Terry Szuplat Oral History

All right. Let us get started. Tell us—we know from your wonderful memoir, by the way, Say It Well—

Available in bookstores everywhere. [laughs]

Available, and makes a wonderful gift. [laughter] And I love it because it’s not just a memoir, though you so skillfully weave in your stories, but it really is a “how to do public speaking” book. And as someone who, like you, started giving speeches in grade school, I’m still learning. And so for the lectures I’ve been giving of late, and last Friday I was asked to do an officiating role at a wedding of a friend’s daughter, and I actually used tips from here, and then for public lectures.

Hopefully it went well.

It went very well. I discovered a second career, apparently, as a wedding officiant. It was great. Some of this will be repetitious from the memoir, but we want to get it on the record. So just talk to us about the interesting background of your family, and your Ukrainian ties, and ties to World War II, and then how the family ended up in Boston to begin with.

Sure. So yes, I’m Ukrainian on my father’s side. My grandparents were both born in Ukraine. Like a lot of family histories, it’s vague, but somehow they ended up in Nazi Germany in a labor camp. Maybe not prisoners per se, but when you’re an ethnic Ukrainian in Nazi Germany, you’re not really free to wander about, so they were in some sort of work camp. We have pictures of them in the work camp. My father was born in a displaced persons, a refugee camp after World War II in what was occupied Germany. I think they missed the boat to—they were supposed to go to Australia. Someone got sick. They missed the boat, so they got the boat the next day, and they ended up in New York City, sponsored by a Ukrainian church in Amsterdam, New York, and ended up there. They had nothing. They had nothing. They had whatever—

Clothes on their backs, I guess.

Clothes on their back. My father was, I think, two or three years old perhaps, and they had nothing. They were sponsored by the church and lived on, I guess, what we’d now call welfare, food stamps, whatever, food from the local food pantry. He ended up joining the Navy, became a citizen. On shore leave one day in Boston, he met a young girl and they started dating. That became my mom, and they settled where she—she grew up Irish Catholic, Boston. That’s where I was born. And that’s the backstory.

So we asked about the pronunciation of your name, and the S is really dropped, right, would you say?

Well, you know, I think it’s one of those things where you go through immigration, and whoever—you go to one table, they write it one way, and you go to a different table, and they write it another way. So every time I’ve gone to Eastern Europe or I meet someone from Eastern Europe, they say, “Oh, Mr. ‘Shoe-plat.’” You know, the S-Z is a “sh” sound, S-H sound in English. So that’s how it’s said in Eastern Europe. But yes, different—some people in my family say “Zuplat” with a Z, some say “Suplat” with an S.

But you use the Z typically, “Zuplat.”

I guess I use—that’s how I say it.

We should have said at the very beginning that this is the Terry Szuplat interview for the Barack Obama presidential oral history at UVA’s [University of Virginia’s] Miller Center. Bob, anything on roots to begin with?

No, that really is an interesting background. Your grandparents came from eastern Ukraine?

Yes, and a part of Ukraine that has gone back and forth, well, that went back and forth between Poland and Ukraine over the decades. So it’s always a little bit unclear whether they were—they’re ethnic Ukrainian, whether they were in Ukraine or Poland at the time. We do have a photograph of my grandfather in the Polish army in between the two world wars. So again, so much is blurry.

But they were not Jewish and rounded up.

No, no.

But again, being Ukrainian, somehow ending—so you don’t know whether they were rounded up from Ukraine and sent to Nazi Germany, or had they moved to Germany?

As we understand it, they had voluntarily moved. I mean, right, they were in western Ukraine, so they were very anti-Russian. There’s a lot of complexity around what happened in Ukraine during World War II, and where people’s allegiances were, and how they perceived the different sides.

But no, my understanding is that they both went willingly to Germany, that my grandmother, as told in our family, went because that’s where the jobs were. There were jobs in Germany, so you could go and you could work in Germany. She had many, many brothers, a large family. A number of her brothers were hauled off by the Soviets, sent away and never returned. And so there just was no future there that she saw, and just as a young woman, left and somehow ended up—again, we have this black-and-white photo of them in some sort of camp where they’re making something. But they were of that generation—they didn’t talk a lot about it or give a lot of details to my parents. But that shapes how you see the world, I think.

Sure, sure. So you then are born in the Boston area. A suburb of Boston, was it?

So born in Boston. My mother’s from Roslindale, which is a neighborhood in Boston, and we lived there for a few years. My dad was and is a plumber and got a job down on Cape Cod [Massachusetts] at the military base, so we moved down there.

To Falmouth.

To Falmouth, on the Cape, and that’s where I grew up. I was always fascinated with politics and government and history, and of course the Kennedys are a few towns over.

Yes, in Hyannis [Massachusetts].

A world away in Hyannis Port. When you grow up on Cape Cod, the Kennedys, they’re national news, but they’re local news as well. You see them. You hear about them. They make the news all the time, and so you’re surrounded by that. And I was captivated by that.

Were your parents political, or did you talk about politics at the dinner table?

Not a ton. I think my mother, you know, Irish Catholic, Massachusetts, clearly liberal—well, Democrat. I think my father—growing up in the ’80s, I probably think of him more as a [Ronald] Reagan Democrat, or Reagan supporter. But I was always very much—I saw myself as a Democrat. I remember growing up and thinking—I remember reading at one point in school that John F. Kennedy had faced the challenge of being an Irish Catholic, and I didn’t understand why that would be a problem. Everybody I knew was Irish Catholic. The whole state, the whole everybody is Irish Catholic. How could this not be anything but a benefit for you? But we all live in our bubbles, and that was the bubble I grew up in.

Right. I remember writing to you initially on email, I think, once you had accepted the invitation, to say I had started into your book, Say It Well. And I was captivated by the fact that you portrayed John F. Kennedy in fourth grade for your book report, that you think is your first public speech.

Right, right. [laughs]

So I think I know then why you chose to portray him. One of my questions was, how did you dress, and what did you look like to portray John Kennedy?

I still have the photo. And I was in, what, fourth? So yes, the background. We had to read a biography of a famous person but then dress up as the person and present your book report in class.

Public school or Catholic?

Yes, public school. All public schools the whole time. So I had dressed up as John F. Kennedy, which was just me in slacks, and a blue blazer that was too big, and a tie that didn’t fit, and a white shirt. And I stood in front of an American flag, and I gave my little book report.

If you’d like to include and append that photo, a copy of that photo, we’re always happy to put that with your transcript. That would be great. Also, before you do that, send it to me. I’d love to see it.

So how do you get from working class Cape Cod to Washington D.C.?

Well, like I said, I’ve always loved government, politics, history. I was very active in my student government in high school, and great support from my teachers. Again, this is all public school. With [American Legion] Boys State—you know, all the things that you do when you’re interested in politics as a kid.

Oh, so you did do Boys State.

You have Boys State. Student Government Day at the state capital, where my history teacher took me up, and we sat in the chairs of the state senators. So I got to do all these things. Came to Washington on a Boy Scout trip. And I just—you know, if you want to be an actor, you go to LA [Los Angeles, California]. You want to do finance, you go to New York. You want to do public service, you go to Washington. So I wanted to be in the D.C. or D.C.-adjacent area. I did apply to a school that was founded by one of our founding fathers, south of Washington. Didn’t quite make the cut, but—

[laughter] We won’t name that.

But hey, I’m here today [at University of Virginia].

A great loss for that university, we can say.

There you go. There you go. Not everyone gets it right. What can I say? But I really wanted to be in Washington and chose American University. American is wonderful at really pushing students to be out in the city. My sophomore year, I did an internship for my senator, a guy named John Kerry. My junior year, I studied abroad in England, and I got an internship in the British Parliament. I’m helping a member of Parliament and sitting in the chamber, watching these great Prime Minister’s Questions times [weekly event], which is just a phenomenal experience.

Then senior year, I got to be an intern in the White House for [William J.] Bill Clinton’s White House. I was assigned to the foreign policy speechwriters. People like [Robert] Bob Boorstin, [Daniel] Dan Benjamin, and a guy named [Antony J.] Tony Blinken, who were the first people that really taught me how to write for the ear. I write in the book a little bit about that experience. Just to be—that’s why I came to Washington. That’s what I wanted to do. And so that’s how I ended up in the space.

Before you had that speechwriting experience as an intern in the [William J.] Clinton era, did you consider running for office yourself? Did you ever think about, I’m going into an elective part of politics?

Maybe, yes. Like so many young people, Oh, maybe someday I’ll run for office, or I’ll be a lawyer. I really wanted to go to law school. Again, [laughs]—

That didn’t quite work out?

That didn’t quite work out. I think when you set your sights on certain schools, and then you take the LSAT [Law School Admission Test], and your LSAT scores don’t match those schools, you should recalibrate, and I never did. So the answer was not what I wanted it to be. But what blessing, right? You know, one door closes and another opens. Right about the time, a year or two after college, when the law school route was starting to not look so promising is when I got my first speechwriting job at the Department of Defense, and I thought, Well, this is an interesting way to contribute. To be able to help tell the larger story of any kind of administration, this is interesting.

And it allowed me to explore a lot of the things that I loved—again, history, government, politics—without necessarily, you don’t have to be the person at the podium. Maybe you could be the person backstage. Or you don’t have to be the lawyer. Maybe you can be the person making the argument but maybe not in a legal sense. So it was starting to—it wasn’t the intent. Sometimes people like to recount their lives, and it all looks so linear, and it makes a certain sense, but this was not the path that I had envisioned.

What did the speechwriters use their interns for? Were you doing research, fact checking, or were you primarily watching what was going on?

Both. Day to day, it’s interesting. Gosh, there were maybe four or five interns at the time for the Clinton speechwriters. When I became a speechwriter at the White House years later, we had one intern for the whole team. So we were assigned, and I was assigned to the foreign policy speechwriters. And yes, sometimes it’s just getting them—the nonglamorous stuff, getting them coffee, getting them lunch, going to the library, doing research. But they were really very encouraging of me.

One of the things I remember is when President Clinton had to do an anniversary of the Iwo Jima landing [February 19, 1945, World War II battle]. They said—somehow they must have matched me up with a veterans organization, and I just spent every day interviewing veterans about their experience in Iwo Jima. And God, I love just being able to talk to people and get their story, and all these nuggets. Anyone can go to the library and pull them from a history book, but to be able to speak to people and help the president channel their story, I loved doing that.

But yes, observing. I remember being there the night of one of Clinton’s State of the Union addresses. We all stayed up, and I watched the speechwriters and the senior staff watch the speech on one monitor but also watch their focus groups with their dials in real time. Watching them watching voters react to their words, several levels of thought at work there, and that was captivating.

I’m sitting in the back of the room as 22-year-old student fascinated with government, watching presidential speechwriters watch their president give the speech that they wrote while also watching the target audience reacting in real time with their dials. Watching the numbers go up, and then watching them process how the president’s delivering their words, how they’re being received by the voters, how the voters are giving their feedback in real time, and then how the speechwriters are internalizing that. It was just remarkable.

When you say they sent you to the library, is that the White House Library?

Yes. There’s a beautiful library in the Old Executive Office Building [Eisenhower Executive Office Building], as you both know. It’s a wonderful place to be able to just sit. You know, these three or four levels. We also had this wonderful new thing called the internet. We were learning how to use that at the time. But still, we mostly went and found books, and carried books back to them, and marked the pages, and made photocopies of book pages. So that was—

I’m a senior in college. It’s 1995, spring. I still didn’t necessarily want to make that my life, but loved the experience. And I just thought, here are some folks, they don’t have to spend their days in endless policy meetings hashing out the memorandums and the executive orders. They get to write the music. They get to write the poetry of the presidency, to tell the thematics. What’s the big story? And they were getting to do things that I thought, Wow, that’s—

I neglected to mention it, but one of the things that my mother, who knew that I was fascinated with politics and government, did for me when I was a teenager was she gave me an album of speeches by John F. Kennedy. So other kids were outside playing, and I’m inside listening to these speeches by Kennedy. I didn’t even have the words for it yet, but there was something in those words, in the rhythm and the cadence, that I just knew was special and I knew was different. And so to then, in college, be watching the Ted Sorensens of the Bill Clinton era try to do that was just—

As a teenager, I just got to be the recipient, to hear all those words but not necessarily understand them. And then as a college student, to be able to see behind the scenes, the mechanics of folks trying to create those was, I thought, fascinating.

And you were a White House intern before that became controversial in the Clinton years.

That’s right. Correct.

I had two questions. One is about watching the focus groups, and watching the speechwriters of the State of the Union watching the focus groups. Were they commenting to each other—you said, first of all, they were watching the president deliver the State of the Union address. Were they commenting about what was happening in the chamber? And then were they commenting to each other, or exclaiming, or just making an observation of, “Oh, I thought that would get a different response,” or, “Oh, good, that’s exactly what we hoped that line would do”?

Sitting here today, I don’t have any specific memories. I just have the impression of being—I remember being there. And yes, which lines landed. Now that it’s 30 years later, and I know, as a speechwriter, what they were doing, yes, they were watching for, did he deliver the line the way they hoped he would? Did it get the response in the chamber that they wanted? Did it get the reaction amongst the voters in the focus group that they wanted? And I’m sure, yes, I’m sure there were lines that did better than they thought, and certain lines that probably did not land as well as they thought, which is the experience of every speechwriter and every speech.

Right. And then presumably, because every year they have to write a State of the Union address, they take those notes to heart and say, “Let’s do more of those lines that, at least last year, got the big response or the response that we want.”

The other question was about your Iwo Jima research and talking to the veterans from that very bloody battle, but ultimately victorious. Did you find any of your anecdotes or stories incorporated into the speech that the president ultimately gave?

Yes, absolutely. So what an incredible—to know that you worked on something, and then all you do is you serve it up to the speechwriters as a buffet. You know that most of them, they’re not going to pick, but they might pick a few, and they did.

Were you at the level, even as an intern, where you were able to see the interaction that they had, the full-time speechwriters with the president, and what would come back? Presumably, some things would come back, as often with President Obama, and you go into great detail, and so does Cody in his book, about all of the lines that are written to the side or lines that are crossed out. Did you get the sense that Clinton did that as well?

As an intern, no. As an intern, I don’t think—I think I spent my entire time in the Old Executive Office Building.

In the library. [laughs]

In the library, sometimes with the speechwriters, but I don’t think I ever went to the West Wing. I don’t think I ever observed them interacting with the president, President Clinton. No, just as an intern, I was—

Right. Did they ever comment to you about, “Oh, that draft that we were working on has come back,” or, “We’re going back and reworking this for the president’s comments”?

No. I mean, not that I remember. I remember some of my drafts coming back. They would let me take a crack at writing something once in a while, because they were so important writing important speeches. There were just so many speeches to be written. The few times that I did take a crack at something, I remember what they looked like because this was back in the pen-and-ink days. There was no Google Docs [collaborative word processor]. And so you’d give them a piece of paper, and they’d give you a piece of paper back. It was just a bloodbath. It was just covered in red ink. I thought that I had been brought in because I had some writing talent, or I knew something about writing, and clearly I did not know enough.

The two that stick to mind were, I drafted a toast for when Bill Clinton hosted the king of Morocco—again, not going to make or break foreign policy, but I thought I did a great job, and it just came back completely covered—and writing some talking points for the president speaking to U.S. Embassy staff in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Did that come to you because they knew your background?

I don’t know why that came to me. Maybe I asked, or maybe they just knew, or maybe they were just swamped with real speeches. But yes, I still have a framed copy of the presidential schedule for that day in spring of ’95, where it says, “President Bill Clinton remarks, U.S. Embassy staff, Kiev, remarks by Terry Szuplat.”

That’s pretty exciting.

That’s pretty cool to be able to have.

Right. Another thing we always say to folks who’ve written a memoir, anything that comes to mind that you left on the cutting room floor for length or that you want to add, feel free as we go along, and you may already be doing that.

The other question that I had, and I think this is helpful, particularly—people who read these transcripts are biographers, and historians, and political scientists, and practitioners, and journalists, and students who are aspiring to do the kinds of things that you do. We have an undergraduate class here now in speechwriting. One thing that struck me—and I think I mentioned this to you in my email as well, because I come from a similar working-class background—was that so many people that you met, maybe even as an intern, and certainly as you got into the Defense Department and moving on from there, were Ivy League trained. That sometimes felt how to you?

I think there have been studies done on the number of Ivy League graduates in the D.C., New York, Boston area, and it’s off the charts. It’s unlike anything else in the country. And so I think when you come to Washington, it’s a city that is powered by credentials and titles, and it doesn’t take long in any conversation, lunch, cocktail party, where someone is kind of letting you know where they went to school or they’re asking you where you went. It’s hard not to feel like folks are slotting things out in their mind.

It happens in the academic world too. [laughs]

I’m sure it does. I mean, it happens everywhere. Everyone is trying to see where they fit. It happens everywhere. I think it’s especially pronounced in Washington. And so when you don’t come from that background, it can—if you let it get to you, it can be a very dangerous thing. It can warp your sense of self.

I think it took me a long time to figure out how to process it in the right way because, again, when you’re in a group of—and anyone who reads this and spends time in Washington will know what this is like. You’re at a party. You’re at an event. You’re at a cocktail hour. And folks are going around, and it’s like, “Where did you go to school? Where did you go to school?” And if you went to Harvard [University] or Yale [University], there’s always a follow-up: “Oh, which [fraternity] house did you live in? Did you know So-and-so, and did you know this—” You can just sort of see the network kicking in.

And if you didn’t necessarily go to one of those schools, oftentimes that was the end of the question. “Where did you go to school?” And you say where you went to school, and they’re like, “Oh, great. Interesting.” And they move on. They’re really not interested in exploring that further. There’s an assumption that maybe you don’t know the people I know, or you don’t have the connections. Sometimes it’s overt, and sometimes it’s subtle. But I’ve talked to a lot of folks who have come from similar backgrounds, and I do write about it in the book. I’ve had so many people come up to me in the past year and say, “I’m so glad you put that in there because that’s exactly what I feel. I feel like it’s—” You can’t be in Washington and not feel it.

And I realized over time that it’s an asset. In Washington, you might feel like you’re sometimes the odd person out, but actually, in America, it’s those folks who are the odd folks out. Most people, 99 percent of people who go to college don’t go to Ivy League schools. In fact, most Americans have not even gone to college in the first place. So who’s really representative of the larger society?

And that’s the audience the president, any president, is trying to reach.

Exactly. And so, yes, I think through the course of my career, one of the things—we always talk about ourselves as speechwriters. We’re translators.

We’re lucky. We’re fortunate. We get to sit in the room where these incredibly accomplished, smart, talented, highly credentialed people are hashing out complex policies in all of their contradictions, and they’re talking about it and thinking about it one way. But when the president of the United States gets up and has to talk about that issue, that policy, to the American people, to 300 million Americans, the vast majority of whom don’t have the background and the perspective of those policy experts, then that’s an exercise in translation and simplification.

So maybe in the end, maybe not going to law school turned out to be an asset. Maybe not going to graduate school turned out be an asset for this particular profession because I was constantly trying to simplify and to make the complex accessible. Oftentimes, as we’d write, Is this going to make sense to my parents back home, my sisters, my friends?

Your Uncle Dan.

My Uncle Dan, who I write about in the book. Just all the folks who are watching. And so maybe having not been completely sucked into that turned out to be a blessing.

Bob, did you have a question?

Well, I want to put a pin on that, and let’s come back later. One of the interesting things about Barack Obama is that he has a foot in that world. He goes to Harvard Law School, he’s the editor of the [Harvard Law] Review, but that’s not his world completely. He has this much more varied educational track, family track, and it’s—well, I want to ask. How does that work for him? Does it give him a comfort level with people of those credentials and backgrounds? Or is he—well, we’ll come back, because I want to think about that in terms of who Obama is.

Yes, I think, right. So much of what’s been written by Obama and about Obama is the tensions in his life around race, given his father’s background and his mother’s background. But there’s also a tension around class and the way he grew up. He did not grow up in affluence, and yet he, over time, was fortunate to attend some of the most prestigious schools in the United States, and the world, and rise to the highest levels of politics. I think if you look closely at a lot of his writings, he’s writing about feeling like an outsider, not just from a racial standpoint but from a class standpoint. And of course, he spoke to that during his ’08 campaign especially.

But as a speechwriter, it always gave us, I think, opportunities when he was speaking to audiences, again, to draw on those experiences that he had had that maybe past presidents had not had. I mean, we might be jumping ahead here, but as a speechwriter, one of the things you’re always trying to do is allow the speaker to give the speech that only they can give. Once you become president, you’re in the stratosphere, and you can seem unrelatable to so many people. But whenever we sat down, we were trying to write a speech for Barack Obama that was different than what any other president had been able to ever give.

There were stories and experiences that he had had, whether it was growing up in Hawaii, one of the most multicultural states in the country; spending time as a child in Indonesia, in a post—at a time when they were still recovering from mass slaughter in an incredibly racial and ethnic diverse country; having family members all over the world in different countries and different backgrounds. That’s all part of what made him who he was and made him unique. And so that wasn’t just race. That was class, and that was ethnicity. When you’re Christian but you have Muslim ancestors, and your middle name is Hussein, [laughter] as his critics would always like to emphasize when they say his name, that all made him who he was. And that allowed him to connect with so many different audiences.

I think that’s why so many people around the world—I mean, in our country and around the world—related to him. They had entry points to him that they did not have with, maybe, a more traditional president or a past president.

And Clinton could talk “small-town Arkansas” when he wanted to, and he could talk “Yale Law School” when he wanted to.

He could, right. Yes. And we can talk about—I think one of the—every president, they have strengths and vulnerabilities as a communicator. One of Barack Obama’s great strengths was his ability to dissect and unpack and lay out an argument, and that comes from, as he said to me once, “the lawyer side of my brain.” Not just a law student and a lawyer, but someone who taught constitutional law and civil rights. He had to, every week, sit down and think, How do I present this idea to these students? And I didn’t understand at the time. Now that I’m an adjunct professor myself, I understand, Oh, I get it. You have to think out how you’re going to use these three hours every week. That forces you to really think about how you’re going to structure your argument, and he did that. So that was great.

And you have to think about audience. It’s not your expert knowledge. It’s, Where are my students, and how far can I take them?

Right, what do they bring to this? And what are they bringing to this, and what assumptions do they bring. I teach—my students are 20, 21, 22 [years old]. They didn’t live through 9/11 [September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks]. They were born after 9/11. Right? For us, that’s like, God. That’s like someone talking to me about Pearl Harbor [December 7, 1941, Japanese surprise attack]. I’ve read about it, but I didn’t live it.

All of that is to say that all of these things made Barack Obama who he is. And so we were always, as speechwriters, trying to bring as much of that into the speech as possible.

So if we circle back to your earliest experiences as you come out of college, you mentioned—I want to certainly go back to DoD [Department of Defense], but also, as a researcher for the Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy [Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy]. What was that like? And getting into that concept of digging down, getting the information that somebody needs, that then helps you move into the speechwriting category in DoD.

That was a wild experience because, basically, Senator [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan set this up because he felt our government classifies too much and declassifies too little. Clearly, we solved that problem. [laughter]

For two years, we basically—I was given TS/SCI [Top Secret/Secret Compartmented Information] security clearance as a 22-year-old kid, and then brought on these visits to the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], NSA [National Security Agency], I mean, into the deepest bowels of our national security apparatus. At one point, they took us out to the CIA’s quote, unquote, “The Farm,” where they do their training of their officers for a weekend. I’m a 22-year-old kid just getting to see not how government is supposed to work, or in theory, but how it actually works. That was Moynihan’s—one of his big insights into this was, if you really want to understand how this massive system operates, you have to understand the incentive structures that go on every day.

You have 2 [million] to 3 million people who have the ability to classify information, and they put it into a system. They’re incentivized to do so because if they don’t do so, they’ll get reprimanded, but no one ever gets punished for overclassifying. And then likewise, at the other end of the pipe, no one gets rewarded for declassifying too much. And so really understanding the inner workings of how the government actually works—not in theory, not how it’s supposed to, not according to the EOs [executive orders], but how it actually works day in and day out. The people who are, not literally stamping it, but putting the mark on—there has to be someone somewhere, years later, who takes the mark off.

Again, understanding incentives was—it was so eye opening. I mean, again, to be 22 years old with a top-secret security clearance, and being brought along, and sitting down with the top counterintelligence agents of the CIA in the wake of Aldrich Ames [convicted CIA agent and Soviet spy], in the wake of these other situations, it was just—it was eye-opening.

A lot of what we heard was not—as speechwriters, we’re the storytellers. We want to tell the most positive or—we can talk about this later—honest story of the United States. But so much of what we were hearing, these were not the most glorious moments of the United States: the foreign interference in foreign elections and efforts to depose foreign leaders. This is not the story that most Americans want to hear or the story that our leaders tend to tell us. And so to be, again, at the beginning of your career, to see that, to see—having watched the speechwriters tell the glorious story of the country, but then to spend two years seeing the other side of it was—

A bit of a dark underbelly, I guess you could say. But it didn’t make you cynical, it seems, about American government or history.

No, it didn’t, because I think every person, every country does great things and they do horrible things, or they do good things and they do bad things. The bigger you are, the bigger your achievements and the bigger your mistakes.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been arguably the biggest player on the world stage. When we do things right, it can help lift millions of people out of poverty. When we do things wrong and unsettle foreign governments, it can plunge a country into civil war and lead to the deaths of countless people. So your impact is magnified. And so yes, you can do remarkable things. You can do horrible things. But why not be in there and try to work for people who are trying to use American power in a way that actually creates more stability rather than less, is the thinking.

And I would assume that the takeaway from a study of our classification system isn’t just, it’s sometimes used to cover up misdeeds. The big takeaway would be, it’s absurd. It’s complicated. And it’s almost unmanageable.

Yes. I mean, the complexity of the system, the vastness of the system. I don’t think we talked about this in the report, but one of my takeaways was just, we met with—we would sit down at the table with, again, CIA, DIA, NSA, DoD, all these—and one on one, from what I could tell, good people. Americans who, every day, went to work because they believed that they were doing important work for the United States of America.

One of my takeaways was, you can be a good person doing good things, and every day doing your best, but be in a system that cumulatively leads to the wrong outcome. Everyone agrees we shouldn’t be classifying so much. Everyone agrees we should be declassifying, to a person. No one ever said, in all those two years, “Oh, no, we should be classifying a lot more and we should be declassifying a lot less.” So everyone was on the same page. And yet the cumulative effect of everyone doing their job every day was to perpetuate a system that everyone agreed was not producing the results we wanted.

So how do you get the vast systems of agency and department and organization to do what you want them to do? We did not solve that problem, but I think Moynihan was correct. It was the incentive structure. How else can you explain millions of people doing things every day that millions of people agree are not necessarily in the best interest of the country? And so that probably, just on a personal level, certainly impacts what I then do later, because then here we are writing for a president at the very top of this massive system, this federal system of roughly 4 million military and civilian personnel. How do you get that massive organization to do what you want? Or how, as the quote, unquote, “leader of the free world” [U.S. president], do you get coalitions of countries to do what you want when everyone’s incentives maybe are not the same?

You made a comment, tongue in cheek, about, “Looks like we’ve solved part of this issue.” And just so people match up the dates, several things have happened. First of all, just in the last week, but also from the [Donald J.] Trump administration’s first administration, the taking away of boxes and boxes of documents in violation of the Presidential Records Act. But also when they were seized, under a duly indicated warrant from the courts, at Mar-a-Lago [Club, Florida], it was discovered that there were classified documents in these boxes and boxes that were taken away by the president and his people. That prompted, in the last few years particularly, stories about overclassification.

Then this past week, we’ve had the situation of the release of most, finally, of the John Kennedy assassination documents. And there was just a really interesting NPR [National Public Radio] spot yesterday, “The Daily,” that The New York Times interviews, and they were talking to their person, their journalist who covers CIA, about what was in there. So much of what was in there, as this person said, in his mind, didn’t change anything from the Warren Commission’s [President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy’s] ultimate conclusions, but that it was the issues of the CIA, and how the CIA operates, and how it was operating during the Cold War particularly.

And then finally, what happened this week, by coincidence, is to have the current Trump administration engaging in conversations on a public chat platform that dealt with upcoming attacks on Yemen. So all of this is now stirring in the public mind once again, by coincidence, about what you were doing as a 22-year-old, so on go the conversations.

Take us then to the Pentagon. How did you get that position in the Pentagon? And you are there from, I’ve got down in the timeline [background materials], 1995 to 2001? Is that right?

Or about maybe 1997.

Sorry, yes, I’ve got ’97 to ’01.

So yes, two years.

With [William S.] Bill Cohen as SecDef [secretary of defense].

So two years of being at the Secrecy Commission. Got to know folks. It was time to find the next—commissions end. I always knew it was a temporary thing. It turned out one of the folks, the staffers on our commission, knew that I was interested in maybe speechwriting, knew one of the speechwriters at the State Department for the secretary of state, so I went over and had an interview. They were not hiring. They’d had no opening. But he said, “Oh, I hear the speechwriters for the secretary of defense are looking for someone.” So I threw my name in. They made me take a writing test, and I got hired.

I probably had no business being there. I had never served in the military. I had never worked in the Defense Department. I think I had maybe been to the Pentagon once. At this point, I’m like 24 years old. They were not hiring a senior speechwriter. They had a very seasoned team. They were looking for a junior writer to write the Marine Corps birthday statement that they were tired of writing every year, the toast for the visiting minister of defense. So I got that.

And at the time, it was Bill Cohen, former senator from Maine, Republican, who had been brought in across the aisle. One of the few elected officials to ever serve in the administration of the other party. It’s happened a few times, but not often. And again, another incredible learning experience, to be able—again, not coming from a military background. I mean, my father served, but I didn’t grow up, I wouldn’t say, in a military family per se. So to be a civilian, a liberal Democrat, learning the ways and the language of the military and those who served, and to be able to be around that environment every day, it was like being in a different—

I’d wake up in the morning as a civilian, and go spend my day with the military, and travel around the world with the secretary of defense, and help him communicate to our allies, our adversaries. And just an incredible—again, another fascinating learning experience. And Bill Cohen, just a great orator, a lover of the classics, a scholar of the classics, majored in Greek and Latin at Bowdoin [College], and just loved to pepper his speeches with all sorts of references to ancient Greece, ancient Rome. I think that’s where I really learned just how beautiful language could be, that it didn’t always have—famous saying, “We campaign in poetry and govern in prose.” But we don’t have to. [laughter] You can govern in poetry too.

And I think we’ve seen, over time, the great leaders at the presidential level and elsewhere, the great communicators, are the ones who bring the poetry to bear in the way they govern. That’s something I got to really—to read Joshua Chamberlain from the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and to be able to infuse these things into contemporary rhetoric was just a wonderful experience. To recognize that there’s a time and a place for that and to try to not overdo it. But yes, I learned from him.

Could you give us some more—is it possible to give details? As I wrote down, you’re mentioning poetry. As I went through the yearbook and the briefing book [background materials], I wrote down “cadence,” and “lyricism,” and “lyrical.” And you’re giving the examples of references to ancient Greece and Rome. Both the content of ancient Greece and Rome, or the great quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes, that’s the content. But the cadence, and the lyricism, and the “lilt,” I’ll call it—is there a way to explain how to do that, and how do you do it in the words? And then you’ve got to have someone like a Kennedy; like a Reagan, who’s viewed as a great communicator; like a Barack Obama, who particularly are good at that. How does all that come together?

I think part of it is actually how you write it on the page. I talk about this in the book. Bill Cohen, even as he served in the Senate, he published his own poetry. We would write his speeches out like you’d write a poem or a song, in stanzas, so that every sentence would start flush on the left margin.

You would literally see—if you have a short sentence, you see it. It’s short. There’s lots of white space to the right. If there’s a long sentence, and it goes onto a second line, and then a third line, and then a fourth line, my God, that’s—what a long sentence. Where do you breathe? Where do you pause? How do you actually say that sentence? When you write it out and then start every new sentence flush left margin, you see it on the page. I teach this to my students.

We didn’t write like this for Barack Obama. In the White House, the formatting would have just screwed with everybody’s minds in the bureaucracy and in the White House. But that’s how I write now because, I think, we all know what a song looks like. We’ve all seen the lyrics of a song. We’ve all read poems. And we know that with that comes lyricism and rhythm. And when you have three short sentences, you can see it, literally, on the page. You say, Oh, those are three very tight sentences, or This sentence is longer, or These three sentences start out with the same refrain. You can literally see it on the page.

So I think there are ways that you can, even if—I don’t think I’m a musical person. I don’t play an instrument. I don’t know how to read music. But writing in this way helps bring out the musicality, and the poetry, and the rhythm, and the cadence, and the lyricism of language.

I learned recently that [Winston] Churchill wrote like this. I didn’t know this. Thirty years I’ve been doing this, and I found out that Churchill wrote this way as well, which is not surprising. Of all people—but yes. And I teach this to my students. It’s so simple, and yet when you do that—because again, you just look at a normal essay, you have no sense of the pattern of the language. But this is a way of allowing me to see the patterns on the page. That’s one way to do it.

I was just going to follow up, and then Bob. How do you do that so that it feels natural to the person who’s speaking? How do you capture that voice? I think you had said listening—obviously, you listen to the president you’re writing for, or the defense secretary you’re writing for. How are you able to incorporate that as you’re writing, to make sure that doesn’t sound artificial when the person you’re writing for is saying it?

Yes. Well, it is. You just have to listen. You listen. I would spend hours and hours and hours listening to Barack Obama’s speeches. I would put my headset on, and then I’d go to YouTube [online video-sharing platform], and I’d play a speech. And I would turn the screen off, so I wouldn’t get distracted by all the body language, and the movements, and the crowd shots, and this. The only thing I wanted to focus on was the way Barack Obama spoke, and his speech pattern. The only way you can learn how to do that for someone is just by countless hours of listening.

I teach political speechwriting in college, and my students are always saying, “Teach me how to write for somebody else.” So I do one lesson on that. But the only way to learn how to write for someone else over time is to spend lots of time with them, listening to them, and listening to how they think and how they approach problems, and talking with them, to the point where you can anticipate how they would approach it.

One of the games we would like to play at the White House is, Barack Obama goes out to a press conference. We don’t know what questions he’s going to get asked. He doesn’t know either. But he would get asked a question, and in that split second before he starts speaking, we’d try to think—or I certainly would try to think—What’s he going to say? It’s my job to know how Barack Obama, not just how he speaks but how he thinks. How is he going to answer this question? So if I could get it right, I felt pretty good. In speechwriting, we call it having a “mind meld” with this person you’re writing for. You can only write how they speak if you know how they think. And so if he gave the answer from an unexpected angle, then that was a moment where I could learn from that.

But yes, there’s no quick or easy way. You just listen, you keep track. I would study—one other thing I would do was not only listen to Barack Obama’s speeches. I would print them out, and I would mark them up. I would study them. I would dissect them: OK, this is the introduction, now he’s moving into part 1 of his argument. I’d put a big line across the page. And I’d look at it and just kind of reverse-outline the speech.

Especially in those first few months before I started writing for him, where I was just consuming every speech he gave, I wanted to just know, how are they structuring these speeches? How does Barack Obama order his speech? And so I would mark it up and realize, OK, this speech had seven parts. So when I get there, I can write a speech in seven parts, and part 1 is the introduction, and part 7 is the conclusion. That meant there were five pieces of his argument. And this is how he tends to start, by giving you historical context.

Every person that I’ve ever written for, and all of us, we do that differently. I do it differently than you. If the three of us were asked to give a speech about presidential rhetoric, we’d each probably approach it in a different way, because you’re historians and I’m not, and I’m a speechwriter and you’re not. So as a speechwriter, yes, you’re really trying to just get inside someone’s brain as much as you can. It’s a wonderful and terrifying thing all at once to be inside someone’s brain all the time.

So that description is legal, right? It’s how you would brief a case. You would start out with, Here was the question, here’s the introduction.

Here’s Obama the constitutional law professor, right?

Exactly. Here are the facts of the case. Here’s the evidence to support that. Here’s the conclusion. And [Thomas] Jefferson—I would teach students how to write by the Declaration of Independence, with a premise and argument, evidence, and conclusion. Very lawyerly.

Right, very lawyerly.

Bob.

Did Cohen have speeches he wanted you to read: “Here are some of my good ones, make sure you know these”? Or other people on the staff, or things he had written, or orators he liked? “Make sure you know these [Abraham] Lincoln speeches. Make sure you know these Churchill speeches. They’re the ones he likes to revisit.” Sometimes people have those.

Right.

I worked for a congressman. He had three binders of his best work, and the first thing you did when you were asked to draft a speech was sit down and read them.

Yes, “Read that. No, all of the above.” So by the time Bill Cohen became secretary of defense, he had been a member of Congress. He had been a U.S. senator for, I mean, decades. And yes, we had all of it. When you read a hundred speeches by someone, again, you look for the patterns, not just the content: OK, clearly he loves Joshua Chamberlain from Maine. He loves Oliver Wendell Holmes. He loves Walter Lippman. He loves those generations. And he has “go-to” quotes and excerpts that you see over and over. He loves Pericles’s funeral oration. And so yes, this is the body of work. We’re going to draw from this.

But one of the things we tried to do also, too, was, OK, so he clearly loves these five quotes by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Well, he’s going to be secretary of defense for the next four years. We can’t just use the same four quotes every day.

Do those every day, yes.

So I remember taking the time. I’m going to go read as much Oliver Wendell Holmes as I can, and basically say, “Sir, you clearly love Oliver Wendell Holmes. Here are 20 more beautiful things that maybe we just haven’t infused that.” So meeting him where he was, not trying to reinvent him, not trying to, “No, stop quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes. Stop quoting all of these old white guys. Maybe you should quote someone else,” but really bringing—

That’s something I could do, even after all of these years, to try to help him become—well, not become. He’s already an incredible speaker and orator. But to provide him with fresh material that was consistent with him. He wasn’t being reinvented. He was just continuing to grow as a speaker. I think that’s what you can do as a speechwriter: Help your speaker grow in ways that are authentic to them.

Did he write and think regionally? Did it help that you were also from New England?

I think it helped that—and we talked about this once. It helped that I had gone to public schools in New England because he talked about what it was like to go from being a kid from a working-class background in Maine to Bowdoin, where he was suddenly surrounded by—it seemed everybody had gone to a [private college-preparatory] prep school. And he just felt like a fish out of water. It’s like, wow, even all these years later, he could still remember what that felt like.

Again, going back to what we were talking about earlier, people think, Oh, you’re exaggerating. Here I am having a conversation with former U.S. Senator Bill Cohen, secretary of defense, who is still speaking about what it felt like to have gone from that working-class background to Bowdoin, and how he tried to—I think one of the reasons it seems that maybe he gravitated to classics was it was a way of him exploring a side of himself and a side that he didn’t necessarily come from. So it was really fascinating to hear him talk. Despite all of his achievements—U.S. congressman, U.S. senator, secretary of defense—he still remembered what it felt like to be a kid from a blue-collar background in an environment where he didn’t feel he fit at times.

Not to be a psychologist, but that would have—the things that he wanted to major in, presumably, at Bowdoin, in the classics, would have been the things those kids around him at Bowdoin would have been taught in prep school. Right?

Right. Perhaps, yes. Perhaps it was some way of kind of catching up. I was listening to him and thinking, Yes, I hear you. I hear what you—I’ve been there. I know what that’s like.

Did you ever find, for him or for Obama, that capturing their interest in a particular person, and that person’s rhetoric, and you go and find new quotes, and you put those in a speech, and it comes back and the principal has taken that out and gone back to their usual quote? Or that quote didn’t have as much resonance with them as their usual standard ones, or something else that they would choose from that speaker?

I think they understood what was going on. I mean, no one wants to say the same thing all the time, everywhere. You want to freshen up, keep it interesting. And so yes, if you did it right, you’re helping them evolve. You’re helping them build on. You’re not trying to make them someone they’re not. You’re not trying to force them into a new direction or path. You’re recognizing the path they’re on, and the space where they feel comfortable and most authentic, and you’re trying to expand that space for them. So no, generally it worked.

For a team of speechwriters for Cohen, was there somebody who did jokes? Was there somebody more likely to do military history? Was there specialization, or were people generally assigned, You’re going to do this one—show it to others, but you’re going to be the primary author?

Well, this has been true throughout my experience whenever I’ve been part of a speechwriting team: You all have to be ready to write for everything all the time because one person might not be available. You can’t just have an “Asia person,” or a “Europe person,” or an “Africa person,” because they might be busy. You need to be able to write about everything all the time. So no, we never—I don’t remember there being any sort of siloed topics, and certainly not jokes or anything like that. That was also true at the White House on the speechwriting team as well. I mean, we couldn’t have a “health care person” because there was just too much for one person to do. Everyone had to be able to do that.

Perhaps coming from your bipartisan parental home, [laughter] we’ve gotten you now to be working for a prominent Democratic member of Congress, a prominent former Republican member of Congress who’s in, as you said, a Democratic administration. But we get you to that 2001–2002 era where the Clinton administration has served its two terms and is gone, and Bush 43, George W. Bush, comes into power in ’01. You then switch over to the Hill [U.S. Congress], right, and go up to the Hill to work with the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Tell us what that was like in your sense, I think, as a person being a liberal or left-of-center Democrat. Probably not thinking, I’m going to go into the White House and work for the Bush administration, so making that switch to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

I should say something. I was there at the Pentagon writing for the secretary of defense until the very end, so January 2001. And we weren’t sure which way the courts were going to go.

In Bush v. Gore.

Right. So we don’t know whether we’re going to have a President [Albert] Gore or a President Bush. I was hopeful, as a speechwriter, Maybe I can make the jump. Maybe I can become a foreign policy speechwriter for President Gore. So I was there. I was hopeful. I was ready. I was optimistic that maybe that was something that could be a path for me. And the Supreme Court had other things in mind.

So I did not have another thing lined up. I actually stayed at the Defense Department for a few months. The incoming Bush team asked if some of us would be willing to help, because they were behind as well. They had spent so much time sort of fighting in the courts that I don’t think they had everybody they wanted to line up. So I actually stayed for several months, continuing to serve as a speechwriter, working with Donald Rumsfeld and his team.

And what was that—who were they, and what were they like?

I remember Donald Rumsfeld. I remember—that’s it. I can’t remember who his other—I’d have to be reminded on a staff sheet. [laughs] I mean, I was a Democratic holdover from the Clinton administration, so they were not thrilled with me, and I was not thrilled with them. But we were like, In the interest of national security, if there’s any place that this should be able to work, this is it.

It was— [laughs] I spent a lot of time writing tributes to Ronald Reagan. I don’t know what had happened, but for eight years, the federal government had not been producing tributes to Ronald Reagan. Clearly, there was this—it was very odd—this pent-up demand for tributes to Ronald Reagan for all these different events. I just spent quite a bit of time.

I think I only met Donald Rumsfeld once or twice. They were eager to bring their own people in, and I knew that. I was time-stamped, so I was aggressively looking to be somewhere else and chose to work on the Senate Armed Services Committee. That was Senator Carl Levin at the time, and then ranking member—well, I can’t remember, because it was split. This was 2000–2001, where there was a 50–50 split in the Senate.

Until Jim Jeffords switched over to caucus with the Democrats, right?

Switched, and threw everything. But I was there as a Democratic staff member on the Armed Services Committee, so I reported to Carl Levin, and the Republican lead was John Warner of Virginia. So again, as far as committees go, a fairly bipartisan space that I felt matched my temperament, and my interests, and my background, and how I thought government was supposed to work.

I was a speechwriter. I wanted to help people communicate their agenda, their vision, their values to the public. Carl Levin was more of a—to his credit, he was a true legislator. He’d get in there in the legislative trenches and work the bills. And so most of that time, I was writing statements for the opening for committee hearing. I spent most of my time writing the annual report, the budget report, whatever it was, with all the different line items, and it was not what I wanted to be doing. I did it for about a year. I was there on 9/11, on the Hill on 9/11.

Tell us about that day.

Like everybody else, we’re watching television. We don’t know what’s happening. We don’t know if it was a small plane that’s hit the World Trade Center [New York City]. But at that point, I remember we—they were starting to evacuate the Hill. We were in the Russell Senate Office Building, so right at the corner of the street, looking across the street at the Capitol. And I remember running up the stairs—not something I should have done—to look out the window, to look at the Capitol. I remember seeing just hundreds of staff pouring out of the U.S. Capitol Building and down the marble—and some people tripping and falling down the marble steps to get out of the building. They evacuated us from the Russell Building.

Where did you go?

We went and stood next to the building in the park—there’s a park right next to the building—because we didn’t know what was going on. I distinctly remember—you remember weird things in moments like this, right? So just hundreds of staff standing, milling about in this park, and Senator [Edward M.] Ted Kennedy’s dog running around just frantically. And I remember, we remembered hearing a loud boom that we thought was some sort of bomb of some kind in the city. We didn’t know where. We were getting reports that the Pentagon had been hit.

And at this point, they just told us to go home, Don’t come back in the buildings. My wife worked at the Government Accountability Office, a few blocks away, so I walked up there to get her. I watched the [Twin] Towers fall [on TV news] with her colleagues. Then we were part of that sort of parade. There was an exodus out of the city that day. We lived in Virginia, so we had to walk through the heart of the city and over the bridges. And I remember, because we didn’t know what was going on, no one wanted to walk down the city streets near all the federal buildings, so we all just walked down the [National] Mall, all the way down the Mall, this massive march of people out of the city and over the Roosevelt Bridge. You could look left and see the smoke coming out of the Pentagon.

And no one, I guess, wanted—at least the group you were with, did not want to go into the [Washington] Metro? Were you told not to go into the Metro?

Probably. I can’t remember, but we didn’t.

You just knew you had to walk across the Potomac [River] to get to—

Yes. So we just spent hours.

Could you see, then, the smoke rising from the Pentagon?

Yes. So this was—the year before, I had been working there. So I had a sense of probably what was going on there. And yes. So that was awful. And just the fear, and the uncertainty.

And then I stayed at the Armed Services Committee for a number, maybe half a year or more, helping Carl Levin and the Democratic Caucus in the Armed Services Committee frame up the hearings in the wake of 9/11. But still, I just—obviously it was an important time for the country, but it was just—and it was hard to leave, because I care deeply about, obviously, national security and foreign policy, and clearly we were entering a new moment. But just the work that I was doing day to day was not the work I wanted to be doing, so that’s when I went and started my own speechwriting consulting business.

Can I step back for just a second? Is there anything you could say about Secretary Cohen’s role as a thinker, articulator, of what the post–Cold War world meant?

Yes, right. So it’s 1997 through 2000. It’s those inter—we don’t call them that, but those are the interwar years. It’s post–Cold War, pre–9/11. So 9/11, it’s all counterterrorism all the time. That’s going to be the next two decades. But we’re still in this—this is America at its high point. We’ve won the Cold War. We vanquished the Soviet Union. China has not yet had the economic rise that it has today. Russia is not even much of a regional player at that point. This is America bestriding the world.

But with that comes the disintegration—we have the implosion of Yugoslavia, and so we had Bosnia, we had Kosovo. I went on visits with him to both of those places. That was the U.S. and NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] trying to put out some of the worst ethnic fighting we had seen since the Second World War. This is U.S. becoming—this is the era of U.S. as “global policeman” that, then, so many Americans react negatively to. Right?

We’re just sort of everywhere putting out fires. We’re putting out fires in the Balkans. We’re the military force and muscle behind UN [United Nations] inspections in Iraq at a time when the entire national security apparatus—again, we could talk about incentives—is convinced that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, has a nuclear program, has not disarmed, and we’re going to make him disarm. And so we have—when we’re there, I’m writing speeches for the military strikes against Saddam Hussein to force him to abide by a UN inspection regime.

We have the bombing of the USS Cole by this vague group called al-Qaeda, and whoever leads it, someone named Osama bin Laden, and the bombing of our embassies in Africa. The beginnings of the U.S. war against al-Qaeda and their war against us, without necessarily understanding that that’s going to become the defining foreign policy challenge for the next 20 years.

So it’s this, you know, we haven’t sorted things out. Right? We’ve lost one—we’ve lost the adversary and the foil that has shaped the entire post–World War II era. We have yet to find a challenge like al-Qaeda. And it’s everything. It’s the Balkans. It’s the Middle East. It’s the rise of al-Qaeda. I think it was—I’d have to ask Bill Cohen to distill it. I’m always wary of trying to distill other people’s philosophy. But it seemed like America was at a high point globally in terms of influence and impact, but with that was coming—there was this risk of overstretch. We’re galvanized, and things weren’t going to happen unless the United States took the lead. And we’ve seen a backlash to that, of course, in recent years.

How do you hang out a shingle in Washington to say, “I’m a speechwriter and consultant”? How does that work?

Well, it’s easier now that there’s a real internet, and LinkedIn [job-related social media], and you have networks. But in 2001, 2002, it was, you reach out to everybody you know to say, “Hey, I’m thinking of doing this. Any advice?” And through my network, I found two or three groups around town that needed this kind of support, needed writing and speechwriting support, none of which were a full-time job, but maybe together, I could cobble together enough that it could work.

Are these lobbying associations or nonprofits?

They were mostly advocacy groups, nonprofits, some companies, some members of Congress. I did end up doing it for about six years. And it was a mix. It was really a mix. So yes, sitting members of Congress, leaders of advocacy groups both in and outside of Washington, some in the defense space but most not. So that’s the point—that’s when I start branching out and doing more political work, partisan work, nonprofit work, not just in the national security space.

What are you thinking as the ’04 election comes around? And you had interned for, you said, Senator Kerry from your home state, the “Bay State” of Massachusetts, and he becomes the Democratic nominee.

Right. So I volunteer. I helped with the campaign a little bit, but the main thing I did was I volunteered as a speechwriter at the 2004 convention, which was in Boston. And as a speechwriter—actually, I love and loathe conventions because, on the one hand, they’re all—it’s a parade of speeches. A convention is a show. It’s four days of speeches. But I loathe them in part because often the speeches, from both parties, they’re just so awful.

And why is that?

Well, because there’s—again, it’s a four-day “message fest.” It’s about hammering home the same message for four days to the American people, most of whom don’t watch it back to back, and they just tune in for an hour. So what you want is every speaker hitting the same message over again, because most Americans are going to get a little clip here, a little clip there. From the inside, so much of it is just repetitive. But then one of the reasons I love it is because every once in a while, somebody breaks through and breaks out. And you can ask yourself, Why did that person break out? Well, they must have done something different and interesting. Well, what did they do? Maybe we can learn from that and do more of that.

And so when you’re a volunteer speechwriter at a convention, they’re at sports arenas. We’re in Boston. You’re in this room with no windows in the basement, a preview of the White House to come. And it’s maybe a dozen speechwriters, mostly young people in their twenties, early thirties.

Mostly volunteers?

Pretty much all volunteers. I’m in my twenties. Yes, I guess I’m in my late twenties at that point.

And whom do you go to? The DNC [Democratic National Committee], or somebody you know who’s in the campaign, to say, “Hi, here I am. I’d like to be a speechwriter for you”?

Well, the speechwriting world is a pretty—it’s like any sector, it’s a pretty small world. We all know each other. And so you know there’s, Oh, this year, So-and-so is going to lead the team, and so you reach out, “Hey, I’m free. I’m available. I’d love to come and do this.” And you either get picked or you don’t.

But yes, you spend every waking hour in this room. No one gets to that stage to give the speech unless they’ve gone through the speechwriters. So whether you’re Speaker of the House, or a member of the House, Senate, governor, whatever, teacher, truck driver, whatever, you’ve got to get your speech approved by the team. And so either you’re cleaning up somebody’s speech, getting them back on message, or if they come and they don’t have a speech, you help them write it. And it’s just insane. You’re working 20-hour days.

Who was leading that group for—again, is it for the campaign? Is it for the nominee? Or is it a DNC person, or both?

I mean, the DNC probably pays and hires them. But you’re there to—people forget. We see this every year. It is a four-day commercial for the candidate, the nominee, in that case John Kerry. It is not for 200 people to get up and talk about whatever they want to talk about, which is the constant fight, that everyone is, like, “Well, I’m the ranking member of such-and-such committee, and I want”—

I remember some member of Congress came to me at one of the conventions that I worked at, and he was from—this is going to be funny, 2004, 2008—he’s from a coal state, and he wanted to talk about imports of coal. It’s important to him and his constituents. That’s not what the convention is about. It’s about not coal. It was about to move away from coal. So this person didn’t understand what they’re there to do, but they get a spot, because they’re prominent. Here I am, as a 20-something, 30-something, telling a U.S. senator that the speech is just completely off. It’s just completely the wrong message. And they don’t know who I am, and so they don’t want to hear that, and they’re not being—“I’m a senator. I don’t get told no.” So the senator did whatever he wanted. He ultimately said what he wanted to say.

But through that, that’s what a convention is. You’re trying to keep everybody on message, why John Kerry should be the next president of the United States. That’s it. That is the purpose of the convention—and to get people excited for that. And we heard that some keynote—this guy had been picked as the keynote speaker. He’s a state senator from Illinois. No one’s ever heard of him, “But you guys should be out there. The speech is”—

He has a funny name.

He has a funny name. He has an unusual name. But, “We’ve heard him practicing. You’ve got to be out there.” So OK, fine. We’ll go out there. We go out there on the floor.

Out comes Barack Hussein Obama. And it’s like 16 minutes later—his whole speech was maybe 16, 17 minutes. People are saying—I remember, OK, every Democrat who heard that speech says, “I knew he was going to be president.” And I hate to be the cliché, but I remember walking through the streets of Boston that night, on the phone with my wife, and she’s, like, “What did you think of that?” I’m like, “Oh, my God. Maybe we just heard a future president.” He electrified the room.

We could talk for hours about that speech, about why it—again, here we are, all these years later, and we’re talking about Barack Obama’s speech. I haven’t had a whole lot of folks come up to me in my life and say, “Tell me about that John Kerry speech,” or, “Tell me about the other speech.” That speech is just about all anybody remembers from that year. So you ask me, why did that break through when all the other speeches didn’t? He did something different. He was something different. I think he spoke to the country in ways that we hadn’t heard before. And of course, he embodied the message that he was delivering, which is what truly great communicators do. He was a living embodiment of his message of unity and of a pluralistic America. And of course, the delivery was just off the charts.

So did he get through the review process because what he was saying fit somehow into the Kerry theme for the convention? Or did he get through because people saw it and said, “Oh, that’s really good. We’re just going to put him up on the stage”?

Well, at that point, I have no connection to him whatsoever. Everything I know about that, I’ve either read in books or from talking to the folks who were with him, one of which would be David Axelrod, his senior advisor. He was part of that process. My understanding of it, based on everything I’ve been told and read, is that the Kerry campaign picked him because they had heard and knew that he was a great communicator, a great speaker, perhaps a rising star. He’s running for the U.S. Senate. This is the kind of rising star that you hope to both give some fuel to—

But no, the speech hadn’t been written. He gets invited, then he writes the speech. And as he’s explained to us over and over again, the speech was a distillation. In much the way [Martin Luther] King’s [Jr.] “I Have a Dream” speech was familiar to anyone who had been listening to King for years, anyone who had been listening to Barack Obama in Illinois for years would have recognized that speech. He wasn’t trotting out all sorts of new—I mean, there was some, obviously, the tribute and the celebration of Kerry and the moment. But the story about his background, and what he represented, and what he believed, that would have been familiar to folks who had heard Barack Obama speak before.

And in your judgment, what made that speech the special event that it was?

I think that the greatest speeches, at their core, are aspirational. You look at all the great speeches throughout history. They are painting a picture, and pointing a way, and offering a vision of something that is not true in the moment but needs to be true in the future. So many of Lincoln’s speeches were about the country that we could be postslavery. Churchill’s greatest speeches, “We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight in the hills,” these are all the things he hopes we could be. Reagan, Kennedy, King. Reagan’s “City Upon a Hill,” back to John Winthrop. These were all visions. They were painting a picture of the America, the world, we could be.

I think that’s what Barack Obama’s speech did in ’04. He says, “We are not a black America or a white America. We are the United States of America.” Well, factually, statistically, you could say, actually, he’s totally wrong. There are—and someone like John Edwards had built an entire campaign around the fact that he sees two Americas. And there are all sorts of statistics to show you that actually the lived experience of an African American family in the United States is profoundly different economically, educationally, income-wise, wealth-wise. So factually, actually, maybe Barack Obama was technically wrong in that moment. What he was doing was pointing the way to the country that he felt we could be.

And that’s what, ultimately, I think, great speakers do. They’re pointing, and they’re giving you something to work for, to fight for, to strive for.

And the public must have wanted that.

I think, clearly, at that moment, the public wanted that. Again, my God, he said, “We’re not as divided as they want us to believe we are.” I mean, buckle up, here we are.

I teach this to my students. This is what great leaders do, right? They offer a vision to people, and in the moment, the vision is not true. We have the Declaration of Independence as the ultimate vision statement: “All men are created equal.” At the time that was written, factually not true in the sense that—clearly not true. It was true for wealthy, white, landholding men, and nobody else. When the abolitionists built a movement, they had a vision of an America without slavery, and it was just not true in the moment. The suffragettes had a vision of an America where women could vote. At the time, they said, “They sound like lunatics. They sound like radicals.” The civil rights movement is built on a vision where all people, regardless of their background, have equal rights. Again, just not true at the time.

It’s a vision statement. Pick every movement. Labor, women’s rights, LGBTQ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer]. They have a vision.

Churchill is talking about a vision when he’s losing the war.

Right. This is post–Dunkirk [1940, British military evacuation from France]. They’re the last nation standing, and he’s painting a vision of a Europe that’s free. These are vision statements. And so you ask, Why is that so powerful? Because look at what people in all of those—American Revolution, abolition, suffragettes, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, England fighting back, all of this. When you give people a vision that’s inspiring, look at what they’ll do. They’ll march. They’ll fight. They’ll get beaten. They’ll go to jail. They’ll die. People die for visions. They won’t die for numbers or statistics or something.

I think what Barack Obama was doing was offering one of the most beautiful visions of a pluralistic America that had ever been put forth. And of course, he embodied it in his own life, and so that gave it added credibility. Imagine that same speech delivered by someone else. It wouldn’t have had the same effect.

John Kerry couldn’t have done it.

He couldn’t have given that speech. No one else could have given that speech, in part because no one else can get up there and say, “My father is a black man from Kenya. My mother is a white woman from Kansas. My grandfather herded goats.” And the whole story. He was the living embodiment of the message, and that’s when it all syncs up.

We see this every cycle. You might have the right message, but you’re the wrong messenger. Or it’s the wrong moment, and a candidate who can win one cycle can’t win the next cycle. He was the right messenger with the right message at the right moment. Just about, it seems, at least in recent decades, every presidency is a reaction to the previous presidency. It’s a course correction of some kind. It’s a backlash. And so he was what the American people said they wanted after eight years of Clinton, after eight years of Bush. He was offering something new, fresh, and different in a way that no one had ever offered it before.

And let me ask an impossible question, but one I’m sure you may have thought of. Does Obama truly believe it, or is it the rhetorical instrument for his ambitions?

“It” being, does he believe—?

This speech. Does he have confidence in that vision?

Well, I think it goes back to what I’m saying. It’s an aspirational speech. It’s not a diagnosis of just where we are. I mean, in parts of it, he’s talking about where we are: we’re divided, and they slice us and they dice us, and they play us off of each other to make money, and get ratings, and to win elections. Does he believe in that [aspirational] vision? Absolutely. Does he believe that that’s where we need to be and where we need to go as a country? Absolutely. I mean, I have no—we’ll talk a lot, and I have doubts, as we all do, about all sorts of things, and think deeply about mistakes that were made, and things that were done right, and accomplishments and failures. But this one, absolutely. I have no doubt in my mind this is essential and core to who he is.

It’s rooted in his life experience. He knows that his story—as he says in the speech, “My story is only possible in America.” I mean, literally, no. You can be multiracial in all sorts of different countries, and there are all sorts of leaders. But what he was trying to—he was trying to point the way towards the country that he felt we still needed to be. So as a vision statement, absolutely. I have no doubt in my mind that that is an authentic—that is who he is.

Having nothing in my eight years of being there and the years since—I appreciate you asking because I’ve never been asked that question. I’ve never even thought for a moment that it wasn’t what he really believed. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t ask myself the question. But, no, it doesn’t—it’s like, Is gravity real? Of course it is. But if I had heard him say things or do things over those years that were at odds with that, I would think, Well, maybe there’s some tension there. Maybe there’s something about that that’s not quite right, because I think, yes, so many politicians say things that they don’t believe because it serves their ambitions. But everything that I know about him, that I’ve seen about him then and since, nothing has ever made me question the authenticity of that core message that he gave in 2004.

And I want to reference back to something you had said earlier. Conventions rarely get a speech like that.

Right.

What are some of the other examples? Was [Mario] Cuomo’s [speech, “A Tale of Two Cities,” Democratic National Convention, July 16, 1984] like that?

As an orator, yes.

It was less aspirational. It was more—

Diagnostic.

—foundational.

It was. “I see two cities. President Reagan speaks of a city on a hill. Well, here’s the city that I see,” and he paints a very different picture. Ted Kennedy’s—yes. If you make a—OK, top five convention speeches of all time and why are they—I think you have to put Barack Obama’s on there. You have to put Mario Cuomo’s on there. You put Ted Kennedy’s on there in ’80. He challenges a sitting president, he loses. Maybe this is the end of a Kennedy running for president for a while. And of course, the part that everyone remembers is the end, “The dream shall never die,” you know? That’s aspirational.

Other great convention speeches? It’s only in a—because pre–late ’60s, we’re actually using conventions to pick the nominee, and there’s horse trading and all this stuff going on.

Does “Cross of Gold” [speech by William Jennings Bryan, Democratic National Convention, July 9, 1896] get—

Was that a convention speech?

I was thinking that. We’d have to look that up. In 1932, and FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] was pretty strong about—

I would say every great speech at a convention or elsewhere, a sitting president, candidate, whatever, every single one of them, they are great because they are aspirational. They are great because they’re painting a vision, and they’re offering the audience, the American people, a big, bold picture of where we need to go, and This is what needs to be our work.

And again, just to follow up, is it possible to give an aspirational speech that just goes too far, and the audience is not going to go with you?

Yes, sure. I mean, it has to be rooted in reality. It can’t be fantastical. It can’t be Pollyannaish.

And it has to connect to what the people are thinking and feeling.

Oh, sure. And I’m trying to think. Speeches throughout history, or leaders who—they like to say they were ahead of their time. They were speaking about something that, maybe in decades later, seemed—

Woodrow Wilson.

Right. Either the people or the politics weren’t there yet. Then they’re truly a visionary, and their vision never comes to pass. So yes, there’s a danger in that.

A great example of that—not of that but the tensions there—is when, early in his presidency, Barack Obama goes to Prague [Czech Republic] and gives a speech where he commits the United States to a vision of a world without nuclear weapons. OK? So that sentence sounds ridiculous. That would be wonderful. Everyone agrees that would be wonderful. If he stops there, he looks ridiculous. He looks completely out of touch with reality. And he’s the president of the United States, sitting atop and commanding one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world. He goes on to say in that speech, “I realize that this may not happen in my lifetime, but the work must begin now,” so that’s the realism that kicks in.

I think when leaders only offer the first part, the vision, without acknowledging the reality, that’s when they get in trouble, or that’s when they look disconnected. You have to have both, I think.

I am interested, always, in personality. And we do, as political scientists, as Bob and I are, know of the books on the “personal president” and the “rhetorical president.” What always strikes me about the personal president is the personality of some. Some can be personal but not even necessarily sparkling or magical. You can add charisma in here if you want. But I do think that Barack Obama had that in ’04, and has it to this day, and had it all during his presidency. I think John Kennedy had it. And people to whom Ronald Reagan made connections had it.

What is that? Can you define that? Can you define the magic of the personality? And I’ll use the term sparkle. There’s just something about these particular people we’re naming—and FDR would fall into it as well, and then in the modern media era, when it’s particularly important. And people will say, “Lincoln didn’t have it, didn’t need it in the nonelectronic era of media,” but obviously he had the message. So that’s one question.

And related to that, then, is the personal side of the personal presidency, and going back to your looking up the Iwo Jima veterans, and talking to them, and adding them in. I always use the contrast of the Gettysburg Address. In the Gettysburg Address, it is beautiful poetry, lyrical.

Abstract.

Abstract, elegant, eloquent. But there’s not a lot of person there. There’s not, “I’d like to point out Joe from Pennsylvania who is here today, who lost a leg at the Battle of Gettysburg.” Does that primarily start with Reagan and the [1982] State of the Union, Lenny Skutnik—

Right, right, right.

—where the guests come in? But we know that President Obama did that, and I’m sure you did it a lot in writing speeches. That’s one element, it seems to me, of a personal president and a personal presidency, where now that is expected and must be done, I think, or people feel that they’re left out.

And then the other is the personality of the president. If you could talk about what you saw, that spark and sparkle and charisma of Barack Obama in person in 2004, and not just seeing him speak at the White House or even in Congress, but light up an entire giant athletic arena and come through on television.

Yes, that’s what I was—so when you say—

Because I watched it on TV.

You’re asking, what is charisma? What makes a charismatic leader? And as you were asking the question, I’m thinking, well, millions of people would agree that FDR, and Kennedy, and Reagan, and Obama were charismatic, are charismatic leaders. Millions of people believe that. Almost none of them have ever met that person. So their only relationship with that person is through the media, is through the television, through—

Or radio in the case of FDR, and newsreels.

—radio. Right. And so why do millions of people think that John F. Kennedy was charismatic, or Reagan? There’s actually a scholar based in, like, Geneva [Switzerland] who studies charisma. He has all these metrics and numbers, and they rate them, and they rank them, and they give numbers to them. I’ve never really looked at it that closely.

But I think it’s when you see a leader in a moment where, number one, they’re just comfortable in that space. So everybody we’ve just mentioned, they’re comfortable being up in front of an auditorium or a stadium full of tens of thousands of people. They’re comfortable in that space. And they can get that audience on their feet by speaking to their hopes, their dreams, their highest aspirations, by painting a vision. And yet despite all that, even in these massive moments, when you are at home on your couch watching this experience, you feel like they’re in a conversation with you. They’re not orating. They’re not lecturing to you. You actually feel like they are communicating to you.

That’s the only way I can explain why millions of people would think that those leaders you just mentioned, that they have a relationship with them that does not exist. You know, most people have never met Barack Obama and never will, yet they feel they know him. They know about his mother and his father. Normally, you know things about—the average American knows things about their presidents and about Barack Obama that often they don’t know about their next-door neighbor, because he has shared it with you. He has talked to you about what it was like to be from a black father and a white mother, from a Kenyan father and an American mother, growing up in multiracial Hawaii, what it’s like to be a black man in America, to be pulled over by the police or to be followed in a store when you’re shopping, because he’s shared all of that with you.

I think charismatic leaders build through the lens. They create a personal connection with an audience so that millions of people feel that they are connected to that person.

And now would you say that does have to be done most of the time, because Franklin Roosevelt didn’t talk to the American people about his polio. John Kennedy didn’t typically talk about his World War II experiences, or even his immigrant background, for reasons—now we know that he wouldn’t have wanted to talk about being Catholic until he had to in Houston [Texas], et cetera.

Now there’s a different level of expectation.

So now there’s an expectation, right?

Right. We expect our leaders to be open, to be vulnerable, to share, to get to know us. But in a way—you can talk to a scholar on Roosevelt, who probably has—my sense is, though, that while maybe Roosevelt didn’t talk about his polio, people would sit in their living rooms on their couch, gather around a radio, and he would speak directly to them. I play his “Fireside Chats” to my students, my speechwriting students, and he does what great speakers do. He keeps saying, “I want to talk to you tonight about the banking system and how it affects you and your family, and your savings. And I want to do this in a way that you don’t need to be a banker to understand.”

That’s his first.

That’s his opening, first Fireside Chat, the opening minutes. He does what every great speaker does: He speaks to his audience, not at them, not about them. It drives me insane, and I still hear it. Presidents do it, candidates do it. They’re giving a speech, ostensibly to the American people, and they talk about the American people as “they”: “They deserve this. They deserve that.” Well, if you’re an American, speak to me. Speak directly to me about my life, “you, you and your family.” That’s what Roosevelt was doing in those Fireside Chats. So he did have that. The effect of that was a deep—millions of people who never met him and never would meet him felt that they had a personal connection to him.

I think, ultimately, that’s what charismatic leaders do. And throughout history, we’ve seen charismatic leaders do this for good. We’ve seen charismatic leaders do it for evil. But I think one of the constants is, people feel a deep connection to that person, that leader. So I think, again, that’s the only way I can explain why millions of people who’ve never met a person could say that they feel connected.

When you hear someone say, “He spoke for me”—or “she”—or “That leader spoke to me,” that’s when you know that it’s working. And that’s one of the best compliments you can get as a speaker and a speechwriter, is when someone in the audience says, “That person spoke for me today.” What they’re describing is a deeply personal relationship between someone they don’t know and will never meet. And so to me, that’s what a great charismatic communicator does.

It’s heart to heart, would you say?

Yes. You know, Kennedy—

Or maybe soul to soul.

Yes, I would say so.

You were about to say, Kennedy?

Oh, just I don’t think anyone ever accused a John F. Kennedy speech of being of the people. He was still—he was one of the last great speakers of—it was true oratory.

More Lincolnesque.

More Lincolnesque, more Roosevelt. He was orating constantly. And our leaders today don’t orate as much. And by that I mean, he was very much writing for history, speaking for history. There was an elegance and a poetry to his language that even we don’t see necessarily in a Barack Obama speech. It’s a different kind of speech for a different era.

You had some other questions?

No, that is perfect. Perfect. Bob?

Well, I wanted to take off on something you just said, because you can be charismatic, you can be aspirational, and you can be evil. And we could rattle off examples. Does America have more of the good aspirational examples than the other kind? And if that were true, what might explain that?

I don’t know if we have more or less than any other country in the world. I think for every moment in American history—we have books filled with the great speeches of American history, and for every single one of them that might be aspirational and appeal to our “better angels of our nature,” there’s a corresponding speech that wants to go in a very different direction at every step, every single step. We read the great speeches of the abolitionists. Well, [laughs] there are some pretty horrific speeches on the other side of that argument. Labor rights, women’s rights.

You mean powerful, effective speeches on the other sides, is that—?

Yes, I mean, George Wallace ran one of the most successful third-party campaigns in American history with a pretty vicious message that connected with, appealed to, and motivated and inspired millions of Americans. That’s one example. He was—I mean, I talk about this in the book. He was an effective public speaker. I would never use the word “good” to describe him. Was [Adolf] Hitler—Hitler was an effective public speaker. I would not say he was a good public speaker because the word—I can’t separate the means from the ends. I don’t think we ever should.

So yes, rhetoric, ultimately, rhetoric, language is what we make of it. We can use it for good or we can use it for ill. We can use it to divide people or bring people together. I don’t know if, ultimately, we’ve had more—my mind is quantifying it, and I just think—

We tend to honor the good examples as we describe our national trajectory, our national history.

I think so, right. And that’s part of the challenge, right, is we hold up the speeches—again, if you accept the fact that a truly great speech is aspirational, then we look back and we hold up the speeches and the leaders that we think brought us closer to our aspirations. That gives the misleading impression that this has been a constant, unrelenting march toward progress, however you define progress, when in fact that’s not the case at all. We want to talk about the great speeches of Franklin Roosevelt, and they’re beautiful, and they’re aspirational, and they’re some of the most iconic speeches in American history. Well, you have to include the executive order on the internment of Japanese Americans right alongside that. I mean, how do you reconcile that? Those are both true at the same time. And there’s example after example after example of that.

For every aspiration, there’s something—and I think we can talk about this today. One of the things that set Barack Obama apart as a leader and distinguished him as an orator and as a leader was that he was willing, perhaps more than any other president in American history, to acknowledge those tensions and those contradictions. That even as we are a nation driven by this vision put forth in a declaration that all men are created equal, we still did things that were at odds with that: enslaving millions of people for the benefit of their free labor; committing genocide against native peoples—as did Canada, as did Australia, it’s not unique to the United States; interning American citizens in camps.

Back to my earlier point. Nations, like people, do beautiful things and terrible things. And so often, I think, as leaders and speechwriters, you only want to tell one part of the story. You only want to tell the part of the story that makes us feel good. And one of the things that Barack Obama did, I think throughout his presidency, is he acknowledged the times we fell short. And it wasn’t just a gratuitous critique to slam America. His critics love to say he went on an eight-year apology tour. That’s ridiculous. I was there. I saw it. I sat in those meetings. He wasn’t apologizing for America.

What he was doing was, he was, especially overseas, speaking to people going through similar challenges—ethnic, racial, class strife—who don’t necessarily see whether it’s going to work. They don’t see a path forward. In comes this guy, Barack Obama, and he says, “Hey, you think America is pretty great. We are. But we’ve been through tough times too. And in fact, there was a time when we enslaved people. There was a time when we denied women the right to vote. We denied people like me the right to vote, and to work, and to live in the neighborhoods of our choosing. But we’ve kept at it. We didn’t give up. We forced and marched and fought for change every step. It may take a long time.”

The message was not, “The U.S. is terrible.” The message is, “My God, look what’s possible when people don’t give up and when they don’t let go, when they keep working for that vision,” whatever the vision is. That’s why he talked about all these things overseas. It’s not an apology tour. And it’s what gave hope—again, hope and strength to people as they pursued their own vision statement.

Here’s another question. Putting your current hat on, teacher of rhetoric. You would present the 2004 Obama speech as an example of a great speech. What would be your significant criticism of it?

Of that speech?

Of that speech. Some people might say—

That’s good, another question I’ve never been asked.

Some people might say it promises an ability to get past partisanship at a time when, in general, partisanship is getting worse. It may give us the aspiration, but it doesn’t—or the forces at play in America—doesn’t ultimately move us in that direction.

I think the strength of an aspirational speech is in the vision that it paints. It may lay a path to get there, but ultimately, it’s up to the people as to whether or not they want to do the work to make that vision a reality. You could go back to an early abolitionist and be like, “You’re out of your mind. There is no way that the United States, built on slavery, is going to ever be a nation without slavery. It’s not possible.” So this great speech, this vision sounds great, but it’s—so the criticism is, you were not rooted in reality. OK, now we have the benefit of history. Was that a fair critique of that person, that leader, that speech? I think no. I think, again, it was an aspirational call to arms to work for the kind of country you can be. So if—I’m one of the—so can I change the question?

Yes, please.

It’s not a critique of the speech. One of the biggest critiques of President Obama, criticisms, mostly by his opposition: Well, you promised us unity, and you didn’t give us unity. That’s on you. It infuriates me. Infuriates me all eight years. It infuriates me to this day. And I will say, there have been a few times when President Obama, in interviews, has almost accepted that argument.

Here’s why it infuriates me. It’s not on any one person to bring unity to a country of 300 million people, including the president. No one person can do that. It has to be the work of millions of people. It has to be the work of journalists who conduct journalism in a way that they’re not just going for conflict and ratings. It is up to every level of public servant, from the presidency all the way down to mayor, who chooses to lead in a way that doesn’t divide people, that brings people together. There is no one person who can bring this country together.

And I think Barack Obama, in terms of his vision that he articulated in that speech and in so many speeches since, the way he conducted himself, did more than just about anybody else to try to move us towards that vision—so much so that there were times when his own party and supporters lost patience with him. Working with Republicans on the Hill, he believed that, in the end, that they wanted to reach an agreement. They wanted to reach consensus. And so he was being accused, every time he’d work with the Hill or bring Paul Ryan in to try to do one more deal, people were—there were cartoons at the time, Barack Obama as Charlie Brown, just trying to kick that football one more time, because he believed—

He was going to be the last person in America to believe, to your earlier question, that this vision was impossible. He had staked his whole career and his life around the idea that there is more that we share than what divides us. There is more that we have in common than that divides us. And that in the end, we all want to work together for a bigger—a better America. Now, the idea that it’s on him for 300 million of us not living up to that standard, I find ludicrous. And so if there were a criticism of that speech, it would be one of the criticisms of his presidency.

I think, time and again, one of the hallmarks of his speeches was acknowledging that different people see the problem differently, or see the solution differently. And so look at the transcripts. He’ll say, “On the other hand.” He’s like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. He runs out of hands, there’s so many “on the other hands”: “Some Americans feel this way, and some Americans feel that.” And as speechwriters, sometimes it would be—we’d be banging our heads against our desk, like, Oh, my God, it’s the professor again. He’s always acknowledging that there’s another point of view, another argument, another way to see the problem.

Sometimes people just want you to lead. George [W.] Bush led from the gut. He said, “This is the problem. Here’s my solution. This is what we’re going to do.” Sometimes people like that. Every president is a backlash, a response. Barack Obama is going to walk you through the problem, the origins of the problem, different ways to see the problem. He’s going to put on his professor hat. And that’s both one of his great strengths but also a weakness, perhaps, when it comes to oratory. And he told me once, he realized that sometimes that didn’t always make for the most effective forms of communication, but he wanted to acknowledge the world as it actually is, the complexities and the nuances of it, and to not demonize people.

So yes, I’ve never heard a criticism of that speech, but it ties to the criticism of that, and I just don’t accept that. If you want to point fingers at why this country is so divided, and you made a list of a thousand people who had polarized this country, or a hundred people who are most responsible for the viciousness and the divisiveness in our political rhetoric, obviously I’m biased, I have my blind—but I don’t see Barack Obama as being on that list. And I can think of a lot of other people who are on that list.

That is fascinating and connects to several points that I’ve been writing down as this has been discussed. So one is, is it an irony that—and I happen to agree with you that Barack Obama, I believe, would not be on that list of dividers. But there is an irony that who he was helps to lead to—in other words, the backlash against not just his presidency but the backlash against him, who he was, who Mrs. [Michelle R.] Obama was, his family living in the White House.

As an example of that, the Miller Center sent me to the Republican [National] Convention in 2016 to cover it. Coming back to Charlottesville [Virginia] out of Cleveland [Ohio], there was an elderly woman sitting next to me, and I was surrounded by all sorts of Republican delegates. I just made conversation and said, “Oh, have you always been in politics?” “No,” she said, “I was a teacher in Alabama, but I just had to get involved because I worry so much about our American values.” And trying to keep peace on the plane, I didn’t say, “What values are you worried about?” I knew what that was coded language for. So is that part of the irony of that speech and of Barack Obama himself, that I never thought it was the end of history, I never thought it was the end of racial conflict, but that the very embodiment of who he was has led to—

And then another part of this conversation I wanted to get to is demagoguery, because you explicitly say—and I agree with you—in the book, “Don’t be a demagogue. If you’re a person who’s called upon to speak, don’t be a demagogue.” But I just had to note it: Do we have evil people in America who have come to the fore and, I would say, are demagogues? Joe McCarthy, Father [Charles E.] Coughlin, maybe Huey Long, George Wallace you named.

Yes, there’s a long—they’re always there.

It’s a long list.

They’re always there.

And I believe we have to add Donald Trump to that list. So what has caused current demagoguery to take off in such a way? And how do you draw the distinctions between a speech that fires people up and makes them ready to go that wouldn’t follow the definition of demagoguery?

Well, your first question, is there an irony that the election and presidency of Barack Obama was followed by or culminated in the division and partisanship intensifying even more? And again, this is where I go back to, obviously, there’s a correlation there, but that’s not causation. And that’s what always gets me when people say that Barack Obama somehow is the cause of the intensity and the deepening divisions, when everything about his politics was about trying to bridge those divides.

Yes, I mean, he himself said more than once, he said, “I know there are people who probably vote for me because I’m black, and there are probably some people who vote against me because I’m black.” I think in Ben Rhodes’s book [The World as It Is], Ben recounts a conversation he had with the president where he said something to the effect of, Maybe we were too soon, or we were too early, or maybe they weren’t ready for—something to the idea that the country wasn’t ready for him or for anyone. Right? The late-night comedians say, “First and last black president.”

So yes, there’s no doubt that—I mean, listen. I don’t know how a researcher would do this, but you take out the variable of race. The elections of 2000 and 2004, as you had 1996. The 2000 and 2004 are close elections, super close elections, divided country, 50–50. Two white guys, in both cases, battling it out. So we’re not divided necessarily because the candidate is like—and if anything, Barack Obama, and your fact checkers can fact check, but the first and/or only president to win two terms with more than 50 percent of the vote since Eisenhower? Something to that effect.

Yes. He’s also the first to win his second term with a smaller majority than the first.

So to me, my takeaways from that are, clearly he was doing something right. Clearly he was doing something that no one else had been able to do before, or at least in the last 70 years. But yes, you can’t deny—so the divisions—we were divided before Obama. We’re still roughly a 50–50 country, politically speaking. And he was able to pull together a coalition that gave him electoral victories that had been unmatched since before—

Was race—how much of this backlash is race? I mean, it’s there. I don’t know how anyone can—my point is, I think it’s difficult to quantify, but there’s no doubt it’s there. When you go to a Tea Party [movement] rally in 2010, and you listen to it, and you see the posters, and you see the stuff, and now on social media, I mean, it’s always there. It’s always there. And yes, some folks may never be ready for it. They just don’t want it.

That gives one more bullet to the arsenal of the demagogues, because demagogues sell at “otherizing” people, and Obama was otherized from the get-go. The entire Donald Trump birther movement was an attempt to otherize Barack Obama: He’s not like you. He’s not an American. He’s a Kenyan. He’s not Christian. He’s a Muslim. There’s a reason that his critics will stress his middle name. Why do they do that? Because they want you to think of him as something other, something different than what you know. So yes, it was always there. And for some people, it’s effective. For me, it’s not effective, obviously. It’s not how I see the world. But for some people, it is effective.

Demagoguery, in all of its forms, demonizing people, dehumanizing people, otherizing people, it didn’t start with Donald Trump. You just listed off a lot of names, and again, I think someone did the analysis at one point. You look at Huey Long; Father Coughlin, the number of listeners he had; the number of votes George Wallace got; and there’s always this steady third-ish of the country that will tune into, listen to, vote for that. Always. And it’s never been enough. At most, maybe it’s a George Wallace campaign that peels off some states, or it’s a Pat Buchanan campaign that maybe he challenges but doesn’t win. But it’s always there.

I think what Donald Trump did is, he basically tapped into something that’s always been there, and he supercharged it. And then in 2016, it was just enough people in just enough places, because we have an Electoral College, that he won.

But yes, race is foundational to that. It was—you cannot tell the story of Donald Trump’s rise as evolution from a business-entertainment figure to politics—the bridge, his bridge into politics was to question the identity of Barack Obama, his racial identity and his citizenship. It’s the foundation of his entire political career.

Can we get you to the White House? Or is there anything prior that you want to speak about? Ben Rhodes, according to the stories and your book, asks you to join the speechwriting team and work with him. How had you known Ben? How did he come to you and ask you to come join the Barack Obama White House speechwriting office and team?

So I told you I was a volunteer speechwriter at the 2004 convention. Then I was a volunteer again in 2008. Now that great keynote speaker becomes the nominee. So I got to know a little bit—not much, everyone’s busy and running around—but I got to know Jon Favreau, Obama’s chief speechwriter on the campaign; Ben Rhodes, the chief foreign policy speechwriter on the campaign; his other speechwriter, Adam Frankel, a little bit. Those are the sort of three originals. We got to know each other a little bit and kept in touch. I continued to volunteer on the campaign and write for surrogates. When Hillary [Rodham] Clinton’s campaign ended, one of her chief speechwriters, Sarah Hurwitz, moved over and joined the Obama campaign. And like I said, it’s a small world. We all kept in touch throughout the campaign.

When Obama won, Ben reached out and said, “We’re going to expand our team. Would you be interested in applying?” [laughter] Of course. This is the dream. They did what we typically do in—I’ve been both the giver and receiver of this. We give a speechwriting test.

And what is that like? Are you given a prompt or a topic?

You’re given a prompt and a deadline, and your job is to write the best possible speech. In this case, it was the best possible speech for Barack Obama that I could.

Do you remember what the topic was you were given?

I do. And I should say, so Ben said he wanted to talk to us: “Do you want to be considered?” “Absolutely.” By this point, he and Favreau and the team are in their transition headquarters downtown. We met at a Starbucks [coffee shop] and just had conversation and coffee about speechwriting, and the importance of capturing the person’s voice, and really channeling their—everything we’ve talked about today, how they think, how they talk. And after that, they invited me to take the test.

And yes, I actually have it. I have a copy here. [pats notebook] The prompt was, President Barack Obama has struck some sort of vague peace deal in the Middle East, and the night before he departs, he’ll give a speech at the Jewish Federation of America. Write the speech on the eve—

And so I had clients. I cleared my schedule. I asked my clients—I had to take an emergency week off. Our children were very young. My wife was wonderful and kept the kids out of the office for a week. And it was like, you’re going to step up to the plate. They’re going to throw you the pitch. You get one swing. And you have to hit a home run. And if you do it, you get the job of a lifetime, and if you strike out, you don’t. So that was it. Everything was—

Length? Did they say, It will be this number of minutes or this number of words?

They might have, yes, roughly this many words. But it was super short. Just do these five things. Be aspirational, [laughter] lay out the—just very vague, but that’s typically how it is. You don’t get a ton of guidance each time. There’s an assumption that you know what you’re doing at that level.

How did you approach it?

I reread everything Barack Obama had ever said or written about the Middle East, about Israel, about Palestinians. And I researched some trips that he had taken to the region. I found that he had met with a little Israeli boy who had been injured by rockets from Gaza [Strip, Palestinian Territories]. He had met a little boy from Gaza. And I thought, Oh, man, that would be something, a speech where he brings both of those kids in. And so it’s big, and it’s bold, and aspirational, and it’s for history, but then it’s also real, for real people. Maybe you can do this so we make people who typically are pro-Palestinian care about this little Israeli kid, make the people who are pro-Israel care about this little Palestinian kid. That feels like a Barack Obama speech to me. And so I did that, turned it in.

Did you find out, back to your point, about people he had quoted over the years, and did you use any quotes that you thought, Oh, I will quote from this person, because he does that on occasion?

Maybe. I mean, it’s in there. It’s here.

Feel free, if you’d like to add that to your transcript. That would be great.

But, so yes. I found out a week later. They said, “We really like the speech. We’ll be in touch.” I don’t know what that means. [laughter] I mean, do you have the job or don’t have the job?

This is still during transition.

Yes, this is—we meet in November. I write the speech in early December. And before Christmas, they tell me, “We want you to join the team. We loved it. We think you’d be a great fit. And we want you to start on Inauguration Day. So can you start and be ready to go?”

So at Christmas, I think I’m going to start on January 21st [2009], but there are thousands of people. Back then we did security clearance vetting on people, and so you had to get in line, and it took me a few months. I was helping from the outside. January, February, March, Ben is sharing drafts with me. I offer edits, thoughts. They take them, they don’t take them, whatever, but I’m sort of helping from the outside. And then I get on board in April, May of 2009. So I was there but not there. But it was amazing.

Bob, did you have a question at this point? [shakes head no] We usually take a break, but you’ve just been going so well and smoothly, we didn’t take a break. But we’ll break for lunch very soon, unless anybody needs to take a break. [indicate no]

So you know that you’re—am I correct in saying you’re hired to work with Ben primarily on foreign policy, defense policy issues, rather—well, this is a question, I suppose, because, as you said, on these teams you may be hired to do one thing or one specialty area, but you always have to be prepared.

Right.

But do you find that most of what you’re doing is foreign policy and defense policy?

Yes, and this is the one exception. So the way to think about the speechwriting team, at least as we had it, is you have roughly five or six of us. You’ve got Jon Favreau, chief speechwriter to the president; Ben Rhodes, chief foreign policy speechwriter to the president. Ben has one full-time deputy or whatever, me. Favreau has maybe four domestic-focused writers, people like Adam Frankel, Cody Keenan, [Jonathan I.] Jon Lovett, over time Kyle O’Connor. They almost never—Favs [Jon Favreau] is his own thing, but all those folks almost never do foreign policy, national security, and I almost never do domestic policy.

The exception is, on the really big foreign policy speeches, Favreau may help Ben and me. So for something like the Nobel Peace Prize speech, that was Obama, Favreau, Ben, those—and the rest of us just offer thoughts, which get ignored or whatever. But for the most part, for that first term, I am 90-something percent national security, foreign policy, defense, homeland security, all that stuff, international.

The joke was, Wow, guys, Ben and I handle 200 countries. The five of you handle one country. Of course, that was a total misleading representation of the workload. But that was pretty much it. So Ben was chief foreign policy speechwriter. I’m the only other foreign policy full time. And Favs is the chief speechwriter with a domestic focus for the most part. But we are one team with two parts.

And of course, part of that, too, is then the First Lady’s speechwriting team, led by Sarah Hurwitz and, over time, Tyler Lechtenberg. But we would say we were one team with three parts.

Bob, did you have a question? [indicates no] Process, then. Now that you’ve laid out the three parts, can you take us through the process that was involved. Would Ben typically say to you, “Here’s the next speech we need to do. Here’s where it’s going to be. Here’s the topic, broadly. Here’s the group. Let’s get started”? And you have x number of weeks, typically, to do it, I presume, in most instances?

Yes. One of the good things is we, I can’t remember, but we always had, or at least I did, we had access to the president’s schedule—not just the daily schedule but the “look-aheads,” the weeks and months ahead. So a big part of what we would do is just monitor the schedule and keep our own speechwriting schedule because, so often, things would just get added to the schedule but no one tells you. And it’s on the schedule. It’s like, “President is going to give a major foreign policy address at—” or just, “Invite accepted, veterans convention, August.” Well, that’s obviously going to be a foreign policy speech, but no one ever said, necessarily, “Tell the speechwriters.”

We’d have these weekly speechwriting meetings in Favreau’s office, or I’d meet with Ben every few days, and it would always start with, What’s the schedule? What’s coming up? We don’t want to miss anything. The worst thing as a speechwriter is when they say, “Where’s the speech?” And you’re thinking, What are you talking about? No one told us this event was happening. Or the domestic folks thought we were doing it, or vice versa. Just making sure we had clarity on the schedule, and what the demands were, and what the work was—and then yes, I would sit there in Ben’s office, and we would talk. But even a 45-minute major foreign policy address, the extent of it would be just a few minutes of talk about the agenda, talk about what we’re trying to do.

At that point, we know what we’re supposed to be doing. I don’t need Ben to spend 30 minutes laying out to me what a speech should look like. That’s why we’re there, because we should know how to do this at this point. I always broke it down into daily, run-of-the-mill stuff and then the big ones. So the daily, run-of-the-mill stuff, I might not even have to go to Ben. I know if you’re giving the Medal of Honor to somebody, we know what that’s supposed to look like. That is a tribute and a celebration of that service member, their unit, the war, the effort, the families. I don’t need to bother Ben or anybody else to do that.

And so would you say there’s a template? It’s not AI [artificial intelligence], where you say, I’m just going to use all this language and put in the person’s name who’s the winner, but you know what the organizational framework is for that kind of speech and you need somebody to do—

Yes.

And then do you assign a lower-level person to research that person who is the recipient, and their family, and the war, and the unit, as you say, and where the battle was won?

Right. I mean, the Medal of Honor things were always unique because we would get this massive binder from the Pentagon, both classified and unclassified materials that we would see. But yes, for a speech, we would put together, Here are the kind of stories I’m looking for, here’s the depth, and we would have a team of researchers. We had researchers and interns.

One of the best researchers I ever had was Kyle O’Connor, who started as a researcher and then became a full-fledged speechwriter. For the first few years, I’d say, “Hey, Kyle, this is what I’m looking for in—these are the kind of stories.” He’d just go out. I always think of it as sifting for gold. You’re going to get a lot of dirt, a lot of rocks, a lot of junk, but you just keep sifting, and every once in a while, you’ll find that little nugget. And you just know it when you see it, and you keep it. You may not necessarily know where in the speech it’s going to go, but you know it’s good. And maybe it’s the beginning or the end or the middle.

So a lot of it was, I want to say, self-led. The president—I think Cody Keenan tracked it. It was like 4,377 speeches or so, something like that, over the course. That’s everything from a State of the Union, gigantic mega-speech, down to a small statement.

It says 3,477.

3,477?

Yes.

OK, so there you go.

And I had a question about those kinds of speeches. Does Obama always read them in advance? Does he always offer comment? Or is there a kind of routine level where he doesn’t invest a lot of his own time?

So the routine, run-of-the-mill—so a Medal of Honor speech, Super Bowl champion speech, Cinco de Mayo speech. There are so many things in that space where you think, number one, we don’t need to bother the president of the United States in advance to figure out what he wants to say. This is your job. Your draft should get him 90 to 100 percent of where he needs to be.

The other category are the bigger speeches, the big foreign policy speeches, the State of the Union speeches, Nobel [Prize], big announcements on Iraq or Afghanistan, or what have you. Those are the ones where we would get time with him a week or two or more in advance to sit down, go to the Oval Office with him, and really have those sessions where he just unloaded, brainstormed—here’s what’s on his mind, or here’s how he has been thinking about the speech. And to his credit, so often, we would come in, and he had been told, “The speechwriters are coming and they want to talk about these four speeches.” He’d already given them some thought.

Sometimes he’d bring his yellow legal pad, and he had already sketched out an outline. That lawyer brain of his working, you know, “I think the speech has four parts. I think first, part one is this.” And he'd lay it out. “And that leads to number two, which is this. And number two has three parts, so 2a is this and 2b is this.” I mean, really had structured it out. And he’d go through all five or six points, and then he’d say, “See what you can do with this.” And we’d work on it.

Other times he maybe hadn’t outlined it, but he had a sense of the headline he wanted. He’s like, “I think this is the story we want. This is the headline we want out of this speech.” Or if he was still thinking it through, he’d ask, often, “What’s the story we’re trying to tell in this speech here? What’s the story we want the audience to remember?”

Those sessions were invaluable because we then, as speechwriters, had to go out, and we might have one or two or three weeks to write this big speech. And inevitably, dozens of people across the White House or even across the administration are going to try to—they want to get their initiative, their program, their argument into the speech. These speeches can become, especially State of the Unions, they can become like Christmas trees: Everybody wants to hang their individual ornament on it. And we all know when you say yes to everybody, the tree looks horrific. You can’t say yes to everybody. But because we knew what the president wanted the speech to be about, we could then say, “Oh, that fits. Yes, we could put that in. That would—” Or if someone comes out of left field with something that—

Cody has great stories from the State of the Union where it had nothing to do with the theme of the speech. The speech was supposed to have a theme, a core message. If it doesn’t have something to do with that, it doesn’t belong in the speech, no matter how senior the person is. It doesn’t fit.

So who tells them no?

Yes, well, often what we would do is, we would say—well, this is all by email usually. Every once in a while they’d walk in and try to strong-arm you, but mostly it’s by email: “Hey, can you see if you can get this in?” Usually they’re good. “See if you can get this in,” and if it’s a senior person, you try to. But if it just doesn’t fit, you could go back, and we would have these conversations: “He says he wants to focus on this. It doesn’t seem to fit. Can we hold it?” You always try to say, “There’s another speech coming up.” Instead of just saying no, say, “Well, it doesn’t really fit in this week’s speech, but he has another speech coming in the next week or two, and we know it will fit there. Can we try it there?” And most times, they’d understand.

I did have one situation where a very senior person came and said, “Would you—the president is giving a speech next week. I really think it would be great if he did a really strong defense of treaties, the importance of treaties.” And it just felt—it was like a military commencement. It felt very academic, and it just didn’t seem like it fit. I mean, I love this person, respect this person, great friend and colleague. I was like, “I’m sorry. This doesn’t fit. It doesn’t fit in the speech.” This person said, “OK.” [laughs]

And then I can’t remember exactly how it happened, but we sent the speech up to the president, and he wrote back, “Let’s say something about treaties.” So they had clearly done an end run. They had tried working the speechwriters. We said no. And they, being good bureaucratic ninja warriors, they went directly to the president and sold him on the idea, and so the president said, “Put the—” So to this day, I joke with this person, “Oh, let’s do a great—” shoehorn in a rousing defense of treaties.

I have to say, I did not write it the way it was presented to me because it was a commencement address, taking that complex, academic, kind of think-tanky concept but putting into a frame that would make sense for a graduation speech for cadets and their families. We actually got an applause line out of it. [laughter] So we both won. They got their rousing defense of treaties, and it was something we did in a way that made sense to people.

If you feel comfortable putting that in at this point in the transcript, I’d be so fascinated to know, if you were comfortable, putting the original think-tanky kind—if that is not too revelatory of who might have been pressuring you. But what was the academic think-tanky version, and then what was your version? Or if you just want to put in—

I don’t have—

—the final version.

Yes, I don’t have the version that they said.

That they proposed?

But I have the final version there. So on those big speeches, having the president’s guidance up front was so important because it allowed us to push back and protect the integrity of the speech and the integrity of the message. Imagine if we didn’t know what the president wanted. Then we don’t know what to say yes to and what to say no to. It’s not that these things are all bad or good ideas. I mean, some of them are bad ideas that shouldn’t be in a speech. But some of them, if you don’t know what the core message is, then you don’t know what fits and what doesn’t. That gave us tremendous power.

And then two other things helped the process. One is that I think, generally speaking, because everyone around President Obama recognized that his ability to communicate and give a speech was central to his leadership, it was central to who he was as a candidate and as a president. And so whereas in some White Houses, I’ve heard they don’t let the speechwriters get on the schedule, they keep the speechwriters at arm’s length—we never had that problem. He and Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes had established such a close working relationship with him, if they said they needed time with the president to talk about a speech, they got the time more often than not. We didn’t have to fight to get in to him. And everyone knew. The scheduler, the chief of staff, they all knew that this was important, that the speechwriters have time with the president.

The other thing that was useful was that our name was at the top of every draft. [pulls out folder] I have—not the originals, of course, because those are [presidential] records—but just copies of speeches, draft speeches. And our name and date and time stamp was on each. [holds up papers] Again, these are just copies, but this was, [reading and pointing] “June 14, 2016, Presidential Remarks on the Fight Against ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria].” So it’s the date of the draft, June 13, 9:30 p.m., my name and my phone number. [laughter] So if the president—

In the days and weeks leading up to a speech, people are like, “Put this in. Put this in. Put this in.” The final card that I could play was, “I’m sorry. This just doesn’t fit in this speech. This is not how the president talks about it. It’s not appropriate. And he’s going to get this draft the day or two before, and it’s going to have my name on it, not your name. And if he doesn’t like it or he has a problem with it, they’re going to call me at these phone numbers, and they’re going to bring me into the Oval Office the next morning, and I’m going to have to defend every word and every line. And he may ask me, ‘Why did you put this in? Why is this in here? It doesn’t fit.’ I have to be able to defend every word of this, and I cannot defend what you’re asking me to do.” And that usually was the end of it.

So to have your name on it and to know that the president or someone can call you to say, or you’re going to get called up—because [points to Strong] your question was, “When did he see?” Again, State of the Union, big major foreign policy, he’s seeing these a week or two out, or a week out. Most of those thousands of speeches he’s seeing one to two days out, which is not enough time to completely—it needs to be 99, 100 percent done. He shouldn’t have to break out the yellow legal pad and rewrite the speech, which is what he did in this case. [laughs]

And the sequence of these will be in the files that open up in the [Barack Obama Presidential] Library?

Yes, all of this is—

And you’ll be able to track the trajectory of the speech?

Yes. If someone wants to go through and see that the first draft went to the president—well, the records. We are circulating the speech for the first time outside the speechwriting office. OK. So maybe the speech is on a Friday, which means it’s going to go to the president Thursday night or Wednesday night. We’re probably going to circulate it amongst White House staff Tuesday or Wednesday, and we are going to give a deadline, saying, “Please send any thoughts by 3:00 p.m. Wednesday, because we’re sending it to the president.”

And that was another great thing. I’ve heard of other White Houses where, “Hold. Don’t forward to the president. The chair of the [Council of] Economic Advisers has not approved review.” We never had that. Every night, the staff secretary’s office puts the binder together, the presidential homework for the night, and the speeches need to be in there. And every day, the book changed. “The book,” they called it. The book is going to the president at 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, 8:00, 9 o’clock, whatever. And we would know all day.

If we know the book is going to the president at 7:00 p.m., it means we can’t be received—we have to turn it in at, whatever, 6:30 p.m., which means we can’t be getting edits, like, rewrite the speech, at 6:00 p.m. So we say to everybody in the White House, “Give us your edits no later than 4:00 p.m.” And if they don’t give us edits—there was no checklist. No one had a hold or a veto power. It was wonderful. We decided when it was ready to go to the book because, otherwise, dozens of people across the White House—we would never have been able to finalize a speech. So that was generally the process.

And related to that, if I’m a scholar and I’m trying to track the trajectory of a speech, am I going to find Obama’s input in his own hand in most cases?

Yes.

It won’t be, he called you, or he called Ben, and he said, “Open up your laptop, and I want you to change this. I want you to—”

Oh, I see what you mean. Both. There’s both, right?

There’s both. OK.

There are two ways the president is going to give edits. A hard copy goes to him a day or two before or sooner, and it comes back with pen-and-ink edits, which is what I’m showing you here, or writing out a complete—

Whole new paragraphs.

—a whole new thing that he wanted to say. That’s one way. Another is you get a call from his assistant sitting right outside the Oval Office, someone like Anita Decker Breckinridge, or [Katherine B.] Katie Johnson, or Ferial Govashiri: “Hey, the boss wants to see you. Come up.” Now, that’s never what you want to hear, [laughter] because, wow, it’s like, clearly if he could have done line edits [small text corrections], he would have done line edits, so something bigger is going on. And it’s usually—

So you go up. You’re just “pit in your stomach” because you know this is going to be something. And it was usually some version of—and you’ll hear Cody say this, and I’m sure you’ve heard other speechwriters say this—he was so kind about it. He’d say, “Hey, great job. Solid first draft.” Of course, you’ve been working on it for weeks. It’s not a first draft. It’s like your heart and soul. It's everything you’ve left—it’s the best you could—and to him, it’s a first draft because it's the first he’s seen it.

And he’d say something, inevitably, like, “You know, I could give this today, and that would be fine. But I don’t have to give it for a few days, which means we have three days to make it better, so let’s see. And here’s what I’m thinking.” And he’d have either edits like this. [ruffles papers] He might have a different structure in mind, or a different angle in mind, or something that he couldn’t really communicate through line edits. It was just better for him to talk it out with you, and so that’s what those sessions were. There’s probably no record of that other than our handwritten notes or whatever typed notes we took that should, in theory, be part of the official record. So those would be there.

And there’s the log that says you were called to the office?

Yes, there will be logs that say, “Speechwriter, 30 minutes with him.” And, you know, there are tons of pictures of all of us in there. And those, to me, were the hardest moments because you’ve spent days or weeks building this thing, maybe with or without his guidance, and you have done it as best you can. Again, you’re trying to give him the speech. You’re trying to write the speech that Barack Obama would write if he only had time to write it himself, which he doesn’t, so that’s why you’re there. Not what I think or what I want to say, but what Barack Obama should say.

And so you’ve done this whole thing, and maybe you have a speech in seven parts, and he’s now telling you, “I don’t think there are seven parts. I think there are only four parts. And part 6 actually is part of part 3, and what you’ve got here is actually part of this second page.” So you’re having to unlearn and unthink everything you had thought about this speech and reorder it. So he said, “The content is all there. It’s still a great story. But I just think the story is more illustrative of your second point.” And, of course, that’s not what I thought because that’s not what I did. I thought he would—so those were always the hardest ones for me because he was basically saying, “Dismantle and rebuild.” That’s hard. I found that that was hard.

The other hard one was if the tone was not what he wanted. And because tone is—well, I write something. We could each three of us write something, and I might not like your tone. I think your tone is too aggressive: “Make it less aggressive.” Well, what you think—

One example of that was after the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the annexation of Crimea by the Russians. The president was going to give a big speech in Brussels [Belgium]. And our rhetoric was that this was one of the most brazen challenges to the post–World War II order, an invasion of a sovereign European country by another country, and so this is a big moment. I don’t know if I—

Again, I know what Barack Obama believes. I know what our policy was. I wrote a speech that I thought was entirely consistent with that. Apparently, what I wrote struck him as perhaps too—I don’t know if, through Ben—so I turn the speech in. And then a week—this is a big foreign policy speech with significant impact, and I didn’t hear back. Every day, we’re on this trip through Europe. “Hey, Ben, have you heard back from the president?” “No, he’s still looking at. He’s still thinking about it.” I’m like, This is not good. That was never good. Next day, “Have you heard back?” “No, not yet.”

The night before, Ben says, “OK, he pulled me in.” I wasn’t there. He said, “He wants to take the speech in a—again, it’s all right. It’s all there. But just the tone, it’s just a little bit too bombastic,” or something to that effect, “a little bit too aggressive.”

Did that mean too critical? Just what you said, this is the worst example of violating the post–World War II order. Was it like that, that he said, Don’t be so critical?

No. Again, like I said, I knew what our policy was. There was nothing wrong with what I’d written. It’s not like I got the policy wrong. It had been reviewed and approved by everybody across the NSC [National Security Council], so no one had flagged that there was anything wrong with the speech, had thought it was consistent. But maybe it was based on the meetings the president was having that week. Maybe his thinking was evolving. Maybe he was wanting to take a slightly different tack or tone. But maybe his thinking was evolving. I can’t remember. But what I remember is that the tone—he just felt that the tone of the draft that I had worked on was not where he wanted to be.

And so that’s a hard thing to do, to be told, “All the content is right, but I just think it needs to be less”—again, I’m making this up. I don’t know what word—but maybe I was too strident or too bombastic. I don’t know. Maybe there were things going on behind the scenes. Who knows? Maybe there was outreach to the Ukrainians and the Russians. Maybe the tone would have sent a different signal than—I mean, who knows?

But we had one evening. Ben took the front of the speech, I took the back of the speech, and we did our best try to make it less whatever, whatever the—

And that’s an example where the president doesn’t have the time, presumably, to sit down and be making line edits or rewriting big paragraphs. He’s saying, “Generally speaking, this is not the tone,” and so, “Content is OK, redo the tone.”

Right. And the tone means every line. Look at every line, and whatever—again, we’re so many years removed from it. I just remember the tone was not what he wanted, and so that meant the whole thing had to be scrubbed. I often thought of it as like taking a comb through knotty hair. Right? The whole thing is a mess. He wasn’t saying that it was a mess, but that’s not a matter of just brushing a little piece. You’ve got to work hard and get the knots out of every sentence, and ask yourself, Does this—? And again, it’s not incorrect, but it’s just not—there are a hundred different ways to write any speech. That wasn’t the one way he wanted to give that speech on that occasion.

And to Bob’s point, that will be in the files, so you’ll see your original—

I guess so, yes.

—that went to the president, and then we scholars will look at the final version, and maybe we can tell the difference in the tone.

And that will be true for so many speeches where—and here I am, I was involved—there’s only about three of us who can speak to that particular speech: the president, Ben, and me. And I can barely remember the specific tone, but I think it was something like that it was maybe too bombastic, too strident, and I think they were trying to explore maybe diplomatic options, and it just wasn’t right for that day.

Scholars really love these things. Again, another way to think about it is, you identify moments where Barack Obama decides to make policy: OK, I have in front of me the standard fare of what we’ve said about Crimea. And now I want to sharpen it, or soften it, or I have decided that I am making a change. That’s what we really hope to find when we’re going through—

Right. And that’s true with every speech. In the end, people are always like, “Did you push back on this or that?” I was like, “No, I never pushed back because, why would I push back?” It’s his speech. It’s his words. It’s his presidency. He was elected, not me. And he’s getting so much more information than I am getting. I’m getting a ton of information to be able to write that speech, and all the people involved in all the conversations are volunteering, but he is still getting more information and has a field of vision that’s so much broader than what I want.

In that case, the Brussels speech, to this day, I don’t exactly—maybe there was something going on behind the scenes. Maybe they were trying to work some—ratchet the pressure down, and maybe not everybody knew about that, so it would have sent the wrong signal to Kyiv or Moscow [Russia] if he had come out “guns blazing.” I don’t know.

And certainly with Ben Rhodes—he talks about this in his book, but I’m sure it happened with you also. Wouldn’t the president have, at some point, asked you. “Now that I’ve changed it, is this right, or is this better? Or am I making a mistake by being too harsh on [Vladimir] Putin,” or what have you?

He wouldn’t ask me. I’m the number two guy, right? Maybe he would ask Favreau or Ben or Cody questions like that. But the most he would ever say—he’d make the edits. He’d talk it out. And he would say, maybe, “See if that works,” or, “What do you think?” or, “Do you think there’s anything I’m missing?”

Or, “Will people get it?”

Right. But there were always—in these meetings, you could ask a question. I found if I had a concern in my mind—again, it’s his speech. He’s the president, not me. I’m there to serve him. I can’t think of a specific example, but I know just generally the attitude was, Is there any concern that—blank—and how would you want us to deal with that explicitly or implicitly? I can think, maybe come back to that. But no, that was more of a—what you’re [looks at Strong] describing is more about, at least in my experience, President Obama to a chief of staff, or Ben, Cody, or Favs.

But no, oftentimes he’d be writing things out. At that point, we’re kind of a transcriber. And you think, Hm, that’s—I wonder if he maybe didn’t realize how that’s going to land, so you maybe tweak the word. It’s funny because of all the times I did that, almost always, the next draft would come back, and he’d cross out the word, and he’d put back his original word. And he’s probably thinking, This person’s an idiot. Terry’s an idiot. He can’t even transcribe what I write, or he’s not listening and being insubordinate. What’s the deal here? I was very clear what I wanted to say. Why are you not writing what I want to say?

But because we’re not going through word by word with him, it’s me back in my office, and I’d check with Cody or Ben. It’s like, “Hey, this is what he wrote, but maybe he didn’t realize how there’s this controversy bubbling up over here, and that word is going to set off something.” And so Cody or Ben would say, “Oh, yes, sure. Just make the change that you think—just do what you think is best.” But then 9 times out of 10, what I thought would be best would come back, and he’d cross it out and write it again. [laughter] So I’m like, Oh, he thinks I’m not listening.

I was just going to say, so that wouldn’t be in tracked changes—I guess I should I ask. That was always by hand?

Yes, like little stuff like this, [shows papers] crossing out words. Putting—again, these are copies, not originals, but just—this is him writing and adding in things. We would go through two or three times on a big speech like this. And so if a scholar wants to take the time and, OK, here are the five drafts that we know exist, and here are the five times Obama inked it, you could—you’ll know. He crossed out this line and changed it to this, and then he crossed it out again and changed it. That’s the result.

And this is the process.

You can now surmise why he, he’s not only—well, I’ve written about this, but this is—so usually you’ll just get the line edits. You won’t know why he’s making them. Right? You can deduce. But sometimes he would explain his edits.

And so this one is one that I describe in the book. [reading from paper] “June 2016.” We would do these monthly updates to the American people. He’d come out as commander in chief and update the country on the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria and around the world, in this rhythm of updating the American people. And this is right around the time of—after the awful shooting and terrorist attack in Orlando [Florida] at the Pulse nightclub [June 12, 2016]. And candidate Donald Trump is out there saying we need to, you know, “Barack Obama won’t call it radical Islamic terrorism, and if you can’t call it what it is, how can you ever defeat it?” And so every single day, Donald Trump is saying, “Barack Obama needs to say it’s radical Islamic terrorism.” For the most part, Obama wasn’t taking the bait. He was ignoring it, but he’d clearly had enough.

So we sent the speech up at [reading] “9:30 p.m. on June 13, 2016.” The speech is the next day. He’s going to go to the Treasury Department, stand with his national security team, and give this speech. What comes back the next morning is pages of just something that the president wants to say. And what he writes at the top of the speech is, [reading] “Terry, I wrote out the changes on page 4 so they would be easier to track. Let me know if it’s confusing, and make sure”—this is the part that I find fascinating—“make sure that I’m precise in describing what Trump has already proposed. Also, if we can trim a little, that would be helpful.” [laughter] So he adds two pages and says then trim.

So here is this moment of maximum political combat. [hits fists together] He’s being accused by Trump of [makes air quotes] “not taking the terrorism threat seriously,” and he’s going to push back on that whole argument: Here’s why we don’t constantly play into the religious arguments of our opponents.

And by this time, Trump is—it’s June of ’16, so he’s not been officially nominated.

He is the presumptive nominee.

He’s the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party.

But even in that, to his [Obama’s] credit, he said, “Make sure I’m precise in describing.” He didn’t want to misrepresent what Donald Trump—so a standard of truth-telling that I think we should all aspire to. So that—absent that, you don’t really know what’s going on with these two pages. But once you have this [draft], you know, Oh, that’s where this is coming from. This is a massive pushback. I mean, it’s evident from the writing that it’s a massive pushback on Trump. But he wants to make sure he gets it right. So every once in a while—

There was another one, too, where he was giving a speech at the Air Force Academy in 2012, and it was a, “Rah, rah, here’s all the great things we’re doing in the world.” And I guess I got carried away because he wrote, [reading from paper] “This is really good. My only concern is that we need, I think, at least one paragraph acknowledging the danger of terrorism, Iran, and North Korea, real challenges. We will remain vigilant. Don’t want to have just happy talk.” So he felt I had—so again, with these edits, you don’t really know what’s going on, but in the next draft, there’s now a robust paragraph. He felt that I wasn’t, you know, it was just happy talk, Everything’s great. We’re making all this progress. And he felt it was a little bit too much.

Can I ask another quick process question? In some administrations, the president, from time to time, gets the speechwriters and says, “I want you to craft a speech about X.” It might be a commencement. It might be something that I’m going to do. A fair amount of work goes into it, and the speech is never given because when they go through the process—

Yes, it reveals—yes, Hey, we’re not ready.

Yes, this is too far, or this is too controversial.

Right, this is half-baked.

Or, I don’t need to open that can of worms. The president wanted to, but when the speechwriters start putting it to paper, there are second thoughts. Are there undelivered Obama speeches?

Not that I know of. I mean, you can ask Ben and Cody. I don’t know. And again, part—I think that would have been so infuriating. We were so stretched. We were so overworked. There was so much to do. The idea that we would go off and write a speech—and again, we always try to write for an audience, and a moment, and a time and place. The idea that we’re going to write some sort of generic speech for a to-be-determined time and space about a topic that we don’t even know, when it’s—I mean, it would just be impossible. It would just be, I don’t know. Maybe that’s happened in other administrations.

The closest undelivered speeches that I know—and I write about this in the book, and maybe Ben has talked about this too. But when the Rolling Stone article came out with General [Stanley A.] McChrystal’s comments, Ben was the lead on that. The president asked him to write two speeches, one keeping McChrystal and one letting him go. And Ben sent them—and I wasn’t sure what I believed and what I thought should happen, but Ben sent me both, and he said, “Can you take a look?” I remember being at home reading it and going, Oh, my God, he’s got to go. This general can’t stay. You can’t have this sort of disrespect and insubordination and expect the chain of command to hold.

So I was never part of the discussions with the president on that. Ben can speak to that. But there is an undelivered speech where he keeps McChrystal, but that’s not the decision that he ultimately made. I have to think that having—I mean, certainly for me, seeing both helped crystalize it in my mind. I mean, who cares what I think? But I guess it must have been useful to the president, too, to have two speeches to help make a decision.

There’s another phenomena that happens, and it may have not happened in Obama’s case. Some other advisor, not on the speechwriting staff, writes a speech for the president: “Mr. President, you should go out and say this.”

Oh, my gosh.

Well, that’s part of—

This has happened sometimes? People don’t have enough to do in their own job, they have to decide to write a speech that—

Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise” speech starts with something that his pollster writes as if it were a speech to the American public, not a memo to the president. And the First Lady likes it, and it becomes part of that complicated set of events that eventually produces the speech that Carter gives. So it does happen from time to time that a president is given something—“Oh, I like this. I want to do something with this.”

I don’t remember anything like that. [thinking] Yes. I mean, I would have—I just can imagine the look on Cody Keenan’s face [laughter] if someone handed him a speech that said, “Yes, someone wrote this, and they think the president should give it,” and, “What do you think?” It would never get to the president. It wouldn’t get to the president. And I could just see his eyes rolling, he’d say, Are you kidding me? The presumptuousness to think that you’re going to write a speech—we could barely do it half the time. We barely—again, we worked for the guy every day. We’re around him every day. And still, we didn’t know that he wanted to do these two pages against Trump, because it was in his head, and he hadn’t articulated it yet. But no, I don’t remember anything like that.

So we really do need to break for lunch. But one point about his detail-orientedness and, I guess, lawyerly mind was that you weren’t doing these in tracked changes, so he wouldn’t have seen his word crossed out and your word added in a tracked change. He knew his own language—

He had remembered it.

—so well that he sees that you changed a word, and he goes back to the original word.

Yes. No, it’s, again, he—people are going to like him or not like him, like his policies or not, but what you cannot dispute is that he cared deeply about the words and the language that he used, to the point that if one of his speechwriters didn’t include the right word, he changed it back. So yes. And again, I felt terrible because he must have thought—I didn’t get a chance to explain myself, or couldn’t do margin comments and explain, I know you wrote this, but I write this, and it’s true, but—like a paragraph explaining.

Right. Because you’re not doing tracked changes, you couldn’t even do a comment out into the margin to say, “What would you think, sir, about using this word?”

Right. Now, again, if we were in a meeting, or Ben or Cody or Favs, yes, they might have the opportunity to do that, and he would hear them out. So you’ll probably get more of that from Ben and Cody.

Again, early in the Carter administration, Jimmy Carter keeps inserting into speeches the word “Palestinian homeland,” and his staff keep crossing it out. They come back and tell him, “No, you can’t do that. Here’s why you can’t do that. The Israelis would adamantly object. It will just cost you. You can’t do it.” He keeps inserting it. And finally he just insists, “I’m going to say it.” And then they have this long negotiation, “Well, you can’t say it in a written speech. You can’t say it in Washington. But when you’re somewhere far away from the capital, we’ll get a reporter to ask you a question, and in your response, you can say it.”

When you’re in Michigan. [laughs]

And then we’ll find out just how bad it is. It really is.

Right. Whereas Reagan took a different approach when the State Department kept telling him that you can’t say, “Tear down this wall.” He just does it. And then he and his speechwriters—thank God. I will say, there were a lot of occasions like that where—and I think Ben writes about this in his book—DoD, somebody somewhere states, somebody says, “We don’t want you to say that.” And at some point, you’ve just got to ignore it. It’s the president’s speech. The president was the one who was elected. The president knows what he wants to do and say. And this is not speechwriting by committee. And so, yes, you hear people out, but you’re not under any obligation to take them [their ideas].

That was even true at the White House. I remember one of the first speeches that I worked on, that I write about in the book, where our cybersecurity experts are writing this big, gigantic report about all the things we need to do to protect the country, and the president’s going to go out and give a big speech. And I write this speech, and they cross out, like, most of the speech. They’re just cutting pages of it, and I don’t know what to do. These are people that outrank me. So I go to Ben. It’s like, “What should I do?” He said, “Just ignore it. [laughter] Just write what you think the president should say, what the American people need to hear.” OK, great. They don’t need to hear a report. They can get the report online. They need to hear from a president as a leader pointing the way to the vision that he wants us to pursue.

But, yes, I think those are some of the great moments. It actually pains me to hear—it’s a credit to President Carter that he would value his staff enough and their opinion that he wouldn’t just steamroll them. But sometimes you do have to just steamroll them. We have a current president, for better or worse, who, they don’t know what he’s going to say when they send him out. So it’s almost like there’s no sense having a big drag-out fight about the text because 9 times out of 10, he’s not going to read the text anyway. The better thing to do is just whisper in his ear the moment before he goes out, and probably say—

Hope for the best.

—“Nobody wants you to say this,” which is the best way to get him to say something. But yes, once the president says it, it’s policy.

Howard [H. Baker [Jr.], the clip that we used from him in the [Ronald Reagan Oral History Project] commemorative book is about, “Mr. [Mikhail] Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” I guess he’s chief of staff at that point, and he tells on himself, you know, “I said to the president”—I think he says, “I don’t think that sounds presidential because it’s never going to happen,” or something like that. And then he says, “Of course, he said it, and it’s brilliant, and I’m so glad he didn’t listen to me.”

And it’s aspirational.

It’s aspirational.

It’s a challenge. It’s a demand. It’s one of the great moments—

And it’s one step beyond, “Ich bin ein Berliner” [John F. Kennedy speech in West Berlin, June 26, 1963].

It’s one of the great moments in presidential—and it’s telling, right? One of the greatest moments in presidential rhetoric would not have happened had the president listened to the team, the bureaucracy, [makes air quotes] the “experts” who supposedly know this.

And his own chief of staff.

And his own chief of staff. He listened—that reveals the leader. That revealed the kind of leader that Reagan was. And again, I think moments where Barack Obama gave speeches that maybe the State Department or the DoD weren’t thrilled about—presidents are oftentimes dragging and pulling their own governments, their own agencies, to policies, as we’re witnessing now. The speeches become a forcing mechanism as to whether or not it’s going to be the president’s voice and vision for where the country, including the government, needs to go, or whether it’s just this watered down, consensus view of the government. We’re not a parliamentary system, so the president doesn’t have to say anything that the president doesn’t want to have to say.

On that note, let us break for lunch.

[BREAK]

Afternoon Session

Bob, do you have a question that you wanted to start with after lunch?

Well, here’s one suggestion. In our briefing book and in the comments you make in your book, lots of Obama speeches—can we shorten the list? If you were advising someone putting together the book on presidential rhetoric, and you could only put in three or four of Obama’s speeches, which ones would you choose?

Across his career?

Across his career. And then what I’m really thinking about are—maybe a separate question. If we only have time to talk in detail about several of them, [laughter] how would we best spend our time? That has more to do with how we could use your expertise.

Sure, all right. Well, I guess the three that—if you could only pick three, it would have to be the 2004 speech in Boston. That’s where he first introduces himself to the country, to the world. It catapults him to national fame and puts him on a trajectory to become president. Maybe the second one would be, then, his Nobel address, where he really is wrestling with all of the tensions between war and peace, and idealism and realism, and the world as we want it to be and the world as it is, and all the contradictions, and how to bring about change.

And then, again, if you could only do three, I’m a fan of the farewell address, his final words to the country as he wraps of his presidency. Of course, he’s leaving office as someone very different from him taking office, so it’s very much his parting message to the American people and the world about how you keep this thing called democracy going.

So if you only had to pick three—none of which I wrote, by the way, [laughter] but that’s how it is, you know?

Then let me give us a caveat: the best Obama speech that you worked directly on.

Hmm. You know, at the end of the administration, we were each asked by the White House, “What’s your favorite Obama speech?” And they did a post on it. Some of them are—they are not always ones that are the most well known.

Having been born in Boston, raised in Massachusetts, to be able to have helped him and worked on his Boston Marathon speech, after the bombing [April 15, 2013, domestic terror attack]. I know it meant a lot to people that are important to me, my home state, but also it was really one of many speeches that he gave after terrorist attacks or mass shootings. It was his effort to articulate how we can be strong in the face of fear, and not give in to panic, and not target communities that we think are somehow to blame for this, but what it means to be strong in the face of—and it’s not always the bravado and the bombastic rhetoric. I mean, he keeps bringing it back to love and compassion and how we take care of each other in times of crisis.

You asked personally. On a personal level, that’s one that I’m very proud to have helped him with. And again, he went through a lot of iterations and really made it his own, but to have helped him was meaningful to me.

That raises a follow-up for me. I remember that day so well. We were having a special lecture here and getting people to where they were supposed to be and then to a dinner, and listening. My brother lived in Boston a long time. I love Boston. I love the Kennedy Library [John F. Kennedy Presidential Library]. It just strikes me that when these tragedies are happening—and in that case, it wasn’t, Oh, we hear there’s been a terrible shooting, and so you know you’re going to have to write on that, but it was ongoing for 24 hours, really.

And so what are you thinking about, one, your hometown, people you know there? You might have known somebody running in the marathon that year. And then realizing that you’re going to have to write a speech, no doubt, for the president. What are you thinking in real time as the crisis is happening? Do you start thinking about, I need to write this. I know I’m going to have to write a speech. I’m sure the president is going to go there in some capacity. And that notion of “comforter in chief” that he—that is, all presidents, in the modern era anyway—have taken on.

Yes, he did that so many times. After we left the White House, I made sort of a chronology of speeches that I had worked on, and looking at it—I hadn’t realized it at the time, but it seemed that Barack Obama was going out to the country after a mass shooting, a terrorist attack of some kind, almost every month. Every few weeks, he was going out, whether they were mass shootings, foreign terrorist–inspired shootings or bombings, things like the Boston Marathon. And so, yes, this is something that the president had to do over and over and over again, especially after mass shootings.

Cody Keenan writes about the president’s first reaction after the Charleston [South Carolina] shooting [June 17, 2015, racist hate crime], which is something to the effect of, “What do they want me—I don’t want to go and I don’t want to speak. I have nothing left to say. I’ve said it all over and over again. The country is not moving on this issue of guns.” Of course, he went, and he delivered one of the greatest speeches of his presidency.

But I’ve often wondered, it must be exhausting. Can you imagine? There’s no other person on the planet, or at least in the United States, who has to go out every few weeks or months and somehow try to console the country. I joined him on his trip and the First Lady’s trip down to Orlando, after the Orlando nightclub shooting, and I was in the next room as they were meeting—one big room where they were working their way through and meeting the families. And it was—I couldn’t even bear to be in the next room. I couldn’t imagine being him or her having to do that, and then having to do it every few weeks. The personal toll has to be absolutely exhausting. So that’s just—I can’t even imagine being the president in that case.

But as a speechwriter, yes, those were the most difficult things to write because you knew that no matter what you said, it wasn’t going to change anything about what had happened already. There are no magic words that could bring anybody back, make anyone heal faster. All you could do was try to offer some solidarity with the community that has been impacted, to let them know that they’re not alone, that the whole country is with them, and that the country is going to continue to be with them, and then to provide some sort of—to steel the country for whatever it is that’s coming or whatever the road is ahead.

So, yes, in that week, the Boston Marathon being one example. The bombing is on a Monday, and the president went out Monday to do a brief statement to the press, Tuesday to do a brief statement to the press. We got word that he might go to a memorial on Thursday. It was unclear whether he would because they hadn’t caught the bombers yet. People forget that he goes up there to Boston in the middle of a massive manhunt. The city is on lockdown. There were questions about whether he should go, whether it would pull police resources away from the search, but the decision was made that he would go. And so, yes, in those moments, you just—

If someone else on my team had written it [the speech], I think they would have done something similar, which is, what does this community—by that meaning Boston, the state of Massachusetts, the country—what does this audience need at this moment? And can he give that to them? There’s a point in that speech where it goes from being this somber memorial to being almost like a rally. And the people are getting up out of their pews, and they’re cheering, and they’re putting their fists in the air, because he was tapping into a spirit of resolve and defiance that had permeated the city. And you saw that in Charleston after the shooting. You saw that in a number of other memorials and eulogies that he gave over the years.

So not just consoler in chief but also I think, when you’re president, one of your jobs is to channel the spirit of your people. We’ve talked about aspirational speeches, but in this case, someone needed to give voice—and there were a number of people who did after Boston—give voice to what that community was feeling and to align yourself, to make sure that you’re in sync. And we’ve seen moments when leaders kind of misread the public or misread the mood. We often talk about them misreading the mood. But I think in that moment and many others, he reflected the mood, and he channeled the mood, and he amplified it. I think it was a great sync-up between what that community needed in that moment and what he was able to do, including at the podium with his delivery.

I was going to ask about the combination in Charleston of the tragedy, as it would be in all these mass shootings, and race. And we’ve talked about race before lunch as it related to demagoguery and what’s happened since, and how people reacted to Barack Obama as the first African American president—maybe the last, as some say. How did you negotiate through the shoals of race with him and for him in speeches? And did that happen less in your category of foreign affairs?

Yes. So I think the fact that I was primarily a foreign policy and national security writer, I, for the most part—it was Cody that worked on the Charleston speech with him. It was Jon Favreau who worked with him on his famous Philadelphia [Pennsylvania] speech during the 2008 campaign, where he really grappled with race and religion in American life.

There were a number of times when he would speak overseas, when he’d go to India and give a speech to the people of India, or the parliament of India, or Australia. Inevitably, there comes a part in the speech where you have to talk about how different communities need to live and work together. That would always be inherently—he would bring his own experience to bear. I found in those cases, yes, it really wasn’t my place, [laughs] as who I am [point to himself, as a white man] to really push Barack Obama in any direction on race. Those were moments where I truly was iterating or almost drawing on what he had said previously. Unless he had given us some specific guidance, that was a space that I—

When you speak with Cody, he can really get into this because Cody talks about this in his book: How do I, as a white man who’s never experienced what he’s experienced, possibly give voice to his life? And the president would say to him, “Just do the best you can. I’ll take it from there.” Tee something up that lets him.

But there were moments, I think, again, when he went to India the second time and you saw the rise of [Narendra] Modi, a nationalistic Hindu, a champion of Hindu nationalism. Big questions are being raised about whether India is going to persist as a pluralistic, multiethnic, multiracial, secular nation or whether it would go down the path of Hindu nationalism. To speak to that from his own experience of what it means to be a black man in America—that was probably the one time where I took everything I knew that he had ever said and thought and tried to apply it to an Indian context, again, so that the people of India might know that this is something that he struggled with as well. But yes, it wasn’t really my place to—

That makes sense. That makes sense. What is the difference—obviously, there’s a difference—but I guess my first question is, when there is a tragedy, and I’m thinking about Newtown [Connecticut, Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, December 14, 2012], for example, also the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida [February 26, 2012]. When there’s something that happens and the president needs to go out to a podium, or he’s already at a podium because he’s doing a presser [press conference] or something, did this president, just because he could, speak eloquently about what had happened? I think, though, tying race to Trayvon Martin, the famous line of, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon,” or famously the tears that came into his eyes on Newtown.

When he’s first called upon as the president, when there’s a crisis, to go right out and say something and calm the nation, did he just do that? Or did someone come running in and say, “Oh, my gosh, he’s going out in 10 minutes. Can you just write down a few ideas”?

Well, that would sometimes happen, but sometimes we didn’t need anyone to tell us that. I remember waking up the morning, Sunday morning, June—the years all blend together—oh, yeah, 2016. And we start getting these reports out of Orlando that there’s been just a horrific shooting, and the numbers are just beyond anything we had seen at that point in the United States, you know, 20, 30 [people killed], and it keeps going up. I just started—it was a domestic, potentially, shooting.

I just knew I was going to—the president’s going to have to go out and say something. No one told me that. I just knew at that point. This is something the president will have to speak to, so I just start researching, start writing. I just start writing something. And thank God I did, because at some point late that morning, someone said, “Where’s the draft?” Again, no one had said, “Write a speech.” Someone just said, “Where’s the draft? He’s going out in an hour and a half,” or something like that. So thank God I had been writing. But that’s because you just know there are certain moments the president has to go out. There’s an expectation that the country needs and wants to hear from a president in those moments.

But then, some of the moments you mentioned, too. A lot of the most authentic ones are the ones when he’s not reading from a script. I mean, I don’t think anyone wrote down, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” And there certainly wasn’t—there aren’t stage directions telling him what to feel. So those moments that you cite, he does go out there with a script, we did have to work very fast, but ultimately, he had to be himself. And as a parent, particularly after something like Newtown—obviously, that was another difficult one where he could barely get through the statement and had to collect himself several times to be able to get through that. But that also, again—

So many people ask all of our speechwriting team about those moments. And they’re unscripted, and they’re genuine, and they’re authentic. I think they resonate with people because it’s just, in those moments, he wasn’t a president. He was just a father, a husband, who’s reacting the way we all were reacting. So again, back to that. He was channeling what we were feeling. I think that’s why people connect to those moments.

I want to ask a general question and then maybe double back and talk about the Nobel Prize speech and some of the others you had mentioned. It’s a comment about your book. It will sound like a criticism. It’s not.

Sure. No, that’s fine.

It’s not. It’s not. It’s really asking you about, what would you have done if you wrote a different book? In this book, you make the case that we could all be better public speakers. Here are some things we could learn, not only from Obama but from a variety of people you’ve worked with, through a variety of ages and circumstances. Here’s a really great speech. Here’s what you need to take away from it. All that. I think you do a fabulous job with it, and you make your case. Think about what you’re doing. Follow some of these rules. You can be a better public speaker.

What I thought was sometimes missing was an answer to this other question: How in the world do you become as good at public speaking as somebody like Obama? Not just better, but really—

That’s a second book. [laughter] There we go.

Volume two.

Say It Weller. [laughter]

Did the writers talk about that? Or did you reflect on what it was that made him so extraordinary in that regard?

I think two things, right? Speeches ultimately come down to substance and style. You can have a lot of substance but not be a particularly dynamic, charismatic speaker. You can be a charismatic speaker but really not say anything. You may be a great performer, but you don’t have—there’s no “there” there.

Congress is full of both of those.

Yes, and so I think one of the things that sets him apart is he brought both. He thought deeply about what he wanted to say. He didn’t want to be someone who just got up there and recited boilerplate language handed down by party elders. He didn’t want to just recite cliches. And any time he felt that we were doing that, he’d cross them out.

He believed that you could actually—that people were grown up enough and mature enough to sit still and listen to someone make a nuanced, complicated argument. So some of his greatest speeches, his biggest speeches, I think the speeches that most people cite, are these big speeches like “Philadelphia race,” where he goes out and he puts on the hat of a professor, the hat of an American, the hat of a black man, the hat of a parishioner who is struggling with what his pastor is saying. And it’s all in there. And it’s not easy. There aren’t throwaway lines.

But I don’t know. I think that he thought the audience—and we’re always saying, “Simplify.” And he was taking a gamble, often, that folks could handle more than we speechwriters give them credit for. I think I even say that in the book somewhere. He’s like, “There’s too much patronizing of the American people. They can handle tough questions. They can handle contradictions. They can handle the gray. It’s not a black-and-white world.” And he was willing to go there over and over and over again, whether it’s race, or America’s role in the world, or America’s impact in the world. But I think he was thoughtful person.

One of the things I try to capture in the book is that he doesn’t burst onto the national stage until he’s in his forties. He’s a state legislator. But he had been thinking deeply about his own identity, his place in America, where he fit in, for years. He had spent a tremendous amount of time really thinking through what he believed and who he was. I think a lot of politicians don’t. They just sort of, What do I need to say to get elected?

Remember, a lot of his advisors told him not to give that speech in Philadelphia on race. A traditional politician, safe, cautious, somebody who puts their fingers to the wind, probably wouldn’t have given that speech. He decided, No, I’m going to do this. The American people can handle it. And I’m going to go through with it. I’m going to talk about some really—I’m not just going to touch the issue of race or touch the issue of religion. I’m going to put my hand on it. I’m going to hold onto it for an hour and have a lecture on this.

I think that comes from just his temperament, but it also comes from his background as a lawyer. He was willing to have conversations in public that most leaders don’t want to have, because he felt they were important. And I say in the book, too, he knew that, backstage, we were banging our heads against the wall. Be more succinct. You don’t have to go into the whole history of an issue and decades of context before you get to answer the question. He felt that was important, and I think people respected that.

I think one of the big pieces of feedback that I get over the years is, yes, he’s a great speaker. He can deliver a great line. People love the way he made them feel. But people appreciated being spoken to like an adult because they knew that so many of these issues are complicated and messy. And he was willing to go there and say things that hadn’t been said before. He was willing to go to Cuba, and give a speech to the Cuban people, and acknowledge that sanctions and the embargo have hurt them. No American president had said that before because, supposedly, it’s political suicide.

He went to Cairo [Egypt] after [his election], you know, and made a genuine effort to try to reconnect the United States with Muslims around the world. That was an incredibly—talk about a tightrope. I think that’s another one, the Cairo speech [June 4, 2009], which Ben and the president worked on very closely together. I think people appreciated that. Most politicians don’t do that. They don’t go up and touch the thing that is dangerous.

So I don’t know. I think that’s what made him an admired speaker. That’s different than, How do you actually become a great speaker? But I think if you want to be a great speaker, you have to be a great thinker. You have to have great ideas. You have to be willing to say hard truths, things that are uncomfortable, and call things out. But yes.

Well, you, I thought, also, in the book, by starting with your own fears about public speaking—it’s hard for me to believe that you had those because you obviously are such a great writer and fluent speaker. But as we all know, that is one of the top fears that people have, is speaking in public. And that you tied your own fears to the fact that Barack Obama—in addition to answering Bob’s question about how he [Obama] had thought carefully and deeply about himself, and history, and the country—that he didn’t start out as a great speaker and also had those moments of freezing up in public. And if you can get past that, that helps.

And so he had really worked hard, himself, to be—as did Kennedy, I would say—I don’t know whether he would completely agree that he wasn’t very good to start with, but he knew that he wasn’t great to start with, that he was pretty stiff and uncompelling as a speaker. And these people who can recognize that they need assistance might take lessons or just learn more about themselves. It seems that he was willing to do—he could admit to himself that he wasn’t great to start with.

I mean, people say, “Wow, that Boston speech was great.” It’s 2004. He’s 42 years old when he gives that speech. And I said, you know, it’s a version that he had been giving over the years. But yes, I tell the story in the book of when he was in his midtwenties, a grassroots organizer in Chicago [Illinois], that he was the first to say—it’s not like he was a bad speaker. He could give speeches all the time. But just on this one particular day, he hadn’t prepared. He just thought he was going to wing it, and it was kind of a disaster. I wanted people to know that because, look, if you think Barack Obama is a great speaker, well, he put in the work. What you saw when he was 42 years old was the result of two decades of hard work.

So we can all do that. We can all put in the work. And in the book, he shared all the different ways that he worked to get better, based on talking to people in the neighborhoods of Chicago, listening to how the preachers were preaching from the pulpit and trying to mimic that to some extent. Years spent in the classroom, having to plan a lesson every week and keep an audience of students engaged for hours at a time—that made him a better speaker. And having to be out there on the campaign trail, where he, by his own accounts, said he was often too quick to get into the details and the policy minutiae and forget some basic lessons about storytelling. All of those things became what we then saw. But yes, it’s something that he worked very hard at to become the orator that he was and he is.

We mentioned earlier today about Donald Trump departing from scripts and teleprompters, and going off script many, many times. And I’ll always remember Jim Lehrer, who became a member of our [Miller Center] board in 2015, coming here for an introductory luncheon that summer. He said to a group of professors, “I could see Donald Trump getting the nomination.” This is in August of 2015. And there was much poopooing and guffawing, and, “Oh, no, that will never happen.” And he stopped, and he said, “Have any of you listened to or watched a Donald Trump speech?” And no one said yes. I said, “I sometimes read the paper, and he might be on the background.” And he said, “Listen to the message and listen to how he’s doing it.” And it did startle me to think, there is a certain liturgical call and response that he does.

So my one question about Obama is, how often did you see him depart from the written word that you and he had agreed upon, or with other speechwriters? Certainly his ad libs or responding to an audience comment in a funny way or a good way, and firing them up, and getting them ready to go. But did he tend to do that, in your experience? And if so, how?

Well, just because of the lane that I was in—foreign policy, national security, homeland security, responding to terrorist attacks, shootings—those were situations where, as we’ve seen in recent years, ad libbing is probably not the wisest thing to do, really. When you go to Seoul, South Korea, and you’re delivering a speech on nuclear weapons, and you know that the regime in Pyongyang [North Korea] is watching across the DMZ [Korean Demilitarized Zone], that’s really not a good time to ad lib. You trust your team, trust your advisors. They’ve thought about the message.

So in our space, he didn’t ad lib as much as he said, maybe, on the domestic side of things. I think the consequences, the risks, were too—but obviously, when he’s in a press conference, he’s on his own. He’s flying solo. But yes, not as big of an issue for us on the foreign policy side.

I was just going to add that the ad lib, perhaps, the one about the guns and God and clinging [April 6, 2008, fundraiser speech], that he admitted was probably something he shouldn’t have said. And yet, would you agree that what happens after the Obama administration, and the Trump first presidency and now second presidency, that there is truth to what he said? That as localities deteriorate and people don’t have jobs, or kids are on drugs, or whatever, that people turn to other things, and sometimes it’s religion and God, and sometimes it’s weaponry and guns. It seems to me, as I reread it in context now, he was right.

I think people turn to a lot of things in times of change that give them strength. I think that the problem with his formulation, as he has said himself, is that it came off as dismissive. He explained that he wasn’t trying to be dismissive, but you can see very—you can see that when it’s said, why the way he did that was offensive to so many people.

I think one of the lessons there, though, too, is that when you’re someone like a presidential candidate or then president, and the volume of words that you speak—there isn’t a president out there or a candidate out there who hasn’t said something that they regret later. To me, that’s not so much the test, although they can be revealing moments. The real test is whether they own up to it, and then whether they keep saying it, or whether they change.

Usually, if you hear an elected official say something, they get criticized for it, and they keep saying it, well, clearly that’s what they believe and they’re not going to be deterred. But if they either apologize for it or stop saying it and never say it again, then that, to me, shows that they recognize that it wasn’t the right thing to do.

A misspeak, or—

Yes. And he never did that again. And in fact, he—

Asserted the opposite, or maybe took it back. And being dismissive, as he saw it, did that play into, then, the “elitist versus populist” movement of the Trump success?

I mean, that was just one comment. I think the reason we have Trump—there are many huge social and economic forces at work that give a country as big as ours a leader like Trump. I don’t think there’s—but if there’s a perception that one party is too disconnected from working-class voters or seen as too elitist, you can make a list of all the different reasons why people think that. And maybe that’s one of the many examples.

OK. Bob?

Again, another question from the book, and I hope I’m characterizing it correctly. One of the things I think you said about Obama is that he didn’t necessarily want a speech that was flowery or filled with intentionally memorable phrases. He’d rather have the compelling story that he was telling in more simple and direct language.

There’s a document in the [George] H. W. Bush [Presidential] Library. He was giving a big speech at Texas A&M [University], and he writes to the speechwriters, “This is good, but it doesn’t have any ‘Noonanisms.’ [referring to Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan] Go get me some Noonanisms.” [laughter] Obama wouldn’t have asked you for that kind of language.

He’s not going to say, “Where’s the line?” If anything, it’s opposite, right? If he ever felt we were trying to obsess about the perfect line, his message was, “Get the story right first. Get the narrative arc right, and the lines will follow.”

It’s interesting. We were—you ask people, “What are the five famous lines from John F. Kennedy?” A lot of people, even now, can give them to you. Five famous lines from Barack Obama? It’s a little bit harder. They’ll tell you “We’re not a white America, black America, United States of America.” That’s from the first one, that’s 2004. OK, what about since then? Give us a line, and there’s “change we can believe in.” But because he wasn’t trying to come up—he would always say, “A speech is not just a sequence of sound bites.”

What people will tell you is, “Right, oh, that speech about race in Philadelphia. So thoughtful. So careful. That spoke to me.” Or, “I remember how I felt listening to a Barack Obama speech.” That’s feedback we would get a lot. I talk about it in the book. I’d sometimes go up to people in an audience after a speech. They didn’t know who I was. Maybe they just thought I was a reporter or something. And I asked them, “What did you think of that speech?” They had just heard the speech. “What was your favorite part?” “Oh, there’s no one line.” There’s no one passage that they would necessarily say, but it was always more of, “Well, I felt like he saw us. He heard us. He spoke for me. I feel that he heard me and saw me.”

So yes, he was generally—he never once said to me, and I never once heard any of my colleagues come back and say, “He likes the speech but he wants more soundbites. He likes the speech, but he wants a line. He wants a catchy line.” If anything, to be honest with you—just as one example, here’s a line: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it. If you like your plan, you can keep it.” That’s succinct. That’s catchy. That’s memorable. It turned out to be incorrect. Another one, once it was brought to his attention that that was not correct, he stopped saying it. But he paid a price for that.

So yes, as a general rule—and I love that, because the challenge is, of course, when you start building memorials and museums, you need short statements, so there’s a lot of Ted Sorensen out there in the world, John F. Kennedy’s speechwriter. There’s a lot of Franklin Roosevelt.

Peggy Noonan.

Peggy Noonan, right. Maybe Barack Obama’s will begin with, “On the other hand.” [laughter] I’m just kidding. But the museum, when it opens—we’re here in 2025. The museum will open in 2026. There will be a lot. There will be a lot there.

I’m thinking about Charleston. I realize that Cody spent more time with him on that, maybe, than you. But surely everyone, if asked about a speech, will remember his turning to singing.

Right.

In some ways, it seems like the last thing Barack Obama would do because it might—it could have, by someone else, seemed hokey, but it seemed so—I watched it live. He was surrounded by the African American community and the African American cleric, and I could just—first of all, there was already a call and response that was going on.

Yes, and the organ was there, and so music was—right.

And so how did he—?

It would have been weird had he done it at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston for the marathon.

Right, or burst into the fight song of a college or university, or the “Navy Hymn” at Annapolis [Maryland]. So were you surprised about that? And frankly, was—I guess we’ll ask Cody. But who added that? Who added the lyrics from “Amazing Grace,” and was it thought he would read them? Did anyone ever think he would burst into the tune?

Well, again, yes, Cody will be the best person to tell you this. But just from—Cody was on either Air Force One [presidential plane] or Marine One [presidential helicopter] with him. Cody texted back to two or three of us and said, “He says he might sing ‘Amazing Grace.’ Don’t say anything to anybody.” I was raised Catholic, so I’m thinking, You don’t just start singing in the middle of a mass. You do what the priest tells you to do. Of course, I knew he was not going to a Catholic mass. But I was thinking, Oh, man, I wonder about that. And someone asked, “Is he going to or not?” He said, “He’ll just decide in the moment.”

So the president—as I understand it, it was the president’s idea. He told Cody and a few others. We were all sworn to secrecy, and we just had to watch. He said he would do it if he felt it in the moment, which again, is a great—you just learn as a speaker, as a communicator. He was the only one—if he didn’t do it, it still would have been a remarkable speech. The fact that he did it took it to another level.

And again, you ask yourself—that is easily one of the top 10 most memorable Obama speeches. That happened towards the very end of his presidency. I ask myself, why do so many people ask about that? Why did that break through? Why did it resonate the way it did? There are several reasons for it. One is, it was unexpected. We’re not used to seeing our presidents in that space. And also, to your point, first black president in a church where they are eulogizing someone who is basically killed in a racist hate attack, and the leader of our country is there not just as president but as a black man. And feeling inspired by the victims’ families, who have forgiven the shooter already, it was remarkable.

I’m always teaching my students and my clients that when you get up to speak in front of a group of people, it’s not just the words. You’re there to forge a human connection. You are a human standing in front of humans. You are there to forge a human connection. You’re not just there to read the results of a white paper. And what he was doing in that moment was the ultimate experience. He was truly communing with them through song. It’s something we had never, ever seen. Two hundred–plus years of American history, that had never happened. You know?

You think about, in 1850, telling Americans, “Someday there will be a black president, and after a terrible—he’ll be at a Southern black church, and they’re going to sing ‘Amazing Grace.’” Again, lunacy. Madness. It will never happen. It's one of the speeches that we get asked about the most.

I bet. And literally unique, as you’re saying, in our history. I’m so—I went back and read it again last night. To think that when that happened, he had to be so upset about what had happened and that he was saying, What can I do? I can’t say anything more about guns and violence and race. And he yet deals with it, but then goes into the grace, and then not only starting the tune, singing the tune, and then naming the victims: “This person found grace, and this person found grace.” It’s moving to read it. That has to be the sign of a really good speech as well.

Again, I think Cody is pretty candid in the book [Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America] that both he and the president were struggling with—again, What do we say here? It was the act of grace by the victims that gave them the hook that they needed to make this speech different. In a somewhat similar way, in the lead-up to the anniversary of the march at Selma [Alabama], Cody and the president were struggling, and it was only when Rudolph Giuliani came out and started saying what it means to be an American and who an American is, it gave them their hook. Rather than just be a bunch of abstractions and yet another speech about race and guns, he could react to something in the moment.

Another crisis area that we haven’t talked about are natural disasters. Any thoughts about that, how those have to be prepared? And then shall we circle back to the reelection, the campaigning for the reelect [reelection], the change in your title, and carry on slightly more chronologically into the second term?

Natural disasters?

I’m thinking maybe Hurricane Sandy comes to mind, 2012, fall of 2012. And again, maybe not in your lane.

Right, but gosh, there were so many. I mean, hurricanes, tornadoes, accidents like the tragedy in Waco [Texas; 2013 fertilizer plant explosion]. Being on the foreign policy side, we had our own versions of that. We had the Haiti earthquake [2010], where the president was going out every day almost to update the American people on the Haiti earthquake. Or the Japanese earthquake and tsunami [March 11, 2011]. Those were all—because they were international, we had to take the lead on that. And there were others, as well.

Those moments are all—I put them all under “crisis communications.” We’ve talked about how you need to channel and speak to the mood and emotions of your country and the people. Whether it’s a shooting, a natural disaster, an industrial accident, or what have you, folks are looking for you to lead in that moment. They are looking to the president for facts, not speculation. They’re looking for actions, not promises of action.

And so if you were to read 10 of these speeches after a mass shooting, a terrorist attack, an earthquake, a tsunami, the structures are remarkably similar. It starts out with the facts as we know them so far, with the huge caveat that we know so little: Here are the steps that I’m taking. So you hear a lot of phrases like, “I’ve ordered,” “I’ve directed,” “I’ve appointed,” “I’ve named.” The president in “commander in chief–leader” moment convening world leaders, directing aid, and then promising some sort of update. And he usually ends—we would try to, again, get him out of—

A lot of times, those first parts of the speech were about all the steps that he’s taking as leader of government, but to always bring it back to the people most affected. You oftentimes would end with a story or an example of someone dealing with that crisis, one of the victims or one of the first responders. But regardless of the cause, I think usually the audience is looking for the same thing out of their leader: facts, reassurance, calm, not panic. And I think for the most part, he did that.

One of the challenges he faced was, especially after terrorist attacks, he was determined to go out there and show that he wasn’t going to get rattled, that these small terrorists and their bombs—that they weren’t going to send the United States of America into a panic, and he was determined to project calm. Sometimes there was a mismatch between the mood of the country and the more cerebral, professorial Barack Obama. He’s talked about this publicly, where there were times that perhaps he could have channeled the anxiety and fear of the country more and showed that he also shared that. But what he was trying to do was project calm, project reassurance.

I think most of the time, he got it right, but he’s acknowledged that there were times he could have—particularly, basically, 2014, ’15, ’16, the rise of ISIS and the explosion of terrorist attacks in Europe and across the United States. There was genuine fear, and there was panic. Now, we weren’t looking for our president to panic, but it seems—he’s spoken about how he might have approached some of those remarks differently.

No doubt about that. [to Perry] Did you want to do the chronology of the second term, or do you want to go back to Nobel Peace Prize?

Oh, sure, absolutely. Yes.

OK.

Going back to the list of the memorable and most important—

Yes, back to the list. I didn’t reread the speeches to get ready. I took your advice. I listened to them.

Oh, good. There you go.

The one that was most striking to me was the Nobel Peace Prize speech. I, of course, knew it before. I used to assign students to read it in courses on American foreign policy. Was there significant debate at the early stages about what Obama should do at that occasion?

Well, that’s definitely a question for Ben.

And he talks about it some in his book.

Yes, some in his book, and hopefully he’ll talk about it even more, because he was—I was not involved in that speech with the president, so all I know is what Ben and Favs have told me. But yes, they’ve told me that he was very aware of the irony of him getting this award at the very moment he’s sending—he’s escalating a war in Afghanistan. And the reason I include it—

And at the beginning of his presidency?

When he arguably, he’s still in the vision stage. And, of course, it’s announced over the summer, right? So it’s not even—it’s literally half a year into his first year, so he’s had maybe six months. It truly is a—clearly they were trying to show a blessing, an endorsement of his approach. The worded their statement pretty carefully, I think.

But yes, I think he did—there’s a great lesson there. That’s why I share it in the book, that so often, leaders in politics, business, what have you, have a hard issue, something that’s hard to talk about. Maybe it’s a scandal or embarrassing or a crisis, and they want to tuck it away. They want to maybe deal with it at the end, deal with it in passing, or refer to it with euphemisms. Think about what he did there, right?

It’s right at the beginning.

It’s not something he’s going to touch on at the end. He acknowledges it, and he does his acknowledgments, and he deals with it right at the top. He said, “I know that there’s a debate about me receiving this, not only because it’s so early in my term, but because I’ve just ordered tens of thousands”—and so the whole speech then becomes about the contradiction, the tension between peace and war, and how you seek peace at a time when at times you must use force. I think that’s a great lesson for all of us: Don’t hide from these contradictions.

It’s considered one of his greatest speeches, and I think, again, we can go back to, why is that? Well, he treated us like adults. He was honest. He acknowledged very candidly that there was a bit of tension and irony in him even getting that award. But he owned it, he went right to it, and he spoke to that. And the whole speech is about how you reconcile these two seemingly irreconcilable things. I wish more leaders would do that. Just like he went out against the advice of his advisors and gave the race speech in Philadelphia, another one of his greatest speeches. So twice, it’s his own instinct and his own judgment, whereas others might say, That’s just too risky. I don’t want to touch that. He goes out and he gets rewarded both in the moment and by history. I wish more leaders would recognize that.

Coming back to what you were talking about earlier, Secretary Cohen at the end of that first block of time after the end of the Cold War, America triumphant. That all changes with 9/11. For Obama, is ending the War in Iraq and moving beyond that initial response another line of demarcation? He deals with that in that speech in the sense that he doesn’t make the claim that terrorism is gone. It still has to be fought. He even suggests evil is not going to be gone, and it will have to be fought. We can do more to make the world peaceful, but in a way, it’s a speech that tamps down aspiration.

It’s Barack Obama the realist. An idealist tempered by realism. Absolutely. I don’t know if it was in that speech or another speech where he talks about his desire not simply to end the War in Iraq and ultimately Afghanistan but to end the mindset that got us into these wars in the first place. And again, another classic Obama technique, right? He’s not just going to talk about the policies. He’s going to talk about the underlying causes of why those choices were made in the first place. You’re targeting a mindset. You’re really getting at the underlying assumptions, and attitudes, and psychology of a country.

So throughout his presidency, I think some of his most memorable speeches—when he goes to the Justice Department and talks about our policy and his efforts to reduce the population of and ultimately close Guantanamo Bay [detention camp, Cuba]; or why he wants to charge and prosecute terrorists in U.S. civilian courts, not military courts; or why he wants to disclose more about how we conduct drone strikes, all of which while he was trying to get us out of this, what he called “perpetual war footing.” Again, this is a reaction to his predecessor, where often the first instinct was, Let’s attack, and maybe we don’t need to spend so much time with diplomacy.

But yes, I think one of the biggest things he was trying to do when he came in was to try to change the way Americans think about how to deal with problems around the world. How many times have you heard “bomb them back into the Stone Age”? Now, our leaders don’t usually say that, although we’ve had a few who have said that. But a lot of Americans say that. It’s not a doctrine. [laughter] No smart foreign policy practitioner says that. But there is this attitude, We’re the biggest military in the world. And you’re starting to hear it again.

He was trying to make an argument—again, make an argument—that we have a lot of tools at our disposal, and we should only be using our military as a last resort after everything else has failed. I think he’s fundamentally right in that, but you can see how hard that is when you look at Syria and the use of chemical weapons, and the famous “red line” comment, where he implied that there would be military consequences for that. He ultimately went in a different direction. It’s a hard—and again, he gives the Nobel address and he’s ordering tens of thousands of troops to Afghanistan, when his own vice president [Joseph R. Biden Jr.] at the time was arguing against it. So there was no—it’s not like everybody agreed that that was the obvious choice. President Obama made a choice. He disagreed with his vice president on that.

But that is a speech that lots of people point to, I think. Again, it has all the elements of the ultimate Barack Obama experience. He acknowledges the complexities and the contradictions.

Do you know if—you weren’t there. Do you know if it was appreciated in the room in that way?

Oh, gosh.

It quickly got that reputation shortly after it was delivered.

I don’t know if it was in—I suspect so. Generally speaking, when he gave his—you knew it was a good speech in the moment. Whether we were watching at home or in the room, we’d be texting with each other and, like, This is working. He’s on tonight.

One question that you noticed at the top of our questions that we always ask people in a presidency, and that I neglected to ask: Your first impression when you met him face to face, what was that like?

It was May of 2009. I had just written my first speech for him, or worked on a speech for him, his commencement address at the Naval Academy. So it’s the first time he’s going to a military academy to give a commencement. He never served in the military, but now he’s commander in chief. I had written—I had worked on the speech.

We had these weekly meetings with David Axelrod in the West Wing, just down the hall from the Oval Office. We’d all file in. We’d have to bring printouts of our speech and hand them to Axe [Axelrod], and he would read them quietly in front of us. I mean, it was agonizing. [laughs] You didn’t know whether he was loving it, hating it—

So we were in the room there, and there’s a knock on the door, and the president just kind of waltzes in. He had a football in his hand. I don’t know if someone had just given him this football or he was just tossing the football around. And he just started chitchatting with us. And I’ll always remember—because this is the first time I’m meeting him up close—he didn’t have his jacket on. He just had his shirt and tie. And he said, “Hey, where’s the new guy?” And I’m thinking, I don’t know who—is that me? I don’t know. I’m the newest person here, so maybe that’s me. And so I put up my hand. He goes, “Hey, I just”—he was, just—“It was a good speech. Good speech. I liked it. Nice job.” Something like that. I’m like, Wow. I can retire now. [laughter] You know?

And I just thought, with everything that he had going on in his life as president, and whatever he had going on that day, that he took even a moment to seek out and ask about the new member of the team. Like, yes, I hadn’t interviewed with him to be on the team—it was Favreau and Rhodes who hired me—so he trusted them to bring people on board. So that was my first interaction. I thought, Wow, what a—just nothing to do with his politics. Nothing to do with his worldview. Just as a person, as a human being, as a boss, he took time out to say thank you for something I worked on.

And it happened again a few months later. I had worked on his first remarks at one of the 9/11 anniversaries. He went over to the Pentagon to give some remarks. A few minutes later, after the event, my phone rang, and they say, “Stand by for the president.” And I’m like, Oh, God. Something’s wrong. This is not good. I immediately start thinking about the remarks. Did something go wrong? I watched it live. It seemed to go fine. He was calling from the limo [limousine] on his way back, and he said, “I just wanted to say thank you for the speech. I thought it was great.” I’m like, Wow, what a person. You know? It made me want to keep working hard. And I did. I went for years on those two moments.

But to me, it just—and I tell a lot of groups about those moments because, I know half the country doesn’t like the guy, but I hope everyone gets a boss like that. He’s a good person, and he treated—I always say, eight years, never raised his voice at me. He had plenty—I made mistakes. I turned in drafts that didn’t always meet the moment. He had enough stress. He had every right to blow a gasket once in a while, and other presidents have. But not only did he never do that with me, I never heard of him doing that to anybody else. He did something worse, which is, he gave us the “disappointed dad” look, We can do better, and you’re like, [sighs] Just yell at me. It would be better.

But yes, he was just a good, decent person to work for, and I appreciated that because when we did make a mistake, or when we didn’t deliver the best speech, we had to go back—they don’t take the speech away from you and give it to somebody else. You have to go back and fix it. So you need to be able to function, and you can’t be rushed and demoralized and thinking that you shouldn’t be there. He had a way about him giving feedback that made you want to work harder, as opposed to making you want to quit.

But you were honest in your book that the stresses of dealing with the draft coming back, or not wanting to disappoint the president, that I think you said—was it Cody who had hypertension, and you would get migraine headaches? I’m also thinking about the time—I mean, I realize the president’s time is the most valuable—but all of that time that you all would spend, weeks and weeks, and then have to start all over. In the example you gave, he has written out—you could never say this, but just on occasion, did you want to just say, Just write it yourself? [laughs] You clearly have the time to do this in some instances. How do you keep your spirits up, and how do you keep your stamina and your energy?

No, I never wanted to say [laughter] to him, Write it yourself. He didn’t have the time, and we barely had—a whole team of us—we barely had enough time to do everything that was required. There’s no one person in the world who could do that. I think there were some dark moments, and I put those things in the book. One of our members of our team started counseling because he was just really struggling with feeling he was not up for it.

And that was the other thing, too. I think part of it was, because he had given that amazing speech in 2004, because he gave that great race speech in 2008, and so many others, we knew that if left to his own devices, he could come up with something incredible. And we knew that probably on our best day, we’re not going to be able to do that. So always in the back of your mind, you just felt like maybe, no matter what you did, it wouldn’t be good enough. I think a lot of us felt that way at different times and struggled with it. But yes, our job was to do the best we could under the circumstances, and that was the job.

How did we keep our stamina up? It was exciting. It was exciting. When you work on something, and then the president of the United States likes it, delivers it, it has the impact and effect that you wanted, and you can see from the audience that they’re moved or that you’ve given them some encouragement or hope or strength, and helped them get through—a community after a tragedy, a foreign country that’s going through a difficult time—that you were a part of that. Every other day, you just got this huge—I mean, we all know how important it is to get great feedback, not just for our kids but for each other as colleagues. Someone compliments you, and you can go for a long time on that compliment. Well, we would get that feedback every 48 hours when he goes out and gives a speech.

And so it was exhausting. Getting ready for our session [this interview], I went back and I looked at a list of speeches that I had worked on over the years, and I couldn’t believe it. It was, like, a major speech every few days.

Do you know what your number is? You gave the total in the book.

I think I’m something around 500. Five hundred speeches, statements, op-eds, articles, big speeches, short speeches. Five hundred times, start over, do it again, do it again. And that was the other thing. You could have a phenomenal week. The speeches you’ve worked on for the president are just, they’re home runs. And the next thing they say to you is, “Well, go do it again.” “Great. Do it again.” “That’s excellent. Do it again.” It was never over. It was like being a bit on the hamster wheel.

But again, when you’re in—there are some speechwriters that don’t like to be in the room when the speech is being given. They just can’t handle it. It’s too stressful. They can’t bear to feel the speaker mangle it, which was never an issue with President Obama. But I loved being there. I had spent days or weeks in my office in the basement of the West Wing, with no window, bad ventilation, imagining this moment. Trying to imagine as best I could, weeks in advance, what he’s going to look like, what that crowd’s going to feel like, and to try to help create an experience between him and the audience, something that hopefully the audience will remember and the people watching will remember. So I wanted to be there. I wanted to see if that experience was going to play out the way I had imagined it in my head.

I wouldn’t sit in the back and watch the president. I could watch the video later. Whenever I could, I would try to sit in the front, off to the side, so that I could look at the audience. I wanted to see their faces. I wanted to see if they were paying attention, leaning in, laughing, smiling, nodding along. I wanted to just see whether they were receiving this thing, this speech, the way we had intended. And when it worked—and it didn’t always work—but when it worked, it was magical. He’s written about this in his memoir [A Promised Land], what that felt like for him at the podium. I know what it felt like for me. Yes, there’s this moment of—he called it a “current of emotion” between him and his audience. He felt it, but I saw it. And to be part of that was just—it didn’t matter how little sleep I had.

These trips we took, especially to Asia, these 12-day slogs through six different countries, we’d pass out from exhaustion at the end of it. But what kept you going each time is just those crowds and knowing that he was connecting with them, and he was giving them something. It was a beautiful thing to see. It was really beautiful.

Adrenaline? Big adrenaline rushes around those times?

Oh, sure, yes. It’s like a show. I mean, I’m not a theater person, but every day was like opening night. We had to get ready. The cameras are going to come out. The audience is going to come out. The stage is going to be built. Every day was like a new show, and we had to make it work. And when it works, there’s no—I’m sure I was probably getting a dopamine hit after one of these things. I was probably addicted to it on some level. But yes, when a leader really connects, you just see it. You can feel it. When a leader can connect with an audience like that, it’s just a beautiful thing to see.

Can you remember a time or two that didn’t quite work? And when that happened, were you in the venue or not, but you thought, Oh, that didn’t work so well? And then were you able to say, Oh, maybe it was the content? Or did you ever see the president—and I’ll use the example of the first debate of the reelect, the famous flatness of his affect that night to the point where people who were very supportive thought, Oh, we hope something hasn’t gone terribly wrong, there’s not a problem in the family or—but in any event, that’s part of another story.

Did you ever see that happen in a speech setting and could you pinpoint what it was: the audience, the president’s affect that day, the content, or a combination somehow of that?

You know, off the top of my head, there’s no one speech where I remember that happening. But I remember the experience, more than once, of being—when you work at the White House, we have our own camera crew following the president around all the time. Even if the event is not broadcast live on television, we can still watch the event live back in our office. So whether it’s across town or across the country, we could always watch his speeches live. There were a few times where I had worked on speeches, and I imagined him—you know, he comes out. The audience is cheering. He’s waving and cheering. And we have his opening lines, and they’re going to laugh or cheer at that first line, and then he’s going to laugh and smile back and him, and then they’re going to laugh and smile. You get this whole thing going.

I remember, multiple times, watching back at my desk, OK, here it comes. He’s going to deliver the line. He delivers the line just the way I thought, and the audience—they were supposed to roar in approval. Instead, there are tepid chuckles and scattered applause. You know? And you’re like, Hmm, that didn’t work quite well. You could almost see on his face, he knew it was supposed to be a big line too. And then maybe a moment later, there’s another line, and that one was supposed to be a big one, and the same thing happens. And so something is up.

I remember watching, two or three times, that happens at the beginning in the opening minutes. It’s sort of the kiss of death because at that point, I could see it on his face. I remember watching the screen and going, The audience is not, for whatever reason, reacting the way that we thought, and he starts to pull back. Why would you, on the fourth time, try to deliver this killer line, a punchline, if you know that they’re not going to respond the way you think? So he’d start to pull back—I felt, anyway. This is my perception. He would start to pull back. And then as he pulls back, the audience starts to pull back. So this is this death spiral of noncharisma, this anticharisma moment.

I saw that multiple times, and I would yell out—because Cody and I would sit in offices side by side—I would just yell out. It was like, “Nope. Not happening. It’s not working. Something’s up.” And I wasn’t there. The few times that I saw it happen, I didn’t think it was his delivery. I thought he was delivering it exactly—but you know, you never know. It might have been late in the day. Maybe the pump-up music before the event wasn’t so great, or maybe they had been waiting too long, or the room was too hot, and people are tired. Who knows? But there was something that just—and he talks about this in the book. Even when he was a professor, he says there are just some days it’s just not there. The magic is not there. You can do everything right, and it’s just not there.

So same Barack Obama, same guy with all his—same great orator. Sometimes it didn’t click. And yes, it’s hard to watch. But then you just settle in. You’re like, Well, this is not going to be what we thought it was going to be today. We’ll do better tomorrow.

Coming back to your earlier comment about his kindness and his decency. Some observers sometimes said maybe it would have been better if he got angry occasionally. Maybe the “no drama Obama” didn’t always help him.

Sure.

Is there any reason to think that there were occasions where he should have shown greater passion, greater anger?

So double-edged sword there with him. I think, again, we’ve talked—one example where, by his own admission, he probably could have shown more anger, reflect the mood of the country after some of the terrorist attacks, some of the ISIS attacks. Again, he was trying to stay calm. He was trying to project a sense of calm and show that there’s a steady hand, and he was not going to panic, and he was not going to make decisions out of fear. But I agree. I think there were times after some of the terrorist attacks that he could have maybe channeled the emotions of the country even better.

The problem was, you know, he was held to a standard that all of his predecessors and successors have not, which is, in the United States of America, if you’re a black man showing anger, that doesn’t always get received the way it is when George Bush gets angry or Bill Clinton gets angry. When they do it, it’s fierce resolve, determination. And there were times when he [Obama] got angry or emotional, and it came back to bite him a little bit.

You think of the famous episode where Professor [Henry Louis] Gates [Jr.] was arrested on his own doorstep in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and can you imagine, as a black man in America, to see that? It doesn’t matter how accomplished and credentialed you are. You are, at times, just seen as a potential threat. You could see he was getting angry, and then he said some things in the moment that maybe he, in retrospect, would have characterized differently.

You look at Michelle Obama in the 2008 campaign. Admired by millions for her grace, for her eloquence, for her commitment to her family and her country. And yet millions of people thought she was an “angry black woman” because she dared say that there was a time when she wasn’t proud of the country. I think for Barack Obama, black men in America, there was no winning that one. I just think he was going to—you know, damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. And I think there are examples of both of those. That would be my take on that.

I had a question about your going into David Axelrod’s office. He and David Plouffe are there the first two years of the first term. I guess my question is, as the lead political advisors who get him to the White House, get Barack Obama to the White House, first of all, what kinds of responses would you get from David Axelrod when you would be in these meetings and he would be reading? And either from him and/or Plouffe, did you feel that they, understandably, had to be concerned about how these speeches would hit politically?

Oh, sure.

Public approval ratings, Gallup polls, and particularly always looking towards reelection, how did that feel? Did it feel that not only were you having to follow, of course, what the president wanted—and he wanted to be reelected, and I’m sure he did care about how these things would hit politically in the polls. But did it ever feel difficult to try to negotiate through these different routes to the final product?

Yes. I mean, again, for that first term, I’m almost 90-plus percent of my time dealing with the national security and foreign policy lane. Every once in a while—but everything is watched everywhere. I don’t want to give a name, but there was someone at the White House who came to me once and said, “This speech you’re having the president give, he’s overseas, and we’d love to have him say something in the local language and say something in Arabic,” or whatever the language was. It was just me kind of probably going line after line after line of President Obama speaking this other language.

And then I think this person who was more on the domestic side said, “Do we have to do so much of the foreign language?” Here he is being accused of being a Muslim, Kenyan, not born in the United States, and I’m having him give half the speech in another language. They’re like, “Can you ratchet it back a little bit?” Their political antenna was up in a way that mine wasn’t. At first, I was like, “How dare you!” They were correct. He’s the president of the United States representing the United States. He doesn’t need to give half the speech in a foreign language.

But yes, there were moments like that. That’s pretty mild. But everything we wrote—people always ask, how do you write for multiple audiences? Well, when you go and give a speech in New Delhi [India] or Seoul or Tokyo [Japan], all the reporters are there. They’re all watching. They’re all listening. Anything and everything you say is always—it’s not not a domestic speech. It’s always for the people in the room, it’s for that country, and it’s for the American people back home who expect their president to be standing up for the United States of America. So it was just always—we knew what we were doing.

We always knew that one of the first rules of politics is, you don’t give your political opponents a stick to beat you with. You don’t say things that invite the critics to pounce on you. So thank God for our fact checkers. We haven’t talked about that, but we had a team of fact checkers, and they would go through every single speech and every single word. And a lot of times, they’d flag things and say, “Hey, this sounds like you’re setting the president up for a problem here. Maybe you could change the wording or something.” And I hadn’t thought about that particular angle or wasn’t even aware that that was a controversy around some issue. So yes, it was always—when you’re the president of the United States and you’re speaking, everywhere you go, everybody is listening all the time. It may be a toast at a dinner in Malaysia. You say something wrong, it will be headline news back home or a banner headline on Fox News, which we were always mindful of.

Bob?

Maybe we should pivot to some of the legacy questions, because they’re important and we don’t have a lot of time left. [thinking] Here’s one angle on it. Is there a speech you are aware of, either one you worked on or one he gave, that didn’t receive as much attention when it was given but is quite likely to hold up over time?

That didn’t receive much attention— [thinking]

You were working for a president. They all received enormous attention, so that’s, kind of—[laughter]

Yes, I know, that was going to be sarcastic. They always—that was the thing.

Or put another way. You gave, I think, pretty conventional answers to those questions, “What are the greatest speeches?” Is there a hidden gem somewhere that’s, over time, going to rise in the list?

You know, this is my own bias. So many of the speeches that Ben and I worked on over the years, they were overseas. They were first and foremost for those audiences, and so they weren’t—even as we were mindful of any domestic blowback or repercussions, they were first and foremost for the people of those countries. And so if there’s a speech out there that maybe Americans don’t fully appreciate, I want to say it must be one of those, because those are the ones that tended not to get as much attention.

Here’s one, though, that I love, that most people—some people, when I say it, will remember. One that Ben worked on with the president, and I’m not sure exactly—I think because Cody was so swamped, and I was working on something else. But I remember in Dallas [Texas], there was a man who shot up a police station. This is right around the time there had been several police shootings of unarmed black men in America that had been all over the news, and then the man—I believe he was black—shot up a police station. And the president went and spoke in Dallas [July 12, 2016].

Cody writes about this in the book. I mean, there were chyrons on the news at that point asking, “Will there be a race war in the United States?” when you’ve gotten to this point where you’ve had so many unarmed African American men being shot by law enforcement and now someone shooting up law enforcement, seemingly a reprisal.

President Obama went in, and imagine what he had to do in that moment. He had to speak to the real, legitimate grievances of black Americans who feel that they are unjustly targeted. He had to deal with the real, legitimate grievances of law enforcement, who feel they don’t get the support and backing that they need. And he had to speak to both of those things all at once in one memorial service. I think it’s one of his greatest speeches, and I think that—I almost never hear anyone talk about it. Now, people in Dallas probably remember it, and when I talk about it, often people say, “Oh, I do, I remember that.”

I had that experience right now. And I certainly remember the drama of that event. There’s a parking lot and the police officers are being shot, and it goes on for a while.

Yes. And can you imagine the tightrope that he had to walk? That any president would have to walk, that Barack Obama had to walk. And he did it. I think both communities felt heard that day and recognized and realized that the pain that they felt is often shared by the other group in a different way. So I would say that one is definitely one that probably doesn’t make the top 10 when you ask people, but it ought to, I think, and maybe someday it will. I’m sure there are others, but that’s one that sticks out.

And let me do some more of the legacy kinds of questions.

I was going to say, ask Ben Rhodes about that speech if you haven’t already, because I think—

OK. No, we have not already.

I know that he—he was the foreign policy guy, but I think everybody was so busy, that was an example of, he had to step in. And it was just beautiful. Sorry.

No, go ahead.

Conventional ways we measure presidential success: He wins a second term.

First rule of a politician: Get elected, and stay elected.

That will stand. And then we ask about presidential approval. He has this odd pattern that may now be the new normal. It’s high on his arrival; there’s a lot of enthusiasm; it declines over time. It tracks a recession that was longer and deeper, more serious as it went along, but when it turns, when we come out, he doesn’t rise dramatically. His approval rating in the second term looks more like—it’s higher than Trump’s, but it looks more like his. It looks more like a flat line. You can get Democrats who say they like you, but you can’t get many from the other side. And that’s where we now are. And then, of course, there are scholars, historians: How do you rank presidents?

If you were in the market for presidential rankings, would you hold your Obama stocks, or would you buy or sell? Is he going to rise or fall in the decades ahead?

You probably know this better than I do, right, but we do tend to look at our former presidents through the lens of our current moments.

We do. We do.

Right? And so when we are going through a moment and we find that we would like our presidents to have certain qualities, the past presidents with those qualities seem to rise in our estimation. And I have to say, we’re going through a moment right now with a second Trump presidency where I bet—I mean, I haven’t looked at the historians’ rankings. But hey, if you like what America is going through right now, and you love Trump, you’re probably not thinking too highly of Barack Obama. But I think most historians probably take a more skeptical view of the moment we’re in, and I have to think that—my hope would be that he [Obama] continues to improve with time. I mean, I am not a neutral observer here. I dedicated eight years of my life to that project, so I’m probably the last person you want to ask, or any of us who worked with him.

One question I do get a lot that relates to this is, Did you agree with everything he did? Or, Did you think he was a success? Of course I thought he was a successful president. But what do you do when you disagree? Or looking back, what would you wish he had done differently? With every president, there are those things. The presidents themselves, when they’re being candid, will tell you there are things they wish they did differently.

But I think as far as a leader who made a genuine effort to try to bridge this seemingly now intractable partisan divide that you’re referring to, he tried. He made the effort, to a point where even members of his own party were frustrated with him. Arguing to him, “You don’t have genuine good faith actors on the other side. You’re treating the Republicans on the Hill as if it’s the late ’80s. This is not [Thomas P.] Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan. John Boehner does not have control of his caucus, and you keep dealing with him as if he can go back and present a rational, reasonable deal to his caucus, and they will approve it. They will not. There is nothing you can do to persuade them to support the Affordable Care Act. There’s nothing you can say that will persuade them to support—” the various initiatives that he had. He was the last one to give up on that.

I guess we can go on like this for a while, the way we’re going, but history shows us that countries that become that polarized, where every difference is seen as an existential threat to the survival of the republic, those countries don’t do so well. I hope that wherever he is ranked now, that that continues to rise.

And here’s another version of the same sort of thinking. [Harry S.] Truman leaves office choosing not to run again and not terribly popular. But over time, people look back and see policy monuments: Oh, that NATO thing worked out well, and the Marshall Plan that was controversial when it was proposed made a huge difference, et cetera.

Desegregating the armed forces by executive order.

Desegregating the military, yes. So what are Obama’s policy monuments? Getting us through the [Great] Recession without the worst of the consequences that were—we were close to that abyss. Certainly expanding access to health care, from a complicated and flawed health care system, but nevertheless increasing access. Getting out of the high levels of Middle East commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, or moving away from them. What else is on the list? And is it a list likely to be seen to be like Truman’s in the future?

I think another one is taking a leading role in getting the world to agree to deal with climate change through the Paris [Climate] Accords. That was one of the many test cases for his whole approach and philosophy of American foreign policy: You’re asking every country to give up something, so no one has incentive to do that, yet everyone collectively has incentive to deal with this problem. How do you do that? That story, the negotiations that occurred where he and Hillary Clinton, they’re literally bringing the leaders together and finding if there are secret meetings going on with other world leaders. I can’t remember the exact, where that was happening. But getting the world to that, that was a huge deal.

We’ll see how that holds up over time. I mean, if we’re in and out of it for the next—my fear is that it’s now become such a toxic thing on the Right that, I mean, are we going to be in a situation where every Democratic president rejoins Paris, redoes climate, and then every new Republican president removes? I mean, it’s just—as we’ve now done twice. So that’s there.

Again, by the same token, a deal that got Iran to forgo a nuclear weapon is another agreement that Trump pulled out of and now is maybe—now, how interesting. He’s looking at, Maybe we’ll negotiate with Iran over a nuclear deal. [sarcastically] Well, what a novel idea. Someone should try that someday and see how that works out.

And if we get to an Iranian weapon, or to an American–Israeli attack to prevent one, we’ll have two consequences far worse than the agreement Kerry negotiated.

Yes. Oh, yes, you’re probably never going to get back to the great—when you rip up any deal, we all know, you don’t get to go back to the deal you had. And I don’t know what the exact—it’s not a particular—

This is one of the big contradictions of Barack Obama and his presidency, right, is he does have an accomplished record. And yet when you travel around the country or when you travel around the world, and you ask people what they remember about Barack Obama, what they remember, for so many of them the answer is “Barack Obama.” They remember Barack Obama, who he was, and how he spoke, and the vision that he offered, and the direction that he pointed in. He’s said this publicly. Of all the initiatives he’s most proud of, the initiative he’s most proud of is all these youth initiatives around the world. Collectively, they have many different names, but they’re now continued on through the Obama Foundation.

I do work with them sometimes, where I do sessions with them. There are tens of thousands, if not more, of young people all over the world who, when I meet with these groups, they’ll tell me, “When he came to Indonesia, I was in the audience, and I heard that speech in Jakarta,” or, “I was at home with my family. I remember watching that speech, and I remember how I felt, and that’s why I decided to be a climate activist, or an advocate for justice.” Or somebody in India who watched his speech there, and remembered, and that’s what inspired them, and now they’ve started a nonprofit that serves young people, or what have you.

There are people, and they’re usually young, all over the world who have—they’re going to be building organizations and leading groups for generations to come. And there’s no one name for that. It’s not like Kennedy and the Peace Corps. But I think that his legacy will be that. It will be a million different people who heard him, were inspired by him, and decided to dedicate their lives to building the kind of world that he spoke about and that they believed in. Again, there’s no one name for all of these programs, but the Obama Foundation continues to do work with them. I just met with some of them the other day. And every single one of them can recall a specific speech that they remember hearing him give that helped inspire them to do the work that they do.

As a speechwriter, that’s incredibly gratifying. Sometimes these are speeches that most Americans have never heard of, but they [world youth] heard them, and they were there for them. That’s why he gave those speeches. We were writing it for them, in the hopes that they would carry this with them.

He gave a speech at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York one year, and it was a speech about—it was basically a human rights speech, but why we support the activists and the advocates around the world. It was in the United States, but it was broadcast around the world. A few months later, someone in the White House told me that they had met an Egyptian human rights activist who—they’ve been beaten, they’ve been jailed. And they keep a copy of Obama’s Clinton Global Initiative speech in their pocket that they carry around with them every day to remind them why they do the work that they do.

I couldn’t believe—why does an Egyptian human rights activist need validation or affirmation from anybody else? They know what they’re doing. They know why they’re doing it. But that the words that we worked on, the words that Barack Obama spoke on that day, so moved and touched this person that they actually printed it out and carry it around with them to remind them why they do what they do. To me, that’s a monument. That’s a legacy. There’s no word for that. There’s no name for that. There’s no program for that. But that’s just one person, and I’ve seen that over and over again. I think the legacy will be the people who actually—the people who outlast the demagogues.

Is there a book you’d like to have Obama write? All presidents have to write their memoirs when they leave, and they vary in quality. His first volume is very good. But is there something else? Is there a story you would like to have him tell? [Szuplat thinking] Jimmy Carter’s presidential memoir is really awful. It’s hard to get through and slog through. It has all the details, and it has all the policies.

You’re on record with this. We are recording this. [laughter]

But later on, he wrote really remarkable books about his early political career, about being a young boy on a rural farm, about a wide variety of subjects. He became a much better writer and, again, changed his reputation with the American people.

Right, and he had many decades to do it.

And he had many decades to do it, as does Obama.

That’s right. That’s a really interesting question. The second volume is coming, so there’s—he gets into it. I just generally—we’ve just had a change in administrations. There’s going to be a whole other batch of books coming out. I’m really not interested in memoirs that just, you know, “why I was right,” you know? Because we know you think you were right.

I think any time a leader can really just be candid and honest in a way that doesn’t necessarily make them look great—because the reality is, these are hard calls all the time. I guess I would like for Obama, but anybody, Four decisions I wish I made differently. I don’t mean specifically Obama. He could do it. Anyone could do it. But typically what you get is, yes, there’s reflection—this is not about Obama. This is about all former leaders. When the memoir comes out, there’s this gauze of self-reflection. They ask themselves hard questions, they grapple with it, and they end up exactly, “If I had to do it all over again, I’d do it exactly the same way.” So what was the point of that? All you’ve done is shown how you thought you were right all along.

But I know we know—I think a lot of people who worked for Barack Obama struggled with the pace at which he came around to support marriage equality. A lot of aides have spoken to that. You had Vice President Biden coming out first. I’d like to really learn even more about that moment, that process.

But yes, I think, generally speaking, presidents have to make thousands of decisions. All of us make decisions in our lives that we wish we had done—I wonder what decisions would be made differently, because I don’t know. You know?

Speaking of Biden, as you did a couple of times, thoughts about your observations of him from inside the White House? I doubt that you had a lot of personal interactions with him, or maybe I’m wrong, because we did hear that he would walk around and talk to people. But anyway, just from your observation in those eight years, what were your perspectives about him?

People always ask, To what extent do a president’s and vice president’s speechwriting teams work together? I know in our case, we were friends with and colleagues with his speechwriters. I think Favreau and Ben and Cody dealt with him one-on-one in a way that I did not. In all those eight years, I met Joe Biden once. It just happened to be because it was Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, and we were crossing West Executive Avenue, and he was out there, so all the kids ran up, and that was it. Oh, I guess a second time, we went to his Christmas party one time. But I never worked with him directly, so to be there eight years and only meet him twice, it just wasn’t—I guess our lanes didn’t cross.

But he has a very different style of public speaking, a different kind of communicator than President Obama. Again, every speaker has strengths and vulnerabilities. I think in some cases, they were the perfect match for each other. Right? If anything, to one of your questions earlier, were there times where you wish President Obama had shown more anger, well, there were probably times when—no one’s ever accused Joe Biden of not showing his “Irish fire” when he wants to. So they could, at times, whereas Barack Obama is going to argue out half a dozen points like a constitutional lawyer, Biden is not going to do that. But yes, I didn’t have much interaction with him.

I have one more question about the end of the administration, and then one more current one. The question about the end. You’re very open about the president speaking to the group of people the day after the 2016 election, about Hillary’s loss and Trump’s victory. That day of the zigging and the zagging, “Don’t worry. Keep hope alive. History zigs and zags. The United States zigs and zags.” And then preparing the Athens [Greece] speech on democracy.

If you were working with him today on a speech in Athens about democracy, knowing what has happened in these intervening eight to nine years—I guess one of my questions is, was he too hopeful at that speech, too hopeful the day after the election? How do you think you all would write the Athens democracy speech today?

When I wrote the book, I was trying to—those days after the 2016 election leading up to his final days, I wrote that because that was one of the few times in all the years I worked for him where I felt like he wasn’t speaking for me, right? I was angry, and I was hurt, and I was scared, like so many people were. And so often, he had always—again, we talked about it—been channeling, in my case, what I felt and what I wanted to hear from my leader. What I wanted to hear was, like, some fight. But of course, he’s the president of the United States. It’s his responsibility to lead a peaceful transition, and that’s what he was going to do. So I think, in retrospect, I was probably applying my own angst to that situation.

But he was recognizing that he didn’t want us to give in to anger and bitterness. He knew we had to go back out there and keep up the work of democracy. It’s one of those things where, intellectually, I understood what he was doing. Emotionally, [laughs] I was furious. Not at him, but furious at the situation. And he couldn’t, he just couldn’t, speak to that because of his role, and he shouldn’t have.

Yes, if you had to give a speech now—and he did. Barack Obama gave a speech about democracy. We’re here in March 2025. I believe he gave a speech in Chicago about democracy in late 2004.

Late 2024?

I’m so sorry, 2024, yes. So, I believe, post-election. Anyway, late 2024, at some point either just before or after the election, he gave a speech on democracy [December 5, 2024].

Do you still help him, by the way? Do you still work with him?

I do not work directly with him. Every so often, maybe I hear—they say, “Hey, take a look at something. What do you think?” But very rarely.

I think if I had to help him with a democracy speech, or any leader give a speech about democracy, I think obviously the message, more so than ever, is that there is no such thing as inevitable progress. There are going to be not just steps back but giant leaps backward at times. And more so than ever, democracy is not simply elections. Democracy is not something that you participate in once every two or four years to go vote. It’s being part of organizations that work to uphold the rule of law. It’s being part of organizations that serve vulnerable communities. It’s being a journalist. It’s being a lawyer, being a judge, upholding the rule of law.

I think expanding the definition of what it means to be involved in democracy, as we’re seeing now—I’ve never been so grateful to lawyers in my life. As a Democrat, as someone who values the rule of law, my experience with lawyers mainly is fighting with lawyers in government to try to make the speeches more clear, and they’re trying to gunk it up with a lot of legalese. But I’ve never been so grateful.

So I think laying out, for especially young people, that if you care about democracy, then you need to care about the rule of law. If you care about democracy, then you need to be—if you want to go into business, you need to be a business leader who pays your workers enough where they can live so they don’t grow bitter, or that you’re not a CEO [chief executive officer] who takes home a paycheck that’s 500 times more than what your worker makes. There are all sorts of different ways that you can help create an equitable society where you don’t have these frustrations that boil up to the point where people find a demagogue attractive.

I think Obama has done this. He’s given some tough love to the Left in recent years, and I’m not sure that it’s always been well received.

Particularly to black Left men.

Yes, yes. I was thinking more in the sense of the tendency among some on the Left to condescend to, quote, unquote, “flyover country” [Midwest], or to be telling people, “Why are you voting against your interests, your economic interests?” which is profoundly offensive to anyone. As diverse a party as we are, we’re not inclusive of whole segments of the country. People of faith often see liberals as skeptical if not outright hostile to their faith—well, that’s a problem in a country that’s as religious as ours—or rural communities, or anyone who doesn’t have a college degree. The way we even talk about—

President Obama has spoken about this, but I think that all goes to—you hear folks on the Left so often say, “There are folks—” We talk about a “diploma divide” in this country. Well, there are folks with a college education, and those who have, quote, unquote, “only” a high school education, or quote, “don’t have a college education.” We all believe in higher education here, but when you’re defining people by something they lack, that’s not a particularly kind way to speak to someone. My parents don’t have college degrees. My father has run his own business for 40 years. He’s raised a family, provided for a family, put three kids through college. I would never—he has a lot of skills that I don’t have. He has a lot of skills that most college graduates don’t have. But we don’t go around—

And he may make more money.

He may make more money. But we don’t go around describing people with a college degree as “people without hard skills.” Imagine that? Being told—I’m sorry, we’re getting off—but imagine that, being told year after year, decade after decade, that you are a group of “people without,” and the future belongs to people with a diploma. People aren’t stupid. They know when they’re being condescended to, and they know when they’re being talked down to. So yes, sure, the Republicans are egging them on with all sorts of things, but we’ve sort of dug our own grave on this one.

And it bothers me—to end where we started—having come from a background that I did, and traditionally Democrats were the party of the working class, to see what’s happened is just deeply upsetting. And so I think that’s been part of what Obama’s democracy message has been in recent years, which is, you can’t expect a group of people to support you if they feel that you just fundamentally don’t value them for who they are.

Do you think he still sees the arc of the moral universe in the way he did as bending towards justice? The reason I ask that is, I think I was naive coming through the ’60s and ’70s to believe that and to see it like the arch in St. Louis [Gateway Arch], that if you take the first part of it in the ground, and then you bent it and it went towards the moral universe, and then it went down, then I viewed it as being in concrete at the other end.

Right. A bend implies that it’s not always going up. [laughter]

Well, yes. But I thought, OK, it bent towards good, and then whether it just went up and got stuck in concrete or came down and we stuck it in concrete—but I feel as though some people have grabbed hold of it. And maybe this is the zigzag. Maybe it turns out that the arc gets bent and zigs and zags. But it feels to me as though it’s being bent back in the other direction towards, in some ways, immorality and injustice. How do you see it, and how do you think the president sees it, the former president?

Well, I have no idea how he sees it now. I haven’t spoken to him in a while, certainly not since the election, so I would have no idea. But it’s interesting, as you say that. Suppose they brought me back today to help with a speech for a few weeks, and he said, “We’re going to use the quote, ‘The moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.’” And then you’re sort of like, OK, what comes next? As it is, it almost implies an inevitability: “The moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.” You almost want to annotate it. It can bend towards justice, or it bends towards justice over time, or only if the people bend it. I think he spoke to this even as president. It doesn’t bend on its own.

No, and the rule of law has to keep going, right?

Yes. It’s pulled by people, and there are people who will bend it in a different direction. It’s interesting, 77 million people in this country voted for Donald Trump. They have a version of justice that is different than my version of justice. And I think we probably all have loved ones who voted for someone we profoundly disagree with. I wouldn’t term them racist. But they have a profoundly different perspective on this country, and what it should be, and who it should be for, and who we should be protecting. So yes, I think it would be interesting. That would be an interesting thought exercise, to say, OK, where are we? Where are we on that quote these days?

Maybe your students could wrangle with it.

Yes. But I think the way it’s always been told, there’s almost an inevitability to it. That if you work hard and push, it will bend. I think the asterisk now, probably more so than ever. But I don’t know. That quote was uttered during the civil rights movement, but that was a pretty rough time for black Americans in slavery. We went through slavery, then Reconstruction, so there was hope, and there was despair. Maybe there’s the zigzag again.

In a way, that was your ultimate aspirational statement for King to have made in the midst of what was going on.

Right, in that time, in the midst of it. There was—yes, it’s a long-term hope. I think one of the criticisms—it’s not even of Obama, but it’s of Americans and “hopes for a postracial America.” Barack Obama never talked about a postracial America. That was something that was pushed on him by hopeful and naive people who probably didn’t know history.

And so likewise, this quote would—there’s nothing inevitable about this. But you look through dark times. Pick the darkest moments in history, and they can be awful, but we lived through a civil war, and a lot of people got hurt and died, and it ended. And slavery was an abomination for centuries that killed and maimed generations, and it ended. We shouldn’t have to go through these in the first place.

But I think he’d be hopeful. I can’t imagine a Barack Obama speech that doesn’t end in hope. I think that’s central to who he is, central to who he is as a person, his presidency. And I think he would probably, again, talk about young people, because they’re going to be here long after us, and they have to make this work. I think that’s why it’s so interesting and troubling to see so many young people, particularly young men, gravitating towards Trump, or Trumpism, or whatever you want to call it, because that’s the final—that’s Barack Obama’s last argument.

If you listen closely, that’s what gives him hope: young people, and all these young people that I’ve been interacting with through the Obama Foundation who are out there building these organizations. Of course, again, that’s a long-term proposition. That’s a 50-, 100-year proposition. But that’s always been—that’s how he ended the Athens speech, at a time when people were not feeling very hopeful. I think he would—I don’t think he would temper his hope, but I think he would probably be even more candid about how hard this is going to be, and that it’s not a phase. It’s not this—

Everyone said, the joke is, right, the temperature will break?

The fever will break.

The fever will break. [laughs] Well, we’re going on nine years now. This is quite a fever. But I mean, going back, I can’t imagine a Barack Obama speech that doesn’t end with hope.

Like Bill Clinton. He still believes in “a place called hope.”

“A place called hope,” right.

Speaking of speeches.

Can I ask another “circling back” question?

Yes, sure.

If I were a young Democrat and I wanted to give the breakthrough speech at the next convention, what would my themes be? What’s a message that the nation and the Democratic Party need to hear?

Yes. God, if I could answer that so quickly. I do think that the next Democratic nominee—again, given where the country is, given where the party is—has to kind of deliver some tough love to a party that—I was at the convention this summer. It’s funny because I just had a guest speaker in my class the other day who helped write a lot of those speeches. In the room, it’s the Democratic Party. It’s the base. We love—we are proud of, and rightly so—how diverse we are, and how inclusive we are, and how we are a place to give representation to so many people. When a speaker comes up and celebrates those things, it will blow the roof off the place.

I remember sitting there at one point, several hours in one night, texting a friend watching at home. I said, “I’m feeling the love, but maybe at some point tonight, they’ll talk about the price of eggs and the price of groceries because,” I’m like, “the American people are screaming at us, telling us that they can’t afford things, and we’re in our moment of self—” So we make the mistake sometimes, I think, of Democratic leaders speaking first and foremost to fellow Democrats and fellow liberals, forgetting that a lot of the country doesn’t see the world the way we do.

I think a successful nominee is probably going to have to give it a little bit. And it doesn’t mean repudiating, but it’s like, I consider myself—I don’t know if this is made up or what—a pragmatic progressive. I know the kind of country I’d like to live in, a robust safety net more akin to the Scandinavian countries. Are we going to get there right away? No. And so we make pragmatic, sometimes painful compromises, like the Affordable Care Act, which preserves an industry-based insurance system. We would never create that. We’re building off of where we’re at.

I think someone who is pragmatic and really, I think, speaks—I’m less interested in a nominee or someone who speaks to me and to my fellow liberals and Democrats and more someone who can show me that they know how to speak to people who are still persuadable. I’m most interested in Democratic governors who win in states that Trump wins in because they show how to do it. They’re not overtly partisan. They’re not extreme Left or Right. They’re just focused on making people’s lives better, everybody’s lives better. They’re not speaking to just one group of Americans. They’re speaking to all Americans. I would like to hear that.

I think there are some governors out there who talk like that, who have that message. Whether or not they can win a Democratic primary? But we’re going to be hearing more of them, I think, in the next few months and, of course, the next two years.

When you lose, it’s not like you did everything wrong. But obviously, the Democratic brand right now is in the toilet, to use an academic term. I know how I see the Democratic party and what Democrats ought to be. I recognize that that is not how most Americans—the first time I saw a poll that said the Americans view the Democratic Party as more extreme than the Republican, I actually had to read it twice. I’m like, This is post-January 6th [2021, U.S. Capitol attack]. You’re telling me that a president who led a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol to thwart an election, that we [Democrats] are actually perceived as more extreme.

That ought to be a wake-up call to every Democrat in this country that whatever we think we are, and whatever we think we’re saying to people, that is not what they’re hearing. What they’re hearing is, you know, You dumb people with your guns and your religion and without your college degrees, you’re the past, and we don’t have a place for you here. OK, that I get, because that does sound pretty extreme. That sounds pretty elitist, and it sounds pretty extreme.

I think people who are willing to speak some really tough messages to liberals and Democrats, because we’re not—I mean, look, folks were willing to sign on to Donald Trump because they think he speaks for them, because they don’t hear anyone else speaking for them. I don’t know. That’s what I would—it’s still a message of hope, but we’ll see. I’m not sure a lot of—

I mean, again, I consider myself progressive, but I’m not a progressive activist. And I’m not sure that a lot of folks are ready to hear that, especially in this moment where there’s tremendous pressure on the party and the leaders to fight and oppose Trump on all fronts all the time. The idea that we actually have some self-reflection to do—you know? That’s a hard thing to do when you’re in a fight. You feel like you’re in a knife fight, and someone tells you, “Well, you need to rethink who you are or how you talk to voters. They’re not really interested in hearing that.” So it’s going to be a—I’ll be interested to see if anyone can do it. I think there are a few people that will try. We’re already seeing a few folks who are.

Gavin Newsome is obviously out there. Not the example of the Democratic governor in a red state. My fellow Kentuckian Andy Beshear—so can I tell him to meet with you? [laughs]

Yes. You know him well?

Not well, but—

I think what he’s doing, and in Colorado, right, [Jared] Polis, and in Arizona. You know, [Elissa] Slotkin as a [Michigan] senator. Democrats who know how to speak because that’s their—

That’s their bread and butter. And certainly in Kentucky, it’s knowing how to speak to godly people and people who have their guns, and hunt, and fish. Andy Beshear is one of those people. I think if he had you as the speechwriter, my only concern is the sparkle, the za-za-zoo, the sparkle, the charisma. He needs some help on that. I don’t know if that can be learned. I guess that’s a question we could—we’ve asked a lot about that, but can that be learned? Can you gain sparkle? Effervescence, magic?

You know—

Well, we said—yes, we did say Barack Obama had to learn, and John Kennedy had to learn.

But I think to learn, they had to improve their speaking, their public speaking skills, so I think that’s one thing. You’re describing this sort of intangible “it.” They’ve just got “it.” I think that’s different, right? I think we kind of know the people in our high school classes who were like that, in college, or people we work with.

And some of those people, including Obama and [John F.] Kennedy, you can look at their—actually, baby pictures of John Kennedy and toddler pictures of Barack Obama, and they exude—and Kennedy’s headmasters and teachers at prep school would say, “His smile would charm the birds out of the trees.” So I think there is something that’s hardwired and inborn.

There might be. One of the things we always try to do, or I always try to do, when writing a speech for the president, assuming that it was the right mood—not for a tragedy or a disaster—but when he was giving a speech, I would often try to think, What’s the opening line that will get him to smile? Because if he smiles, the audience will smile. If he chuckles, they’ll chuckle, and then he’ll chuckle, and they’ve got this moment together. So I would sit there and, like, How do we get him to smile? What can we do? Let him have some fun. Let him be—because he’s got a great smile. And yes, I think maybe that’s one of the metrics on the charisma scale, is smile.

Because it is. There is something about smiling—

Oh, yes. They’ve done all sorts of research.

—and eyes. People have eyes—

If it’s a real smile, right? They’ve done studies that if it’s perceived as a fake smile, then you’re seen as suspicious—

And untrustworthy and illegitimate.

—and untrustworthy in different cultures. But yes.

Gretchen Whitmer. Thoughts?

Maybe.

Yes, yes. So, my last question is, if you feel comfortable, can you compare and contrast President Obama’s speech and Mrs. Obama’s, First Lady Obama’s, speech at the most recent convention? Were you there in person for those?

I was there for those. But then, I watched them for eight years, and they have a very—so like I said, some of our colleagues wrote for her. A great Barack Obama speech is very different than a great Michelle Obama speech. They can both be great, and they’re both totally different. The big one being that a President Barack Obama is a partisan figure, a political figure, leader of a party, a Democrat serving as president who campaigns for Democrats, whereas the First Lady—and Sarah Hurwitz has talked a lot about this, too—the First Lady’s influence and power does not flow directly from her party. Right? It flows from her and who she is in whatever space she can carve out for herself.

So a president has both power and influence. Primarily, a First Lady has some power to move things but also mostly influence, which is why I’ve always been—there’s no reason to think that—the First Lady has said she will never run for office of any kind, no matter how times people ask her. And she is widely beloved. I guarantee you, if she were ever to declare for any office, her popularity would take a hit because now, all of a sudden, she’s going to have to take even sharper positions on all sorts of issues that, until now, she has not. But her politics are widely known.

And I think, again, Barack Obama is going to argue a case, which—they’re both lawyers.

Harvard lawyers.

Yes. They’re both lawyers. He worked for her at the beginning. He was the young guy. She argues more—and again, this is not—I don’t want it to sound sexist in any way, but I think this is just a true, objective evaluation of her communication style, and her speechwriters have said this. She speaks from the heart in a way that sometimes even Barack Obama does not. If she does not feel something, if she does not truly feel what she’s saying, she won’t say it.

Time and again, she went back to her speechwriters to have them do it again because she didn’t feel that she was speaking to people in ways that would resonate with their actual lives. She didn’t like speaking in abstractions. She liked having a conversation with people. That’s what she does at the convention. Right? She’s going to just talk to you as a person, as a mom who cares about her kids, who cares about her kids’ future, and the kind of America she wants her children to grow up in.

What I just described is not how Barack Obama gives a speech. He does not, “I’m here tonight as a father who wants my two daughters to grow up”—that’s just not how he approaches it. His way in is totally—but that’s how she does it. So they can both be phenomenal, but in profoundly different ways. I think, as he said himself, “Who wants to follow Michelle Obama?”

And what a pair. What a pair they make on the stage and in the White House.

Yes, it was—there were a few times—

And on the world stage.

There were a few times where, because so much of her work was around veterans, there were a few occasions where I worked on—they appeared together.

Oh, the [National Convention for] Disabled American Veterans, the Orlando meeting?

Yes, one of the veterans conventions, right, where she spoke and he spoke. There was another, Joining Forces veterans event, where he spoke and she spoke, and we worked on both. I helped her with one or two speeches early on, but I’m not sure I was a good fit. I just didn’t—she’s very demanding. She’s a very exacting, very precise, very effective communicator. But just, again—so same issue, back to back, veterans, military families, and you get two profoundly different speeches.

One, of course, is a sitting president who is leading a government designed to protect and serve veterans. She is not, but she’s using her influence and talking about her work with military families. So I think just, yes, it’s a great example of how you can both be good—you can be good but in profoundly different ways, and they’ve each found their way.

You can be great and good and very different. Bob?

If Obama agreed to an oral history interview, and you were sitting on our side of the table, what’s the question you would most want to ask him?

Oh, I love that. Good job, Bob.

Well, you know, he’s writing a memoir. I think it’s the same question I’d ask any leader: You served for many years. We all know your accomplishments and the decisions you’re most proud of. If you had to do it all over again, what are a few decisions you’d make differently? Actual decisions you’d make differently? I'm sure every president must have them.

He was asked, “What do you think the worst mistake of your presidency was?” And he said, “Failure to plan for the aftermath of Libya.” Launching a military campaign without a proper plan in place to secure the peace afterwards. That’s a valid critique. That’s one. But what others? We all have them in our lives.

Syria? Do you think the red line in Syria—do you think that was something? That he regrets drawing the line, but then people were criticizing him for not, seemingly in their minds, sticking with it?

Yes. I mean, I have no idea what he regrets or doesn’t regret. I read the memoir the way you read the memoir. I know that that was something that I struggled—Syria, generally—Ben has written about this. [Samantha J.] Sam Power has written about this. I wrote a lot of those speeches as well, and I struggled with it too.

One of the speeches I worked on was when he went to the Holocaust Museum [Washington, D.C.] during the early days of Syria, and Elie Wiesel is right there. And we all knew that he had ripped into Bill Clinton over Bosnia at a similar event years earlier. The question in our minds was, Is he going to rip into Barack Obama about Syria? We were using this occasion to announce a new policy on how to prevent mass atrocities. And so to have to grapple with acknowledging that we can’t stop every war, and we can’t save every life, that was a really hard thing to work on. A lot of us struggled with that policy.

I struggled with Ukraine. I mean, not just, probably, as a Ukrainian American. But yes, I mean, at the end of the day, you realize, Well, no one elected me to do anything. People resign from government all the time if they think that they’ve crossed some sort of line that you just can’t abide by, and people leave. I never felt that because I felt that my values were aligned with the person I was working for. I might disagree with his particular decision on a particular policy, but I—even as I struggled with our Syria policy, I understood intellectually how he got there. Even as I wished we were doing more to support Ukraine, I understood his logic pattern that got him to the policy that he did. I still didn’t like the final call. I think I might have made a different call. But again, no one elected me president.

And there were splits, as you know, within the White House itself on Syria and Egypt, and generational changes and differences on how to move forward on that.

Yes. And I don’t know. Being a younger person, I tended to come on the side of what I’ve just described. But again, you know, for me, they weren’t deal-breakers because we’re doing 100 things and I think I’m agreeing with 98 of them. The 2 that I don’t agree with really hurt, but we’re doing 98 great other things, and I want to keep being part of that. So you keep on.

And as you say, basic values you shared.

Yes, a basic worldview, a basic set of values. I respected the way he thought through problems, so I always felt that he had the right motivations and the right goals. I was more focused on that. Now, if it starts to be like, Well, there’s 30 things I don’t agree with out of 100, or there’s 50, now then that’s different. If you find yourself disagreeing more than you agree, you probably shouldn’t be there. You’ve picked the wrong boss. But that’s up to you to—

I think there were far more occasions where I was so grateful to be a part of that work. I think that the world was—was the country stronger and safer and more prosperous when we were done? Was the world a more secure place? Yes, I think it was. Did we treat people with human dignity? I think we did. So yes, I know people love to nitpick a thousand little things, and you can write whole books about screwups and mistakes and things that would have been done differently. But I think for eight years, I had the honor of being a part of someone who was trying to move the country and the world into a direction that I agreed with. There’s a lot on the ledger to be proud of, and there are some things we would have done differently, but man, given what we’re living through now— [laughs]

Hopefully credits rather than debits.

There we go. I’ll take the credits.

And I think that’s an elegant and eloquent way to end.

Right. And then for any young people or students who are ever reading this, you’re not always going to agree with everything that your boss does that you personally work for. And yes, if you get to the point where there are some things that are so important to you and you cannot support them, you need to leave. You need to leave because that person deserves someone who will support them, and you deserve to be in a place where you feel like you’re being true to yourself. You need to leave. And we see that all the time. We’ve seen that in recent years too. That’s not a bad thing. That’s actually a good thing, what you stand for and what you believe.

And never—never, ever once, in eight years—did something occur that made me question who he was or what motivated him, that made me question whether I should be there. Because again, I think he led—I was in sync with him, and I agreed with what he was trying to do, even if I didn’t always agree with every single thing. So if that’s one lesson, then yes. If your values are out of sync with the person you’re working for, you actually have an obligation to leave. And I was lucky for eight years to be able to work with someone who I thought was doing the right thing.

Well, we are glad that you did, and we’re glad that you took all of today in a busy life to talk to us.

Sure. I hope it’s useful.

And we always thank folks for doing this and for their public service, because we look at this as an extension of your public service of eight-plus years, of all the other work that you did before you got to the White House. We’re grateful for that.

I was thinking that on the way down last night, that, yes, this is—you have to do this because, first of all, the taxpayers paid for you to do your job. And you owe a readout at the end of what were you doing all those years and some reflections on it. So hopefully it’s useful.

Very useful. We can guarantee you that.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]