to reading words other people had written for him. And a lot of people were totally enamored of that.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, I actually recently watched a montage that The Washington Post put together, illustrating some of Trump's most off the cuff speeches.
Donald Trump: You have you had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent, and nobody wants to [00:24:00] say that. But I'll say it right now. I've condemned neo-Nazis. I've condemned many different groups. But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. It says, I love all of the people of our country. I didn't say, I love you because you're black or I love you because you're white or I love you because you're from Japan or you're from China, [00:24:30] or you're from Kenya, or you're from Scotland or Sweden. I love all the people of our country,
Hannah McCarthy: And I think, Nick, the reason you have voters who watch this kind of performance and really like it is that the one thing that did not die out with the modern presidency is this very American desire for seeming authenticity in a president. If a politician seems obviously staged, it gets our hackles up or the very least, it gets a heavy eye roll. [00:25:00] And actually, this brings me back to this question I have about modern, definitely ghostwritten presidential speeches. What is going on in these operations that has an effect that is moving or calming or inspiring regardless of where it originated? Why is it OK that Kennedy did not write his Moon speech that his intellectual blood bank Ted Sorensen did?
John Fitzgerald Kennedy: We choose [00:25:30] to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things? Not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal...
Nick Capodice: You want my honest take?
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, please.
Nick Capodice: Because that's a promise the president can make. The president has power. If Ted Sorensen promised us the Moon, it wouldn't mean a thing because he couldn't do it. And that power also means that the president can read someone else's words without penalty. [00:26:00] Really, the question is, can the president perform well? Are they a good orator? Can they stir something in the hearts of the American people?
Hannah McCarthy: Which Kennedy pretty much knocked out of the park, right? He was considered a consummate performer. And to your point about power, I want to play you one last thing, Nick.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy: In short, both the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies have a mutually deep interest in a [00:26:30] just and genuine peace. And in holding the arms race agreements to this end, are in the interests of the Soviet Union, as well as ours and even the most hostile nations.
Theodore Sorensen: I know many people think the inaugural was his best, but this was better and more important because it said more in addition to the moratorium on nuclear testing in the atmosphere than what you mentioned. That [00:27:00] speech called for a reexamination of the Cold War. No president had ever done that. It called for a reexamination of our relations with the Soviet Union. No president had ever done that. It called for a reexamination, part of which you heard of what we mean by peace itself. So it was an important speech and I had a lot to do with it. Yes. Uh, the president...
Nick Capodice: So Sorensen is saying, Yeah, [00:27:30] I wrote that. What does that matter? These are the president's ideas. This is the president breaking new ground because it's the president's ground to break. I am simply the arm of the administration that makes these ideas great on paper. The president is the one who makes the great speech,
Theodore Sorensen: And on the way back, he made the decision and cleared it on the Air Force One telephone with Bob McNamara in Defense and Mac Bundy back [00:28:00] in the White House to add to that speech, the moratorium on nuclear testing in the atmosphere, which he hoped would help bring the Soviets to the bargaining table. And it did. And later that same summer, a treaty was signed in Moscow, the first step toward arms control in the nuclear age the limited nuclear test [00:28:30] ban treaty. So speeches can have consequences. They aren't just empty words.
Nick Capodice: You know, you talked about speechwriters as these ghosts of the White House, Hannah. But when you think about it like this, the way they capture policy desires pinned them to a page, make them beautiful or funny and then hand them back to the leader of the free world to present to the American people. [00:29:00] They're more like mediums than they are ghosts. The president needs to say something, and they have the time and the writing chops to make those words happen.
Hannah McCarthy: This episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Our staff includes Christina Phillips and Jacqui Fulton. Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. Music in this episode by Ketsa, Xylo Zico [00:29:30] and Evan Schaefer. If you like this episode and want more, you can check out our whole catalog of adventures in American democracy and history at civics101podcast.org. And there is a really easy way to never miss a Civics episode. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. Civic 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.
