The Speechwriter by Barton Swaim

Author:Barton Swaim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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VERBIAGE

The governor now trusted me to write his letters. I wrote a good many personal letters for him, most of them responses to letters from acquaintances or allies or critics, but some of them self-generated. With a little help from my list of his favorite words and phrases, his incommodious style now came to me naturally. Once he even told me that I had “cracked the code.” He meant it as a compliment, but I sometimes feared the habits would become unshakable; one day I’d start work on a book review and find myself writing “I’d simply say three things” or “It speaks to this larger notion of where do we go from here.”

The governor received hundreds of letters every week. Many of these were written by people who were angry at him for some reason; others were requests for parole and pardon or for help in some appalling domestic situation. The Correspondence Office had ways of responding to all of these. But there were always a few letters Correspondence didn’t know what to do with. Those fell to me. There were lots of invitations to weddings and oyster roasts and block parties. I would regret those, always in the governor’s voice. But there were odd ones too. Somebody would write to ask his advice on getting into politics. Another would ask what he was doing about recycling, or why he didn’t wear a wedding ring, or whether he thought the state of Israel had a right to exist. A great many letters asked how the governor would define the American Dream; some of these were from children and had probably been school assignments, but some of them seemed to be from ordinary people who just wanted to know, which was touching in a way. I developed an arsenal of responses to these and other questions. I had an “American Dream” response, a “How do I get into politics?” response, a “Won’t you please run for president?” response, and many others. The trick was to use the maximum number of words with the maximum number of legitimate interpretations. Put that way, it sounds terrible, but there’s no other way to do it. If a constituent writes to ask the governor the best way to get into politics, and you (in the governor’s voice) write back using words like “I think you should run” or “Go for it,” you may soon hear about some nitwit running for county council claiming he’s been endorsed by the governor. Or take the “Won’t you please run for president?” letters, of which there were many around this time. In case the letter was made public, you couldn’t have the governor responding in a way that could be construed as an admission of an intent to run or of an interest in running, or as an admission of anything. At the same time, though, you wouldn’t want to deny an intention to run for president because that would have been obviously dishonest and, as I thought, soon disprovable.

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