Not only did we belong to the same department. We worked in the same building. On the same floor. Nora’s office was down the hall.
What would have been cute in a romantic comedy felt icky and overly personal in real life. That was our first and only date, but from then on we’d administer clipped, uncomfortable nods in the hallway, as though we’d run into each other at a porno theater the night before. I was through with online dating. I was ready to give it up.
And then I met Jacqui. I found her attractive, of course. But even more than her looks, I was struck by her sense of purpose. She seemed fiercely determined, even just crossing the street. Halfway through her third year of law school, she nonetheless managed to make it through an entire evening without once using the phrase according to the law. She told me about growing up in New Jersey, and yet, despite my New York City background, I found her impossible to hate.
About an hour into our first date, a waiter came to take the drinks menu. Jacqui smiled and shot out a hand. “We’re keeping that,” she said. Her tone was warm and charming, while also suggesting someone might lose a finger if he didn’t obey. My favorite TV show is The Sopranos. I’ve always had an odd thing for Laura Linney. I was floored.
IN MY PERSONAL LIFE, I WAS BEGINNING MY FIRST SERIOUS RELATIONSHIP in years. At work, I was going through what can only be described as a slutty phase. I was, of course, Valerie Jarrett’s speechwriter. But Bill Daley, then the White House chief of staff, had also been told I was his speechwriter. Straut and his fellow senior staffers were told I was the senior staff speechwriter. Three years out of college, I wrote six commencement addresses for five different White House VIPs.
In the House of Cards version of my life, my exhausting schedule would have been rewarded with influence. Slowly but surely, I would turn speakers against each other, putting words in their mouths in the service of some nefarious end. But that’s not how speeches work. In the real world, speechwriters are more like personal trainers than puppet masters. They can help you present the most attractive version of yourself to the public. They can’t turn you into someone you’re not.
Nor can they “find your voice.” This is the most common misconception about speechwriting. It came up especially often in the years before I started at the White House, when I wrote for CEOs. “You seem capable,” they would tell me, “but can you really find my voice?”
“I think I can manage it,” I’d reply gravely.
Left unsaid is that it would be easy, because when it comes to rhetorical styling, 99.9 percent of speeches sound the same. Martin Luther King had a voice. John F. Kennedy had a voice. With all due respect, you probably don’t.
What you do have are thoughts. What you need, although you may not know it, is someone to organize them. A good writer can take your ten ideas and turn them into one coherent whole. Where you see two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame seed bun, a speechwriter sees a Big Mac.
Just as important, speechwriters act as standins for the audience. If you’re working with a writer, chances are you’re an expert. And if you’re an expert, chances are you’re boring. You can’t help it. The more you know about a subject, the harder it is to express your knowledge in a way the rest of us understand. As professional dilettantes, speechwriters use their short attention spans to your advantage. Sifting through the dense muck of fact and anecdote, they find nuggets worth something to the outside world.
This doesn’t always turn out perfectly. Sometimes the final draft will forgo a single thesis in favor of a seven-point list, causing eyes to glaze over. (If the list is divided into sublists, as occasionally happens, the remarks can legally be used during surgery as anesthesia.) Other times the speaker insists on heaps of esoteric verbiage, then blames the writer when audience members start checking their phones mid-speech. But if you’re holding the pen, and everything works as it’s supposed to—if you define the forest of an argument without losing sight of the trees—the speaker will be forever grateful for your work.
“Wow, you really found my voice!” they’ll say.
And you’ll say thank you. If you were the kind of person who enjoyed correcting powerful people for no reason, you would have gone into a different line of work.
Because that’s the other thing about speechwriting: unlike novelists or poets, the speechwriter must let go. Take prepositions. Valerie followed the rule that you could never use one to end a sentence. I found this unnecessary. In my own writing, preposition placement isn’t something I lose sleep over. But this was not my own writing. It belonged to Valerie, and the prepositions rule was one about which I did not argue.
The same went for “At the end of the day.” I’ve always liked the singsong nature of the phrase, but each time I added it to a draft, Valerie cut it. That this was a matter of preference rather than grammar was unimportant. Speechwriters and speakers are free to disagree on just about anything. But at the end of the day, the speaker is always right.
Besides, Valerie’s remarks were far easier than Bill Daley’s. With the chief of staff, the challenge was not word choice but pronunciation. A compact, broad-shouldered man, Bill had developed the habit of speaking with his chin tucked into his neck. With most words this wasn’t a problem. S sounds, however, lodged themselves in his Adam’s apple before tumbling unceremoniously from his mouth. I tried to skirt this obstacle by avoiding sibilants at all costs. But consider the sorts of sentences Bill might be expected to say.
“As the president’s chief of staff, I assure you he takes the possibility of rising deficits seriously.”
“One of the president’s most successful and courageous actions was his decision to send in Seal Team Six.”
Sometimes, speechwriters must surrender to circumstance.
There was one final element to my professional promiscuity: I was beginning to write more often for the president. In the summer of 2011, there were eight of us who wrote POTUS remarks. Like many speechwriting teams, we were all below the age of forty. (At the time, we were also exclusively white and male, a regrettable trend my hiring did nothing to reverse.)