- Sometimes, maybe often, politics can feel like a thankless and often futile undertaking, but today's guest tells his readers that, occasionally, through long and sustained effort, the world moves.

He's former White House chief speech writer, Cody Keenan, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with The Providence Journal.

- This week, we're joined by Cody Keenan, a former chief White House speech writer for President Barack Obama.

He's the author now of "Grace: President Obama And Ten Days In The Battle For America."

Cody, thank you so much for being with us today.

- It's so nice to be with you guys.

- And I have to tell you, congratulations on "Grace."

This is a tremendously powerful, enthralling account of 10 really critical days in the Obama presidency.

I told you before we started, it made me cry more than once, and I just really wanted to congratulate you on it.

For the audience who hasn't read it yet, tell us, what is the book about?

- Sure, it's like you said.

It's about 10 days, and I'd argue that they were 10 consequential days, not just for the Obama presidency, but more importantly for America.

And you know, when I remind friends what happened in these 10 days, they're like, "My God, I knew all that stuff happened, but I didn't know it was just 10 days."

You know, there were 10 days in June, 2015.

They began with the mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, where white nationalists killed a bunch of black people in their church.

And, you know, inside the White House, we're learning this in real time like everybody else.

And there was kinda this general sense that, you know, this is worse than the rest.

Something could really kinda go off the rails here.

But as the days started progressing, you know, the families of the victims forgave the killer, which really kinda created space in America for, it was like something we'd never seen before, for kinda like this open debate, and, you know, the Confederate flags started coming down around public spaces in the south, and people were talking more openly and honestly about race than usual, and all the while, we're watching the Supreme Court, which is poised to rule on Obamacare and marriage equality, two things, of course, that were important to President Obama.

But more importantly, you know, there were millions of Americans who were waiting to see what the fate of their health insurance was, working Americans who weren't able to afford it before Obamacare came along, LGBTQ Americans who didn't know if they'd ever be able to get married like anybody else.

Supreme Court rules, you know, the right way on both of those things.

And then on the 10th day, when the marriage quality decision came down, you know, the White House is euphoric.

And then President Obama and I take off for Charleston where he is gotta eulogize everyone who died in the mass shooting.

So it was really kinda this extraordinary 10 days.

And it was all packed with, you know, it was the fruit of these movements that have been going on for decades in America.

So it's really a story about, you know, what America can do with time and effort and perseverance.

- And grace.

We're gonna talk a little bit more about the book and those 10 days in a little bit, but I wanna pick up on something you just said.

You talked about, so much of popular parlance about Washington these days is that people in Washington are out of touch, but you just talked about being sensitive to the impact that those Supreme Court decisions would have on millions of Americans around the world.

How mindful were you of that greater impact of policies of decisions by the courts of things going through Congress?

How real does that feel to you when you're working inside the White House?

- It's more real than anything.

And I understand that cynical impulse.

You know, there were, I remember reading a bunch of headlines that week that, you know, such and such would be a win for Obama or a loss for Obama.

And that's often the way that the political media looks at things, but we didn't look at things that way.

You know, we knew, partially because we read their letters every night, you know, the thousands of Americans who would write letters to President Obama, what Obamacare meant to a family that wasn't able to afford health insurance, for what marriage quality might mean to two people that had been together for decades and weren't able to see their marriage realized depending on which state they lived in.

I mean, these are the people we were always thinking about.

That's why we do the job.

And I know it can sound kinda, you know, trite and cliche, but we didn't go to Washington, and by we, I mean, everyone who joined the Obama campaign, to make a name for ourselves or to climb the rungs or to advance one man's legacy.

We went because there were things we wanted to do.

You know, we went because we believed that politics is this common endeavor where we can dive in and make this country better, you know, as each generation goes along.

And then one of the themes of the book is that the whole story of America is the story of progress and backlash to that progress.

And the progress only comes when enough people get in and push.

- So, Cody, where did your interest in public service come from?

I mean, like anyone, you could have gone in any number of directions, you went in this direction.

Give us a little of your personal journey, what attracted you to public service and your commitment to it.

- You know, my earliest political memories were my parents bickering at the dining table.

You know, know we were a big, we were big newspaper subscribers.

We got the Chicago Tribune.

So you know, you kinda, you awaken by looking at the headlines each day over years.

And my dad was kinda an old school California Reagan Republican, the kind Republican that is sort of endangered these days.

He's now a Democrat.

My mom was a big liberal, you know?

She volunteered on Ted Kennedy's campaign in 1980 and on the McGovern campaign before that.

But neither of them had worked in politics, but listening to them kinda bicker about it really sort of woke me up to it, and in college, I'll admit I started premed in college, like a lot of people, and like a lot of people, chemistry weeded me out.

(group laughs) - Yeah, biochemistry, no good, no good.

- I didn't even get there.

(group laughs) But in college, you know, I noticed once I decided pre-med wasn't for me, I had been taking a bunch of political science courses on this side, and I was like, this is clearly what I wanna do.

And after college, I moved to Washington.

I found a job working for Ted Kennedy.

It had nothing to do with my mother's time on his campaign decades before.

And that's where I learned, to get back to your first question, my first job was mail room intern, and I was reading and routing letters from just ordinary Americans who'd write into the center, both because they were constituents who needed help with a specific issue, but even more often, people from around the country who were desperate and were hoping that the last Kennedy brother could help them.

And that really opens your eyes, you know?

"The West Wing" was a popular TV show when I entered public service, but you realize it's not like this at all.

It's not dramatic.

It's not quick.

It's not sexy walk and talks.

You know, a lot of people in politics aren't that attractive.

But reading all these letters, you start to see what this is really all about.

And then to watch someone like Senator Kennedy, you know, really work hard to pass bills that would help people's lives and stay in touch.

And that changed me in a profound way.

And then I saw President Obama come along, someone who saw politics in the same way.

And I knew that's the guy I wanted to work for.

- So how did you get to work in the White House for Barack Obama?

Did you know him before he was elected?

- I did not, no.

I'd spent a few years after college, you know, like I said, I'm a Chicagoan, but I'd spent a few years immersing myself in Massachusetts politics 'cause I was working for Ted Kennedy, and, you know, here's this guy, Barack Obama, who's a rising star in Chicago, and I randomly, you know, when I worked for Senator Kennedy to Boston, the Democratic National Convention was in Boston in 2004, and we were all allowed to go up and volunteer for the week.

We had to take time off work to keep business and politics separate, but our reward was a floor pass to one night of the convention.

And I just randomly happened to be on the floor of the convention in the Fleet Center in Boston the night that State Senator Barack Obama, you know, takes the stage largely anonymous and leaves a global megastar.

That's when I first got interested in speech writing and interested in him, and I started writing some speeches for Ted Kennedy in the Senate, and a mutual friend connected me with Jon Favreau who was Senator Obama's speech writer at the time.

And he hired me as an intern early in 2007 on the campaign.

And I just, I was too stubborn to leave.

So I hung on for the next 14 years.

- That's tremendous.

You know, Cody, you mentioned "The West Wing," and I think that for a lot of Americans, their understanding of presidential speech writing is through the eyes and lens of either Toby Ziegler or Sam Seaborn.

What's the reality of being a presidential speech writer?

- It's not like that at all.

You know, so by the time I left the White House, I became chief speech writer in the second term out of a team of eight, and they were just eight, you know, extraordinary writers and extraordinary people.

And we wouldn't collaborate on speeches really 'cause we found it slowed us down, but we'd meet every morning.

We'd talk about what speeches were coming up.

We'd kinda claim the ones that we cared about most.

And it's a solitary endeavor most of the time.

You're sitting at your computer, you know, trying to find the right words, the right themes, the right ideas, the right stories.

And that's what I love about it.

I mean, you have to be precise with your language when you're president of the United States.

Your words can move markets.

They can move armies.

But they can also move people to a cause, to believe in something, to care.

And it's a really incredible gift to have a captive audience, whoever you are.

And that's not something President Obama ever put to waste.

So he was also, it was a solitary endeavor for us, but he was also very involved in each speech from the beginning brainstorming sessions to line editing late at night before the speech.

You know, we'd often come in at 7:00 AM the day of his speech and get his edits back.

And he just marked up the thing like crazy, 'cause he cared.

I mean, he was a writer.

You know, he reminds me to this day that he wrote that Boston speech by himself.

- Tremendous speech.

So, you know, specifically, what's it like to work for?

So, you know, Barack Obama, I think is probably generally recognized, whether you like his politics or not, as maybe the greatest American political orator in at least a generation.

And he did write that speech, and he did write a couple of bestselling books.

What's it like to be the speech writer for a guy who just himself can flat out write?

- It's a wonderful struggle.

(group laughs) It's great, and it's terrible.

You know, it's great to write for a writer 'cause you know he'll be there to help you take the speech to a higher place.

It's terrible because you'll kill yourself to get him a great first draft that, you know, he'll be happy with, that he can work with.

So it's kinda both ends of the spectrum.

I mean, there were plenty of all-nighters in the White House where I'd agonize over some certain speech just to get it to him and get it in a place where he could work on it and be happy.

And then you watch him, in a fraction of the time, take it somewhere better.

But he was always good about reminding us, you know, when we were down about it, that what we gave him was something good enough to work with.

It was only truly a failure if he sent the entire thing back to you without any edits and said, "Let's start over."

- So did that happen very often?

I mean, I can't imagine how happy you would be getting, "Start over, please, this didn't work."

Did that ever happen?

- Pretty.

Rarely.

Pretty rarely, thank goodness.

And that's 'cause we had a good team of writers around us too that would, our tire team would look at his speech before it went to him.

And then you have other staff that looks at a speech before it goes in the press, staff, communications, lawyers, policy people.

So it's pretty rare to just like really crap the bed.

But, you know, early on, I would find his edits crushing.

You know, when you get a speech back, and it's all marked up, you feel really bad about yourself, but only with time, do you realize that's actually a compliment, you know?

'Cause you gave him something he could work with, and he's just trying to make it a little bit better.

And then your job as a speech writer is to take his edits and make those better.

And in those rare circumstances when that collaboration would yield each draft getting better than the last, that's when it's truly something special.

- So, Cody, let's turn back now to "Grace: President Obama And Ten Days In The Battle For America."

You outlined the sort of the major moments in those 10 days, the mass shooting at the church in Charleston, South Carolina, the two Supreme Court decisions, President Obama's eulogy in Charleston at the end of those 10 days.

One of the things that you talk about in the book is President Obama had a number of mass shootings in his presidency.

And after Newtown, you write that he didn't want to give eulogies for mass shooting victims anymore 'cause it just seemed like there wasn't anything left to say.

What do you think ultimately convinced him that he needed to say something in Charleston?

- Yeah, I remember that day in 2013.

It was the angriest and most cynical I'd ever seen him when Republicans in the Senate blocked background checks.

And this was after the mass shooting in Newtown where 20 little kids were murdered in their classroom along with, you know, six of the educators who were trying to protect 'em.

And we'd been through a bunch of these mass shootings where there's this cycle of kinda finger pointing and, you know, Republicans trying to blame anything else.

And then finally, Obama comes in and gives a eulogy, and everybody kinda moves on, and he wanted to break that cycle.

You know, I personally felt like it wasn't his job to go out and absolve America of our collective sin, not to do something every time this happened.

So when Republicans voted down background checks, he said, "I don't want to do this anymore.

You know, what do I do?

I just keep coming out and eulogizing a bunch of Americans we've lost 'cause we weren't gonna do anything about this?"

We knew that couldn't stand.

You know, as commander in chief, he had to go give a couple eulogies after two more mass shootings on, and one on a navy base, one on an army base, and then Charleston happens, and we still had that debate over whether or not he should speak at all.

And at first, he didn't want to for the same reason, but then we watched these families who had lost, you know, people who had lost parents and grandparents and children forgive the killer one by one in open court on television.

And that was something that I couldn't do.

I was watching it with my mouth open.

You know, I don't think I could forgive somebody who had done that to someone I loved, and it was this act of grace that, you know, President Obama said, "When you're familiar with the AME church, this'll make sense to you."

And he said, you know, as he progressed through that week, he said, you know, "I still don't wanna speak, but I do want to go down there to the service and hug those families."

And just as the week went along, we decided, okay, let's do it.

But it was really him who kinda opened up the floodgates into something special.

You know, I struggled with the eulogy for a few days trying to work everything into it.

You know, we were talking about race and guns and the Confederate flag and all these kinda potent things in America that we just hadn't dealt with over the centuries.

And he took the theme of "Amazing Grace," tied it all together, and you know, we were already kinda happy from that morning's ruling on marriage equality, and he tells me on the way to Charleston, you know, "If it feels right, I might sing it, "Amazing Grace.'"

And then we go give this eulogy and come back.

And the coda to that day, to those 10 days was the White House lit up in all the colors of the rainbow, you know, a symbolic gesture to show the world that in America, everybody's welcome.

And it was just, it was extraordinary that all these things happened in a 10-day span.

And I don't even think I processed it at the time.

You know, two years later, I did a little tweet storm on the anniversary because by then, we were living in sort of the opposite of politics, and people really gravitated to it.

And that was the first time I thought, you know, "There's a book here, and I wanna get this down so that my daughter, my baby daughter, reads it someday and sees what America is capable of."

- So, Cody, you mentioned marriage equality as one of these monumental events.

It was recognized by the Supreme Court.

What was the president's reaction to that?

I mean, again, all of this came in such a flurry, but that specifically, what was his reaction?

- Yeah, it's interesting.

I mean, he had an evolution on the issue like of a lot of people of his generation.

For my generation, you know, it was a given.

For people younger than me in the White House, it was a given.

I was 34 during the events in this book, and, you know, my system was 22, and you look at them, just how on Earth could the Supreme Court rule the other way, is the way it went, but we also had, you know, LGBTQ colleagues and friends, and so we're really rooting for the Supreme Court to rule the right way so that their lives or their loves considered equal to ours.

But I was watching President Obama that morning, and I knew he was happy about it.

He was thrilled about it.

He he'd said it was a decision who's time had come, but I'm watching him give the speech that morning that we wrote for him, my team and I, a young woman named Sarah Perry drafted it.

And he was speaking even slower than usual, and he's a pretty slow speaker in general.

And you could tell, and he ad-libbed a bunch, he ad-lib a new ending to it.

And you could tell that he was really moved, that the country had come so far, so quickly on a civil rights issue like that.

And really did feel like things were trending in the right direction.

Now I asked him about that afterwards, if that's why he was speaking so slowly, and he said, "No, it's 'cause I was up all night rewriting the eulogy."

But I knew that wasn't true 'cause he gave it back to me before midnight.

So I suspect he was just as moved as the rest of us.

- You know, Cody, you quote your now wife in the book, reminding you, as you were struggling with the draft of the eulogy that, and I'm quoting here, "Empathy is the most important quality in a speech writer."

We've talked about empathy with a lot of different writers over the five years that we've done this show, what is empathy and why is it so important to a speech writer?

- Yeah, it's vital.

I mean, maybe the most important thing about speech writing is being able to string a sentence together, but empathy is critical in that you want to understand other people in their lives and what they're going through, you know?

The president of the United States speaks to every kinda audience there is.

And you want to give them some sense that he understands their lives, their struggles, you know, even if you haven't, and let's be honest, anybody that works in the White House has walked a more privileged path than most Americans.

It's just the way it works, you know?

And hopefully, it's changing a little, but, so I can't possibly know, for example, you know, what an LGBTQ person had been going through, you know, knowing that in much of the country, they wouldn't be able to get married and what that feels like and what the anticipation of that ruling feels like.

So you do your best to put yourself into somebody's shoes.

You know, I'd always had healthcare, whether it was through my parents or during college or through, you know, jobs afterwards.

What's it like to not have it and be terrified that one illness or accident could lead to financial ruin?

So you really wanna dive into these people's lives and understand them as best you can.

I mean, honestly, a lot of young people ask me, "How do you become a speech writer?"

My first piece of advice is read constantly, widely, you know, understand different people and what they've gone through.

And that's how you start figuring out what people's hopes and dreams are, and that's really what, you know, being a politician is all about.

- So, Cody, you're a master speech writer without question.

What are the secrets of a great and successful speech?

What goes into it?

What gives it its power?

Is there an element of alchemy or magic to it, or give us sort of, you know, speech writing 101 or 301.

(group laughs) 'Cause you can do the doctorate level one for sure.

- I actually teach speech writing 394 at Northwestern University.

- There you go.

(group laughs) - See, we knew.

- Yeah, I went back to my alma mater.

I teach a class there now because when I left to go get that first job in Washington, you know, everyone in Washington asks, "What can you do?"

And as much as I loved Northwestern, loved my degree, there's not a lot you can do.

You know, I said, "I could write you paper on the Central American political economy or something," but to have actual skills is really, really important.

So I went back and made a pitch to the department.

"Hey, let me teach kids how to speech write so that when they go try to find that first job, they've got a whole portfolio of speeches of all different kinds that they can show people."

But, you know, what I'd tell them is, to actually be colloquial, you know?

If you watch most of Barack Obama's speeches, it depends on the venue and the moment, but there are not many moments that call for this kinda soaring Kennedyesque rhetoric that you think of.

Most people just wanna be spoken to on the level.

Always assume that the voter is smarter than you.

You know, we never dumbed things down.

We tried to talk to people on the level like a human being.

A speech needs to have a great structure to it.

It has to have some sort of story to it.

I don't just mean adding an anecdote, but I mean an actual beginning, middle and end.

What's the arc where we're taking people?

And then if you're somebody like a president United States who speaks all the time, where does this one speech fit in the entire spectrum of speeches you've given?

You know, your presidency should tell a story, and the speech should make sure that it's a part of that story.

- You know, the idea of story, obviously, is central to this show.

You and I talked last week when we were getting ready for this a little bit about the story of America, and you quote in the book Justice Anthony Kennedy from his decision on marriage equality, where he wrote, "America is great because America can change."

And that resonated with you because of that seemed so central to what President Obama, the story that he had been telling about America.

Can you elaborate on that a little bit for us?

- Exactly, that is the story we told about America.

You know, there's this thin-skinned version of American exceptionalism that says America's great because we deem it.

So and therefore, you can't question it.

Whereas, you know, the reason I gravitated to him is because he said in the 2004 speech that made him famous, only in this country could his story even be possible.

You know, you've got this kid who's half Kenyan, half Kansan, right?

Who becomes president of the United States.

That's unbelievable.

And the whole glory of America is that we can change.

It's written into our founding documents.

You know, we, the people, in order to become a more perfect union, it explicitly says we're not perfect.

And it's the challenge of each new generation to try and become more perfect, to be better, to kinda, to narrow the gap between those founding ideals and the realities of our time.

And with something like the Civil Rights Movement, as one of the biggest proof points of that.

- Cody.

- Medicare, Medicaid.

Obamacare, LGBTQ rights, marriage equality.

You're constantly kinda narrowing that gap.

And that's the story President Obama wanted people to see about America.

That's what the, I begin the speech with the prologue about the Selma book, and that's probably his best speech about it.

Is that, what makes America great, is that against impossible odds, people who love their country can change it for the better.

- Cody, do you?

So, you know?

You've got an epilogue in your book that we move from sort of the soaring triumph and so almost the Sorkin-esque triumph of those 10 days to the reality of 2016 and the election of Donald Trump and the divisiveness that followed in American politics.

Do you, what's your assessment of the story of America as we sit here in 2022?

- Yeah, I mean, these things aren't really in conflict.

You know, America is great because America can change.

But as President Obama always said from the first campaign forward, the arc of the moral universe bend towards justice, but it doesn't bend that way on its own.

You know, it requires constant vigilance, both progress and democracy.

And the true story of America is a story of progress and backlash to that progress.

We've lived through it through the centuries, through the generations, through the decades.

And now, you know, those cycles are, it seems like months at a time.

So all of these things, you know, none of us in the book were ever naive, that at the end of those 10 days, America was, you know, going forward forever and there was never gonna be any backlash to it.

We knew that there were people who were unhappy with those decisions, who were unhappy with what happened that week.

Don't forget the whole thing began with a white supremacist killing, you know?

We know that that's out there that, that those parts of America are out there and will always be around, but progress and its defense requires constant vigilance, constant voting, constant participation.

You never get to take a break.

You know, even marriage equality now is not set in stone.

You've got justices on the bench saying they're gonna take a look at that and maybe undo that and take away marriage rights from American people.

I mean, all this stuff is up for grabs in a way that hasn't been in my lifetime.

You know, older Americans would say, "Yeah, I've seen it worse."

But progress requires us to constantly pay attention.

You know, the overturning Roe, for example, people were working on that for 50 years.

And they kept showing up through what they described as disappointments until they got what they wanted.

And, you know, progressives, my side, we need to do the exact same thing on whatever issue it is that we care about.

Keep showing up until we get that victory.

I mean, it was really rare that we got those victories in that same tiny stretch of time in this book.

That's just a coincidence, but it's like Barack Obama said in his speech after the marriage quality decision, you know?

Progress takes a long time, tons of work, persistent, dedicated effort, but then some days, there are days like this when justice comes down like a thunderbolt.

It's rare.

You know, it required 50 years of effort just to get that one ruling, but it's worth it.

And then you protect that victory, and you go get the next one.

- Cody, this is just a tremendous accomplishment.

"Grace: President Obama In Ten Days In The Battle Of America."

Thank you so much for being with us.

And thank you so much for telling this story.

- Thank you, really appreciate it.

- That's all the time we have have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

for G Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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