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Live updates, who is vinay reddy, joe biden’s speechwriter.

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Joe Biden’s speechwriter is a first-generation Indian American who lives in New York and previously worked for the new commander-in-chief, reports said Wednesday. 

Vinay Reddy, who penned Biden’s inaugural speech for Wednesday’s ceremony , is currently the speechwriter on the Biden-Harris transition team and also worked as a senior adviser and speechwriter for the team’s campaign, the Hindustan Times reported . 

Previously, Reddy did stints writing speeches for the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Obama-Biden re-election campaign. 

He also worked for the National Basketball Association as the vice president of strategic communications after serving as Biden’s chief speechwriter during his second term as vice president in the Obama-Biden White House, the outlet reported. 

Reddy was born and raised in Ohio, but his family comes from the Telangana Pothireddypeta village in Karimnagar, India, the outlet said. Reddy’s father, Narayana Reddy, started his life in the US in 1970 following his completion of medical school in Karimnagar. 

The speechwriter’s family is well connected in their hometown: Reddy’s grandfather Thirupathi Reddy served as the village head and the family still owns acres of land in the area, visiting regularly. 

Reddy currently lives in New York with his wife and two daughters. 

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Presidential Speechwriting

Five former presidential speechwriters discussed the role of presidential speechwriters throughout history and their relationships with the … read more

Five former presidential speechwriters discussed the role of presidential speechwriters throughout history and their relationships with the presidents they served. Topics included their assessments of President Obama ’s rhetoric. They also responded to questions from members of the audience.

Panel: Ted Sorensen , adviser and primary speechwriter for President Kennedy; Chris Matthews , speechwriter for President Carter; Landon Parvin , speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan and both Presidents Bush; Michael Waldman , speechwriter for President Clinton; and Michael Gerson , speechwriter for President George W. Bush. The moderator was Ken Walsh .

“Presidential Speechwriters: Making History One Word at a Time” was an evening presentation of the Smithsonian Associates . close

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• Filter by Speaker All Speakers Michael J. Gerson Chris Matthews Landon Parvin Ruth Robbins Theodore "Ted" C. Sorensen Michael Waldman Kenneth T. Walsh
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• Nov 13, 2010 | 3:29pm EST | C-SPAN 3
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• Dec 30, 2010 | 4:00am EST | C-SPAN 3

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Help inform the discussion

Mary Kate Cary

• Former speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush
• Provides political commentary for NPR, CNN, Fox News Channel, and CTV (Canada)
• Executive producer of 41ON41 , a documentary about President George H.W. Bush
• Expertise on presidential communications , speechwriting

Areas Of Expertise

• Domestic Affairs
• Media and the Press
• The Presidency

Mary Kate Cary, practitioner senior fellow, served as a White House speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush from 1989 to early 1992, authoring more than 100 of his presidential addresses. She also has ghostwritten several books related to President Bush’s life and career and served as senior writer for communications for the 1988 Bush-Quayle presidential campaign.

Currently an adjunct professor in the University of Virginia’s Department of Politics, Cary teaches classes on political speechwriting; the greatest American political speeches; and the 2020 presidential election. In her first year in the politics department, she was recognized by the UVA Student Council for excellence in teaching.

Cary currently chairs the advisory board of the George and Barbara Bush Foundation, where she has been a member since 2004. The Bush Foundation oversees the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum and the Bush School of Government & Public Service, with campuses at Texas A&M University and in Washington, D.C.. In 2014, she was the creator and executive producer of 41ON41 , a documentary about President George H. W. Bush, which premiered internationally on CNN. She is also a producer of President in Waiting,  a documentary about the modern vice presidency that features interviews with all of the living vice presidents, which debuted on CNN in December 2020.

Following her tenure at the White House, Cary served as spokesman and deputy director of policy and communications for U.S. Attorney General William Barr and deputy director of communications at the Republican National Committee under Chairman Haley Barbour. She also served as a long-time columnist at US News & World Report, writing on politics and the presidency.

Cary is currently a member of the Ronald Reagan Institute's Women in Civics Advisory Council; UVA's Darden School of Business Leadership Communication Council; and the national advisory board of The Network of Enlightened Women, which supports conservative female leaders on more than 50 college campuses. She is a long-time member of the Judson Welliver Society of former presidential speechwriters.

Mary Kate Cary News Feed

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Who is Joe Biden's speechwriter Vinay Reddy? 5 things to know

Vinay's father narayana reddy migrated to the us in 1970 after completing mbbs from hyderabad.

Several Indian-Americans will find a place in the administration of Joe Biden, including Vinay Reddy, who has been chosen as the director of speechwriting. In fact, Biden's inaugural speech, a forward-looking vision for his presidency, has been written by Vinay.

His official bio on the website of Build Back Better says: "Vinay Reddy serves as a speechwriter on the Biden-Harris Transition and served as Senior Advisor and Speechwriter for the Biden-Harris Campaign. He previously served as chief speechwriter to Vice President Biden in the second term of the Obama-Biden White House, after which, he worked as Vice President of Strategic Communications at the National Basketball Association. During the Obama-Biden Administration, he also served as senior speechwriter at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services, deputy speechwriter for the Obama-Biden reelection campaign, and speechwriter for his home state Senator, Sherrod Brown of Ohio...."

Here is all you need to know about Vinay Reddy:

1. Vinay Reddy was born and raised in Ohio, while his family hails from Telangana's Pothireddypeta village in Karimnagar. At present, Vinay lives in New York, with wife and two daughters.

2. He was Biden's speechwriter during his second term as the vice president of the US from 2013 to 2017.

3. Vinay's father Narayana Reddy migrated to the US in 1970 after completing MBBS from Hyderabad. His schooling was in Karimnagar.

4. Vinay Reddy's grandfather Thirupathi Reddy was the village head.

5. Vinay, the middle of the three sons of Narayana Reddy and Vijaya Reddy, went to Miami University and attended the Ohio State University College of Law.

The Reddy family still owns acres of land in the village and visit the village at regular intervals. In February 2020, Narayana Reddy has visited the village.

(With agency inputs

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PRESIDENTIAL SPEECHWRITERS

TOM PUTNAM:   What better way to celebrate Presidents’ Day than at the nation’s memorial to our 35 th President and in the company of one of his most trusted advisors?  I'm Tom Putnam, the Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.  And on behalf of John Shattuck, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I want to welcome you to this very special forum.  Let me begin by thanking all of you for coming, by acknowledging those watching this program on C-SPAN and listening on public radio, and by expressing appreciation to the sponsors of the Kennedy Library forums, including lead sponsor, Bank of America, Boston Capital, The Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation, Corcoran Jennison Companies, as well as our media sponsors, The Boston Globe, WBUR, and NECN.  

As you know, today’s national holiday began first as a tribute to George Washington, then was later wedded to the birthday of Abraham Lincoln.  In more recent times, it has become popularly known as Presidents’ Day, continuing the tradition of honoring Washington and Lincoln and highlighting one of the hallmarks of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power between all those who have served in our nation’s highest office.  It is a day devoted to history, to harkening back to the famous words of Abraham Lincoln, to the mystic chords of memory, and to learning from those who have preceded us.  For just as President Kennedy instructed Theodore Sorensen to study the secret of Lincoln’s rhetoric, many recent presidential speechwriters describe how they in turn spent hours examining the speech craft of Kennedy and Sorensen.  For those budding speechwriters in today’s audience, one of Mr. Sorensen’s conclusions was that Abraham Lincoln never used two or three words where one would do, so I promise to try and make my introduction of today’s speakers brief.  [laughter] 

Theodore Sorensen served for 11 years as policy advisor, legal counsel and speechwriter to Senator and President John F. Kennedy.  He was deeply involved in such presidential decisions as the Cuban Missile Crisis, civil rights legislation, and the decision to send a man to the moon.  He is the author of numerous books, including his best-selling biography, Kennedy , and Let the Word Go Forth , a selection of the best JFK speeches.  He is also an international lawyer, lecturer and writer.

If you’ll allow me one anecdote, I once had the privilege of going through our Museum with Mr. Sorensen, his wife Gillian, who is here with us today and will be a featured speaker at our next Kennedy Library Forum, and their daughter Juliet.  After watching the renowned 1961 inaugural address, I asked Mr. Sorensen the following question.  Recalling the catechism of my youth, I speculated that some of the religious references in President Kennedy’s speeches were more Unitarian in their world view than Roman Catholic.  And I asked Mr. Sorensen, who was raised Unitarian in Lincoln, Nebraska, if that topic had ever come up in conversation with the President. It turns out it had.  He recounted to me an exchange in which President Kennedy once asked him, “So, Ted, has my Catholicism begun to rub off on you yet?”  Mr. Sorensen’s reply was, “No, I’m sorry, Mr. President.  On the contrary, it’s my Unitarianism that's finding its way into your speeches.”  [laughter] 

We're honored to have three other presidential speechwriters joining in today’s conversation who I’ll introduce chronologically.  It was exactly 40 years ago on this very holiday, Washington’s Birthday in 1967, that Raymond K. Price received the phone call that would change his life.  It was an invitation to join the campaign staff of Richard Nixon, who was considering mounting a second run for the presidency in 1968.  Over time, Mr. Price became a close friend, advisor, speechwriter, and special consultant to the President.  He was the President’s collaborator on both inaugural addresses, all of his State of the Union speeches, and President Nixon’s 1974 announcement from the Oval Office that he would resign.  Mr. Price had a distinguished career as a journalist, editor and public policy analyst and served for many years as the President of the Economic Club of New York.

Chriss Winston was the first woman to head the White House Office of Speechwriting and she was named Director of Speechwriting for President George H. W.  Bush.  She was also the Deputy Director of Communications for Bush/Quayle in 1988 and oversaw communications for the Department of Labor under President Reagan.  She’s the author of numerous books, including the forthcoming How to Raise an American in which, among other suggestions, she advises parents to bring their children to Boston to learn of this city’s rich history and to visit the Museum at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.  We’ll provide a free plug for any book that does the same for our Museum.   [laughter]   Ms. Winston is currently serving as a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Ted Widmer came to the Kennedy Library six years ago when he was charged by President Clinton to survey the field of presidential libraries in preparation for the design of the Clinton Library in Arkansas.  It is no surprise that President Clinton would have charged him with this task, for not only is Mr. Widmer a historian by training, he also served from 1997 to 2001 as a foreign policy speechwriter and senior advisor to President Clinton.  He is known for the creative programs he has designed to enliven the teaching of American history and politics to diverse groups, ranging from Muslim college students living in countries that have been historically suspicious of western culture, and to underprivileged children living in our own country with limited access to libraries and history museums.  He is currently the Director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Moderating today’s forum is one of the most recognizable and trusted voices in national journalism, Linda Wertheimer.  Currently Senior National Correspondent for National Public Radio, for 13 years she was the host of NPR’s flagship news magazine All Things Considered .  In her 30 years with NPR, she anchored dozens of nominating conventions and election nights, and has reported on countless presidential addresses.  She knows a good speech when she hears one, and we're so fortunate to have her here today to guide today’s conversation, Linda Wertheimer.  [applause] 

LINDA WERTHEIMER:   Thank you very much.  Thank you.  As perhaps you know, the format of this event will be to hear from the speechwriters, to hear some of the speeches that presidents have given, and to then have an opportunity for you all to ask questions.  So I'm going to keep my part of this very brief, since these are all people who have a way with words.  I don’t need to do very much.  So let me just begin by saying that the first clip you will hear, this is a speech that John Kennedy gave at American University.  And it was an important policy speech, because he introduced the idea of a test ban treaty and said that the United States would take the voluntary step of banning atmospheric testing. So it was a very important speech in terms of making news for people like me, but it was also a tremendously important speech because it talked about world peace, as you're just about to hear.  We have two clips that have been put together, so this is a somewhat telescoped version of the speech.

PRESIDENT KENNEDY:   I have, therefore, chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived – yet it is the most important topic on earth, peace.  

What kind of a peace do I mean?  What kind of a peace do we seek?  Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.  Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.  I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their children.  Not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women. Not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time.

I speak of peace because of the new face of war.  Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces.  It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War.  It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and a generation yet unborn.

Today, the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to the keeping of peace.  But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles, which can only destroy and never create, is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.  

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational man.  I realize the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war and frequently the words of the pursuers fall on deaf ears.  But we have no more urgent task.

For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combat ignorance, poverty and disease.  We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counter weapons.

In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race.  Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours.  And even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interests.  

So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved.  And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.  For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet.  We all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s futures, and we are all mortal.  

MS. WERTHEIMER:   President Kennedy speaking at American University.  That speech was … Let’s see, what was the date of that speech?

THEODORE SORENSEN:   June 10 th , 1963.  [laughter] 

MS. WERTHEIMER:   And Theodore Sorensen who is, I think, perhaps the best known of all the presidential speechwriters, is here with us to talk about why that speech happened the way it did and tell us about writing speeches for President Kennedy.

MR. SORENSEN:   Well, thank you Linda.  First, I want to say how honored I am to be back at the Kennedy Library, my favorite institution in the whole world, where I’ve been so often that you're going to get tired of seeing me.  But I'm going to be back next year.  And to be with you, Linda, whom I’ve been a fan for many years, as I told you during lunch.  To be with my longtime friend, Ray Price, and I was glad to meet Ted and Chriss, so this is a terrific group.  But Linda, I am not the best known presidential speechwriter.  Abraham Lincoln was the best known.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   I was going to say unless we count Abraham Lincoln, I should have said that.  [laughter] 

MR. SORENSEN:   I picked that particular speech to be shown here today, and I must say it’s the first time I’ve seen it since June 10, 1963.  I was sitting on the platform behind him at American University, and I’m rather touched to see it again and to be reminded how wonderful a human being John F. Kennedy was, how well he spoke.  But I picked that particular speech to be shown today because I'm still on a crusade that I’ve been on all my life, to try to make this a better world and nobody is more disheartened than I by what has happened to this country and its foreign policy over these last six years or so.  [applause] 

And I wanted you in the audience and those who watch this later on television to remember that America had a tradition of peace once, we were a peaceful country.  We did have a President who wasn't waging unilateral war and preemptive strikes, but who believed … I hope you’ll weigh carefully the particular words that were in those two excerpts that were shown there, because they are the very opposite of what our policy has been since 2001.  So I think it’s very, very important to get that message out.  

I like to think that that was John F. Kennedy’s best speech.  Certainly his most important speech.  I know many people think the inaugural was his best, but this was better and more important, because it said more.  In addition to the moratorium on nuclear testing in the atmosphere, Linda, which you mentioned, that speech called for a reexamination of the Cold War.  No President had ever done that.  It called for a reexamination of our relations with the Soviet Union.  No President had ever done that.  It called for a reexamination, part of which you heard, of what we mean by peace itself.  

So it was an important speech, and I had a lot to do with it, yes.  The President had gone out to Hawaii, he made a swing through some western states, and then he spoke to the American Conference of Mayors in Honolulu.  Like other young men, I had reasons to go to Hawaii, but I had to stay back and work on the speech.  I then flew out with it.  He gave his speech on June 9 th , 1963, in Hawaii, in Honolulu, and we then flew back.   I brought the draft with me.  We then flew back overnight, in those days, from Honolulu to Washington.  I went directly to the campus of the American University in Washington, unshaven.  He was President, so he went to the White House and changed his shirt and got a shower and then came before … and he had a little time before delivering the speech.

But it was still the height of the Cold War.  But the previous October, the President had led the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that had made a tremendous impression on him. 

And I will say it made a tremendous impression on Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev as well.  And both of them learned from that serious experience and Kennedy wanted to speak about it, and there are words in this speech that talk about the follies of war and the follies of backing your adversary into a corner.  

And on the way back, he made the decision and cleared it on the Air Force One telephone with Bob McNamara in Defense and McBundy back in the White House to add to that speech the moratorium on nuclear testing in the atmosphere, which he hoped would help bring the Soviets to the bargaining table.  And it did, and later that same summer a treaty was signed in Moscow, the first step toward arms control in the nuclear age, the limited nuclear test ban treaty.  So speeches can have consequences, they aren't just empty words, and that speech was selected because it was both his best and his most important.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   There are lots of wonderful quotes in this speech.  If I were presenting a piece, I would be very torn about which ones to use.  He said, “Our problems are manmade, and therefore they can be solved by man, and man can be as big as he wants.”

MR. SORENSEN:   Now, that's good Unitarianism.  [laughter]  

MS. WERTHEIMER:   And here's one of those parallel constructions for which Mr. Sorensen is so famous.  Talking about seeking peace, the speech says, “So let us persevere, peace need not be impracticable and war need not be inevitable.”  And then there's a wonderful … The ending is fabulous.  But one of the things that he says in the last paragraph of the speech, which I think resonates today, is “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.”  

Now, the next speech is another one of those speeches which just caused shivers to run right down the back of everyone who heard it, because it was such a terribly important speech.  And we have Ray Price, who had a hand in drafting it.  It was delivered by President Nixon on August 8 th , 1974.  You want to talk about the Great Occasion?

RAY PRICE:   Yeah, I chose the resignation announcement, partly because it’s significant, partly because there have been fewer of those than there have been inaugurals.  And it was quite a wrenching one to do, but I was glad to be the one doing it with him.  The part you’ll hear now is just the last concluding portion of it.  If we had more time, I would have included what came before.  What came immediately before it dealt more with the world, with what we had succeeded in doing, but what was yet left to do in making this a better world.  And that section that is before it, before this closing, very personal part, was something that was largely worked out through a series of phone calls from him to me beginning at … It was Thursday night he delivered it, beginning 8:30 p.m. Wednesday and ending at 5:07 a.m. Thursday.  That part that we did end leading, about the world, leads into this very personal conclusion.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Let’s hear it.

PRESIDENT NIXON:   For more than a quarter of a century of public life, I have shared in the turbulent history of this nation.  I have fought for what I believed.  I have tried to the best of my ability to discharge those duties and meet those responsibilities that were entrusted to me.

Sometimes I have succeeded and sometimes I have failed, but always I have taken heart from what Theodore Roosevelt once said about the man in the arena, “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again because there is not effort with error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deed, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievements and at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

I pledge to you tonight that as long as I have a breath of light in my body, I shall continue in that spirit.  I shall continue to work for the great causes to which I have been dedicated throughout my years as a Congressman, a Senator, Vice President and President, the cause of peace not just for America, but among all nations, prosperity, justice and opportunity for all our people.  

There is one cause above all to which I have been devoted and to which I shall always be devoted for as long as I live.  

When I first took the oath of office of President 5 ½ years ago, I made this sacred commitment: “to consecrate my office, my energies, and all of the wisdom I can summon to the cause of peace among nations.”

  I have done my very best in all the days since to be true to that pledge.  As a result  of these efforts, I am confident that the world is a safer place today not only for the people of America, but for the people of all nations and that all of our children have a better chance than before of living in peace rather than dying in war.

This, more than anything, is what I hoped to achieve when I sought the Presidency.  This, more than anything, is what I hope will be my legacy to you, to our country, as I leave the Presidency.  

To have served in this office is to have felt a very personal sense of kinship with each and every American.  In leaving it, I do so with this prayer.  May God’s grace be with you in all the days ahead.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Ray Price, early in the speech, the President said the thing that I think just was so shocking to hear, even though we knew it was coming, where he talked about the country needed him to leave, basically.  And then he said, “Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency, effective at noon tomorrow.  Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour, in this office.”  I'm sure that everyone who heard that will never forget those words. This speech had an enormous emotional content, something we were not generally accustomed to hear from President Nixon.

MR. PRICE:   Well, he tried not to be emotional in his speeches.  But it had been a difficult week for him, too.  [laughter]  And he had been up and down on whether to resign or not, but figured the resignation finally was having to turn over a bunch of tapes to the court and the prosecutor, having lost the case in the Supreme Court.  And they included one which we were pretty sure would be fatal anyway, that we could have handled earlier, easily if we had known about it earlier; we could not at that point.  And that week had begun, really, a week earlier.  

I’ll tell you a little bit on the lead up to that.  On Thursday the 1 st , the speech was Thursday, August 8, 1974.  On Thursday, August 1 st , Al Haig was then the Chief of Staff, convened a meeting in his office of a few department heads and so forth, including me, and had a lot of charts and so forth, laying out the strategy for the battle in the Congress over the impeachment.  From there on, it was at a crucial point and assigning what people would do and all the patterns for reporting and reconvening and so forth.  And then we left.  And had chalkboards laying this all out … And then we left and a few of us were talking outside, and his secretary motioned to me to come in, and I came back, and he told me that was all a sham.  He wants to go on the air on Monday, he wants a speech for Monday announcing his resignation.  So I started then on Thursday, the 1 st .  And then on Friday, the next day, Friday the 2 nd , was called back over to Al’s office again, and by then we had an actual transcript of what was called the smoking gun tape, in which he had temporarily, only temporarily, but temporarily approved having the CIA try to head the FBI off in wanting an investigation.

Incidentally, just one parenthetical aside, this, which was a trigger to the resignation, was an investigation into a Mexican connection that could have run into some other things.  And so he was told in a meeting, this was a meeting with Bob Haldeman, and Haldeman is reporting to him on what he had learned, what he had been told, and he said that John Dean and John Mitchell -- Bob later told me that not Mitchell had told him this, but Dean had told him this -- that recommended asking the CIA to head the FBI off from the Mexican connection.  And he said okay.

And then two weeks later … So he made the call to the director of the FBI.  And two weeks later, the President got a call from the CIA saying they no longer had a problem with the Mexican connection.  Or, rather, he got a call from the head of the FBI saying that the CIA had told him they no longer had a problem.  So the President said, “Go ahead, do a full investigation.”  Which they did.  The only practical impact of that intervention, which ultimately brought him down, was a two week delay in interviews of two witnesses, nothing more.  But things had gotten to a point, at that point, where that was enough.

But anyway, by Friday, he had decided no, he wanted a different speech.  He still wanted to make a speech on Monday.  But instead of saying he was going to resign, he was going to explain the transcripts which he was turning over, explain the context and so forth, and pledged to fight on in the … To answer questions under oath in the well of the Senate and fight on.  I thought that was a mistake.  At this point, I thought we could not save it.  

Then I saw the transcript, and it looked to me at first glance as though it was something we could not survive.  Then Saturday, Al called.  The President wanted us to come up to Camp David on Sunday.  We did, and meanwhile I’d been working on the draft and so on, but thinking it was probably a mistake.  We did meet up there.  While up there, he changed his mind and instead of pledging to fight on or resigning, he was going to put out the transcripts with a written statement explaining what they meant and see if the reaction was as bad as we thought it was going to be.  I thought that made sense, a lot was at stake, and let’s really see what it is.

We did put out the transcripts on Monday; the reaction was what we expected.  Tuesday, I got a call from Al.  We're back on the resignation track, but still very secretly.  And so Tuesday to Thursday is when we were working on the resignation speech, back and forth.

Linda, as a parenthetical aside, we did not call ours the speechwriting section, we called it the writing and research.  And this was accurate because in Nixon’s case, most of his speeches were not written and he never used notes.  My educated guess, having only a guess but educated because I did run the writing staff, is that 19 out of 20 speeches were not written, 1 out of 20 was.  And he never used notes.  He was always more comfortable without a text than with one.  But some were, and this of course, was one of those that were.  The State of Unions were all written, the inaugurals were written, and some others where he particularly wanted a text for some special reason, but he preferred not to have one.  But anyway, so that was the background.  

But then on the night before we’d been going back and forth on it.  Then the day before, the Thursday, rather, Wednesday, we were sitting in his old executive office building office.  I had my office a couple doors down and going over it.  And he mentioned to me that the head of the, the Republican leaders of the House and Senate were both going to be coming and together with Barry Goldwater, were going to come in to see him at five.  And a lot of notes made a  couple of years ago when this story really hit about how they had come in and bearded the lion in his den and persuaded him to resign.  We discussed this at 3:00 before they came in.  He had already written in the margin of the draft we were working on what he expected them to say.

He was already working on a resignation.  But he explained to me at 3:00 that he thought it was important to hear them out so that it would be more like an impeachment and thus to less damage the future presidency.  But then we worked on through and those calls that I mention, beginning at 8:30 on Wednesday, we were talking through and then really honing it down.  And then it went on through two or three calls that evening.  As he began to get into the kind of world view, the foreign policy stakes and what we’d done, what needed to be done.  And then these continued up until about 11:00 or so.  And he mentioned he wanted to get in that man in the arena quote and to find that, and that had been located and so on.

Then finally, around 1:00, I left the office.  Well, piece to that, shortly before one, I got a call from Jerry Warren, who was the Deputy Press Secretary, but he was Acting Press Secretary, saying that he’d gotten … very cautiously, saying that he was getting some calls from reporters who were still on duty there, noticing the lights were on in my office and wondering if that meant that Nixon was planning to resign.  And Jerry said, very cautiously, I told them I don’t know, or I told them or …How should I handle it?  And I thought a second, I said, “Jerry, you can tell them you don’t know.”  This was very careful, and he understood what I was doing.  He was a man of total integrity.  I was alerting him that he shouldn’t deny it, but not giving him actual knowledge so he didn't have to affirm it. But then we went on.

And then finally I went home and about 3:45, got a call from him.  He was working more.  He was working in the Lincoln sitting room, that's up in the family quarters, which was his working area up there.  He’d been working on the end and fleshing out more about one thing after another that we’d been doing, but there was this much left to do and so on.  And it was in those calls there that 3:45, 4:15, 4:30, 4:45, he really kind of worked out the meat of that.  And then finally at 5:07, the last call, was from him saying, “Just bring it over in the morning.”  He wanted it at 8:30.  “But don’t run it by Al Haig, don’t run it by Henry Kissinger or anyone else.  Just you and me, I want this to be my speech.”

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Goodness.  For those of us who spent as many hours, weeks and days as I did covering Watergate, it’s fascinating to hear the behind the scenes moments.  We're going to move on to Chriss Winston who is, as you heard, the first woman, to head a speechwriting office.  And it was in the Bush Administration, but she has chosen, instead, to include a speech which was delivered by the Great Communicator.  Chriss?

CHRISS WINSTON:   And I'm not casting any aspersions on my boss.  I actually started out, I was going to do one of his speeches.  He did a series of speeches in Europe just before and just after the fall of the Berlin Wall that were very exciting places to be, Prague and Poland and Budapest and a number of other places that we went in eastern Europe.  So, initially, I was going to pick one of those speeches and talk about what it was like to be in these countries at that moment in time and hopefully in the Q&A, we’ll have some time to talk about that.  

But kind of in the last minute, I had a change of heart and I decided to go with Ronald Reagan’s farewell address from the Oval Office, an excerpt from that speech.  And the reason I did that was because it’s Presidents’ Day, and I started thinking about how important Presidents are as our models and have been since the beginning of our country.  Abraham Lincoln talked about the fact that as a young boy, George Washington was his hero and his model.  And I started thinking about what I’d been studying for the last couple of years, which is how do we create good citizens today in the sort of political and cultural climate in which our children are being raised.

And one of the ways we do that, I think, is to teach our children about America’s great story and our history is something that can inspire them.   So I started thinking about Presidents’ Day and that made me think, well, Ronald Reagan talked about exactly that issue in his farewell address.  It was sort of his final … He called it the warning as he left office.  And so I wanted to focus on that in part because he is such a wonderful communicator and it seemed to me to have a panel here without something from Ronald Reagan would be a glaring omission.

But also because I thought about a quote from a Czech writer who wrote that if you want to destroy a nation, destroy its memory.  And so I wanted to use this excerpt on Presidents’ Day to remind us all that our presidents are our models for our children, and heroes like John Kennedy was to me when I was a young girl at the time.  And how important it is for our children to have those kinds of models in their lives to become good citizens.  That's why I chose this excerpt.

[VIDEO]  

PRESIDENT REAGAN:   Finally, there is a great tradition of warnings in presidential farewells, and I’ve got one that's been on my mind for some time.  And oddly enough, it starts with one of the things I’m proudest of in the past eight years: the resurgence of national pride that I call the new patriotism.  This national feeling is good, but it won’t count for much and it won’t last unless it’s grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.  

An informed patriotism is what we want.  And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world?  Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America.  We were taught very directly what it means to be an American, and we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions.  If you didn't get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea, or the family who lost someone at Anzio.  Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school.  And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture.  The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special.  TV was like that, too, through the mid-‘60s.

But now we're about to enter the ‘90s and some things have changed.  Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children.  And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style.  Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it.  We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom -- freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise, and freedom is special and rare.  It’s fragile, it needs protection.  

So we've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion, but what's important.  Why the pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant.  You know, four years ago on the 40 th anniversary of D Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father who had fought at Omaha Beach.  Her name was Liza Zanatta Henn and she said, “We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.”  Well, let’s help her keep her word.  If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are.  I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.  Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.  And let me offer lesson number one about America: all great change in America begins at the dinner table.  So tomorrow night in the kitchen, I hope the talking begins.  And children, if your parents hadn't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let them know and nail them on it.  That would be a very American thing to do.    

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Chriss, this is a wonderful example of President Reagan’s long conversation with the American people.  It’s not a particularly good example of Presidential speechwriting, however, because the President wrote it, according to David Gergen, he wrote it himself.  But why does it stand out for you, besides the … I mean, just in terms of the writing of a speech?

MS. WINSTON:   Well, I do think conversation is the right word.  I think his final address from the Oval Office was very much a conversational kind of speech.  The language was that way, and if you remember at the very end of the speech, he says something to the effect of all in all, we didn't do too badly, not bad at all.  And it was very Reagan in so many ways.  The language, the love of America.  He was always optimistic about America.  I think that's one of the reasons the American people always responded to him.  He was hopeful and optimistic and clearly loved his country, and that was evident in so much of what he had to say to the American people over the eight years he was in office.

The other thing that I think was so typical of him was the humor.  Ronald Reagan used humor sometimes to attack the other side, and they really wouldn’t feel it coming.  I mean, he always did it in a way that would bring a smile to the faces of sometimes even the other side.  So humor was a really great strength.

I brought the speech with me, and if I can do this without putting my glasses on, which is debatable, but I will try and read you what he said in this speech about being a great communicator.  He said, “I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference.  It was the content.  I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things.  And they didn't spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation, from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in principles that have guided us for two centuries.”  And I think that really was his style.  He always attributed his success to the country he grew up in.  And he may not have wanted to take the credit, but he was, in fact, a great communicator.  So I found this a very moving speech watching it at the time.  And having reread it over the last couple of years several times, it just struck me as an appropriate speech today, when times are tough in the country again, that it might be something that we could maybe agree on.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   I very much liked listening to Ronald Reagan’s speeches, I have to say.  He ends this one talking about the shining city on the hill; he talked about it so much in his speeches.  And he says how stands the city on this winter night?  One of the things that you’d hear from him was what I think of as kind of cowboy rhetoric, talking about the Soviet Union. 

He says that he wants the closeness that the United States had, and that he had, with the new Soviet leader Gorbachev at the time, to continue.  And he says that as long as they continue to act in a helpful manner, and then he said, “If and when they don’t, first pull your punches.  If they persist, then pull the plug.  It’s still trust, but verify.  It’s still play, but cut the cards.   And watch closely, and don’t be afraid to see what you see.”  I mean, that kind of thing, I think the American people used to love.

MS. WINSTON:   I think that's one of the reasons why the current President has often been criticized for the same kind of rhetoric.  I believe cowboy has been used frequently to describe this President as well, but there are some similarities between Reagan and Bush in terms of some of the rhetoric they've used over the years.  Obviously, I think President Reagan had a real ability to communicate through a prepared text, through a speech, which is difficult to do, very difficult as a matter of fact, prepared text.  And it was interesting hearing about how many prepared texts were done with President Nixon.  It’s something we might want to talk about later, the whole technical process side of speechwriting in the White House today has become, I think in large part because of a change in how much coverage there is at the White House, Presidents today will have a fairly substantial speechwriting operation.  We had seven speechwriters in our shop and seven researchers.  And President Bush would give sometimes as many as four speeches a day.  So you can see how things have really changed substantially.  And most speeches were not written by President Bush.  

But as Linda said, David Gergen, just after we finished lunch here today, we were talking about the speech and he said that he thought that President Reagan in this case had written this one, for the most part, himself though he did have a fairly large speechwriting operation, too.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   We're going to move on to Ted Widmer, who was writing speeches in the administration of President Clinton, and as you heard, is instrumental in setting up the Clinton Library.  So the speech you have chosen was given in Ireland.

TED WIDMER:   It was given in a small town called Armagh, outside of Belfast, in Northern Ireland in September, 1998.  Before I describe it, I want to thank the Library for organizing this thoughtful panel.  It’s a great pleasure to be with my fellow speechwriters.  And I want to particularly thank Ted Sorensen, who by the way, he asked me at lunch which speeches by President Kennedy I included in an anthology I’ve just published with the Library of America,  Great American Political Speeches .  And he correctly guessed all five speeches.  [laughter]  And I believe he would have known the dates of them also.  And I want to thank Ted for a very personal reason.  His speeches were not only moving and persuasive to the American people, leading to the election of then-Senator Kennedy, but they were exciting and persuasive to many of the young volunteers in the 1960 campaign, including two college students from Massachusetts who joined the campaign, met each other and got married, and they were my parents.  So we speechwriters tend to beget more speechwriters.  [laughter] 

Well, this particular speech by President Clinton is probably not that well known to most of you, although it was an important foreign policy speech at the time.  It was his first day in Northern Ireland since brokering the Good Friday Accord, and it was a very exciting day.  We had been on a trip to Russia and then to Ireland and Northern Ireland, and you couldn’t find two more different regions of the world.  Russia was dark and cold and people were not in a very good mood at the time.  They had had a severe economic setback and we touched down in Ireland; I remember that day vividly.  It was one of those days where you fly all around the world, it seems, giving speeches at different locations.  And we left Moscow at about six in the morning and landed in Ireland.  And everywhere we went, just driving from the airport into a city, the roads were thick with enthusiastic people waving at the motorcade and it was tremendously exciting, and he gave a number of speeches.

One of my great challenges today was to pick a single Bill Clinton speech after he gave so many of them.  There are 17 volumes in the collected speeches of President Bill Clinton.  I don't think any other President comes within five or six of that number.  They were sent to me by the Clinton Library, and I remember thinking, “Would one UPS man be strong enough to carry all of these volumes?”  

But this was a magical day and a magical particular speech.  He gave it in the late afternoon.  It’s September, early September, and the light was beginning to diminish.  And we had chosen a location in this beautiful small town called Armagh.  And there was a Catholic church facing a Protestant church across the town green.  So it was a beautiful location for so many reasons.  And it was a speech outdoors, which I fear is a disappearing presidential tradition.  I loved the quote that President Nixon chose from Teddy Roosevelt, about the man in the arena.  And I think for most of the 20 th century that was something that American presidents loved to do, certainly when they were campaigning, but then after they became president.  And one thinks a little bit about JFK’s speech in Berlin, or Ronald Reagan’s speech in Berlin.  And part of the drama is it’s this man who’s the embodiment of American openness and confidence standing amidst huge throngs of foreign people who are listening very closely.  And so much of it is the body language.  And I fear for many reasons, including unavoidable reasons stemming from 9/11, but also from the great unpopularity of the Iraq war and other U.S. policies, that it will be a long time before we return to that tradition.

But on this particular day, Clinton was in full form.  He was very much the man in the arena, and he strode out to the lectern and an enormous roar came from the crowd and he gave a speech that was both beautiful with some literary allusions and deeply humane.  He said he’d wanted to come back to his hometown in Ireland, but his ancestors were so poor that no one knew what that hometown was.  And he just talked about peace, and I think that's very much related to the idea of the open air speech.  He talked about how important the peace was that the Irish people had discovered for themselves, and I think he would have phrased it that way, he had just helped bring them together.

And the end of the speech I felt was moving because he said, “Look, you're not just doing this for yourselves.  You have your own tradition.  Part of the problem has been that you haven’t always been able to look at yourselves objectively outside these two traditions.  And what is fantastic about the peace of Northern Ireland in 1998 is that all peoples indulging in similar feuds around the Earth will see this and see that peace is achievable.”  And so, he ended the speech with a long section that wasn’t about Ireland at all, but it was about what this would mean to all other peoples on Earth.  And I think that sort of contrarian approach, going a little bit beyond what is expected, can make a speech truly distinctive.  

PRESIDENT CLINTON:   We wanted to come here in person to thank you, to thank you for the peace, to thank you for strengthening the hand of everyone, everyone anywhere, who is working to make the world a little better.  When I go about to other troubled places, I talk to you as proof that peace is not an idle daydream, for your peace is real and it resonates around the world.  It echoes in the ears of people hungry for the end of strife in their own country.  

Now, when I meet Palestinians and Israelis, I can say, “Don't tell me it’s impossible, look at Northern Ireland.”  When I meet Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo, I can say, “Don’t tell me it’s impossible, look at Northern Ireland.”  When I hear what the Indians and Pakistanis say about each other over their religious differences, I say, “Don’t tell me you can’t work this out.  Look at Northern Ireland.”  Centuries were put to bed and a new day has dawned.  Thank you for that gift to the world.  

And never underestimate the impact you can have on the world.  The great English poet and clergyman, John Donne, wrote those famous lines, “No man is an island.  We are all a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”  Tonight, we might even say in this interconnected world, not even an island, not even a very unique island, not even Ireland, is fully an island.  On this island, Northern Ireland, is obviously connected in ways to the Republic as well as to England, Scotland and Wales.  And in ways, the Republic of Ireland is connected to them also.  All of you on this island increasingly are connected to Europe and to the rest of the world as ideas and information and people fly across the globe at record speed.

We are tied ever closer together, and we have obligations now that we cannot shirk to stand for the cause of human dignity everywhere.  To continue John Donne’s beautiful metaphor, when the bells of Armagh toll, they ring out not just to the Irish of Protestant and Catholic traditions, they ring out to people everywhere in the world who long for peace and freedom and dignity.  That is your gift.  

We Americans will do what we can to support the peace, to support economic projects, to support educational projects.  Tomorrow, the Secretary of Education will announce a cooperative effort here to help children bring peace by doing cross community civic projects.  We know we have an obligation to you because your ancestors were such a source of strength in America’s early history., because their descendents are building America’s future today.  Because of all that, we have not forgotten our debt to Ulster.  But we really owe an obligation to you because none of us are islands.  We are all now a part of the main.  

Three years ago, I pledged that if you chose peace, America would walk with you.  You made the choice, and America will honor its pledge.  Thank you for the springtime of hope you have given the world.  Thank you for reminding us of one of life’s most important lessons, that it is never too late for a new beginning.  And remember, you will be tested again and again, but a God of grace has given you a new beginning.  Now, you must make the most of it, mindful of President Kennedy’s adage that here on Earth, God’s work must truly be our own.  Your work is the world’s work, and everywhere, in every corner, there are people who long to believe in our better selves, who want to be able to say for the rest of their lives in the face of an act of madness borne of hatred, over religious or racial or ethnic or tribal differences, they want to be able to shake their fist in defiance and say, “Do not tell me it has to be this way.  Look at Northern Ireland.”  Thank you, and God bless you.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   An extraordinarily inspirational speech.  I want to, because I want to get to the questions as quickly as possible, let me just ask you all to just talk for a few minutes about some of the technical aspects of speechwriting, and I suppose some of you will have questions of that sort as well.  I’d like to begin with Ted Sorensen whose memoir, as you heard, is going to be published, but we don’t know the name of it yet.  That I understand, in part of it, you talk about how you did what you did, how to write speeches for presidents.  Could you just share a little bit of that with us?

MR. SORENSEN:   Well, thanks for the plug.  It’s true, I’ve been working for five years on my life story, and I'm at the finish line at last.  And I expect it will be out next year, and I hope you’ll invite me back.  One of the chapters is entitled, “Speechwriting.”  And looking over the latest draft, and it’s still a draft … 

MS. WERTHEIMER:   And too long ... (inaudible)—

MR. SORENSEN:   Oh yes, I couldn’t possibly.  But I did find one excerpt that I thought I would read to you.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Great.

MR. SORENSEN:   This is what somebody else said about the Kennedy/Sorensen collaboration, and I thought you might be interested in that.  Now, these are not my views, please understand.  “You need a mind like Sorensen’s around you that's clicking and clicking all the time.  You can get a beautifully tooled speech, but at best just one sentence of it will make the difference.  It takes an intellectual to come up with a phrase that may penetrate.  Sorensen is tough, cold, not carried away by emotion, and he has the rare gift of being an intellectual who can completely sublimate his style to another individual.  And in his case, it’s the right combination. Sorensen is analytical and unemotional, so was Kennedy.  There hasn’t been such a combination of speechwriter and president since Raymond Moley and Franklin D. Roosevelt.”  

And a little bit later, “A public figure shouldn’t be just a puppet who echoes his speechmaker.  The ideas should be his, the opinions his, the words his.  It’s easy for Kennedy to get up and read Sorensen’s speeches.  But I don't think it’s responsible unless he believes in it deeply himself.”  That's Richard Nixon.  [laughter] 

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Well, that is the essential problem of being a presidential speechwriter, it does seem to me.  You know, the big question, who wrote that?  Which you always have to stand back from, deny, efface yourself from.  What is that like?  Ray Price, what was that like?

MR. PRICE:   I didn't have that problem so much.  I had been a professional writer before I joined up with Nixon, and I’d been a debater and things like that, and at times a speechwriter, as well as a parliamentary debater.  But he taught me speechwriting.  He’d been a master of the craft.  And again, as I said, my rough count was probably 19 out of 20 speeches in the White House were not written.  Most of our writing was things like the legislative messages to Congress and so forth, long written things in which we laid out what we wanted and made the argument for why and so on.  And these were delivered in written form, they're not spoken.

Nixon had a first rate mind, a very organized mind.  I was always appalled at speechwriters who would brag, as I heard a number of them do from time to time, about how they had snuck something into a president’s speech, or how they’d gotten him to say what they, the speechwriters, wanted him to say.  I felt my role, both as a writer and as head of the writing department, was to make sure that nothing got into the President’s speech that was not what he wanted to say, the way he wanted to say it.  And in the process of back and forth with him, in his case when we went back and forth on a written speech, it was usually through about six or seven or eight drafts.  But he would be using that, and we’d be editing and revising and so on.  He would be using that process as a means of refining ideas.  As you find they don’t work out on paper, you find maybe they don’t work quite right.  You get different views on it.

I did all State of the Unions with him, and every one of those worked out, coincidentally, did 14 drafts.  But these were much more complicated things and much longer.  But again, he was an organized thinker.  He himself had been a champion debater from high school on, and debating teaches you something about rhetoric and about organizing thoughts and so forth.  And he was a lawyer, and this was part of his background.  But again, he was more comfortable without.  He just felt he connected better with the audience without it, and he didn't need a text.  And he was a natural, natural speaker.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   So your habit of self effacement has completely overtaken you here. [laughter]  Chriss, among other things, you had a principal who was not the orator that President Reagan was or President Clinton was.  I remember many times reading a speech and thinking, “There's my quote,” and then he would get to it and he would stumble somewhere in the middle of the money quote. 

MS. WINSTON:   Right.  [laughter]  I remember that, too.  One of my favorites was we were in one of those eastern European trips, and I believe it was -- I have to really go back to my memory bank here -- but I think it was Hungary, we were in Hungary.  And Rubic, who did Rubic’s Cube, the man who had created Rubic’s Cube, was one of the first entrepreneurs in Hungary after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he’d been living there, he was Hungarian.  So in one of the speeches that President Bush was giving there, Mr. Rubic was going to be in the audience and we were talking about entrepreneurship and capitalism and all of these things, and we were going to use him as a good example.  When President Bush got to that section of the speech, he started talking about it, and he proceeded to call it Rubic’s Cone, which was one of those, we're just sitting there, “Well, great.”  [laughter]  And those things did happen sometimes with him.  

But I think it’s true with anyone that you write for.  One of the things that's most difficult to do is to try and learn that person’s voice, because you are reflecting not your thoughts and not your voice, but his or hers.  And President Bush, when we started to write for him, none of us had written speeches for him during the campaign.  We were in another part of the communications operation, and then we brought in some new speechwriters.  And so we had to learn that, and we had to learn it on the ground as we went along.  And one of the first things we discovered with him happened … Well, there were two things, really.  First of all, frequently when a speech draft would come back, in the margin would be the phrase that all of us came to really hate.  And it would say, “Too much rhetoric.”  Okay, that's the phrase, and it was the kiss of death.  Anything very flowery, the kind of language that speechwriters like to indulge in, he found it to be just overly dramatic or too flowery for him.  He liked very plain language.  So that was the first thing we learned.

The second thing we learned, and it happened just a few months after we were in office, and the  U.S.S. Iowa had a terrible explosion and I think over 100 sailors were killed, a terrible accident.  The President was going to speak to the memorial service.  Now, this was the first military speech that we had written, and of course it was a very difficult moment.  And so in the speech, the speechwriter, who was a very good speechwriter by the name of Mark Davis, wrote these really wonderful memorial remarks.  And he, in it, used a phrase from a poem referring to the men behind the gun.  And at one point in the speech, there was a paragraph where the President was to say something to the effect that he remembered as a young airman, Navy pilot in World War II, coming back to the ship at night after a mission — (pause on tape) -- and then we heard the President to be sniffling and kind of … And both of us were kind of, “What?”  And as the speech went on, it was clear he was becoming more and more choked up as the speech went on.   And as we got to that dramatic moment in the speech that we knew was coming, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, he’s really going to have a tough time getting through it.”  Well, he didn't have any trouble getting through it at all because he just leapfrogged right over it and dropped the paragraph out of the speech and went on, and that paragraph never saw the light of day.  And I thought Mark was going to commit suicide right there in my office.  We're both sitting there, like, “He dropped it.”  But that is what we learned -- was that President Bush, and I think this President Bush is much like his father, that they have a great difficulty talking about the military and military sacrifices.  It is something very near and dear to their heart, and we learned to write in a way that he could get through that kind of language without breaking up.  But that's what you have to do.  It’s part of the process of learning to write for someone, whatever level.

MR. PRICE:   If I could throw in a p.s. to that one, my guess would be that—President Bush, Senior., is an old friend of mine—That particular one would have been especially hard for him because as a Navy pilot in World War II, one of the most traumatic events of his life was being shot down.  He survived, and his two crewmates did not.

MS. WINSTON:   Right, and he still can’t talk about it.  He has a lot of difficulty discussing that.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   But some presidents, I keep going back to President Reagan, President Reagan, for example, could make an emotional speech in which tears would come into his eyes and then 3 ½ hours later, you know, in the next town, he would make the same emotional speech, and the tear would come into his eye.  And four hours later.  But the thing that was always just so dazzling to me was that tears would come into my eye!  You know, and I had heard that speech … 

MS. WINSTON:   Every time.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   For 11 times.  [laughter]  But he just had that capacity to cause you to share in the emotional content of the speech.  Now, I was very impressed, Ted, with your boss’s … 

MR. SORENSEN:   Which Ted?

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Other one.  [laughter]  

MR. WIDMER:   I’m always going to be the other Ted in speechdom.  [laughter] 

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Ted Widmer.  Somebody pointed out at the beginning that we had lots of people whose names begin with W and two people named Ted.  Let me just show you this.  This is Ted Widmer’s book, The Anthology of American Speeches .  And if you are interested in reading some of these speeches, it’s a very good place to go.  I’ve been reading it all morning.  One of the things that happened in the Clinton Administration, obviously, was that like the Nixon Administration, you had a very bad patch to go through and the President was not permitted to hide in the Rose Garden and never speak.  And that, it seems to me, must have been a very difficult thing to do for you, for him as well?

MR. WIDMER:   It was, but I think you could say that 1998, which was my first full year as a speechwriter, was in many ways his best year as well as his worst year, if you can say both things at the same time, which I think you can.  He achieved an enormous amount with his foreign policy and I think we tend to forget what an effective foreign policy President Bill Clinton had.  Besides Northern Ireland, he had quite an important trip to Africa, still the longest trip to Africa of any U.S. President, an important trip to China.  And throughout the year, terribly serious things were happening that he was handling effectively and his political ratings were rising.  So it was a funny year in that he was in dire political peril, but he was performing better than ever.  No foreign policy jitters whatsoever, and the American people were growing to appreciate that.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Well, one of the things I remember was the State of the Union which came just days after all the Monica Lewinski revelations.  I mean, that must have been an amazing drafting session?

MR. WIDMER:   It was.  [laughter]  I was only involved peripherally; I’d been there just a couple of months.  I was a very junior speechwriter.  But until about the day of the speech, I had a single line in it, which was based on a repair that was happening in my house at the time where my wife had said the best time to fix our roof is when the sun is shining.  And so I thought, “That's a pretty good line.”  [laughter]  That was about fixing the economy when things are— Fine tuning it when things are good, and that line survived until almost the moment of delivery, and then it was scratched at the last minute because apparently President Kennedy had said something very similar in a rather obscure place and time, and it was not a line I remembered.  I truly had just heard my wife say it.  And I was disappointed, it was my only line and it disappeared.  But then the next day …

MR. SORENSEN:   Wait until I tell you about President Kennedy and your wife.  [laughter] 

MR. WIDMER:   Fortunately, we don’t get C-SPAN, we don’t have cable, you can say anything you want.  [laughter]  The next day, President Clinton said, “You know, when I was a kid growing up in Arkansas, we had a saying.  The best time to fix your roof is when the sun is shining,” so a good line has many fathers.  

MS. WERTHEIMER:   But he really did knock that State of the Union speech out of the park.

MR. WIDMER:   It was unbelievably dramatic.  He never looked more confident than that day, and he was probably never in more peril than at that moment.  It wasn’t just that he survived.  In that same speech he saved the social security system with four strategic words, “Save social security first.”  So it was like watching Nureyev, it was just an extraordinary thing to watch.  I just watched it on TV in the White House with the other speechwriters, but it couldn’t have been more exciting.

MR. SORENSEN:   You know, I got to thinking listening to this, I think one thing you really have to understand in understanding the presidency itself, setting speechwriting aside, is that you cannot function effectively as a president unless you're very good at compartmentalizing.  

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Yeah.  Okay, your turn folks.  Chriss is going to make one more comment, but you might want to start forming lines behind the microphones.  Chriss?

MS. WINSTON:   I was just going to mention a story about a line that we tried to get into a speech also, which was a speech -- this was in the run-up to the Gulf War, and the President was going to speak, I believe it was at the Defense Department to employees at the Defense

Department.  And we were doing a whole series of speeches in terms of building support for the Gulf War.  And we had decided in speechwriting, we were going to make a comparison of Saddam to Hitler.  This sounds very familiar to some of you now, I suspect.  But we thought that that was an apt description, given the … Remember at this time, it wasn't that long a period of time from when he had gassed the Kurds and so forth, and we thought this was an apt comparison and we put it in the draft of the speech and it went through the process.  And it came back, and I believe it was the NSC, the National Security Council, had Xed it out.  And I went in and I argued for it, and I said, “What's the problem?  We need … “  “No, no, this is not the kind of rhetoric we want to use.”  I said, “Okay, fine.”  So we took it out.  We went off to the Defense Department, the President got up there and gave the speech.  And when he got to that point in the speech, and though he'd never seen this line, it never even made it into the Oval Office for him to even consider doing it, he got up there and he gave the speech and halfway through the speech, lo and behold, he just ad libbed it anyway.  And, of course, speechwriting was cheering over this whole thing.  

So the next speech we had to do for the Gulf War, we thought, “All right, he’s already said it, we're golden.”  We put it back in the speech, it went through the process.  Lo and behold, NSC scratched it out again.  So even when the President says it, the bureaucracy can sometimes do you in, so I sympathize.  

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Okay, let’s start over here?

AUDIENCE:   I’d like to address my opening remark to Ted Widmer.  I was fortunate enough to be in Independence, Missouri, when President Clinton -- he wasn't President then -- but he accepted the nomination of his party to run for President.  And then the next time I was in his presence was at the 50 th anniversary of D Day in Normandy.  Senator Dole was also there, and he got a much bigger response, a much bigger response from the people who were there.  President Clinton was not very popular with veterans at that point.  But when he made his speech on Omaha Beach, he closed it with the words, “They walk with a little less spring in their steps, and their ranks are growing thinner.  But we must always remember when these men were young, they saved the world.”  And my voice is cracking a little bit and that is in keeping with Linda Wertheimer’s reaction to some other speeches.

But I also hark back to President Reagan’s speech when he quoted the woman who said that they would always be grateful to the American people.  And when I go back to Europe, in Luxembourg, and in Belgium and France, and even when I meet, and I’ve been in Germany, and when people find out that I'm a D Day veteran, they—especially the Germans—they say, “Thank you for liberating my country.”  And so I'm harking back to what President Reagan quoted that woman as saying, that we will never forget what the Americans in Normandy did for us.  And since that time, I have read polls that say that they have interviewed young people, and fully onethird of them believed that the Germans were our allies in World War II.  And I'm just wondering, Linda, I mean Chriss, what has happened to history?  And why is this situation prevalent today?

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Thank you.  Chriss, you want to take a very quick … 

MS. WINSTON:   I’ll try and make this really short, and by using an example.  In working on the book that I’ve been working on for the last couple of years, at one point I sat down and read my son’s 11 th grade American history textbook, all 1,000 pages and some of it.  And this will give you an example.  Part of the problem, I think, with the teaching of American history today is how the textbook authors decide what subjects to tackle and how much space they're going to get.  And so let me just give you an example, and I think this will say it all.  

I looked at his book and I started counting words.  And there was a section called The Disco Generation, and it got 214 words.  And Steven Spielberg got his own section, and that was 381 words.  Nicaragua, Iran Contra, but a lot on the history of Nicaragua, got over 1,000 words.  And Neil Armstrong and the moon landing got a whopping 78 words, which I think is shocking.  And I actually thought very seriously today of using President Kennedy’s speech at Rice University, which is one of my favorite speeches, because I think that the space program is one of America’s most wonderful and inspiring stories for our children.  There's no downside, it’s courageous, it embodies all of our values and spirits and has brought so much new science and technology to the world.  And yet, American history today all but ignores it.

And so I would just use that example to tell you that's part of the problem.  And I would suggest that people read their child’s textbooks.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Let’s try to keep this to relatively concise questions, yes?

AUDIENCE:   Absolutely.  My question is for Ted No. 1, and I believe that President Kennedy’s favorite orator, from my understanding, was Sir Winston Churchill.  And so my question is, in your workings with President Kennedy, how much was Churchill referenced, his speeches or his actions or deeds?  And could you possibly give an example?

MR. SORENSEN:   The answer to everything you just said is yes.  President Kennedy admired Winston Churchill, both as a public figure and as an orator.  And I believe you will find references to Churchill in Kennedy’s speeches and in his off the cuff remarks, such as press conferences.  And I have to tell you that I read a lot of Churchill in my role in helping Kennedy on some of the things that he said and wrote.  And I have often, when I occasionally lecture to students on speechwriting, invoke Churchill as the example of what -- Who was it?  I guess Tom Putnam in the introduction here today cited as being one of my principles, which is don’t use any unnecessary words of which the best example is Winston Churchill after the fall of France.  He began his report to the British people over radio with what, it’s about seven words.  “The news from France is very bad.”  Says it all.  

MS. WERTHEIMER:   I was just checking—I'm not fast enough here—I was checking the index to see if I could find one.  Yes?

AUDIENCE:   Yes, hi.  I listened to a lot of President Kennedy’s speeches personally,and also downstairs a number of times.  And I’ve always wondered the source of two words that he uses repeatedly, and that's “let us.”  And I wondered if there was a history to how that started and if he used it a lot before he was President, or just this part of his way of saying things when he became President?

MR. SORENSEN:   I have to say I’ve never thought about that before, and I don't know the answer.  I learned from the master that when you don’t know the answer, don’t give one.  [laughter]  

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Yes?

AUDIENCE:   Mr.  Sorensen, it’s an honor to speak to you.  My question is related to something you said earlier.  You referred to the American University speech as being President Kennedy reexamining attitudes about the Cold War, including his own attitudes.  And that made me think of the passage in the inaugural address, which obviously came first, “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to insure the survival and the success of liberty.”  And that quote is obviously magnificent oratory, but it has been criticized, unjustly in my view, but criticized nonetheless as maybe raising the bar a little too high.  And do you think that in the later speech, the American University speech, President Kennedy was reexamining some of the things he’d said about the Cold War.  

MR. SORENSEN:   That's a very thoughtful question.  I have to say that he had the same help on the inaugural as he had on the American University speech.  [laughter]  And so no, I don't think it was a reexamination.  And I'm glad you said that he is unjustly criticized for those words in the inaugural because people who single out those words and focus on it as a Cold War rhetoric forget the rest of the speech in which he said—back to the lady’s question—“Let us, let both sides, join.”  Meaning east and west, Soviets and Americans.  “Let us together join in exploring the heavens and the stars.  Let us enjoin in pushing back the desert.  Let us explore the ocean depths, and let us fight the …“  I don’t remember it exactly.  “Fight the common enemies of disease, poverty, tyranny and war itself.”  No American President had ever said that before.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Here's another one.  “Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Cold War.”  This is from the American University speech.  Yes?

AUDIENCE:   This is directed primarily to Mr. Sorensen, but the other … 

MS. WERTHEIMER:   We’ve got to broaden out here.

AUDIENCE:   When did it become apparent that in working with John Kennedy that you two were of a mind, or more significantly, of a voice together, and that your writings pretty much represented his voice, or captured his thoughts and the rhetoric captured the way he preferred to communicate them?

MR. SORENSEN:   First, I have to say this is all in my book and you’ll have to buy it.  [laughter] 

AUDIENCE:   And I happily will.

MR. SORENSEN:   But I would say that our compatibility was not apparent until the afternoon of the first day we met.  [laughter]  I had worked for him almost a year before he asked me to help on speeches.  And interestingly enough, here in Boston, the reason was—I still remember him coming into my office adjoining his, or actually a waiting room in between—He came into my office and he said, “I have to give three speeches, I believe all in Boston, on St. Patrick’s Day.  How about helping?”  I’m a Unitarian from Lincoln, Nebraska, where we never observed St. Patrick’s Day, but I thought it’d be an interesting challenge.  And I turned out three speeches for St. Patrick’s Day, and he loved them, and I never got rid of the job for the next ten years.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Ted, the other Ted, let me just ask you to speak to the, as Chriss already has, about finding the voice of your principal?

MR. WIDMER:   Well, you just read his speeches.  I came well into his Presidency, I came in in ’97, and you begin by just reading.  And then you learn a lot from your fellow speechwriters.  We were similar numbers, we were up to nine or ten, I think, in Clinton. We had two staffs, by the way.  We had a foreign policy staff inside the NSC, which I was part of, and then a domestic staff.  And so it’s imitative.  You're just trying to get that voice, and for me, the best coaches were my fellow speechwriters at first.  But then after a certain amount of time, it becomes more natural.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   I remember on a couple of occasions when I was standing right behind President Reagan because I was in the tight pool, I saw him change his speech while he was giving it, into a locution that was more comfortable for him.  You know, it’s just something that, I guess, they just get good at it after they do it for a while.  Over here?

AUDIENCE:   My name is Alison Shapiro, I work at the Kennedy School and I'm a public speaking and speechwriting consultant.  My question is I’d like to hear from any of our distinguished speechwriters about the unique relationship between our speechwriter and a principal, and how that manifests itself on a presidential level, especially given the large number of speechwriters who are involved in writing a speech?

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Shall we start with Ted Sorensen?

MR. SORENSEN:   Occasionally, since I left the White House, I have been asked by others if I would write speeches for them, which I have for the most part not done.  And I have tried to explain to them that for ultimately 11 years, I was with John F. Kennedy day and night.  I knew what he thought and what he said on almost every subject.  Between the convention of 1956 and the convention of 1960, we traveled to all 50 states together.  We ate together, we lived together, we formed a bond that unless you have that kind of bond, you don't have the same relationship.  And with a stranger calling me up on the phone asking me to write a speech for him, it’s not going to be in his voice the way I was able to help JFK with words that he was comfortable with.

But I would add one other important fact at the presidential level, as you suggest.  We've heard quite a bit today about speechwriting and research departments.  We didn't have a speechwriting and research department in the Kennedy White House.  Occasionally, and on some important occasions, Arthur Schlesinger would help.  He was our resident historian.  During the first ten months of the presidency, as during the Presidential campaign, that is the post convention campaign, Dick Goodwin was a very good speechwriter who made a lot of contributions.  But the speechwriting department was essentially John F. Kennedy and me.  

And I had the advantage of being counsel to the President, special counsel to the President and policy advisor, as mentioned by Tom in his introduction, so that I was able to take part in the policy decisions, and the great speeches are communicating great decisions.  And I would listen to the evidence being presented to the President and watch his reaction.  I could tell what impressed him, what ideas, what themes, what thoughts, even what words or what data made a difference to him.  And then walk down the hall to my office and put it together in the form of a draft speech.  That is so much easier than being across the street at the executive office building, in a speechwriting and research department with six or nine other people and getting a phone call from the Chief of Staff, “The President wants a speech on agriculture. Who wants to write the speech on agriculture?”  Thank goodness I didn't have to do that.  And I sympathize with Chriss and the fact that the clearance process sometimes interfered with good lines, except on State of the Union messages and on the Cuban Missile Crisis speech, which was a totally different story.  I didn't have a clearance process.  My drafts went to John F. Kennedy.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Would anybody else like to add something?  Chriss?

MS. WINSTON:   Only, you know, the phrase good old days comes to mind because it would have been wonderful to have that kind of a relationship.  I think maybe a couple of things changed over time.  One was the demands of the numbers of speeches that presidents gave.  I know I was working on a book and I called Franklin Roosevelt’s Presidential Library to get a five or six month schedule, a particular time to look at his speeches, to see where he’d given speeches.  And in that five month period, he gave four speeches, which was staggering to me.  I just assumed presidents gave lots of speeches, they didn't.

I think that's one change that is different.  And I also think the intense media scrutiny of speeches, now there's so much.  There's just so much more media out there to cover speeches; I think sort of intensifies that.  But, you know, I agree with everything Ted said.  The ideal is the kind of relationship that he had with President Kennedy.  I mean, you can always do a better job if you're very close to the principal you're writing for.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   I'm going to move on because we can really only take, I think, one more question.  We have planes to catch here, people are about to leave.

AUDIENCE:   To those of you who’ve done both, which is more challenging and which more enjoyable: writing for the presidential candidate or writing for the man in the Oval Office?

MS. WERTHEIMER:   That's a good question.  Ted, do you want to start?

MR. WIDMER:   I haven’t written for a campaigner, I only wrote for President Clinton.  The first speech I ever wrote was for President Clinton, and I haven’t written any after.  So I can’t compare.

MS. WINSTON:   No, I was on the campaign but I had other responsibilities on the campaign.

MR. PRICE:   I’m not sure how to answer.  In the ’68 campaign, I was part of—His key writer, and I did a lot of speeches there, although a lot of these—We did our policy things in ’68 campaign on radio.  We didn't use television, we used radio.  That worked much better.  It was cheaper, and—[laughter]  No, quite seriously, we could buy half an hour of radio for 2,000 bucks, and also we wouldn't preempt “I Love Lucy.”  And we got anywhere from half a million to two million people actually sitting and listening to what was said.

And so for serious policy things, we used radio.  That's more cerebral than television is.  But in terms of satisfaction, I'm going to suggest a different thing.  The first presidential campaign is an exciting thing in itself.  The second campaign is less exciting.  The presidency is very demanding, the campaigns are very demanding.  And my guess it would be more, not so much more one to the other as within each one, was more or less.  

MS. WERTHEIMER:   Mr. Sorensen?

MR. SORENSEN:   There's a total difference, vast difference, between writing speeches for the presidential candidate and writing speeches for the president of the United States.  First of all, the campaign, I warn those of you who want to be a speechwriter, is the most exhausting ordeal of your life.  The candidate gets a little sleep at night, but the speechwriter doesn’t.  That's when he has to work.  

Second, the speeches themselves are much easier to write.  When a crisis arises during the campaign, the candidate can give a speech raising the right question, pointing with alarm, demanding an investigation.  That's no good when you're president of the United States.  You're in charge, you have to come up with the answer.  And every word the president utters is fraught with implication.  If it’s in foreign policy, the president’s words become the policy.  Not in domestic, because Congress has to authorize it and appropriate the money for it.  But in foreign policy, every word is policy.  Moreover, as president, you are simultaneously addressing many different and inconsistent audiences.  Your supporters and your opponents at home, Congress, the allies, the adversaries abroad, every one of them is going to look and listen to that speech very differently, and all of that has to be weighed.  So it’s much tougher for the president.

MS. WERTHEIMER:   I think that this is it for us.  And thank you all so much.  My apologies to the people who are still waiting in line, but we have a group that has to leave.  Thank you all so much.  [applause] 

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What's the best state for you », how speechwriters delve into a president's mind: lots of listening, studying and becoming a mirror.

There are few times in a American presidency that the art of speechwriting is more on display than during a State of the Union

How Speechwriters Delve Into a President's Mind: Lots of Listening, Studying and Becoming a Mirror

Patrick Semansky

FILE - President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol, Feb. 7, 2023, in Washington. It’s an annual process that former presidential speechwriters say take months. Speechwriters have the uneviable task of taking dozens of ideas and stitching into a cohesive narrative of a president’s vision for the year. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Speechwriting, in one sense, is essentially being someone else’s mirror.

“You can try to find the right words,” said Dan Cluchey, a former speechwriter for President Joe Biden . “But ultimately, your job is to ensure that when the speech is done, that it has a reflection of the speaker.”

That concept is infinitely magnified in the role of the presidential speechwriter. Over the course of U.S. history, those aides have absorbed the personalities, the quirks, the speech cadences of the most powerful leader on the globe, capturing his thoughts for all manner of public remarks, from the mundane to the historic and most consequential.

There are few times in a presidency that the art — and the rigorous, often painful process — of speechwriting is more on display than during a State of the Union , when the vast array of a president’s policy aspirations and political messages come together in one, hour-plus carefully choreographed address at the Capitol. Biden will deliver the annual address on Thursday .

It’s a process that former White House speechwriters say take months, with untold lobbying and input from various federal agencies and others outside the president’s inner circle who are all working to ensure their favored proposals merit a mention. Speechwriters have the unenviable task of taking dozens of ideas and stitching them into a cohesive narrative of a president’s vision for the year.

It’s less elegant prose, more laundry list of policy ideas.

Amid all those formalities and constraints of a State of the Union address, there is also how a president executes the speech.

Biden’s biggest political liability remains his age (81) and voters’ questions about whether he is still up to the job (his doctor this past week declared him fit to serve ). His every word is watched by Republican operatives eager to capture any misspeak to plant doubt about Biden’s fitness among the public.

“This year, of course, is an election year. It also comes as there’s much more chatter about his age,” said Michael Waldman, who served as a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. “People are really going to be scrutinizing him for how he delivers the speech, as much as what he says.”

Biden will remain at Camp David through Tuesday and is expected to spend much of that time preparing for the State of the Union. Bruce Reed, the White House deputy chief of staff, accompanied Biden to the presidential retreat outside Washington on Friday evening.

The White House has said lowering costs, shoring up democracy and protecting women’s reproductive care will be among the topics that Biden will address on Thursday night.

Biden likely won’t top the list of the most talented presidential orators. He has thrived the most during small chance encounters with Americans, where interactions can be more off the cuff and intimate.

The plain-spoken Biden is known to hate Washington jargon and the alphabet soup of government acronyms, and he has challenged aides, when writing his remarks, to cut through the clutter and to get to the point with speed. Cluchey, who worked for Biden from 2018 to 2022, said the president was very engaged in the speech drafting process, all the way down to individual lines and words.

Biden can also come across as stiff at times when standing and reading from a teleprompter, but immediately loosens up and appears more comfortable when he switches to a hand-held microphone mid-remark. Biden has also learned to navigate a childhood stutter that he says helped him develop empathy for others facing similar challenges.

To become engrossed in another person’s voice, past presidential speechwriters list things that are critical. One is just doing a lot of listening to the principal, to get a sense of his rhythms and how he uses language.

Lots of direct conversation with the president is key, to try and get inside the commander in chief's thinking and how that leader frames arguments and make their case.

“This is not an act of impression, where you’re simply just trying to get the accent down,” said Jeff Shesol, another former Clinton speechwriter. “What you really are learning to do and need to learn to do -– this is true of speechwriters in any role, but particularly for a president –- is to understand not just how he sounds, but how he thinks.”

Shesol added: “You’re absorbing not just the rhythms and cadences of speech, but you’re absorbing a worldview.”

Then there is always the matter of the speech-giver going rogue.

Biden is often candid, and White House aides are sometimes left to clean up and clarify what he said in unvarnished moments. But other times when he deviates from the script, it ends up being an improvement on what his aides had scripted.

Take last year’s State of the Union . Biden had launched into an attack prepared in advance against some Republicans who were insisting on requiring renewal votes on popular programs such as Medicare and Social Security, which would effectively threaten their fate every five years.

That prompted heckling from Republicans and shouts of “Liar!” from the audience.

Biden immediately pivoted, egging on the Republicans to contact his office for a copy of the proposal and joking that he was enjoying their “conversion.”

“Folks, as we all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the — off the books now, right? They’re not to be touched?” Biden continued. The crowd of lawmakers applauded. “All right. All right. We got unanimity!"

Speechwriters do try and prepare for such moments, particularly if a president is known to speak extemporaneously.

Shesol recalled that Clinton's speechwriters would draft remarks that were relatively spare, to account for him veering off on his own. The writers would write a clear structure into the speech that would allow Clinton to easily return to his prepared remarks once his riff was over.

“Clinton used to liken it to playing a jazz solo and then he’s going back to the score,” Waldman added.

Cluchey, when asked for his reaction when his former boss would go off-script, described it as a “ballet with several movements of, you know, panic, to ‘Wait a minute, this is actually very good,’ and then ‘Oh man, he really nailed it.’”

Biden is “at his best when he’s most authentically, most loosely, just speaking the plain truth,” Cluchey said. “The speechwriting process even at its best has strictures around it.”

Copyright 2024 The  Associated Press . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Achsah Nesmith, who wrote speeches for President Jimmy Carter, has died at age 84

This April 2016 photo provided by Terry Adamson shows Achsah Nesmith, second from left, and her husband, Jeff Nesmith, right, posing for a photo with former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn Carter, in Plains, Ga. Achsah Nesmith, a speechwriter for Carter during his presidency, died March 5, 2025, in Alexandria, Va. (Terry Adamson via AP)

This photo taken March 14, 2024, in Alexadria, Va., shows a 1978 newspaper on which then-President Jimmy Carter wrote a personal note to one of his speechwriters, Achsah Nesmith. One of the first women to write speeches for an American president, Nesmith worked at the Carter White House for all four years of his presidency. She died March 5, 2024, in Alexandria, Va., at age 84. (AP/Susannah Nesmith)

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When Achsah Nesmith got the phone call offering her a job writing presidential speeches for Jimmy Carter, she turned it down. As the mother of two young children, she explained to Carter’s chief of staff, she just didn’t have time.

Nesmith quickly changed her mind, however, and called back to accept with encouragement from her husband, a fellow journalist who told her: “I can raise two babies.” She arrived at the White House right after Carter’s 1977 inauguration, becoming one of the first women to work as a speechwriter for an American president.

“She was not one to tout her own accomplishments,” Susannah Nesmith said of her mother. “She was always careful to point out that Betty Ford had a speechwriter who wrote for President Ford. And John Adams’ wife wrote some, if not all, of his speeches.”

Nesmith, who lived in Alexandria, Virginia, died March 5 following a brief illness at age 84. She prided herself on crafting speeches that enabled Carter to sound like himself, free of political double-speak and cliches, her daughter said.

“She was one of his favorite speechwriters by far. She just had his voice,” said Terry Adamson, who worked with Nesmith in the newsroom of The Atlanta Constitution before serving in the Justice Department during the Carter administration and later as Carter’s personal attorney.

Carter, 99, entered hospice care a year ago at his home in Plains, Georgia, and is the longest-living U.S. president.

When he met Nesmith, Carter was a little-known peanut farmer running his first campaign for Georgia governor in 1966. She was a reporter for The Atlanta Constitution covering the race, which Carter lost.

“She was sometimes the only reporter on those campaign stops, because he traveled all over the state,” Susannah Nesmith said in a phone interview. “So she got to know him very well. They had similar ideas, I think, about justice and about a new South that could shed its racist legacy.”

Nesmith started as an intern at the Atlanta newspaper, her daughter said, and was hired full-time after she kept coming to work after her internship had officially ended. She was assigned to cover Atlanta’s federal courts as they ruled on important civil rights cases. And she wrote stories about some of the civil rights movement’s key figures, including Martin Luther King Jr.

On April 5, 1968, the day after King was assassinated in Tennessee, the front page of The Atlanta Constitution included the obituary Nesmith wrote, memorializing King as the grandson of a slave whose nonviolent activism made him “one of the best known men in the world.”

“She told me she wrote that while crying,” Nesmith’s daughter said.

Nesmith’s rapport with Carter paid off soon after he won the presidency in 1976 and his chief of staff, Jody Powell, hired her as a speechwriter. It took some adjustment by Carter, who was used to preparing his own public remarks as Georgia governor and even wrote his own inaugural address.

Nesmith would later say their shared Georgia roots gave her an edge in writing for Carter, noting that she was the only fellow Southerner on his speechwriting staff.

“He was not a part of the Washington thinking, to some extent,” Nesmith said in a 1992 interview on C-SPAN. “He was very much inclined not to schmooze so much as to explain and then expect people to understand and then act on it.”

Among the newspaper clippings Nesmith kept was a full-page story from The Washington Star on a speech Carter delivered in October 1978 on King’s legacy of nonviolence, which the slain civil rights leader’s family attended. On the page was a handwritten note from the president: “Achsah — It was an excellent speech.”

Nesmith remained on Carter’s staff until the end of his presidency. The day after he lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, Nesmith dealt with the defeat by planting hundreds of daffodil bulbs in the yard of her Virginia home.

“She felt like it was the only thing she could do that would yield anything good,” her daughter said.

After they left the White House, Nesmith helped the former president and his wife, Rosalynn Carter, with their co-authored 1987 book, “Everything To Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life,” Susannah Nesmith said, and later worked with Carter on his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 2002.

In the mid-1980s, Nesmith went to work for U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat known for his work to rein in the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

“Achsah had a quiet and caring but very strong voice, with a depth of knowledge across many areas,” Nunn said in a statement. “She was a talented and wonderful partner for those of us in the arena of public service. I was very proud to be the beneficiary of Achsah’s wonderful character, her wisdom and her sound judgment. She was able to read a room on every occasion.”

Nesmith’s husband of 57 years, Jeff Nesmith, died last year. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for an investigative series on medical malpractice in the military published by the Dayton Daily News in Ohio. In addition to her daughter, Nesmith is survived by her son, Hollis Jefferson Nesmith III, two grandchildren and a niece.

This story has been updated to correct a quote from Nesmith’s daughter. She said Nesmith felt the South “could shed” its racist legacy, not that it “could not.”

Young Leaders Network: The Art of Presidential Speechwriting

The art of speechwriting: a conversation with presidential speechwriters  .

Campaign speeches and presidential communications have distinct goals. While stump speeches are in front of a more friendly crowd, allowing the candidate to promote his or her policy goals, presidential speeches have a wider, more diverse audience that may limit what goals the president can promote. Former presidential speechwriters on how they tackled this issue and what strategies they used to write memorable and historic speeches for former Presidents.

The John Brademas Center at New York University, as part of the 2018 Young Leaders Network series, hosted a dialogue with John P. McConnell , former speechwriter to President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and June Shih , former speechwriter to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The pair discussed their own experiences of writing historic presidential and campaign speeches. The event was moderated by Vaughn Hillyard , Political Reporter at NBC News.

This free event was open to all Congressional interns and members of the public.

Event Photos

John P. McConnell

Vaughn Hillyard

John P. McConnell served more than ten years on the White House staff, in two administrations.  As a senior speechwriter for President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, he was part of the three-person team responsible for all of the 43 rd  President’s major addresses.

In the Bush-Cheney White House, John held the unique position of both Deputy Assistant to the President and Assistant to the Vice President.  In his career he has also worked as a principal speechwriter for Vice President Dan Quayle, 1996 presidential nominee Bob Dole, and 2012 vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan.  

John is a former resident fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, in the John F. Kennedy School of Government.  He is a trustee of Wayland Academy and serves as chairman of the selection committee for the annual Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency.  

A lifelong political enthusiast, John was a page in the United States Senate under the sponsorship of Senator William Proxmire.  He grew up in Bayfield, Wisconsin and is a graduate of Wayland Academy, Carleton College, and Yale Law School. 

June Shih is a writer and lawyer with nearly 25 years’ experience in speechwriting, communication and public policy. She began her career as a cops and courts reporter for a Florida newspaper, but left to assist then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton with her syndicated newspaper column and speeches. In 1997, she became a Special Assistant to the President and Presidential Speechwriter, writing speeches for President Bill Clinton on a range of issues from civil rights and race relations to education and health care policy. After serving as chief speechwriter for Mrs. Clinton’s first U.S. Senate campaign in 2000, June attended law school and then practiced law in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. From 2011-2014, she served in the Obama Administration as a Senior Advisor in the U.S. State Department’s Office of Global Women’s Issues, helping to shape initiatives on global women’s leadership and girls’ education. She also served as an expert on East Asian affairs and managed bilateral dialogues with Chinese, Korean, and Japanese counterparts. June is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and holds a B.A., magna cum laude, from Harvard University, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

This August, June will join the leadership team of NYU-Shanghai as Director of University Communications.

Vaughn Hillyard is an award winning journalist and Political Reporter for NBC News, notably covering the special election Senate race in Alabama between Roy Moore and Doug Jones and the entirety of the 2016 presidential campaign as an embedded reporter, from the Iowa coffee shop stops to election night at Trump HQ in New York.  Vaughn first started at NBC News in July 2013 as a Tim Russert fellow.

Vaughn began his journalism career in Arizona at AZ Fact Check, Arizona Republic, Channel 12 News and AZCentral.

Vaughn attended Arizona State University, where he received a Bachelor’s and master’s degree in journalism.

Former Obama speechwriter, ‘Pod Save America’ host Jon Lovett to appear on 47th season of ‘Survivor’

A former speechwriter in the Obama White House is fleeing into the wilderness — to compete in the upcoming season of “Survivor.”

Jon Lovett, who is one of the hosts of the liberal “Pod Save America” podcast, is set to be on the 47th season of the CBS competition series.

His appearance on the long running show was confirmed Thursday with the release of the “Survivor” trailer.

“I have no outdoor skills,” Lovett, also co-founder of Crooked Media, admitted in front of the camera. “What am I doing here? I went camping as a cub scout. I threw up and went home.”

Former Obama White House colleague Jon Favreau acknowledged his buddy will appear on the hit show in a tongue-in-cheek tweet.

“What did I tell you?” he posted. “Eat Pray Lovett.”

Favreau and fellow podcast host Dan Pfeiffer also joked about how Lovett, 41, might fare during his trip into the jungle.

“I would just say many people have argued that in a critical election year where democracy hangs in the balance the best place for Lovett would be on an island with no access to the internet,” Pfeiffer said in a clip shared of an upcoming new podcast episode.

“I’m sure he is busy doing some deep canvassing,” Favreau replied. “No doubt every other contestant is from a swing state.”

“Just out there trying to get every vote,” he continued. “Sure, for the tribal council, but also for Joe Biden.”

Taping for the “Survivor” is happening between early May and early July, the show said on its website.

The show is scheduled to be televised in the fall, though an exact date hasn’t been determined. 

Jon Lovett, 'Pod Save America' host and former Obama speechwriter, joins 'Survivor'

Jon Lovett is going from the cutthroat world of American politics to the cutthroat world of " Survivor ."

Lovett, co-host of the political podcast " Pod Save America " and former speechwriter for former President Barack Obama , will appear as a contestant on " Survivor " next season. A teaser for the competition show's 47th season featured Lovett, 41, noting that he is out of his element.

"I have no outdoor skills," he says in the footage. "What am I doing here? I went camping as a cub scout. I threw up and went home."

USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Lovett for comment. A representative for CBS confirmed Lovett's casting to USA TODAY.

Lovett discusses U.S. politics on "Pod Save America," which launched the month of former President Donald Trump's inauguration in 2017, alongside fellow Obama alums Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor and Dan Pfeiffer. He also hosts the "Lovett or Leave It" podcast and co-founded the media company Crooked Media.

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

Favreau confirmed Lovett is a contestant in "Survivor" Season 47 by sharing the teaser clip on X and writing , "What did I tell you? Eat Pray Lovett."

Who won 'Survivor'? What to know about the winner of Season 46

Writer Evan Ross Katz reacted to the news on X by writing that "this is Mike White-level casting," referring to the fact that the "White Lotus" creator was a contestant on "Survivor: David vs. Goliath." Chris Geidner, author of the Law Dork newsletter, also joked on X , "Some people *say* they want to take some time away before the presidential campaign season heats up. Other people *do* something about it."

Ronan Farrow proposed to Jon Lovett in 'Catch and Kill' draft: 'Marriage?'

According to Entertainment Weekly , Season 47 of "Survivor" started filming about a week ago in Fiji. It's expected to debut in the fall.

"We are very excited to bring our fans another season of 'Survivor' featuring 18 new faces who are ready to take on the 'Survivor' adventure," host Jeff Probst told EW. "One of the most enjoyable parts of making 'Survivor' is that you spend nearly a year looking for new players and then day 1 arrives and you turn the entire show over to them!"

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‘only murders in the building’ season 4: everything we know so far.

• Former Obama Speechwriter & Pod Save America Co-Host Jon Lovett To Wash Ashore ‘Survivor’

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A background in D.C. politics just might be better preparation for Survivor than any wilderness training, at least former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett had better hope so.

Lovett, the speechwriter-turned- Pod Save America regular turned up in a rather unlikely place last night: The preview trailer for the Season 47 installment of CBS’ Survivor .

Lovett was one of the new contestants revealed in the preview. “I have no outdoor skills,” he said, looking into the camera. “What am I doing here? I went camping as a cub scout. I threw up and went home.”

Watch the clip above.

Survivor Season 47 premieres on CBS this fall.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Survivor (@survivorcbs)

What did I tell you? Eat Pray Lovett https://t.co/Xc4gGf3feP — Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) May 23, 2024

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How speechwriters delve into a president’s mind: Lots of listening, studying and becoming a mirror

WASHINGTON (AP) — Speechwriting, in one sense, is essentially being someone else’s mirror.

“You can try to find the right words,” said Dan Cluchey, a former speechwriter for President Joe Biden. “But ultimately, your job is to ensure that when the speech is done, that it has a reflection of the speaker.”

That concept is infinitely magnified in the role of the presidential speechwriter. Over the course of U.S. history, those aides have absorbed the personalities, the quirks, the speech cadences of the most powerful leader on the globe, capturing his thoughts for all manner of public remarks, from the mundane to the historic and most consequential.

There are few times in a presidency that the art — and the rigorous, often painful process — of speechwriting is more on display than during a State of the Union, when the vast array of a president’s policy aspirations and political messages come together in one, hour-plus carefully choreographed address at the Capitol. Biden will deliver the annual address on Thursday.

It’s a process that former White House speechwriters say take months, with untold lobbying and input from various federal agencies and others outside the president’s inner circle who are all working to ensure their favored proposals merit a mention. Speechwriters have the unenviable task of taking dozens of ideas and stitching them into a cohesive narrative of a president’s vision for the year.

It’s less elegant prose, more laundry list of policy ideas.

Amid all those formalities and constraints of a State of the Union address, there is also how a president executes the speech.

Biden’s biggest political liability remains his age (81) and voters’ questions about whether he is still up to the job (his doctor this past week declared him fit to serve ). His every word is watched by Republican operatives eager to capture any misspeak to plant doubt about Biden’s fitness among the public.

“This year, of course, is an election year. It also comes as there’s much more chatter about his age,” said Michael Waldman, who served as a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. “People are really going to be scrutinizing him for how he delivers the speech, as much as what he says.”

Biden will remain at Camp David through Tuesday and is expected to spend much of that time preparing for the State of the Union. Bruce Reed, the White House deputy chief of staff, accompanied Biden to the presidential retreat outside Washington on Friday evening.

The White House has said lowering costs, shoring up democracy and protecting women’s reproductive care will be among the topics that Biden will address on Thursday night.

Biden likely won’t top the list of the most talented presidential orators. He has thrived the most during small chance encounters with Americans, where interactions can be more off the cuff and intimate.

The plain-spoken Biden is known to hate Washington jargon and the alphabet soup of government acronyms, and he has challenged aides, when writing his remarks, to cut through the clutter and to get to the point with speed. Cluchey, who worked for Biden from 2018 to 2022, said the president was very engaged in the speech drafting process, all the way down to individual lines and words.

Biden can also come across as stiff at times when standing and reading from a teleprompter, but immediately loosens up and appears more comfortable when he switches to a hand-held microphone mid-remark. Biden has also learned to navigate a childhood stutter that he says helped him develop empathy for others facing similar challenges.

To become engrossed in another person’s voice, past presidential speechwriters list things that are critical. One is just doing a lot of listening to the principal, to get a sense of his rhythms and how he uses language.

Lots of direct conversation with the president is key, to try and get inside the commander in chief’s thinking and how that leader frames arguments and make their case.

“This is not an act of impression, where you’re simply just trying to get the accent down,” said Jeff Shesol, another former Clinton speechwriter. “What you really are learning to do and need to learn to do -– this is true of speechwriters in any role, but particularly for a president –- is to understand not just how he sounds, but how he thinks.”

Shesol added: “You’re absorbing not just the rhythms and cadences of speech, but you’re absorbing a worldview.”

Then there is always the matter of the speech-giver going rogue.

Biden is often candid, and White House aides are sometimes left to clean up and clarify what he said in unvarnished moments. But other times when he deviates from the script, it ends up being an improvement on what his aides had scripted.

Take last year’s State of the Union. Biden had launched into an attack prepared in advance against some Republicans who were insisting on requiring renewal votes on popular programs such as Medicare and Social Security, which would effectively threaten their fate every five years.

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That prompted heckling from Republicans and shouts of “Liar!” from the audience.

Biden immediately pivoted, egging on the Republicans to contact his office for a copy of the proposal and joking that he was enjoying their “conversion.”

“Folks, as we all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the — off the books now, right? They’re not to be touched?” Biden continued. The crowd of lawmakers applauded. “All right. All right. We got unanimity!”

Speechwriters do try and prepare for such moments, particularly if a president is known to speak extemporaneously.

Shesol recalled that Clinton’s speechwriters would draft remarks that were relatively spare, to account for him veering off on his own. The writers would write a clear structure into the speech that would allow Clinton to easily return to his prepared remarks once his riff was over.

“Clinton used to liken it to playing a jazz solo and then he’s going back to the score,” Waldman added.

Cluchey, when asked for his reaction when his former boss would go off-script, described it as a “ballet with several movements of, you know, panic, to ‘Wait a minute, this is actually very good,’ and then ‘Oh man, he really nailed it.’”

Biden is “at his best when he’s most authentically, most loosely, just speaking the plain truth,” Cluchey said. “The speechwriting process even at its best has strictures around it.”

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Optimistic About the War in Ukraine, Putin Unleashes a Purge at Home

Despite years of criticism, President Vladimir V. Putin has only now changed his defense minister and allowed high-level corruption arrests.

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By Paul Sonne and Anatoly Kurmanaev

Reporting from Berlin

Periodic outcries over incompetence and corruption at the top of the Russian military have dogged President Vladimir V. Putin’s war effort since the start of his invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.

When his forces faltered around the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, the need for change was laid bare. When they were routed months later outside the city of Kharkiv, expectations of a shake-up grew. And after the mercenary leader Yevgeny V. Prigozhin marched his men toward Moscow, complaining of deep rot and ineptitude at the top of the Russian force, Mr. Putin seemed obliged to respond.

But, at each turn, the Russian president avoided any major public moves that could have been seen as validating the criticism, keeping his defense minister and top general in place through the firestorm while shuffling battlefield commanders and making other moves lower on the chain.

Now, with the battlefield crises seemingly behind him and Mr. Prigozhin dead, the Russian leader has decided to act, changing defense ministers for the first time in more than a decade and allowing a number of corruption arrests among top ministry officials.

The moves have ushered in the biggest overhaul at the Russian Defense Ministry since the invasion began and have confirmed Mr. Putin’s preference for avoiding big, responsive changes in the heat of a crisis and instead acting at a less conspicuous time of his own choosing.

“We have to understand that Putin is a person who is stubborn and not very flexible,” said Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter who now lives outside Russia. “He believes that reacting too quickly and rapidly to a changing situation is a sign of weakness.”

The timing of Mr. Putin’s recent moves is most likely a sign that he has greater confidence about his battlefield prospects in Ukraine and his hold on political power as he begins his fifth term as president, experts say.

Russian forces are making gains in Ukraine , taking territory around Kharkiv and in the Donbas region, as Ukraine struggles with aid delays from the United States and strained reserves of ammunition and personnel . Top officials in the Kremlin are feeling optimistic.

“They likely judge the situation within the force as stable enough to punish some in the military leadership for its prior failures,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Demand for change at the top of the Russian military has been pent up since the invasion’s earliest days, when stories circulated about Russian soldiers going to war without proper food and equipment and losing their lives while answering to feckless military leaders.

The anger crested with an aborted uprising led last year by Mr. Prigozhin , who died in a subsequent plane crash that U.S. officials have said was most likely a state-sanctioned assassination .

Mr. Prigozhin , a caterer turned warlord who grew rich on state contracts, was an unlikely messenger. But he put high-level corruption on the minds of Russia’s rank and file and the public more broadly, releasing profanity-laced tirades against Sergei K. Shoigu, then the defense minister, and Russia’s top uniformed officer, Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov. At one point, Mr. Prigozhin filmed himself in front of a pile of dead Russian fighters and denounced top officials for “rolling in fat” in their wood-paneled offices.

His subsequent failed mutiny showed that the problems festering in the Defense Ministry under Mr. Shoigu for over a decade had boiled over and that the populace craved renewal, said a person close to the ministry who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive topics.

The Russian leader now appears to be moving against the very officials that Mr. Prigozhin had been attacking.

The first harbinger of change arose last month with the arrest of Timur Ivanov , a protégé of Mr. Shoigu and the deputy defense minister in charge of military construction projects whom the Russian authorities have accused of taking a large bribe. He has denied wrongdoing. Mr. Ivanov previously attracted the attention of Aleksei A. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation for his and his wife’s conspicuously lavish lifestyle, including yacht rentals on the French Riviera.

Then, this month, days after Mr. Putin began his new term as president, the Kremlin announced that he had replaced Mr. Shoigu and chosen Andrei R. Belousov, one of his longtime economic advisers, as the new defense minister. Mr. Shoigu was moved to run the Russian Security Council, where he would still have access to the president but would have little direct control over money.

Mr. Belousov has no military experience . But he boasts a relatively clean image and a long government career untainted by large corruption scandals.

“If you want to win a war, corruption at a larger scale impacting the results on the battlefield is, in theory at least, not something you want,” said Maria Engqvist, the deputy head of Russia and Eurasia studies at the Swedish Defense Research Agency.

Still, Ms. Engqvist called high-level corruption in Russia “a feature, not a bug.”

“Corruption is a tool to gain influence, but it can also be used against you at any given time, depending on whether you say the wrong thing at the wrong time or make the wrong decision at the wrong time,” she said. “So you can be ousted with a reasonable explanation that the public can accept.”

Ms. Engqvist said the changes also raised questions about how long General Gerasimov would stay in his position as chief of the general staff and top battlefield commander in Ukraine.

The arrests at the Defense Ministry have gathered pace this month, with four more top generals and defense officials detained on corruption charges. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, denied on Thursday that the arrests represented a “campaign.”

The corruption charges against top Defense Ministry officials have come alongside promises of greater financial and social benefits for the rank-and-file soldiers, an apparent attempt to improve morale and mollify populist critics.

Mr. Belousov used his first remarks after his nomination as defense minister to describe his plans to cut bureaucracy and improve access to health care and other social services for veterans of the war. And on Thursday, the speaker of Russia’s lower house of Parliament, Vyacheslav V. Volodin, and Finance Minister Anton G. Siluanov expressed support for exempting fighters in Ukraine from proposed income-tax increases.

The high-level arrests are unlikely to root out vast corruption in the Russian military establishment, but they could make top officials think twice before stealing at a particularly large scale, at least for a period, said Dara Massicot, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“It will introduce a chill into the system and make everyone pause as they try to figure out the new code of accepted behavior,” Ms. Massicot said.

Beyond sending an anticorruption message, at least one of the arrests seemed to be aimed at settling a political score.

Maj. Gen. Ivan Popov, a top Russian commander who led forces holding off Ukraine’s counteroffensive, chided the Russian military leadership in a widely seen recording last year after he was removed from his post. He was apprehended on Tuesday on fraud charges, according to the state news agency TASS. He denied wrongdoing, his lawyer said.

“The bottom line is that the war exposed a lot of different problems — corruption, incompetence and openness to public expressions of insubordination — that the leadership feels a need to address,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. “Now is a good time to do this, precisely because there isn’t a short-term acute risk on the battlefield.”

Paul Sonne is an international correspondent, focusing on Russia and the varied impacts of President Vladimir V. Putin’s domestic and foreign policies, with a focus on the war against Ukraine. More about Paul Sonne

Anatoly Kurmanaev covers Russia and its transformation following the invasion of Ukraine. More about Anatoly Kurmanaev

Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine

News and Analysis

U.S. and allied intelligence officials are tracking an increase in low-level sabotage operations in Europe  that they say are part of a Russian campaign to undermine support for Ukraine’s war effort.

Some American-made, precision-guided weapons supplied to Ukraine have proved ineffective on the battlefield , their accuracy badly diminished by Russian jamming efforts.

Ukraine has begun releasing prisoners to serve in its army , part of a wider effort to rebuild a military that has been depleted by more than two years of war and is strained by relentless Russian assaults.

Striking a Chord: A play based on a classic 19th-century novel, “The Witch of Konotop,” is a smash hit among Ukrainians who see cultural and historical echoes  in the story of what they face after two years of war.

Europe’s Defense Industry: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine jolted Europe out of complacency about military spending. But the challenges are about more than just money .

Putin’s Victory Narrative: The Russian leader’s message to his country appears to be taking hold : that Russia is fighting against the whole Western world — and winning.

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