Cursed Are The Speechmakers

Darkness. Light … harm/evil … challenge … enemy … defeat and destroy. Eyes open … alerted. We’ve been a continent shielded by oceans. Carnage known only in Civil War. Foe: Political ideology, not a religion. Our view of the world—‘challenge we did not ask for in a world we did not make.’ People turn to America. Much grief but many questions. Who is the enemy?

An update is needed on Bismarck's line about politics and sausages being two things whose creation should never be witnessed. These slightly poetic and heavily world-historical jottings constitute the early notes of George W. Bush's speechwriting team's State of the Union address for September 20, 2001. "Team" might actually be the most significant word to take away from above extract, which comes to us courtesy of former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully in an already classic piece in this month's Atlantic, titled "Present at the Creation." It's less Profiles in Courage Scully is concerned with and more the hubris of one Michael Gerson, another former wordsmith for the executive and, as we now know, not accidentally the most famous presidential speechwriter since Ted Sorenson.

Scully's essay is a partial critique of Gerson's new self-fellating memoir, Heroic Conservatism, in which the head hero is none other than Gerson himself. Known for his studious evangelicalism — in Revenge of the Nerds terms, the Gilbert to Bush's Booger — Gerson's greatest flourish, says a disgruntled ex-colleague, was not rhetorical but autobiographical:

[Gerson] allowed false assumptions, and also encouraged them. Among chummy reporters, he created a fictionalized, “Mike, we’re at war” version of presidential speechwriting, casting himself in a grand and solitary role. The narrative that Mike Gerson presented to the world is a story of extravagant falsehood. He has been held up for us in six years’ worth of coddling profiles as the great, inspiring, and idealistic exception of the Bush White House. In reality, Mike’s conduct is just the most familiar and depressing of Washington stories—a history of self- seeking and media manipulation that is only more distasteful for being cast in such lofty terms.

The "Mike, we're at war" bit derives from Gerson's factitious addition of his own name to a famous bull-session statement made by President Bush shortly after the Twin Towers were incinerated. Gerson, like all good Beltway showmen, got in nice and cozy with Bob Woodward, who duly regurgitated his source's self-aggrandizing quotes without bothering to check them against other administration officials, most notably the speaker-in-chief.

Matthew Scully commands instant respect for being a meat-and-potatoes conservative who not too long ago published a meticulous and morally serious book about vegetarianism. (Christopher Hitchens reviewed Dominion in the Atlantic and said, "Scully shows a martyrlike patience in the face of [the militant taunters of animal rights activists], as befits a man who's had to hear innumerable jests about veal and spotted owls at carnivorous Republican fundraisers.") Anyway, it's clear he's been saving his carnivorous tendencies for a rather different cut of meat.

We all know that David Frum first suggested the phrase "axis of hatred," which later became more memorable and at least as provocative as any construction by Hannah Arendt. "Evil," though, was never the invention of Gerson, despite his best efforts to give the contrary impression. It was Scully's. Also unwarranted for Mike's clipfile are: "This conflict has begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour of our choosing;" "Americans should not expect one battle but a lengthy campaign;" "The war on terrorism will not be won on the defensive." If only there were someone in the Bush administration with so peacockish a desire to claim credit for the policies which followed from these high-flown phrases.

Minuting the finest hours is usually the work of presidential biographers long after their subjects have expired and years after poring through musty archives. What fun that so divided a White House with so unending a supply of defectors gives us the real story as the rough draft of history. It was a major point of all the moist profiles of Gerson that he liked to come up with Bush's best lines while sitting in a local Starbucks, beating back the "solitude of writing" with, presumably, calls for global democracy and Venti foam lattes. Here, at last, is the decaffeinated version:

My most vivid memory of Mike at Starbucks is one I have labored in vain to shake. We were working on a State of the Union address in John’s office when suddenly Mike was called away for an unspecified appointment, leaving us to “keep going.” We learned only later, from a chance conversation with his secretary, where he had gone, and it was a piece of Washington self-promotion for the ages: At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John and me, Mike was off pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.

The more I cut and paste from this hilarious hatchet job, the more I think the parallels to the Kennedy era are frighteningly apt. As a speechwriter, Ted Sorenson was a model of humility and self-abnegation, for which he must have exhibited martyrlike patience in the face of his grandstanding and reckless and feckless boss. With the Bush administration, we've got it backwards: It's the king who sits small, while the pudgy and pious court servant chews away at his ear and struts around the palace like he owns the joint.