find it where you listen to podcasts. next, on the presidency. three former white house speechwriters on the process of turning a president's policies and politics into a speech. this session was from the presidential ideas festival, hosted by university of virginia's miller center. >> we appreciate you coming in. there are a few other panels going at the same time. thanks for picking this one. we'll try to make it worth your while. those of you maybe in the wrong place, this is the one on speechwriting. we're lucky. i am tyler connor, former speech writer for president obama. we are lucky to have sarah perry, and john mcconnell who worked for president george w. bush. jeff hessel was supposed to be here, had a conflict. we will tell as many of his stories as we can remember. we heard a few of them.

my hope is to use about half of the time to talk about questions i've got for these two, then spend the other half taking questions that you have. if there's one thing i hope you take from this whole session, it is that being a presidential speechwriter is exactly what you would think it would be on "the west wing." that's it. i'm kidding, it is much more like veep. since this is the presidential ideas festival, i will start with a question about the relationship between ideas and speeches. sometimes what starts off as an idea ends up in a speech, sometimes the speechwriting process starts before you have the idea. just curious, sarah, what do you think, what would you share about that process, how an idea becomes a speech. >> i think in a weird way as speechwriters, we are not coming up with the ideas. there are much smarter people in the building that are developing those ideas. but in a way i think that these

ideas kind of -- they don't get crystallized until they're litigated on the page. so a lot of speech writing ends up being a process job, you're managing the various interests of different policy staffs who all want, have different equity and interests, and have different ideas, and you help shape how you explain the message, and in that process a lot of deegtcisions can be made during the process. you're not making the decisions but they're on the page. in our white house, with president obama, a speech may get assigned to us, a speech on say a new trade policy. first thing we would do is go talk to the foenlks involved in that to get their input on what needed to be said. from there, to the drafting process. i think the process itself often helped crystallize what the idea was going to be. >> working for george w. bush

was a unique experience in the sense that he had, when i went to work for him, he was governor of texas. he had gotten elected to that position on a on a reform agenda, four things he wanted to do for the state of texas. it was a policy-driven campaign. and when i joined the bush operation, he was full fledged presidential candidate, and that was also a campaign on issues. so, it was a very disciplined process with him. you had your policy team, the speechwriting team would be given the policy. it was our job to turn it into a nice, presentable, persuadable speech, but it was a very, very good policy operation. and when the president got up to give a speech on whatever it was he was proposing, it represented what he really wanted to say about it, and it also represented a very disciplined

process that had been under way for some weeks or months prior to the event itself. it's also the case that working with george w. bush, we found ourselves in, in many ways, a crisis presidency. things kept happening. and of course, the ultimate was the 9/11 experience. and the monday after 9/11, the president made the decision that he was going to address the joint session of congress, or more precisely, he was probably going to address the joint session of congress, but he wanted to see a speech draft before he made his final decision. and so, it was our job -- my colleagues, mike gerse and matthew scully and i, it was our job to do a speech for the president that monday. and he asked that he be given the entire speech that day, and the assignment came that morning. and as much as we protested, it was made clear to us that we had to get it done.

we got to work. it wasn't as if we were lacking for subject matter or material. we knew exactly what we needed to write about, but we did need some policy direction, which we received. mike gerson talked to condie rice that morning. then at about 1:00 that afternoon, we got called over to the oval office to see the president. we had seen him quite a bit since the attacks the previous tuesday, but we hadn't seen him since we had gotten this assignment, obviously, so we were brought in, and he asked how the drafting was going. and i'm sure mike speaking for the group, said it's going fine, mr. president, but we're not quite there. and he looked at us, and he said, "americans have questions." they want to know who attacked our country. they want to know why they hate us. they want to know what's expected of us now. and they want to know if we're at war, how we're going to fight and win the war. and from there, we had a

structure for the speech itself. and if you go back and look at that speech to congress the following thursday, the president went through those questions and -- and i've always thought, because he gave us that basic construct at the beginning, we were able to finish the draft that day. we didn't have a conclusion ready. he allowed us to move that over into tuesday. >> and sir, can you talk about how president obama would kind of give you the framework for a speech like that? because he's a lawyer. i remember he would always give you like point 1, 1a, 1b. >> literally, 1a, 1b. so what's interesting about president obama that he, himself, is a writer, and if he had time would write the speeches better than we would himself. but the commander in chief doesn't have time to write speeches. so a lot of times what would happen is you would go in the oval with him and he would just start riffing and then maybe seven minutes in, he would say,

okay, okay, so, here's what i'm thinking. one. and then he would, you know, give you sort of your opening. you know, one. two, give you, you know, the next paragraph. 1a. go back, give you that. then he would sort of walk you back through the outline. and it was so irritating as a writer because you had been sitting in your office trying to come up with a structure for hours and you just spend ten minutes with him and he's got the whole thing down. it was both inspiring and incredibly annoying. he was really good at this. and what was also interesting is i think one of the challenges of being a president, or really any elected leader -- i worked in the senate for a senator for years and saw the same dynamic, which is that you're going from very different event to very different event in the course of a very busy day. so, he might be talking, having a meeting with me about the national prayer breakfast speech, but right before then, he was in the situation room

talking about china with people who are way more important than i am. and then after that, he's going to some ceremony with the girl scouts. i mean, the day is so fragmented, and your mind has to sort of very quickly shift. and for a whole host of reasons, president obama, as sort of a lawyerly writer, but also somebody who's just, like president bush, extremely disciplined, was able to just kind of shift. so, i remember we were working on the remarks for when pope francis came to visit the united states. and because the pope is the head of a state, you know, the holy see, the vatican, we did a proper state arrival. and it was a very early-morning speech. they do these state arrivals on the south lawn, you know, starting at 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning, so it's quite early. and so, i had been working on this speech and had handed in a draft a couple of days earlier. and in our white house, the process was that the draft would get -- you know, we would write the draft and then the chief speechwriter would edit it, and then it would go around the

building to many people for their input and edits, and this included lawyers and fact-checkers. our white house had fact-checkers. [ laughter ] >> so did john's. >> so did john's. >> good ones. >> we had good ones. and policy people. and they would, you know, offer their input, which we would then incorporate. and then eventually, the draft would go to the president. you know, we had probably spoken to him beforehand about the speech, but then it would go through this process and go back to him. and so, you know, i'd send it in to him a couple nights earlier, and i got it back and only one word was crossed out. and i thought, this can't be right, you know. the president loved -- he loved pope francis. he felt really strongly and was excited about this pope, this arrival. i just couldn't imagine that he had no edited. and of course, i get a call from the president's secretary the morning before the speech, and she says, he wasn't done editing, he wants you up here. so, i go up to the oval, and he's sitting behind the desk. and in his very neat

handwriting, making edits. and he says, "come on in." i do a really bad obama impression. and he says, yeah, i wasn't quite done. i really want to boil out this section where we talk about pope francis' emphasis on the least of these, on those who are most in need. that really ties to my own faith and i want to focus on that. and it wasn't supposed to be a long speech, which he knew, but he wanted to blow that out a little bit. so, he says go work on this and send me a draft and i'll look at it over lunch. i go back to my office, work on it, send it back to him. i get another call around lunchtime and i'm summoned back. so i go into the oval, and i don't see him. and his secretary says, no, he's having lunch in his private dining room. go back there. and i had never been back there, so i'm sort of both terrified and trying to take in everything that's on the walls. >> yeah. >> as i make this, you know, two-second walk to the private dining room. and he's in there. and you know, eating a plate of

carrots or something. and you know, he's made his edits and he wants me to read them and make sure i understand what he's doing. and i see that he's kind of blown out that section a little more and added a little piece about refugees. and you know, later on, i learned that he had actually been in a meeting related to refuge refugees. and you could sort of see the evolution of his thinking. but you know, he was going to do something else right after that, and he said, go make these edits and send me back a draft and i'm going to go meet the pope at andrews later, but you know, i'll take a look at it tonight. so, i sent it back. and at the end of the night, maybe around 8:00 p.m., i went up to get his edits and he had a few more. but what was so interesting about that day was just to watch the evolution of his thinking, where he, even though there was so much else going on, this is what, you know, any president has, he was able to in those few minutes he had to sort of really focus in on the speech and give it the thinking he needed. not that it wasn't influenced by what was going on throughout the

day -- it was -- but just the ability of a person in that office to sort of continually give something its focus and tend to it, even though there's all this other stuff going on. >> that's one of the value adds that speechwriting brings to a president. he's got so much going on. give him something to react to. give him something he can look at. president bush, he wasn't really a writer, but he was a real serious editor. >> right. >> very, very confident editor. and he had this very, very logical mind. he could read -- you've heard me tell this story -- he could read an eight-page speech draft, throw it down on his desk, look at the ceiling and recite to you the outline of the speech. i'm not capable of doing that, but he could internalize it. and he called me one morning real early, and he was going to give a speech across town. and it was one of these speeches where you had to cover two things that were not related.

and so, you had to in the middle of the speech, connect the two. and he was going through his final read-through before being taken over to the hilton or wherever, and he said, "what's this on page three, the middle graph?" and it was, you know, 6:30 in the morning or something, and i said, well, it's in the nature of a transition, mr. president. and he says, it's just words, isn't it? and i said, "yes, sir." he said, "take it out." he wanted direct, clear. and he could feel in the way sorensen used to describe john f. kennedy, he could feel the momentum of the words. and if he didn't feel it while reading the speech, he saw a problem. >> interesting. >> but give him something to react to. i was, the morning of 9/11, i was sitting with vice president cheney. and the reason i was with him was that he had a speech coming up that friday. and the arrangement we always had was, i'm not going to go in

and saturday, you have a speech on friday, what are you going to say? i'm going to say, you have a speech on friday, here's what i recommend. here's something. and then you can get the gears turning and something to react to. because they have so many other things going on. oh, i've got to give a foreign policy speech and -- >> right. >> -- in chicago. no, deans that to them. give them something. >> yeah. go ahead. >> no, go ahead. >> i was going to say, that sounds really familiar to me because i had to write a speech that president obama gave. it was a commencement address at morehouse college, which is an historically black college in atlanta. and i remember walking to the oval office and my boss says, kyle has some words for you to say to the morehouse crowds. and there's a picture at the time where i'm telling him what to say. he's looking at me as the first black president, like i'm going to let you finish, then i'm going to tell you what you should say. so, that's very familiar. and then, you probably remember this, too, but about the editing. the more edits you got from president obama, the better. >> the better it got, always. >> if he spent time at night

writing it out on a yellow legal pad about your draft next to it, that was great because it meant he was completely engaged. if he had a bunp of edits on the top, that was fine. the note on the top that said, "please come see me" meant you're starting over. >> it's bad. but it's true, when you always want the person you're working with to be engaged with the draft. i was also going to respond to something john said, which is really important. you know, president bush was looking for that momentum in his speech, and here i can represent our colleague who's missing, jeff, who i worked with for many years at west wing writers. and one of the things he taught me is that a speech ought to have a sense of inevitability about it. so you're building an argument through a speech. there's momentum so that by the time you get to the end, the audience says, obviously, this is where we are, you know. we get to the point, and it is -- there is an inevitability about it. and you know, what president bush saw with that bad transition was there wasn't a sense of inevitability. his momentum got broken. and i was thinking, you know, you could do the joe biden

transition -- look, folks, and just pivot to a different topic. but bush wouldn't like that. >> no. >> so, we're all speechwriters, but not all speeches were the same and not all ways that the president gets their message across is the same. and so, whether it's the state of the union, a major address, a press conference just talking to reporters, sharing something on social media, where do you feel like president bush and president obama were best and where do you feel like they were not as good, and any stories about good or bad example there? >> he was pretty good in all these settings. i always -- the issue of authenticity comes up. and nowadays, you hear people say, well, it's more authentic if someone just tweets something off the top of their head or it's more authentic if they're doing an interview or just something more off the cuff or a town hall meeting and that sort of thing, and you can be authentic. of course, you can be your authentic self, but you also are

authentic when you are saying what you want to say. >> yes. >> in the best way you know how to say it. that's actually, you know -- i saw ambassador eric adelman here at this conference and he's writing an essay on reagan's address at moscow state university back in 1988. that speech, reagan's speech at the berlin wall, a memorable speech, just one of the great speeches in the english language remembered by everybody. it was worked on very, very closely by the speechwriters, the secretary of state, i think was involved. the president himself. there wasn't a spare word, extra word in the speech. it was a very carefully, well-done speech. no one is going to say that wasn't authentic because reagan just wasn't standing there saying what had just popped into his mind. there was nothing more authentically reagan than that. president bush -- >> being prepared is being respectful of your audience, too. >> yeah, and respectful of their time. what president bush would do --

i remember one time he did a town hall meeting in manhattan, kansas. and i wasn't on the trip, but i guess c-span -- i saw it on c-span or something. next time i saw him, i said, did you know you were up there for an hour and a half answering questions from the audience? and he did, but he said at the time, he said, i had no earthly idea i was up there that long. but it was a very good event. he had his microphone. and when he would come into an event like that, he wouldn't have a prepared speech and he would tell us, don't waste your time, don't get me a prepared speech for the first couple minutes of a town hall. and he would make his own notes about things he wanted to say. and by notes, i mean, tax plan, public schools. >> right. >> freedom. >> always freedom. >> yeah, always freedom. and so, he was very good in those settings as well. i also felt that his secret weapon was the press conference, because the late-night comics were always making fun of george w. bush's word stumbles,

especially if he was reading a speech, pronouncing a name, something like that, and they would catch him and then they would run these things constantly. but then, everybody at some point in the course of a year, everybody is going to see the president or hear him in a situation that they're kind of -- it's the only thing they can listen to. they're in their car and the president's making an announcement or there's a press conference that's interesting or something. and you listen to bush, and i think a lot of people thought, well, actually, he's very well-informed and very well-spoken, and this is really not what i was expecting, because most people are busy with their lives. but in these moments, these rare moments, where they would hear him for 15 minutes or so, he would sound pretty good, and that's why i say it was his secret weapon. >> he's also really funny. >> yes. >> president bush is very funny. >> didn't have to write jokes. i mean, you'd try, but -- >> very funny. >> he came up with the best ones. >> i'd be curious what you would say to this. i think, you know, we know president obama's reputation is as somebody who gives these sort

of soaring speeches with a lot of oratorical flourish, and some of the sort of seminole speeches of the last ten years have been -- 15 years -- have been ones that he gave at these really critical moments, you know, whether it was the 2008 philadelphia speech about race, selma, charleston. these are speeches that he put a lot of thought into, right? as john says, he was saying the thing he wanted to say, that he was prepared to say. but i also think that our -- and i'm sure you guys felt this, because kyle was first term and a half and then i was second term -- we were sort of -- his presidency followed the growth of social media. and so, it was a whole other opportunity to, you know, communicate in a new way, and also to screw up in a new way, but also to reach audiences in different ways. and i think that he really followed mrs. obama's lead on this. i mean, the first lady was

such -- so on the cutting edge of using social media to reach audiences, you know. she wanted to meet people where they were. and so, she was always, you know, getting to young people through whatever social media channel they were using. she went on "ellen" all the time because she knew that those were the audience of women who watched "ellen" were people who she really wanted to reach with her policy ideas and also to kind of shift culture around issues like college access and, you know, healthier food for children. and so, she was really good about that. she wasn't above any of that. and i think that helped kind of also inspire the president's team to get more bold about social media, too. and so, you know, he did the "between two ferns" video, which some of you may remember, you know, to encourage people to sign up for health care. but then we also did things like, he did a facebook live video to encourage young people to sign up for facebook. and then it turns out, young people aren't on facebook, so then he used snapchat, or i

forget what it's called now, something like that. >> yeah. >> to remind young people to fill out their fas fasa form. he went to places where they were. we had a day where he was interviewed by a bunch of youtube stars. and i didn't at the time know what a youtube star is. but these are young people who have these shows on youtube and have millions of followers. and your traditional journalists were extremely angry that he was doing interviews with, you know, these young people who are not serious journalists and wasn't, you know, speaking to "face the nation" or whatever, but he really felt like this was an opportunity to reach young people. and you know, there are pitfalls to all of this, but i feel like, you know, throughout his eight years, he was really good about finding ways to use every medium at his disposal to get his message across. it didn't always work, but he tried. >> yeah. a couple quick points about

bush. he would -- he was very funny, as you said. he used the first page of his speech -- he would take acknowledgments that would just be names. we wouldn't write these acknowledgments, and he would riff off the names, and that's where a lot of the humor came from in his speech. he really, he wanted to thank, you know, the person who introduced him and the local dignitaries and the band. everybody he wanted to thank. and he would riff on these things. then he would come up with these things. somebody asked him the story somewhere, maybe around the time of the lincoln movie or one of the books about lincoln. some presidents have said they saw lincoln's ghost. you ever seen lincoln's ghost? and he said, "no, i quit drinking in 1987." but cheney was also very -- has a great sense of humor. very, very kind of low-key delivery but very good timing. and he called me one time. and it was in the morning.

and i picked up the phone, and it was that deep voice of dick cheney. he said, "john, i got us into some trouble." and i said, "oh?" and he said, "yeah, the president's going to europe and he's not going to go to the radio/tv correspondents' dinner, so i've got to go there tomorrow and be funny for ten minutes." then he says, "i don't do funny." but the truth is, he does. and my colleague, matthew scully and i sat down and kind of hurriedly put together a speech for him for the next night, i think it was. and he did a great job. he was very good at that. >> yeah. i want to ask you this question because i actually don't know the answer, but the way the correspondents' dinner works is there's usually a lead writer who is the funny speechwriter. i was not the funny speechwriter, ever. but everybody else could kind of submit jokes to that person and they'll kind of pick some. >> right. >> so, i would always spend a time on a page or two of jokes and give them to john lovett, who was our funny speechwriter.

he was very nice about it. it he would maybe choose one, but maybe zero. did you have any jokes that were accepted in a correspondents speech? >> i don't remember. i think maybe. so, david lit lit and tyler ran our speechwriting process for that. i honestly can't remember. yeah, there was sort of this pressure to get jokes. but people sent jokes in unsolicited and solicited, from the outside, too. >> right. >> right? so, you know, whoever was running, who was lead pen on the correspondents' dinner was getting all kinds of emails from everybody, you know, suggesting jokes, but then also might reach out to, you know, comedians, comedy writers and others for help, too. so, it was this big, huge undertaking. it always had the -- you know, the state of the union is a really hard speech to write, and you might always have seen, you know, cody would grow a beard during state of the union season and then shave it at the end. but the white house correspondents' dinner felt like that, too, because there was so much pressure. and like president bush, president obama's pretty funny

naturally. and so, you know, it's all about delivery. it's all about timing. and they both were good at that. so, you could always trust them to deliver, but the pressure to really pull off these speeches was i think so great. >> going back to the thing you said about compartmentalizing and how presidents be really good at that. >> oh, my gosh. >> this is a famous story some of you may have heard, but there is a correspondents' dinner, i think a few years into his presidency when there was a joke in it where i think his middle name was hussein and there was a joke that, what you really don't know is there's a republican politician whose name is osama, some joke about that. and our speech writers went in to do the final edits for this correspondents' dinner and he said, you know what, i think we're just going to cut this out and -- >> changed it to hosni barak. >> so we're like, okay, that works. turns out, that was the day they had the mission to kill bin laden, and he had just come from a meeting in the situation room and later that night they were

going to actually do it. but he didn't let on, and he just told them, let's just not do this, in the joke speech. >> that famous photo of all of them in the situation room is the day after the correspondents' dinner. >> right. >> but the speechwriters didn't know that. so in his book, david writes about how annoyed he was that hosni isn't as funny as osama, but of course, you know -- >> because you have to be able to switch gears. >> you've got to switch gears. >> yeah. >> one of the tough jobs as a speechwriter is to reach different audiences, whether it's members of congress, members of the public, press. how would you think about, as you're writing a speech, which audience you're talking to and how to reach that specific audience? >> well, that's always the first question i ask is what's the audience? and it's an exaggeration, but in a certain sense, you're halfway there when you know who the audience is. is it your friends? is it the unpersuaded? is it an academic? is it an academic audience? is it the core of the -- the brigade of midshipmen at the naval academy? is it the chicago world affairs

council? is it the veterans of foreign wars? is it the republican club of cedar rapids, you know? you just -- you find out what your audience is, and then you know probably how you're going to get into the speech, what the general tone of the presentation is going to be and things of that nature. however, it's the president speaking, and therefore, as he always told us, he said, everything's important. you know, we work to think of a small rose garden event for the teacher of the year as unimportant. it actually was an important event, and it was part of the full volume of statements he made as president of the united states. also, he was always after us never to skip a step in making a case. even if you're speaking to the people who -- an audience of people who are likely to be in agreement with what you're saying, don't skip a logical

step, because the president always has a broader audience. and you know, if he's making his case for social security reform and he skips over the hard part and just tells you all the great things that are going to happen, a person who disagrees, and maybe even a person who hasn't done a lot of thinking about it, is going to go, well, now, you skipped a step. so, he was always after us to explain things, regardless of who the audience was. >> and it can -- you can get bogged down in the fear of the audience, because like john said, i mean, the audience is the world for really any speech. you never know who's paying attention. i mean, i would have relatives in india say that, you know, the president -- one of the president's speeches was reported on in a paper there. i mean, it's -- you just never know. and so, by the time we came into office, everything is on twitter. and you could watch a speech that -- i would do this sometimes -- a speech that i had worked on. i'm watching it on tv and i'm watching twitter at the same time. and it's a really great way to

lose your mind, right? because you can see how any given news outlet will just filter pieces of that speech through its own view and then slice and dice it and reinterpret it however you want, and it appears on twitter in a very different way from what you intended, right? so, all of this can make you lose your mind. but i agree, i think you have to sort of think about who the primary audience is. and one of our colleagues, terry zuplat, would always say -- well, he once said to me when i was working on a speech for memorial day, he said, you know, think about -- again, you could get bogged down in all of the potential people who are paying attention, so focus on the emotional heart center of this speech. who is the person whose heart you are most trying to touch? start with that and then you can work out, you know. so, for a memorial day speech, it's the spouse of a fallen soldier. start with that person and then move broader. and that was a really helpful way to kind of stay focused and not lose sight and not let

twitter ruin your life. >> i'm going to ask one more question, and then if anybody -- if you want to line up at that microphone right there, we'll start taking questions from the audience. but my last question -- and i know, sarada, we were mostly domestic speech writers, but there is a big difference between a foreign policy speech and a domestic speech. can you talk a little bit about, based on what we've seen our colleagues do and what we know, what the different considerations are for those two? >> yeah, i mean -- you want to start? >> i am not an expert in any policy area, so i had to write speeches about things i had in many cases not done any thinking about. but one of the great things about working at the white house is that you have policy experts. and they love talking about their area of expertise, and they're very good at it. so, i never -- i was always toggling back and forth between the foreign policy/military

stuff and the domestic and all of the other things that fall under that umbrella. president bush, his signature issue as governor of texas was education reform, and he wanted it to be the signature issue of his presidency. and that was ted kennedy and john boehner co-authored the legislation that bush signed, and it was really a big part of his, of what he wanted to accomplish. as president, it fell far into the background, but we could never make him happy about the education speech because he understood more about it to the granular writer that speechwriters never get. it would go through the staffing process and be fine and then it would get to the president and he would say, you don't get it! you don't have it. you don't have it right. >> you do a better bush impression -- >> he did. that's good. >> so, one time, it was in 2004, middle of the re-election campaign, a lot going on. and i said to mike and matthew, my colleagues, i said, you know, the president didn't like the last education speech we did.

we have another one to do. let's take the one he didn't use and look at the transcript of what he actually said and use that. and so, we did. we took that transcript of that last speech and we just -- we cleaned it up and did some, you know, put in some current, local references and current facts and data to sort of freshen it up. and you know, it just -- i thought, well, this is what he wanted to say, and clearly, that day, it was the rare event he had a speech in front of him and didn't use it, but it was education. he just wanted to do his own thing. so we took that transcript, made it into a speech draft, staffed it around, sent it to the president. now we'll see if he likes that. word comes back, he loves it. [ laughter ] exactly what he wanted, yeah. because he wrote it. >> so, you know, my understanding from colleagues who worked with bill clinton is

that previously, the speech writers were sort of all in one kind of shop, and then when sandy booker was national security adviser for president clinton, he really wanted the foreign policy speech writers under his purview, so they moved technically over to nsc, the national security council. so even when we were in the white house, i don't know if it was true with yours, but our colleagues who wrote policy speeches, ben rhodes and terry zuplat, their email addresses were nsc, even though they were on our team. and they had a different level of clearance and everything in their lives, a lot of -- you know, they were looking at classified materials in order to write speeches. it's a very different process. but the few times i did have to work with nsc staff and work on foreign policy, you realize that it really is a different ball game. i mean, you know, foreign leaders and foreign -- and populations of foreign countries are really looking to the president of the united states and what he says.

they're poring over every word in a way that nobody is poring over my, you know, economic policy speech. and so, there is a level of care that needs to be given to those speeches, not that you're not careful about every single speech, but you know, the considerations that go into those speeches is i think really different. and sometimes that would have an effect on the pros, ye. so, i would be going back and forth with various members of nsc staff who wanted something said in a very precise way but that didn't sound like human english. and so, you know, you'd be going back and forth trying to get to a place where it sounded like something a person would say but was accurate in the way that they needed to be -- or precise in the way that they needed. i remember one friend from the nsc told me that he had been helping -- he wasn't a speechwriter, he was a policy person, but he was helping one of his bosses for remarks that she was giving somewhere. and in the speech, you know, she said -- the draft said something like, we're going to do this for

the american people. and the nsc lawyers came back and said, you have to say u.s. persons. you can't say the american people. >> geez. >> so, which is, of course, ridiculous. but there are just these considerations that are just different from the foreign policy side. >> piece of trivia. when a president of the united states goes abroad, all of his public remarks that he's going to make on that trip, whether it's two days or ten, those are all done and cleared and approved before air force one leaves the united states. so, it's a real crunch for speechwriting before. >> please tell us your name, too. >> as the former resident of south carolina and charleston, i'd like to hear you elaborate on his decision to sing "amazing grace." >> yeah. do you know cody's story about this? >> yeah, i know cody's story. >> go for it. >> we'll tell our boss' story. i was not involved in writing

the charleston speech, and i was not there, but our director of speech writing, cody keenan, tells a story that they were actually on the plane heading down there and that the president said, you know, there's a 50/50 chance i'll sing. and i think it was probably in the moment that he felt that it was the right thing, you know. he felt it. >> and our boss who wrote that speech with him said, he never would have imagined suggesting that he sing it. >> yeah, exactly. >> that's not a conversation you have. i think you should just break into song. but yeah, it was in the moment. >> thank you. >> to what extent do you try to speak in the voice of the president? i mean, to mimic his phraseology or to make it sound like something that he, himself, would say? or is that a road too far? >> no, that's a huge part of the speechwriter's job, and i'd say it's probably the hardest part of the beginning phase of being a speechwriter is getting somebody's voice and writing and speaking like they would speak. >> does that come from getting to know them well? or how does that -- >> so, i think one way to sort

of overcome the initial hurdle of how am i going to sound like, you know, a 55-year-old black man who's a leader of the free world when i'm me is to think about how that voice, the idea of how someone speaks, getting someone's voice is really about how they think. and if you start there, then you'll figure out what words they like and what phrases they gravitate towards. but what you're really trying to do is how -- understand is how do they approach the world? how do they approach problems? so, at least for me -- i don't know if this is how -- you had a lot more time with president bush than certainly i had with president obama. but before i even got to the white house, as soon as i got that job offer, i immersed myself in everything that i could about him. so, i read his books. i read every speech he had given. i watched when he was on "jimmy fallon." i just spent a lot of time immersing myself in the mind and soul of barack obama, which is kind of creepy, but i think that's how you sort of start to -- so you get to a point where you wake up in the morning

and you're not thinking, what do i think about what happened in the world? you're thinking, what does barack obama think about what's happening in the world? >> it's hard to break out off. after getting out of the white house, there were a few months where i was writing emails to friends as barack obama. and i had to kind of pull that back, okay, back to kyle now. so it's hard to get out of, you know. 3. >> i imagine any of the presidents' speeches are rewritten and rewritten endlessly and cleared by dozens and dozens of people. meckically, how do you control -- how do you know what the draft is at given moment "a"? and then, two, the practical question -- what happens to all of the drafts? are they shredded? are they erased? are they filed? >> that's illegal. >> files sent to the archives or what? >> yeah, everything for us was comments due in the speech writing office say 5:00 usually on the same day that the draft went around the staffing process.

nobody was given, during the staffing process, no one was given an electronic copy of the speech. we didn't want anyone -- everybody liked -- colin powell said one time, everybody likes to grade papers. everybody would love to get to the computer and play with your work. we insisted on edits on a hard copy. and they would come into us, and we would have a stack of them. >> i really wish we had done that. >> there is no other way to do it. because you get it in their hand, and also, when someone -- when someone has to take the time to write something, that's thinking, too. and rather than just dashing something off. and the idea of having all these electronic copies of our speech coming red-lined and all that, that would just have made our jobs so -- it would have made it miserable. but the hard copy. you go through them, and the president, you know, if you worked on the speech, your name and your phone number was on the bottom of the last page. and the president always made

clear, and the vice president, you're accountable for the speech, which means that you have the power to make sure that the speech still works as a whole. that doesn't mean that you can overrule the national security adviser on a question of wording or whatever, but it does mean that, you know, when you get all these multiple suggestions from people who haven't done a lot of thinking about the speech and maybe just commenting on the fly, and maybe don't feel strongly about the suggestion they're making, all those factors come into play, but it's your responsibility to go through those edits, accommodate the changes that need to be accommodated, laugh at the ones you, you know -- >> send to the other speech writers -- >> exactly. become annoyed at the people who don't appreciate your artistry and all of that. but that's the only -- to answer the question, that is the only -- you've got to have a process and you've got to stick to it. otherwise, it becomes chaos.

and then the final thing was what happens to the drafts? they are all in the bush library. all of those paper -- we had to give everything. if, what, two sets were on it, it became a record? something like that. >> it's actually -- i feel like going forward, given where we are in the world and the current occupant of the white house, you should know, they can't just throw things out. every record must be kept. there is a federal law to that effect. i was just going to say, we, unfortunately, did not have people do handwriting edits, and i surely wish we did. but i think everybody had a different method. similarly, we would ask for them by, you know, 5:00 the day we circulated. but i think most speech writers that i know, we're all kind of obsessive about version control. so, you know, i have an elaborate system of how i name my file to make sure i'm looking at the right version. and when i got a lot of edits, i would actually print out all of the edits so i could check off that i had gone through all of them.

and oftentimes, i might be getting a bunch of edits from members of the same team, say the economic policy team. i would ask them to combine them all, litigate among themselves what they wanted to send me and then send everything to me. i wouldn't accept, you know, 20 different edits from people on the same team. >> there's also kind of a mental listing in the head of people who you had to take their edits and people you could kind of ignore. >> right. >> and obviously we didn't tell those people they were on that list, but yeah. yes, please. >> hi. thank you for coming, first of all. so, you mentioned earlier that a lot of times when you're writing a speech, the ideas can't just be your own. and of course, mr. mcconnell, as you mentioned, you can't really overrule the director of the nsc. there are certain factors you have to take into consideration. but you are the voice of the leader of the free world, and that carries a certain weight. so, my question is, to what extent did you feel that you had influence over policy as a speechwriter? >> you know, i -- i don't know if -- i personally did not feel

like i had any influence over actually policy. a couple of our colleagues were also policy people, like ben rhodes, who was very instrumental in president obama's foreign policy. but i did feel like i had some influence in shaping how he talked about something. so, specifically by the time i got there, i felt like i could kind of help the president be more vocal about his feminism. and so, i used various opportunities. a few essays we had. and then culminating in a speech he gave at a conference that the white house held called the united state of women in 2016, that i could kind of build up and sort of help, you know, help him find voice, give voice to what i knew he truly believed, and that i could push it and see whether he pushed back in a way, you know. and i worked on a team of men, so i felt like i had the ability to do that and to kind of

challenge it a little bit. and through each, you know, piece of writing about this issue that we did, i could kind of push the envelope a little bit more, a little bit more, so by the time he gave that speech, he got up on a stage in front of thousands of people and said, this is what a feminist looks like. and it took slowly moving us towards that direction. and it wasn't that i was putting an idea into his head. it was something he already had. i was just helping him find voice, giving it voice. >> you know, the things that is most rewarding about writing for a president, the president you like, is -- and the vice president, i need to say, as well -- is that the reasons you like the person you're writing for, you want the whole country to see. >> yes. >> what you like about the person. and so, you think about that when you're writing. and i don't consider that as having influence on policy so

much as giving him confidence, expressing his best thoughts, you know, putting all you can into it to ensure that the qualities you like and admire are there for all to see. i will quickly add, in the bush/cheney white house, mike gerson, the chief speechwriter for the president for more than half the administration, was a senior policy adviser. and so, he was -- you know, he had real standing on the white house staff, and that was a good influence because mike was very good at what he did. >> the other point of a speech is to widen the circle of people who care about something. and so, i remember i was there when we were trying to pass health care, and so, that was important because he spoke on it a lot. we really had to persuade people, including members of congress and people in different states to not only approve this law but to sign up. and we ended up going through all of the letters. like, president obama received thousands of letters and read ten every night, including a lot

from people who were saying, you know, these are the issues i'm dealing with. this is what i've been through. this is why this is really important. and so, we would tell a lot of those stories as a way to help people understand why this matters and who this is really going to make a difference for. >> thank you. i appreciate it. >> unfortunately, i'm a bit short, and also, my good friend just basically put together a much more eloquent version of the question i had. >> sorry about that. >> so, i'm a little bit of a scramble right now, but i think if i were to shift the perspective a little bit on how you as a speechwriter have an influence, i think something that's really been talked about a lot during this festival is the idea that the president surrounds himself with people who are willing and able to respectfully disagree and hold discourse in front of him and with him or her, whenever we get a female president. and i think one of the questions i had was, you know, in the time that you guys were speech writers, were there moments where you were able to challenge the president on a way that he

was approaching a certain topic or issue or perhaps even just the topic itself? were there places where you were able to have that kind of discourse with him and kind of show that there was maybe a different path to what he was originally thinking? >> not many times. i mean, there were -- but i will say, you know, if there was something i really felt strongly about that i wanted to say to president bush about policy, i wouldn't say, "mr. president, can i grab you for a second?" you know. but i remember talking to a deputy chief of staff one time about something that i had a strong opinion on, and that was good enough, because i knew that this would be presented to the president. i didn't even care if he said, you know, whose thought it was. and the white houvice presidente a little more free with the vice president. cheney, he's not the man in the oval office, but he was chief of staff to a president, secretary

of defense, congressman. he was a serious guy. and i never lobbied or anything like that. but i remember raising a couple of things with him. and he's the kind of guy you would not hesitate to do that. but you would also want to make sure you had done some serious thinking before you talk about it, because he respects anyone who's talking to him, but you need to respect his time, you know. just don't come in with a half-baked idea or something like that. and then in terms of speeches, you always have to tell yourself, this is his speech. this is not me. i'm not contributing to the corpus of my work. it's him talking. >> that's a really important point. nobody would ever say, that's a great speech by sarada. they would say this lousy speech by barack obama, you know. so you have to be really cognizant of that.

i don't know if you ever challenged him on policy. i certainly never did. but my understanding of people who worked on policy is that he really wanted very robust discussions about policy in front of -- you know, happening in front of him where his experts were disagreeing with each other and talking about it. i mean, there's really great accounts of those conversations happening during the financial crisis, you know, during the transition, before he even took office and then when he did. and even conversations, you know -- the transition was really smooth in part, largely due to president bush's, you know, really magnanimous personality. but i think that transition, during that transition, there were these really robust conversations that many people have written books about at this point, and i think he wanted that. and i think from a writing perspective, i mean, we were giving him our best in a draft, and then the edits would come from him. and it was rare that -- i've never had an experience where i would say, well, no, i could come up with something better than the edit you gave me. i mean, more often than not, he would cross off two of your

words and come up with one better one, so you know. >> i heard a story robert strauss told, a longtime democratic operative, national party chairman. he told about, he had big problems with the vietnam war and he told about going in to see president johnson and being determined to tell johnson he was on the wrong track. and all he remembered saying was something like, "mr. president, you're the greatest man." and he said he left the oval office and he was so angry at himself and he made a vow to himself that if he was ever speaking to a president again, he would tell him exactly what was on his mind. and he maintained that he kept that. he ended up in the cabinet during the carter years and he maintained ever after that he had stayed true to that. i was in a meeting in the oval office one time, and it was glen hubbard, one of the economic advisers who later on became dean of the columbian business school. and i don't remember what the issue was, but glen was there and i was there, so obviously, a speech was being talked about. but i remember there was kind of

a loose consensus forming around some idea. and the president looks at glen hubbard, dr. hubbard, says "what do you think of that?" and he goes, "mr. president, i don't agree with that at all!" and i've never forgotten that, and i've mentioned it to glen hubbard over the years. it was one of those moments that you hope would actually happen, you know, that someone is not going to -- the president asks them their opinion and they tell them, instead of holding back. and that was kind of the tone that i always felt the president works at, even though i never felt in a position where i needed to say i disagreed with something. just never happened. >> it's hard to overstate how hard that is. the first time i was in the oval office, i forget the complete thing. like, i don't even remember walking out. because you're just there in the room. you're like, i'm in the room, it's so bright. like, what am i doing with my hands? and it's hard. you get used to it, especially senior people get used to it. >> yeah.

>> yeah, thanks. >> in the impeachment of andrew johnson, one of the articles of impeachment involves speechwriting. the president had done a tour of the country defending his version of reconstruction and had apparently been so crude, so offensive, so unpresidential in his criticism of the radical republicans that they wrote that as a reason for his removal from office. is it possible for a president to say something, write something or tweet something that would justify removal from office? >> wow, justify the removal of the writer. imagine, that's what you live in fear of. but of course, johnson didn't have writers. and so, bang on, impeachment. >> yeah. >> i mean, legally, i can't answer that question. i think if he says something that is -- where he perjured himself, then yes?

>> it seems like it could be the sign of an actual crime. >> right. there are questions about whether this president's use of his twitter account, deleting tweets. i mean, whether he's in violation of the presidential records act by doing certain things. but i think, as john said, one of the things that speech writers live in fear of is just being wrong, and you know, writing something -- well, maybe not these current speech writers, but what we lived in fear of was just being incorrect. and so, hence the fact-checkers, hence the lawyers who made sure that what we said was not in violation of anything. and like you said, johnson didn't have that, so. there were also other reasons they impeached him, but -- >> it's a good history lesson. thank you. >> so, for all of us prospective speechwriters, what are you doing now? >> good question. >> i write speeches for private

clients. i work with a former white house colleague named matthew scully. >> and i also have my own sort of one-woman shop and i do speeches and all kinds of writing, but also message strategy, communications, coaching for different clients. >> sweet. >> and actually, i graduated from uva in 2008 and i'm -- >> yes! >> so, the applause at the beginning. i work for jim ryan in the president's office doing communications with him. >> also writing speeches for the president. >> yeah, also writing some speeches. yeah, this president, not that president. >> i'm just curious, once you have all of the words on the paper, how much time did your prospective presidents spend practicing, or did they just have the ability to read it a few times and really be able to deliver in a way that, you know, with the appropriate pauses and,

you know, all that goes into really communicating that? and is that the kind of thing they're doing at night in front of a mirror? i mean, how do they do that? >> i don't know. that's a good question, and i don't know the answer. i don't know how much time he spent on it. but now and then -- we gave him the speeches on 23-point type and he read them usually on cards that are about two-thirds the size of a sheet of paper. and so, it was big type and he could read it without his glasses. and on occasion, i would ask the staff secretary to give me the president's reading copy, because i wanted to look at it and see what he had done in the last moments, what changes he had made and what cross-outs, what additions, things like that, which weren't terribly common, but they did occur and i wanted to see them. but my point is, i would notice that he would underline words for emphasis. he would mark out where he wanted to stop and pause. he wouldn't write notes to

himself, but he would put signals. he would underline. and so, that suggests that there was at least one serious practice of the speech. i've been in the oval office when he reads an entire speech aloud for the small audience of people sitting around the desk, and that's when he's doing -- it's typically when he was doing his first major edit of the speech. if it was a -- then if he was going to go off to a city in the heartland and read a speech, there wasn't be a practice session, but there would be practice sessions in the family theater in the east wing of the white house and the family theater's about as deep as this room and about half the width, maybe, and set up like a little movie theater and they would set up the teleprompter and everything. but he used the teleprompter. i know president obama used it a lot. president bush probably used it four or five times a year. but he would practice.

he would practice those things. and he -- and sometimes he would edit while reading the speech from the teleprompter and stay there with us while he did it. but in the ordinary course of things, i know there was some, but i just don't know -- i never really asked him how much time he spent with it. >> my understanding is that, you might know better than i do -- my understanding is that the speeches that the president -- that president obama sort of rehearsed were white house correspondents' dinner, state of the union, you know, the convention speeches. but that the ones that he was doing kind of regularly -- i mean, you just get -- i think as a president, you just get so used to delivering these speeches. and because he had prepared the speech and spent time with it, i mean, there was a subset of the population that would mock president obama's use of a teleprompter, but it really is a better way to deliver a speech. you're looking out at the audience. you have written it down. you have prepared. you have thought about what you want to say. and so, he just got accustomed to doing that, and he's really

just a terrific orator and is able to do that. the first lady is always prepared, does her homework early, and so she -- i know that she would rehearse her speeches, because she wanted to make sure she got it right. you know, she would -- she wrote about this in her book, but she knew that little kids were listening to every word she said, you know. people were hanging on every word. what she said mattered. and so, she really wanted to put a lot of thought into what she said and how she said it. just, you know, she really took her role as sort of mom-in-chief seriously, and wanted to be very prepared. i don't think president obama -- he took his role very seriously. i don't think he rehearsed the way that she did. >> she was also not a politician. >> right. so she needed to practice. >> one other person's story quickly. the only speech i remember hearing about him really practicing was in 2007 during the first campaign in iowa, he was doing the jefferson jackson dinner, which is a big campaign event. and the stage is round and there's no podium and there's no

room for any kind of notes. and so, he had to memorize it. and so, it was about i think a 20-minute speech. so his head speechwriter at the time, jon favreau, was telling him a week out, you have to memorize this speech, you have to learn it. turns out the night before he started memorizing it and when his body man, reggie love, is walking by his hotel room and hears cnn blasting on the tv. it's because he was in the bathroom talking to himself in the mirror, trying to memorize the speech and he didn't want people to hear it. so, he apparently hated doing that, so didn't ever memorize anything ever again. we are out of time. thank you all so much for coming. really appreciate it. [ applause ] and enjoy the rest of the day. >> announcer: we're featuring american history tv programs this week as a preview of what's

available every weekend on c-span3. this evening, pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist pat oliphant and his work are subjects of discussion at the university of virginia, focusing on presidents lyndon johnson through ronald reagan. american history tv, tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span3. next on "the presidency," former secret service agents talk about the challenges they faced protecting the first family. speakers include larry buendorf, who prevented an assassination attempt on gerald ford. the george w. bush presidential center hosted this event. >> here at the bush center, of course, we have a wonderful relationship with our partners at smu, and it's so nice to have smu president dr. gerald turner and his wife, gayle, here with us tonight. we're grateful to all of our