the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more, including comcast. >> you think this is a community center? it is more. >> comcast is partnering with community centers to create wi-fi enabled lift zones so students and families can get with a need to be ready for anything. >> comcast supports c-span2 as a public service. >> follow american history tv on twitter, facebook and youtube for schedule updates, to learn about what happened this day in history, watch videos and learn about the people and events that shaped the american story. find us @c-spanhistory. >> now, on american history tv, three former white house be traders talked about -- white house speechwriters talked about

the process of turning a president's politics and policies into a speech. kyle: we appreciate you coming, we have some other panels going on at the same time, we will try to make it worth your while. for those of you who may be in the wrong place, these are speechwriters and today, we are really lucky. my name is kyle o'connor. i am a former speechwriter for president obama. we are also really lucky to have sarada, who also worked for president obama, and john, who worked for president bush. jeff, who worked for president clinton, was supposed to be here, but he had a conflict that kept him in in d.c. we will try to tell as many of his stories as we remember. [laughter] we have some questions for these two, and then we will take any questions you have. if there's one thing i hope you take away from this session, it is that being a presidential speechwriter is exactly like you think it would be on "the west wing." [laughter] that's it. i'm kidding.

it is much more lengthy. so i will -- so since this is the ideas festival, i will start up with a question for these two about the relationship between ideas and speeches. sometimes what starts as an idea in a speech, sometimes the speechwriting process starts before you have the idea. i am curious, how does an idea become a speech? sarada: in a weird way, you know, speechwriters, we are not up -- not coming up with the ideas. there are much smarter people in volved in developing these ideas. but in the way, i think these ideas, they don't get crystallized until they are litigated on the page. a lot of speechwriting is a process job where you are managing the various points of -- the various interests of different policy staffs who have different interests and you are

working on how you shape this message, and in that process, a lot of decisions can be made on -- the page. for our white house with president obama, a speech might get assigned to us, say on a new trade policy, and the first thing we would do is go and talk to the folks involved in the trade policy to get their input on exactly what needed to be said, and from there, we would go to the drafting process. but i think the process itself often helped crystallize what the idea would be. john: 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, and he had gotten elected to that position 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 a 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 underway for some weeks or months prior to the event itself. it is also the case that working with george w. bush, we found ourselves in, in many ways, in a crisis presidency. things kept happening. 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, was probably going to address the joint session of congress but he wanted to see a speech draft before he made his final decision. so it was our job, my colleagues and i, to do a speech for the president that monday. and he asked that he begin the -- that he be given the entire speech for that day. and the assignment came that morning. 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 talked to condi rice that morning. about 1:00 that afternoon, we were called to the oval office

to see the president. we had seen him quite a bit since the attacks the previous tuesday, but we had not seen him since we had gotten this assignment, obviously. so we were brought in and he asked how the drafting was going and i am sure mike, speaking for the group, said it is going fine, mr. president, but we are not quite there. he looked at us and 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 is expected of us now, and if we are at war, how we are going to fight and win the war. from there, we had a structure for the speech itself. if you go back and look at that speech to congress the following thursday, the president went through those questions and because, 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 onto

-- move that over into tuesday. kyle: can you talk about how president obama would give you the framework for a speech like that? because he is a lawyer. he would always give you point 1a, 1b. sarada: yeah, literally. what is interesting about president obama is that he himself is a writer, and if he had time, he would write the speeches better than we would himself, but the commander-in-chief doesn't have time to write speeches. so often times, what would happen is you would go into the oval and sit down and he was start riffing, and maybe seven minutes in, he would say ok, so here's what i am thinking. one, and then he would, you know, start, give you your sort of opening. two, give you the next paragraph. 1a, go back. he would walk you through the outline. and it was so irritating because you were trying to come up with a structure for hours and east

-- hours and you just spent 10 minutes with him and he had the whole thing down. it was inspiring and incredibly annoying. [laughter] he was really good at this. also interesting, one of the challenges of being a president, really any elected leader, i worked in the senate for a senator for years and saw the same dynamic, which is that you are going from very different event to very different event in the course of a very busy day, so he might be having a meeting with me about the national prayer breakfast speech and right before then he was in the situation room talking about china with people way more important than i am, and after that he is going to a 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 a lawyerly writer, but also, like president bush,

someone who is extremely disciplined and able to shift. i remember we were working on the remarks for when pope francis came to visit the u.s. and because the pope is the head of a state, the holy see of the vatican, we did a proper state arrival. it was a very early speech, they do these state arrivals on the south lawn starting at 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning, quite early, and so i had been working on the speech and handed in a draft a couple of days earlier, and in our white house, the process was that the draft -- we would write the draft and 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. and -- new and [laughter] -- and -- [laughter] sarada: yeah. we had good ones. and policy people they would

offer their input, which we would then incorporate. eventually the draft would go to the president. we had probably spoken to him about the speech before but then it would go back to him. i sent it into him a couple of nights earlier and i got it back and only one word was crossed out. and i thought, this can't be right. the president loves pope francis. he felt really strongly and is -- and was excited about the pope's arrival. i couldn't imagine he had no edits. of course, i get a call from the president's secretary the morning before the speech and she says, he wasn't on editing. he wants you up here. so i go to the oval and he is behind the desk, and in his neat handwriting he is making edits. he says "come on in." i do a really bad obama impression. [laughter] he says, yeah, i wasn't quite done. i want to boil out this section on pope francis's emphasis on the least of these. that really ties to my own faith and i want to focus on that. it wasn't supposed to be a long speech, but he wanted to blow

that out a little bit. he said work on this and similar draft and i will 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 am summoned back, so i go into the oval and i don't see him. his secretary says, he is having lunch in his private dining room. go back there. i had never been back there. so i am sort of both terrified and trying to take in everything that's on the walls as i make this two-second walk to the private dining room. and he is in there eating a plate of carrots or something. [laughter] he has made his edits and wants me to read them and make sure i understand what he is doing. and i see he has kind of blown out that section a little more and added a little piece about refugees. later on i learned that he had been in a meeting related to refugees. and you could sort of see the evolution of his thinking, but 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 i will look at it tonight. at the end of the night, maybe around 8:00 p.m., i went to get his edits and he had a few more. what was interesting about that day was to watch the evolution of his thinking where even though there was so much else going on, what any president has , in those few minutes he had to focus in on the speech and give it the thinking he needed -- not that it was an influence i what was going on through the day, but the ability of a person in that office to sort of continually give something this focused -- this focus and tend to it even though there are other things going on. john: that's one of the value adds that speech writing brings to a president. they have got so much going on. give him something to react to, give him something he can look at. president bush was not really a

writer, but he was a real serious editor. very, very confident editor. he had this very, very logical mind. he could read -- you have heard me tell this story -- he could read an eight-page speech draft, throw it down on his desk and look at the ceiling and recite to you the outline of the speech. i am not capable of doing that, but he could internalize it. he called me in 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. so you had to in the middle of the speech connect the two. he was going to his final read through before being taken to the hilton or whatever, and he said what is this on page three in the middle paragraph? it was 6:30 in the morning or something. i said, well it is the nature of a transition, mr. president.

he said, it is just words, isn't it? i said, yes, sir. he said, take it out. [laughter] he wanted it direct and clear, the way that sorenson used to describe john f. kennedy, he could feel the momentum of the words. and if you didn't feel it while reading the speech, he saw a problem. but give them something to react to. the morning of 9/11, i was sitting with vice president cheney, and the reason i was with him is he had a speech that friday and the arrangement we always had was i'm not going to go in and say you have a speech on friday, what do you want to say? i'm going to come in and say you have a speech on friday, here is 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. i have to give a foreign-policy speech in chicago. no, don't do that. kyle: 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 a historically black college in atlanta. i remember walking to the oval office and my boss said kyle has some ideas for you. he is looking at me, the first black president, like i'm going to let you finish. then i will tell you what you should say. [laughter] so that's very familiar. and you probably remember this, but the editing, the more you got from president obama, the better. if he spent time at night writing it out on a yellow legal pad at night with your draft next to them, that was great because it meant he was completely engaged. if you had a bunch of edits on the page, that's fine. what you didn't want was a note at the top that said please come see me because it meant you are starting over. sarada: it's true, you always want the person you're working with to be engaged with the draft. also something john said was

really important, president bush was looking for that momentum in his speech, and here i can represent our collie to is -- our colleague who is missing, jeff, who i worked with for many years. one of the things he taught me is a speech should have a sense of inevitability about it. you are building an argument through a speech, there is momentum, so by the time you get to the end, the audience says obviously this is where we are. we get to the point and there is an inevitability about it. what president bush saw with the 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 would like that. kyle: we are all speech writers but not all speeches are the same and not always a president gets a message across is the same. whether it is a state of the union, press conference, social media, talking to reporters, where do you feel like president

bush and president obama were best and where do you feel like they were not as good? and how -- you know, any stories about a good or bad example? john: he was pretty good in all of these settings. the issue of authenticity comes up and nowadays you here people say, well, this more authentic if someone just tweets something off the top of their head or it is more authentic if they are doing an interview or something more off-the-cuff, a town hall meeting or that sort of thing. and you can be authentic, but you also are authentic when you're saying what you want to say in the best way you know how to say it. that's actually, you know, i saw an ambassador here at this conference and he's writing an essay on reagan's address at moscow state university back in 1980. that speech, reagan's speech at the berlin mall, one of the --

the berlin wall, one of the great speeches of the english language, remembered by everybody. it was worked on very closely by the speechwriters, the secretary of state i believe was involved, the president himself. there wasn't a spare word, an extra word in the speech, it was a very carefully, well done speech. no one would say that was not authentic because reagan wasn't saying what just popped into his mind. there was nothing more authentically reagan than that. sarada: it's about being respectful of your audience, too. john: yeah. and respectful of their time. one time president bush did a town hall meeting in manhattan, kansas, and i wasn't on the trip but i saw it on c-span or something, and i said, did you know you were up there for an hour and a half answering questions from the audience question mark -- from the audience? he did, but at the time he said he had no idea. it was a big event, he had his

microphone, and when he would come into an event like that, he wouldn't have a prepared speech. he said don't waste your time giving me a prepared speech for the first few minutes of a town hall. he would make notes about what he wanted to say. by notes i mean "tax plan," "public schools," "freedom." john: always freedom. he was very good in all settings as well. -- in those settings as well. i always felt 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, mispronouncing a name, something like that, and they would catch him and run these things constantly. but then everybody at some point in the course of the year, everybody is going to see the president or hear him in a situation that they are kind of, it's the only thing they can listen to, they are in their car and the president is making an announcement.

or there's a press conference that's interesting or something. you listen to bush and i thing a lot of people thought, he is very well informed and well spoken and this is not what i was expecting. most people are busy with their lives. but in these moments, these rare moments when they would here for 15 minutes or so, he would some -- sound pretty good, and that's why i say i was his secret weapon. sarada: he was also really funny. president bush is very funny. john: yes. you did not have to write jokes. you could try but he came up with the best ones. sarada: we know that president obama's reputation is somebody who gives these soaring speeches with a lot of oratorical flourish. some of the seminal speeches of the last 10 years, 15 years have been ones he gave at a critical moment. selma, charleston, speeches that he put a lot of thought into.

as john said, sort of, he was saying the thing he wanted to say and was prepared to say. but i also think that -- and i am sure you guys felt this, we were sort of -- his presidency followed the growth of social media. and so it was a whole other opportunity to communicate in a new way and also screw up in a new way but to really reach audiences in different ways. and so, you know, when he, and i think he really followed mrs. obama's lead on this. the first lady was on the cutting edge of using social media to reach audiences. she wanted to meet people where they were. and so she was always 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, women who watched ellen, that she wanted to reach

with policy ideas come and also to shift culture around issues like college access and healthier food for children. she was really good about that . she wasn't above any of that. i think that helped kind of also inspired the president's team to get more bold about social media. he did the "between two ferns" video, which some of you may remember, to encourage people to sign up for health care. but he also did a facebook live video to encourage young people to sign up for facebook and it turns out young people are not on facebook, so he used snapchat or i forget what it is called now. something like that. to get young people to fill out their fafsa form. he went to places where they were. at one point, we had a day where he was interviewed by a bunch of youtube stars. and i didn't at the time know what youtube star is, but they are young people who have shows on youtube and have millions of followers. your traditional journalists

were extremely angry he was doing interviews with these young people who are not serious journalists and not speaking to face the nation or whatever. but he felt this was an opportunity to reach young people. there are pitfalls to all of this but i feel like 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. john: a couple of quick points about bush. he was very funny, as you said. he would use the first page of his speech. he would take acknowledgments, just names. we wouldn't write these acknowledgments. he would riff off of the names. that's where a lot of his humor came from in his speech. he wanted to thank the person who introduced him and the local dignitaries and the band

and he would riff on these things. he came up with this thing, some time around the lincoln movie or one of the books about lincoln, he was asked, some presidents have seen lincoln's ghost. have you? and he said no. i quit drinking in 1987. [laughter] but cheney also has a great sense of humor, very low-key delivery but very good timing. he called me one time and it was in the morning and i picked up the phone and it was the deep voice of dick cheney and he said, "john, i got us into some trouble." i said oh? he said the president is going to europe and he is not going to go to the radio and tv correspondents dinner and i have to go there tomorrow and be funny for 10 minutes. he says, don't do funny.

but the truth is he does. my colleague matthew scully and i sat down and 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. kyle: i want to ask this question because i don't know the answer, but the way the correspondents dinner works is there is usually a lead writer who is the funny speechwriter. i was not the funny speechwriter ever, but everybody else will submit jokes to that person and they will pick some. odo's spent a lot of time on a page or of jokes and give them two to our funny speechwriter. he was very nice about it. he would choose did you have any one. jokes that were accepted? sarada: i think maybe. i can't remember. honestly, i can't remember. there was sort of this pressure to get jokes, but people send -- people sent jokes in,

unsolicited and solicited from the outside too. whoever was running lead on the correspondents dinner was getting emails from everybody suggesting jokes, but they also might reach out to comedians, comedy writers and others for help. it was this big, huge undertaking. the state of the union is a really hard speech to write. cody would grow a beard during meetings and then shave it at the end. the white house correspondents dinner felt like that too because there was so much pressure. like president bush, president obama is pretty funny naturally, and so it is all about delivery. it is all about timing and they were both 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. kyle: going back to what you said about compartmentalizing, this is a story you may have heard, but there is a correspondents dinner, i think a

few years into his presidency, when there was a joke and it -- joke and it -- in it, where there was a joke about -- his middle name is hussein. and there was a joke that was something like there was a republican whose middle name was osama. he said, you know what, i think we can cut this out. we can make it some other name. do you remember who the republican was? we changed the enter like ok. that works. turns out, that was the day they had the mission to kill bin laden. he had just come from a meeting in the situation room and later that night they were going to do it but he didn't let on. he was just like, let's not do that. sarada: that famous photo of them in the situation room is the the day after the correspondents dinner. but the speechwriter did not know that. in his book, david writes about how annoyed he was that the other name is not as funny as osama but they had to be able to switch gears. kyle: it is tough to reach

different audiences, members of congress, members of the public , press. how would you think about, as you are writing a speech, how to reach a specific audience question mark -- audience? john: that's always the first question i asked. it's an exaggeration but in a certain sense you're halfway there when you know who the audience is. is it your friends, the unpersuaded, academics, the brigade of midshipmen at the naval academy, the chicago world affairs council, veterans of foreign wars, the republican club of cedar rapids? you find out what your audience is and then you know probably how you will get into this speech, what the general tone of the presentation is going to be, and things of that nature. however, it is the president

speaking and therefore, as he always told us, everything is important. we were not to think of a small rose garden event for the teacher of the year as unimportant. it 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 are 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 a president always has a broader audience. if he is making his case for social security reform and he skips over the hard part and just tells you all of the great things that will happen, a person who disagrees and maybe even a person who hasn't done a lot of thinking about it will go, you skipped a step. he was always after us to explain things, regardless of

who the audience was. sarada: and you can get bogged down in the fear of the audience because, like john said, the audience is the world for any speech. you never know who is paying attention. i would have relatives in india say one of the president's speeches was reported on in a paper there. you just never know. by the time we came into office, everything is on twitter, and you could watch -- i would do this sometimes, a speech i worked on, i am watching it on tv and i am watching twitter at the same time and it is a great way to lose your mind. [laughter] because you can see how any given news outlet will 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 at all of this can make you lose your mind. but i agree, you have to think about who the prodigy -- about

who the primary audience is and one of our colleagues would always say, once said to me when i was working on a speech for memorial day, you can get bogged down in the potential people paying attention, so focus on the emotional heart and center of the speech. who is the person whose heart you are most trying to touch and then you can work out. for a memorial day speech, it is the spouse of a fallen soldier. start with that person and then move broader. that was a helpful way to stay focused and not lose sight and not let twitter ruin your life. [laughter] kyle: i will ask one more question and then if you want to line up at the microphone, we will take questions from the audience. you and i were mostly domestic speechwriters but there is a big difference between a foreign policy speech and a domestic speech. can you talk a little bit about what we have seen colleagues do and what we know, the different considerations for the two.

john: i was fortunate, i am a lawyer by training but i'm not an expert in any kind of a policy area. i had to write speeches about things that in many cases i have not done much thinking about. but one of the great things about working about 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 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 who co-authored the legislation that bush signed and it was really a big part of what

he wanted to accomplish as president. of course, it fell far into the background, but we could never make him happy with an education speech draft because he simply knew too much about it, to a granular level of detail that speechwriters could never get. it would go through the staffing process and everything was find and it would then get to the president and he would say, you don't get it. you don't get it. you don't have it right. [laughter] so one time, it was in 2004, the middle of a reelection campaign, a lot going on. i said to mike and matthew, my colleagues, you know, the president like the last education speech we did. we have another one to do. let's take the one he did not use and look at the transcript of what he actually said and use that. so we did commit we took the transcript of the last speech, we cleaned it up, did some, you know, put in some current references, some facts and data

to freshen it up. i thought, 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. on education, he wanted to do his own thing. so we took the transcript, made it into a speech draft, sent it around and sent to the president and we will see if he likes appear. work comes back, he loves it. [laughter] because he wrote it. [laughter] sarada: my understanding from colleagues who worked with bill clinton is that previously the speechwriters were sort of all in one kind of shop, and then when sandy berger was national security adviser for clinton, he wanted the foreign policy speechwriters under his purview. so they moved technically over to nsc, to the national security council. even when we were in the white house -- i don't know if this is true of your white house too -- but our colleagues who were

foreign-policy speeches, there -- speeches, their email addresses were nsc. they were technically part of the nsc even know they were on our team. they had a different level of clearance and everything in their lives. they were looking at classified materials in order to write speeches. it's a very different process. the few times i did have to work with nsc staff and work on foreign policy, you realize it is a different ballgame. i mean, you know, foreign leaders and populations of foreign countries are really looking to the president of the united states and what he says, they are poring over every word. in a way that nobody is poring over my economic policy speech, so there is a level of care that needs to be giving to those speeches, not that you're not careful about every speech, but the considerations that go into those speeches i think is really different, and, sometimes, that would have an effect on the

prose. you'd be going back and forth with the nsc staff who wanted something said in a very precise way but that didn't sound like human english. and so you would be going back and forth, trying to get to a place where it sounded like something a person would say, but was accurate in a way they needed or precise in the way that they needed. one friend from the nsc told me . -- told me, he wasn't a speechwriter. he was a policy person, but was helping one of his bosses with remarks, and in the speech she said, the draft said something like, we are going to do this for the american people. and the nsc lawyers came back and said, you have to say u.s. persons. [laughter] you cannot say the american people. which is of course ridiculous. but there are these considerations that are just different from the foreign policy side. john: a piece of trivia. when a president of the united states goes abroad, all of his public remarks he makes on that trip, whether it is two days or

10, those are all done and cleared and approved before air force one leaves the united states, so it is a real crunch for speechwriting before. >> please tell us your name 2. -- your name too. >> as a former resident of south carolina in charleston, i would like to hear you elaborate on his decision to sing "amazing grace." kyle: yeah. do you know cody's story about this? sarada: so i was not involved in writing the charleston speech and i was not there, but our director of speechwriting tells the story that they were actually on the plane headed down there and the president said there is a 50-50 chance i will will sing. i think in the moment he felt it. kyle: at our boss who wrote that speech said he never would have

imagined suggesting that he sing it. it was in the moment. [laughter] >> thank you. >> to what extent do you try to speak in the voice of the president? i mean, to mimic his phrasing or -- his phraseology or make it sound like something he himself would say? or is that a road too far? kyle: that a huge part of the speechwriter's job and i would say it is probably the hardest part of the beginning phase of being a speechwriter, getting somebody's voice. >> does that come from getting to know them well? sarada: i think one way to overcome the initial hurdle, how am i going to sound like a 55-year-old black man who is the leader of the free world when i am me, is to think about how that voice, the idea of how someone speaks, getting someone's voice, is really about how they think. if you start there, you figure

out what words and phrases they gravitate towards, but what you are trying to understand is how they approach the world and problems. at least for me, i don't know if -- you had a lot more time with president bush than i had with president obama, but is soon as i got to the white house, i immersed myself in everything i could about him. i read his books, i read every speech he had given, i wash when he was on jimmy fallon. i spent a lot of time immersing myself in the mind and soul of barack obama, which is kind of creepy, but i think is how you sort of start to -- so that you get to a where you wake up in point the morning and it's not what to i think about what is going on in the world, what does barack obama think about what is going on the world? kyle: and it is hard to break out of. when i left the white house, there were a few months where i was writing you most of friends like barack obama. i would have to pulled back and say ok, back to kyle now. it is hard to get out of. >> i imagine any of the

president's speeches are rewritten and rewritten endlessly and cleared by dozens and dozens of people. mechanically, how do you know -- how do you control -- how do you know what the draft is at a given moment, and a practical question, what happens to all of the drafts? are they shredded? are they erased? are they filed to the archives were what? -- archives or what? john: everything for us was comments due in the speechwriting office at 5:00 on the same day the draft went around in 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 -- colin powell said one time everybody likes to grade papers. everybody would love to get on the computer and play with your work. we insisted on edits on hard copy. they would come into us and we would have a stack of them. sarada: i really wish we had done that. [laughter]

john: there's no other way to do it, because you get in their hand, and also when someone has to take the time to write something, that is thinking, too, rather than dashing something off. the idea of having all these electronic copies of our speech, that would just make our job -- it just would have made it miserable. but the hardcopy, you go through them, and if you worked on the speech, your name and phone number was on the bottom of the last page. the president and vice president always made clear you are accountable for the speech, which means you have the power to make sure the speech still works as a whole. that doesn't mean you can overrule the national security advisor on a question of wording or whatever. but it does mean that when you get all of these multiple suggestions from people who

haven't done a lot of thinking about the speech, maybe just commenting on the fly, and maybe don't feel strongly about the suggestion they are making, all of those factors come into play but it is your responsibility to go through those edits, a comedy -- edits, accommodate the changes that need to be accommodated, laugh at the ones that don't. [laughter] right. exactly. become annoyed. all of that. but that's the only -- you have to have a process and stick to it, or otherwise it becomes chaos. and then the final thing is what happens to the drafts? they are all in the bush library. all of those papers. we had to give everything. if two sets of eyeballs were on it, it became a record. sarada: yes. especially going forward in the -- going forward with 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. we unfortunately did not have people do handwritten edits and i surely wish we did, but i think everybody had a different method. similarly, would ask for them by 5:00 the day we circulated. but i think most speechwriters i know, we are all kind of obsessive about version control. so i have an elaborate system of how i name my file to make sure i'm looking at the right version. when i got a lot of edits, i would print out all the edits i got so that i could check off that i'd gone through all of them, and often times, if, you know, 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 would not accept 20 different edits from people on the same team. kyle: there's also the mental list in your head of people you had to take their edits and the

people that you could kind of ignore. and obviously we didn't tell those people they were on that list, but yeah. next please. >> hi. thank you for coming, first of all. you mentioned earlier that a lot of times when you're running the speech, the ideas cannot just be your own, and you can't really overrule the director of the nsc. so 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 do you feel you had influence over policy as a speechwriter? sarada: you know, i don't know if -- i personally didn't feel like i had influence over actual 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. 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 states of women in 2016, that i could kind of build up and help him find a voice, give voice to what i knew he truly believed. and that i could push it and see whether he would push back. in a way, you know? i worked on a team of men, so i felt like i had the ability to do that and kind of challenge it a little bit. and, through each piece of writing about this issue that we did, i could kind of push the envelope a little more so than -- so that, by the time he gave the speech, when he got on the stage in front of thousands of people and said this is what a feminist looks like, and it took us just slowly moving in that direction. it wasn't that i was putting an

idea into his head. it was something he already had, i was just helping him find his voice, giving it voice. john: the thing that is most rewarding about writing for a president, a president you like, and a vice president i should say as well, is the reasons you like the person you are writing for, you want the whole country to see what you like about the person. so you think about that when you are writing. and i don't consider that as having influence on policy so much as giving him confidence, expressing his best thoughts, 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 that in the bush-cheney white house, the chief speechwriter for the

president for more than half the administration was a senior policy advisor, and so, he had real standing with the white house staff and that was a good influence because he was very good at what he did. kyle: you can widen the circle of people who care about something -- and so i remember when they were trying to pass health care. we really had to persuade people in congress and in different states not only to approve this law but to sign up. weeded up going through all the letters -- we ended up going through all the letters. president obama received thousands of letters and read 10 every night, including from people who say these are the issues i'm dealing with, this is what i have been through. this is why this is really important. we would tell a lot of those stories to help people understand why this matters. >> thank you. >> my good friend just basically put together a more elegant

-- eloquent version of the question i had, so i'm in a little bit of a scramble, but if i could shift the perspective on how you as a speechwriter have influence, i think something that's been talked about a lot during this festival is that the president surrounds himself with people who are able to respectfully hold discourse -- respectfully disagree and hold discourse with him or her. one of the questions i had is in the time you were speechwriters, where there moments where you were able to challenge the president on a way he was approaching a certain topic or issue, or perhaps even just the topic itself? were the places where you could have that kind of discourse with him and show that there was maybe a different path to what he was originally thinking? john: not many times. [laughter] 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, can i grab you for a second? but i remember talking to a deputy chief of staff once 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 and i didn't care if he said whose thought it was. and the vice president, you can be a little more free with the vice president. cheney was not the man in the oval office but he was a chief of staff to the president, a secretary, a congressman, a serious guy. i never lobbied or anything like that. but i remember raising a couple of things with him. and he is 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 talked about it because he respects anyone who is talking to him but you

need to respect his time. don't come in with a half-baked idea or something like that. but -- 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 is him talking. sarada: that's an important point. nobody would ever say wow, this great speech by sarada. they would say this lousy speech by barack obama. 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 from people who worked on policy is that he really wanted very robust discussions about policy happening in front of him where his experts were disagreeing with each other and talking about it. i mean, there really great accounts of those conversations happening during the financial crisis. during the transition before he even took office, and even

when he did come into even in conversations and the transition was really smooth in part largely because of president bush's magnanimous personality. but i think during the transition, there were really robust conversations that many people have written books about at this point. i think he wanted that. from a writing perspective, we were giving him our best in a draft and the edits would come from him. it was rare, i've never had an experience where i would say, i could come up with something better than the edit you gave me. more often than not, he would cross out two of your words and come up with one better one, so, you know. john: robert strauss told a story, a longtime democratic operative and national party chairman. he had problems with the vietnam war and he was determined to tell president johnson he was on the wrong track. all he remembered saying was something like, mr. president, you are the greatest man... [laughter] he said he left the oval office and 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 them exactly what was on his mind. he maintained that he kept that . he ended up on the cabinet in the carter years. he maintained ever after that he stayed true to that. i was in a meeting in the oval office one time and it was glenn hubbard, one of the economic advisors who later on became dean of the columbia business school. i don't never what the issue was, that glenn 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 glenn hubbard, and dr. hubbard, what do you think about that? and he said, "mr. president, i don't agree with that at all!" [laughter] and i've never forgotten that. i have mentioned it to glenn hubbard over the years. it was one of those moments that

you would hope what actually happened, that someone is not going to -- the president asks them their opinion and they told him instead of holding back, and was kind of the tone i always felt that president bush had even though i never felt in a position where i needed to say i disagreed with something. it just never happened. kyle: it's hard to overstate how hard that is. the first time i was in the oval office, i forgot the complete thing. i don't even remember walking out. you were just there. i am in the room. it is so bright. what am i doing with my hands question mark [laughter] it is hard, but you get used to it. thanks. >> in the impeachment of andrew johnson, one of the articles of impeachment involved speechwriting. the president had done a tour of the country defending his version of reconstruction and had apparently been so crude, so offensive, so i'm presidential in his criticism of the radical

republicans that they wrote that as a reason for his removal from office. is it possible for president to say something, write something or tweet something that would justify removal from office? [laughter] kyle: it would justify the removal of the writer. [laughter] john: that's what you live in fear of. of course, johnson didn't have writers, so bango -- impeachment. sarada: legally, i can't answer that question. i think if he says something that is -- that, where he perjured himself, then yes. kyle: it seems like it could be the sign of an actual crime. sarada: there are questions about whether this president, the use of his twitter account, deleting tweets, whether he is in violation of the presidential records act by doing certain things, but as john said, one of the things that speechwriters

live in fear of is being wrong. and writing something -- maybe not these current speechwriters, but we lived in fear of being incorrect. hence the fact checkers and the lawyers who made sure that what we said was not in violation of anything. like you said, johnson didn't have that. there were also other reasons they impeached him. >> sort of a history lesson. >> for all of us prospective speechwriters, what are you doing now? john: i write speeches for private clients. i work with a former white house writer named matthew scully. sarada: 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. kyle: actually, i graduated from uva in 2008.

i am back. i moved back to charlottesville about a year ago and i work for jim ryan in the present's office doing communications with him. and i also write 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 respective presidents spent -- spend practicing, or did they just have the ability to read it a few times and really deliver in a way that, with the appropriate pauses and all that goes into really communicating that? and is that the kind of thing they are doing at night in front of a mirror? how to they do that? john: that's a good question and i don't know the answer. i don't know how much time he spent on it. now and then -- we gave him the speeches in 23 point type and he read them usually on cards about two thirds the size of a sheet of paper.

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 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. 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 should just 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 is when he is doing, typically doing his first major edit of the speech.

if it was a -- and then come if he was going to go off -- and then, if he was going to go off to a city in the heartland and read a speech, there would not be a practice session, but there would be practice sessions in the family theater in the east wing of the white house. the family theater is 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 a teleprompter and everything. but he used a teleprompter. i know president obama used it lot. president bush used it maybe four or five times a year. but he would practice. he would practice those things. and he would sometimes edit it while reading the speech from a teleprompter and stay 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. sarada: my understanding, you might know better than i do, the

speeches that the president -- president obama sort of her hearst were -- sort of rehearsed were white house correspondent dinner, the convention speeches, but the ones he was doing regularly, 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, 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 are prepared. you thought about what you're going to say. he got accustomed to doing that and he is a terrific order and -- terrific orator and was able to do that. the first lady is always prepared, does her homework early. i know she would rehearse her speeches. she wanted to make sure she got it right. she wrote about this in her book, but she knew that little kids were listening to every word she said. 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 could -- said it. just, you know, she took her role as mom in chief seriously and wanted to be very prepared. i don't think president obama -- he took his role very seriously. but i don't think he rehearsed the way she did. kyle: she was not a politician. >> right. >> one other story quickly. the only speech of a mirror him 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 studio was around and there is room for notes. he had to memorize it. it was about a 20 minute speech. his head speech writer at the time kept telling them a week out that you have to start memorizing it. he was like yeah, i will get to it. it turns out the night before he started memorizing it. his body man at the time remembers walking by the door in the next hotel room and hearing

espn blasting on the tv and it was 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. he apparently hated doing that so i don't think it happened again. we are out of time. thank you for coming. [applause] >> enjoy the rest of the day. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> weekends on c-span two are an intellectual feast. every saturday, american history tv documents america's story. book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding comes from these television companies and more including media,. >> media, was ready. we never slowed down.

schools and businesses went virtual and repowered a new reality. we are built to keep you ahead. announcer: media com supports c-span2 as a public service. >> follow american history tv on twitter, facebook and youtube for schedule updates. to learn about what happened to stay in history, watch videos and learn more about the people and events that have shaped the american story. find us at c-span history. >> now from american history tv's oral history series, michael schlitz recounts his time in the u.s. army during the iraq war. he recalls his appointment following the september 11 terrorist attacks. today his vehicle was hit by an ied and his road to recovery. this interviews from the veterans history project that was conducted by the atlanta history center's kenan resear