Speechwriters Answered Your Questions on Crafting an Inaugural Speech

JEFF SHESOL: (Chuckles.) I'm afraid that's true.

CLARK JUDGE: Yeah, we would - a typical assignment for us might come a week in advance. I would typically spend a day in preparation. That would be interviewing people within the White House who had policy interests, then going - doing research, either using the research office or on my own.

I kept - I'd keep large files on the major issue areas and we were within the office, in constant kind of debate among ourselves and other parts of the White House about the state of argument about issues. I'd spend a day, then, writing, and then at the end of that day, the speech would go into draft - into clearance. And usually, by the end of the next day, we had got all the comments from interested parties throughout the White House and I'd incorporate them.

And then the speech would go to the president. The president might get the speech a couple of days in advance; more likely, get the speech 24 hours in advance. He'd make comments of his own, which would then be incorporated, and then he would deliver it the next day or the day following.

So that was pretty much our routine. In the State of the Union addresses, we started a little later than before Thanksgiving and the heart of the work was done in January, and might be the product of one or two people or the product of the entire staff, depending on the year, who was running the office, the number of issues before us and that sort of thing.

In summits - in the Moscow summit in '88, which was arguably the biggest - and certainly, for speechwriting, by far the biggest - of the Reagan presidency, and in which it was recognized that his words would have unusual importance, at least equal to the importance of the diplomacy underway, the White House cleared an entire month for us to work on the speeches and with nothing else for that month. And each of us received two speeches to draft and we went over these with considerable care and, ultimately, considerable success.

The inaugural addresses follow a similar line with this exception: The White House staff is not yet in place. Parts of it are in place, but this is, necessarily, then, much more a personal statement by the president.

In the Kennedy inaugural, [Ted] Sorenson sought the advice of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., of John Kenneth Galbraith, and of a number of other people very close to the president, but there wasn't the kind of deep staffing that is typical of a speech once the administration has begun.

RAY SUAREZ: Carol has some interesting questions from Washington State: "What's the ideal length for a political speech? How long can people nowadays really listen? How much does the speechwriter consider poetry versus policy? Does the speechwriter give physical clues to the speaker as well? Lean in here. Point to the heavens, here. And I'm curious to know whether some phrases have become inadvertent tongue twisters, or whether practice ferrets them out."

JEFF SHESOL: To the first question, as to the ideal length, there really is no ideal length, in that you're speaking at once - a president is speaking, at once, to a number of different audiences. And there's - even if the speech is only five minutes long, it's not going to run in its entirety on the evening news.

It may run during the day live on some of the networks, but it is not going to be seen by most Americans in its entirety, whether it's five minutes long or 45 minutes long. The critical thing is whether you can synthesize - whether you can capture the message in a sound bite or two and get that message across to the broadest audience.

In terms of the audience in the room, I tend to think that no speech should go much longer than 20 or 30 minutes, although President Clinton's speeches often did and no one in the room complained. I think it really depends on the speaker.

President Clinton could keep a room fairly hypnotized for an hour. And even though there was much commentary among the media every year at the time of the State of the Union address about how long these speeches were, the public never complained and the response - the public response to the speeches - was always quite high, even the longest one.

So I think sometimes there's an underestimation on the part of the media as to the public's appetite for listening to presidents speak when they actually have something to say.

I think, with respect to sound bites, this is going to differ for every president and is going to differ from era to era, but I'll say, with respect to President Clinton, that he had a real allergy to any line that sounded like a speechwriter had written it for him. He was very interested - and I think he drew very consciously on the examples of both President Roosevelt - Franklin Roosevelt - and also President Reagan in a more conversational style of speech.

It's not that those two presidents I've just mentioned couldn't give a formal address - they certainly could, and few could match their ability to do that - but both President Roosevelt and President Reagan spoke very directly to the American people. It was less speechifying than simply talking. And that talking was in a very structured way, but it was very direct. And President Clinton, I think, fit more effectively in that model of speaking than in a sort of more rigid or formal manner of speaking.

CLARK JUDGE: Yeah, I'd agree with that. I'd also agree with what Jeff said about the conversational style. President Reagan would say to his speechwriters - did say to his speechwriters - to remember that we were going into people's living rooms and talking with them; we weren't - it wasn't a grandiloquent moment. Any speech in the current time, it is a time of some intimacy with the audience.

As to sound bites, sound bites have declined in importance in recent years because so many speeches are broadcast in their entirety.

When Jeff was in the White House - even more so when I was - we had one little portal - which was the three networks and, I guess I should say to you, Ray, public television, too. But those were relatively limited broadcasts, whereas today, a large part of your audience will be watching on cable television. You still have the evening news, but it has declined in importance as the ability to reach audiences in your entirety has increased.

President Obama, it appears to me, was the first to catch on to this. He had formal structured speeches for each of the acceptance - each of the evenings of the primaries during the primary season when he would win or occasionally not win, but where he could, in a full way, put out his case. And it took a while for the other candidates, particularly then Senator Clinton, to catch on to this and to come out as disciplined as Senator Obama was.

That isn't to say they were being grandiloquent in the 19^th-century sense, but they were, nevertheless, being conversational. But they were being structured, and Senator and now President-elect Obama was particularly good at this.

The balance of poetry and policy, you are always balancing those and it isn't an either/or. The well-phrased - a phrase that captures the essence of policy objectives, of policy values, will advance policy. And so you're trying to do it - the phrase, I think, that's most apt is, you're trying to practice your art without it appearing that you're practicing you're art. So you're conversational, but you're memorable.

As to length, yes, the rule of thumb is about 20 minutes in length, although that tends to be the rule of thumb, really, for political events - political rallies and fundraisers and that sort of thing.

Jeff is right that longer speeches - certainly, President Clinton was able to go on at some length. And there are some greater lengths. I think his longest State of the Union address was an hour and 20 minutes. And those were successful addresses. And some kinds of addresses, it - State of the Union addresses, for example - the national audience is going to be disappointed unless you go on about 45 minutes or a little longer. But in an inaugural address, you probably ought to hold it, actually, on the short end - under 20 minutes, more in the 15-minute range.

JEFF SHESOL: You do have to separate yourself from the words you put on paper. You can't - there are speechwriters and sometimes I'm one of them - who are a little bit seduced by whatever they've just put on the page and they want to protect it and they want to shepherd it all the way to the Oval Office.

The problem with that is that there are a lot of other people who have a say in this. So there are a lot of other people who have a legitimate say in this. And that starts, of course, with the person who's going to stand up and say these words. And so you do have to develop a certain - you can't throw yourself into whatever it is that you're writing. But you have to develop a certain emotional distance or every day is an injury of some kind.

And President Clinton would, as I said a little bit earlier, President Clinton would tend to strike out of the speech anything that really sounded like a speechwriter had written it. So if you've got a little too fancy with your language, if you used one of those Sorensonian phrases - one of which we used to call them the reversible raincoat sentences, where you say, you know, we must never negotiate out of fear but we must never fear to negotiate. You put anything like that and it was going out. And so you, again, you learn not to be too clever. You learn not to be more clever than the man you are writing for and you learn not to fall in love with your own prose.

CLARK JUDGE: There's a lot about speechwriting I think it's not well understood by most of the public - that is negotiation and mediation. You are talking to a number of people that have an interest in the speech within the White House and sometimes beyond the White House and they'll have different views.

And part of your role as speechwriter is to find a way to finesse those views as much as you can while - so that they're reconciled while keeping true to the president's vision and to his - his core. In the Reagan White House, we had quite a few battles - these become legendary and have been the subject of books. And the speechwriters were known as the - for taking positions, but only really in a sense of resolving towards what the president's core was.

The question of overwriting - I should say that very early in my tenure, I received, as others had early in their tenure, a very heavily marked up draft back from the president in which, in my case, he had taken out probably fourth or fifth word. He hadn't actually struck out any sentence. He had struck out adjectives, adverbs. He had simplified verbs and he wrote at the top, "This is a fine speech. I've just sweated a little of the fat out of it." What he was really saying is that my style is very simple and very direct and don't overdo it, much as what Jeff said about President Clinton's style.

JEFF SHESOL: In a similar vein, I would just add that President Clinton did a lot of the embroidering himself and that was by design. We would always write a speech that if he so desired, he could stand up and read it word for word and it would be fine, it would say all the things that it needed to say and it would say it with some elegance and some force.

At the same time, we knew that he liked to ad-lib, that he could probably stand up and speak on the subject for 20 minutes without much help from us at all, or without any help from us at all. And so it changes the way that you see your role as a speechwriter.

We were certainly trying from time to time to write words for the ages and to write words that would appear in the headlines the next day and would live on long after that. But I think, more fundamentally, we saw our role in the Clinton White House as providing a structure for an argument that we were making. We were making an argument for a policy. We were making an argument for a particular set of beliefs or an approach. And we would build a very solid structure that would allow the president, with all of this natural abilities, to do all the things that only he could do.

We used all kinds of different metaphors for this but sometimes we would speak of building a - sort of assembling a high dive and on this very solid structure, he could leap off that and do all the sort of flips and pirouettes that really only he could do.

CLARK JUDGE: In our case, President Reagan wanted the texts to be final texts but he had an instinct - and understanding of what worked as a text. There were occasions where for one reason or another, the senior staff had taken out a section of text and there was a feel at the last moment and there was the feel of a hole in the speech. And in each of those cases, I'm confident senior staff hadn't shared that with the president, the president ad-libbed a section of his own that gave the speech more a full - a greater fullness and a greater force as a presentation.

At the same time, President Reagan was highly conscious that his words were policy and he wanted a disciplined policy process that produced a text that he could then stand behind long after it was delivered, that was not dependent upon his latest ad-libbing.

He would occasionally but his ad-libs were extremely - other than stories and other matters to fill out the - to fill out a text and give it force as a performance. His ad-libs tended to be very considered and focused.

But for the most part, I think in the vast, vast majority of cases, what he was doing was ad-libbing within the context of what had been put on the page and because he was so attentive to what was on the page, he knew where the seams were. He knew how the structure was stitched together. He could find his way out of the speech to emphasize a particular point, to bring it home with an anecdote of his own, to bring it home with a language of his own, and then seamlessly find his way back into the text.

And sometimes, we wouldn't even know when he had left a draft and come back in because it was as seamless as that. It was as organic as all that. And I think that that is what gave the speeches force, not only in the moment, but later as well. They weren't, I think, as well contained, probably, as a speech by either President Reagan or President Bush, the current President Bush, where the speeches, I think, are a little bit more - a little bit more button-down than any Clinton speech was ever going to be. But I think that both President Reagan and President Clinton understood intuitively that this was the way to be effective.

CLARK JUDGE: Yeah, let me tell you one story about President Reagan and I suspect - I think there's a similar story about President Clinton, where he went to an event that, in this case, happened to be in the East Room, one of the presentation rooms in the White House. And as he was going up to the stage, he tripped on something and dropped his cards. The speechwriter, in this case, was in the back of the room, had the text and he got up - President Reagan and was following it as the president began to speak.

It became quickly clear that he was not following the text but then it became clear that he was picking - he was taking the cards, which had got jumbled and the cards at the top, he was building his own speech around it while he simultaneously reshuffled the cards left to get back to this flow of the actual speech.

He ad-libbed and using these cards and flowing them together for several cards until he got the speech put back together and then he followed the text he actually had. So he had, in that sense, these are people who get to this level - the presidential level - are very, very practiced speakers who have the capacity to write the speeches and to deliver them, extemporaneous speeches and are very facile at it.

And as I say in this case, this was the demonstration of how President Reagan could both ad-lib and follow a text, but his preference was, as Jeff said of President Clinton as well, is to follow the text pretty closely, very closely, with the - because of the policy implications.

Now, let me just say one other thing. President Bush - the first President Bush, I wrote for when he was vice president. And this is not quite the same as being president but what I saw with him was that he liked to have sections left in the speech where he could ad-lib. And those sections tended - I would give him stories that he knew and sometimes humor, sometimes other kinds of stories and allow him to get out of the text and ad-lib and more fully and spontaneously interact with his audience.

When he did that, he found - I found that he was much more amenable and happy with sticking with the more policy portions of the text as they were written so long as we - I, at least - respected his feeling that he should interact spontaneously with the audience in some segmented sections of the speech.