Joseph P. Duggan
“How and Why to Write Effective Speeches”
Lecture to students of communication and international relations at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Estado de México
March 27, 2009
I. Ethics in Rhetoric
I am very grateful for the invitation to speak about writing speeches. But before we talk about how to write a good speech, let’s consider why to do so.
Elements of effective rhetoric can be used for bad purposes. The demagogue uses most of the same skills as the virtuous statesman. The difference is ethics. Rhetoric should be used for the common good – even, as St. Ignatius of Loyola taught, ad majorem Dei gloriam.
So I would like to begin by urging you always, no matter how deep you may descend into the muck of practical politics, to approach rhetoric with a certain piety. When you draft a speech or craft an argument, remember you are traveling in the footsteps of rhetorical and moral giants; you are journeying on holy ground. By piety I don’t mean Puritanism. Quite the contrary: Erasmus and St. Thomas More and Cervantes were fun-loving people who loved wine and song and satire. But I believe they would have agreed that their love of language – and love of the truth — involved a kind of deep reverence or piety.
In classical and early Christian Rome, Cicero and Quintilian and St. Augustine were devoted to the notion of the vir bonus dicendi peritus – the good man skilled in speaking.
These good men, both the pre-Christian and the Christian, were devoted to jus naturale, the natural law. And if we think in terms of the wisdom of “media ecology” as it is so ably investigated and taught here at Tec de Monterrey, what is the natural law if not a healthy, sane, reasonable moral environment?
I strongly recommend you read selections of these classic authors’ work concerning the art and the purpose and ethics of rhetoric. These are easily available on the Internet in many languages including Spanish. Do not be intimidated by trying to read these primary sources. They were great communicators after all, and they speak to you and me with great power and effectiveness today.
If it helps you break into contact with the thoughts and words of these great rhetoricians, first you might want to read their biographies. Theoretical treatises are valuable, but great biographies can be richer. Whether it is before or after you read the theoretical work, do read Plutarch’s Lives of Cicero, Demosthenes, and others. I don’t mean Plutarco Elías Calles – I mean the original Plutarco, from almost two thousand years ago. He was a Greek during the latter days of the Roman Empire who wrote “parallel lives” of noted statesmen and military figures from classical Greece, paired with their later counterparts in Rome. He wrote with a certain charm and sense of drama, and with a sound moral sense. Each of the biographies Plutarch wrote is a brief essay, easily readable in one sitting, like a good essay inThe New Yorker. If there had been a comparable magazine two millennia ago called The Roman, Plutarch probably would have been a regular contributor. In English there is a new full-length book on the life of Cicero by Anthony Everitt. It is very lively reading. Peter Brown’s life of St. Augustine of Hippo also is superb.
As for the theoretical work, don’t bog down in too much detail, but consult one of the many web sites devoted to explaining classical rhetoric and read at your own pace some of the most relevant excerpts from Cicero and his follower, Quintilian.
In our time, an extraordinarily rich book is Richard M. Weaver’s The Ethics of Rhetoric. I would have to admit that the first chapters are very dense and erudite, assuming a familiarity with Plato that surely I never have attained. May I recommend you read the last chapter first as it is the most accessible. The last chapter is called “Ultimate Terms in Contemporary Rhetoric.” The book was written in the early 1950s but the most of the terms he discusses are still contemporary for us.
Weaver remarked that political discourse in our time employs “god terms,” “devil terms,” and “charismatic terms.” Each of these is the stuff of propaganda slogans. “Devil terms” are epithets that demonize opposing ideas and individuals. Weaver gave as examples in his time: “fascist,” “communist,” “reactionary.”
God terms of course are the opposite: They are invoked in the effort to win an argument because the audience will have been conditioned to believe that no right-thinking person could doubt or de-value such pillars of correctness. Examples are “progress,” “facts,” “modern,” and “science.”
Charismatic terms, for Weaver at least, kick the power of “god terms” up a notch. He considers “freedom” and “democracy” in this league.
Please read Weaver on your own, but let me leave you with a suggestion that high on the list of today’s “devil” terms of political correctness might be: “sexist,” “racist,” and “homophobe.” I am not suggesting that any of you should think or behave as any of these retrograde types but simply to consider whether these epithets are now being used, prodigally, to stifle dissent and throttle rational discourse. In Washington, D.C., these days, the most gleaming “god” term in the pantheon has to be “diversity.”
Next in the education of one who would write good speeches, at least in English, one should read George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language.” If I were giving you homework assignments I might ask you to write an essay examining the defects and virtues of Mexican and other Spanish language contemporary political rhetoric according to the principles in this essay. Orwell implores us: Recover “language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.”
I am embarrassed to say I do not know your language well, but I have read enough selections in translation of writers recommended by trustworthy sources to know that you have a trove of wisdom in the great philosophers of Hispanidad. I know just a smidgen of the work of Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno, but that is enough for me to know that this is a great treasure a sus ordenes. We live in a very liberal culture, and even if you are not a conservative you can keep sane and balanced by having some contact with a counter-culture, for example the work of eloquent but unfashionable, allegedly “reactionary” men such as Donoso Cortés. (I perform “sanity checks” on my conservative self from time to time by reading things from intelligent leftists.)
When you write, avoid demagoguery and propaganda. Handle polling data and focus-group output and other such marketing research with great care. These can be very powerful tools but often they fall into the hands of people who are stubbornly shallow, philosophically stupid, and ethically lax – mere manipulators.
Mass appetites combined with new mass media tend to coarsen and foster the “dumbing down” of our culture. But it doesn’t have to be, and it shouldn’t be that way. It is not intellectual snobbery to try to elevate our culture – to promote both reason and beauty. Try to make every day one in which you can make at least a small contribution to the supply of reason and beauty in the world.
So much for my sermon on ethics.
II. Style Trumps Substance, or the Medium is indeed the Message
Now, supposing you are a junior level writer or publicist for a politician or a corporation or a public relations agency, can you really advance the goals I’ve just put forward? As Barack Obama was often heard to say, “Yes, we can!” Si, se puede!
Scripting a speech for a client or even for oneself marries two media: writing and speaking. Public presentations these days usually involve several other media as well. The wisdom of Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism, “the medium is the message,” is as deep and relevant as ever.
Let’s consider Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as a case in point. I will ask one of you to read this, the original Address, aloud to the class:
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth
on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing
whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so
dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-
field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of
that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave
their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether
fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate…we cannot
consecrate…we cannot hallow…this ground. The brave men,
living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it
far above our poor power to add or detract. The world
will little note nor long remember what we say here, but
it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the
living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly
advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the
great task remaining before us…that from these honored
dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which
they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here
highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain;
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
freedom; and that government of the people, by the people,
for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
This work of careful, original composition by Lincoln is now part of the folklore and “civil religion” of the United States. Schoolchildren in every generation are made to memorize it. It is beautiful, reverent, eloquent, and restrained.
Now, let’s read this. It is a parody composed by Oliver Jensen, who was a reporter during the 1950s who had to cover the White House press conferences of President Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower was a very smart and effective leader, and his prepared speeches were quite good. But his business and military jargon and his mangled syntax in his extemporaneous remarks at news conferences made him a loveable laughing stock.
The Gettysburg Address, if Eisenhower had given it (written by Oliver Jensen):
I haven’t checked these figures but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental set-up here in this country, I believe it covered certain Eastern areas, with this idea they were following up based on a sort of national independence arrangement and the program that every individual is just as good as every other individual. Well, now, of course, we are dealing with this big difference of opinion, civil disturbance you might say, although I don’t like to appear to take sides or name any individuals, and the point is naturally to check up, by actual experience in the field, to see whether any governmental set-up with a basis like the one I was mentioning has any validity and find out whether that dedication by those early individuals will pay off in lasting values and things of that kind. . . . But if you look at the over-all picture of this, we can’t pay any tribute – we can’t sanctify this area, you might say – we can’t hallow according to whatever individual creeds or faiths or sort of religious outlooks are involved like I said about this particular area. It was those individuals themselves, including the enlisted men, very brave individuals, who have given the religious character to the area. The way I see it, the rest of the world will not remember any statements issued here but it will never forget how these men put their shoulders to the wheel and carried this idea down the fairway. Now frankly, our job, the living individuals’ job here is to pick up the burden and sink the putt they made these big efforts here for. It is our job to get on with the assignment – and from these deceased fine individuals to take extra inspiration, you could call it, for the same theories about the set-up for which they made such a big contribution. We have to make up our minds right here and now, as I see it, that they didn’t put out all that blood, perspiration and – well – that they didn’t just make a dry run here, and that all of us here, under God, that is, the God of our choice, shall beef up this idea about freedom and liberty and those kind of arrangements, and that government of all individuals, by all individuals and for the individuals, shall not pass out of the world-picture.
I can tell from your laughter that you get the point.
Finally, let me show you a PowerPoint. I am not a PowerPoint kind of person, and you are about to find out why. Peter Norvig, who is an eminent scientist and director of research at Google, created a brilliant parody of the PowerPoint by adapting the great Gettysburg Address to this lamentable format.
Please take a few moments to review the Gettysburg PowerPoint, at this web link: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/
I was glad to hear your even louder laughter at this amazing piece of work. Dr. Norvig faithfully transposed all of Lincoln’s “message points” into a tight PowerPoint. This is exactly how PowerPoint slides are supposed to be made – and that’s the crux of the problem. PowerPoint is very useful in a limited way but too much (or in the case of what PowerPoint does to rhetoric, too little) of a good thing is toxic. Thus the PowerPoint is the reductio ad absurdum of linear, rationalistic, Point A – to – Point B, unilateral, “talking at” someone instead of talking with someone. Descartes and Ramus would have loved PowerPoint. It is the ultimate in what Father Walter Ong called the “decay of dialogue.”
And isn’t it also a striking example of how the medium overwhelms and becomes the message?
Lincoln’s address was not an interactive town hall meeting with questions and answers, but still it had rhetorical quality – resonance – conducive to dialogue. Indeed, it kicked off a dialogue in that, nearly 150 years later, people have never ceased reciting it and talking about it with admiration.
On the other hand, have you ever gone to the hotel bar after a stultifying PowerPoint presentation by a corporate bureaucrat and while they were pouring yourmichelada, was it ever your thought to say, “Wow! What a great PowerPoint presentation! How beautiful! How moving! I won’t ever forget that! Madre de Dios, that reminded me of the Grito de Dolores!
I didn’t think so.
PowerPoint kills poetry, euphony, imagery, emotion. If I could give you a homework assignment, I would ask you to take an eloquent Mexican political speech and condense it just as Peter Norvig did with the Gettysburg Address – “accurately” but inevitably, absurdly — into PowerPoint.
The Eisenhower example points us toward the need for speechwriters and good working relationships between principals and their writers.
More often than not, the President of the Republic or the CEO of the corporation needs someone to save him from himself. That is where competent, discreet speechwriters come in.
III. Reminiscences of Working in the White House
I think I have made it plain that far anterior to the process of writing any individual speech is the literary, political and rhetorical education of the speechwriter. Also anterior is familiarity with the sight and sound of the speaker and his backlog of speech texts and videos. Beginning to write for the first President Bush was easy in some ways because I was so familiar with his voice and mannerisms – and even how his mimics made us laugh in their parodies on Saturday Night Live. SNL was a great aid in showing what kinds of words or phrases to avoid putting in the President’s scripts because the public had come to perceive them as ridiculous.
Before I arrived at the White House under the first President Bush, I tried to apprentice myself to some of President Reagan’s speechwriters. Reagan was a writer before he was a politician. His political philosophy was well formed and coherent. His style was very good and very well known. His writers did not have to invent him or fill and empty suit.
Bush was no Reagan but he was a man of substance and leadership ability, and in his better moments, of some grace as a public speaker. But clearly he was uncomfortable on the platform. He had a kind of WASP-y Manichean separation between “politics” and “governing.” In Federal politics, his background was as a minority party congressman when Republicans were doormats and not much of an opposition to the Democrats. He performed with skill as Ambassador and CIA director, but he had the ethos of the very best of the civil service, which is not what the Presidency is about. He was a diplomat and national security strategist of the highest quality. He was not much interested in domestic politics. And it showed when he spoke. He had energy and conviction and clear intellectual and emotional engagement with international relations speeches. He seemed bored with domestic policy speeches. I could tell this most clearly when I was in the live audience, maybe only a few feet away from him. His body language was unmistakable, and no doubt it showed on television too. I tended to share his predilection for foreign relations, but I knew he needed to impress the public on domestic issues and I watched helplessly as he went his own way.
As for types of speeches, I was not senior enough to get assigned to write any nationally televised network addresses to the nation from the Oval Office, nor to work on the State of the Union speech. This last was a blessing because working on a State of the Union can be the ruin of a writer. There is too much exposure to real or potential enemies; and it is impossible to please one’s friends in these situations.
Some of my colleagues were hungry to be known as the experts on health care “reform” or “education reform” or some such. I wrote my share of policy speeches, but I often deliberately picked what Aristotle and company called “epideictic” speeches. For example: a toast to the King and Queen of Spain at a white-tie dinner for the National Gallery of Art. Or remarks on the White House lawn at the departure ceremony for the President of Costa Rica. These sorts of things never drew much press attention. The Machiavellians on the White House staff called these “Rose Garden rubbish” but I saw in them potential to offer the mot juste in public diplomacy and to make a few baby steps in the direction of greater beauty and civility and international and intercultural understanding in the world. The words were being addressed in a personal way to a King or a President. And because the words were being uttered by the President of the United States, these epideictic speeches were occasions to make “policy impact” when the policy sentinels were off-guard.
IV. The Process of Writing an Executive Speech: Case Study of the White House
During my tenure in the White House, the President had six or seven speechwriters directed by a chief speechwriter. Every week or two, we would receive from the office of the Chief of Staff a list newly scheduled speaking engagements. The chief speechwriter in some cases would give writing assignments directly, to himself or other writers. On other occasions he would post a list and let the writers volunteer for assignments. I liked this last arrangement, which gave me and the other individual writers a greater sense of initiative.
Usually there were only about 10 days, and no more than two weeks, lead time between the writer’s assignment and the President’s speaking event. This kept our adrenaline flowing and kept our work fresh. Sometimes of course there were urgent assignments. I was asked one morning at 8:30 to write the Rose Garden remarks for the conclusion of the NAFTA agreement, to be delivered at 11:00 a.m. There was pressure, but it really wasn’t so hard because I knew the issues and had years of experience in deadline writing.
Some day I hope you will get a classroom assignment like this: say, two and a half hours to make your best effort at a five minute speech of this sort. You’d get no advance warning but only a briefing book and talking points at the beginning of the session.
Every speechwriter had a full-time research assistant. Mine was superb. In the more familiar circumstance of longer lead time to prepare a speech, he would help me research the audience and the issues that were necessary or at least desirable to discuss in front of the audience. I always would do my own research too. I would have several conversations with leaders of the organization representing the audience – for example, a local chamber of commerce or a religious group. Marshall McLuhan said “the content of any speech is the audience.” I followed that dictum, making sure that every speech to a live audience contained historical or anecdotal details reflecting a pleasing and perhaps surprising depth of research about who and what they are. Even if the audience knows that staff members helped find this information for the President, they are flattered to see and hear him telling the world something about them. Always I would correlate the President’s policy agenda to the interests of the audience. And of course we would be aware that we were preparing remarks for the millions around the nation and the world to hear or read through the media.
With a research assistant, I felt free to write imaginatively without being too fastidious about “facts.” One of the most liberating things about this very demanding and stressful job was the freedom to “make something up” on a hunch believing it was “the way things ought to be” and then have my research assistant either validate or correct or knock out what I had written. Fact checking of course is essential at the back end of writing official remarks. The President must be spared embarrassment. Presidential “gaffes” or misstatements get much more publicity than important but undramatic “accurate” statements.
I would work through a few drafts before attaining something I found fit to send to the chief speechwriter. He would provide his edits and comments, and then we’d send the text to “staffing.” The office of the White House Staff Secretary ran a very disciplined operation – sending copies of draft speeches to all relevant offices in the White House and the Cabinet Departments. That office enforced deadlines so we received the bureaucracy’s comments promptly.
Often this part of the process was a pain. Peggy Noonan, a former Reagan writer, has a hilarious discussion of “staffing” in her memoir, What I Saw at the Revolution. She presents a parody of the heavily marked-up text of a draft speech following review by the legal counsel and budget and domestic policy offices. Most of the comments are idiotic, naturally. The speech she used for this demonstration? You guessed it, the Gettysburg Address. “Four score and seven years ago” is changed to “Some time ago” ….and it gets worse from there on.
The interaction with the policy specialists during “staffing” of a draft usually was the second go-around with these folks. If the speech had much to do with a particular policy, of course I would talk over the issues with the relevant policy staff before the first draft. In both the first draft and “staffing,” it was necessary to be diplomatic and to cajole the specialists into being satisfied that I was helping them get their message across. At one point or another in the process, I would ponder a set of sterile talking points from the bureaucracy and figure out how to fertilize them with some beauty. The research staff and I would find some anecdotes to connect the policy arguments with Real People.
Then I would go back to the policy wonk and politely ask, does this preserve your meaning? And wouldn’t you agree that this is expressed in an appealing way?
At the end of a project, it is very satisfying when one can hear one of the President’s lawyers or senior advisors on trade or finance or relations with a particular country or region say: “you got him to communicate just what I wanted him to say, but with such style! How did you do that?”
I would not let them in on the secrets of my craft, but I am telling you.
When I simply wanted to reject an office’s comments, or when different offices offered conflicting comments, it was left to me – or to the chief speechwriter when I thought the stakes were too high for me to go it alone – to decide what to put in the final text to send to the President. Then we sent it to him.
Amazingly, in 24 hours or less, the text would be returned to me with the President’s handwritten edits and comments. He was a busy man, and he did not tend to edit heavily. If he noticed a pattern of product from a writer that did not meet his standards, he would not spend a long time editing speeches; it seems instead that he would take a moment to tell the Chief of Staff to fire the speechwriter. This was brutally efficient, or at least brutal, quality control. The elder President Bush was a gracious gentleman but when he thought he had to be tough he was tough.
With the President’s changes incorporated, we sent the text to the technicians who ran the teleprompter. In our final text for the prompter, we added simple but usually effective delivery aids – underlining words and phrases to get him to raise his voice, and slash marks after certain phrases, to tell him (like this) to slow down! ////
These are the speechwriter and speaker’s analogues to the ubiquitous “topes” on Mexican streets and roads. George H.W. Bush was an intelligent, busy, energetic, athletic, impatient man. His natural tendency was to speak too quickly and without the necessary pauses for effect and emotion. His teleprompter scripts and other final reading scripts needed a lot of “topes,” and we provided them.
That was the end of the speechwriter’s involvement in the process.
Since President Obama took office there has been some controversy in that some people have criticized him for relying too much on the teleprompter. By coincidence, today there is a good article on the topic in today’s Washington Post by Michael Gerson, who is a former chief speechwriter for the younger President Bush.
I am a friend or acquaintance of many other former presidential speechwriters, but I have never met Michael Gerson. He was very influential with the younger President Bush — more so than most other speechwriters. Reagan’s speechwriters were superb at their craft and their contribution to the national discourse, but few have been called upon for direct policy advice with the influence that Gerson had on George W. Bush. During the President’s second term, Gerson changed jobs and became exclusively a policy advisor to the President. I have my doubts about some of Gerson’s policy advice, but on the issue of the teleprompter, he is absolutely in the right. He says that the teleprompter is benign, that it is almost always in the public interest as well as the President’s interest for him to use the prompter. It simply helps him communicate more effectively.
I agree. The teleprompter is as appropriate as simple stage props or face makeup for stage or TV. These are artifices but all they do is make the speaker appear more natural. The prompter allows a speaker to engage with more grace and directness and eye contact or at least face contact with the audience. The accusation that there is something inauthentic about using the prompter is way off the mark.
Here is the web link to Gerson’s article. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/26/AR2009032603114.html
V. Shouldn’t the President Just Write his own Speeches?
The unwarranted stir about such useful technologies as the prompter remind me of a big question that may have been on your minds from the outset of this session.
Isn’t there something “wrong” – that is, inauthentic, unethical — when anyone, especially someone as powerful as the President of a Republic reads something he did not write himself?
No. The demands of his speaking schedule and all his other duties are such that he needs talented assistants, and a good organization, for crafting his speeches. In the same article, Gerson said, “it is a mistake to argue that the uncrafted is somehow more authentic.”
I am a classicist and a traditionalist as you know, and tradition is on the side of speechwriting.
Ghostwriting in western civilization goes back at least as far as 5th-century BC Greece – the Golden Age. Lysias wrote speeches for clients in Athens 2500 years ago – good speeches. Cicero wrote material for clients. Before he saw the Light, Saint Augustine was a speechwriter, speech coach and “political consultant,” like Dick Morris.
George Washington had speechwriters. A team of writers – all-stars including Alexander Hamilton and James Madison — produced his famous “Farewell Address.” Abraham Lincoln – yes, even Abraham Lincoln – had speechwriters. The evidence is clear that Lincoln was a superb and original writer and that he himself composed his greatest speeches. But even Lincoln had to delegate many speeches to be drafted by others. One of these writers was his confidential assistant, John Hay.
There is life after White House speechwriting. Years after his apprenticeship under Lincoln, John Hay became the nation’s chief diplomat, the Secretary of State. I’ve even heard of a former speechwriter who grew up become a lecturer at Tec de Monterrey!
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