“I would soon be indispensable. I would study the questions faced by this great, graceful statesman, and I would suggest to him what he should say. He wouldn’t always say what I suggested, but often he would. Someday I would write for the president, maybe. I would be revered for my skills as a fashioner of words.” – Barton Swaim, “The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics”
Expectation did not become reality for author and former speechwriter Barton Swaim. Having completed his PhD in English just a few years earlier, Swaim – a native South Carolinian and graduate of the University of South Carolina – mailed his resume to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford in 2007 with a short note: You need a better writer. Sanford agreed.
Swaim spent the next three years penning thank you notes, writing letters, drafting speeches, mass-producing op-eds and seeking a still elusive “larger notion” for the only man to find his way to Argentina by “hiking the Appalachian Trail.”
Swaim’s great skill for fashioning words became a public relations tool to buy time for the governor, or to “just sound like you’re saying something instead of nothing,” Swaim writes.
This speechwriter would not become the next Arthur Schlesinger or William Safire. Yet Swaim did manage to accomplish something far more remarkable for a young writer: He found his own story. Below is a transcript of a RealClearBooks conversation with Barton Swaim.
Q: What do you think is the ideal preparation for a modern-day political speechwriter? What skills must this particular writer possess in order to craft the best letters, memos and speeches for a politician?
Bear in mind that I wasn’t a greatly successful speechwriter – my main achievement was not being fired. And of course a lot depends on a healthy working relationship between the writer and the boss: a relationship I certainly didn’t have with my boss.
Still, there are relevant skills. One is the ability to imitate. I’ve always been a good mimic – it’s the kind of talent that’s usually not good for anything except getting you into trouble. (Hey, I heard you do a great imitation of me. Why don’t you do it right now?) In writing for someone else, I find you’re essentially just mimicking him – using his phrases, his sentence structures and his attitude. It takes a kind of versatility – it’s the written equivalent of acting.
It also helps if you’re able to forget about your hang-ups and annoyances. If you’re, for example, extremely concerned about grammatical correctness, speechwriting is probably not what you want to do for a living. If your boss likes the phrase “at the end of the day” and it annoys you – as it should – you’re just going to have to write “at the end of the day” and live with it. If he likes a certain overused metaphor – maybe he likes to call every big decision a “crossroads” – you’ve just got to go with it.
Q: If the value of political rhetoric is its ability to “preserve options, buy time or sound like you’re saying something instead of nothing,” then how can Americans honestly assess the beliefs of their political leaders? In short, is political speech disingenuous or is it merely functional?
I think it’s both. In our politicians’ defense, they have to fashion everything they say or write with the knowledge that some demographic or constituency may find it offensive or objectionable somehow. This is the reality of universal suffrage – everyone can vote, and “everyone” is a vast array of innumerable interests and ideologies and dispositions. When you add in the special interest groups, it becomes almost impossible for a politician to say anything without somebody finding it disagreeable.
On top of that, we expect our politicians to speak all the time, about everything, even about things they’re not interested in. So there’s just no way they can win. They do the only possible thing they can do: They express themselves in bland language, generalities, unwieldy abstractions that nobody can object to.
Of course, the result is that we’re awash in quasi-meaningless verbiage. But I don’t see how it can be otherwise.
Q: The governor considered hiring a new writer during a particularly disorienting period of your tenure as speechwriter. “It’s not that you’re a bad writer,” a colleague comforted you. How did this episode affect your confidence as a writer?
Not really at all. Writers are a pretty self-regarding lot – I never thought his criticisms reflected reality. I did worry a little when we would send out a really badly written op-ed – badly written, but in the governor’s distinctive “voice.” People knew I worked for him as a writer, and they’d conclude I’d produced that unreadable rigmarole. (Told you we’re a self-regarding lot.)
Q: Toward the end of the book you come to the conclusion that Americans should be wary of giving their trust to political leaders – “They may be lauded when they’re right and venerated when they’re dead, but [politicians] should never be trusted.” Is it appropriate to call this the “larger notion” of your story?
It is!
I like politics, and I enjoy liking some politicians and disliking others. I grow fond of the ones I like, and something inside me wants to trust them, or wants to think of them as essentially good. And maybe some of them are. But if he’s a politician, that means he’s asked lots of people to put him in a position of authority. It means he’s sought out recognition and prestige, and it means he has some capacity for convincing wealthy and influential people to back his candidacy. Would a good person do this – a trustworthy person? I’m not sure.
Q: What are some of the literary works that continue to inspire you? What do you like to read?
More than anything, I like essays. Books of essays don’t sell very well – that’s what I’m told – but I buy them. I feel most things said in books nowadays could have been said better in a few thousand words. I’ve always been a magazine junkie for that reason. Favorite essay collections: John Simon’s The Sheep from the Goats, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Victorian Minds, Anthony Daniels’ several collections, and I do love E. P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory, Marxist though Thompson was.
I almost always find biographies and autobiographies inspiring, even if they’re so-so. The British do political and literary biographies particularly well. I’m not sure why that is – maybe because they have better raw material than we do – but there’s just no equivalent for, say, Robert Blake’s Disraeli or Jasper Ridley’s Lord Palmerston. And no presidential memoir is as good as the second volume of Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography.
