Writing has been central to my career, and writing executive speeches is part of my portfolio.
I got my start as a speechwriter when the Bureau of Naval Personnel, in an uncharacteristic display of logic, matched my degree in journalism with an assignment as an admiral’s speechwriter at the Great Lakes Naval Base in Illinois. I had never written a speech, but it was a change from a minesweeper in the Western Pacific.
The speechwriter’s job is to write the speech the executive would write if he or she had the time and writing talent. The speech should sound like the speaker’s own words, perhaps jotted on the back of an envelope as Lincoln reputedly did with the Gettysburg Address. The best speeches are the product of an alter-ego partnership between the executive and speechwriter, such as John F. Kennedy and Ted Sorenson or Ronald Reagan and Peggy Noonan.
I rarely got to see my admiral, much less become his alter ego. Fortunately, I was not writing nuanced policy speeches. The admiral mostly spoke to community groups in his capacity as Naval District commandant, using talking points that came down from the Pentagon.
Delivering speeches did not come naturally to a former destroyer skipper. Listening to the admiral read every word I wrote was painful, but he was inspiring when he occasionally departed from the script and spoke off the cuff. We tape-recorded him once when he did that and wrote his words into his next speech, only to hear him read his own words as woodenly as he read mine.
Writing a speech is industrial-strength wordsmithing. Beyond the art of capturing the audience’s attention and making key points memorable, grinding out 3,000 words for a 20-minute speech was hard work in the manual-typewriter era. The admiral’s busy speaking schedule gave me a heavy workload on tight deadlines. At one point an impatient admiral’s aide dispatched a Marine orderly to wait in my office as I pounded out the manuscript.
I had a more satisfying experience as a speechwriter at Illinois Bell, where the head speechwriter was an excellent mentor and the company president was an accomplished speaker. The president always asked for the final manuscript with a generous right-hand margin so he could add his notes to make the speech his own. The result often was better than we could have written. Okay, he’s smarter than we are… that’s why he’s the president.
When I heard him deliver the first speech I wrote for him, I recognized little of what I had written because the president had wrapped his words around my ideas. He took me aside afterward and said he hoped he had done justice to my material.
When I wrote speeches for other executives, I would research the audience and subject matter and then sit down with the executive to talk about the speech. Chatting with the speaker (and recording the conversation) was an opportunity to learn how the guy talked when he was speaking informally. Was he good at telling stories? Would he be comfortable quoting Shakespeare, or would a Yogi Berra one-liner be a better fit? Could he tell a joke?
Some executives would say: “I don’t need a manuscript. Just give me bullet points.” I get it. He’s an engineer. So I would break the manuscript into snippets and format it as bullet points.
My annual reserve duty in the Navy often involved speechwriting. I would report for duty in Washington or San Diego and be told: Welcome aboard! We need you to write two speeches for the admiral by Friday. In the early days of word processing every office in the Navy used a different system, so being an itinerant speechwriter made me a word processing whiz.
I especially enjoyed hanging out with other speechwriters for interesting and witty conversation. I was a public relations generalist who occasionally wrote speeches, but full-time speechwriters (there are not many of them) are an eclectic bunch. Some have academic backgrounds and my mentor at Illinois Bell was an ex-priest. When I started writing speeches I contacted the Chicago Speechwriters’ Forum and asked how I could qualify for membership. You just show up, I was told. Speechwriters are not organization types, apparently.
The most rewarding aspect of speechwriting is the opportunity to communicate ideas. Important people have big ideas, but those ideas have no impact until they are expressed in clear language and delivered persuasively. A great speech can make history. Powerpoint slides can’t do that.