the president making an announcement or there is a press conference that is interesting or something. and you listen to bush and i think a lot of people thought well he is very well informed and well spoken and this is not what i was expecting because most people are busy with their lives. >> is he funny . >> there was a . kind out who your audience is. and things of that natch. however, it is the president speaking and therefore as he always told us, everybody is important. we were not to think of a small rose garden event for teacher of the year as not important. it was part of the full jol yum of statements that he made at president of the united states. he was always after us to never skip a step in making a case. even if you're speaking to the people that -- an audience of people likely to be in agreement of what you're saying, he always has a broader audience. and if he is making his case for social security reform and he skips the hard part, a person who disagrees and maybe even a person who has not done a lot of thinking about it will say oh, we'll now you skipped a step. >> and you can get bogged down in the fear of the audience. the audience is the world for really any speech. you never know who is paying attention. i would have relatives in dia saying one of the president's speeches is reported on there. and by the time we came into office everything was on twitter. i would watch a speech i worked on, i'm watching it on tv, and i'm watching it on twitter at the same time and it is a great way to lose your mind. they will just filter pieces of that speech through their own view and slice and dice it, and it appears on swtwitter in a ve different way. but i agree i think you have to think about who the primary audience is, and they would say to me, you know, think about you could get again bogged down in all of the potential people who are paying attention, so focus on the emotional heart center of this speech. who are you most trying to touch. start with that and then it can work out. it is the spouse of a fallen soldier. and then move broader. and that was a really helpful way to stay focused and not lose sight and not let twitter ruin your life. >> i'm going to ask one last question. there is a big difference between a foreign policy speech and a domestic speech. based on what we have seen our colleagues do and what we know what the different considerations are for those? >> i was fortunate, i'm a lawyer in training but i'm not an expert in any policy area so i had to write speeches about things that done thinking about. but you have policy experts at the white house that love talking about their area of expertise and they're very good at it. i was always toggling back and forth between foreign policy and military type stuff and all of the things that fall into that area. president bush's signature issue was education reform. and that was ted kennedy and john boehner. and it was really a big part of what he want today accomplish as president, of course. it fell far into the background, but we could never make him happy with an education speech draft because he knew too much about it to the granular level of detail. it could go through the staffing process and everything was fine. he would say you don't get it, you don't have it. so one anytime 2004, in the middle of a reelection campaign, a lot going on, i said you know what, he didn't like the last education speech, we have another one to do, let's take the one he didn't use and look at the transcript of what he actually said, and nice that. we took that transcript of the last speech and we cleaned it up and we did some, you know, put in some current local references and current facts and data to freshen it up. and i thought this is what he wanted to say and it was a rare event that he had a speech and he didn't use it. so he took that transcript, make it into a speech, send it back to him, he loved it, he wrote it. >> my understanding from colleges that worked with bill clinton is that previously the speechwriters were sort of all in one shop and when sandy was national security advisor for clinton, he wanted the speechwriters under his per view. i don't know if this is true in your white house too, but our colleagues that wrote foreign policy speeches, their e-mail addresses were nsc, they were technically part of the nsc even though they were on our team. and you know they had a different level of clearance and everything in their lives. they were looking at classified materials to write speeches and it is a very different process. but it is really a different ball game. foreign leaders and populations are looking at what the president says and they're pouring every word in a way that people are not pouring over my economic policy speech. there is a level of care that needs to be given to those speeches. not that you're not careful about every one, but i think sometimes that would have an effect on the prose. i would be going back and forth with various members that would want something said in a very precise way but it didn't sound like human english. so you would be trying to go back and look at it, and it needed to be more precise. he was not a speech writer, but he was helping for remarks he was given somewhere. she drafted tf and you have to say u.s. persons and not american people, which is ridiculous, but they are just considerations that are different from force policy. >> when the president of the united states goes abroad, all of his public remarks he makes on that trip whether or not it is two days or ten. those are done, cleared, and approved before air force one leaves the united states. it is a real crunch for speech writing before. >> i would like to hear you elaborate on the decision to sing amazing grace? >> we'll tell our bosses story. i was not involved in writing the charleston speech, but they were on the plane going down there. and they said there is a 50/50 chance i will sing. and i think he just felt it. >> he never would have managed suggesting he sing it. >> to what extent do you try to speak in the voice of the president to mimic his phrasing or try to make it sound like something -- >> i would say that is the hardest part of the beginning phases is getting someone's voice and writing and speaking the way they would speak. >> how does that -- >> i think that one way to overcome the hurdle of how will i sound like a 55-year-old black man who is the leader of the free world is to think about how that voice, the idea of how someone speaks, getting someone's voice, is really about how they think. if you start there then you will figure out what words they like and what phrases they gravitate to. but before i even got to the white house, as soon as i got that job offer, i immersed myself in everything that i could about him. i read his books, every speech he had given, i watched him on jimmy fall lon. and it is creepy, but i think it is how you get to a point where your not thinking about what do i think about what is happening in the world. >> there was a few months when i left that i was writing e-mails as barack obama. it was hard to get out of. >> i manage many of the president's speeches are rewritten and rewritten end lessly ales endlessly. how do you know what the draft is, and two, the practical question, what happens to all of the drafts? are they shredded, erased, filed? >> everything for us was comments due. during the staffing process. no one was given an electronic copy. we would have edits on a hard copy and we would have a tack of them. there is no other way to do it because you get it in their hand, and also when someone takes the time to write something, that is thinking, too. and rather than just dashing something, too, and the idea of have all of the electronic copies coming at redline and -- it would have made our job miserable, but the heart -- you go through them and the president, if you worked on the speech, your name and your phone number was on the bottom of the last page. that means you have the power to make sure that the speech still works as a whole. but if you're a national security advisor questioning a wording or whatever it is, maybe they don't feel strongly about the suggestion they're making, all of those factors come into play and it is your responsibility to go through those edits, accommodate the changes. laugh at the ones that -- >> send it to the other ones, become annoyed at the people that don't appreciate your artistry. but that is the only -- you have to have a process, and you have to stick to it, otherwise it is chaos. and then, the final thing, was what happens to the drafts. they're all in the bush library. all of those paper. we had to give everything. if two sets of eyeballs were on it it became a record. >> i feel like going forward, given where we are in the world and the current occupant in the white house, they can't just throw things out, every record must be kept, there is -- it's like a law to that effect. we unfortunately did not have people do handwritten edits and i wish with did, by i think everyone had a different method, but we would ask for them by 5:00 the day we circulated. there is version control. i have an elaborate system of how i name my file, and when i got a lot of edits, i would print them all off so i could check off that i went through all of them so often times if i might be getting a bunch of edits from members of the same time, i would ask them to combine them all, litigate among themselves what they want today send me and then send everything to me. i would not accept 20 edits from people on the same team. >> there was also a list of people you had to take their edits and others that you could kind of ignore. >> hi, thank you for being here first of all. you mentioned that a lot of times the ideas can't just be your own, and as you mentioned you can't really overrule the director of the nsc, so there are other things to consider. >> you know, i don't know, i don't know if i personally had any influence over actual policy. a couple of our colleagues were also people. like president obama's foreign policy, but i felt like i had some influence in shaping how he talked about something. so specifically, by the time i got there, i felt like i could kind of help the president be more vocal about his feminism. so i felt like i could build up and help him have voice to what he believed. and i could push it and see if he pushed back, in a way, you know? and i was on a team of men, so i felt like through each piece of writing about what we did. he got up on a stage in front of thousands of people and said this is what a feminist looks like. and it wasn't that i was putting an idea into his head, it was something he already had, i was just helping him find the voice for it. >> the thing most rewarding about writing for a president -- a president you like, is -- and a vice president i have to say as well, is that the reasons you like the person you're writing for you the whole country to see what you like about the person. so you think about that when you're writing. and i don't consider that as having influence on policy. not so much as giving him confidence, expressing his best thoughts, pulls all you can into it to make sure the qualities you like an admire are there for all to see. i will quickly add the chief speech writer for the president for more than half of the administration was a senior policy advisor. he was -- he had real standing on the white house staff and that was a good influence. >> another point is to widen the circle of people that care care about something. i remember when we were trying to pass health care and that was important because he spoke on it a lot. we had to really persuade people to not only approve this law but to sign up and we went through all of the letters, he received thousands of letters and he red ten every night from people saying these are the issues that i'm dealing with, this is why it is really important so we would tell the stories as a way to help people understand why this matters and who it will make a difference for. >> my good friend just basically put together a much more eloquent version of the question i had. if i was to shift the perspective a little bit on how you have an influence, i think something that is really talked about. and one of the questions that i had was, you know, in the time that you were speechwriters, were there moments you were able to challenge the president on the way that he was approaching a certain topic, issue, or just the topic itself. were you able to have that discourse with him and show that maybe there was a different path to what he was thinking. >> no many times. there were -- but i will say, you know, if there was something i really felt strongly about that i wanted to say to president bush about pols, i would not say mr. president, can i grab you for a second, but i did speak to a deputy chief of staff once about something that i had a strong opinion on. and the vice president, you could be a little more free with the vice president. cheney, you know, he is not the man in the oval office, but he was a chief of staff to a secretary of defense, a congressman, and i never lobbied or anything like that but i remember raising a couple things with him and he was the kind of guy that you would not hesitate to do that but you want to do some serious thinking before you talk about it. he respects anyone that is talking to him but you need to respect his time. and then in terms of speeches, you always have to tell yourself this is his speech. this is not me. this is not me contributing to my work, it is him talking. >> nobody would ever say this great speech by sarada, they would say the lousy speech by barack obama. i don't know if you ever changed him on policy, i never did, but my understanding of people that worked on policy is that he really wanted robust discussions happening in front of him where his experts were disawith each other and talking about it there is really great conversationing happening before he even took office, and the tran sis was really smooth largely in part to his personality, but i think in that transition, there was really robust conversations that people have written books about at this point, and from a writing perspective, we were diving him our best in a blast, and i would not say i could come up with something better. more often than not he would cross off two words and. >> i heard he was a long time democratic operative, he had big problems with the vietnam war. and he was determined to tell johnson that he was on the wrong track. and all he remembered saying was mr. president you're the greatest man that ever lived, and he said he left the oval office so angry at himself and he made a vow to himself that if he was ever to speak to a president again he would tell him exactly what was on his mind and he maintained that he kept that and he ended up on the cabinet, and he stayed true to thoo. i was in a meeting in the oval office one time and it was one of the economic advisors that later on became dean, and i don't remember what the issue was, but glenn was there and i was there so a speech was being talked about, but i remember there was kind of a laos consensus forming around some idea, and the president looks at glen hubbard. and he says mr. president, i don't agree with that at all. and i have never forgotten that. it was one of those moments that you hope would actually happen. the president asked their opinion an they tell them instead of holding back. that was the tone i always felt. i never felt in a position where i needed to say i disagree with something. >> it is hard to overstate how hard that is. the first time i was in the oval office, i forgot the whole thing, you're there and you're like i'm in the room, it's so bright, what am i doing with my hands, and it is hard, you get used to. especially senior people, you get used to it. >> in the impeachment of andrew johnson, one of the articles of impeachment involves peach wrsp writing. the president did a tour of the country about reconstruction, and he was so rude that they wrote that as a reason for his removal from office. is it possible for a president to to say something, write something, or tweet something that we would justify removal from office. >> justify the removal of the writer. and that is what you live in fear of. but of course johnson didn't have writers. so bang, impeachment. >> legally i can't answer that question. if he says something where he perjuried himself, then yes. >> seems like it could be the sign of a crime. i don't know if -- i mean there are questions about whether or not this president's use of his twitter account, deleting tweets, if he is in violation of the presidential records act by doing certain things but speechwriters live in fear of being wrong. what we lived in fear of was being incorrect. and johnson didn't have that, so -- there were also other reasons for impeaching him though, but -- >> so for all of us perspective spee speechwriters, what are you doing now? >> i write speeches for private clients. >> i also have my own sort of one woman shop and i do speeches and all kinds of writing but also strategy, communication coaching for different clients. >> i graduated in 2008 and i moved back -- i also write some speeches. . >> i'm just curious once you have all of the words on the paper, how much time did your perspective presidents spend practicing or did they just have the ability to read it a few times and really be able to deliver in a way that, you know, with the appropriate pauses and all that goes in to communicating that. scene that the kind of thing they're doing at night in front of a mirror? >> that is a good question and i don't know the answer. but now and then, we gave them the speeches, 23 point type and he read them on cards that are about two thirds the side of a sheet of paper. it was big type and he could read without his glasses and on occasion i would ask the staff secretary to ask for the president's copy because i wanted to see what chances he made. and they were not terribly common but i did see them. he would underline words for emphasis. he would mark out where he wanted to stop and pause. he would not write notes to himself, but he would put signals to underline. that would suggest there was at least once sheers practice. i'm sure when he reads a speech out loud, she doing what -- he is typically doing is the first flavor edit of the speech. there would not be a practice session but there would be practice sessions in the family theater in the east wing of the white house, and it is about as deep as this room and half of the width maybe, and set up like a little movie theater and they would set up the teleprompter a lot. but he would practice those things. and he sometimes would edit while reading the speech, but in the ordinary course of things i know there was some, but i never really asked him how much time he spent with it. >> my understanding is that the speeches that president obama would rehearse was a white house correspondents dinner, but that the ones he was doing regularly, you just get, i think as a president you get used to delivering these speeches, and there was a subset of the population that would mock his use of a teleprompter, but it is really a better way, it's a written down, prepared, and he just got accustomed to doing that and he is a terrific oritor. the first lady is always prepared, does her homework early, and she would rehearse because she wanted to make sure she got it right. she knew that little kids were listening to every word she said. people were hanging on every word. what she said mattered and she really wanted to put a lot of thought into what've she said and how she said it. i don't think president obama -- i don't think he rehearsed the way she did. >> yeah, she needed to practice. >> in 2007 in the first campaign in iowa he was doing the jefferson-jackson dinner. it was about a 20 minute speech. and they were telling a week out, hi was like yeah, i will get to it, and the night before he started memorizing it and he was walking by and espn was blasting on the tv and it's because he was in the bathroom talking to himself in the mirror trying to memorize the speech. he hated doing that and he didn't want to memorize anything ever again. we're out of time, thank you so much for coming. enjoy each other thee ethe reste day. we're featuring american history tv programs this week as a preview of what is available every weekend on c-span 3. this evening, pat oliphant and his works that are subjects of discussion at the university of virginia focusing on lyndon johnson. >> next, the former secret service agents talking about the challenges they face protecting the first family. the a -- >> here as the bush center we have a wonderful relationship and it is so great to have dr. gerald turner and his wife, gayle, with us tonight. tonight will

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