the president. in the modern era, dated to at least december 7, 19 41, the president has not only been the commander in chief but the comforter in chief, the mourner in chief. the job description of the president in the modern era now includes expressing our national outrage, our national grief at good moments, expressing our national joy. and clarifying the meaning of what has happened and where the country goes forward from here. so if the nation turns to the president to whom does the president turn for help in stepping up to this unbiden moment? there is not yet, as they say, an app for that. so the president has to go old school. george washington in his first term was thinking about maybe stepping down after a term in office so he asked james madison to help him write some fair well address. washingtonened up serving two full terms setting the example

for the people who followed him. but four years on he dusted off the madison draft and asked hamilton to take a look and make suggestions which i think instantly, and i'm sure no one here will take any offense, gives george washington the greatest speech writing team ever. that is until the trump administration which i gather will have a bigger, classier, speech writing team. so presidents from the beginning have sought help occasionally. but it wasn't until the rise of mass communication that the speech writer became part of the presidential orbit. the first president who is credited with having a full-time speech writer was warren harding. it's no surprise that harding was also the first radio president. as mass media has involved going from radio to television to social media, so has the way

the presidential speeches are prepared, so is the way they are received, so is the role of presidential speech writers. so i'm very excite that we have been able to pull together a terrific panel. i say that not just because i consider them to be friends of mine. we have representatives from six administrations from the nixon, reagan, bush 41, clinton, bush 43, president obama. i was a little disappointed we couldn't getford and quarter. this could have qualified as a presidential republican debate. so what i'm going to do is go chronologically. i'm going to ask everyone to speak for no more than five minutes and i will cut you off with a have to. i forgot to bring my watch so if you see me looking at my i phone that's why. speech for five minutes about how their president handled moments of national tension and

then have panel discussion and then open up to questions. so the first person sitting immediately to my left is lee, deputy director in the nixon white house of the white house writing and research staff. now professor of media and public affairs. >> thanks for all who organized this conference, and this association which is bringing into more visibility and coherence i think what used to be a group that preferred to remain rather quiet and anonymous. ghost writers. students are flocking to courses on speech writing. my own experience at george washington university, i just came from my class where i defiped robert's book. but students are lining up to get into courses of this sort. they regard this as an excite progress fessional prospect for

them. they don't quite know how to make it work. there is no clear career ladder. but already this afternoon i talked to a couple of people that they have leads if we have any good students who might be able to take advantage of these opportunities so it's a lot of fun. a lot of students learn about speech writing on the west wing tv show, i think. while that's a bit romanticized, it's an intriguing one. i didn't work directly on big crises speeches except in my role i might edit and review. sometimes rescuing comments that might have at a time of national emotion gone in the

wrong direction not always being able to rescue them and sometimes adding my own little touch and sometimes that helped and often it didn't. the one story i thought, since we want to do this quickly, that related to a big crisis speech happened in 1972. the one anecdote that quickly came to my mind. i had worked quite hard with a lot of people on the president's address to a joint session of the canadian parliament. he was going up to ottowa, was going to address the parliament. a lot of people took that speech very seriously. it was a state occasion. but mistearsly, the last couple of days before the trip, the president seemed to disappear. got no reaction back from him, no decisions on a couple of policy points. often in these speeches you leave the policy points a little open waiting for the right decider, to use that word, to make a commitment. peggy noonan once wrote that

speeches were where policy got made often. i think that was true. but in this case nesmen was silent. then i got a sudden thing saying please add this to the draft. it was a short paragraph about vietnam. i didn't know what it was all about. it was worded in burektizz, maybe kissingerees. he told us to put the voibs back in the middle of the sentence where they belong. so i did. i changed the wording then i got a call i had to go to camp david because the president was unhappy with the way that wording had been changed. well, to cut to the chase. what was happening was that nixon was deciding whether or not to mine the harbors and increase the bombing of vietnam. a huge step up in the military effort. in 72 he was about to go to moscow. he had just been to china. everything was falling into place. first arms control treaty was

going to be signed of the nuclear era. and kissinger felt that nixon shouldn't do anything that would upset the russians, the soviets. he was nixon, anyway, making this decision. he finally decided to go ahead and do this against kissinger's advice. eventually led to the end of american involvement in vietnam. this was what was preoccupying him. it was a crisis moment. he just didn't have time to think about the canadian parliament. only speech he didn't change one word. probably the best speech he ever gave. i had to go to camp david. i saw nixon. he asked if i was having a good time, was i comfortable, did i want to go bowling. so nice. >> was that when you walked in and he was sitting in the dark? >> he was sitting in the dark by himself pondering all this.

at any rate, years later out at the national archives and the director was showing me through the nixon papers. and he said, oh, let's look up your name. let's see what pops up. they had jut put bob's diaries on the website. so they put my name in and up popped haldemann's account of that moment when i changed the language in the speech and haldemann writes nixon absolutely blew up and went into a tie raid how speech writers don't understand the nuances of foreign policy. we had to get a speech. and then at the end haldemann wrote, typical nixon tant rum. i think it reflected the moment. this had been changed in some way and that's why nixon was so

nice i think when i went down to camp david to make sure i was happy, and i think he realized that he had overstepped. but the tension at those moments -- maybe this plays some way into the theme -- is terrific. and the tension that is shared and felt even though i didn't know at the time what was brewing in vietnam. xon called their bluff effectively. the summit went on. he was reelected. and then some other stuff happened that wasn't so happy. i was never asked to work on anything related to watergate. i think speech writers, as happened in other administrations, were given a little bit of discretion as to whether they worked on, whether they didn't, what they felt passionate about, what they didn't want to try to get involved in. and that diversified staff. i think those presidents have

had fairly diversified writing taffs. grand themes, state of the union addresses. i was very much a junior writer. but the point of all of this i guess is that i didn't get involved in that kind of speech but i experienced the atmosphere out of which such speeches came. i paid a lot of attention, i'm sure we will hear some of the stories that i remember hearing from other presidents. but the other point is especially with nixon, the more important the speech the more likely he was to really write it himself. thank you. >> clark judge wrote for president reagan. founder of the white house writers group.

>> has everybody seen the cover of his book? hold it up. this is how i get on the good side of moderators. that's a great book. i read over the reagan chapter today basically to make sure he didn't pop something on me that i didn't remember. in your introduction you mentioned challenger. that was written by peggy noonan. one of the things i did was went over your account. we talked about this and i hadn't remembered it. she realized something was coming up that would have to be -- he would have to give a talk on television that night. she was the obvious go-to person for that. she did largely ceremonial speeches, largely she was known at the time or made jokes at the time about being the one who always went to the

funerals. wrote for the funerals. she was working on it, one of the senior staffers came over and had some notes from the president, had been with the president as i recall just during the speeches -- during the disaster. and the president had talked about the need to speak to children and to talk about the ture and that we -- that adventure required and frontiers required sense of adventure but also a willingness to accept danger. if you read the speech you see that theme coming up right away. then you see -- was written very fast -- the next section is about i think sir frances drake had died on that day, and tell us about that clearly. i'm pretty sure what happened is one of the researchers came

in with a list of thing that is happened on that day that were appropriate to the moment. you have to work very fast. you fit them in. now, it's best known for its inal line. slip the surly bonds of efforts o touch the face of god. the beginning and end of a poem called flite -- flight written by a canadian pilot. some time ago i was giving talks overseas on speech writing by a professor, said well -- on something i'd written. well did you work this out? did you think about it? no. you never do that. at least i never did. with the really the truly memorable things. there are a few times you do that when you're writing thing that is have humor in them. but mostly it's a moment where this sense comes to you. and this is where the arts stri

comes in or at least the impulse tortse artistry. speech writing is not about flowery words, not about oirn nate phrases. in fact, one of the only speeches i received back from reagan, he had crossed out every fifth or sixth word. he didn't cross out a single sentence but fifth or sixth word. he wrote at the top -- he had written -- well. this is a fine speech. i've just sweat add little of the bad out of it. that's what he wrote. now you're supposed to applaud. [applause] and then the guy pulled you off the stage. but what he was saying was this is my style. it's very lean. it's not flowery.

and keep it in mind. and what she did with that was in a moment capture that and capture -- ending with a quote is extremely powerful. it was all the more so in this because of the quality of it. but that's the kind of thing you're facing at a moment of crisis. some of it is direction, some of it is research. and some of it is inspiration. >> i should say not everyone is obligated to do impressions of their former boss but it is certainly encouraged. our next speaker is mary kate, speech writer for president bush 41. as you can guess we're progressing chronologically. she still sometimes writes speeches. she is a contributing editor at u.s. news and world report.

>> thank you. so i started writing for president bush when i was three years out of college. i was by far the youngest speech writer in our office. so as a result, i got assigned not the big challenger crisis type of speeches. i did a lot of the spelling bewinners and girl scout of the year awards. there could have been a crisis if the turkey that got pardoned somehow met his fate. but i never had that crisis. by the way, george bush 41 was the first president to pardon a thanksgiving turkey and that is a great tradition that has lived on. you're always guaranteed to make the nightly news. reagan did not pardon the turkey. >> no, no. that was the evil empire. >> so by the end -- by january

of 92 -- so i had been on the job for three years by then. i would worked my way up from spelling bee winners and i was on the trip where the president went to the state dinner in japan and had an unfortunate incident shall we say where he bar fed on the japanese prime minister at the state dinner. i had written the speech for the next morning which was to the japanese diet. and it was a crazy night. i was not senior enough to be at the state dinner so the kids my age were all back at the hotel and watching on television. once we got the word something happened we turned on the tv's. and it was sort of like -- not a politically correct thing to say. it was a godzilla movie the wrong way. their lips are moving and english is coming out. so these were american anchingecors in america speaking in japanese

subtitelings. they were showing this god awful film of the president keeling over and it really looked like he was dead and there was no words on the screen to know otherwise. so we thought, holy cow, i think the president is either dead or about to die tonight. and the guys were saying, don't move. everybody stay where you are. don't answer any phone calls, don't talk to anybody outside until you talk to me. about midnight i get a phone call and it's from nick, secretary of the treasury and a dear friend of president bush's. he said i understand you wrote the speech for tomorrow morning. they asked me to deliver it in the president's' place. can you meet with me? of course. so i meet with him. he is absolutely shell shocked. he clearly -- good friend of the president. he thinks like we all do, maybe the president is already dead. he says, i don't know what to do. and i said, well, i think you should deliver the speech.

and the only question is do you want to do it in the first person as if you were george bush and start with the sentence that says i will now deliver the speech as george bush would have delivered it himself? or do you want me to switch it to the third person and we'll change every sentence to george bush believes in free trade? and he said i don't know. i don't know what to do. what do you think? and he just couldn't make a decision. i think he was genuinely emotional about the situation. so finally i'm looking at my clock thinking, i really don't have to rewrite this whole thing. so i said you know, i think it would be absolutely brilliant if you just kept it. you're right. ok. so he kept up. he goes to the dais. i'm watching it on the closed circuit. and he says i will now deliver the speech as if george bush were here.

i george bush blah blah blah and off he goes. and every single time the man stopped to take a breath, whether it was an applause line nuts the japnizz went and clapped like crazy as if they were going to clap george bush back into health. so we get out of there. and nick says oh that was bompingers that's the greatest. i can't believe it. it was very sweet that he was so excited. but i really think in hindsight -- i shouldn't say hindsight. it was right then. that it was not about nick brady, it was not about the speech i wrote. it was about the gracious hospitality of the japanese people who were mortified that this had happened to george bush. d i think it was an act of love for george bush that these people were just trying to applaud in every way to show the president that he was missed and loved and it was a

very sweet moment in time. so my advice to you as speech writers is some sort of misfor tune befalls your speaker, just keep the speech the way it is. less work and it allows people to clap. in memory of that person. there you have it. >> our next speaker is jeff who was a speech writer for president clinton. the author of several books. he's a founding partner at west wing writers. >> i hadn't really come prepared to talk about this but mary kate, i just want to add a different and slightly less elevated perspective on the story you just told. i was in college when president bush threw up on the prime minister. i will say this isn't probably a revelation to any of you but college students are usually pretty creative in coming up

with ways of describing throwing up. barfing being pretty old school. so there was a moment that followed this incident when the erm on campus was for throwing up, after an overindulgent night at frat parties, was reeting miazawa. ll over the common room. we were very politically focused where i went to college. so i don't know if if you'll forgive me for going from comedy to tragedy. but robert you talked about the president in his role as comforter in chief.

my president, president clinton, obviously well known as someone who famously said, i feel your pain. we actually learned -- you can fact check this -- that it wasn't president clinton who originated that phrase in the presidential context. it was actually president carter who first said i feel your pain. i think that president clinton is probably just better at it than some other president have been. it was a particular -- and actually i think a very important strength. easy to kind of have fun with. but really, really very important in all sorts of contexts that presidents are confronted with. i will just talk briefly about one in which i was involved in. it is one that feels very fresh in this moment. this was the sort of horrific school shooting in columbine high school in littleton,

colorado, in my home state. that happened in april of 1999. i'm sure you all remember. it wasn't simply, if one can say, simply about a school shooting. it wasn't typical of other school shootings in that it had been met tick clussly methodically planned and excuted. so there was something about -- there had been a wave of school shootings. beginning in ernest really in 1997 there had been a whole eries. across the country. every one of these shocking and horrifying in its own way. one of these, the shooting had been carried out by an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old. so there was a very active process of soul searching going on in the country, very active discussion in the same way that we have right now in the present context. and then there was columbine.

and this in a way was the moment when it all just sort of broke. peggy noonan wrote the column at the time talking about the culture of death that existed in the country and said that some kind of critical mass had been reached. it really did feel that way very much. so i worked with president clinton on a number of different speeches related to that horrible moment. i think it's useful actually to think about a moment like this not as sort of resulting in a single speech but really the process in a discussion. as i went back into my files and now for all the world to see frighteningly, all of our pdf is up op line in form. you're next. and so i actually dug back into my own files to take a look at this. i think what struck me is that

there are just as there are phases of grief, there are phases of a discussion like this. it begins in the moment with reaction. the president usually gets to a podium as quickly as he can to say almost inevitably we're still trying to sort out the facts of whatever happened and we're talking to law enforcement and our hearts and prayers go out to the families. there's not very much else to say at that moment because it's a swirl of confusion as to what took place. so the first phase is simply one of kind of an immediate reaction. d in fairly short order, you move really more toward reflection. if there is a funeral service in this case vice president gore actually attended the service in littleton with the families and gave essentially a homily, a eulogy and a homily

all at once very focused on scripture, an entirely different kind of speech really than the others that both preceded and followed it. and then as this begins to recede, then the discussion moves more toward action. what are we going to do about this? is there anything to do about this? i think it was about ten days out of the incident, of the -- of this tragedy that president clinton went to the rose garden to talk about what the government could do about it. he announced that the white house was going to convene, turned about ten days later, a white house strategy session on children and violence. there was a lot of discussion about violence in pop culture, violence in video games and so forth, and whether there was anything short of stepping all over free speech that could be done about this. so that meeting was scheduled. and then he and democrats in the senate initiated a series -- gun legislation

to close the gun show loophole and require safety locks on all new guns that were sold and so forth. so that debate began ultimately like this debate almost inevitably it was fruitless and nothing was done in that regard. moving a little further along this trajectory, there is hopefully a time for healing. and so pro sicely one month after the shooting i went with the president to littleton to -- for him to deliver a speech to the students who had been moved. they had shut down that high school for the time being and moved all the kids to another high school. he spoke to them in the auditorium there and met with the families beforehand, which is something that i witnessed from the very edge of the room not wanting in any way to intrude on this moment. i think that what really struck

me in that morning was just how important it is for these communities to understand that the nation is focused on their grief through the president. it makes clear that this is not simply an isolated local incident but this is a national tragedy with national consequences and that hopefully some good and some concrete action can come of that. and so the president in these moments i think has got to not only comfort communities but has got to do all of these things each at an appropriate time. and i think we have seen this obviously in recent days and recent years all too often with president obama. >> thank you, jeff. up next is john, senior speech writer for president w. bush and vice president dick cheney. and is currently writing

speeches for private clients. >> thank you. i want to point out first of all that our moderator rob is not just an expert on presidential speech writer. he is the son of a speech writer. one of the best ever. his father author wrote for president kennedy. a wonderful man. rob asked me to talk about crisis during the bush-cheney years. but of course there were no crises during the bush-cheney years. i will talk about the quickest turnaround we ever had. that would be february 1, 2003. that was a saturday morning. and that was the day i got a call about 9:15, 9:30 from our administrative person at the white house saying that mission control had lost touch with our space shuttle columbia and that the worst was feared and that we should prepare for a presidential statement.

so i worked as part of a team with mike and matthew and we had been together since bush had been governor of texas. so we assembled -- i think we were all in mike's west wing office by 10:00 and i don't know if by then we knew exactly what had happened and exactly what the fate of the astronauts was but it was, as i say, the worst was feared. so we got to work on a statement for the president. >> he was at camp david. it was kind of a misty foggy day. they couldn't take him as would be the helicopter. had to be taken by car and motorcade from the mountains out of maryland took quite a while. we didn't see him for some time. we asked for another hour. hat was refused.

i said my motto is where there is no alternative, there is no problem. also it's the case that you had three writers working on this. you didn't have that intense pressure of being one person in the room under extreme conditions time wise. happen to get it on your own. we put our heads together. obviously, we didn't have a lot of space and time. the final speech ended up 375 words and one great contribution came from karen hughes who was president bush's senior advisor and communication. that was a verse from the old testament, from isaiah talking about the creator calls him by name. which led into a nice line for

the president. that the same creator who named all the stars and named the seven souls, we know them today. we also learned in writing this, something that all speech writers have experienced is the ressure doesn't just concentrate your mind. it really clears away the clutter in the writing. you can do something in two hours in a situation like that. it's not going to be of any less quality. there's just something about those kinds of conditions where you don't have to strain for meaning. you don't have to find a way to introduce drama into what it is you're talking about. it's all there. we've been working for george . for a while. at this point, all of us were in our fourth year of writing for president bush. there was something we knew and

that was that this speech to the nation, which -- did not meditate on the tragedy but announced the deaths of the astronauts. this speech wasn't about him. this speech did not use the personal pronoun, not once. president bush like to convey his thought. he like to convey his feelings. he like to do so with words ned of founds -- instead of announcing his frame of mind. he like to convey actual feelings with his words. that's an example. it's an instinct he put into it. of course, we met with him briefly, everything was so compressed before we went ive. went into the speech, it was four minutes. it was all over very fast.

then as always the case with george w. bush, that was over, e reconvened in the oval office momentarily. he said thanks guys. >> thanks. finally, adam frankel speech writer for president obama. he's currently vice president of internal affairs. >> i was assistant on his memoirs which is probably the most impressive credential in his crowd. ted has a story about the missile crisis.

when he was asked to produce two speeches, depending on how the missile crisises unfolded, one in the event of invasion of cuba the other if one was blockade. he couldn't the write about the invasion. he would tell that story how the decision-making process unfold. that played itself out many years later. as i was thinking about stories to share today when raid on bin laden happened. i remember i was actually at home on my couch and got an alert on my blackberry and the president was about to deliver some remarks. i was like, i didn't know about any remarks. i e-mailed all the speech writers. anybody know anything about his.

we were in the dark. ben has a story about not being able to make that speech in advance. he had sat down to write it in advance, started writing tonight, osama bin laden was killed. he said i can't write this. after the raid was successful, he started grab the president, saying, we got to talk about this speech. you know, that's one kind of challenge. picking up on what jeff was saying, i think it's a mark of sort of tragic string of gun violence the country faced. this president had to speak on that topic. i went to write for president obama in 2007, i remember going -- working on a speech then that he delivered in a church on the south side about gun

violence. the speeches have a -- for anybody who speaks about this topic and writers, sort of a numbing familiarity. you write these speeches and it's heart breaking every time. you try to make them as unique and distinct as possible. tell the story about the individuals who's lives were lost. they're so tragically familiar. i remember when i was working on a number of the speeches, these speeches, when people were killed or another tragedy, i think about trying to -- people who were suffering were in the room. how would i tunnel u talk to -- how would i talk to them. how would i want a president talk to them. one story along those lines that was probably the earliest sign was how talented a writer, president obama is.

was early on in the campaign in 2008, he went to speak 15th anniversary of l.a. riots. he didn't want a peach. he -- speech but he wanted some notes. aw a story in the l.a. times about a pregnant woman who had een shot in the belly. she was rushed to the emergency room. it turned out the bullet lodged itself in the flushing part of her baby's arm. the baby was fine. this was the story. extraordinary story. i share this story with president obama. not knowing at all what he would do with this. i'm listening to -- we had a link up, i was listening. no video. i got audio from the event. he weaved this into a -- into

american experience. he weaved this beautiful metaphor for america and merican society. e raised the standard for me and all the other speech writers when i saw -- when i heard that. as a student of all the other speech writers, one of the things that's fun and rewarding as a writer to work with president obama, he would check in not just on moments of national importance, parts of tragedies. he would get very involved in

speeches. he just cared a lot about. it might not have been something that was a tragedy. it might not have been something of great political importance, issues of faith and civil rights. he would just dive in and work with you on. it was a rewarding experience. > thank you. have a discussion. we'll open up to questions. since we're in a room full of professional speech writers, what advice would you give to speech writers who may encounter in their life, whether it's working for a politician or working for a private business person might encounter where, where you got three hours or you got three days but this is a huge high level moment. what advice would you give? >> well, one of the better pieces of advice i got while i

was -- i worked for vice president bush for 2 1/2 years before president reagan, i wrote for 2 1/2 years. in the course of that i was talking to someone who had been -- who was writing for a governor. he said, what we do, we keep files. we keep files on all the big issues. part of this is keeping up. when you're working for a political executive, you're working on -- you want to know where the edge of debate is and where the edge of discussion is. whether it's on economic policy or the press or the opposition and where your people. where it's public opinion and where is the edge. what are the aren'ts out -- arguments out there. you want to have it. of course with the president, you have quite a few issues. i made a point of doing than i have stories. i collect stories.

when -- we're talking here about emergencies in a sense when you're in the white house, everything is an emergency. there's never enough time. f you're well prepared, when i was thinking about this, i was thinking, well, you know, we pretty much had control of the agenda. we always knew very rarely, something like challenge, or something else would come up. there wasn't much. we were driving the agenda and there was a back and a forth. somebody would make a political run at us. we were always prepared. e always knew -- it was part an ongoing discussion. it was part of the ongoing debate in washington. by the way, i wouldn't say that

when you -- it feels like nothing comes of it when it doesn't go your way. the whole point of the debate is that some place or another, it setted oh -- it sells down to some decision. t's not fruitless. it's not fruitless. many of them, you plan for all major areas which you're engaged in. where you're in part of the debate. then when surprises come, you have much less distance to cover to deal with them. >> i agree with that. i think that in these moments of crisis of various kinds, whether we're talking about the

shuttle disaster or shooting or any of number kinds of crisis or disasters, what it is that the audience and in this case, the national audience or if you're a ceo running a large enterprise, that's a substantial audience as well. there maybe a public element or a global company. a global audience of employees and investors and so forth. there's confusion in these moments. there is confusion at first what happened. i talked about that a moment ago. in a larger sense, i think what people are looking for, if they can't necessarily articulate that, is meaning. it's understanding. the president or the ceo or anyone else in a substantial position like this, is an authority figure. we don't always regard them that way.

they absolutely are. i think that we look to these authority figures to help us understand -- to help us connect so we can each other our -- achieve our own understanding. certainly the president will not stand in the moment of tragedy and say to you this is what this means. lot of the speeches that i reviewed when i was thinking about this discussion, acknowledge the meaning is elusive. president clinton in these moments quoted st. paul and seeing through a glass darkly and acknowledging that we will probably never really understand what drives human beings to do these acts and commit these acts of violence. we should hold on to our faith regardless. i think that what you're looking for here to the best you can manage it while recognizing there are limits on

this is a clarifying moment. at least clarify the issues. clarify the fundamentals. think that's where we are all grappling with in these kinds of speeches. to touch that and acknowledge in and give some direction to the way people themselves as they search their own souls. to connect them to what's really at stake. >> one thing i would say, adding to that speech writers, it's important that you don't ver write. as i mentioned, so much of what the speech writer does especially in the political world, try to give drama and force and special meaning. whether it's the speech on federal education policy or the latest announcement about what's going to happen at hud.

you try to make it -- you try to give it some extra meaning or make it part of a larger story. that's really your job. in these moments of crisis, these big dramatic tragic moments, speech will not fail unless it's been over written. the moment requires plain english. >> not over writing but also ot saying the wrong thing. i hear this discussion, kent state, which is worst part in the early moment of the nixon administration, student was illed and nixon give given this speech about cambodia incursion. that's the only foreign policy speech pat buchanan did

write. instruction from the president was don't show it to henry. he said he would have calmed it down. to make it worse, statement came over the white house after the students were killed, speech writer staff sworn they never seen it. usually the rule is we would see all the words before it went out as a final check. i don't know where the statement came from. somebody if the press office. it got out. then a sentence out of context can become inflammatory. and the phrase was something that went out. dissent turns to violence. it invites tragedy. that sounds okay except it seem to be blaming the victims. it wasn't accompanied by other expressions of sympathy or regret.

it had a terrible effect on the nation's campuses. >>. >> i don't think it does. hat happened the next day, nixon went to the pentagon and a woman's husband was in vietnam. and tried to say to her, hurt husband is such a great hero. we had bombs around the campuses blowing things up. that got played up. the wrong ord at the wrong time can have a terrible effect. the father at kent state said my daughter was not a bomb. polarized everything. it was a long time -- it was a real turning point. wrong words at the wrong time. >> it's not just on tragedies where one has to be careful about over writing.

ot every speech is supposed to be the gettiesburg address. i remember early on writing a speech, labor audience, had got into this. it was red meat. i remember getting a call from axelrod, it was very clear immediately that he just gotten a call from the president. said ax begins by telling a story about reporter in chicago. there was a lesson about to ome. i wrote this piece. i thought it was the most beautiful piece that one can read and write about the opening of an airport. i talked about planes and all of this stuff. editor describes him saying, when did it open and what airlines will be flying out and what are the routes. i got the message. it was great advice. ax himself a great writer. that

was an early lesson for me. you got to write for the occasion. if you don't, you're going to miss the mark. >> mary kate when you were talking about your experience being in japan and not knowing what was going on, it struck me if something like that happened today, it will be information verload. people will be -- reporters will be tweeting about it who were there. you wouldn't have to watch the japanese plane. how has the social media transformation change how presidents communicate with the public in moments of great oment like this? >> i will give one response

here, which is one of the things that i really admire about president obama and one of the reasons i was drawn to him initially, he sort of resist that temptation to play into a lot of this. the 30 second sound bites and all of this stuff. i really respected that. as a writer, that was the kind offer. i wanted to work for. somebody who is more concerned about telling the whole story, making the complete argument and less concerned about the other approach which to quote the aid to a governor who will not name, who i once helped, he said well, our view of speech writer is bringing sound bites together. i told that story who liked so much he included it in his book as an example of what not to do. i think there is one to be

mindful. now everybody is mindful of how the speech will be conveyed in a certain media environment and the speech writers is think being that. i do think it's important for a speech writer to think about the integrity of the speech. when you start thinking swinging sound bites together and writing nuggets and sort of compiling them into a speech, you lose something. the speech of the integ-- integrity gets lost. >> i have somewhat similar view. i think too many speeches are just the speaker. i remember at one time seeing a senator give a talk. afterwards, i went up to the podium and it was a list of

sound bites. it was given by his staff. he said you got to weave them into whatever he says. i don't think of that. agree with you totally on that. let me say something about the changing medium environment and technology environment. this big difference between what you have been doing and what we did, about 1988 the new rehub had a cover story about the change sound bites. it turned out they had timing, somebody had done it. somebody was sitting there timing the quote from speeches and presidential speeches

during political campaigns. i believe this was 1968. the typical clip of the speech that went on the evening news was 52 seconds. by the time we were -- this is now 1988 -- we were playing, it was down to seven seconds. we have three networks to get through. if they didn't cover our stuff or the "new york times" or the washington post, might as well ot have been said. if you look at speeches, they are a coherent arguments about the character of the country. we also knew that we had to get through that seven seconds for different audience. everyone here will know, maybe you will too. when you're writing speeches, i had layers of audiences in ind. i cared about what the audience in front of the president was saying.

i care about that line of reporters back was thinking. i cared about what the editors were thinking. i cared about what the american people were thinking. i cared about what audiences around the world were thinking and all of them had to be collapsed into this one document. very familiar. let me just finish. i knew that the line in the back of the room were up for debate. they were also not particularly friendly. it mattered that we understood what kinds of things they like to quote. what kind of language and what kind of sentence structure. ll of these things that are in the tv business called good

sound and in the news business, are called a good quote. we made sure that we had one or two in. you do not want ten of them in because you want to control the story. we were under particular pressure to come up with one or two of those. we weren't going to get the 52 seconds. it is like now. your man was the leader on this. one of few times i will say good thing about president obama. that's a joke. come on. f you look at the 2008 campaign and his dual with hillary clinton, battle of the rimaries, week after week. this is the age of cable. what does that mean? when they come out, a good chunk of the speech, 10 to 15

minutes will be covered. then they'll cut off and give the same amount of time to the other side. she would come out and do what politicians had been doing. recognizing everybody in the audience. that was about the time they cut away because they were allowing 15 minutes. he would come out and right into his message each time and at the time, he was through with his 15 minutes. he had got everything he needed to say to the country out. >> we thought of that. >> you were a generation ahead of them. now this is the last point i'll make, your dad got up once and said, why are there more memorable phrases? the answer to that was, people in the positions we had no

longer have -- we are -- television coverage entire peeches regularly. up know you got a million people watching or at least several hundred thousand every time you get up. there's much less pressure to come up with that seven seconds. you got much time as you ant. >> very quickly to sort of bridge the generations. clark, as you put it. the clinton white house, we were presmartphone and pretwitter. we had cell phones, nobody put them together. at the same time, we were dealing very actively with and struggling with the fragmentation of the media environment and the acceleration of the news cycle.

this was very much topic of conversation internally in the white house. this was a period of the dvents of msnbc and fox news and the networks didn't control the conversation to the extent that they did. the major newspapers didn't control the conversations to the fent that they did. other newspapers were disappearing online was rising. how do you deal with this? one of the thing that was noted at the time was that president clinton gave a lot of speeches. bewrote our own internal analysis. we found that -- i have the numbers a little bit off. a similar point in their presidency, nonelection year late in the presidency, harry truman gave 88 speeches. president reagan gave 300. resident clinton gave 550. statistics like that will wheel it to justice that president clinton was disciplined and

love to get in front of a microphone. t's absolutely the case. anybody has watched bill clinton, he love to give a speech. he was good at it with no help from any of us. but at the same time, this was an acknowledgement of the demands on a modern president. he is expected to be out there everyday and during period of time when the president has not been actively trying to drive the conversation, he's come in for a lot of criticism. adam will remember this because you were there. during that summer when the debate was heating up over the affordable care act, and president obama went relatively quiet because a lot of the negotiations were happening behind the scenes. he was not looking to complicate things by giving a lot of speeches that would inflame the other side. the other side jumped into the breach.

this was tea party summer. when the president finally came out there, it was in september of 2010, right after the summer vacation to give a big speech to take control. this was seen as a great acknowledgement that he's been too quiet for too long. presidents are expected to be seen and heard all the time. all the more so in a time of witter and so forth. it creates on a part not only a president but a ceo and university presidents and heads of foundation. there's feeling of that if you're not tweeting once an our. it is harder today than ever efore to control the onversation.

there are too many livers out there. ou got to keep trying. >> after this, i wanted to go to questions from the audience. we have microphones on either side. please pick up the microphone and we'll get to you quickly. >> president nixon had advice that would have applied to people in this room. he asked us, before we sent the speech to us, he called us in and said i want you to do this. he said underline the red the aragraph that you think that will be the lead in tomorrow's paper. what quote would they use? the thing was, we would do that and we couldn't find it.

we couldn't one that summed up the message. we started to write them in. that was just sound bites but as good summaries, i think that's wonderful advice to writers. crystalize everything and do a few words. >> that's before you start writing. >> i'm with the client. what sentence do you want your audience to go away with. >> when i say this to young people, eisenhower used to say you should be able to sit it on he back of a match book. >> this isn't grade school where people are thinking you're uncool. here we are. >> probably shesoh interested in knowing president clinton referred to his 1988 convention speech.

one of the great failures of speeches he made and one of the most remarkable turn arounds to become the president four years later. any comments on that? >> you did refer to it from time to time. i think he has a different perspective on it. not that the speech was a great success, he's never argued hat. he had a set of obligations and that contributed to the length. that was the fact that he wanted us to understand. >> this is summer of 1988. clinton is the third term. was in law school between years and i was at me house in northern wisconsin watching that convention.

one of my pals i group with was across town. he called up during the clinton speech. he said are you watching the future president? said i sure am. we both thought he was presidential material. >> good afternoon, thank you all for being here. what one of the things that got we as speech writers, i want to drive outcomes of policy, conversations and policy debate. can you speak to a time where you were down, you were behind in the polling. you didn't have the votes if congress. you were trying to get a policy done and a series of speeches where you felt like you turned round.

>> modestly prevents itself. >> you will be in your speaker. our president. >> question whether the speech can redirect. >> ted used to talk about this. you talk about how -- ted believed in few other. i say one circumstance that comes to mind here is on healthcare. i worked on the speech american medical association when we were kick off the drive for healthcare reform. i remember talking to dan pfeifer who was communication nstructor.

>> not only that, cbo came out ith a study.

we thought would help sort of frame the debate, explain what was at stake. so we lost. not exactly an example what we turned it.

george bush his last speech as he left office he said we can talk about the treaties, the legislation, the end of the cold war. all sorts of things that heageed during my administration. the thing i want to be most want to be remembered is the points of life. >> when i was that age, community service was something that the juvenile justice system imposed on people as an punishment. there has been a complete sea change in the idea of community service and solitary movement across this country has spread overseas. i think there are a lot of reasons for that. do i think george bush deserves credit for that. i think he threw his rhetoric over the years, caused a cultural change in the way people view volunteers.

it's been a great thing for our country. >> in 1988, vice president bush was quite a bit behind in the polls coming out of the democratic convention. several weeks before, i written a speech. i do not talk about peeches. i written a peach in which at the beginning of the democratic convention, about a week before it. about maybe two weeks. this is during the platform process. ted sorenson said we're going to have to be short and bland bout the platform. i wrote a speech for the president which had a line this it. the democrats put on their

political treachery coat and sun glasses, wrapped their platform and never whisper the l word again. if you remember that campaign later, the l-word became a note. but it didn't in that peach. an event in iran on the day it was delivered -- the night before we shot down an airbus by accident. no presidential speech was going to get coverage that day. it came to the democratic convention and we went dark all through the convention. we did not -- i don't think you all did or vice president did. >> it's something you'll never get away with now. >> we really had teams at the democratic convention. i get the assignment to write the presidential weekly address

on saturday conventions end on thursdays. i decided we had lost but this was the right moment. you talked about moments. might as well never been said. it never appeared in the new ork times. we started driving the l-word as a term. by the time the convention came, the vice president wasn't campaigning because he was out of money between the two conventions. we were there all the time and we broke the l word and we were back even with them with dukakis. afterwards, we drove and drove and finally dukakis got so frustrated with it, he said he's been dodging whether he

was a liberal. he said well i am a liberal in the style of harry truman. nobody heard the rest. that is that. that's how you can turn around something. it's the right phrase but it's also the right moment and then keeping at it. >> we're bumping up against time. >> question for the whole panel. the poet richard wilber once gave a graduation address called "the speech and ceremony" he said it was to enable people to respond to great events in their lives by feeling appropriate motion. will you say that's the duty of the president of the great events on national life? >> yes. thank you. >> my question is, what's your advice on how you approach using humor when matters of diplomacy and decor rum have to be factored in. so you come up that's funny

despite that it is appropriate. >> i got pulled into a lot of humor speeches. one rule i would say across the board it's very tricky to use humor in a situation where there will be people in the audience where the remarks are translated. you tend not to do humor at an international toast overseas. there's so in pitfalls in the translation. that's one rule. just keep it straight when you're in a language situation. second, the white house -- we had a guy, which i'm sure there's plenty of guys floating around, who was freelance writer. he lived on malibu beach in california with a fax machine. he would fax in these jokes. i saved these fax.

it's a joke fall. they're all formula jokes. he would just change the name. in fact those back in the 1980's were about donald trump. don't be afraid to take formula jokes and just change the words and change the name to the current crowd. second, at the white house, you can't just feel from carson and leno and letterman now, you can't just take stuff off tv nd steal it. the essence of a joke is two ideas being put together that have nothing to do with each other. that is the surprise that causes the laughter. we would do for the big white house correspondents dinners and gridiron, we'd have the

researchers come up with lists of all the current stuff. top movies top songs. we would call in all of these funny people. whether they were professionally associated with us or not. put a big bottle of scotch in the middle of the table. something with michael jackson and speaker of the house. you come up with these funny things. 95% of it completely unusable by the president of the united states. we were con trained because george w. bush did not like humor that belittled other people or insulted people or any way made fun especially of his political opponents. that was a great credit to him and the reason why he got so much done in a bipartisan way. he did not stoop to insulting

his political opponents. we were left with jokes about broccoli, the dog. you can't make new jersey jokes, west virginia jokes. the list gets smaller and smaller and the pile on the floor gets bigger and bigger. it was great fun and it really makes you appreciate the people who have to stay up and do omedy monologue. we would come up with stuff. original comedy is really fun ut really difficult. >> i gathered, -- we got one people that want to ask questions. >> i'm an undergrad here.

we have a speech writing advisory group. i think this is a more general speech writing question. are there any crutches that you see used a lot in speech writing specific to presidential administrations? do you guys have any pet peeves? >> let's get the other question. >> my question is if you're in a position that has so much pressure all the time, you guys spoke about earlier, when you make a mistake and the american public takes something you wrote in the direction that you not intended. how will you deal with the disappointment. is there any way for a strategy to pop back up and get back into it after you've been beaten down? >> the questions that annoy you and the times you need a crutch? >> i can answer. you just get used to some of this stuff. i wrote a speech on education, got up next day, it was a

peech about nothing. there are plenty of other speeches where you write this thing, you deliver it and you get hammered on the news. it comes with the territory. disappointment is sort of the deal. >> a way to avoid awful things like that happening are that the president was going to the drug summit in columbia. very dangerous. first half of the speech was on reducing supply. second half was on reducing demand. the guy who wrote it had this habit, which was a great habit of walking the hall and reading the speech out loud in order to catch tongue twisters. we walked down the halls and they will listen to my peach. get through the supply part.

segway sentence between the two was, and big bust are not enough. wait, back up. i don't think that's a good sentence there. if he hospital read it out loud, he never would have caught it. i think you got to do stuff like that to avoid pitfalls. second to your question about pet peeves, the one that i think is adding to the ivisiveness. they mischaracter the other ide. t would be more honest and more informative to actually correctly summarize the other side. so that your arcs against -- arguments against it are stronger. that's my pet peeve.

there are those who say. >> there are those who say theirry kate was wrong. >> i will say there are degrees to this thing. probably the worst thank this can happen when you're writing these speeches when you work really hard on something and it gets ignored. it's either up ended by events or it's not interesting enough for anybody to bother covering it. a lot of things the president say escapes the notice of the nation. you're mostly happy to get attention. we're a little bit envious of ne another when we do. one of the jokes i wrote for the white house correspondents dinner early in 1988 i listed a very angry maureen dowd column.

she took public defense at a joke i written in. history not wounded but actually delighted. 'm being honest. sometimes this need for your speeches to get noticed, reach a kind of extreme that might be a little unfortunate. after president bush delivered his axis of evil line and licited a stronger reaction if iran and my joke was in the maureen dowd column, one of my olleagues called me up, he said, you know, nothing you ever wrote got million people out on the street of tehran. ou can hope. i just want to more seriously say this briefly. circle back to a larger point

that adam was touching on about the power of these speeches. this is a response to your question about power of the speeches to change. we all recognize that a speech is not a work iloka mee. there are landmark speeches that become a pivot point in istory or in campaign. i think back to the reverend wright speech, so the called speech that then senator obama gave in the campaign. that was the defining moment. certainly a single speech can make a tremendous difference in all kinds of ways. for the most part, there's a whole school of thought actually, maybe some of you are

familiar with. there's a growing school of thought that speeches don't matter at all. if they matter, it's in the wrong way. when president speak, they can only polarized. they can only deliver ounterproductive speeches. there's a political scientists, i won't name him because i'm not going to give him publicity here on who produced number of works said the great number of speeches didn't make a difference at all. i think the way to think about speeches in terms of impact, is

not sort of an instantaneous work of ailky mi but an argument. it transforms discussions that are not immediate in a given ole. but presidents are in a truly unique position to help steer the national discussion in a certain direction. does not always go the direction that they want. they have enormous influence even today. >> once in a while, hate speech can really move a needle. nixon saved his career with that speech. half hour public opinion turned upside down. >> he told about his pet peeve about president nixon.

nixon had this device he would use in the speeches. he said my staff told me to take the easy way. 'm not going to do that. sometimes bill would walk by the door at the oval office, he would say take the easy way mr. president. >> thank you all for taking the easy way and listening to this great panel. most of all, thank you all for his wonderful panel. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national able satellite corp. 2015]

captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption contents and accuracy. visit ncicap.org >> tonight on the communicators author robbie balk joins us from new york to talk about his book. he worked for microsoft for 22 years including four years as president of its entertainment division guiding its creation and development. he also discusses technology, tech competition, and microsoft and the importance of civics in american life. >> to me it's the work that any of us can do and all of us should and must do to make our communities operate more

efficiently and effectively. to serve citizens in a better way. it's old school civics. >> watch >> next, q&a with ronald feinman. then, washington journal live with your calls and this morning's headlines. this week on q&a, ronald feinman , author of "assassinations, threats, and the american presidency." in the book feinman looks of the , many assassination attempts against presidents and presidential candidates.

you have a book called "assassinations, threats, and the american presidency." why did you get interested in this? prof feinman: it began when i was in college. i had to write a paper and i chose the lincoln assassination. i was fascinated by it. the following year, the kennedy assassination took place. ever since, i have been interested in it. i have done interviews with various groups, and lectures. two years ago, roman littlefield asked me to write a book. here i am semiretired. i figured, why not yucca assad me out and i said yes. they sort me out. brian: you start with andrew i was pleased to say us. jackson.