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

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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.”

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Ct man charged with attempted murder, assault after allegedly stabbing partner multiple times, uncategorized, how speechwriters delve into a president’s mind: lots of listening, studying and becoming a mirror.

By SEUNG MIN KIM (Associated Press)

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.”

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Exploring the Craft of Presidential Speechwriting: A Glimpse into Crafting a President’s Voice

A t the heart of Washington’s political stage lies the art of presidential speechwriting, where a speechwriter’s task is to become a reflection of the President.

Dan Cluchey, who has penned speeches for President Joe Biden , explains that the central goal is to capture the President’s essence in the speech. This endeavor becomes even more critical when preparing for significant events like the State of the Union address.

Throughout American history, presidential speechwriters have tuned into the nuances of the President’s personality, communication style, and thought patterns to articulate his message to the nation and the world.

When a President prepares for the State of the Union, the speechwriting process comes under intense focus. This event consolidates a vast array of policy goals and political narratives into a single, elaborate presentation. President Biden is scheduled to deliver the annual address on Thursday , continuing this timeless tradition.

Months of preparation are invested in this process, with extensive input from various federal agencies and presidential advisors. The challenge for speechwriters lies in weaving many policy proposals into a seamless narrative that encapsulates the President’s vision.

Amidst this process, the President’s delivery of the speech is equally crucial. With questions surrounding Biden’s age and capability due to his being 81, his performance during the speech is under the microscope, magnified by election-year pressures and public scrutiny.

As he prepares at Camp David, President Biden, along with his deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed, carefully hones his address, which is expected to cover lowering costs, democracy, and women’s reproductive care among other topics.

Biden’s oratory may not be the most polished, but his strength lies in spontaneous and genuine interactions.

Biden dislikes Washington speak and challenges his speechwriters to communicate ideas clearly and quickly. Cluchey notes that Biden is intimately involved in the speechwriting process, emphasizing clarity and brevity.

Sometimes, when Biden deviates from the prepared text, it results in moments of authenticity that resonate well. For instance, during the previous State of the Union, his off-the-cuff response to hecklers was deemed a highlight.

Veteran speechwriters like Jeff Shesol emphasize the importance of understanding the President’s worldview, not just his speaking style. This means speechwriters spend considerable time listening to and conversing with the President to internalize his thinking.

Preparing for unscripted moments is also part of the craft. Speechwriters anticipate improvisation, especially for Presidents known for spontaneity, like Bill Clinton.

Cluchey describes the experience of watching a President go off-script as a rollercoaster of emotions, but acknowledges that these moments often reveal the President’s most sincere self.

FAQ Section

What does a presidential speechwriter do.

A presidential speechwriter is responsible for composing speeches that reflect the President’s voice and policy positions. They work closely with the President to capture their essence and deliver their message effectively to the public.

How does a President prepare for the State of the Union?

The President usually spends months preparing for the State of the Union. This involves collaboration with speechwriters, advisors, and various agencies to create a cohesive address that outlines the President’s vision and policy initiatives for the year.

Is President Biden involved in the speechwriting process?

Yes, President Biden is known to be very engaged in the speechwriting process, focusing on individual lines and words to ensure clarity and precision in his speeches.

How do speechwriters prepare for moments when a President goes off-script?

Speechwriters anticipate and prepare for improvisational moments by structuring speeches to allow the President to return to the prepared text seamlessly after an extemporaneous section. They understand that such moments can showcase the President’s authenticity and connect with the audience.

Presidential speechwriting is an intricate balance of echoing the President’s voice and packaging policy into compelling narratives. Speechwriters not only construct speeches but also serve as linguistic architects, shaping the President’s message for pivotal moments such as the State of the Union. Amidst the meticulous crafting of words and the anticipation of off-script improvisations, these writers play a crucial role in shaping political discourse. Whether in well-scripted addresses or spontaneous exchanges, the enduring power of presidential speechwriting lies in its ability to capture the authentic spirit of the nation’s leader.

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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• Text type Closed Captioning Record People Graphical Timeline
• Filter by Speaker All Speakers Michael J. Gerson Chris Matthews Landon Parvin Ruth Robbins Theodore "Ted" C. Sorensen Michael Waldman Kenneth T. Walsh
• Search this text

*This text was compiled from uncorrected Closed Captioning.

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Hosting Organization

• Smithsonian Associates Smithsonian Associates
• The Presidency
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• Nov 13, 2010 | 3:29pm EST | C-SPAN 3
• Nov 14, 2010 | 2:30am EST | C-SPAN 3
• Nov 14, 2010 | 8:30am EST | C-SPAN 3
• Nov 14, 2010 | 7:30pm EST | C-SPAN 3
• Nov 14, 2010 | 10:30pm EST | C-SPAN 3
• Nov 21, 2010 | 2:30am EST | C-SPAN 3
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• Dec 30, 2010 | 12:00am EST | C-SPAN 3
• 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

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.

Photos You Should See - April 2024

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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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.

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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.

Our Last Great Adventure

My husband, Richard Goodwin, drafted landmark speeches for JFK and LBJ. Late in life, we dived into his archives, searching for vivid traces of our hopeful youth.

O ne summer morning, seven months after he had turned 80, my husband, Dick Goodwin, came down the stairs, clumps of shaving cream on his earlobes, singing, “The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye,” from the musical Oklahoma!

“Why so chipper?” I asked.

“I had a flash,” he said, looking over the headlines of the three newspapers I had laid out for him on the breakfast table in our home in Concord, Massachusetts. Putting them aside, he started writing down numbers. “Three times eight is 24. Three times 80 is 240.”

“Is that your revelation?” I asked.

Explore the May 2024 Issue

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“Look, my 80-year life span occupies more than a third of our republic’s history. That means that our democracy is merely three ‘Goodwins’ long.”

I tried to suppress a smile.

“Doris, one Goodwin ago, when I was born, we were in the midst of the Great Depression. Pearl Harbor happened on December 7, 1941, my 10th birthday. It ruined my whole party! If we go back two Goodwins, we find our Concord Village roiled in furor over the Fugitive Slave Act. A third Goodwin will bring us back to the point that, if we went out our front door, took a left, and walked down the road, we might just see those embattled farmers and witness the commencement of the Revolutionary War.”

He glanced at the newspapers and went to his study, on the far side of the house. An hour later, he was back to read aloud a paragraph he had just written:

Three spans of one long life traverse the whole of our short national history. One certain thing that a look backward at the vicissitudes of our country’s story suggests is that massive and sweeping change will come. And it can come swiftly. Whether or not it is healing and inclusive change depends on us. As ever, such change will generally percolate from the ground up, as in the days of the American Revolution, the anti-slavery movement, the progressive movement, the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay-rights movement, the environmental movement. From the long view of my life, I see how history turns and veers. The end of our country has loomed many times before. America is not as fragile as it seems.

“It’s now or never,” he said, announcing that the time had finally come to unpack and examine the 300 boxes of material he had dragged along with us during 40 years of marriage. Dick had saved everything relating to his time in public service in the 1960s as a speechwriter for and adviser to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy, and Eugene McCarthy: reams of White House memos, diaries, initial drafts of speeches annotated by presidents and presidential hopefuls, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, photographs, menus—a mass that would prove to contain a unique and comprehensive archive of a pivotal era. Dick had been involved in a remarkable number of defining moments .

He was the junior speechwriter, working under Ted Sorensen, during JFK’s 1960 presidential campaign. He was in the room to help the candidate prepare for his first televised debate with Richard Nixon. In the box labeled DEBATE were pages torn from a yellow pad upon which Kennedy had scrawled requests for information or clarification. Dick was in the White House when the president’s coffin returned from Dallas, and he was responsible for making arrangements to install an eternal flame at the grave site. He was at LBJ’s side during the summit of his historic achievements in civil rights and the Great Society. He was in New Hampshire during McCarthy’s crusade against the Vietnam War, and in the hospital room when Robert Kennedy died in Los Angeles. He was a central figure in the debate over the peace plank during the mayhem of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

For years, however, Dick had resisted opening these boxes. They were from a time he recalled with both elation and a crushing sense of loss. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy; the war in Vietnam; the riots in the cities; the violence on college campuses—all the turmoil had drawn a dark curtain on the entire decade. He had wanted only to look ahead.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: The divided legacy of Lyndon B. Johnson

Now he had resolved to go back in time. “I’m an old guy,” he said. “If I have any wisdom to dispense, I’d better start dispensing.” A friend, Deb Colby, became his research assistant, and together they began the slow process of arranging the boxes in chronological order. Once that preliminary task had been completed, Dick was hopeful that there might be something of a book in the material he had uncovered. He wanted me to go back with him to the very first box and work our way through all of them. I was not only his wife but a historian.

“I need your help,” he said. “Jog my memory, ask me questions, see what we can learn.” I joined him in his study, and we started on the first group of boxes. We made a deal to try to spend time on this project every weekend to see what might come of it.

Our last great adventure together was about to begin.

Some 30 boxes contained materials relating to JFK’s 1960 presidential campaign. From September 4 to November 8, 1960, Dick was a member of the small entourage that flew across the country with Kennedy for more than two months of nonstop campaigning. The first-ever private plane used by a presidential candidate during a campaign, the Caroline (named for Kennedy’s daughter) had been modified into a luxurious executive office. It had plush couches and four chairs that could be converted into small beds—two of them for Dick and Ted Sorensen. Kennedy had his own suite of bedrooms farther aft.

“You were all so young,” I marveled to Dick after looking up the ages of the team. The candidate was 43; Bobby Kennedy, 34; Ted Sorensen, 32. “And you—”

“Twenty-eight,” he interrupted, adding, “Youngest of the lot.”

After midnight on October 14, 1960, the Caroline landed at Willow Run Airport, near Ypsilanti, Michigan. Three weeks remained until Election Day. Everyone was bone-tired as the caravan set out for Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan.

As they approached the Michigan campus, there was little to suggest that one of the most enduring moments of the campaign was about to occur. It was nearly 2 a.m. by the time the caravan reached the Michigan Union, where Kennedy was scheduled to catch a few hours of sleep before starting on a whistle-stop tour of the state. No one in the campaign had expected to find as many as 10,000 students waiting in the streets to greet the candidate. Neither Ted nor Dick had prepared remarks for the occasion.

As Kennedy ascended the steps of the union, the crowd chanted his name. He turned around, smiled, and introduced himself as “a graduate of the Michigan of the East—Harvard University.” He then began speaking extemporaneously, falling back on his familiar argument that the 1960 campaign presaged the outcome of the race between communism and the free world. But suddenly, he caught a second wind and swerved from his stock stump speech. He asked the crowd of young people what they might be willing to contribute for the sake of the country.

How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete.

What stirred Kennedy to these spontaneous questions is not clear. Weariness, intuition, or—most likely, I suspect—because they had lingered in his mind after the third debate with Nixon, which had taken place only hours before and had been focused on whether America’s prestige in the world was rising or falling relative to that of Communist nations. The concept of students volunteering for public service in Africa and Asia might well bolster goodwill for America in countries wavering (as Kennedy had put it) “on the razor edge of decision” between the free world and the Communist system.

Drawing his impromptu speech to a close, Kennedy confessed that he had come to the union on this cold and early morning simply to go to bed. The words elicited raucous laughter and applause that continued to mount when he threw down a final challenge: “May I just say in conclusion that this university is not maintained by its alumni, by the state, merely to help its graduates have an economic advantage in the life struggle. There is certainly a greater purpose, and I’m sure you recognize it.”

Kennedy’s remarks lasted only three minutes—“the longest short speech,” he called it. Yet something extraordinary transpired: The students took up the challenge he posed. Led by two graduate students, Alan and Judith Guskin, they organized, they held meetings , they sent letters and telegrams to the campaign asking Kennedy to develop plans for a corps of American volunteers overseas. Within a week, 1,000 students had signed petitions pledging to give two years of their lives to help people in developing countries.

When Dick and Ted learned of the student petitions, they redrafted an upcoming Kennedy speech on foreign policy to be delivered at the Cow Palace, in San Francisco, working in a formal proposal for “a peace corps of talented young men and women.” We pulled the speech from one of the boxes. Dick’s hand can be readily detected in the closing lines, which used a favorite quote of his from the Greek philosopher Archimedes. “Give me a fulcrum,” Archimedes said, “and I will move the world.” Dick would later invoke the same line in a historic speech by Robert Kennedy in South Africa.

Two days after JFK’s speech at the Cow Palace, the candidate was flying to Toledo, Ohio . He sent word to the Guskins that he would like to meet them and see their petitions, crammed with names. A photo captures the moment when an eager Judy Guskin clutches the petitions before she presents them to the weary-eyed Kennedy, who is reaching out in anticipation.

Later, Dick and Ted had coffee with Judy and Alan. They talked of the Peace Corps and the election, by then only five days away. Nixon had immediately denounced the idea of a Peace Corps—“ a Kiddie Corps ,” he and others called it—warning that it would become a haven for draft dodgers. But for Judy and Alan, as for nearly a quarter of a million others, the Peace Corps would prove a transformative experience. The Guskins were in the first group to travel to Thailand, where Judy taught English and organized a teacher-training program. Alan set up a program at the same school in psychology and educational research. Returning home, they served as founders of the VISTA program, LBJ’s domestic version of the Peace Corps.

For Dick, the Peace Corps, more than any other venture of the Kennedy years, represented the essence of the administration’s New Frontier vision. After JFK’s inauguration, as a member of the White House staff, Dick joined the task force that formally launched the Peace Corps. He was barely older than the typical volunteer.

SUMMER 1963

Dick and I often talked, half-jokingly, half-seriously, about the various occasions when we were in the same place at the same time before we finally met—in the summer of 1972, when he arrived at the Harvard building where I had my office as an assistant professor. I knew who he was. I had heard that he was brilliant, brash, mercurial, arrogant, a fascinating figure. He was more than a decade older than me. His appearance was intriguing: curly, disheveled black hair; thick, unruly eyebrows; a pockmarked face; and several large cigars in the pocket of his casual shirt. We began a conversation that day about LBJ, literature, philosophy, astronomy, sex, gossip, and the Red Sox that would continue for 46 years.

The first occasion when we could have crossed paths but didn’t was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, on August 28, 1963. It was not surprising that we didn’t meet, given that some 250,000 people had gathered for the event.

I was spending the summer before my senior year at Colby College as an intern at the State Department. All government employees had been given the day off and been cautioned to stay home, warned that it wasn’t safe. I was 20 years old—I had no intention of staying home. But I still remember the nervous excitement I felt that morning as I walked with a group of friends toward the Washington Monument. We had been planning to attend the march for weeks.

A state of emergency had been declared as people descended on the capital from all over the country. Marchers arriving by bus and train on Wednesday morning were encouraged to depart the city proper by that night. Hospitals canceled elective surgery to make space in the event of mass casualties. The Washington Senators baseball game was postponed . Liquor stores and bars were closed. We learned that thousands of National Guardsmen had been mobilized to bolster the D.C. police force. Thousands of additional soldiers stood ready across the Potomac, in Virginia.

I asked Dick if these precautions had seemed a bit much. He explained that Kennedy was worried that if things got out of hand, the civil-rights bill he had introduced in June could unravel, and “take his administration with it.” Though government workers were discouraged from attending the march, Dick grabbed Bill Moyers, the deputy Peace Corps director, and headed toward the National Mall.

So there Dick and I were, unknown to each other, both moving along with what seemed to be all of humanity toward the Reflecting Pool and the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where the march would culminate. I carried a poster stapled to a stick: Catholics, Protestants and Jews Unite in the Struggle for Civil Rights . A sense that I was connected to something larger than myself took hold.

It’s easy to cast a cynical eye upon this youthful exultation, to view it in retrospect as sentimental idealism, but the feelings were genuine, and they were profound. At the start of the march, I had wondered what proportion of the vast throng was white (it was later estimated at 25 percent). By the time I returned to my rooming house in Foggy Bottom, I had forgotten all about calculations and proportions. I had set out that morning apprehensive, yet had been lifted up by the most joyful day of public unity and community I had ever experienced.

Facing the Lincoln Memorial, with Martin Luther King’s soaring “I Have a Dream” speech still ahead, we all held hands, our voices rising as we sang “We Shall Overcome”—the hymn that had long instilled purpose and courage in the foot soldiers of the civil-rights movement. That moment made as deep an impression on Dick as it did on me.

SPRING 1964

During our years of archival sifting, Dick and I, like two nosy neighbors on a party line, tracked down transcripts of conversations recorded by Lyndon Johnson’s secret taping system.

“How splendid to be flies on the wall, to eavesdrop across the decades!” That was Dick’s gleeful response after I read him a transcript of a telephone call between the president and Bill Moyers—by then a special assistant to Johnson—on the evening of March 9, 1964. Here Dick and I were, he in his 80s and I in my 70s, finally privy to the very conversation that, previously unbeknownst to Dick, had led him from the nucleus of the Kennedy camp, through a period of confusion and drift in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, to the highest circles of the Johnson administration.

The phone call began with Johnson grousing about the dreary language in the poverty message that he soon planned to deliver to Congress. Passionately invested in the poverty program, he was dissatisfied with the drafts he had seen and was now pressing Moyers to find “whoever’s the best explainer of this that you can get.”

Johnson: Since [Ted] Sorensen left, we’ve got no one that can be phonetic, and get rhythm … Moyers: The only person I know who can—and I’m reluctant to ask him to get involved in this, because right now it’s in our little circle—is Goodwin. Johnson: Why not just ask him if he can’t put some sex in it? I’d ask him if he couldn’t put some rhyme in it and some beautiful Churchillian phrases and take it and turn it out for us tomorrow … If he will, then we’ll use it. But ask him if he can do it in confidence. Call him tonight and say, “I want to bring it to you now. I’ve got it ready to go, but he wants you to work on it if you can do it without getting it into a column.” Moyers: All right, I’ll call him right now. Johnson: Tell him that I’m pretty impressed with him. He’s working on Latin America already; see how he’s getting along. But can he put the music to it?

As we reached the end of the conversation, Dick swore that he could hear Johnson’s voice clearly in his mind’s ear. “Lyndon’s a kind of poet,” Dick said. “What a unique recipe for high oratory: rhyme, sex, music, phonetics, and beautiful Churchillian phrases.”

We both knew him so well: Dick because he worked with him intimately in the White House and on the 1964 campaign, and I because, after a time as a White House fellow, I’d joined a small team in Texas to help him go through his papers, conduct research, and draft his memoir. From the time Dick and I met, we often referred to the president simply as “Lyndon” when speaking with each other. There are a lot of Johnsons, but there was only one Lyndon .

SPRING 1965

A year and a half after the March on Washington, the memory of its transcendent finale returned to become the heart of the most important speech Dick ever drafted. We pulled a copy of the draft, some notes, the final speech, and newspaper clippings from one of the Johnson boxes.

The moment Dick stepped into the West Wing on the morning of March 15, 1965, he sensed an unusual hubbub and tension. Pacing back and forth in a dither outside Dick’s second-floor office was the White House special assistant Jack Valenti. Normally full of glossy good cheer, Valenti pounced on Dick before he could even open his office door.

The night before, Johnson had decided to give a televised address to a joint session of Congress calling for a voting-rights bill. He believed that the conscience of America had been fired by the events at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, a week earlier, when peaceful marchers had been attacked by Alabama state troopers wielding clubs, nightsticks, and whips.

“He needs the speech from you right away,” Valenti said.

“From me! Why didn’t you tell me yesterday? I’ve lost the entire night,” Dick responded.

“It was a mistake, my mistake,” Valenti acknowledged. He explained that the first words out of the president’s mouth that morning had been “How is Goodwin doing on the speech?” and Valenti had told him he’d assigned it to another aide, Horace Busby. Johnson had erupted, “The hell you did! Get Dick to do it, and now !”

The speech had to be finished before 6 p.m., Valenti told Dick, in order to be loaded onto the teleprompter. Dick looked at his watch. Nine hours away. Valenti asked Dick if there was anything—anything at all—he could get for him.

“Serenity,” Dick replied, “a globe of serenity. I can’t be disturbed. If you want to know how it’s coming, ask my secretary.”

“I didn’t want to think about time passing,” Dick recalled to me. “I lit a cigar, looked at my watch, took the watch off my wrist, and put it on the desk beside my typewriter. Another puff of my cigar, and I took the watch and put it away in my desk drawer.”

“The pressure would have short-circuited me,” I said. “I never had the makings of a good speechwriter or journalist. History is more patient.”

“Well,” Dick said, laughing, “miss the speech deadline and those pages are only scraps of paper.”

Dick examined the folder of notes Valenti had given him. Johnson wanted no uncertainty about where he stood. To deny fellow Americans the right to vote was simply and unequivocally wrong. He wanted the speech to be affirmative and hopeful. He would be sending a bill to Congress to protect the right to vote for all Americans, and he wanted this speech to speed public sentiment along.

In the year since Dick had started working at the White House, he had listened to Johnson talk for hundreds of hours—on planes and in cars, during meals in the mansion and at his ranch, in the swimming pool and over late-night drinks. He understood Johnson’s deeply held convictions about civil rights, and he had the cadences of his speech in his ear. The speechwriter’s job, Dick knew, was to clarify, heighten, and polish a speaker’s convictions in the speaker’s own language and natural rhythms. Without that authenticity, the emotional current of the speech would never hit home.

I knew that Dick often searched for a short, arresting sentence to begin every speech or article he wrote. On this day, he surely found it:

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy … At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.

No sooner would Dick pull a page out of his typewriter and give it to his secretary than Valenti would somehow materialize, a nerve-worn courier, eager to express pages from Dick’s secretary into the president’s anxious hands. Johnson’s edits and penciled notations were incorporated into the text while he awaited the next installment, lashing out at everyone within range—everyone except Dick.

The speech was no lawyer’s brief debating the merits of the bill to be sent to Congress. It was a credo, a declaration of what we are as a nation and who we are as a people—a redefining moment in our history brought forth by the civil-rights movement.

The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro. His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this nation … He has called upon us to make good the promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not for his persistent bravery, and his faith in American democracy?

As the light shifted across his office, Dick became aware that the day suddenly seemed to be rushing by. He opened the desk drawer, peered at the face of his watch, took a deep breath, and slammed the drawer shut. He walked outside to get air and refresh his mind.

In the distance, Dick heard demonstrators demanding that Johnson send federal troops to Selma. Dick hurried back to his office. Something seemed forlorn about the receding voices—such a great contrast to the spirited resolve of the March on Washington. Loud and clear, the words We shall overcome sounded in his head.

It was after the 6-o’clock deadline when the phone in Dick’s office rang for the first time that day. The voice at the other end was so relaxed and soothing that Dick hardly recognized it as the president’s.

“Far and away,” Dick told me, “the gentlest tones I ever heard from Lyndon.”

“You remember, Dick,” Johnson said, “that one of my first jobs after college was teaching young Mexican Americans in Cotulla. I told you about that down at the ranch. I thought you might want to put in a reference to that.” Then he ended the call: “Well, I won’t keep you, Dick. It’s getting late.”

“When I finished the draft,” Dick recalled, “I felt perfectly blank. It was done. It was beyond revision. It was dark outside, and I checked my wrist to see what time it was, remembered I had hidden my watch away from my sight, retrieved it from the drawer, and put it back on.”

There was nothing left to do but shave, grab a sandwich, and stroll over to the mansion. There, greeted by an exorbitantly grateful Valenti, Dick hardly had the energy to talk. Before he knew it, he was sitting with the president in his limousine on the way to the Capitol.

A hush filled the chamber as the president began to speak. Watching from the well of the House, an exhausted Dick marveled at Johnson’s emotional gravity. The president’s somber, urgent, relentlessly driving delivery demonstrated a conviction and exposed a vulnerability that surpassed anything Dick had seen in him before.

There is no constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of states’ rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights … This time, on this issue, there must be no delay, or no hesitation or no compromise with our purpose … But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches in every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And — we — shall — overcome.

The words came staccato, each hammered and sharply distinct from the others. In Selma, Alabama, Martin Luther King had gathered with friends and colleagues to watch the president’s speech. At this climactic moment when Johnson took up the banner of the civil-rights movement, John Lewis witnessed tears rolling down King’s cheeks.

The time had come for the president to draw on his own experience, to tell the formative story he had mentioned to Dick on the phone.

My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican American school. Few of them could speak English, and I couldn’t speak much Spanish. My students were poor, and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry. And they knew, even in their youth, the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so, because I saw it in their eyes. I often walked home late in the afternoon, after the classes were finished, wishing there was more that I could do … Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child. I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance—and I’ll let you in on a secret: I mean to use it.

The audience stood to deliver perhaps the largest ovation of the night.

I told Dick that I had read an account that when Johnson was later asked who had written the speech, he pulled out a photo of his 20-year-old self surrounded by a cluster of kids, his former students in Cotulla. “ They did,” he said, indicating the whole lot of them.

“You know,” Dick said with a smile, “in the deepest sense, that might just be the truth.”

“God, how I loved Lyndon Johnson that night,” Dick remembered. He long treasured a pen that Johnson gave him after signing the Voting Rights Act. “How unimaginable it would have been to think that in two years time I would, like many others who listened that night, go into the streets against him.”

Nor could I have imagined, as I talked excitedly with my graduate-school friends at Harvard after listening to the speech—certain that a new tide was rising in our country—that only a few years later I would work directly for the president who delivered it. Or that 10 years later, I would marry the man who drafted it.

SPRING 2015

One morning, two years into our project, I found Dick mumbling and grumbling as he worked his way along the two-tiered row of archival containers. “Look how many boxes we have left!” he exclaimed. “See Jackie and Bobby here, more Lyndon, riots and protests, McCarthy, anti-war marches, assassinations. Look at them!”

“I guess we better pick up our pace,” I offered.

“You’re a lot younger than me. Shovel more coal into our old train and let’s go.”

This determination to steam ahead had only increased as Dick approached his mid-80s. A pacemaker regulated his heart, he needed a hearing aid, his balance was compromised. One afternoon, he tripped on the way to feeding the fish in our backyard. He sat down on a bench, a pensive expression on his face. I asked if he was okay.

“I heard time’s winged chariot hurrying near,” he said, quoting Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” but then added, “Maybe it was only the hiss of my hearing aid.”

From the June 1971 issue: Richard Goodwin on the social theory of Herbert Marcuse

“Who would you bet on?” he asked me one night at bedtime. “Who will be finished first—me or the boxes?”

Our work on the boxes kept him anchored with a purpose even after he was diagnosed with the cancer that took his life in 2018.

I realize now that we were both in the grip of an enchanted thought—that so long as we had more boxes to unpack, more work to do, his life, my life, our life together would not be finished. So long as we were learning, laughing, discussing the boxes, we were alive. If a talisman is an object thought to have magical powers and to bring luck, the boxes and the future book they held had become ours.

*Lead image sources (left to right from top) : Richard N. Goodwin Papers / Courtesy of Briscoe Center for American History; Cecil Stoughton / Courtesy of LBJ Library; Gibson Moss / Alamy; Associated Press; Yoichi Okamoto / Courtesy of LBJ Library; Marc Peloquin / Courtesy of Doris Kearns Goodwin; Heritage Images / Getty; Bob Parent / Getty; Paul Conklin / Getty; Bettmann / Getty

This essay has been adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s . It appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “The Speechwriter.”

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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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.”

NEWS ALERT: 4th body recovered from Baltimore bridge collapse wreckage

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

The Associated Press

March 3, 2024, 12:37 PM

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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, written or redistributed.

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‘Leave It To The States’: Former President Trump’s 2024 Message On Abortion

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Earlier this week, former President Donald Trump announced his official stance on abortion, saying this issue “should be left to the states” instead of supporting federal regulation. Abortion access and rights remain a top issue for Democrats heading to the polls in November. Former President Trump’s statement has spurred disagreement among other pro-life Republicans, such as Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who says he prefers a federal ban at 15 weeks of pregnancy. Main Street Columnist for the Wall Street Journal and former Chief Speechwriter for President George W. Bush, William McGurn, joins the Rundown to discuss why the former President’s decision on abortion policy was a “wise one,” the merit of states deciding this issue, and why he doubts it will be a winning issue for Democrats.

Can someone staying in your home claim “squatter’s rights?” The issue has gotten national attention after high-profile cases of squatting went viral on Instagram and TikTok. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed a bill that he says will effectively stop squatting throughout the state, in a move that strictly limits the legal rights afforded to squatters. Florida Attorney Kevin Fabrikant joins the podcast to discuss the legal rights that squatters have under various laws, the involved process of evicting a squatter, and how the new Florida law seeks to remedy this housing issue.

Plus, commentary by New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz.

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Author Interviews

Doris kearns goodwin newest book is about her late husband's work in the 1960s.

NPR's Steve Inskeep speaks with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin about her late husband Dick Goodwin and her new book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s .

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

When Doris Kearns Goodwin got married, her husband brought along some baggage.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: All of our married life, Dick had dragged 300 boxes with us, and they were kind of rundown boxes. I saw them, I looked in them a little bit at a time, and I knew that they were an extraordinary time capsule of the '60s, but he would not open them.

INSKEEP: Dick was Richard Goodwin. He was older and had a life before Doris met him in the 1970s. In the '60s, he'd been a presidential aide and speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, then for Lyndon Johnson and then for presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy. The boxes included artifacts from that time.

KEARNS GOODWIN: So they were in barns. They were in storage. They were in basements - until finally, he came down the stairs once when he was 80 years old, saying, OK, it's now or never. If I've any wisdom to dispense, let's start dispensing now. So...

INSKEEP: They hadn't, like, gotten wet in the barns...

KEARNS GOODWIN: No, they had. Oh, no.

INSKEEP: ...Or decayed or whatever?

KEARNS GOODWIN: No, no. In fact, there were mice in them at the beginning or droppings of mice.

INSKEEP: (Laughter).

KEARNS GOODWIN: We had to vacuum them out. We had to move them from these small boxes into bigger boxes.

INSKEEP: The documents became material for a book about the 1960s, which Goodwin began while her husband lived and finished after he died. It's called "An Unfinished Love Story." As the Goodwins went into the boxes, they began to relive moments in history, like the 1960 presidential debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

KEARNS GOODWIN: What Dick decided is we would have a debate date night, and we'd get a bottle of wine, and we would watch it on YouTube.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

JOHN F KENNEDY: I know that there are those who say that we want to turn everything over to the government. I don't at all. I want the individuals to meet their responsibilities, and I want the states to meet their responsibilities. But I think there is also a national responsibility.

KEARNS GOODWIN: And then he would describe to me how he was preparing Kennedy for that. We go backward and forward. So it was really fun. You know, I remember he said to me at the beginning, are you nervous? Do you wonder who's going to win?

KEARNS GOODWIN: And you have to imagine you don't know what's going to happen in order to make it suspenseful. But then he would describe the whole experience of the day before the debate and the day of the debate. John Kennedy was sitting on the bed with all of his notecards spread out on the bed with the question and the answer, the one-sentence or two-sentence answer.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

KEARNS GOODWIN: And once he had memorized them, then he threw them on the floor like cards and just seemed eerily relaxed.

INSKEEP: Richard Goodwin advised Kennedy in the White House and, after Kennedy's assassination, stayed on with President Johnson.

LYNDON B JOHNSON: This time, on this issue, there must be no delay or no hesitation or no compromise with our purpose.

INSKEEP: In 1965, Johnson addressed Congress and decided on short notice to support passage of the Voting Rights Act.

KEARNS GOODWIN: So my husband had only that day to work on that speech. It was a brilliant maneuver to be able to get those words together. They came out little by little from the typewriter, Johnson screaming at the other end, where are they? They're not even here in time. But he never bothered Dick until the very end.

INSKEEP: The key line - you called it the We Shall Overcome speech. This is a line from a spiritual that people sang as they were demonstrating for civil rights. Johnson just says it. What did it mean that Johnson just said that?

KEARNS GOODWIN: I mean, what it really meant was that's a moment when the person in the highest level of power is connecting to an outside group, the civil rights movement, who are pressuring the government to act. And that's when change takes place in our country.

(SOUNDBITE OF ACHIVED RECORDING)

JOHNSON: And we shall overcome.

INSKEEP: How do you think Richard was able to win the favor of and the trust of powerful men without losing himself, as some staffers do?

KEARNS GOODWIN: It wasn't always easy. I think the fact that he had been with John Kennedy before Lyndon Johnson meant there was always a layer in Lyndon Johnson of not fully trusting him because he thought he was a Kennedy.

KEARNS GOODWIN: You know, that was that fault line. You were either a Kennedy, or you were a Johnson. Even the first time when he calls Bill Moyers on the phone and there's this great tape where he's saying, I need someone to be my speechwriter. This was only months after John Kennedy had died.

KEARNS GOODWIN: And he says to Moyers, I need someone who can put sex in my speech, who can put rhythm in my speech, Churchillian phrases. Who could that be? And Moyers says, well, there's Dick Goodwin, but he's not one of us. And he knew then that that would always mean that he would always have a layer of not full trust.

INSKEEP: I feel that that relationship in microcosm is something that goes all the way through American life because this is a class difference along with everything else, right? Guy from Harvard versus the guy from a teacher's college in Texas.

KEARNS GOODWIN: So true. I mean, one of the things Johnson used to say a lot was that his father always told him that if you brush up against the grindstone of life, you'll get more polished than anyone who went to Harvard or Yale ever did. But then he would add, but I never believed that.

KEARNS GOODWIN: I mean, there was always - and he was so much more brilliant than many people who go to Harvard or Yale. I mean, he used to call me Harvard half the time. You know, Harvard, come on over here.

INSKEEP: Doris Goodwin herself had been a young aide to Lyndon Johnson. In later years, she became one of the nation's most acclaimed historians. Her husband began to wonder if anyone would remember him, which is why he at last agreed to the book on his earlier life.

When you met your husband, your future husband, in the early '70s, he's still a relatively young man but had had his greatest accomplishments. Would you say that that's true?

KEARNS GOODWIN: I think that was the thing that was hard for him the rest of his life. I mean, he did do work after that. He wrote a play that was put on in London. He wrote columns. He wrote manifestos about America's revolution, the need for a new revolution. He got more radical as time went on. And he did work on Al Gore's concession speech. I think there was a...

INSKEEP: That's a gracious speech, Al Gore's concession...

KEARNS GOODWIN: It was a...

INSKEEP: ...Speech in the 2000 election.

KEARNS GOODWIN: ...Lovely speech. And Al Gore had called him and said that he wanted a victory speech or a concession speech. But Dick knew that the concession speech would be more important. And what a great, important memory is that right now that in that year 2000, he was able to say, the law of the land is this. I don't agree with the decision, but I cherish this tradition and congratulate President Bush. We need that so badly right now.

INSKEEP: I'm struck by the idea that he thought people would not remember.

KEARNS GOODWIN: I'm not sure what it was, but yeah, he did feel that need. It wasn't so much even for his work but for the work that he did together with these presidents because he wanted people to remember that the '60s was a time when young people in particular were powered by the conviction that they could make a difference. And tens of thousands of people joined the Peace Corps, were marching against segregation, against denial of the right to vote, were anti-war marching - and the beginning of the women's movement, the gay rights movement. It was a great time to be alive and a great time to be young. And I think he was hoping that the book might be able to power people to remember that. It's so necessary today.

INSKEEP: Doris Kearns Goodwin is the author of "An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History Of The 1960s." It's a pleasure to see you. Thanks for coming by.

KEARNS GOODWIN: Oh, thank you so much for having me. We could go on for a long time. I could talk to you forever.

INSKEEP: (Laughter). I would like that.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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Doris Kearns Goodwin: A Personal History of the 1960s

By: Doris Kearns Goodwin

Published: April 15, 2024

Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband Dick had front-row seats into America’s highest reaches of power during one of the most tumultuous decades in America’s history: the 1960s. Dick Goodwin worked closely with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House, and later with Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy on their presidential campaigns and initiatives. Doris began her career as a White House Fellow during the Johnson Administration and worked with him on his presidential memoirs, before launching her storied career as a presidential historian.

Her eighth book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s , chronicles that extraordinary decade through the lens of what Dick and Doris witnessed and experienced. It weaves together biography, memoir and history, providing an unprecedented view into the pivotal people—JFK, LBJ, RFK and MLK—and events of that decade. HISTORY spoke with Goodwin about the book and what she learned in writing it.

HISTORY: How did you come to write An Unfinished Love Story ?

DKG: It began with the 300 boxes my husband had saved from his time in public service in the 1960s when he worked with Jack and Jackie Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and with Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. For nearly half a century, Dick was not ready to delve into the contents—letters, diaries, memos to and from presidents, drafts of speeches, memorabilia from campaigns and much more. The decade of the 1960s had ended so sadly, with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and RFK , riots in cities and violence on campuses, that he didn’t want to look back, only ahead. But when he turned 80, he decided: It’s now or never.

When we began digging into the boxes, we realized we had a veritable time capsule of the major events and figures of the 1960s. Dick was thinking he would write a book about the findings and his reflections, and I would help him, but then he was diagnosed with cancer. Our project gave him a sense of purpose that kept him going during his last years, and I promised him I would finish it. It took me a while to find my way, but I did. And instead of making me miss him, I was able to keep Dick alive in my memory as I have spent the last five years since he died working on the book. It means more to me than anything I’ve ever written.

Dick worked for both JFK and LBJ, departing before you joined as a White House Fellow a few years later. How did your experiences shape the conversations you had about the presidents you observed and served?

While Dick was in his late 20s, after graduating first in his class in college and law school, he joined the small, intimate group surrounding JFK—first as a speechwriter on the campaign, and then as an aide and speechwriter in the White House. This was his introduction to world of politics, and he held a reverence for the Kennedy family for the rest of his life. He then went to work for LBJ, where he did the most important and fulfilling work of his public career, helping launch the Great Society initiative. But the impact of the Vietnam War on the country eclipsed those achievements and changed his feelings for LBJ.

In my 20s, I was chosen as a White House Fellow, and went to work in the Johnson administration. Later, I accompanied him to his ranch in Texas to help with his memoirs. The older I’ve gotten, the more I realize what a privilege it was to have spent so many hours with this aging lion of a man—a victor in a thousand contests, and yet roundly defeated in the end by the Vietnam war. That experience, which inspired my career as a presidential historian, left me with a loyalty to and an empathy for LBJ that has lasted my entire life.

So, we came into our marriage with distinct biases about JFK and LBJ, which beget ongoing disagreements. As we worked together on this project, however, we were able to reflect more deeply, and we came to a growing understanding as we reassessed the progress and unfinished promises that impacted us as well as the country we loved. My views broadened about JFK, and Dick’s softened toward LBJ.

The 1960s began with such optimism and promise—the best of times before becoming the worst of times. Can you share a few high points you focus on in the book?

Some events I found emblematic of the promise of the early 1960s were the birth of the Peace Corps , JFK’s inaugural address , the integration of the Coast Guard and the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. Dick and I both attended the march, but we didn’t meet then. I guess it’s not surprising, since there were a quarter-million people there!

So much of what Dick did during his work for JFK and LBJ impacts our lives today. Tell us about his career and its ongoing relevance.

Dick was a Zelig-like figure in the 1960s, and even I was surprised to learn the astounding number of defining moments he participated in. He traveled with JFK and the small team on the Caroline , the little prop plane that became their home through months of campaigning for the presidency, and worked on speeches for Kennedy. He was in the White House when the president’s body arrived from Dallas, and oversaw securing the eternal flame for Jackie, with whom he worked on a number of initiatives. He drafted some of LBJ’s most important presidential speeches on civil rights and the Great Society, the landmark initiative Dick actually named. It encompassed nearly 200 pieces of legislation to improve Americans’ lives, including the Civil Rights Act , the Voting Rights Act , the War on Poverty, Head Start, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Medicare, Medicaid, NPR, PBS, highway safety, the Clean Air Act and many more programs that altered and advanced the way of life in our country.

After chronicling the lives and legacies of some of America's greatest presidents, you used your last book to explore the qualities of effective leadership. What are some of those qualities, and how did JFK and LBJ embody them?

What I’ve learned from going deep with presidents like Lincoln , Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt is that character matters most. Presidents are most effective when they lead with empathy, humility, the ability to acknowledge errors, practice accountability, learn from their mistakes, demonstrate resilience. Great leaders have an ambition that goes beyond themselves, for a greater good for the country and its people.

This is an oversimplification, but in practical terms, JFK and LBJ were two sides of the same coin. JFK inspired a generation and set goals. He articulated that greater good in a way that inspired people to be optimistic about the future, and to think more collectively—and inclusively—about America. He instilled the idea that progress wasn’t just handed down from the halls of power, but something each citizen could take part in achieving. LBJ, with his political pragmatism, achieved many of Kennedy’s goals. He led with incredible empathy, rooted in some of his earliest professional experiences teaching Mexican American children in Texas. He understood power, timing, persuasion and how to bring people together for that greater good.

What issue from that era especially resonates for you today?

If I had to choose one, it would be voting rights. As LBJ said, it is the most basic right, without which others are meaningless. Voting in a democracy gives individuals the right to control their own destinies—to vote their leaders in or throw them out. The passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—in the wake of the brutal attacks on peaceful protestors in Selma —remains one of most consequential moments in our country’s history. I remember watching LBJ’s Joint Session speech calling for voting rights with a group of graduate school friends. We all hugged each other and cried. Voting is a hard-won right that should never be taken for granted—and never be a partisan issue. If the vote is diminished for any group, it is diminished for us all .

What did you learn through the process of writing this book, and what do you hope readers will take away from reading it?

Many memories of the 1960s are dark: the Vietnam War, the loss of trust in government, the assassinations, violence against peaceful civil rights protestors, violence in the anti-war movement, riots and fires in our cities summer after summer.

And yet, too often these memories have obscured one of the era’s greatest legacies, which was the spark of communal idealism that kindled social justice and a love for a more inclusive vision of America. It was that impetus that led tens of thousands of young people to sign up for the Peace Corps, participate in sit-ins, freedom rides , marches against segregation, against voter repression, and launch the beginnings of the women’s movement and of the gay rights movement.

In a time of turmoil when Abraham Lincoln was 28 years old, he gave a speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum. He was troubled by the temper of the country, the killing of abolitionists, lynching and a substitution of mob action for the rule of law. He feared that as the Revolutionary War generation was dying—the generation that had fought and died for the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution —that the communal feeling necessary for a democracy was fading. He wanted mothers to read and reread books about the Revolution to their children.

So, too, as the ’60s generation is beginning to fade, I’d like to think this work might help restore a living history of the decade, sparking conversations between grandparents who lived through the ’60s, with their children and grandchildren. Maybe it can allow us to see the enormous progress made—and opportunities lost—to see what light might be cast on our own fractured time and what lessons we might learn. It is my fondest hope that today’s youth will carry forward this unfinished love story with America.

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If we lose the presidential debates, they may not come back

On Thursday, former president Donald Trump’s campaign called for more, and earlier, presidential debates—the latest salvo in a running debate over the debates that could lead to no debates at all.

Trump campaign co-managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita sent a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates calling for the schedule to be shifted to “much earlier” than the current September and October dates, and suggesting as many as seven debates, up from the usual three. “The time to start these debates is now,” they declared.

The Trump campaign letter comes after reports that the five major TV news networks were working on a joint open letter calling on Trump and President Biden to publicly commit to debating.

“We, the undersigned national news organizations, urge the presumptive presidential nominees to publicly commit to participating in general election debates before November’s election,” executives from ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC write in a draft of the letter obtained by the New York Times .

Some back-and-forth over how the debates will be conducted isn’t uncommon. But as I noted in February, this year it’s far from certain that these debates will happen at all. The Trump campaign’s letter appears to be less a serious proposal than political posturing aimed at pressuring the commission and making Biden look bad. There’s no way they’re going to debate seven times, and while his team is right that the growth in early voting means debates need to take place earlier than in years past, the commission has already scheduled the first debate two weeks earlier than last time. 

Biden’s team has so far refused to commit to debating Trump at all, and didn’t respond to a request for comment for this piece.

And while Trump is painting himself as the pro-debate candidate—”I would fully accept any debate, anywhere, anytime, anyplace,” he told Fox News on Thursday—his recent track record suggests the opposite. He refused to debate any of his 2024 GOP primary foes, depriving them of a chance to turn the campaign into a real contest.

“Donald Trump was the significant front-runner for the entire race,” Brett O’Donnell, who was Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s debate coach, told me. “When he wasn’t in the debate, it wasn’t even like we were on the playing field, it was like we were fighting in the stands.”

Trump and his allies have been warring with the commission for years: He threatened for months to skip the 2020 debates, and in 2022, the Republican National Committee stopped working with the commission, claiming the bipartisan body that has governed debates since 1987 (and is co-headed by a former RNC chairman) was “biased” against the GOP. In their Thursday letter, Trump’s team complained that the commission had previously “ceded to the wishes of the Biden campaign on every front.”

The Trump campaign’s list of demands closely mirrors the ones they made in 2020. Trump threatened for a full year not to participate. Then, in June, his campaign requested that the commission either move up the debate schedule or add a fourth debate, arguing it was necessary because so many more voters would be casting their ballots early.

The 2020 debates already broke with historical precedent. The second of the three debates was canceled because Trump had COVID and refused to participate remotely.

Not everyone wanted Biden to debate then, either: Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker at the time, urged Biden not to “legitimize” Trump by debating, predicting he would “act in a way that is beneath the dignity of the presidency.”

In the past decade, it’s become more and more common for candidates in both parties to refuse to debate their opponents. Governors and senators have been quicker to duck debates, seeing only downside: it’s a lot easier to lose a debate than win one.

One Democratic strategist who’s been involved in dozens of statewide races (and asked to remain anonymous because of their current job) told me that the increasing level of public distrust in the institutions that put on debates—from media organizations to local universities and civic groups, like the League of Women Voters or Chamber of Commerce—means those groups can no longer pressure candidates into debating.

“There’s no entity with the leverage to force people to do it if they don’t want to do it,” the strategist said.

Strategists in both parties told me they think it’s more likely than not that Biden and Trump won’t end up debating this election. And while each side predicted it’d be the other’s guy who ends up refusing, they agreed that would be a bad thing for the country—and hard to reverse in future years.

That’s the thing about norms: once someone stops adhering to them, it’s a lot harder to put them back in place. And like so much of American politics, these unwritten rules only survive as long as both sides are willing to abide by them.

“I worry that it gives an excuse for future presidential candidates not to debate,” O’Donnell said. “They are extremely important.…They are an opportunity for all of America to really see their democracy in action.”

Other notable stories:

• O.J. Simpson—the former football player who was acquitted of killing his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald L. Goldman in 1995, but was later found civilly liable for their deaths— has died of cancer . As the news filtered through, various commentators reflected on how Simpson’s police chase and subsequent murder trial proved a harbinger of America’s current media environment. “The murder case would show electronic media’s power to bring a country together and to rip it apart,” the TV critic James Poniewozik wrote in the New York Times . “What part of TV, in 1994 and 1995, wasn’t the O.J. Simpson trial?” Meanwhile, the academic Michael Socolow—who covered the Simpson story as an assignment editor at CNN— reshared a piece he wrote for CJR in 2019 on the difference between covering history and studying it later.
• Recently, Cesar Conde, the chair of NBCUniversal’s News Group, has come in for criticism over his handling of NBC’s ( ultimately abortive ) hiring of Ronna McDaniel, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, as a paid pundit. Now the AP’s David Bauder examines a different controversy involving Conde : whether it’s appropriate for him to serve as a news executive while also being paid to sit on the corporate boards of Walmart and Pepsi. Conde has said that he recuses himself from any NBC reporting on the companies, though Bauder notes that his dual roles could at least present a perceived conflict of interest—and that CNBC, the business-focused network that Conde oversees, forbids its journalists and their spouses from owning stock for this reason.
• Yesterday was a busy day for media jobs news. Axios appointed Aja Whitaker-Moore as its editor in chief. Elsewhere, Semafor ’s Max Tani reported that The Intercept is set to name Ben Muessig , a former assistant managing editor at the LA Times , as its interim editor in chief following the recent departure of Roger Hodge. The Lever , an investigative newsroom founded by David Sirota, a former speechwriter for Bernie Sanders, is expanding, adding nine new staffers to grow its newsroom to nineteen people. And former staffers at WAMU —an NPR affiliate in Washington that ran the news site DCist before shutting it down this year—are creating a “worker-led, community-based” outlet.
• According to WESA, an NPR affiliate in Pittsburgh, the local Teamsters union that has led an epic strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (which employs the union’s members as truck drivers) has voted to settle with the paper and dissolve itself . The decision has rankled four other unions at the paper that remain on strike, including one representing the Post-Gazette ’s journalists. The president of that union accused the Teamsters of falling for a “divide and conquer strategy”; a Teamsters representative hit back that the newsroom union undermined the strike due to its members’ crossing the picket line.
• And we learned yesterday that Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in prison in the country earlier this year, wrote a memoir prior to his death that will be published in October. The Times reports that Navalny wrote much of the book while convalescing in Germany following his attempted poisoning by Russian state agents in 2020, and that he finished it from prison after he was arrested on his return to Russia in 2021. While he was alive, Navalny dabbled in journalism, as we wrote after his death .

ICYMI: Lawmakers fight over privacy—on two very different fronts

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Trump’s Call for Israel to ‘Finish Up’ War Alarms Some on the Right

Recent remarks he made urging an end to the Gaza conflict, with no insistence on freeing Israeli hostages first, were another departure from conservatives’ support for Benjamin Netanyahu.

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By Jonathan Swan

Reporting from Washington

Two Israeli journalists traveled to Palm Beach, Fla., a little over a week ago, hoping to elicit from Donald J. Trump a powerful expression of support for their country’s war in Gaza.

Instead, one of them wrote that what they heard from Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago “shocked us deeply.”

“Both U.S. presidential candidates, Biden and Trump, are turning their rhetorical backs on Israel,” concluded Ariel Kahana, a right-wing settler who is the senior diplomatic correspondent for Israel Hayom. The newspaper is owned by the billionaire Republican donor Miriam Adelson; Ms. Adelson herself arranged the interview with Mr. Trump, according to a person with direct knowledge of the planning.

What had Mr. Trump said that so alarmed Mr. Kahana?

He told the interviewers that Israel was losing public support for its Gaza assault, that the images of devastation were bad for Israel’s global image and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should end his war soon — statements that sounded far more like something President Biden might say than the kind of cheerleading Mr. Netanyahu has come to expect from Washington Republicans.

“You have to finish up your war,” Mr. Trump said. “You have to get it done. We have to get to peace. We can’t have this going on.”

That statement apparently troubled Mr. Kahana even more than Mr. Biden’s warnings to Israel. Mr. Biden has called for a six-week cease-fire in exchange for Hamas releasing Israeli hostages. In the interview excerpts released by Israel Hayom, Mr. Trump did not qualify his call for Israel to finish the war by insisting on the release of hostages.

“Trump effectively bypassed Biden from the left, when he expressed willingness to stop this war and get back to being the great country you once were,” Mr. Kahana wrote in Hebrew. “There’s no way to beautify, minimize or cover up that problematic message.”

Trump aides insisted this was a misinterpretation. A campaign spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said that Mr. Trump “fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself and eliminate the terrorist threat,” but that Israel’s interests would be “best served by completing this mission as quickly, decisively and humanely as possible so that the region can return to peace and stability​.”

But there is no getting around the division between Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans, who seem to be competing to see who can more ostentatiously demonstrate support for Mr. Netanyahu’s government. They are flying to Israel to meet with Mr. Netanyahu , planning to invite him to address Congress and generally urging Israel to do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to annihilate Hamas.

In contrast, Mr. Trump’s hedging commentary to Israel Hayom is only the latest in a long line of public statements he has made to undercut Mr. Netanyahu, whom he has still not forgiven for congratulating Mr. Biden as the winner of the 2020 election.

In 2021, Mr. Trump told the Axios journalist Barak Ravid that he had concluded that Mr. Netanyahu “never wanted peace” with the Palestinians.

Mr. Trump’s first reaction to the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack was to criticize Mr. Netanyahu and Israeli intelligence services. Advisers privately pleaded with him to clean up his comments and he quickly turned to standard lines of support for Israel’s right to defend itself.

The ambiguity of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about the Israel-Hamas war has let different audiences hear what they want in his public statements. He has said nothing of substance about what he would do differently from Mr. Biden on Israel policy if he were president, and his team again refused to get into specifics when questioned by The New York Times.

Given that void, right-wing supporters of Israel and Israelis like Mr. Kahana are parsing every utterance from Mr. Trump, worried that in a second term he might not be as reliable an ally as he was in his first term, when he gave Mr. Netanyahu nearly everything he wanted, including moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

“Those who support Trump and also are deeply supportive of Israel’s efforts to win the war with Hamas have to reconcile themselves with the fact that at a crucial moment when the administration seems to be speaking out of both sides of its mouth, and creating a sense of instability in the relationship between the United States and Israel, Trump exacerbated that instability as the putative nominee of the other party,” said John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine and a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan.

“The only difference between Trump and Biden — and I say this as somebody who is not a supporter of Biden — is that Biden has put his money where his mouth is. He’s been sending arms,” Mr. Podhoretz added. “So that would seem to suggest that operationally, the problem with Biden is rhetoric and not policy. And all Trump is is rhetoric, and he’s not laying out any policy that should make anybody feel good.”

Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, David M. Friedman, insisted in an interview that people were misreading Mr. Trump’s statements.

While he said he respected Mr. Kahana, Mr. Friedman suggested the reporter had over-interpreted Mr. Trump’s remarks: “I understand the fear of Republican isolationism, because there is a vein within the Republican Party that moves in that direction, but I didn’t hear him to say what he said. I heard him to say, ‘Finish the job’ — meaning defeat Hamas, defeat them decisively, defeat them as quickly as possible. And then move on.”

Some of Mr. Trump’s former advisers have filled the Trump policy vacuum with their own ideas to resolve the conflict. His son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has pursued foreign deals using relationships he built during the Trump administration, said at a Harvard University forum in February that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable” and that Palestinians should be “moved out” and transported to an area in the Negev Desert in southern Israel that would be bulldozed to accommodate them.

Mr. Friedman has gone much further than Mr. Kushner, who seemed to be only musing. Mr. Friedman has developed a proposal for Israel to claim full sovereignty over the West Bank — definitively ending the possibility of a two-state solution. West Bank Palestinians who have been living under Israeli military occupation since 1967 would not be given Israeli citizenship under the plan, Mr. Friedman confirmed in the interview.

It’s far from clear whether Mr. Trump would support this, though he did tell the Israeli interviewers that he planned to meet with Mr. Friedman to hear his ideas. Mr. Friedman said he had not yet discussed his plan with Mr. Trump.

Unlike Mr. Friedman, Mr. Trump has long clung to the possibility of a grand bargain between Israel and the Palestinians, insisting that only he can broker the “deal of the century.” Still, while in office, Mr. Trump acted so lopsidedly in favor of Israel that a two-state solution that would be acceptable to the Palestinians was never realistic.

John R. Bolton, a former national security adviser to Mr. Trump, who has become a sharp critic, said that Mr. Trump’s interview with Israel Hayom “proves the point that I’ve tried to explain to people: that Trump’s support for Israel in the first term is not guaranteed in the second term, because Trump’s positions are made on the basis of what’s good for Donald Trump, not on some coherent theory of national security.”

“What he said in this most recent interview was ambiguous to a certain extent, but it seemed to me to be verging on negative about Israel’s conduct of the war,” Mr. Bolton said in an interview. “And I think there’s more there than meets the eye.”

“What matters to Trump more than anything else is how you look in the press. So forget the justice of it,” he added. “It just looks bad.”

The way Mr. Bolton sees it, when his former boss warns Mr. Netanyahu that his image is failing, “he’s not worried about Israel’s image. He’s worried about his if he has to defend it.”

Jonathan Weisman contributed reporting.

Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan

Our Coverage of the 2024 Election

Presidential Race

The start of Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan  thrusts the presidential race into uncharted territory and Trump back into the public spotlight in ways he hasn’t been since he left the White House.

An average of recent surveys, including a new poll  by The New York Times and Siena College, shows that President Biden is inching closer to Trump, Nate Cohn writes .

A group of major news organizations issued an unusual joint statement urging Biden and Trump to commit to participating in televised debates  before Election Day.

Vice-Presidential Calculations: As Trump sifts through potential running mates, he has peppered some advisers and associates with a direct question: Which Republican could best help him raise money ?

Embracing the Jan. 6 Rioters:  Trump initially disavowed the attack on the Capitol, but he is now making it a centerpiece of his campaign .

Mobilizing the Left: Amid the war in Gaza, the pro-Palestinian movement has grown into a powerful, if disjointed, political force in the United States. Democrats are feeling the pressure .

On a Collision Course:  As president, Trump never trusted the intelligence community. His antipathy has only grown since he left office, with potentially serious implications should he return to power .