He is a managing editor for opinion at u. S. News world report. He blogs and writes himself, and he works for the boston globe, hes been covering politics for a long time, and he really knows the ins and outs of speechwriting and knows all these guys really well and knows where all the bodies are buried. Without further i do, i would like to introduce robert, and youre in for a real treat. [applause] robert i want to thank the professional Speechwriters Association for putting this panel on, i want to thank georgetown for hosting us, i want to thank cspan for preserving for posterity what will no doubt be great wisdom from this panel. The nation turns its lonely eyes to the president. In the modern era dating to police december 7, 1941, the president has been not only 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, in good moments expressing our national joy. Clarifying the meaning of what has happened and where the country goes forward from here. If the nation turns to the president , to whom does the president turn for help . Theres not yet, as they say, an app for that. The president has to go oldschool. George washington and his first term was thinking about maybe stepping down. He asked James Madison to help him write a farewell address. Washington ended up serving two full terms, setting the example for the people who followed him, but for years on, he dusted off the medicine draft and ask Alexander Hamilton to take a look at it and make any suggestions, which i think is simply im sure no one here will take any offense, gave George Washington the greatest speechwriting team ever. Trumps, until the administration, which i gather will have a bigger, classier speechwriting team. President s from the beginning have sought help occasionally, but it wasnt until the rise of Mass Communications that the speechwriter in the sense we of thef them became part president ial orbit. The first president credited with having a fulltime speechwriter was warren harding. Business a price that harding was also the first radio president. As mass media has evolved over the years going from radio to television to Live Television to social media, so has the way the president ial speeches are prepared and received. And so is the role of president ial speechwriters. Im very excited that we been able to pull together a genuinely terrific panel. We have representatives from six administrations, the Nixon Administration, reagan, clinton, president obama. I was a little disappointed we could not get carter, because we could have gotten to more people on the stage. More people on the stage. Im going to go chronologically. Im going to ask everyone to speak for no more than five minutes, and i will cut you off if i have to. I forgot to bring a watch. If you see me checking my iphone, its looking at time. Speak for five minutes about how their president handled moments of National Intention of this ilk, and then we will have a panel discussion, then open it up to questions. The first person sitting immediately to my left, my right from your perspective, is lee huebner, of the nixon white house. He is now professor of media and Public Affairs at George Washington university. Lee thanks to all who organized this conference and the association which is bringing into more visibility and coherence what used to be a group that preferred to remain rather quiet and anonymous. Students are flocking to courses in speechwriting. I just came from a speechwriting class. Students are lining up to get into courses of this sort. They regard this as an exciting professional prospect for them. They dont quite know how to make it work, theres no clear career ladder, but already this afternoon i talked to a couple of people who say they have leads if we have any Good Networks woulde be able to take advantage of these opportunities. Do they all look like rob lowe . [laughter] im not a good fit for this panel, in that i did not work directly on big crisis speeches, except in my Deputy Director role where i would sometimes edit and review what others had produced. Comments thatuing might have at a time of National Emergency gone and the wrong direction, not always being able to rescue them, and sometimes adding my own little touch, and sometimes that helped and often it didnt. The one story i thought since we wanted to do this quickly that related to a big crisis speech happened in 1972. One anecdote that quickly came into my mind, i had worked quite hard with a lot of people on the president s address to joint session of the canadian parliament, whos going up to ottawa, whos going to address the parliament, and a lot of people took that speech very seriously, it was a state occasion. Mysteriously, the last couple of days before the ottawa trip, the president seem to disappear. Got no reaction back from him. Speeches you would live the policy points a little bit open, waiting for the right to make a commitment. Peggy noonan once wrote that cy thats were where poli named often. In this case, next and was silent. Then ive got a sudden note saying, please add this to the draft. It was a short paragraph about vietnam. Bureaucraded in tise. I got a call that i absolutely had to go to camp david because the president was really unhappy with the way that wording had been changed. Cut to the chase, what was happening was that nixon was deciding whether or not to mind the harbors and increase the bombing of vietnam. In the military effort. In 1972 he was about to go to moscow, he had just been to china, everythings falling into place. The first arms control treaty was going to be signed of the nuclear era. Kissinger felt that nixon should not do anything that would upset the russians, or soviets. And yet, nixon has a big offensive. Decision. Ing this he finally decided to go ahead and do this against kissingers advice. And eventually, eight months later led to the ameren and of american evolvement in vietnam. This was what was preoccupying him. He did not have time to think about the canadian parliament. He just delivered a speech, probably the best speech he ever gave. But what was this, i had to go to cap david. In the end i sonics in great he asked if i was having a good time, was a comfortable, did i want to go bowling. So nice. Was that when you walked in and he was sitting in the dark by himself . Lee yes. Years later, at of the national archives, and the director was papers, andhe nixon he said, lets see what pops up. He put my name in, and up popped of the momentount i change the language in the speech. Nixon blew up, went into a tirade about how speechwriters dont understand the nuances of foreign policy, we have to get a speechwriter on the nsc staff to Bring International sophistication, and at the end, halderman wrote, typical nixon tantrum. This language had been changed in some way. That is why nixon was so nice. I think he realized maybe he had overstepped. The tension at those moments play some way into the theme and is terrific. Attention that is shared and felt, even though i did not know at the time what was brewing in vietnam. Nixon called the president s bluff. He was overwhelmingly reelected, and some other stuff happened that wasnt so happy. [laughter] i was never asked to work on anything related to watergate. Other administrators were given a little bit of a discretion as. O what they worked on he wrote a lot of tough political speeches. Thing about aa grand themes, state of the union addresses. Bill safire was another senior writer. I was very much a junior writer. Is thatt of all of this i didnt get involved in that type of speech, but i experience the atmosphere out of which such speeches came. I paid a lot of attention, and im sure will hear the stories that i remember from hearing about other president s. The other point is that in the end, especially with nixon, the more important the speech, the more likely he was to write it himself. Judge was founder and director of the white house writers group. Clark is everybody seen the cover of his has everybody seen the cover of his book . This is how i get on the good side of the moderator. Tod the reagan chapter today make sure he did not pop something on me that i did not remember. In your introduction, you mentioned challenger. That is written by peggy noonan. We talked about this the other day and i had not remembered it. Reagan she realized something , he would have to give a talk on television that night. She was the obvious go to person for that. She did large ceremonial speeches, largely she was known at the time for made jokes at the time about being the one who always went to the funerals, funerals. The as she was working on it, one of the senior staffers came over and had some notes from the the president had talked about the need to speak to children and talk about the future, about the adventure required and frontiers required, sense of adventure, but also our willingness to accept danger. If you read the speech, you see that seem coming up right away. Written see that was very fast. Sirt section is about Francis Drake had died on that day. Talked about that clearly. You have to work very fast to fit them in. That is the beginning and end of , writtenled flight by a canadian pilot in the first world war. I did that some time ago when i was giving some talks overseas on speech writing by a professor. You work this out, did you think about no, you never do that, or at least i with the truly memorable things. Theres a few times you do that when you are writing things that have humor in them. Mostly its a moment where this sense comes to you. Where the artistry comes in, or at least the impulse towards artistry. Speech writing is not about flowery words. Its not about ornate phrases. One of the early speeches i yetived back from reagan, crossed out every fifth or sixth word he had crossed out every fifth or sixth word. Top hetten at the had written, well, this is a fine speech. [inaudible] thats what he wrote. [applause] are you clark what he was saying was, this is my style. Its very lean. Its not flowery. Keep it in mind. That, and captured ending with a quote is extremely powerful. It was all the more so in this. That is the kind of thing you are facing at a moment of crisis. Is direction, some of it is research, and some of it is inspiration. Not everyone is obligated to do impressions of their former boss, but it is certainly encouraged. She was the executive producer of 41 on 41, which was about bush 41, which aired on cnn. She still sometimes writes speeches. Most importantly, for my perspective, shes contributing editor at u. S. News world report. Mary kate thank you. I started writing for president bush when i was three years out of college. I was by far the youngest speechwriter and our office. Not result, i got assigned the big challenger crisis type of speeches. I did a lot of spelling bee winners and girl scout of the year award. There could have been a crisis if the turkey that got pardon somehow met the state, but i never had that crisis. The firsth 41 was president to pardon a thanksgiving turkey. That is a great tradition that has gone on. [indiscernible] [laughter] kate reagan did not pardon a turkey. [laughter] i had been1992 on the job for three years, and slowly worked my way up from the spelling bee winners. I was on the trip where the president went to the state dinner in japan and had an unfortunate incident where he prime on the japanese minister at the state dinner. I had written the speech for the next morning, which was to the japanese diet. Night. A crazy i was not senior enough to be at the state dinner. The kids my age were all back at the hotel, watching on television. Once we got the word something happened, we turned on the tvs. Probably not a politically correct thing to say, but it was sort of like a godzilla movie the runway. You know you have those japanese movies where the lips are moving an english is coming out . They have these great looks on their faces, but the japanese is coming out. Theres no subtitles. Theyre showing this godawful film of the president keeling over. It really looked like he was dead. Theres no words on the screen to know otherwise. We thinke, holy cow, the president is dead or about to die tonight. Are saying, dont move, everybody stay where you are. Dont talk to anybody outside until you talk to me. About midnight i get a phone its from the secretary of the treasury and a dear friend of president bushs. He says, i understand you wrote the speech for tomorrow morning. They just asked me to deliver it in the president s place. Can you meet me right now . I said of course. I meet with him. Hes absolutely shellshocked. Hes a good friend of the president. He thinks it may be the president is already dead. He said, i dont know what to do. I said, i think you should deliver the speech. 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 which says i will now deliver the speech as george bush would have delivered it to himself, or do you want to deliver it in the third person and we will change every sentence. And he said, i dont know. What do you think . He could not make a decision. Think he was genuinely emotional about the situation. My clockim looking at and thinking, i really dont want to have to rewrite this whole speech. I said, i think it would be brilliant if you just kept it. [laughter] he says, i will now deliver the speech as if george bush were here. And off he goes. The meny single time stopped to take a breath, whether it was an applause line or not, the japanese diet went nuts and clapped like crazy is if they were going to apply george bush back into good health. We get out of there, and nick brady says, mary kate, that was the greatest. I cant believe it. It was very sweet that he was so excited. Minute that it was not about neck brady nick brady, it was about the gracious hospitality of the japanese people who were mortified this happened to george bush. An act ofk it was love for george bush that these people were just trying to a plot every way to show the president that he was missed and loved. It was a sweet moment in time. My advice to you as speechwriters, if some 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. [laughter] jeffr next speaker is shesol, speechwriter for president clinton. Hes a Founding Partner at west wing writers, the democratic focused speechwriting group here in town. Jeff thanks. I had not really come prepared to talk about this. Mary kate, i want to add a slightly less elevated perspective on the story that you just told. I was in college when president bush threw up on the prime minister. College students are usually pretty creative in coming up ways of describing throwing up. Barfing being pretty oldschool. There was a moment that follow where the term on campus for throwing up after an overindulgent night at frat greeting miyazawa. Miyazawa. Lly greeted [laughter] we were very politically focused. [laughter] i dont know if you will forgive for going from comedy to tragedy. Robert, you talked about the president in his role as comforter in chief. President , president clinton, is well known as somebody who famously said, i feel your pain. You canlly learned fact check this it wasnt president clinton who originated that phrase, it was actually president carter who first said, i feel your pain. I think president clinton is probably better at it than some other president s have been. It was a particular, and actually, i think important , easy to kind of have fun with, but really very sorts of in all contexts that president s are confronted with. I will just talk briefly about one and was involved in that feels very fresh in this moment. Horrificthe sort of School Shooting at columbine, high school in colorado, my home state im sure that you all remember. If one couldply, say simply, about a School Shooting. It wasnt typical of other School Shootings in that it had been minted meticulously and methodically planned and executed. There was something about there had been a of School Shootings beginning in earnest in 1997. From purdue, kentucky, to jonesboro, arkansas, to springfield, oregon, across the country. Everyone of these shocking and horrifying in its own way. Of these had been carried out by an 11yearold and 13yearold. There was an active process of soulsearching going on in the country. A very active discussion in the same way that we have right now in the present context. And then there was columbine. In a way this was the moment when it all just sort of broke. Peggy noonan wrote a column at the time talking about the culture of death that existed in the country and that sums some kind of Critical Mass of been reached. It really did 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 is useful, actually, to think not as moment like this resulting in a single speech, but really part of a process in a discussion. As i went back into my files and for all the world to see, frighteningly, all of our stuff is online in pdf form. You are next. [laughter] dug back into my own files to take a look at this. I think that what struck me is that there are, just as there are phases of grief, there are phases of discussion like this. It gains in the moment with a reaction. The president usually gets to a he can toquickly as inevitably say we are still trying to sort out the fact. Our hearts and prayers go out to the families. Theres not much else to say at that moment because it is a swirl of confusion as to what actually took place. The first phase is simply one of immediate reaction. You move short order really more toward reflection. If there is a Funeral Service in this case Vice President gore attended the service in littleton with the families. And gave essentially a homily, a eulogy in the homily all at once , very focused on scripture. An entirely different kind of speech, really, than the others that preceded and followed it. And then is this begins to the discussion moves more towards action. What are we going to do about this . Is there anything to do about this . I think it was about 10 days out from the incident, this tragedy that president clinton went to the rose garden to talk about what the government could do about it. He talked about the white house convening about 10 days later in a strategy session on children and violence. There was a lot of discussion about violence in pop culture, video games and so forth, and anything shortas of stepping all over free speech that could be done about this. And then he and democrats in the senate initiated a series of reforms and gun legislations, the gun show loophole, requiring safety locks on all new guns over that were sold in so forth. That debate began ultimately like this debate, almost inevitably, it was fruitless in the end. Nothing was done in that regard. Moving a little further along this trajectory, there is hopefully a time for healing. Precisely one month after the shooting i went with the president to littleton for him to deliver the speech to the students, who have been moved from the shutdown high school for the time being. It is something that i witnessed from the very edge, not wanting to intrude on the moment. What struck me in that morning was how important it was with them to understand that the nation is focused on their grief. It makes it clear that this is not simply an isolated incident. With national consequences. Hopefully some concrete action can come from that. They each had to these things at an appropriate time. In recent days and recent years all too often we have seen this with president obama. Mr. Schlesinger thank you, jeff. Next, the current speechwriter for private lives, formally for president bush and Vice President cheney. At would like to point out that he is the son of a speechwriter. His father, arthur, wrote for president kennedy and was a man that we all admired and like very much. Rob asked me to talk about crisis during the bush cheney years. Of course, there were no crises during those years. [laughter] about the quickest turnaround we ever had, february morning, theturday at 9 15, nine l 30 from our administrative person at the white house saying that Mission Control had lost touch with columbia. The worst was feared and we should prepare for a president ial statement. Worked as part of a team we have been together since bush had been governor of texas. We were all in the west wing office by 10 00. Im not sure exactly what had happened and what the fate of the astronauts was, but as i say the worst was feared. We got to work on the statement and it was a fraught day. They could not take them as would be custom by the helicopter, it would be the car. The motorcade took quite a while. We did not see him for quite some time. At 10 00 and we were told that we had two hours in the speech had to be ready by noon. We asked for another hour, 1 00, which was refused. I have often said that my motto, not original to me, is where there is no alternative, there is no problem. [laughter] is also the case the you have three writers working on this, see did not have that intense pressure of being one person in a room under extreme conditions timewise having to get this out on your own. We do that we could do it because we could get our heads together. We didnt have a lot of time. ,hat final speech, 375 words one great contribution came from karen hughes, president bushs indispensable Senior Adviser in communications. 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 by name, leading into a nice line for the president the same creator who named all the stars new the names of the souls of we mourned today. Somethingiting this that all speechwriters have experienced is that pressure does not just concentrate your mind. It really clears away the clutter in the writing. You can do something in two hours like that. Its not going to be of any less quality is something you have been given a week to work on. Something about those kinds of conditions where you dont have to strain for meeting meaning. Strain for a way to introduce drama. Its all there. As i mentioned, we have been working for george w for a while. At this point since 2003. We work in our fourth year of writing for president bush. It did not just meditate on the tragedy, the speech was not about him. President bush always like to convey his thoughts. He like to convey his feelings with words, instead of simply announcing his frame of mind he would like to convey actual feeling with his words. That is an example of it. It is an instinct that he put into us. Of course, we met with him briefly. Everything was so compressed. As i say, we met with him briefly before he went live at 2 04 in the afternoon. Changes, put his touch on it. It was all over very fast. This was the first time the president had ever addressed the nation from the cabinet room. No special meaning to that other than it was thought to be a good venue. As is always the case with george w. Bush, when that was over we reconvene in the oval office momentarily and is always said thanks, guys. Mr. Schlesinger thanks. ,inally, adam frankel speechwriter for president obama in his first term. Mr. Frankel i was assisted to ted sorensen for a number of years, probably the most intensive credential in this crowd. Story about the cuban missile crisis where he was a member of the xcom that gathered during the crisis. Asked to produce two speeches depending on how it unfolded, one in the event of an invasion of cuba, the other if they went with a blockade, he went to write the speeches and couldnt write the one about the invasion. He would tell that story as a way of showing us how the decisionmaking process unfolded. It unfolded many years later. When the raid on bin laden happened, i was at home on an all ornd got showing that the president was about to deliver some remarks. So, i emailed the other speechwriters to say does anyone know anything about this . Dark except for ben, who have been appointed as part of the deliberations. He had the story about not being able to write that speech in advance either. That he had sat down to write it in advance and started writing tonight Osama Bin Laden was killed in a raid. ,e said, i cant write this what if things go horribly wrong . Afterwards he grabbed the president and said we got to talk about the speech. ,hats one kind of challenge challenging circumstance. Picking up on what jeff was saying, it is sort of a mark of the tragic strain of gun violence that this president has had to speak on that topic so often. I went to write for president obama in 2007, a couple of weeks after he announced his candidacy. I remember working on a speech than the he delivered at a church on the south side about gun violence. These speeches have a for anyone who speaks about this topic, and for the writers who work on them, a numbing familiarity. Its heartbreaking overtime. Every time. You try to make them as unique and distinct as possible, telling the stories of the individuals whose lives were lost. It is so tragically familiar. In so many cases. When i would work on a number of these speeches, they were killed in gun violence. I would think about if the people were somewhere in the room, how what i talk to them . How would i want the president to talk to them . You dont think about writing for the country. One story along those lines that was probably the earliest to the the earliest to me of what a talented writer the president was, early in 2008 he went to speak on the 50th anniversary of the l. A. Riots. He didnt want to speech. He just wanted some notes as brief. As part of the research, we found this story from during the riots that was a story about a pregnant woman who had been shot in the belly. She was wretch she was rushed to the emergency room. It turned out that the bullet had lodged itself in the fleshy part of the babies arm. The baby was fine. This is the story, an extraordinary story. I share this story with the president , not knowing at all what he would do with it. And he weaves this into a tapestry of the american experience. The violence in the cities and across the country. Shot, butwe have been its not a fatal wound. Metaphor foriful american society. And that is one of his more as a student of the speakers appear, one of the things that was particularly fun and rewarding as a writer, to work. Ith president obama on this or it apart from tragedy if have been something that there is, dive in. Mr. Schlesinger thank you. We will have some intrapanel discussion and then we will open it up to questions. We are in a roomful of aspiring professional speechwriters. Would you give to speechwriters who may encounter in their life, working for a politician or working for a private business person, might encounter one of these moments you have gotht, three hours or three days but this is a huge amount. What piece of advice would you give, anyone . In the course of working for the Vice President i was speaking to someone who had been who was writing for the governor and he said you know we do . We keep files on all of the big issues. Part of this is keeping up. When you are working for a whetherl executive, its economic policy, the but that this the opposition, the and if you wanted to have it at your fingertips as president have more of these issues. And i have stories. In this senseies that everything is an emergency not in the white house, i , you know, weell pretty much had control of the agenda. Very rarely went Something Like challenger or Something Else would come up, but it wasnt much. We were basically driving back and forth, someone would make a political run at us, but we were always prepared and we always knew that it was part of an ongoingdiscussion, debate in washington. By the way, i wouldnt say like nothing comes of it when it doesnt go your way, but the whole point of the debate is that somewhere else it settles down to some decision. Its not fruitless im saying this to comfort jeff. Its not fruitless. But many of them, in this you all the as much as major areas where you are engaged as part of the debate. Surprisesome come, you have less distance to cover. I agree. Ger whether were talking about other kinds of crises or or if you are a ceo or ang a large enterprise global audience of employees, investors and so forth. There is confusion in these moments. There is a very real confusion as to what happened. I talk about that i talked about that a moment ago. In a larger sensor think that what people are looking for in an inchoate way, even if they cannot articulate it, is meaning, understanding. The president , the ceo, or anyone else in a substantial is anon like this authority figure. We dont always regard them that way. But they absolutely are. I think that we look to the to help usigures in the at the very least president s stand and say you acknowledge their or a frankly that meaning is elusive. President clinton would quote st. Paul, acknowledging that we would probably never really understand what drives human beings to commit these acts of violence. But we should hold on to our faith regardless. I think that what you are looking for here, to the best you can manage it, is a clarifying element. At least to clarify the issues, to clarify the fundamentals. I think that that is what we are all grappling with in these kinds of speeches, to touch that, to acknowledge that, to give some direction at least to the people themselves as they search their own souls to connect them to whats really at stake. Just adding to that mr. Huebner just adding to that from a speechwriters perspective, its important not to overwrite. So much of what the speechwriter does in the political world is , force, anddrama special meaning to the speech you are doing. When it is her 99 speech on education policy or the latest announcement about whats topening at hud, you try give it some extra meaning or make it part of a larger story. Thats really your job. In these moments of crisis, these big, dramatic tragic moments, a speech is not going to fail unless its been overwritten. Unless its kind of wallowing in things. The moment requires planning. And also noter saying the long the wrong thing. Mr. Judge after kent state, nixon had just given this egg, rather hawkish speech about the cambodia incursion. Policythe only foreign speech that pat buchanan did right in his structure from the president was dont show it to Henry Henry Kissinger who would have conned me down. That had a polarizing effect on opinion. To make it worse a statement came out after the students were killed. Speechwriters swore theyd never seen it or check it. That wethe rule was would see all the words before they went out as a final kind of check. I dont know where the statement came from. Someone said someone in the press office, and it got out in a sentence out of context can become inflammatory and the phrase was something that went out in the president s name. Maybe he even wrote it, though i dont think so. It was Something Like when dissent turns to violence, it thates tragedy area and sounds ok except it seemed to be blaming the victims and it was not accompanied i other expressions of sympathy or regret. Had a terrible effect on the nation. Readily anybody does, do you . [inaudible] [laughter] mr. Huebner the next day nixon went to the pentagon and sent to a woman there sympathetically your husband is the hero, we have these great heroes, then these bombs running around campus in blowing things up. He happened to be on the microphone, which cap played out. The wrong word at the wrong time can have a terrible effect area the father of one of the victims there said famously my daughter was not a bum. It just polarized everything. Was a long time and the Nixon Administration hardly came out from that. Mr. Frankel not every speech is supposed to be the gettysburg address. I learned that early on. Distinctly i remember writing a inech for a labor audience 2008. I got really into this. It was red meat, it was as lofty as i could get it. It was very clear immediately that he had just gotten a call from the president. He started with a story about how he was a reporter in chicago. There was a lesson that was about to come. I remember covering the opening of an airport in illinois. I wrote this piece and i thought it was the most beautiful piece that someone could read or write about the opening of an airport. I talked about planes in the sky, all this kind of stuff but airlines will be flying out of there . Himself it is a great himself, he is a great writer. Mr. Schlesinger when you were talking about your experience in japan and this information if Something Like that happened today, people would be speculating about it on twitter. How has the social media transformation changed, do you think, how president s communicate with the public in moments of great a great moment like this . Anyone . Enemy to pick on mary kay. I will give one response here. One of the things i really admire about president obama, one of the reasons i was drawn to him initially, he resists that temptation to play into a lot of these, the 32nd sound bite, all that stuff. We get knocked for it. Was it counterproductive at times . Maybe. But i really respected that and as a writer that was the kind of person i wanted to work for. Someone who was more concerned with telling the whole story, making the complete argument, and west concerned less concerned about the other approach, which was to quote the aid to a governor who i will not aid who i once helped on speeches stringing soundbites together. I told that story to ted sorensen, who liked it so much that he included it in his book as an example of what not to do. Shortly, one needs to be mindful of this. This, when your father was running speeches it was a different deal. Now everyone is mindful of how the speech will be conveyed in a certain media environment and the speechwriter is a course worried about that. It is important to also think about the integrity of the speech. Writing digestible nuggets, any one of which could be pulled out and compiled, you lose something, i think. The integrity of lost. Maybe thats a good thing for the message you are trying to deliver that day, but not for speechwriting. I have a somewhat similar view. Many speeches are just the speaker, i remember one time seeing a senator give a talk and afterwards i went up to the podium and it included a list of soundbites. He had been given them by his staff and the staff was there indecent yeah, got to weave them into whatever he says. So, i dont think of that. I agree with you totally. Me Say Something about the changing media and technology environment. This is a big difference between what you have been doing and what we did. 88 the new republic had a cover story about the changing soundbites. It turns out that they had timings. Someone had done it, someone was timing that quotes of speeches during political campaigns. 1968. Eve it was the typical clip of a speech was on the evening news and 52 seconds. Were thishat we is now 1988 by the time we were playing, it was down to seven seconds. We have three networks to get through. Stuff, didnt cover our it might as well have not been set. If you look at reagans speeches, they are coherent arguments about the character of the country, its direction, and the challenges we were facing. That we had to get through that seven seconds for a different audience. Everyone here will know this, maybe you will. , in you are writing speeches had layers of audiences in mind. I cared about what the audience in front of me, the president , was saying. I cared about what the line of reporters was thinking. I cared about what their editors were thinking. I cared about what the American People were thinking. And i cared about what audiences around the world were thinking. Very familiar, right . Let me just finish. I also i knew that the at least for us that the line in was that itthe room was a vehicle for debate and they were not particularly friendly. Understoodhat we what kinds of things they liked to quote. What kind of language. What kind of sentence structure. There are these things that come out of 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 dont want 10 of them in, because you want to control the story. So, we were under particular pressure to come up with one or two of those, because we were not going to get the 52 seconds. What is it like now . Your man was the leader on this. This is the one this is one of the few times i will say good things about president obama. But thats a joke. [laughter] come on. [laughter] 2008 campaign the and his duel with hillary of the, the battle primaries, week after week one or the other wins. This is the age of cable. What does it mean . 10 to 15 minutes covered. Then they will cut off and give the same amount of time to the other side. She would come out and do a politician seven doing since mark and beer in. Martin then were in. Recognizing our martin van buren. Recognizing everyone in the say what shethen had to say. That would cut into her time. He would come out and move right into his message. By the time he was done, he had gotten everything he needed to say to the country out. Im sure some place later he said nice things about the people there. Mr. Frankel we thought about doing that later in the speech for that reason. The clinton people did not you were literally a generation ahead of them. This is the last point i will make, in the justin welliver society, your dad got one and said why are there no more memorable phrases . The answer to that was that ,eople in the positions we had campaigns now covered entire speeches television covers entire speeches regularly. You know you have got one Million People watching. Or at least several hundred thousand every time you get it up. There is much less pressure to come up with that 727 seconds. You have got as much time as you want. Quickly, to bridge the generations, as you put it, the Clinton White house, we were presmart phone, pretwitter we did have these clunky palm pilots and cell phones, but nobody had put them together yet. At the same time, we were anding very actively on struggling with the fragmentation of the media environment and the acceleration of the news cycle. This was very much a topic of conversation internally at the white house, who reckoned with this. This was the advent of msnbc, of fox news. The networks didnt control the conversation to the extent that they did. The major newspapers didnt control the conversation to the extent that they did. Other newspapers were risingaring, online was and so forth. How do you deal with this . One of the things noted at the time was that president clinton gave a lot of ages. We ran our own internal analysis on this. Found that the numbers are a bit off, but close, in a similar point in their presidency, harry truman gave 88 speeches. President reagan gave somewhere around the order of 300. Clinton gave 550. Statistics like that were wielded to suggest that president clinton was not disciplined and loved to get in front of a microphone and so forth. This was kind of a trope in the media. Look, its absolutely the case, anyone who has watched bill clinton knows that she loves to give a speech, hes awfully good at it with no help from any of us. At the same time this was an acknowledgment of the demand on a modern president. That he is expected to be out there every day and during times when the president has not been actively trying to drive the conversation he has come in for a lot of criticism. You are there, adam. During that summer when the debate was heating up over the Affordable Care act, president obama went relatively quiet because a lot of the negotiations as i understand it were happening behind the scenes and he was not looking to complicate things by giving a lot of inflammatory speeches on the other side, the other side jumped into the breach. This was tea party summer. When the president finally came , rightseptember of 2010 after the Summer Vacation he gave a big speech to take control of the debate is that when it was . This was seen as a great acknowledgment that hed been too quiet for too long. President s are expected to be seen and heard all the time. All the more so in a time of twitter and so forth. So, it creates on the part of , ceos, University President s, heads of foundations , this feeling that if you are not tweeting once per hour if you dont have something to say then yourything have created a vacuum that others will exploit. Asre is a danger in that well, of course, where if you comment on everything, you are spreading yourself thin and sacrificing the opportunity, even if its harder to realize today than it was when president reagan was in office, to control the conversation. It is harder today than ever before to control, for a president , to control the conversation. There are too many lovers out there and too much noise. But you have got to keep trying. I. Schlesinger after this want to go to questions from the audience. We have microphones on either side in either of aisle. Lee . President nixon asked us to underline in red a sentence or two, the paragraph, the think is going to be the lead in tomorrows paper. A sophisticated, good journalist , what quote would they use . The startling thing was we would do that and we couldnt find it, we couldnt find one thing that summed up the message, so we started to write them in not just as soundbites that good, pity summaries of what we were doing and i think that was wonderful advice to writers. Somewhere along the line crystallizing things for when im with the client, one of the things i ask them is what one sentence do you want your audience to go away with . Ms. Cary eisenhower used to say you should be able to see it on the back of a matchbook. The problem is explaining what a matchbook is. [laughter] come on,singer people, this is not great school where people will think you are uncool if you speak up and ask questions. Here we are. Im interested in knowing if president clinton ever referred to his 1988 convention speech, one of the great failures of a speech that he made, and one of the most remarkable turnarounds to become the president for years later. Any comments on that . Mr. Judge he did refer to it from time to time. I think he had a different perspective on it. Not that it was a great success, but he walked up there with a long line of things that the dukakis people wanted him to discuss in that speech. That contributed to the length. And that was a fact that he wanted us to understand. [laughter] jeff, i can tell you something, though, clinton is the third or fourth term governor of arkansas. I was in law school. It was between years. I was at my folks house in northern wisconsin, watching that convention. One of my pals i grew up with across town, he called up during and he saidspeech are you watching the future president . I said i sure am. In both of our minds this was an amazing talent. Judging on that speech, we both thought he was president ial material. Its interesting that thats how we felt about it. [laughter] mr. Schlesinger over here. Good afternoon, thank you all for being here. One of the things that drives me as a speechwriters i want to affect, drive outcomes of policy, conversations and debates. Can any of you speak to a time when you were down, you didnt have the votes in congress and were trying to get a policy done in a speech or series of speeches where you felt like you turned that around . [laughter] modesty prevents us. Modesty prevents us. [laughter] you being your team, your president. Ted used to talk about this, about whether a speech could redirect . How used to talk about ted believed in the power of like few others, except present he alsoincluded, but believed that the speech was just a speech in there had to be a confluence of the circumstance being right for a great speech to move people. Id say that one circumstance that comes to mind here is on health care. I worked on the speech to the American Medical Association when we were supposed to kick off the drive for Health Care Reform. I remember talking to dan , who was then the Communications Director i forget his title back then. He said that when history books about this administration are written, we want to try for Health Care Reform to start with a speech not something that you say to a speechwriter. [laughter] i remember working on that and the vision of that speech was lets just explain this thing as well as we know how and really lay out the policy. I remember calling everybody with input to give on the speech together, from larry summers, peter or zach, all these folks, get their thoughts on the speech. Has the distinction that i am not particularly proud of of being the longest speech the president had given until that point. There were events in events in iran. The next day there was no coverage of the speech at all. Not only that, cbo came out with a study that muddy the water of reporting. This whole speech that we thought would help to frame the debate, help to explain what was at stake, we lost. Its not exactly an example of but of howrned it, they can foil those good plans. Do you want to go first . Mr. Schlesinger chivalry is not dead. Ms. Cary the example that i can think of from the bush 1988istration, recall his convention address, the one line about 1000 points of light across the night sky. It made it into his inaugural address, peggy noonan was responsible for both of those. Once we got into office the idea which points of light, started as a nice idea that people thought would come to nothing, grew and grew. Had one particular sentence to be in any speech any definition of a successful life must include service to others. George bush, his last speech as he left office he said you know, we can talk about the , the legislation, the end of the cold war, all sorts that happened during my administration, but the thing i want to be most response are remembered for is the points of life and i want to go become one myself. At that Age Community service was something the juvenile Justice System imposed on people as a punishment. Nowadays i think there has been a complete seachange in the idea of community service. The volunteer as a movement in this country has spread overseas. There are a lot of reasons for that and i think that george bush deserves deserves some credit. Through his rhetoric over the years i think that he caused a cultural change in the way that people have viewed volunteers. It is sort of a melding of these things that have been said. President bush was quite a bit behind in the polls, coming out of the democratic convention. Seven weeks before i had written the speech. I do not often talk about my speeches, but i will say this to give an example. At theritten a speech beginning of the democratic convention, maybe two weeks before no, it was during the platform process. Ted sorensen said that they would not be able to paint us with being liberals. I wrote a speech for the president that had a line and it the democrats have put on their political trenchcoats and sunglasses, wrapped their platform in a brown paper wrapper and will never whisper the l word again. If you remember that campaign, later the l word became known, but not in that speech, because of an event in iran. , theay it was delivered night before we had shot down an airbus by accident. Of course, no president ial speech speech was going to get coverage that day. It came to the democratic convention. We went dark all through the convention. We did not, i dont think you all did, the Vice President ms. Cary [inaudible] fishing, something he would never get away with now. Teams, and itave comes i get the assignment to write the president ial weekly address on saturday, conventions and on thursdays. And i decided we had lost, but this was the right moment. You talked about the moment. It was it might as well have never been said if it doesnt appear in the new york times, or the network news. So, i recycled it. It defined the election. We started driving the l word as a term and finally by the time the convention came, the Vice President wasnt campaigning because he was out of money between the two conventions. We were out there all the time. We drove the l word, we were backing him with us for dukakis. We droves on our team and we drove the term and finally dukakis got so frustrated with us he said well, he had been dodging whether he was a liberal. He said well, am a liberal in the style of harry truman. But no one heard the rest. Thats how you can turn around something. As such is the right phrase, but the right moment and then keeping at it. Mr. Schlesinger lets see if we can get in a couple of more real quick. Richard wilbur once gave an address call the speech and the ceremony, saying that the function of ceremony was to enable people to respond to great events in their lives by feeling an appropriate emotion. Would you say that thats the feeling of the president in the great events of our National Life . Yes. Good answer. [laughter] what is your advice on how you approach using humor when matters of diplomacy and decorum have to be factored in so that you can come up with something that is still funny despite the fact that its also appropriate . Ms. Cary i got pulled into a lot of humor speeches. The one rule i would say across the board is that its very, very tricky to use humor in a situation where there will be people in the audience where the remarks are translated. Tend to not douche you are as an international toast overseas, there are so many. Itfalls with translation second, and we have these guys aoating around who was freelance writer on retainer. He lived with a fax machine, and i still have it this file called the joke file they are all formula jokes and he would just change the name. Back then in the 80s a lot of them were about donald trump, so i should pull those back out. [laughter] he was getting divorced at the time, there were all of these jokes about that. To take formula jokes and just change the words and the names to the current crowd. Second, at the white house you cannot just back in those days carson, leno, letterman, now its several different crowds. You cannot just take stuff off tv and steal it. Not these days. The essence of a joke is to ideas put next to each other that have nothing to do with each other. We would have the researchers come off with list of all the current stuff. The top movies, the top song, the celebrity train wreck, whatever. We would call in all these funny people. Whether they were professionally associated with us or not. We would put a bottle of scotch in the table nighttime, not lunch. Sure. [laughter] be cary in those days it like something with Michael Jackson and the speaker of the house. Or whatever, you would come up with these funny, incongruent things. It was ridiculously constrained, because george bush did not like humor that littered over people other people, insulted people , especially of his political because of his political opponents. That was a great credit to him getting things done in a bipartisan way, he did not stoop to insulting his political opponents. We were left with jokes about broccoli, knowing the dog. You cannot make fun of states. And the list gets smaller and things and the pile of we can use gets bigger and bigger. It really makes you appreciate people who stand up to do a comedy monologue every night. President bush said the people did not elect me to be a, why do i hat a comic, why do i have to do this . We are the last thing standing between everyone and the balls of scotch, so we have two more people that want and go to the reception we have a speechwriting advisory group, im an undergrad do you this Hadley Barrett pet peeves . E any if you are in a position that brings so much pressure all the time, when might you make a mistake and the american pig American Public take something in visit after there were being now times when you need a crutch. [applause] you get usedone, to some of the stuff. I wrote a speech on education and woke up the next piece to a andid brooks column called you just get hammered on the news. One way to avoid things like that happening are the president was going to the drug summit. In colombia. I think it was very dangerous. The first half of the speech was on reducing supply, the second half was on reducing demand. The guy that wrote it had this have it. In order to catch 20 and the segway sentence was and big bucks are not enough. [laughter] wait, back up. I dont think thats a good segue. Not read it out loud, i never would have caught it. To your question about pet addingthe one that think theater visit there are those who say this and they mischaracterize the other side of a strawman way. And then they promote their own side. I think it would be more intellectually honest and informative to actually correctly summarize the other that your arguments against it are more intellectually coherent. There are those who say mr. Schlesinger i will say there are degrees to this thing. Probably the worst thank this can happen when youre writing these speeches when you work really hard on something and it gets ignored. Its either up ended by events or its not interesting enough for anybody to bother covering it. Certainly a lot of things the , president say escapes the notice of the nation. Especially when they are saying a lot of things. Youre mostly happy to get attention. Were a little bit envious of one another when we do. Once i had been on the job for a couple of weeks when i was very involved in numerous speeches for president clinton. 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 Defense at a joke i written in. I was not wounded by that but actually delighted. [applause] im 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. [laughter] you can hope. [laughter] 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. Either this is a response to , your question about power of the speeches to change. We all recognize that a speech is not a work of alchemy. It transforms reality in some fundamental way. 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. If he had not gotten it right, it might have been the end of that campaign. Certainly a single speech can make a tremendous difference in all kinds of ways. But i think for the most part, theres a whole school of thought actually, maybe some of you are familiar with. Theres a growing school of thought that speeches dont matter at all. Its in the wrong way. Or if they matter when president , speak, they can only polarize. They can only deliver counterproductive speeches. Because as soon as they stay an opinion on it, then their own supporters are hemmed into a particular set of ideas. Theres a political scientists, i wont name him because im not going to give him publicity here on cspan who produced number of , works said the great number of speeches didnt make a difference at all. Fdrs fireside chats. He says look at the approval ratings. He gave the speech and then the next day it and move the numbers or move the numbers by a single point. These speeches not make any difference at all. I think the way to think about speeches in terms of impact, is not sort of an instantaneous work of alchemy, but an argument. That is built over time. It is sustained in a way that has a cumulative power. It transforms discussions that are not immediate in a given polling. It is not flipping a switch. But president s 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. Once in a while, hate speech a speech can really move the needle. Nixon saved his career with that speech. Half hour Public Opinion turned upside down. His silent majority speech made a big impact. 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. Im 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. [laughter] 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] he was the person who shot president reagan, and president reagan was not wearing a bulletproof vest that day. It was a short trip from the white house. The thing was that he was stocking jimmy carter before this. Q a, a man talks about various assassination attempts and physical threats made against president s and president ial candidates throughout american history. There have been 60 president to have been 60 president said based assassination threats, although none directly since ronald reagan. I also covered three provincial candidates. He we long. Q we long. Robert kennedy. George wallace. He was shot and paralyzed for life. In 1972. I cover candidates as well as president s. It is a long list. Tonight at 8 00 eastern and pacific on cspans q a. Now the u. S. Efforts to fight the influence of terrorist groups like isis on the internet. This is from todays washington journal. Our first guest is with the American Enterprise institute. He worked for the bush administration, good morning. We hear a lot about how isis uses social media and wider success. Tommy what you think that is. I think they have put a huge amount of effort into it. The second reason, which we should not forget is that isis has a very powerful message. Unlike other terrorist groups. , thatbuilding a caliphate is to say its own empire. It has