9 THE WRITING LIFE BY TED WIDMER
Putting words in a president’s mouth I
n 1948, James R. Mastersonand Wen- dell Brooks Phillips published a sat- ire of Washington writing called “Federal Prose.” The verdict, as you might imagine, was not positive.
Here is how they translated “too many cooks spoil the broth” into federalese: “Un- due multiplicity of personnel assigned ei- ther concurrently or consecutively to a sin- gle function involves deterioration of qual- ity in the resultant product as compared with the product of the labor of an exact sufficiency of personnel.” It’s a joke painfully familiar to anyone who has worked here. Yet the government, under rare circumstances, actually can turn people into better writers. Where else do you learn accuracy, speed and an ability to type rapidly over a loud din — usually the sound of people yelling at you? Those skills are not taught at writerly retreats like Yaddo or the MacDowell colony, but they proved to be essential during my four years of presidential speechwriting. Having come from the academic world, possibly the only profession that encour- ages worse writing, I had little experience in writing on deadline, and even less ex- perience in getting a response. So the chance to join the federal government rep- resented a remarkable uptick in activity, to cite one of many expressions I learned to speak in the language of Washington. Like most dialects, it separates insiders from outsiders. When I arrived, the unfamiliar
acronyms of foreign policy sounded like something out of a Don Martin cartoon, and it took time before I could distinguish between UCK (Kosovo Liberation Army), PUK (Kurds), FARC (Colombian rebels) and SLORC (Burma’s regime). A decade later, I’m still not entirely sure what SNOG does (the Senate NATO Observer Group). But what an education it turned out to be. I was lucky to be part of a superb team of writers who instructed me in the finer points of the occult science (when citing a list of objectives, for instance, three is a better number than two or four). And to work for a presidential Editor-in-Chief who always made a speech better, often by completely disregarding prepared text and speaking the way they did it back home. More speeches than I can remem- ber were de-wonkified by President Clin- ton’s folksy anecdotes about turtles on fence posts, turnip trucks and other glimpses of life beyond the beltway. You al- ways knew — no one more acutely than the speechwriter — that the speech was about to get better when he looked up and spoke off the cuff. The more I learned about speechwrit-
ing, the more I realized that it was nothing like other forms of writing. Most literary expression is intensely personal; speech- writing is, by definition, anonymous. It is also a deeply collective enterprise, in which many people join together to say something well. The writer becomes a bit
OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTOGRAPH, RALPH ALSWANG President Bill Clinton with Ted Widmer, who served as one of his speechwriters Ted Widmer: A writer who rocks
Imagine a historian who has starred in a rock and roll band, written speeches for an American president, enjoyed a lifelong love affair with cartoons and now leads one of the most cherished libraries in the land. Such is Ted Widmer. Look no further to understand that some people cannot be catalogued and filed under one subject. Widmer is a galli- maufry of identities: writer, librarian, political observer, scholar of American history and a ravenously curious cultural dilettante. He is also that rarity in academic circles: a bridge between thinking and doing — an intellectual who has done time in the real world. Currently the director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Widmer
was plucked from his junior teaching position at Harvard to be President Bill Clinton’s speechwriter in 1997. He had had no training for it. “I was 90 percent academic, 10 per- cent writer,” he says, but he parlayed his work at the Harvard Lampoon and later at George magazine, wrote a sample dinner toast to a Guatemalan president and got the job. The ease with which Widmer moves from the academy to journalism to politics has made him a keen witness to the American experience. Among his books are “Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City,” the biography “Martin Van Bu- ren” and, most recently, an account of America’s search for a place in the world, “Ark of the Liberties.” His in-depth interviews of the president became the core of Clinton’s auto- biography, “My Life.” Widmer was also the founder and first director of the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College in Chestertown, Md. His father and mother were scholars of Asia: he, a dean at Brown and then headmas- ter of Deerfield Academy; she, a professor of Chinese at Wellesley. When Widmer was 8, his father took him on a field trip to Washington, which prompted his enduring fascina- tion with American history. “Everywhere else in the house, there were Chinese scrolls and Buddhas. In my room, it was [Red Sox ball player] Carl Yastrzemski and Abe Lincoln.” Even the rock band for which he was a lead singer and guitarist, the Upper Crust, was historical in nature: a group of powdered-wig aristocrats crowing, “Let them eat rock!” The FBI, checking his bona fides when he applied to the White House, asked: What did you mean by that, exactly? A Washington moment straight out of “Spinal Tap,” Widmer reflects. “But I was genuinely terrified.”
—Marie Arana
aranam@washpost.com
of a journalist, interviewing dozens of spe- cialists, gathering information and then sifting it before putting pencil to paper. A rudimentary form of e-mail allowed early drafts to be circulated and then to work their way up the chain of command, with liposuction and blemish-removal per- formed at every stage. The sharpest ed- iting was done at the top. Every word spo- ken by a president becomes the official policy of the United States, so there is no room for a lazy adjective. Or, God forbid, a mistake. In some ways, you could not imagine a worse environment for creative output. We had pagers that functioned as cattle prods, stunning us into prolixity. What- ever words we generated were govern- ment property, and we had to leave our hard drives in our office safes. Late at night, the infinite hallways of the Old Ex- ecutive Office Building resembled the ho- tel in “The Shining,” with room after room devoted to inscrutable government func- tions and odd apparitions like jogging Ma- rines (hoo-ah!). Most cubicles were tiny in width and length, but extremely generous in height because ceilings are so tall in that old building. When writer’s block struck, you could spend a long time looking straight up in the air. On travel abroad with the president, conditions were even worse. To prevent surveillance, the Secret Service spread brown paper over our hotel windows, erected writer’s tents within the rooms (don’t ask), and hung loudspeakers that blared dated classic rock. I once tried to crank out a speech while an endless loop of Supertramp played at ear-splitting vol- ume. Top that, Yaddo! It took real focus to avoid writing, “May the people of North- ern Ireland take the long way home to peace and prosperity.” Some physical agili- ty was required as well. It’s not easy to tap a peroration into a laptop inside a speed- ing motorcade, hitting every pothole in Bangladesh. Or to be in the tiny writer’s of- fice on Air Force One, hurriedly printing out a final version of a speech as the plane lands, and notice that there are no seat- belts. (Is there a secret eject button if the
speech is subpar?) But in other ways, it was the best writing school I could have asked for. Turnaround was rapid, everything got published, and those words had an instant impact. For a historian, it was exciting to venture into a form of writing that not only allowed but demanded a dialogue with the past. I rev- eled in the chance to read old presidential speeches. They are everywhere in Wash- ington — chiseled into walls, emblazoned on T-shirts and lovingly gathered in the various libraries I haunted in those pre- Wikipedia days. Like my fellow writers, I prayed to the household gods of our profession: speech- writers who had gone before, like Ted So- rensen, Sam Rosenman and Robert Sher- wood; and vigilantes against government double-talk, like George Orwelland Walter Lippmann. From them we learned that each speech builds on the scaffolding erected by earlier wordsmiths, going all the way back to 1776. One day, stuck inside a poorly written
draft with no exit strategy, I went for a walk to the Library of Congress and was gratified to see an early draft of the Decla- ration of Independence, full of Jefferson’s insertions, deletions and all the inkblots of a frustrated writer. You could almost feel him wrestling those words into existence and, by extension, the nation itself. It probably helped that he did not have Su- pertramp to contend with.
One moonlit night, during the Civil War,
Walt Whitman was struck by the beauty of the president’s house, “the White House of future poems.” He had no idea that so many writers — some of them even poets (Archibald MacLeish) — would find em- ployment there. Most were decidedly less illustrious: nameless prose stylists, crank- ing out the words by which we live, now and then stumbling on a bit of inspiration. Speechwriting has plenty of pitfalls, but in a solipsistic world that expects our writers to dish endlessly about themselves, it can be rewarding to write quietly for a larger cause. Now and then, too many cooks actu- ally improve the broth.
bookworld@washpost.com
THE WASHINGTON POST • BOOK WORLD • SUNDAY, JUNE 20, 2010
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