Speechwriting for the elder President Bush really was the result of a whim. I’m a politics and news junkie, and was caught up in the 1992 campaign, mulling over the issues. The economy was in recession, and I thought none of the issues were addressing how to create more jobs.
I have a Masters from George Washington that had a focus in economics, and I dusted off my knowledge of that dismal science. Drawing on my longtime love for expository writing, I turned out a speech, called “What Bush Should Say,” on how to jumpstart the economy. I sent it off to the campaign unsolicited. I had done something similar with Jay Leno, when he took over “The Tonight Show” from Johnny Carson, which led to work for Leno as a freelance joke writer.
To my shock, not long after I had contacted the White House, I received a nice letter, on official stationary, from Robert Zoellick. Zoellick was the Deputy White House Chief of Staff, later the President’s chief Trade Rep, and now the president of the World Bank. He informed me he loved my speech, and was incorporating parts of it into the President’s stump speech. I was encouraged to send in more material.
The speechwriting shop in the White House is a like a sausage maker. Many people contribute to a speech, and chances are, the material you submit will be greatly altered, maybe beyond recognition.
There’s no guarantee what you submit will make the history books, or even the evening news. In my case, I like to say that George H.W. Bush didn’t pay much attention to my scribblings—as he lost his bid for re-election!
Still, it was quite the thrill to work at such a rarified level, and it led to other politics-related work.
It’s said you should write about what you know, and in the following years I labored sometimes as a technical writer, for the biotech industry in southern Maryland. For a while I got to work on the Human Genome Project, just when it was sequencing the human genome. This was fascinating stuff, and I applied to a number of firms for additional work.
I was contacted by the head of public affairs for one of the field’s biggest firms, Rockville-based Human Genome Sciences. I was awarded a contract to work for its then-CEO, William Haseltine.
My job was speechwriter, for medical conferences and symposia, but much more. I became a ghost writer and ghost editor for a book Haseltine was hatching, on the esoteric subject of regenerative medicine. This involves regrowing the tissues and organs of a stricken patient outside his body, and then implanting them back in his body. I learned a great deal about a new subject, and put another feather in my writing cap.
Haseltine was easy to work for, because he was himself a natural communicator, and terrific at speaking on his feet. I remember one time he invited me into the corporate board room, where he was meeting with the French Ambassador. The emissary had come courting, trying to find out what his country could do to jumpstart its biomedical and other technology industries. Impromptu, Haseltine lectured the top diplomat at length, in French, on such things as tax cuts and seeding new industries. He then ended his talk, in English, that he had the greatest admiration for French scientific thinkers, like Descartes and Pasteur, and was certain the French would soon again rise to technological supremacy. Perhaps it was he who should have been the diplomat.
Typically, a top-notch communicator like Haseltine would already know what he wanted to say in a speech, and would pick among my research and writing to add points of emphasis in his own talk.
Another, more recent job sort of fell into my lap. Along with public affairs and biotech, I’ve often worked in information technology. A few years back, a headhunting firm contacted me about a contract at the Department of Transportation. A political appointee there, Mr. Daniel Matthews, was the deputy Chief Information Officer of the federal government and needed a speechwriter.
Hurricane Katrina has recently blown through the Gulf, and the Transportation Department had mounted a huge effort to move supplies and to rebuild infrastructure in the afflicted region. This gave me an opportunity for one of my better speeches, an overview of Washington’s response to the storm, what went wrong and right, and how the response could be improved in future emergencies.
Mr. Matthews had a hands-off management style. He gave me a series of points he wanted to make in a speech, along with some previous talks of his, then let me go at it. He usually made few changes to what I wrote.
In other work situations, my approach has been more iterative. Often, I’d work with a team of writers, and subject matter experts, to construct a rough “straw man draft.” Then everyone would have at it, through a cycle of reviews and revisions, adding and culling material, until a final, polished draft was obtained.
In sum, the work you do as a speechwriter really depends on the modus operandi of your supervising executive. Moreover, you can obtain work as a speechwriter in many different ways, depending in large part on the kind of work experiences you’ve had.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edward Moser has been a speechwriter to the President of the United States, George H.W. Bush, as well as to the CEO of Human Genome Sciences, William Haseltine, and to the Deputy CIO of the United States Government. The author of six published books, he has recently written a corporate history of Abbott Laboratories.
