cohosted event. it is one hour and a half. good afternoon everybody, i am not a beach writer. but i am making a film about them. this is how i came to be here today. i made a film in 2007 about the obama campaign. my favorite part of the film was he spent time with the speechwriters. dicki met stick goodwin -- goodwin, his stories are so rich and so colorful i thought it would be a great subject for documentary.

>> he knows all these guys really well. i would like to introduce robert. you are in for a real treat your .t thank you alicia for that wonderful production. i would like to thank georgetown for hosting us, i want to think c-span for preserving for posterity what will be great wisdom from this panel.

so the space shuttle has blown up, there has been a terrorist attack, there has been a mass shooting, the nation as the song goes turns its lonely eyes the president. the presidentera, 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, expressing our national grief, our national joy. clarifying the meaning of what has happened and where the country goes forward from here. nation turnsse -- to the president, whom does the president turn? there is not yet an app for that. so the president has a go old school. george washington in his first

term was thinking about maybe term.ng down after his he asked james madison to help write his farewell address. he ended up serving two terms. for years on he does it off the madison draft and asked alexander hamilton to look at it and make any suggestions. that instantly, gives george washington the greatest beach writing team ever. -- speech writing team ever. that is until the trump administration which will have bigger, classier speech writing team. presidents from beginning have sought help on occasion. it wasn't until the rise of mass medication that beach writer as we think of them he came part of the presidential orbit. the first president to have a full-time speech writer was harding.

it was no surprise that harding was also the first radio president. as mass media has evolved going from radio to live television to social media, the ways that the president is received and prepared changed as well as the role of residential's reach writers. -- speechwriters. we have representatives from six administrations, the nexen, , bush 43,sh, clinton obama. we could of got into more people on stage. so i'm going to go chronologically and ask everyone to speak for no more than five minutes. i will cut you off if i have to. i forgot to ring a watch today, abc me check my iphone i am

looking at the time. speaking five minutes about how handled theent's situation. the first person sitting immediately to my left, is only heebner. the director of the white house writing staff. he is now addressing university. -- george washington university. >> thank you so much. what used to be a group that preferred to remain anonymous like ghost writers, students are own experience at george washington university, i

just came for my speech writing class. students are lining up to get into my courses. the regarded as exciting, professional prospects for them. they don't know quite how to make it work, there is no clear career at latter. they have leads if we have any good students who might -- networks to be able to take it vantage of these opportunities. it is a lot of fun. learn aboutstudents speech writing from the west wing tv show. it romanticizes. fit with thed parental -- panel because i did not work directly on big crisis speeches.

sometimes rescuing comments that might have in a time of national emotion gotten in the wrong direction, not only be able to rescue them, sometimes adding my own little touch. thought thatt related to a big crisis was in 1972. one and it oh that quickly came to my mind, i had worked quite hard with a lot of people on the presidents address to the joint session on the canadian parliament. he is going to address the parliament, a lot of people took the speech very seriously as a state occasion. in the last couple days before the trip, president seem to disappear, there is no reaction backed him him.

-- back from him. we were waiting for the last decider to make the commitment. nexen was silence. then he said it please add this to the draft. it was a short paragraph about vietnam. i do not know what it was about. kissingerese.in i changed the wording and then got a call. very unhappy was with the way the wording had changed. i had to go the camp david. to got to the chase, what was happening was nixon was deciding whether to mind the harbors or

these military effort in vietnam. he just been to china, everything was falling into place. the first arms control treaty was going to be signed. kissinger felt that since should not do anything that might upset the russians or soviets. felt nexen was being offensive. he was making the decision, he find decided to do this against kissinger's device -- advice. led to thes later it end of the american involvement in the non-. -- in a vietnam. he did not change one word. it is probably the best speech he ever gave. david, allo the camp he did was ask if i had was

having a good time? was i comfortable, that i want to go bowling? dark isitting in the pondering this. later, the, years director was showing me through the nixon papers. he said let's look up your name, let's see what pops up. he put my name in, when i changed the language in the speech, halderman writes that nixon got into a tirade about house beach writers do not understand foreign policy. we need to get a speechwriter on aboutc staff to write

international -- he wrote typical nixon tantrum. the language had been change in some way. that is why nick's and was so nice to me when i went down to camp david to make sure that i was happy. i think that he had realized that a be yet overstepped. laidension may have somewhat into the scene. it was terrific. and dealtn was shared even though i did not know at the time will was brewing in the vietnam. nixon called the bluff. on, he waswent overwhelmingly elected. stuff happen. to work on asked anything related to watergate. givenk speechwriters were a little but of discretion to

what they worked on what they did not work on and what they felt passionate about. diversified staffs. i'd --very dispersive diversified staffs here at. we did not write about grand aims, state of the union addresses, another senior writer, i was a very much a junior writer. the point of this, i did not get involved in that speech. by did experience the atmosphere which such speeches came. i paid a lot of attention to other presidents. end, the morethe likely it to them was to really

write it himself. judge wrote for president reagan. . >> has everyone seen the cover of his book? how i get on the good side of the moderator. it is a great book. today,the reagan chapter to make sure he did not pop something on me die did not remember. youour introduction, mentioned the challenger those written by peggy newton. was -- ithings i did hadn't remembered it. reagan realized something was coming up that 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. she was known at the time for them. time aboutes at the the one who always went to the funerals. as she was working on it, one of the nsc sent -- senior staff came over and had some notes from the president. during the disaster, the president had talked about the need to speak to children and to talk to them about the future that adventure and frontiers required a willingness to accept danger. if you read the speech, you see a theme coming up right away. then you see, it was written very fast, the next section is

drake had diedis on that day. clearly, itout that was one of the researchers came in with a list of things that happen on that day that were appropriate to the moment. yet the work very fast. line, to touch the face of god. it was the beginning and end of the poem called flight written by a canadian. -- during the first world war. sometime ago i was giving talks on speech writing by a professor, he said, well, on something i had written, did work this out?

did you think about this? no. you never do that. or at least i never did. with the, really the truly memorable things. there are a few times you do that when you're writing things that have humor in them, but mostly it's a moment where this sense comes to you. and this is where the artistry comes in or at least the impulse toward artistry. speech writing is not about flowery words or ornate phrases. one of the early speeches i received back from reagan he had crossed out every fifth or sixth word. he hadn't crossed out a single sentence but crossed out every fifth or sixth word and he had written at the top, well, this is -- actually, no, he had written, well. this is a fine speech. i've just sweated a little of the fat out of it. that's what he wrote. ow you're supposed to applaud.

guy -- 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 captured that and captured, ending with a quote is extremely powerful. and 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's research. some of it's inspiration. not everyone is obligated to do impressions of their former boss. [laughter] >> it is certainly encouraged. our next speaker is mary kate, speechwriter for president bush 41. she was executive producer of 41 on 41 which was about bush

41 which aired on cnn. she still writes, sometimes writes speeches. she, and most importantly from my perspective she is a contributing editor at "u.s. news & 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 speechwriter in our office. as a result, i got assigned not the big challenge or crisis type of speeches. i did a loft spelling bee winners and awards. there could have been a crisis if the turkey that got pardoned somehow met his fate on the holiday but i never had that crisis. by the way, george bush 41 was the first president to pardon a thanksgiving turkey. that is a great tradition that has lived on. and you're always guaranteed to make the nightly news.

reagan did not pardon the turkey. >> no, no. evil empire. >> so by the end of -- by january of 1992, so i had been on the job for three years by then, i had worked my way up from the 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 the here he boyfriend on japanese prime minister at the state dinner. i had written the speech for the negatives morning which was to the japanese diet. 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 watching on television. once we got the word something happened we all turned on the tv's and it was sort of like, probably not a politically correct thing to say but it was sort of like a godzilla movie the wrong way.

you have those movies where they're japanese and the lips are moving and english is coming out. so american anchors in atlanta with crazy looks on their faces but japanese was coming out so we couldn't understand what happened. they had subtitles. they were showing this god awful film of the president, you know, keeling over and it really looked like he was dead. and there was no, you know, words on the screen to know otherwise. we all thought, holy cow. i think the president is either dead or about to die tonight. and they were saying don't move. everybody stay where you are. do not answer any phone calls. don't talk to anybody outside ntil you talk to me. okay. so about midnight i get a phone call. it's from nick brady whose the sect tariff the treasury and a dear friend of president bush's. he says, i understand you wrote the speech for tomorrow morning. they've just asked me to deliver it in the president's place. can you meet with me right now? and i said, of course. so i go meet with him. d he is absolutely shell

shocked. he clearly is a good friend of the president's and thinks like we all do maybe the president is already dead. he said, i don't know what to do. 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. george bush wants to do this, george bush wants to do that? 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 like i said genuinely emotional about the situation. so, finally, i'm looking at my clock and thinking, i really don't want to have to rewrite this whole thing. [laughter] >> so i think it would be absolutely brilliant if you just -- you're right. okay.

[laughter] . >> so he gets up the next morning. he goes to the diet. i'm watching it on the closed circuit. and he starts -- he says, i will now deliver the speech as if george bush were here. and he says, you know, i, george bush, blah, blah, blah. off he goes. and every single time the man stopped to take a breath, whether it was an applause line or not, the japanese diet went nuts and just clapped like crazy as if they were sort of going to applaud george bush back into good health. so we got out of there and nick brady said, oh, my god, mary kate, that was the greatest. i can't believe it. and it was very sweet that he was so excited but i really think in hindsight, and i knew at that minute. 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 this had happened to george bush and i think it was, you know, 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 if some sort of misfortune 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 speechwriter for president clinton, the author of several books including "supreme power franklin roosevelt vs. the supreme court" and the founding writer at west wing writers the democratic focused speechwriters group here in town. >> thanks. i didn't come prepared to talk about this but mary kate i 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 and i will say this is probably not a revelation to any of you but college students are usually pretty creative in coming up with ways of describing throwing up boyfriending being old school. >> yes. >> and so there was a moment that followed this incident when the term on campus was for throwing up, you know, after an over indulgent night, you know, "greeting ties was miazowa." se it in a sentence, you know? totally greeted miazowa all over the common room. so, you know. we were very politically focused where i went to college. so i don't know if you'll

forgive me for going from comedy to tragedy, but we talked about the president in his role as comforter-in-chief. and my president, president clinton, is obviously well known as someone who famously said, i feel your pain. we actually have learned, you know, you can fact check this, that it wasn't actually president clinton who originated that phrase in the presidential context. it was president carter who first said, i feel your pain. i think that president clinton is just probably better at it han some other presidents have been. and it was a particular, and actually i think a very important strength. easy to kind of have fun with but really very important in, you know, all sorts of contexts that presidents are confronted with. i'll just talk briefly about one in which i was involved in and it's one that feels very

fresh in this moment. and 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 meticulously, methodically planned and executed. and so there was something about -- there had been a wave of school shootings. beginning in ernest really in 1997 there had been a whole series from paducah, kentucky to pearl, mississippi, to jonesboro, arkansas, to springfield, oregon, across the country. every one of these shocking, 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. and peggy noonan wrote a 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 didn't feel that way very much. i worked with president clinton on a number of different speeches related to that horrible moment and i think it's useful actually to think about a moment like this not as a 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 stuff is up online in p.d.f. form and this is both of you,

if not you already, you're next. and so i actually dug back into my own files to take a look at this. and i think what struck me is that 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 really at that moment because it's a swirl of confusion as to what actually took place. so the first phase is simply one of kind of an immediate reaction. d in fairly short order, you move really more to reflection. if there is a funeral service, in this case vice president

gore actually attended the service in littleton with the families and gave, you know, essentially a homily annual cxsgsufcxds ology all at once, very -- homily and eulogy, very focused on scripture, entirely different from the others that preceded and followed it. and then as this begins to recede but only begins to recede the discussion moves more to action. what are we going to do about this? is there anything to do about this? i think it was about 10 days out of the incident of the -- 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 out about 10 days later what he called the white house strategy session on children and violence. there was a lot of discussion about violence and pop culture, violence and 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 of reforms and gun legislation to close the gun show loop hoel and require safety locks on all new guns that were sold and so forth. so that began ultimately like this debate almost inevitably as it was a fruitless debate in the end and nothing was done in that regard. and then moving a little further along this trajectory there is hopefully time for healing. and so precisely one month after the shootings i went with the president to littleton to -- for him to deliver a speech to the students. they hadshot shut down the high school for the time being and moved all the kids to another high school and 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 this is not simply an isolated, local incident, but this is a national tragedy with national consequences and that, hopefully, some good and 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've seen this obviously in recent days and ecent years all too often with president obama.

>> thank you, jeff. up next is john mcconnell senior speechwriter for george w. bush and for vice president dick cheney. and is currently writing speeches for private clients. >> thank you. i want to point out, first of all, our moderator, rob, is not just an expert on presidential speechwriters. he is the son of a presidential speechwriter, one of the best ever. his father arthur wrote for president kennedy and was a man we all admired and liked very much. 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. [laughter] >> i will talk about the quickest turn-around we ever had. that would be february first, 2003. that was a saturday morning. 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. o i worked as part of a team with mike and matthew skully and we'd been together since bush had been governor of texas. 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 and so we got to work on a statement for the president. he was at camp david for the weekend and they were bringing him in. it was kind of a misty, foggy day. so they couldn't take him as would be the custom by helicopter. they had to take him by car. and a motorcade from the mountains out of maryland took quite a while. so we didn't see him for some

time. we got writing about 10:00 and were told we had two hours. the speech had to be ready by noon. we asked for another hour. 1:00. and that was refused. so i've often said my motto, not original to me, but my motto is where there is no alternative there is no problem. so it also is the case that you have three writers working on this and so you didn't have that intense pressure of being one person in the room under extreme conditions time wise having to get this out on your own. we knew we could do it because we put our heads together. obviously, we didn't have a lot of space. we didn't have a lot of time. at final speech ended up 375 words and one great contribution came from karen hughes, who was president bush's indispensable senior adviser in communications and

that was a verse from the old testament i think from isaiah talking about the creator who calls forth the starry hosts one by one, calls them by name, which led into a very nice line for the president that the same creator who named all the stars knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. i also learned in writing this something that all speechwriters have experienced doesn't just re concentrate your mind. it really clears away the clutter in the writing. you could do something in two hours in a situation like that, it's not going to be of any less quality than something you've been given a week to work on. there is just something about those kind 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 also as i mentioned have

been working for george w. for so at this point, we were all of us in our fourth year of writing for president bush and there was something we knew instinctively and that was that this speech to the nation, did not just meditate on the tragedy but also announced the deaths of the astronauts. this speech wasn't about him and did not use the personal pronoun once. president bush always liked to convey his thoughts and he always liked to convey his feelings but he liked to do so with words instead of simply announcing his frame of mind he would like to convey actual feeling with his words. an example, an instinct he kind of put into us. of course we met with him briefly. everything was so compressed, as i say. met with him briefly before the

-- before he went live at 2:04 in the afternoon. he made some changes. put some touches on it. went into the speech. it was four minutes. it was all over very fast. it was in the cabinet room which was the first time a president ever addressed the nation from the cabinet room. no special meaning to that other than it was thought to be a good venue. as always the case with george w. bush when that was over we reconvened in the oval office momentarily and as he always did said, thanks, guys. >> thanks. finally, adam frankel, speechwriter for president obama in his first term. he is currently vice president of external affairs with amdela. am i pronouncing that right? >> yes. >> thank you. >> i was also assistant to ted sorenson for a number of years on his memoirs which is probably the most impressive credential in this crowd, writing speeches in the white

house is probably second to that. ted had this story about the cuban missile crisis where he was a member of the x-come which gathered during the missile crisis. when he was asked to produce two speeches depending on how the missile crisis unfolded, one in the event of an invasion with the he other blockades, he went to write the speeches and he couldn't write the one about the invasion. he could only write blockade one. he would tell that story as a way of showing how the decision making process unfolded during the crisis. that sort of played itself out many years later as i was thinking about stories to share today when the raid on bin laden happened several years back. i remember i was actually at home on my couch and got an alert on my blackberry saying the president was about to go deliver some remarks. i was like, i don't know about any remarks.

so i e-mailed the speechwriters. anyone know anything about this? and we were all totally in the dark except ben, who was the speechwriter appointed to work on that speech and who had been a part of those deliberations. and ben has a story about not being able to write that speech in advance either. that he had sat down to write it in advance and, you know, started writing tonight osama bin laden was killed in a raid and he said i can't write this. what if things go horribley wrong? so after the raid was successful he sort of grabbed the -- he started grabbing the president and saying we got to talk about this speech. of now, that's one kind challenge, but picking up on what jeff was saying i think it's a mark of just sort of this tragic string of gun violence the country has faced that this president has had to speak on that topic so often.

i went to write for president obama in 2007 a couple weeks after he announced his candidacy and i remember going and working on a speech then that he delivered in a church on the south side on gun violence. and these speeches have a, for anybody who speaks about this topic, and for the writers i think who work on these speeches, sort of a numbing familiarity. you write these speeches and it's heart breaking every time. d so you try to make them as unique and as distinct as possible and tell the story about the individuals whose lives were lost because that's what helps them stand up because they are so tragically familiar in so many cases. you try, i remember when i would work on a lot of, a number of these speeches, these speeches, i mean, when people were killed in the gun violence or another kind of tragedy you'd, you know, i would think about trying to, if the people who were suffering were in the room how would i talk to them? how would i want a president to

talk to them? just a few of them. you don't think about writing for the country. you think about talking to individuals who are suffering. you know, one story along those lines that was probably the earliest sign to me of just how talented a writer president obama is, was early on in the campaign, in 2008, he went to speak on the 15th anniversary of the l.a. riots. he didn't want a speech. he wanted just some notes he was going to brief from. so as part of the research, found this story from the l.a. times during the riots that was about a pregnant woman who had been shot in the belly. and she was rushed to the emergency room. and it turned out the bullet had lodged itself in the fleshy part of her baby's arm. the baby was fine. and so this was the story. extraordinary story. i just shared this story with

president obama. not knowing at all what he would do with this. and so i'm listening -- we had a link up. i was listening. no video but i got audio from the event while he was delivering the remarks and he weaves this into a tapestry of the american experience. you know, and the violence in the cities and across the country and about how, you know, we've been shot but it's not a fatal wound. and we're going to take that bullet out. there's going to be a scar where that bullet was taken out. we're always going to have that scar. he just weaved in this beautiful metaphor for america and american society and it just -- he raised the standard for me and all the other speechwriters when i saw -- when i heard that. it was always, i mean, you know, one of the more -- as a student of all the other speechwriters up here, one of the things that is particularly fun and rewarding as a writer to work with president obama on

is, you know, he would check in not just on moments of national importance, fully apart from strategy and tragedies, you know, he would get very involved in the speech, in speeches that he just cared a lot about. that might not have been something that was a tragedy. it might not have been something of great political importance. issues of faith, issues of civil rights. he would just dive in and work with you on it. so it was a rewarding experience as well. >> great. thank you. we'll have a little intrapanel discussion and then we'll open up to questions. i guess since we're in a room full of professional speechwriters and aspiring professional speechwriters, what advice would you give to speechwriters who may encounter in their life whether working for a politician or working for a private business person, might encounter one of these moments where, all right. you know, you've got three hours. or you've got three days.

but this is a huge, high leverage moment. what one or two pieces of advice would you give? anyone? >> well, one of the better pieces of advice i got while i was -- i wrote for vice president bush for two and a half years before president reagan arrived, i worked for two and a half years. in the course of that i was alking to someone who had been , was writing for a governor. he said, you know, what we do is we keep files. we keep files on all the big issues and part of this is keeping up. you are, when you're working for a political executive, you're working on the -- you want to know where edge of debate is, where the edge of discussions. whether it's on economic policy or on -- where is the press. where is the opposition, where are your people, where is public opinion, where is the edge? and what are the arguments out

there? you want to be well versed in that. you want to have it at your finger tips. of course, with the president you have quite a few of these issues. but the point of doing that, i'd save clippings from columns that make particularly good arguments or had particularly good data in them. i had stories. i'd collect stories. so that when, you know, 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. in if 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. we 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. it's not fruitless. it's not fruitless.

of various kinds. talking of the shuttle disaster a shooting or anyone of the what itf other things is that the audience and even there mayal audience be a public element to it or may just be a very large global company. global there is confusion in these moments. there is a very real confusion at first as to what happened. i talk about that a moment ago. sense.rger what people are looking for in a

way even if they can't necessarily articulated his meaning and understanding. the president or the ceo is an authority figure we don't always regard them that way. they absolutely are. we look to these authority figures to help us understand so we can achieve our own understanding of what this means. the president is not going to stand in a moment of tragedy and say this is what this means. 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. i 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 over 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 not saying the wrong thing. i hear this discussion, kent state, which is worst part in the early moment of the nixon administration, student was killed 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. what 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 word 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. not every speech is supposed to

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 come. 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 overload. 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 moment 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. i 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 not 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 mind. 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. all 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. [laughter] come on. if you look at the 2008 campaign and his dual with hillary clinton, battle of the primaries, 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 speeches 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 want. >> 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 advents 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.

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 twitter 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 hour.

it is harder today than ever before to control the conversation. you 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

paragraph 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 the 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 that. 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.

i 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? i said i sure am. we both thought he was presidential material. 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 around. >> modestly prevents itself. >> you will be in your speaker. your 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 instructor.

>> not only that, cbo came out with 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. >> 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 speeches. about maybe two weeks. this is during the platform process. ted sorenson said we're going to have to be short and bland about the platform.

i wrote a speech for the president which had a line this it. the democrats put on their 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. 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 york 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 and 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 comedy monologue. we would come up with stuff. original comedy is really fun but 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 speech 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.

get through the supply part. 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 divisiveness. they mischaracter the other side. it would be more honest and more informative to actually correctly summarize the other side.

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 one 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 offense at a joke i written. history not wounded but actually delighted. i'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 elicited a stronger reaction if iran and my joke was in the maureen dowd column, one of my colleagues called me up, he said, you know, nothing you ever wrote got million people out on the street of tehran.

you 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 history 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 counterproductive 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 pole. 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. 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. i'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 this wonderful panel. [applause]

two-timeunday night pulitzer prize winner michael

ramirez on his book of satirical cartoons. ramirez: a look at israeli settlers and a houston in figure. is on a prayer rug but he has his shoes on. both of these figures are utilizing a false religion for political purpose. i an equal opportunity offender. >> tonight on c-span local legislators discuss the state of race relations and policing in their states. followed by a form on criminal justice. the annual washington ideas forum hears from senator cory booker and senator mike lee.

the attorney general talks about changes to the criminal justice system. state legislators from several in as recently took part discussion on race relations and police accountability. many of the speakers represent areas that have received media attention to racial tensions. >> i am particularly pleased to be engaged with such a distinguished panel. i know they are known to all of you. for the purposes of the record electric knowledge who is on the panel.

i would like to acknowledge who is on the panel. we have the honorable catherine hughes who has been a public servant for over 20 years. member of the baltimore city council. before coming to the senate she would currently the majority leader. been an entrepreneur by trade and is also someone who receiving the naacp legislator of the reward. gilda cobb hunter is in the south carolina house of representatives. womanrst african-american

in orangeburg county elected to office. she is ranking member of the house ways and means committee. she has been dubbed the conscience of the house. we have the honorable carl hastie was the first african-american to serve as speaker of the new york state assembly. to develop a financial plan to

make an investment in education. he represents the northeast segment of the bronx. he security interests he security and in the minimum wage. he was instrumental in the passage of a law that prohibited containing water also a very strong proponent of age to victims of domestic violence. the honorable clem smith from missouri. he received his degree from